Morfternight #61: Boycotting the World Cup
The one where we talk a tiny bit about Twitter.
🤩 Welcome to the 5 new Morfternighters who joined us last week.
We love to have you here, and I hope you’ll enjoy reading Morfternight.
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📷 Photo of the week
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👋 Greetings from Vienna!
Where autumn is in full blast, Christmas markets everywhere are again open and fill the atmosphere with the characteristic smell of wine, spice, toasted nuts, and random stuff fried in overused oil.
It is spring for the other half of the planet, but while seasons are reversed, holidays are not. I hope the traditional food and drinks are different in the southern hemisphere, as I’d have a hard time imagining what we have here in hot weather…
On a completely different note, I am gearing up to spend the week helping Jetpack customers and talking to them. Why? Because that’s something we all do at Automattic, once per year, we call it our Happiness Rotation (as in customer’s happiness).
I mentioned it in Morfternight #50: Customers, customers, customers! It is critical to keep talking to customers as often as possible when building products; next week is part of that philosophy.
So, who knows, if you are a Jetpack customer, and have a technical problem, next week we may end up talking about it :)
If we don’t meet in Jetpack support, we can meet on Mastodon; as I mentioned last week, we now have a Morfternight server at: meet.morfternight.com, where all subscribers of this newsletter are welcome!
🗺️ Three places to visit today
“What do executives do, anyway?” is a great post explaining what and how. It is inspired by High Output Management by Andy Grove. Both are worth reading, but if you don’t have more than a few minutes, start with the blog post.
Research Concludes: We Waste Our Time At Work is a provocative title. The article refers to the fact that time is wasted in meetings and shares data from research showing the positive impact of reducing them. Not entirely, though. A 100% reduction is not optimal, and the sweet spot is between 40% and 80%.
Here’s a bit of cross-promotion. You, dear Morfternighters, might be interested in InvestorSnippets to quickly keep up with financial news. InvestorSnippets is a free daily newsletter with bite-sized news on markets, stocks, and ETFs. All curated and snippets with links to keep you informed in just 3 minutes.
🛑 Can we stop cruelty towards employees?
While Twitter, since Elon Musk’s takeover, has been mistreating employees, these are not the employees I am referring to.
Frankly, I am not worried if Twitter breaks down and disappears; I am more concerned about what it’ll become if it survives without serious moderation.
As for the staff that was laid off, I am sincerely sorry for them. On the spectrum of injustice, though, there is so much worse than that.
The employees I am referring to, though, are the ones treated like slaves in the construction of useless stadiums to host the football World Cup.
In case you have missed what’s been happening in Qatar during the past ten years to host the event, here’s John Oliver’s take on it.
It feels almost impossible to do anything about it at the individual level, but the very least I found I can do is to boycott it by not watching it on TV for the first time since 1974. I am not superstitious, but coincidentally it was the 13th one of my lifetime…