It’s Free for ALL Friday! Each week I keep track of some of the off-the-path things I've found, and work extra-hard to make sure you never hit a paywall. (If you do find links that don’t work, let me know!)

red bridge over river under blue sky during daytime — Photo by Hadi Utama on Unsplash

Winners of the 2026 Epson International Pano Awards

A collection of some of the highest-scoring images from the 17th edition of this panoramic-photo competition

These are amazing photographs, and worth the click.

Link: The Atlantic

The Most Polite Trucker in America Is a Driverless 18-Wheeler

They’re on the interstate in Texas and can do almost everything a human truck driver does, except honk

On a busy freight corridor, the 240 miles of I-45 between Dallas and Houston, it was bumper-to-bumper, like usual, when something out-of-the-ordinary happened. A big rig let in several cars from the on-ramp. Another 18-wheeler changed lanes to make space for a truck pulled over on the shoulder.
Neither honked its horn—the baritone blasts anyone who has ever driven a hatchback can’t forget.
They’re driverless trucks: they don’t need to honk and can’t on their own, said Aurora Innovation, a major driverless trucker. The trucks have a perception system that adjusts quickly without having to slam the brakes and sees and avoids potential hazards early. And without a driver, no honking in annoyance.
“It’s our job to continue to operate safely and build trust,” said Chris Urmson, who was the chief technology officer of Google’s self-driving car project that became Waymo and is now CEO of Aurora.
As more goods are trucked across the U.S. every day, moving them is getting more expensive. Businesses complain of an acute driver shortage. Drivers need to stop after 11 hours to rest; driverless trucks don’t, saving both time and fuel. The cost of diesel has risen 62% since late February.
This stretch of Texas, flat, straight and filled with trucks, is the perfect testing spot for dozens of driverless big rigs, some without a human driver and others with one riding along just in case. About half a dozen companies, including Aurora, develop the technology for driverless trucks and team up with truck makers to produce them. Aurora, based in Pittsburgh, expects to have 200 autonomous trucks on highways in Texas and nearby states by year-end, up from around 30 big rigs today.

Link: Wall Street Journal

Bosses Want the Secrets of the Family Firm That Has Never Had a Layoff in 75 Years

Hundreds of executives have flocked to St. Louis to learn how the Gunds’ family business thrives by putting workers before short-term profits

Hundreds of executives have made the pilgrimage to St. Louis to try to replicate Steve Gund’s elusive feat: He’s the third-generation CEO of a family manufacturer that has averaged 18% annual growth for a decade—all without ever laying off an employee.
He said he does it with a leadership model that puts The Gund Co.’s 1,300 employees’ well-being over short-term profits. He has made it his mission to evangelize the approach, especially to leaders of other family owned companies.
“It sounds touchy-feely, but it’s profitable,” said the 55-year-old Gund, whose grandfather, Ed Gund, a former candy salesman, started the composite materials company in 1951. Now approaching $400 million in sales, its customers include General Electric and Rockwell Automation. Its parts can be found in nearly every aspect of the grid, from wind generators to the green boxes dotting subdivision lawns.
The model requires trade-offs, and a lot of discipline: Gund has never had a layoff but staffs sparingly so it can weather the leaner stretches. Employees are pushed to voice and document concerns on red cards displayed on the factory floor, putting leaders on notice to take care of problems quickly. Everyone from line workers to managers crafts a career-development plan. Yet those who don’t adapt to Gund’s high-performance culture are managed out.
And there are financial gambles: This year the company spent tens of millions of dollars to buy back its existing employee-stock ownership plan with the aim of relaunching a similar program to employees in every country where it operates—including China.

Link: Wall Street Journal

See How a Tesla-SpaceX Merger Gives Musk a Shortcut to His $1 Trillion Payday

A critical clause in the CEO’s Tesla stock award would wipe away lofty performance targets if a merger happened

Deep in a $1 trillion pay package approved by Tesla’s shareholders is an escape clause that could pay off for Elon Musk in several ways if he folds the automaker into his SpaceX empire.
That kind of cars-and-rockets tie-up—the subject of widespread speculation among investors, and hinted at by Musk himself—would likely give him the tighter control he has long sought at Tesla. A hefty-enough price would also, in an instant, wipe away key performance targets standing between Musk and billions of dollars in shares.
“This $1 trillion—that was supposed to be a stretch,” said Mary Ellen Carter, a Boston College accounting professor who studies executive pay. “It turns out it isn’t really that hard. All you have to do is be bought.”
Musk has considerable say over any offer SpaceX makes for Tesla, thanks to his sweeping control over the rocket company. The upshot: Even a stratospheric bid would keep Musk in firm control of the combined company.
Tesla shareholders voted to adopt the pay package last fall. Under ordinary circumstances, it would deliver to Musk as many as 423.7 million shares if Tesla hits a series of 12 market-value targets and the company also meets just as many cash-flow and operating goals. Among them: delivering Tesla’s 20-millionth vehicle, selling one million robots and putting one million robotaxis on the street.
The record-setting equity award was “designed to align extraordinary long-term shareholder value with incentives that will drive peak performance from our visionary leader,” Tesla Chair Robyn Denholm told shareholders at the time.
Yet tucked into the bottom of the fifth page of the 16-page 2025 CEO Performance Award Agreement, a single sentence declares half the targets are as good as accomplished if Tesla is acquired or otherwise taken over.
That would leave only market-value targets to determine how many shares Musk gets. The same clause says those targets would be met or missed based on the final deal price—or on Tesla’s market capitalization immediately before any acquisition closed, if that is higher. Musk, SpaceX and Tesla didn’t respond to requests for comment.
“Tesla shareholders could think it’s terrible and the Tesla price drops” ahead of any deal, Carter said. “But it’s whatever SpaceX is willing to offer.”

Link: Wall Street Journal

The Deadly 1.5-Mile Corridor That Shows the Fatal Flaw in America’s Road Design

Six lanes, pitch darkness and crosswalks a half-mile apart: How American urban-planning is failing walkers. ‘To walk on Union Avenue feels like you’re about to be killed’

On a Sunday evening last November, 16-year-old Olga Bessan-Gligo was walking home on one of the most dangerous roads in America: Union Avenue in Memphis, Tenn.
It was a little after 9 p.m. and Bessan-Gligo had just finished her shift at a nearby sandwich shop. Outside, it was near complete darkness; the closest streetlight had gone out.
Her house was across the street. To get to the other side, Bessan-Gligo had two options.
She could walk to an intersection, use a crosswalk and walk back on the other side. This would add a half-mile to her trip, nearly doubling her journey, in the dark.
Bessan-Gligo stepped into the middle of the street. Moments later, a large SUV hit and killed her.
American roads are becoming deadlier for walkers. Between 2009 and 2024, pedestrian deaths increased 72% across the U.S., federal data show. Over the same period, such deaths declined in most other developed nations, according to United Nations data. In road safety, the U.S. is an outlier.
Pedestrian deaths are rising on certain roadways. Increasingly, people are hit by cars on roads designed like Union Avenue—all while this type of roadway continues to spread across the country.

Link: Wall Street Journal

‘There Are No People’: Springfield, Ohio, Faces Loss of Haitian Residents

The city’s economy has taken a hit as Haitian immigrants sequester in their homes or leave after the Trump administration canceled their temporary protected status.

SPRINGFIELD, Ohio — The denizens of this once booming industrial Midwestern city were pining for something to rally people around when they coined the motto: “Speak a good word for Springfield or say nothing.”
It was the height of the Depression in 1932 and the slogan sought to inspire unity among those living in a place where the Shawnee once roamed, European immigrants arrived and freed Black families found a home.
Now some residents in Springfield, Ohio, say the city’s creed is being put to the test.
Since thousands of Haitian residents lost their protection from deportation this summer, dozens have been arrested, scores have lost their jobs and others have either left the country or decided to hunker down at home, out of view.
“Help wanted” ads for cooks, dishwashers and babysitters are going unanswered. Haitian residents are limiting their electrical usage as they worry about how they will pay the bills.
“I’m not sure there is precedent in U.S. history for this small a community to lose that much of its workforce and population cloistered at home,” said Tim Voltz, a Springfield resident who helps Haitian immigrants. “The situation is unsustainable.”

Link: Washington Post

AFTER THE APOCALYPSE

As Venezuela struggles to recover from political upheaval and calamitous earthquakes, the U.S. government is exploiting the country for oil and money.

We drifted past abandoned drilling platforms, ghostly remnants of better days. Cormorants perched on the metal bars of broken oil rigs, drying their wings in the sun. When we reached a swirling, brown-green oil slick, Carlos slowed his motor. Raw oil could damage the engine, he said, and we’d already had to return to shore once that day to swap boats. We floated for a bit. Carlos, who makes his living as a fisherman on Lake Maracaibo, pointed out some surface bubbles, evidence of a leaky pipeline beneath the water. There was a strong smell of gas. He lit a cigarette anyway and laughed.
That morning, Carlos and his team had caught about 30 pounds of fish in the lake, a brackish estuary where oil was discovered more than a century ago. The subsequent boom built the cities of Caracas and Maracaibo, three generations of wealth, and four decades of democracy. A century later, tens of billions of barrels’ worth of reserves remain beneath the water. Some of them might now be controlled by the American government.
They will not be easy to extract.
Billions of dollars of investment will be needed to remediate the site and recover more oil. In the meantime, people who live around the lake, like millions of other Venezuelans, work hard and earn very little. Their fish have to be sold immediately, because electricity is unpredictable and freezers are thus unreliable. Rapid inflation—20 percent in July, an annualized rate of 783 percent—has made everything unaffordable. In a Caracas market, I found prices and exchange rates written on whiteboards, because they change every day.
The state is absent, or indifferent. Carlos pointed to a scar on his leg that he said was an old gunshot wound, the souvenir of an assault by one of the pirates who control the lake: “If you don’t pay them, they kill you and take your boat.”

Link: The Atlantic

Putin Nears a Prize: Restoring Ties With the U.S. While Giving Up Nothing

Russia has sought to separate the war in Ukraine from potential business deals and diplomacy with the United States. Its efforts now appear to be working.

Last October, President Trump imposed significant sanctions on Russia’s two largest oil companies, complaining that negotiations with President Vladimir V. Putin over ending the war in Ukraine “just don’t go anywhere.”
A red-carpet welcome for the Russian leader in Alaska had done nothing to bring peace. A planned summit in Budapest had fallen apart. Mr. Trump had started to acknowledge that Mr. Putin might just be playing him, with no intention of making peace. Faint Ukrainian hopes glimmered of a Trump-Putin break.
But the Russian president was playing a longer game.
Now, exactly a year after the oil sanctions, Mr. Putin has never been so close to his goal of normalizing relations with Washington without having to make any compromises on Ukraine.
Over the past week and a half, Mr. Trump has set aside years of U.S. foreign policy by openly embracing Mr. Putin and easing the economic pressure on the Kremlin. At the same time, Mr. Trump has vilified President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, the putative American ally trying to defend his nation against a Russian invasion.
Newly emboldened, Moscow is moving to assert itself as a global power equal to the United States and China, promoting a trilateral summit among them in November.
“In my personal view, victory has already been achieved,” the pro-Putin journalist Marina Akhmedova wrote on social media on Wednesday. “It is not just a matter of the 20 to 25 percent of territory we have liberated,” she added, referring to Russian-occupied land in Ukraine. “It is also about how the United States now engages with Russia.”

Link: New York Times

U.S. and Israel Draw Up Plans for Renewed Strikes on Iran After Elections

Renewed hostilities might not be any more successful than the war’s first phase, and President Trump has repeatedly canceled plans for a return to major combat.

The U.S. and Israeli militaries have developed specific plans for renewed strikes against Iran after the American midterm elections, according to U.S. officials and other people briefed on the deliberations.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel this week to discuss new strikes, U.S. officials said. The targets would likely include Iran’s energy infrastructure, nuclear facilities, and missile and drone arsenal.
Officials say there is a small possibility that Mr. Trump could decide to begin a campaign this month, but there are many political reasons that he is likely to wait until after the U.S. election, not least his own promise early this month not to strike before the vote.
The United States will not have its full complement of military assets — including three aircraft carriers, thousands of Marines, fighter jets and Special Operations forces — in place until early November. The U.S. military prefers to conduct attacks under the cover of night, and there will be increasing hours of darkness over Iran early next month.
There are also concerns that the war could spiral into a larger conflict. On Wednesday, the U.S. State Department ordered nonemergency government employees and their families to leave Saudi Arabia, as the Iran-backed Houthi militia continues to attack sites there.
A White House official said on Wednesday the administration does not comment on military plans “that may or may not exist.”

Link: New York Times

Thanks for reading and have a great weekend. See you in the comments!

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Free for ALL Friday! (10/23/2026)