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Experts unveil the one country with the longest lifespan – but there's a surprising catch
Scientists calculated the lifespan of 204 countries and what they found was surprisingly consistent
'Calculated' Salah has 'sensed an opportunity and taken it'
Not for the first time this season, Mohamed Salah seems to have taken a thinly veiled dig at the manager. You can't apportion blame when we don't know the full story and why Salah feels the way he does. It will now be interesting to see in that final game of the season at Anfield, his farewell to the supporters and the City, how Slot reacts in terms of team selection and how the fans react to a legend going out in unsavoury fashion.
Tap THC beverage tax to address budget gap
By Christine Lafferty Colorado is faced with the largest budget deficit in recent memory — calculated to be a $1.5 billion hole according to the state’s Joint Budget Committee. Legislators have been scrambling to address this gap, which signals massive cuts to important state services such as education, climate management, and health care. It’s time for […]
The AI tune is changing: From a wave of hype to business realism
The AI revolution is not an overnight upheaval, but a calculated evolution. In the coming years, companies will not win simply because they adopted AI; they will win because they knew how to manage it optimally.
How party politics divided Colorado in 1876 — and eased its path to statehood
The headline in the Jan. 23, 1876, edition of the Rocky Mountain News was a calculated provocation: “Jeff Davis Elected President.” The column that followed, which purported to be a dispatch from “Nov. —, 188–,” told the fictional history of a future presidential campaign won by the “arch-traitor” Jefferson Davis. “The ‘On to Washington’ that […]
Ryan Silverfield must realize how badly he miscalculated
Ryan Silverfield's cowardly coaching remains the big story in Arkansas
My parents taught me to avoid risk. I had to unlearn that to get rich.
Carrie Kerpen grew up prioritizing financial security. Learning to take calculated risks helped her build and eventually sell an eight-figure company.
The Science of “Ramping Up”: Why Aaron Glenn Playing Starters is a Calculated Risk Worth Taking
For years, the conventional wisdom in NFL training camps was simple: wrap the starters in bubble wrap, hold them out of preseason games, save them for Week 1. And every September, like clockwork, the league watches soft-tissue injuries pile up anyway – hamstrings, calves, Achilles, all the non contact stuff that has nothing to do […]
Lindsay Clancy's mental health was getting 'worse and worse' before the murders, ex-husband says
Prosecutors say Lindsay Clancy "knew exactly what she was doing" and made a "calculated" decision to kill her children.
Jacoby Brissett’s holdout is a strongly miscalculated risk
The NFL offseason has entered the OTA phase, and teams like the Arizona Cardinals will soon transition into minicamps before they know it. In just a few months, the preseason will usher in the return of professional football. The Cardinals,…
‘LaPolitics’ Q&A: Scrutinizing the costs of powering Meta
LaPolitics: The Louisiana Public Service Commission recently voted down its administrative law judge’s order that would have required Meta to disclose how it calculated job projections and electricity needs for its Richland Parish data center project. Is the PSC overruling an ALJ unusual? Logan Burke, executive director with the Alliance for Affordable Energy: The commission […]
Midjourney engineer debuts open source Pretext to revolutionize web design
It allows developers to treat text as a fluid substance that can be recalculated every single frame without dropping a beat.
Democrats in disarray as Michigan AG calls for recount after convention vote declared 'a mess'
A failed Michigan Democratic AG candidate backs a full recount of convention votes, alleging broken rules and improperly calculated ballots were found.
Uh, Scientists Have Significantly Miscalculated Earth’s Sea Levels
After analyzing 385 studies related to coastal areas and sea level rise, scientists found a significant discrepancy between geoid measurements and actual sea levels, especially in the global south.
The Disconnected Present: Neoliberal Fascism and the Politics of Erasure
In this political climate, outrage is incessantly manufactured and then swiftly displaced, replaced by the next shock before the public can assemble the fragments into a coherent political picture. Each incident appears as an isolated rupture rather than as part of an unfolding structure of power, severed from the conditions that produce it and from the larger architecture of domination it sustains. This fragmentation is not accidental. It is a calculated strategy to drain meaning from public life, exhaust critical attention, and foreclose any sustained democratic reckoning or resistance. In the age of escalating fascism and a nihilistic worship of greed and raw power, American politics has devolved into a theater of violence aligned with a ceaseless stream of spectacles severed from history and emptied of systemic meaning.
Whoops, Scientists May Have Severely Miscalculated the Number of Species on Earth
A new study focused on cryptic species—animals that look the same but are genetically different—found that they’re more widespread among vertebrates than we previously thought.
Ryan Seacrest’s Six-Pack Did Not Come Easily: ‘500 Crunches a Day’ and a ‘Perfectly Calculated’ Diet
How Stephen Miller micromanages Trump’s immigration policies
Stephen Miller has sought this week to distance himself from the recent fatal shootings in Minneapolis and the administration’s miscalculated response. But more than anyone, Miller has been the overall architect of Trump’s aggressive deportation push, encouraging heavy-handed operations in blue cities, and urging agencies to cast a wide net to meet hefty arrest quotas.
Physician Organizations Oppose Legislation That Gives Health Insurers Unilateral Control Over Out-of-Network Payments
The American Society of Anesthesiologists (ASA), American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP) and American College of Radiology (ACR) today expressed strong opposition to the Lower Premiums, Faster Payments Act, legislation introduced by Rep. Frank Pallone (D-NJ) that would eliminate the independent dispute resolution (IDR) process established under the No Surprises Act (NSA) and replace it with payment rates calculated by health insurance companies.
Oops, Scientists May Have Miscalculated Our Global Warming Timeline
Clues have emerged that reveal a much hotter history than we thought.
Scientists Once Calculated the Date of Doomsday—and It’s Next Month
In 1960, the journal Science published an article in which scientists predicted doomsday would arrive on Friday, November 13, 2026. So should you be worried?
UMD in Third in Latest NSIC All-Sports Standings
The University of Minnesota Duluth athletic department is currently ranked third in the latest Northern Sun Intercollegiate Conference All-Sports Standings after the league calculated the standings again following the winter sports season. Again this year, the NSIC will recognize an overall champion along with a men's and a women's champion.
Steven Fulop on Fighting for Business Interests in Zohran Mamdani's New York
Steven Fulop, the new President and CEO of the Partnership for New York City, the city’s leading big business advocacy group, spoke with The New York Editorial Board on the morning of March 19, 2026. Fulop recently began in the role after 12 years as mayor of Jersey City and a 2025 run for governor of New Jersey. He replaced longtime Partnership President/CEO Kathryn Wylde. (photo by Liena Žagare) Participating journalists: Nicole Gelinas, Josh Greenman, Alyssa Katz, Ben Max, Akash Mehta, Harry Siegel, Ben Smith, Liena Žagare Full Transcript **Ben Max**Good morning. Thanks for being here. So start us off: The people who hired you for this role, what did they make clear were their top priorities for you coming into it, and for the Partnership, and what did you sort-of pitch as the direction you thought things could go? Give us a little of that bifurcation of where the minds met in terms of the priorities and the leadership for the new era. **Steven Fulop**Let me explain to you how I ended up in the job, OK? That’s probably a good starting point, because I don’t think anybody initially thought that I was the pick that they coveted or thought that would be an ideal fit for this position. I’d run for [New Jersey] governor, as you guys know, and I was very deliberate in the lane that I was taking as a candidate for governor. The same candidate when I ran for mayor and city council — it was outside the establishment. It was building on issues, single-issue voters — very, very concentrated on detailed policy. And I thought that if I could build an organization, outside of the typical political organization, of single-issue voters, you could become viable because they’re passionate people generally, OK? And one is mayor, outside the establishment doing that. You won two races in the country that Obama actually engaged in as president. Rahm Emanuel and Jeremiah Healy, my predecessor, was a ten-year incumbent. So we won based on this structure. Run for governor, kind of in that same model. And I thought at the time that 550,000 people would turn out in the election. That was based on history in a similar election, when Chris Christie left and it was Trump’s first-year primary, you know, changeover in governor. There was five hundred or four eighty-seven [thousand]. So I thought five-fifty was a bump up. Same numbers Sherrill had, Ras Baraka had. I thought five hundred and fifty thousand people in the election, six candidates running that are viable — two congresspeople, two mayors, senate president, and the teachers’ union president — that if I got to a hundred and thirty thousand votes, single-issue passionate voters, I would get in through the primary with twenty, twenty-five percent, and then put it back together even though I was kind of the outside establishment guy. I think I did everything perfect during that election, OK? With the exception of winning. Which is the big deal. But I miscalculated one thing. And I don’t know in hindsight how I could have changed anything. But I miscalculated that the turnout ended up spiking to eight-fifty, OK? So I said five-fifty. We all said five-fifty. Going into Election Day on Tuesday, and I’m a pretty pragmatic person. Going into Election Day on Tuesday, if you said, Steve, are you gonna win? I would have told you, we caught them and we’re gonna win, OK? We have more volunteers. I mean, to give you perspective on it: Uber, which is a data company, like, the week before, they wrote a million-dollar check to my super PAC, five hundred [thousand] to Sherrill, five hundred [thousand] to Ciattarelli. Election Day, the New York Times embedded one reporter, photographer for most of the day with only one of us, me. CNN, the day before, me, right? The trend was there. I miscalculated that there was an additional 300,000 people that came out. I saw, similar to here [in New York City], the voter numbers surging early, and I just thought it was a displaced Election-Day voter. I thought you were so excited to vote that you were voting early. I never imagined that there were 300,000 additional people voting. And if you tuned in late, then you would have ultimately– I had the wrong message. My message was, Trenton was broken, these are the things we would fix. And Sherrill, for example, was: I’m a helicopter pilot to fight Trump, right? Her message was better for that. It was over in five minutes. So why do I tell you that? I was shell-shocked, didn’t really know what happened, and the way this business works is when you lose, your phone goes dead. Nobody calls. It’s just, that’s it. Silence. And so, I’m trying to think about what happened and two weeks after the fact, I get a phone call by this guy. His name is Jim Simpson. He was Christie’s DOT chair, OK? Commissioner. And he worked on the widening of the Pulaski Skyway with me as the mayor of Jersey City. And Christie went after me with Bridgegate, and I was a government witness during Bridgegate. But even when nobody in the Christie administration could talk to me, Jim Simpson was always like, I have this major project going through Hudson County, predominantly Jersey City. I’m gonna deal with the guy. And he would tell you that Steve was a professional, good guy to deal with. I think that’s what Jim Simpson would say. I didn’t talk to Jim Simpson for 12 years. I lose the election. Two weeks after, I get a phone call. He leaves a voicemail. Hey, Steve, it’s Jim Simpson. Can you give me a call back? And I was kind of like fuck the world at that point. I didn’t want to call anybody back. And I called Jim Simpson back, and I was like, Hey, Jim. How’s it going? And he says to me, he says, Look, I’m very thankful you remember who I am, blah, blah, blah, blah. He said, Look, I had an issue in a warehouse I own in Jersey City. Didn’t know really how to navigate the building department. I figured it out, right? But thanks for calling me back. That was the conversation, OK? And I’m like, OK, great. You know? Whatever. So the conversation ended. He says, You know, I moved to Pennsylvania, but I’m sometimes up in New York. If I’m up there again, why don’t we just get together? I said Sure. I got nothing but time, right? And so he calls again about a week-and-a-half later, says, I’m gonna be in New York tomorrow. Wanna grab breakfast? Sure. So we meet for breakfast, and he knew nothing about me. When I got there, he was googling me, OK? Like, he knew nothing about my deeds. He’s like, Oh, you were in the military. That’s amazing. Like, it was a weird conversation. And, you know, towards the end of the conversation, he says, What are you gonna do next? And I said, I honestly don’t know. You know, I think maybe this, maybe that. And he says, You know who you should call? I said, No idea. Who, Jim? And he says, I don’t get along with her, he said. I used to be a Rockefeller fellow. I do not get along with her. We do not see eye to eye, but you should call this woman named Kathy Wylde. And I said, I met Kathy, ten years ago once. I don’t know if I would call her, and I don’t…That’s a weird conversation, just to call a stranger and ask for help with a job, right? And he says, No, you should figure out how to call her. We’re gonna figure out how to get you in touch with her again. I gotta think about it. I said, OK. We left. I never thought anything of it. He calls me four days later, and he says, I was giving it some thought. I was googling and I saw she’s leaving [as President and CEO of the Partnership for New York City]. You should apply for the job. And I said, I don’t know anybody. It’s a weird dynamic. And he said, We gotta figure it out. You know? Good guy. A couple weeks later, I was going to a conference in Montana, and three years earlier, I had met Rob Speyer at the conference. Spoke to Rob probably twice in my life since then, OK? But, we had a night we sat next to each other at a dinner, had a nice conversation. So I texted him. I said, Are you going to this conference by chance, in a couple weeks? He said, I am going, right? I said, Oh, can I grab you when you’re there for a couple minutes? He said, Sure. I go with my wife. He comes over, says hello. He knew my wife from a couple years ago, pleasantries. I said, Hey, Rob. you know, I texted you, if I could speak to you. He said, Yeah, yeah. What’s up? And I was, like, nervous at this point. I’m, like, sweating. Like, I’m gonna give a pitch. I said, I see you’re very involved with the Partnership. I think I’d be killer at that job. And he says, Why? And I gave him a pitch, which I’ll tell you in a second. And he said, Honestly, he said, Steve, there’s 12 people in the search committee. He says, I couldn’t even help you if I wanted to, nor would I. But what I can do when people ask me is just get in touch with Heidrick & Struggles and, go through the process. I said, That’s all I could ask. It’s fine. So I send him a text two days later with my resume, and I said I was serious about this. Can you connect me to the person? He says, Sure. Heidrick & Struggles would tell you that they did the interview as a courtesy. And that they thought that it was going nowhere, largely because when the search committee, which is a who’s who of business, outlined who they wanted, they said they wanted somebody from New York City, and they wanted somebody who was not in elected office. So here I am. I would go through these interviews, and I would outline what I thought the Partnership was doing wrong, and how politics has changed, and where I thought the potential was. Largely that the model of shuttle diplomacy, of relationships in the way that it worked 20, 30 years ago, doesn’t work anymore. And today you see, both with Mamdani and Trump— The assets that they [Partnership member companies] have are that they have 800,000 employees. They have the ability to communicate at scale, and they have a general centrist message, and none of those things are leveraged in any meaningful way, is what I would outline. And I really believe, and I continue to believe, that if the Partnership is perceived as a voice of very wealthy people and the CEOs, it will no longer exist in five or ten years. And the reason I say that is because one of the assets that people value is this convening component. And it’s a convening component because you have everybody from, you know, the CEO of JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs towards mid-level to low-level CEOs, and they want to be in the room with the next person in that food chain, so to speak. And when people view it as not good use of their time, because it’s not effective, you start seeing deterioration and you no longer get that involvement. And I would explain this to them, and I would say, This is how we’re going to organize employees, and I think is the most effective way to do it. It’s something that I did as a [mayor] or a candidate when I was running these campaigns, so it’s something I know. And they would ask a lot of questions, and we would go through this model in detail, and they would ask, and they would just move me along in the campaign in, in this situation. And then at the end, probably ten interviews in, the woman from, you know, Heidrick says, You know, I think, you know, as crazy it is, you might land this plane. And I said I knew I was going to land the plane. But— **Josh Greenman**Can I ask? So you mentioned— **Steven Fulop**Sorry to take so much time on that, but— **Josh Greenman**Three hundred thousand, or I forget the number. **Steven Fulop**Eight hundred thousand. **Josh Greenman**Eight hundred thousand employees. And correct me if any of the assumptions embedded in the question are wrong. But you’re a membership organization, you’re supposed to be speaking for the large employers. **Steven Fulop**Yes. Large employees. Employers and employees. **Josh Greenman**Employers and employees. But you don’t canvas them every time an issue comes up. You described it as centrist. OK. An issue comes up. First of all, how do you, as the head of the Partnership, decide whether to get engaged and involved in that particular issue? And second of all, how do you decide what the posture of the Partnership is, if it’s not predefined? How much of it is your instinct? How much of it is, Let me take the temperature of the employees and the employers first? **Steven Fulop**The honest answer is I think it’s a hybrid. At the last board meeting, I spoke about being more narrow in the things that we’re going to be involved in. I think it’s very important we’re very deliberate and specific on issues that we care about and being less involved in kind of broad things that don’t necessarily touch 250 of the different companies. **Josh Greenman**Even though you made a statement about antisemitism. **Steven Fulop**I made a statement on antisemitism because it touches a lot of our companies, if not all of them, because they have Jewish employees, and they’re all very invested here. **Ben Smith**What’s something that you think the Partnership should get out of? **Steven Fulop**We had a lot of time last year in the fashion industry. I think the fashion industry is important. I don’t know who reads that report ultimately or how you move the needle ultimately on the fashion industry. We did some work very publicly on short-term rentals. Not really sure that that’s the best place to be spending a lot of time, because I don’t think it pertains to every single person here. I think that there are things that do pertain, quality-of-life issues that touch everybody. How do those things come to light? So I spoke broadly at the executive board meeting about things that I thought were important. They had lots of questions, Why this, that, and I outlined things both in a framework of government and politics: This is what I think. This is where the opportunity is. This is where the vulnerability is, et cetera, and we went through some of that stuff. When we’re working, for example, now, I gotta review it. We’ve been going back and forth on a blueprint of things to change for New York City that I think, or our team thinks, are meaningful, practical, and tangible things that you could change that would impact the budget in a meaningful way. And a normal person would say, You’re probably right about that. And the politics could be tough for those. So put a litany of, let’s say, 330 of them together. A lot of it’s our team’s ideas. Some of them are a little bit maybe venturing into a place that the Partnership historically has felt maybe uncomfortable. Those are broader conversations because I don’t yet have 20 years of trust with those people. So I say, Here’s what I’m looking to do. Here’s the reasons why. And we have those conversations with the executive board. **Liena Žagare**Does universal childcare fit into that? **Steven Fulop**Universal childcare is a part of it ‘cause— universal childcare is a part of it. It’s definitely in there. And I’ll tell you this. We polled our employee base because we were curious. It’s something again that touches, I believe, the affordability crisis. I think Mamdani and Hochul are right on this. It touches everybody who lives here in some way or another. Roughly two-thirds of our employers provide some sort of childcare today. Some is on-site, some is off-site, some is subsidies for low-income, some is subsidies for everybody, some is using a tax credit. And I’ve said this to the mayor before, that our knowledge of this space is vast because we have experience, practical experience on this sort of thing that others don’t have. They may have abstract experience or be ideological in a certain way. We experience it. We can tell you what works and what doesn’t work in the Building Department, what the challenges are in the bureaucracy, what the issues are in accomplishing this in a different way, because a lot of us have tried to provide that, right? So how do we communicate that publicly in a way that makes sense from our objective, which is improving New York, and at the same time in a way that’s value-added to the mayor or the administration, is kind of where we are. But it’s a hundred-percent part of that blueprint. There is a section on this. **Akash Mehta**It’s interesting to hear you emphasize that you represent the employees, not just the employers. Are there formal structures that put that into practice? Are there elected board positions from the employee base, or anything like that? **Steven Fulop**What we’re starting to do now— So it’s a shift, OK? And what we’re doing now, the short answer is no. What we’re doing now is starting a lot of these town hall-type conversations with the CEOs and me. It is an April, May, June, two, three-year initiative, where we’re talking about civic involvement, the importance of New York, and people can opt to sign up for information from us. So we’re communicating in that way. People will opt in, and then we’ll have the ability to better communicate with the employee base with regards to what we’re doing. You know, there’s no secrets to what I’m saying. I mean— **Ben Smith**But you think the opportunity is to mobilize employees? **Steven Fulop**The opportunity is to better communicate because I think there’s a disconnect between a lot of the things that happen, and how and when we communicate to employees things that may impact them. Because you have all sorts of legalities, and general counsels, obviously, that put obstacles in place on this stuff. And we need to figure out a way, because people are invested here in a meaningful way, so they should have knowledge of this. I don’t believe– Of course, our employee base is different than working for the Hotel Trade Council or Carpenters [union] or whatever, right? They’re monolithic, told to do something, they’re gonna do it. Employee bases aren’t that. I think that’s an asset. Having a generally college-educated employee base, if you lay out an issue in a reasonable way, they could make an informed decision whether that works for them or doesn’t work for them. The— **Akash Mehta**Wait, the carpenters can’t make an informed decision? **Steven Fulop**I didn’t say they can’t make an informed decision. I’m gonna say they’re more monolithic in what they do, and it’s driven by the decision of a leader, specifically in the Carpenters. The Carpenters would say from their executive board, maybe in Washington, maybe in New York, maybe in New Jersey, say, Directionally, we are supporting Ben. And then we support Ben. We don’t have that luxury. That’s not the way we’re structured. **Akash Mehta**What does that have to do with them being college-educated? **Steven Fulop**Well, it doesn’t have to. I mean, I think that you don’t have to necessarily be college-educated, it’s a fair question, to weigh something. But I think generally somebody that’s gone through some sort of rigorous education and training on pragmatic thinking has a better chance because they’ve been educated to think that way. I don’t think it’s a referendum on, you only could understand an issue if you’re college-educated. **Alyssa Katz**But I want to dig in a little more to that when you’re talking about pragmatic thinking, because it’s not an elephant exactly, but the sort-of power in the room is the mayor, who’s elected with actually a lot of college-educated support. And also based on a sort of different way of looking at pretty much everything in some ways, right? Like around– OK, we’re gonna start with principles, we’ll figure out the practicalities later. And also around mobilizing large numbers of people who have interests potentially at odds with capitalism, right? Tenants, people who generally think that money and politics and billionaires are the core problem, or a core problem to address, and on and on. So I’m interested in your efforts to mobilize people in that light. I mean, are you looking to build a counterforce? How does that factor in? **Steven Fulop**I don’t use a “counter force.” I don’t think people are generally sympathetic or upset with capitalism or sympathetic to socialism. I view it more as a couple of things were true in the November election. A, you had an alternative to Mamdani that was tremendously flawed. So they had a ceiling. It was an exact situation that happened in Jersey City, where you had a former governor who resigned in disgrace running for mayor, my old seat, same exact outcome. So it wasn’t, it wasn’t a reflection of, everybody’s sympathetic to socialism. I think elections are choices ultimately, and these are the four choices that you ultimately had. Do I think that people are frustrated and more fiscally liberal than they’ve ever been before? Yeah, absolutely. I think that when people say that I, people say, a twenty-year model ago would say, I am, you know, fiscally conservative and socially liberal, that model has flipped really. People are fiscally liberal because what’s going on today isn’t working for them. They’re not necessarily sympathetic to socialism, but they’re open to trying things because there’s an acknowledgement that what’s happening isn’t working. And we see that too. We’re not blind to that. So do I think that you can organize a counterweight, was the question? Is that what it is? I don’t know if I would frame it as a counterweight. I think that you need to organize something that has a voice that is relevant in the political atmosphere, definitely. **Josh Greenman**Can you just explain both the number and percentage of people the Partnership represents of employees, versus the employment base of the city as a whole? **Steven Fulop**Yeah, I don’t know the— **Josh Greenman**What’s happened to that over time? I’m curious, like, is it— **Steven Fulop**I can get that to you. I don’t know. I don’t know that— **Josh Greenman**And then the other is inside the Partnership. What are the constituent companies and groups, and…Are there a couple of companies that have a highly disproportionate share of Partnership members? **Steven Fulop**No. **Josh Greenman**So how broad-based is it? Can you just describe it? **Steven Fulop**I mean, there’s 350 companies. They range in size from– I mean, they would be significant companies, maybe 50 employees, OK, to several thousand employees. But on the executive board, you can see from the site and the broader board, they vary in size and background. Most of the companies you would have some familiarity with. But, they vary in size. **Josh Greenman**How is it determined whether you’re part of the Partnership as a company in New York City? **Steven Fulop**As part of the Partnership, is generally we go through a process of meetings. I meet with them initially, provide them some information. They express that they’re interested, I express that we’re interested. I take it to the board to make sure that we’re moving in that direction, and then the board validates that. This year we’ve had, I mean, a bunch more have joined, and we’ve restructured some things so some have left intentionally. It’s not intentionally, but I guess– **Nicole Gelinas**You’re running pretty hard against the two income-tax hike proposals that the mayor ran for office and won on. Do you see the employee base as part of the battle against those tax increases? Would Partnership company employees go up to Albany to make their point known against that? **Steven Fulop**Yeah. But I don’t think you’re gonna have that same sort of advocacy group that the DSA does. It’s a totally different type of person that would engage, number one. Do I think that a lot of the employees would be opposed to an increased tax structure in New York? I think without clear parameters on what that tax structure looks like, I think the answer is yes. And it’s not only the income taxes that we’re concerned about. So we’ll go into that, too. The reality on this is, if you look at it from a reasonable point of view, if you added the income tax, the payroll, the PTET tax, which is one that we care a lot about and we’re concerned about, the corporate tax, the estate tax, and the property taxes: You put all of those together, right? And you said, OK, we’re gonna do them all. And without some structural changes to the budget, you will be at the trough again in three years. And I think a reasonable person who’s even supportive of, maybe, the highest earners paying more would say, Does it make sense to do this every two or three years, and at what point is there a tripwire? So I think, yeah, the people would be sympathetic. It depends how and what information you provide and how those taxes are. But we don’t have that structure in place yet. I just got started. So we’re just building that stuff out, which I’ve told you, but it’s new days on this. **Nicole Gelinas**So there’s, there’s a reasonable person, and then there’s Albany. Now that the budget is— **Steven Fulop**No, I gotta be careful ‘cause I gotta work with people. So I can’t say they’re unreasonable. **Nicole Gelinas**Now that the budget is just a week-and-a-half away, what do you see as your prospects for stopping those tax hikes? And if you don’t stop them, does that hurt your power early on? **Steven Fulop**No. I don’t think any reasonable person would say that there’s a structure in place today, after two months of me being there, that is gonna push back against everything in Albany from a political standpoint. I don’t think that’s a fair thing to say. I don’t think the Partnership leadership think of it that way, and I think that most people wouldn’t think of it that way. I think the governor has been very strong [against tax increases], so that’s good. That pass-through tax that was put in place when the SALT reduction was eliminated, and now there’s a proposal to eliminate that, that would be an income tax increase on not only the wealthiest people, it would be an income tax increase on business owners throughout the city. And that is one that we’re keeping track of right now that I think doesn’t get the scrutiny that it deserves. Everybody focuses on the income tax and the corporate tax, which the governor is fairly clear, at least now, that she’s not supportive of, but we’ll see. **Josh Greenman**On the corporate tax, Mamdani has repeatedly said it shouldn’t harm the climate here in New York City because it applies to anyone who does business in the state, not if you’re headquartered here, so it shouldn’t lead to corporate flight of any kind. Is that how you see it? **Steven Fulop**No. So first of all, it’s challenging when it’s depicted as corporate flight, because then it becomes a conversation around, Well, you didn’t leave. You didn’t leave. So I know what I did is OK because you didn’t leave. The reality of how this works is that it’s attrition over time, and decisions on where to scale outside of New York. That’s generally how this works. And because the immediacy isn’t there, people don’t view it as, Well, I made this decision, and tomorrow you left. And that’s a challenge for us, because the argument we lose, even though what we’re saying happens to be true, that people constantly are making decisions to scale [businesses] elsewhere. You see it. You see it. So I think that his argument is flawed, although it’s a political argument ultimately is what he’s making, and I understand that. But if you do change the tax rate as he proposes, you will be one hundred percent higher than New Jersey, right, which is at 11 percent, and you would be at 22 percent, according to the CBC, when you layer in all these other things. So at that point, you start saying, Well, I have the same talent pool that I’m pulling from here in the New York system. I’m no longer making the decision to go to Texas or Florida or Tennessee, where it’s a geographic total distance, but at a hundred percent premium to be in New York City, is that worth it, and should I be elsewhere? Your competition is elsewhere at that point in proximity. That’s the dangerous thing to what he’s saying. **Ben Smith**Do you think even more broadly, there is just this sense among— ’cause I think you’re right. You talk to business leaders, and most of the really big businesses in New York don’t care about New York anymore. They’re not New York businesses. They’re global businesses that happen to be here, and New York taxes are a diminishing share of the thing they worry about. Because they’re so global now, they don’t have the kind of commitment they did when David Rockefeller was running the Partnership. And I think a lot of them and a lot of people just think, long-term, New York is cooked. There’s a flight not to Jersey, but to the Sun Belt — to Houston, to Dallas, to Atlanta, to Miami — that’s kind of unstoppable at this point. And you see just the growth of those cities demographically. You see it in terms of their businesses. You know, maybe that’s not this year or next, but I think if you just literally look at the lines on paper of New York, Philadelphia, Boston…these northeastern cities, versus the Sun Belt. Just feels like an irreversible trend: these places are in decline, these places are rising. This is probably beyond our professional careers even, we’ll be fine. But do you think long-term that it’s true, that New York is just sort of irreversibly declining? **Steven Fulop**I think it’s fragile. There’s a lot of indicators and pressure to push people away, and there isn’t an easy solution to it. First, let’s just talk about last week. Regardless of what you say about the corporate tax conversation, we could disagree or agree, regardless. You know, your job isn’t to agree or disagree. But using the estate tax that was proposed last week, OK, or two weeks ago, nobody above the age of 60 would live in New York City if that happened to be approved. Period. End of story. You would see flight, because no sane person would do that? Because the tax rates, that you’re not talking about the one percent, you’re talking about somebody who has a $750,000 home or apartment, OK? You know who that is. So you have pressure because of the dialogue that’s happening there for sure. You definitely have gradual attrition and people moving jobs elsewhere because they’re more portable. There’s no question about that. You have pressure at the bottom because it is very hard for entry-level people to find jobs, and at the same time to find housing. It’s a true thing here in New York, the pressure. So you have a lot of difficult situations going on and absence of a tough political solution, meaning willing to make decisions that are not popular, you won’t be able to change the trajectory. And that is only one that the mayor can actually drive, OK? So the property tax reform stuff that de Blasio and Adams both tried to do, it’s necessary. It’s really necessary, but it’s gotta be driven by the mayor leaning into it, making that a number one priority. Use things like FHEPS, OK? You guys have all written about that. **Ben Smith**I don’t know what that is, sorry. **Steven Fulop**It’s the rental assistance program, OK? It’s growing at four percent per month. It’s a billion-dollar-plus program. Four percent per month! It’s not sustainable. And if the mayor was sitting here, he would say, Well, I didn’t approve the expansion of the program. That’s what he would say. Because I had a conversation with one of his people last night on this, and I said, Yeah, but the expansion would have made it worse. The existing program is four percent per month, right? We need to solve for that. How do you solve for that? That program is a byproduct of the de Blasio administration when Cuomo got rid of the rental assistance program at the state, and so the city inherited that. There isn’t another city in the country that has a similar entitlement program. It’s not sustainable. That program belongs at the state or at the federal government, but it is a politically tough thing to do. So you gotta be able to make decisions like the property tax reform, that. Those are not easy things to do. But outside of that, your trajectory for the city is very, very dangerous. It’s a fact, you know? [Note: After this interview occurred but before it was published, the Mamdani administration continued the appeal of a court ruling requiring the city to expand the FHEPS program as dictated in a law passed by the City Council, while the two sides of City Hall negotiate a potential settlement.] **Akash Mehta**Do you broadly agree with Mamdani’s analysis that Cuomo shafted New York City — that Albany shafted New York City under Cuomo? **Steven Fulop**Honestly, it predates me, so it’s hard for me to kind of give you a fair assessment on that. I would tell you that I was mayor for 12 years in Jersey City, economic backbone for New Jersey. We drive jobs, we drive the statewide economy, we drive every number. It’s disproportionately housing growth. Everything is Jersey City. And I used to say, We don’t get what we put in. We don’t get that back. It’s true, OK. I know New Jersey and New York both say to the federal government, you know, they both pay much more to the federal government than what they get back. I mean, this is a narrative that people say. It’s probably true. Does it get corrected? I don’t know. You know, it’s on the governor’s situation. I have no idea, is the short answer, ‘cause I’m not in the weeds on that. **Akash Mehta**One quick question on the tax battle. The Partnership has a [501] C4 that was seeded with $10 million. What are your plans for the group? Are you planning to spend that money on this battle? **Steven Fulop**Um…unclear. And, conversations this week on that. You know— **Josh Greenman**Do you run the C4? **Steven Fulop**We hired an executive director this week. There is a willingness, we had a call this week and there is a willingness to spend real money to make sure that New York City stays competitive. So this was literally this week. There was a call. I would tell you that there is a serious appetite there. It’s literally a ripe conversation that’s happening in the last 24 hours. Good question, though. **Nicole Gelinas**Large donors proved last year that they’re very good at spending a lot of money — but it didn’t work. In fact, it may have worked against them. Are you confident that beyond the money, you understand local and state politics well enough that some of these people are actually listening? I mean, is [State Assembly Speaker] Carl Heastie, is [State Senate Majority Leader] Andrea Stewart-Cousins listening to these arguments and saying, We didn’t realize that the potential for attrition in the corporate side was this great. Because the money hasn’t worked before. **Steven Fulop**The short answer is, I’ve been there two months. I doubt at this stage, we don’t have that relationship. I mean, I’ve met everybody. I doubt that I have the standing or credibility with them to make, or the structure in place to make that argument today more compelling than it was made six months ago. It’s just the reality of the situation. I think that you have two types of people that exist in any political sphere. You have ideologues and opportunistic people, OK, that just think about their next election. Those are the two types only. And absent somebody that has an alternative, the opportunistic person will only always be sympathetic to the ideologue, because they view that as their best route to get reelected because that’s where the gravity of energy is. **Josh Greenman**What were you? **Steven Fulop**It’s a good question. I was a hybrid. **Josh Greenman**Oh, the only one. **Steven Fulop**[Laughing] That’s right. I was unique. I think that when you look at Albany, you have a growing DSA base for sure. The question that I would have as I get into it is how much of those— the rest of the people that aren’t pure ideologues are there because there’s not an alternative that they see, can be supportive, and helpful to a pragmatic view. So I don’t know what they’ll listen to — Carl and Andrea — in the next week-and-a-half. I mean, who knows? **Josh Greenman**Should we charge more for street parking? **Steven Fulop**It’s a good question. I happen to be a supporter of some of those proposals on street safety and better streets. I don’t think it’s a broader position that the Partnership has taken, and I don’t think it’s something, going back to what I said earlier, narrowing view and going back to your question earlier on how we approve things. I’ll tell you that, as I wrote out this idea of a blueprint of things that, pragmatically, that are politically difficult to change that I believe are the right things to do, I included it in there. And going back to what you said and questioned earlier in how we get these things approved, because the nature of what we wrote, you know, once we get it to a place, I will circulate that a little bit more to the executive board and get some more feedback on whether we wanna go down this road at this point or not, or not at this time. So there’s a process on this stuff. **Ben Max**What are a few other examples? So property tax reform, some streetscape stuff, universal childcare, what else? **Steven Fulop**If you can wait till next week, it’ll be better. OK. Like– **Josh Greenman**Are you fast enough for the political world? What I’m saying is, if you’ve got to go through that process, and these conversations are happening, the budget’s gonna be cooked in ten days, are you gonna be behind the curve? **Steven Fulop**I am obsessed with the political world. I mean, I, I lived in this— Ben MaxHe means the Partnership. **Josh Greenman**The Partnership. Is the Partnership behind the curve if it’s got to deliberate on all this? **Steven Fulop**Look, I think the answer is yes. The short answer is, I don’t know, right? Like, I don’t know. I’ve not been in long enough to have a gauge on all of this. But my gut tells me yes, because the leadership there is hyper-engaged in New York City and the Partnership, it’s not something where they just kind of parachute in once every three months and think about, kind of the Partnership and what’s happening in Albany and happening in New York City. They happen to be very engaged here on a regular basis. So I think the short answer is yes. They will be able to turn stuff around relatively quickly, and I feel pretty good about that. It’s not where I think about obstacles. **Ben Max**So big picture, I’m still trying to figure out right now: What does the Partnership care about, big picture. I know you’re working on a blueprint. I know you’re rethinking some of this, but is it first and foremost, the business climate and economic growth? **Steven Fulop**Right now, I wouldn’t say this is in perpetuity. I mean, obviously, in this moment in time, it’s competitiveness and the business climate. But when the C4 was launched initially last year, they spent money on one initiative, OK? Spent a couple million dollars on the discovery bill. It had nothing to do with finances, taxes. It had to do with public safety and what they viewed as in the best interest of quality of life. So their interests aren’t necessarily only about taxes. We happen just to be in this fire drill at this moment that I got thrown into, where there’s a new tax proposal every other day. So trying to deal with that is where we are right now. I think broadly speaking, the place of the Partnership is really wanting to have a relationship where we’re kind of helping bridge the gap between the public and private sector, and helping find solutions. We have a venture fund, a $200 million venture fund, which I don’t think gets the recognition it deserves. It’s been involved in creating 37,000 jobs, seeding very early-stage New York companies that do a lot of good here. We have a tech lab that partners with DOT, with the Port Authority, with New Jersey Transit, experimenting on technologies to make government more efficient. It is a collaboration that has happened for 15 or 20 years. A lot of companies are a part of that, new companies helping on that on-ramp. It is a unique and special thing. We actually, I think, at the end of this month, have kind of that shark tank at our office where everybody comes in and pitches, and the board of that is like a who’s who. So, I mean, there’s a lot of things beyond what you guys see on the C4 and the advocacy and the lobbying sort-of side. **Nicole Gelinas**So on the Transit Tech Lab, some of the ideas that have come out of there have been very good ideas. But more broadly, for the MTA or the state and local government to actually save enough money so that we don’t have what you described with them coming back for new revenue every couple years, you have to confront the unions on some big issues, whether it’s work rules on the construction side, whether it’s two people on every single subway train, whether it’s Department of Education rules that mean they can’t be as flexible as charter schools. Do you see the Partnership taking on the unions in any sense? **Steven Fulop**Going back to the pragmatic that you said, I would use the word pragmatic and then you asked me about kind of a little bit more about that. You brought up the conductors on the trains and the proposals on that. It is very expensive. There isn’t a city in the country that has that structure. If you outline that to an employee of XYZ Corporation, and you said to them, Here’s the landscape, OK, We need help with XYZ, I would venture to say that they would be sympathetic to our point of view. That’s what I was getting at, just to give that to you earlier. You know, the New York Post called me the day that Mamdani entered into the— he said at the end of a press conference, I wasn’t there, obviously, but he mentioned that he wasn’t gonna do the sweeps of the homeless encampment. And it was probably my second or third day on the job. And the Post called and said, Do you want to comment on this? And I said, Yeah. And I said something critical of him at the time. Prior to doing that, because it was like my second or third day, I did say to some of the people on the team, going back to how nimble the organization is, I said, Hey, I would like to comment on this, OK? Because I think it’s wrong, his approach, and I think he’s gonna have to move off of where he is, ultimately. And some people said, Well, is that really the hill you wanna climb? Is that really that important to us? And I said, It absolutely is. Because, A, he’s wrong on the issue, and B, it’s a quality-of-life issue. Going back to the fact that it ended up being right, he ended up moving on, and you could see it from, like, far away, just based on being a legislator versus an executive and accountability. But I think our job is to call balls and strikes and just be fair about it. So do I think– Let me say it this way better. If you are gonna grow housing, OK, ‘cause he says it’s a priority. During his election, when he was a candidate, he would tell you if he was sitting here, he would tell you, you look at his CBS, the debates, he would talk about Jersey City and Tokyo, Jersey City and Tokyo as housing growth models. He would tell you that if he was sitting here — he said it on TV multiple times. Now, he followed that about what we did in Jersey City ‘cause we grew a lot. How are we able to grow? OK, A, you had layers of government here that we do not have there, so you need to clean that up. We upzoned, of course, more aggressively than the City of Yes around transit centers, which you have to do here for sure. And then the third part about it is that if you mandate affordable housing, community givebacks, the union labor, et cetera, et cetera, the projects financially cannot handle that. They don’t pencil out. So what we would generally do is that, on the union labor front, because the people that get squeezed the most were the ones that pressure the building trades better, because their jobs are usually the ones that get–are most competitive, are the less skilled parts of the building trades. So when you build a high-rise building, the electricians, the plumbers, the operating engineers, the ironworkers are generally gonna be union, because it’s a more complicated thing. Carpenters, laborers, painters generally are the ones that have competition from non-union, and that’s really where it is ultimately. And we would say in Jersey City, on the projects that are important to us, if they were coming to the city for some sort of subsidies or big zoning changes, and it was an important project, we would work with the developer to give the unions a last look to be competitive with the open-shop bid, and some sort of grace between five and ten percent to be competitive. Now, absent that, there is no way to get it built in union labor. So if the mayor continues to be strident that everything is gonna be a hundred percent building trades, you’re never gonna meet the objective of whatever he has a hundred, two hundred thousand units. So I think that our voice is gonna be that you need some practical reforms to these incentives, and practical reforms means that you cannot pay a 30 percent premium for the carpenters. **Nicole Gelinas**So something very simple on that, though. Two people on a train. Would you see yourself making a statement similar to the encampments that, you know, Hey, intuitively, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to leave people in encampments. Intuitively, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to mandate two people on a train. Would you just call up the Post and say that, or that’s a different— **Steven Fulop**I don’t think that— I think if you called me and you said to me, What do you think? I’d probably just answer you, that I think it’s not something that any other city does, and in a financial crisis, you probably gotta be reasonable about that. **Ben Max**This is what you got hired in part for, right? To be out there more and to be a voice pushing back. **Steven Fulop**I think that it’s just my personality. I don’t know if it’s necessarily, it’s just like this is— You’d ask me, and I would say it. I wouldn’t go call up the Post and say, Let me-- Carl [Campanile], let me comment on this, right? I wouldn’t do that. Like, that’s not how I would think about it, right? I’d be going with my day, and then Carl would say, Do you care to comment on this? Or he would call, and I would just be like, Yeah, I think so and so. And he would say, Is that on the record? And generally, I’m not gonna say, This is off the record, on anything. I generally just talk. OK? So— **Josh Greenman**You talked about incentives, government incentives. I want to talk about literal government incentives, like, Amazon, right? Remember how many years ago, half of Amazon’s HQ2 was gonna be here. **Steven Fulop**Yeah, I remember. We tried to pitch it too. **Josh Greenman**It didn’t happen. You tried to pitch it, too. What do you think of the state’s current corporate incentives? Do they make sense as currently structured? To try to attract businesses to New York State, to try and attract businesses to New York City, there are various programs. There’s been a lot of talk about restructuring those programs to make them more rational, and there’s a larger question of, should we have this environment in which cities chase corporations by throwing money at them or tax abatements at them, or should there be some kind of compact where cities agree that they don’t do this to each other? **Steven Fulop**Yeah. I generally think — putting on my mayor’s hat — that the structure exists today is a race to zero, and it’s not healthy from the public side. But you cannot unilaterally disarm, is the unfortunate part of the conversation. And so absent governors getting together and having some sort of détente where they’re no longer doing that, I do not see how a state doesn’t participate in this. That said, I think that the competitiveness conversation in New York and New York City is more complicated than just incentives. I think that, you think about other places in the country, where people have mobility to get to, and there’s opportunity, there’s more of a deliberate effort to attract beyond just the incentives. Texas reordered their entire court system to replicate Delaware, to make it more friendly for corporations. They’re having a Texas stock exchange to have better access to capital markets. It’s more of a deliberate strategy than just saying, Hey, we’re gonna give incentives. Now, it is not helpful– you know, people, absent certainty on communication, they try to interpret a lot of what somebody means or what they say. So, governor or mayor says X, Y, Z in a statement, they try to interpret, what does that ultimately mean? How should I envision that to manifest itself for what I’m trying to do? And the thing that we are trying to calibrate for, and I say this publicly and privately, is that a lot of the rhetoric out of City Hall, which is consistent tax, tax, tax on any front that’s possible, whether you make $500,000, whether you have a house that’s $750,000, whether it’s a pass-through and you have a small business, it creates a very volatile environment. And that’s the problem ultimately. So I think you need certainty on that. **Josh Greenman**I have one other topic that we haven’t talked about that I just wanna make sure we discuss, which is AI. You represent a lot of employees. And AI is going to be increasingly a large employer, in theory in the city, but it’s also coming for some of those employees’ jobs, maybe many of those employees’ jobs. **Ben Smith**And the employers are very excited about it. **Josh Greenman**And some of the employers, the CEOs, are excited about being able to save dollars and innovate in various ways. **Steven Fulop**Well, they don’t communicate that with me, but just go ahead. **Josh Greenman**So how do you, how do you balance those tensions, which are very, very real, among employees who might be excited and employers who might be excited about AI, and those who might say, Holy shit, my job is gonna be gone in 10 years, or five? **Steven Fulop**I think that that is— I said this, maybe I touched on it a little bit earlier, I think that young people not being able to find jobs and the housing crisis was pressure from the bottom that is one of the most at-risk situations for New York. AI is part of that conversation, potentially — so you have macro environment, why people aren’t hiring, and then AI might be part of that too. You know, though they don’t clarify that with me. They don’t say, Here’s the reason I’m doing this or doing that. I do think that one of the biggest risks over the next 12 or 18 months is the AI impact on jobs. I agree. And I don’t think anybody has a good solution, both in the Partnership or in City Hall, yet on that. And in order to kind of figure out how to do that and solve for that, I think that you need to have some sort of broader conversation on implications. I will tell you that one of the things that we outlined in kind of what we were talking about on this blueprint was that, I do think that part of the procurement process for city government services needs to factor in who is training and who is factoring in the AI conversation, and those scores should be appropriately weighted, beneficial for companies that are thinking about training or have a training program as part of it. So we’re trying to think of ways to kinda think about training people and getting people into another space and using the leverage of City Hall to do that. I don’t think there’s a broad enough plan yet to solve for it. It is the biggest risk for New York, because New York City relies on white-collar jobs disproportionately for its budget. And where AI is coming is directly at the white-collar jobs as opposed to the blue-collar jobs. And so New York City is poised to get hit in a different sort-of way than anybody else. Short answer is, I don’t think anybody has a clear-eyed solution on that. Some of that’s gotta be set by the mayor, you know, that’s the truth too. I said earlier in the conversation, we had a roundtable on childcare in December with the mayor. And the mayor, at the end of it, I said to his staff, I said, You know, we outlined some of the inefficiencies and bureaucracies to getting these childcare centers open, which we’re familiar with. I told you earlier. We can help you with that from a technology standpoint, okay? And this goes back to making tough decisions. You’ve seen employee headcount since COVID skyrocket at City Hall. Whole, another conversation. I mean, that’s a fair thing to say. We said we’d help you with some efficiencies on that from a technology standpoint. And they were nice in their response but there was really no follow-up on that. And, and my point on that is we can only do so much from the Partnership. You need a dance partner in order to dance, right? Like, that’s really the reality of this. So, I do not know the solution, and I push back. People aren’t— They don’t, at least they don’t express to me they’re happy about, you know, not hiring jobs. You know, maybe to you, Ben. But, and AI displacement, I think people are very concerned about it in the Partnership too. **Harry Siegel**You said maybe without some changes, the Partnership won’t be there in five to ten years. We just did have a big turnout election, that led to an avowedly socialist mayor. Can you just step back and say— **Steven Fulop**No, I think the Partnership— I think I clarified that on the, that current trajectory of how it positions itself needed to change. So I think that’s part of the reason we’re here, to make sure it’s relevant for the next ten years, but— **Harry Siegel**But the business community seems increasingly less relevant to the political direction of the city. The Partnership seems less relevant. This is a bit of an inside conversation. For people who maybe vaguely know what it is or just spot its name in headlines or whatever, what is the point of the Partnership? And frankly, what is the good and utility that the business community brings to the city, if you just want to explain that? **Steven Fulop**What does the Partnership add to the city? **Harry Siegel**Sure. **Steven Fulop**Or the politics shifting left. **Harry Siegel**However you want to take it. **Steven Fulop**I think, forget about the Partnership as an organization for a second. I think the big corporations add a disproportionate amount of philanthropy, revenue, budget help, employee help to the ecosystem here in New York City. If those larger corporations migrate out, you would have a massive budget problem, you would have significant more unemployment, and the amount of philanthropy, which is tens of millions of dollars a year across, which sometimes is underreported or undershared, is a good thing ultimately, helps private institutions or public institutions, culture and arts institutions disproportionately, hospitals disproportionately. So I think that the business community here has a huge impact. The Partnership acts as a conduit from them to the public sector, and has multiple layers to it as I touched on earlier, where we help incubate early companies, facilitate connection to New York City, help advocate for policy change, et cetera, et cetera. **Harry Siegel**Outside of real estate, the business community, as you and Ben [Smith] were talking about, is less and less rooted here, and the problem is sort of a slow trickle to other regions, as opposed to people just pushing out and moving. Lots more people are voting. They seem less interested in the priorities of the business community. You’re talking about employees as a sort of base for the organization, 800,000 of them. I’m just trying to understand how business makes itself more relevant. **Steven Fulop**That’s a little bit of a process that I touched on earlier, a little bit of the transition that I touched on earlier on why we’re here. I think that people, as you saw in this last election, are struggling, an affordability crisis is real. There’s a lot of pressure, whether it’s jobs or housing. I think that’s all real. And I think that people have become, as I said earlier, fiscally more liberal because what’s working for them today and not working today has shifted from 10 years ago. So in order to be relevant, we need to be cognizant of that. **Alyssa Katz**People mentioned earlier that antisemitism is a priority for you, fighting it, and you know, I know you— **Steven Fulop**It’s a priority for us, yeah. **Alyssa Katz**Yeah, and we had a couple incidents that may have coincided with right when you arrived at the Partnership, right? The most visible one was, you know, this Israeli drone company. **Steven Fulop**Oh, the Israeli drone company, Easy Aerial? Yeah. OK. **Alyssa Katz**Yeah. What’s the other one? **Steven Fulop**It was the Park East Synagogue situation. **Alyssa Katz**Oh, right. Well, listen, but I’m talking purely on the business side. We can talk about it more broadly. But you know, there’s a company that was in a city-owned property. The city says it was a lease issue but it had been the target of a campaign saying, Well, you’re providing drones to the Israeli military, and we need you out of here. And then sure enough, that’s exactly what happened. And I’m just kind of curious about how you are approaching that kind of pressure on Israeli individuals and their businesses to get out of town, basically. How do you address that? **Steven Fulop**I think it’s a new conversation, obviously. We do think that antisemitism is rising, and it’s a significant concern. The BDS conversation and singling out one country to different standards than other countries that the U.S. or the public agrees with or disagrees with, or that has human rights violations or doesn’t have human rights violations, is a totally different conversation that we don’t agree with — singling out a single country. And the reality is that that BDS conversation, building on that, is not acceptable to us. And as you see elected officials more vocal in this space, unfortunately, if that ends up being, I think that is a place you’d definitely see us spend money. **Liena Žagare**Do you think Mayor Mamdani is doing a good job, and where would you— **Steven Fulop**Doing a good job? **Liena Žagare**Yeah. Doing a good job in the city and— **Steven Fulop**I think— Yeah, look, I think— **Liena Žagare**Where should he be more careful? **Steven Fulop**I think, I think there is— The short answer is, it’s been two-and-a-half months, so it’s hard to tell. I think that there’s a lot of mixed signals between things he says sometimes in smaller meetings versus what he says publicly. I think that, there’s been some missteps along the way, like for example the real estate tax proposal I thought was a misstep. I think that there’s been some really encouraging things. How he’s handled the president has been terrific. And I think that the city is in a better place than anybody would have thought post-election with regards to the president as a result of his communication there. I think that he has shown some willingness to move away from an extreme left position that he came in. That transition from a legislator to an executive is a transition, and from being a backbench Assemblyperson to a prominent front and center mayor, that transition is always complicated. Homeless encampments, the library funding, the FHEPS situation, he’s moderated some of those views, which are good. And at the same time, I think sometimes going back to how we interpret things that he puts out there, sometimes he’ll put something out that we’ll interpret in a way that I – ‘cause you have no choice but to interpret this stuff – you’re concerned about. You know, like, and I’ve said to them, Look, when American Express announced their headquarters, right? It’s a big deal. You know, a big American brand establishing a significant presence again here, recommitting. It’s good for his narrative ultimately, right? You know, that was in the works for some time. Or the Bank of America situation. If you look at the kind of statements that came out as a result of that, they never acknowledged the corporate side. They talked about the building trades. And that signals to us, A, questions about the housing conversation, right? And B, whether you understand the ecosystem that American Express employs thousands of people here, and they’re hugely involved philanthropically and committed to the city, and what that means. So I would say it’s mixed. **Nicole Gelinas**One thing that’s been missing from the ecosystem is a person like Dick Ravitch, who passed a...
Diablo 4 Season 11 arrives just hours after The Game Awards, fueling speculation among fans that Blizzard timed the launch as a deliberate strategy. But why?
Season 11 of Diablo 4 arrives in the shadow of The Game Awards, and fans are debating whether Blizzard’s timing was a coincidence or a calculated move to maximize attention.
Government to U-turn over business rates for pubs
The hospitality industry had called for a rethink of planned changes to the way the tax based on property is calculated.
Oops, Scientists May Have Miscalculated Our Global Warming Timeline
A study suggests Earth surpassed the 1.5°C warming threshold in 2020, sparking debate among scientists about the accuracy of global climate data.
How Trump and His Advisers Miscalculated Iran’s Response to War
In the lead-up to the U.S.-Israeli attack, President Trump downplayed the risks to the energy markets as a short-term concern that should not overshadow the mission to decapitate the Iranian regime.
The politics and possibilities of ‘AI could kill us all’
I found myself fielding a lot of questions from folks who don’t usually talk much about AI this week. They were mostly along the lines of “do you think AI is going to kill us all?” or “how worried should I be about this human extinction stuff?” Motivating this wave of existential anxiety was the highly dramatic resignation of now-former Anthropic employee Jacob Coxon, who quit his job while publicly sharing his concerns about safety practices at the leading AI companies. More specifically, he declared that almost everyone at OpenAI and Anthropic, the leading AI labs, believes that there’s a decent chance the AI systems they’re producing could “kill us all” by the end of the decade, and the companies aren’t “acting responsibly.” Other AI safety researchers, including those still employed at Anthropic and OpenAI, all confirmed that yes, Coxon is correct, they’re all worried that their company’s products might prove fatal for the entire human race as well. Two more AI employees quit and joined the chorus. Now, the warning shot has been covered everywhere from the Wall Street Journal to Fox News to WIRED to the Guardian. I understand why all this sounds scary, but my response to those who have asked, has generally been: No, you don’t need to worry that AI will kill go rogue and kill us all. But that does not mean we shouldn’t worry, period. Far from it. The companies building AI products are now among the wealthiest and most powerful entities in the world. And they very much are building enormous engines of mass surveillance, extraction, and automation. They can and have allowed their AI systems to carry out felony hacks of other companies, provided the government with autonomously generated kill lists, and sold enterprise technology to firms around the world that is explicitly intended to replace jobs. But “AI” has done these things not because they have all-powerful minds of their own but, ultimately, because people have programmed, calibrated, and directed them to. In other words, it’s not AI we need to worry the most about. It’s the people and corporations working to profit from and gain power by deploying it. The technology is sophisticated, sure, and, especially in cybersecurity contexts, potentially disruptive to plenty of existing systems. But if we want to stop this predatory, profiteering, and extractive form of AI—and it’s worth noting that at this point, most people do—we absolutely can. A quick note/plea: I can only do all of this with the support of readers like you, so if you find value in independent, critical tech journalism and analysis, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. I want to keep as much of this un-paywalled as absolutely possible, and I need your support to do so. Many thanks to all who continue to chip in, it’s very much appreciated. Onward. Subscribe First, some context: AI industry folks like Coxon have been discussing the prospect that AI will destroy humanity for years. Even before the beginning of the AI boom, many working in the industry, from the executive staff to the rank and file researchers, have obsessed over ‘x-risk’, or the possibility that AI will become sentient or semi-sentient and move one way or another to exterminate humanity. This is ostensibly why Elon Musk bankrolled OpenAI in the first place, and is the grounds for his lawsuit alleging OpenAI betrayed its charter by abandoning its nonprofit status to become a commercial enterprise. Many AI engineers and startup founders have calculated their own personal p(doom), or the probability that the tech product they are working on will initiate an actual humanity-extinguishing apocalypse. 10-25% p(doom)s are pretty common. (I wrote about a long weekend I spent among these folks at one of their top conferences here, to give you an idea of their ideas and belief systems.) Sam Altman himself drove the narrative of the imminent rise of a super-powerful AI, or artificial general intelligence, to prominence by declaring that the technology he was building posed an existential risk to humanity. This idea is in other words baked into the DNA of modern AI companies and into the products they engineer. It’s also why the industry is routinely accused, by myself and others, of “doom marketing,” ie, using such proclamations and framings to impart the sheer power of the technology behind your product onto investors, partners, consumers, and the state. Some ambient understanding of this tendency may have helped prevent the press from repeating the claim every time one of the x-risk folks made it over the years, including when they quit their jobs at AI companies while doing so. Yet Coxon’s AI x-risk alarm has broken containment, as they say, and has exposed the idea to the mainstream media once again. This has happened, I think, for a number of reasons. First, when AI CEOs were going around saying AI might kill everyone in 2023, their companies were well-capitalized, but not nearly to the extent they are today. They were more easily dismissed as eccentric geeks of the sort that Silicon Valley is supposed to produce. Now, not only do their products have much greater market saturation, but people are more aware of a) the often unethical ways the executives and companies comport themselves b) the other adverse impacts of AI that have already arrived, and c) the physical cost of building these systems, particularly when it comes to data centers. Finally, toss in the constant stream of headlines in 2026 about AI models going rogue or potentially upending the world’s infrastructure. [ ](https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/with-the-backlash-to-data-centers) [ With the backlash to data centers, Flock and AI glasses, a mass opposition to big tech is underway. Silicon Valley is in denial. ](https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/with-the-backlash-to-data-centers) Brian Merchant · Aug 27 [ Read full story ](https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/with-the-backlash-to-data-centers) As a result, general sentiment was already overwhelmingly skeptical of AI and its overlords, so the table was pretty well set for someone to come along and say ‘just a reminder, the companies that are building the product that promises to take your job and leave a data center in your neighborhood also think that it might exterminate the human race’ and get a strong reaction from the media and the public. The question is: Should we understand this stuff as hype, strategically fanned to feed already swelling valuations? Is it doom marketing? Genuine cause for alarm that the infrastructure that undergirds modern life is facing a novel threat vector? Or reason to be sincerely worried that AI companies are amassing too much power, and that their products are genuinely dangerous? The answer, I’m afraid, is “yes.” Let me try to untangle all of this a bit, because arguments over how to navigate this moment are extremely heated right now, as they are essentially arguments over how to approach the politics of AI at a moment where there may be a unique opening for action. Those sympathetic to AI alignment concerns and x risk arguments—which increasingly includes a faction on the left who want to shut down AI over safety concerns—argue that people who dismiss AI as all hype have their heads in the sand. Meanwhile, critics of the x-risk narrative—which I might note includes a cadre of investors and tech folks on the right, too—argue that it is hype and can be used to further inflate valuations or for pursuing regulatory capture. The challenge is that many feel that dismissing AI as just hype or purely marketing also diminishes the urgency of taking on the AI industry as the novel and threat to labor, civil society, and the public sphere it is; others that by accepting the industry’s own terms, we imbue it with undue power and enable it. But let’s be clear: Declarations that AI is so powerful it might end the world are a kind of marketing, and anyone who says otherwise is just as off base as those who say that’s all that it is. If you don’t think that these sub-trillion dollar companies have higher-ups who noticed that when their founders talked about super-powerful dangerous AI they got spikes in media interest and phone calls from investors, or that those founders didn’t notice that themselves, and lean into certain narratives to advantage their products, then I don’t know what to tell you. Not all marketing is a Pepsi ad campaign with a celebrity spokesperson. Yet confronting the AI industry should certainly be considered an urgent project. Do I share the x-riskers’ fear that out-of-control, super-intelligent AI agents might end the world? I do not. I’ve read a good deal of AI extinction literature over the last couple of years and I have not come across a credible, step-by-step documentation of how exactly AI might move from self-recursively improving AI to killing every single human on the planet. Most of what I’ve read seems predicated on a sort of reverse Ian Malcolmian logic: Eventually, it becomes smart enough and AI, uh, finds a way (to exterminate humanity). Are the AI companies also overstating and dramatizing what their products can do? Yes, pretty much all the time. They’re in a knife fight for market share and are trying to win customers and government contracts before their investors come knocking. And yet. They have concentrated enormous amounts of compute, have extensive data collection and surveillance capacities, have inserted themselves into the state in numerous capacities, including military kill chains, and they are being run by egomaniacal billionaires who are rushing to monopolize an entire new market. The way I think about their most recent frightening-seeming exploits is not as a “swarm of rogue AI agents building a new civilization” or whatever, but as corporations with a hitherto-unimaginable amount of compute at their disposal recklessly experimenting with automation programs, completely unafraid of any repercussions because we have been unwilling or unable to impose any on them. So I think we should welcome any newfound imperative to hold them accountable. I also think that ultimately, the AI critics, Pause AI folks, leftists, doomers, effective altruists, and, honestly, most of the public, want a lot of the same things: legitimate checks and limits on AI companies’ power, actual transparency into what the companies are doing, and for more of AI to be under public control. (Ultimately, a lot of what animates the x-risk fears are rooted in just that: a fear of losing control.) How we move towards all this, exactly, is the question of the day, and while there’s much to be argued over in terms of building a viable political platform to challenge the AI industry’s power, I do want to cast a vote against one particular approach. Not to pick on Chris here, as there are a lot of folks out there proposing stuff like this, and the policy ideas actually stem from AI safety groups. But not only would this be challenging to land politically (I can already hear the ‘China will beat us to AGI’ calls) and all but unworkable in practice, this approach is a) far too limiting, b) fails to address the current harms caused by AI and c) would likely only wind up serving Anthropic and OpenAI; it’s what regulatory capture looks like in action. Full model transparency is the floor for what should be on offer here. If these companies believe their products will kill us, the very least we deserve is to know how. It’s in the public interest. I would also argue we might get a lot of the way to stopping any currently envisioned robot apocalypse simply by forcing AI companies to assume liability, and to submit to the full brunt of the law. If Sam Altman were liable to be charged with a felony for approving the hack on Hugging Face1, if Google was forced to pay defamation fines each time it published a false and injurious AI Overviews, these companies might suddenly find cause to restrain their models’ output, and we might hear less about rogue AI. We would need to introduce new frameworks and available tools for tracking automated lawbreaking, to be sure, but I’d wager that little would frighten the AI companies more than actually being held accountable for what their products enable. To that end, Illinois has passed an AI liability law, which the industry fought tooth and nail, and Florida is considering one. The next steps would be towards moving AI under public control; again, it’s only reasonable, since everyone, not just AI insiders, should get a say over how a technology whose developers say might kill us is developed and deployed. Dismantling the whole industrial project as currently structured should be on the table, too, pending democratic input. But that’s for another post. For now, suffice to say that while I won’t be losing any sleep about an AI-enabled extinction event, Mr. Coxon and co. have given us an opportunity to underscore the urgency of the clear and present damage AI companies are doing, the extreme power they wield and the extent to which they hold themselves unaccountable, and the abundance of political capital there is out there for taking them on. Subscribe 1 Purely speculative! I do not know if he did or not.
Radiology Associates of North Texas says it will waste over $51M on costs related to No Surprises Act
The country’s largest independent imaging group—located in Fort Worth and employing about 300 physicians—calculated the figure based on an internal analysis of its billing practices.
Uh, Scientists Have Significantly Miscalculated Earth’s Sea Levels
Scientists found that sea levels are much higher than geoid measurements previously indicated, especially in the global south.
Netflix’s Summer of Bummer
(Welcome to the Entertainment Strategy Guy, a newsletter on the entertainment industry and business strategy. I write a weekly Streaming Ratings Report and a bi-weekly strategy column, along with occasional deep dives into other topics, like today’s article. Please subscribe.) Today, I’ve got a guest post from longtime friend of the newsletter, Brandon Katz. I’ve been trying to find time all summer to look at Netflix’s straight-to-streaming film slate, but between a pre-planned trip and Nielsen moving up their streaming data timeline, I’ve been swamped. So I reached out to Brandon, one of my favorite fellow analysts, to write about it. And I feel like he captured the tone and data focus of the newsletter perfectly. You can connect with Brandon on LinkedIn and Twitter. Enjoy! Don’t worry, folks. You’re in safe hands with me. To ease any anxieties about an interloper in ESG’s domain, I’ll start by stealing one of his best framing devices: headlines. Box office flops are covered in the same way the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles eye pizza: with cartoonish insatiability. I would know. I’m a former reporter who wrote nearly identical headlines: Yet, intentionally or not, streaming misses get treated with kids gloves, filtered through a rosy lens: In the last six years, U.S. streaming viewership has become nearly as transparent as the box office, but the data often arrives weeks later, in a number of less intuitive metrics, and with nary an official budget to be found. This plays into the Wall Street-whispering narratives major streamers have been cultivating for years. They get a pass in a way that theatrical studios simply don’t. Subscribe Netflix’s Summer Slate Not a single Netflix original film released between May and August this year opened above 20 million U.S. TV hours, per Nielsen. That benchmark usually serves as the EntStrategyGuy’s floor for a streaming hit on Netflix. None of these films enjoyed a hit-cementing single week of 20-plus million hours during their runs. Netflix’s two best films were true crime docs, Maternal Instinct (16.5 million hours) and The Crash (19.7 million), the best overall week for a film this summer. Great for most other streamers, but not necessarily what we’re used to seeing from Netflix. For an overly-dramatic comparison, Happy Gilmore 2 opened last summer to around 47 million hours (celebrity cameos, baby!). Zooming out, the picture looks even worse. In 2026, Netflix’s five biggest scripted summer films posted the lowest average (28.6 million hours) and median (28.8 million hours) eight-week viewership totals of the past four years. Now, it’s unrealistic and unfair to expect Netflix to deliver a _KPop Demon Hunters-_sized hit every year. But it’s also not ideal to see the size of their hits shrinking over the last few summers. Let’s quickly run through some of the notable summer misses. Jennifer Lopez and Brett Goldstein’s perfectly fine romcom, Office Romance, fell off the charts after 20 million hours in its first two weeks. Top films usually last for four-plus weeks. Starry titles ideally don’t decay that fast either. Homegrown star Millie Bobby Brown couldn’t prevent the snappy Enola Holmes franchise from diminishing returns. At 14.3 million U.S. hours, the third film posted roughly half of what the first two films did in their first two weeks. What’s on Netflix calculated that per-day global views were down nearly 60% from the second movie. The Whisper Man did okay with more than 36 million hours over its first four weeks. But I expected a little more juice from a film featuring Robert De Niro, Michelle Monaghan, and Adam Scott. Kevin Hart’s Ladies First collected just 11.2 million hours total across two weeks. That’s a big miss for one of Netflix’s go-to stars. Plopping into the same bucket are Sunny Sandler’s Don’t Say Good Luck (10.3 million in two weeks) and John Cena’s Little Brother (17.5 million). Meanwhile, English-language originals Color Book (June 19), In the Hand of Dante (June 24) and Heartstopper Forever (July 17) never sniffed Nielsen’s Top 10 at all, despite needing only 2 to 5 million hours to land in the top ten most weeks. (By my count, eleven English-language scripted original films released between May and August did chart). It’s only fair to mention that Swapped (1-May) posted nearly 42 million U.S. hours over five weeks (the longest Netflix original run this summer) and is currently their eighth most-watched English-language film ever worldwide. Remarkably Bright Creatures (37 million, 4 weeks) and Voicemails for Isabelle (27 million, 4 weeks) weren’t bombs either. Still, overall, I think it’s fair to say this was a quieter summer season than we’re used to seeing from the market-leader. You might not realize that given the language commonly used in public analysis. The Twist Despite the starkly black-and-white tone of the coverage, here’s the twist: when many box office bombs arrive on streaming, their viewership looks a whole lot like many of Netflix’s supposedly successful summer releases. Hmm, where have we heard that one before? Masters of the Universe topped out at $65 million stateside against a $170 million budget_._ I’ll admit, Skeletor ripping sleeveless curls as a gym bro and bodyslamming Adam’s co-workers was funny. But, much to the chagrin of my bank account, my laughter doesn’t launch franchises. Yet the He-Man reboot opened to 19.6 million hours (from a Wednesday five-day opening instead of just one weekend), on par with Hoppers on Disney+ (19.4 million). It put up nearly 47 million hours over its first six weeks, bigger than all of Netflix’s summer releases. Pretty darn healthy and likely to land among the 25 most-watched movies on streaming this year. Sticking with Amazon, The Sheep Detectives just barely broke even at the box office with $133 million worldwide (and only $66 million domestic). I never expected cloven-hooved, cud-chewing mammals to be able to bring me to tears. Yet that’s exactly how I found myself at the end of this surprisingly affecting movie (#NoShame). It was likely the unexpected quality in a family-friendly film that powered its streaming over-performance. Sheep Detectives delivered a solid run for Prime video netting 26.2 million hours! How about franchise IP? Star Wars: The Mandalorian & Grogu had the lowest opening ($81 million) and lowest-grossing Disney-era live-action Star Wars film ($178 million domestic). One day before release, its Heat score (19.8%)—audiences who list their interest as a 7/7—fell behind blockbusters Wicked (21%), Superman (23%), Fantastic Four: First Steps (23%), Michael (23%), Toy Story 5 (26%) and Avatar: Fire and Ash (27%), according to Greenlight Analytics. The urgent enthusiasm just wasn’t there. On streaming, Mando opened to weeks of 12.1 million, 6.1 million and 2.7 million hours (21 million total) over its first three frames. Not the numbers Lucasfilm was hoping for nor the numbers of a streaming hit. But they’re in the same vicinity as some Netflix summer releases with $345 million at the global box office to offset a smidgen of the pain. Final Thoughts So why oh why does this nuance gap exist? Four key reasons: Data Literacy: A “$100 million opening” just makes sense. After decades of box office reporting, even casual movie fans are well-versed in the benchmarks of hits and home runs. There’s an immediate shorthand. But “16.5 million” hours doesn’t land nearly as cleanly. Despite leaps of progress, the streaming ratings era is still in its infancy compared to theatrical. The EntStrategyGuy and I met thanks to a late 2010s group chat of data nerds hungry to find a shred of certainty in nebulous streaming performance. I’m not surprised to see “No. 1 on Netflix” still getting misconstrued out in the wild. Timing: By Friday morning, we have the box office’s Thursday night previews totaled, allowing us to better project the weekend’s expectations. From there, ticket sales are reported daily. By Sunday, the film’s fate is usually finalized, at least in terms of public perception. In streaming, Nielsen recently improved its delay to…two weeks. The medium isn’t forced to contend with instant gratification as harshly. Financials: Theatrical film budgets are a mere Google away. Profit and loss is calculated in the cold and unforgiving naked light of day for all to see. But finding the vast majority of streaming exclusive movie budgets requires the forensic investigation skills of a Criminal Minds detective. Also, it’s very difficult to calculate how much revenue/value a straight-to-streaming films provides a streamer. This is why there are so few stories about streaming original movies “losing X amount of money”. On top of that, marketing budgets are far greater for theatrical movies than streaming exclusive movies, which leads to earlier and better awareness. This then translates to a wider pool of potential interest. Narrative Control: Netflix is the only major streaming service to publish weekly first-hand viewership data and annual engagement reports. Naturally, some headlines borrow their first-hand framing**.** Other streamers benefit from their comparative lack of transparency. They may occasionally announce vague performance platitudes such as Apple TV’s Mayday becoming its “biggest film debut on the platform to date over its first 18 days,” and that it ranked No. 1 with left-handed viewers in its first weekend. (Fine, I made up that second one). But, for the most part, they keep first-hand viewership shrouded in mystery to avoid bad press. Especially for outlets that demand multiple articles per day from their writers, it’s an easy (and understandable) way for some reporters to hit their daily article quota by just repeating what the streamers have told them. TL:DR version: Streaming-exclusive movies are asked to do different things than theatrical movies, but that doesn’t mean they should escape judgment. Both still need to draw enough eyeballs to justify their cost within the proper performance contexts. The more cleanly we can inject a little nuance into streaming analysis, the better we’ll understand the audience and content trends that drive this industry. And that’s what all of this is really about: knowing what audiences actually want! Brandon Katz is the Director of Insights & Content Strategy at Greenlight Analytics where he focuses on evaluating the ever-fluid media landscape to unearth understanding, opportunity and value. Greenlight Analytics is the entertainment intelligence consulting company redefining how Hollywood finds, understands, and activates audiences. Prior to joining Greenlight Analytics, he served as the senior entertainment industry strategist at Parrot Analytics, and as a full-time entertainment industry reporter covering the Xs and Os of Hollywood, most notably with TheWrap and the Observer.
Tom Brady’s Viral Weekend Was A Business Lesson Sports Media Missed
"Far too many were eager to mock a staged wrestling angle, a promotional appearance, or a calculated branding move that they overlooked what was actually happening." The post Tom Brady’s Viral Weekend Was A Business Lesson Sports Media Missed appeared first on Barrett Media.
Oops, Scientists May Have Severely Miscalculated How Many Humans Are on Earth
While most estimates place the current human population at around 8.2 billion, a study suggests we might be vastly underrepresenting rural areas.
Scientists have calculated just how much faster clocks tick on Mars
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‘Calculated’ attack caught on camera as vandals smash window of Cherokee Street business
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Alabama Was Called Cheap; Now Its Strategy Looks Smart
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Science Applications (SAIC) Grew Revenue 6% but Posted a 0.6 Book-to-Bill Ratio. Is the $22B Backlog Enough?
Science Applications International Corporation (NASDAQ:SAIC) reported second-quarter fiscal 2027 revenue of $1.88 billion, up 6.3% year over year. Net bookings, however, were approximately $1.2 billion. That produced a quarterly book-to-bill ratio of 0.6, calculated as net bookings divided by revenue, while the trailing 12-month ratio was 0.8. Total backlog stood at approximately $22.1 billion, including […]
Oops, Scientists May Have Severely Miscalculated How Many Humans Are on Earth
While most estimates place the current human population at around 8.2 billion, a new study suggests we might be vastly underrepresenting rural areas.
Coros Update Brings Key Garmin Feature And More To Coros Watches
A significant Coros update sees a big upgrade to live tracking and how sleep scores are calculated, among other upgrades. It's for all current Coros watch users.
The Disconnected Present: Neoliberal Fascism and the Politics of Erasure
In this political climate, outrage is incessantly manufactured and then swiftly displaced, replaced by the next shock before the public can assemble the fragments into a coherent political picture. Each incident appears as an isolated rupture rather than as part of an unfolding structure of power, severed from the conditions that produce it and from the larger architecture of domination it sustains. This fragmentation is not accidental. It is a calculated strategy to drain meaning from public life, exhaust critical attention, and foreclose any sustained democratic reckoning or resistance. In the age of escalating fascism and a nihilistic worship of greed and raw power, American politics has devolved into a theater of violence aligned with a ceaseless stream of spectacles severed from history and emptied of systemic meaning.
Detroit Pistons: Rotational Upgrades Aplenty Ahead Of 2026-27 Campaign
The Detroit Pistons made small yet calculated offseason moves to bring shooters into the Motor City
Sit Down With Success: Bubba Conner Of Silver Spoon Catering
Success didn’t happen overnight for Bubba Conner. Through four decades of long hours, calculated risks, and a commitment to showing up for his team every day,
Scientists Calculated How Long a Moon City Could Survive. The Results Aren’t Great.
A new study suggests a million-person lunar city could exhaust even an optimistic water supply within a century, despite extensive recycling.
Jake Paul makes calculated business move in facing Anthony Joshua
Paul's choice to move forward with this fight may have been more motivated by money
Vape shops in Scotland to be excluded from business rates relief
Scottish ministers also announced an independent review of how the property tax is calculated.
Walking a tightrope between a global brand and traditional football: Why Como 1907’s entertainment machine is sustainable, unlike RB Leipzig’s
Como 1907 is causing a stir in Serie A. The Lombardy-based club, which just a few years ago was languishing in the lower reaches of Italian football, is on the verge of qualifying for the Champions League. At first glance, this rapid rise may seem like a classic ‘football fairy tale’, but behind it lies a calculated strategy, a pile of money – and a surprising amount of sustainability.
Young Bridgeport scientists learn by doing
BRIDGEPORT – Bridgeport Middle School’s eighth graders at John Martin’s Engineering and Science Technology class are learning the ropes as young scientists and engineers. They have completed their latest project, a wave machine where pendulums swing in a precisely calculated pattern. His classroom and lab is in the Bridge, the new multipurpose facility which opened […]
Scientists Calculated When The Last Plants on Earth Will Die
Your dead ficus will be avenged.
There’s a Reason That Netflix’s Ad Business Has Underwhelmed
Somewhat lost in the company’s slew of firings and engagement warnings over the past few weeks was the fact that Netflix is scaling back its ad forecast for 2026 from $3 billion to $2.7 billion. That’s despite the fact that: CTV is growing by 14-15% this year This year saw a monster upfront Netflix is the biggest streamer out there this side of YouTube, and was the platform that for years brands were supposedly dying to be a part of In other words, that’s an alarming pull-back from Netflix. A Wall Street analyst I spoke with last week was blunt, calling Netflix’s ad business “disappointing.” To me, a red flag on the ad front is that Netflix has never revealed how many ad-supported subscribers it has. Because if I know anything about how big companies work, if they have a positive number that makes them look really good - they tend to share it. (How many subs does go90 have right now? We’re not saying just yet. How are ads going on ChatGPT? Oh, a billion run rate - I see). Yes, to date Netflix has shared some fuzzy ad numbers, such as the idea that the company’s ad tier ‘reaches’ 250 million users globally.’ Here’s why that figure gives me pause: a)they lead with global, and b) they don’t explain how they are calculated. (Are they based on average people in each room? Surveys of some kind?). Regardless, some insiders say that Netflix’s ad tier is scaling nicely - others not so much. Either way, one of Netflix’s biggest challenge on the ad front appears to have been its starting point. Remember, when Netflix launched ads in 2022, it had 73 million subs in the US and Canada. That’s 73 million people who were used to Netflix with zero ads. And when the ad product rolled out, the company clearly was going after new users - a limited pool of potential subscribers by default. That focus seems to have changed over time, as Netflix has tried to convert longtime subscribers to the ad tier. Historically Netflix subscribers are very sticky. But is the company’s low churn a problem? Not necessarily, according to Antenna data. Rather, Netflix’s consumer loyalty is a bit of a double-edged sword. “Netflix is the one streamer which actually has seen substantial “trade downs” but has much lower ‘win backs,’ said Antenna founder Jonathan Carson (win-backs being people who were on the ad-free plan, cancelled, then rejoined on the ad plan). “Netflix has lower churn and so has less opportunity to win back old subs with a lower cost plan option.” This all might explain why Netflix has been so slow to roll out all of these table stakes targeting options until just this week. It likely didn’t have enough users to carve up into various targets. etc. However, what really hit Netflix’s ad business was Amazon’s move a few years ago to turn on advertising for Prime Video by default. Suddenly the market was awash in premium inventory, and Netflix was playing catch-up on multiple fronts. Thus, the streaming giant appears to still be figuring out if if wants lead in ‘programmatic TV,’ or premium ‘upfront’ TV sales. “The CTV market now sorts into three businesses, and Netflix is not the leader of any of them,” wrote analyst Jack Myers. Ouch. So how does Netflix ratchet up its ads business? Get the next NFL package You’re gonna have to wait until 2030 unless one of the bigger media companies like Skydance opts out, but the easiest (not cheapest) way for Netflix to become a huge TV ads contender is to get one of the regular NFL packages, ideally Sunday afternoons. That way it can sell ads to its whole U.S. subs base overnight. Go FAST This one is risky, because to program a compelling FAST channel, you’d likely have to take some older Netflix exclusive shows and make them available for free to non-subscribers. But FASTs, for better or worse, are ad-inventory machines. Go full UGC I’m not sure I see this happening. There is something already off about Netflix carrying podcasts and shows for creators. The experience sticks out in what is such a produced, and generally non-communal environment. But Netflix could open up its platform by allowing creators to upload videos without having to be approved by the service. But that opens a whole other can of worms (policing brand safety, copyright infringement, overall quality). Make a huge RMN Deal I was going to suggest something crazy, such as ‘instead of buying Warner Brothers, Netflix should buy Target. But the company doesn’t want to be in the brick and mortar business. Yet for Netflix’s ad business to compete in an Amazon world, it needs to be able to connect ad exposures to shopping. What if, instead of letting Amazon target Netflix viewers with its DSP, Netflix inked a deal with Target, or even took control of Roundel, and created its version of the Amazon full-funnel for brands? Price us out. I hope they don’t do this, but Netflix’s price increases - while significant - haven’t been enough to push long-term customers out of the ad-free tier. But if they made those prices so prohibitive, it could push large swaths of consumers to trade down. Then again, that could also dent engagement - as binging becomes much less appealing once you bring ads into the equation. Or, they could just launch a bunch of hit shows and maybe everyone will quickly forget all this angst. More from Amazon unBoxed A few weeks ago, I recorded two podcasts live at Amazon’s unBoxed event in San Francisco. I was able to go really deep with several brand partners about how Amazon’s various data and ad products work - particularly the under appreciated Amazon Marketing Cloud. First, I talked with Laura Abadias Velilla, of the Amazon specialty agency Amerge, along with Amazon’s own Charlotte Maines, Vice President, Devices Content & Advertising, about how the two partners helped a very specific printer company Epson launch into a brand new category - high end projectors. It’s a great example of how brands connect audience data across platforms to make budget deployment decisions. Next, I chatted with Monks VP Head of Digital Investment for North America Tom Burchill about how the agency actually brought in data from Linkedin to help target B2B customers across various Amazon properties for the brand Quicken. Check it out: Check these out, or just listen: