Dear Sean Mannion: The screen game is terrible. It’s not ok. It’s not pretty good. It’s not almost there. It’s bad. Stop it.

The memes just write themselves.

She didn’t practice a damn thing. She forced her child to suffer for her ideology, then she used her megaphone to broadcast the struggles of a teenage girl to the world. Nikole Hannah-Jones is the incompetent villain in this story. Her daughter and the children of those parents who listened to Hannah-Jones are the ones who were harmed. There is nothing courageous about actively & intentionally harming your child’s development, then burying your head in the proverbial sand for a decade while your child flounders. Hope this helps, Rob.

This is a scathing indictment of the state of education in many US schools. You’d hope everyone would be on board with supporting & challenging our smartest, most curious & most innovative children- because many of them will be the ones who will be building our future.

If you're a media buyer: how do you define ad fatigue?

People are calling Nikole Hannah-Jones brave for admitting she sacrificed her daughter's education to her politics. They’re calling her courageous for “practicing what she preached” But - news flash - she didn't live her values. She made her daughter live them. The warning signs were flashing red for years: her daughter was bringing home good grades but poor standardized test scores. A self-styled education advocate who has built a career on school quality should be painfully aware of what that gap means. But no, instead of even entertaining the thought that her politics on standardized tests was wrong, she ignored it. And her daughter paid the price again and again. Even now, the regret is personal but the blame goes to segregation and funding, despite the fact that each school in question receives $43k/yr per student. The student-teacher ratios at both are sub 10-to-1. Yet somehow, PS 8 (less than a mile away) only received $15.8k/student & has far inferior student/teacher ratios, but vastly outperforms PS 307. Clearly, the problem isn’t money. There’s no amount of money that guarantees that teachers check student’s work, or supervise the lunch room, or actually do their jobs. That requires leadership, accountability & standards. It requires honest assessments & a willingness to do the difficult thing. But, of course, admitting any of that would undermine NHJ’s politics, so she refuses to do so. And now her daughter’s academic struggles are in the Times Magazine, the 2nd time she's been material for an essay. Calling this brave rewards the pseudo-intellectual who made the choice & ignores the child who paid for it.

An entire thread, from "experts", that sums to: "Let's not teach kids stuff, even if they're ready + eager, because "experts" don't think it's appropriate." Meanwhile, those same "experts" are spending god knows how much time + grant money trying to figure out why the US - with our staggering wealth, innovation + resources - is 14th among OCED countries in literacy and 26th in mathematics. Gee, I wonder.

I've talked dozens of CMOs, VP of Marketings & Marketing Directors in Senior Living. One of the most common questions I hear is: "How much should we be spending on Google/Meta/A Place for Mom/[insert channel here]?" It comes up in budget meetings, ownership calls, QBRs + New Business pitches. Without fail, almost everyone shows up with an opinion & no one shows up having done the math. That's insane, because the reality is that this question has an answer. At its most basic level, your marketing budget is the cost of generating enough move-ins to (i) replace the residents who are going to move out AND (ii) close the gap between current occupancy & target. Those variables are: (1) current occupancy + the tenure distribution of your residents = predict how many units will turn over (& roughly when); (2) target occupancy = calculate occupancy delta to determine how many net move-ins you are needed; (3) sales efficacy (lead to tour to move-in) = how many leads are needed to produce required move-ins; (4) your inbound pipeline (e.g. leads per source + cost per lead per source) = what those leads cost on each platform. Layer in some probabilistic modeling + decay coefficients and voila! You have an answer for how much more (or how much less!) you should be spending. When I first shared this, the response was: "Every community is different! You can't reduce this to a formula." Yes, every community IS different. That's exactly why it has to be calculated community by community + care type by care type, not set by one guesstimate for the whole portfolio. A memory care only community where the average stay is ~18 months and an IL community where it's 5.7 years should have (almost) nothing in common when it comes to budgeting. The math (mostly) isn't new. The challenge (at least historically) is that 99% of senior living marketers couldn't get to it. The data lives in 5+ different places (CRM, PMP, Ad Platforms, Website Analytics, Sales Team). Building the model took longer than the budget season, so it just never happened. Until Now. We've built the first Senior Living Budget Recommendation Engine. It ingests your data: occupancy, resident tenure, target occupancy, leads by source + sales conversion. It gives back the recommended range you should be spending on each platform + care type, plus where that spend should be deployed (including the places you should be spending less - that last part usually surprises people). How much to spend is a math problem. It's time Senior Living treated it as such.

Narrator: The "MA Wealth Tax" does not exist.

Aside from the fact that this could balloon into a trillion-dollar program overnight, why do politicians keep trying to solve supply-side issues with demand-side programs? The reason housing is not affordable is because we are short ~5M housing units. So put your energy + money + focus on figuring out how do we build 5M incremental housing units in the next 5 years. Do that, and affordability takes care of itself. Conversely, if you do this stupid Ro idea, all that happens is the amount new buyers CAN afford goes up AND the incentive becomes to buy as much house as much as you possibly can (since this is a "first time only" program), which means: (1) more competition + (2) higher prices.

If this is the takeaway from the NHJ article, we're in serious trouble. Algebra is - at its core - about teaching students how to reason about unknown quantities. It's how you figure out an what you need to know but don't from what you do know. In the real world, every loan, budget, price increase and business decision contains at least 1 algebra problem. Most contain many. A student who never learns Algebra will spend their entire adult life relying on other people to do the math for them, while children whose families pay for private instruction will learn it anyway (and wield a staggering advantage). If anything, we should be teaching Algebra EARLIER. The Singapore + Russian schools teach these principles in late elementary (4th - 5th grade) and early middle (6th-7th) grades.

This is a well-written, largely honest article. Any respect I've gained for Hannah-Jones for writing it was immediately forfeited because she's a fundamentally defective parent who used her child as a trampoline for her own career, then failed to take accountability for a decade while her child floundered. Her daughter paid a staggering price for NHJ's devotion to The Cause.

Even California (!!!!) has had enough of the pixel-litigation craziness. Some rare good news on a Monday: the CA Senate + House have both unanimously passed SB 690, which sharply limits private lawsuits over website tracking tech (e.g., pixels) if signed by Gov. Newsom. This legislation amends the California Invasion of Privacy Act (CIPA) to restrict private plaintiffs from suing under the pen register and trap-and-trace provision (P.C. Sec. 638.51) for covered online tracking claims. If enacted, only the California attorney general would be authorized to bring claims under those statutes. If you're one of the thousands of companies that was threatened with a lawsuit under either statute, there's more good news: this bill would apply retroactively to pending claims in actions commenced within 2 years before the bill's operative date. This is a MAJOR positive step forward for businesses that rely on the internet and internet-based advertising - though it is NOT a complete solution to CIPA tracking/compliance.

Yes, I'm sure the 1,000s of hours spent each year developing exceptional content, building a robust backlink profile, optimizing the site, building a network of other sites to link to, monitoring the overall program's health, etc. is all done for free. The reality? They likely spend $1.5M-$2.0M/yr in headcount (fully loaded), consulting fees, content creation/production/distribution, SaaS, etc. And yes, I'm sure they do $5M in revenue from organic. Less $1.5M in costs yields a return on spend = 3.33x. That's pretty good! But stop being dishonest about it.

O-H Oh, no Ohio State Really Choked

Is Kevin Patullo calling the Texas offense? Yikes on bikes.

The US *still* has not used all the Purple Hearts it produced in anticipation of the invasion of the Japanese home islands. That's before you realize the scale of the horrors that would have been unleashed between Operation Downfall & the Japanese counter-operation Operation Ketsugō.

"Let's brainstorm" usually means "I haven't thought about this yet and I'd like 8 people to think about it for me." Instead: (1) prepare an initial plan, supporting data & a roadmap in advance (2) share everything with attendees at least 72 hours ahead (3) expect every attendee to arrive ready to challenge the plan or propose an alternative A meeting is the most expensive, least efficient mechanism for thinking. Stop doing it.

P(doom) converges around 14%-19% among the more safety-minded AI researchers, ML engineers & other experts. What’s interesting is that if you run the counterfactual. So, let’s play this stupid game, so Birdie can win his stupid prize. Imagine the US halts all AI development tomorrow. Everything shuts down. Aside from the global depression that follows from millions of jobs vanishing overnight, trillions in contracts & debt obligations becoming worthless and the like (if you thought the Trade War was bad, this would make that look like an ill-timed joke compared to a World War), lets see how much higher that p(doom) goes. For one: export controls that keep China in check are driven by two things: the US being the largest buyer of chips & compute, as well as the frontier development powerhouse. Well, if we suddenly exit, two things happen: (1) we lose that leverage, so the export controls go, too AND (2) supply remains constant while demand collapses - so China, the UAE & the Saudis get compute for pennies on the dollar. For another: the *overwhelming majority* of the legitimate frontier safety apparatus is American. We exit, that goes away. Do you think China or Russia or the Saudis give a single damn about security or safety? But it gets worse. Those millions of developers, researchers & engineers - the ones your ban put out of a job - they’re not going to just throw their hands up. No. Some of them (likely many ) will be recruited by our adversaries. They’ll take lucrative jobs in China or Qatar or India. And guess what? The ones most likely to go first (and be put in charge) are the ones who give precisely zero damns about safety. Think that’s bad? Just wait. What happens in 24-36 months, when the CIA gets credible intel that China is 18 months away from ASI? Do you think the US is going to sit back and let it happen? No. BEST CASE: the US kicks off a Manhattan Project style initiative to get there first. No safety restrictions whatsoever. Absolutely no holds barred. Full send, no matter the cost or the risk. You end up in the same place, but you’ve taken an unpleasant detour through economic ruin & mass suffering to get there. WORST CASE: the US realizes there’s no way to close the technological gap before ASI, and there’s zero diplomatic or economic ways to slow the HFP down, so the only remaining option is kinetic. The only way to do that while protecting American lives & minimizing American casualties would be an all-out first strike. Congratulations.