Free for ALL Friday!
It's Free for All Friday!
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, using my own subscriptions, gift links, and other (legal) hocus-pocus.
Cookies, Deodorant, Socks. Iran War Puts Military Packages in Limbo
Thousands of boxes sent to service members in Middle East are stuck in limbo. The Postal Service has indefinitely suspended delivery amid Iran war.
Dan F. was alarmed when his daughter, a Marine aboard the USS Tripoli, a warship deployed to fight the Iran war, sent him a photo of a meal served on the ship. A lunch tray, two-thirds empty, carried one small scoop of shredded meat and a single folded tortilla.
A picture of a mid-April dinner on the USS Abraham Lincoln, shared by a service member with his family, was similarly unappetizing – a small handful of boiled carrots, a dry meat patty and a gray slab of processed meat.
Dan and other military family members worried that their loved ones deployed to the Middle East are going hungry are filling boxes with items they hope could help service members ride out prolonged deployments in the Middle East – homemade fudge, Jolly Ranchers, crossword puzzle books, playing cards, toothpaste, Girl Scout cookies and fresh socks.
But mail delivery to military ZIP codes across the Middle East has been indefinitely suspended as of April, and packages in transit now hang in limbo.
The Pentagon did not respond to a request for comment on the mail stoppage or reports that some U.S. vessels were short on food.
“We have the strongest military in the world. You shouldn’t be running out of food, and you shouldn’t not be able to get mail on the ship,” said Dan, 63, who also served in the Marines.
Link: USA Today (Multiple reporters)
‘Hard to Not Feel Scammed’: World Cup Fans Say FIFA Misled Them With Ticket Allocations, Seat Maps
World Cup ticket buyers are accusing FIFA of “misleading” them with stadium maps that misrepresented the potential location of seats they were purchasing
Throughout the fall and winter, FIFA sold more than 3 million tickets to the 2026 World Cup. It priced the tickets in four categories, with each category corresponding to a range of sections at each stadium, per color-coded maps embedded in the ticketing portal and published online.
The maps appeared to suggest that Category 1 tickets, the most expensive, could yield seats anywhere in a stadium’s lower bowl or, at some venues, in prime 200-level sections.
But last week, when FIFA converted tickets to specific seats in specific sections, many fans received unfavorable placements, in corners or behind a goal.
“A lot of people feel misled, or confused, or maybe just generally let down about the way seats were assigned,” Jordan Likover, one of the many aggrieved fans, told The Athletic. “You can’t change the rules of the game after someone’s played,” he said. “Like, people paid expecting to be seated in one place. And then when they were assigned [seats], it’s changed.”
The most prevalent gripe among fans who spoke with or contacted The Athletic, though, was that nobody, nor their friends, could find any Category 1 ticket buyers who’d actually been assigned lower-level sideline seats to popular matches.
The maps shown to ticket buyers suggested that these seats were within the range of possibilities. But fans began to theorize that FIFA had blocked them off for corporate partners, VIPs, hospitality or last-minute sales.
Link: The Athletic (Henry Bushnell)
See Which Jobs Are Most Threatened by AI and Who May Be Able to Adapt
It’s the most urgent question about artificial intelligence — and one of the hardest to answer
No one has a perfect road map to the future, but researchers at GovAI, which studies technology policy, and the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank, used a novel approach to estimate which workers may be most and least able to adapt to AI. They concluded that many people most at risk if AI transforms work are also the best placed to find new jobs.
But history shows that economists and researchers have been terrible at predicting the effects of new technologies on work and workers, so take forecasts like this one seriously but not literally.
While web designers and secretaries both scored high in the research for exposure to AI, they diverged in their estimated ability to adapt.
Secretaries were among the 6.1 million largely clerical and administrative workers considered both highly exposed to AI and with the lowest estimated adaptability.
The findings suggest that the majority of workers whose jobs may be transformed by or lost to AI can bounce back. But a smaller share of workers may have a harder time finding new jobs.
Women make up about 86 percent of those most vulnerable workers, the researchers said, suggesting the negative effects of automation won’t be borne equally across society.
Link: Washington Post (Shira Ovide)
Jury Finds Live Nation Acts as a Monopoly in a Victory for States
In a verdict that could have far-reaching consequences in the music industry, the live colossus that includes Ticketmaster was found to have violated antitrust laws
A federal jury on Wednesday found that Live Nation, the concert giant that owns Ticketmaster, has operated as a monopoly in violation of federal and state antitrust laws, ending a closely watched trial in New York that could have far-reaching consequences in the music industry.
The verdict came after four days of deliberations in which the nine-person jury parsed a long list of questions it was asked to consider in a complex case that involved weeks of expert testimony.
The judge overseeing the case, Arun Subramanian, will determine remedies in a separate proceeding. That could include significant divestments by Live Nation, or even a breakup of Live Nation and Ticketmaster — an outcome that the federal government had called for when filing its case almost two years ago, though it is sure to be vigorously contested by Live Nation.
Live Nation will also face monetary damages as a result of the jury’s verdict in the case, which was brought by 33 states and Washington, D.C. The jury determined that Ticketmaster had overcharged consumers by $1.72 for each ticket.
Whatever remedy the judge orders, it will likely shift the competitive landscape in the multibillion-dollar concert business, where Live Nation has been a colossus with no equal. Last year, the company put on 55,000 events and sold 646 million tickets around the world.
According to testimony, Ticketmaster sells about 10 times as many tickets as its closest rival, AEG. As Live Nation has pitched to Wall Street, its greatest advantage is the “flywheel” model of its interconnected businesses, in which an ever-increasing supply of concert tours fuel higher-margin transactions like ticket sales and sponsorship deals.
Link: New York Times (Ben Sisario)
What Viktor Orbán’s Opponents Sacrificed to Beat Him
Hungary offers lessons in defeating right-wing populists
To the outside world, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán began his rule as a pariah—an obstreperous, often lone dissenter from European Union policies, especially over migration. Then he became a prophet to new-style “national conservatives”—the anti-immigration, anti-elite right-wing movement that has reshaped the politics of the West. After resoundingly losing national elections held on April 12, Orbán has become a parable for how populism can be defeated. His political demise was hardly inevitable. It had to be shrewdly engineered by politicians and voters who put aside their ideological differences to defeat him.
Péter Magyar, the presumptive next prime minister, triumphed against a tilted electoral system—gerrymandered districts, government influence over traditional media and even over the country’s billboards—designed to keep Fidesz in power. Magyar understood that such a regime does not simply collapse under the weight of its own contradictions and mismanagement. Magyar was an unlikely agent for Orbán’s undoing, because he was until recently an apparatchik in the Fidesz machine. But that also meant that Magyar’s criticism of Fidesz corruption could not be so easily dismissed.
Crucially, Magyar’s brand of anti-Orbánism was not stridently progressive. He did not repudiate Orbán’s hostility to migration. Quite the opposite: He labeled Orbán a hypocrite for being outwardly hostile to immigration while maintaining a large guest-worker program. Magyar pledged to continue “zero tolerance for illegal immigration” and to keep Fidesz’s opposition to the EU’s migration pact. Magyar avoided being drawn into debates about Orbán’s policies on gay rights, such as the constitutional amendment passed last year that is aimed at shutting down Pride parades.
Link: The Atlantic (Idrees Kahloon)
The Affordable Car Is Dead. What Happened?
For generations, working- and middle-class Americans could find an inexpensive, reliable set of wheels to get around. That era is over
The average transaction price for a new car now sits around $50,000. In December, it became just about impossible to find one for less than $20,000.
A Honda Civic Hatchback? Most start at $28,000. The Touring Hybrid costs more than $32,000. How about the Chevy Trailblazer? On most lots, its price tag approaches $25,000. The Toyota Corolla? The Hybrid trims start around $26,000. Forget the Chevy Malibu; it was discontinued last year.
While politicians and economists scratch their heads at voters upset about affordability in a decent economy, they seem to somehow miss the fact that for most Americans the purchase of a car has become a debt sentence.
People at the bottom of the income scale feel the pain most. Once, they could turn to the used-car lot, but even that has also become a minefield of aging, increasingly repair-prone vehicles with six-figure odometers and five-figure price tags.
For anyone on a budget, an aging car is a trap. Auto repair costs jumped 15 percent in the last year alone, driven by the complexity of modern sensors and labor shortages. An average trip to the mechanic now costs roughly $840, an amount that around 40 percent of Americans likely could not cover with cash they have on hand.
What happened? How did a basic necessity of American life become a luxury good? We have to start with a transformation of the economy itself beginning in the late 1970s.
While hourly compensation for the typical worker remained nearly stagnant, massive stock market bull runs and rising home equity have enriched the most affluent households. Today, there are so many wealthy people who can afford luxury cars that it simply isn’t that profitable for companies to produce cars for the bottom 40 percent of Americans by income. That’s part of the reason manufacturers started rolling out so many higher-priced, higher-tech vehicles:
The profits generated by an inexpensive car pale in comparison to what can be earned from a souped-up midsize S.U.V. or a light truck.
Link: New York Times (Clifford Winston)
Has the Era of the Mega-Layoff Arrived?
From Snap to Block to Amazon, a new template for ‘right sizing’ the workforce is spreading through C-suites—and other companies are taking note
Snap is laying off 16% of its staff. Block lopped off 40% of its workforce. Oracle, meanwhile, is shedding thousands of employees, after Amazon.com cut about 30,000 in a matter of months.
Welcome to the era of the mega-layoff. In Silicon Valley and beyond, companies that are cutting staff are doing it with a big ax. Instead of laying off people in more incremental—and less disruptive—waves, employers are seizing on the potential financial upsides of severing swaths of their workforces at once.
That is a departure from not long ago, when mass layoffs registered as a sign of trouble or mismanagement and that a company needed to take drastic measures to right its performance. Now, such a company is more likely to get a big stock bump and praise from investors for acting boldly. Snap was no different.
Though shares in the social-media company are down 23% over the past year, the company’s stock shot up 8% on Wednesday after executives announced that it was eliminating 1,000 jobs.
Behind the scenes at Block, something else happened: Leaders from across the corporate world messaged the payments company’s top executives, asking for the playbook on how they might replicate such sweeping cuts at their own companies, said Amrita Ahuja, Block’s chief financial officer and chief operating officer.
“We had people kind of coming out of the woodwork,” Ahuja said in an interview. Asked if she saw Block’s layoffs of 40% of its workforce as a new template, she said: “It’s an inevitability. As a CFO, I think it’s better to be a little bit early than to be too late here.”
Having spent 25 years making sure sailors had food to spare, I have a hard time believing the system that’s been in place for many years during all manner of conflicts is suddenly broken. But I could certainly take a pic of a tray with unappealing items on it.
So we have food rationing for our military, a possible FIFA scam(?), high car prices and massive lay-offs? Hell of a way to end the week. I think I’ll go count my socks now.