The majority of Belgian CEOs & #managers are convinced of the benefits of #teleworking: it increases employee satisfaction & #motivation, and helps attract & retain #talent. 86% of large organisations offer it... (1/2) www.brusselstimes.com/belgium/1492... #telework #remotework #homeoffice
Five years after Covid, 75% of...
“We Are Duped Into Blaming Our Problems On Everyone Except Our Rulers”
by Caitlin Johnstone in Caitlin’s Newsletter on Substack
“Your abusers are not some far away nation your own government doesn’t like, nor are they some marginalized group your government doesn’t care about. Your abusers are your government itself, and all its allies and assets around the world”
New #Research Reveals Two #History-Changing #Discoveries : Medium
#Algorithms Need #Managers, Too : HBR
#AI is changing how we study #Bird #Migration : Tech Review
Check our latest #KnowledgeLinks
As #AI steps into managerial roles, do we judge it differently based on gender? A study using RCTs finds that AI #managers —like human ones—face #GenderBiases. Female AI managers, in particular, encounter greater skepticism when denying rewards.
#FutureOfWork
https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.17730
#corporations #managers : "We want you to work as efficiently as possible"
Also corp manager: "we'll also flood you with #email. Also filter rules are disabled for security reasons. Also, we make you jump to 7 flaming hoops every time you want to use a tool you already are proficient with. You also have to use #sap and #sharepoint , our efficiency chapions."
Which one is it? I can either work the way you want me to, or I can work efficiently. The two overlap only a tiny bit.
#Capitalism #RepresentativeDemocracy #Leaders #Managers #Presidents
When it comes to rising to positions of power, our society favours psychopaths.
That is a problem.
@Linknation @kevinrns @pschanen
Don't be that #asshole.
You understand your #computer. This makes you a member of a #minority. Unless you are going to #volunteer to be someone's #techSupport, do not tell them to do things with their #computers that they do not understand.
My opinion is informed by the thirty or so years I've had #Linux on my personal boxen. I help #boomers run blogs. These are not stupid people, but they struggle with #password #managers. There no way they can operate a Linux system without a fucktonne of support.
#Managers at #Suffolk #FireAndRescue service were roasted by His Majesty's #Inspectorate for poor decisions and creating a toxic working environment and low morale (they also fired their in house IT staff, causing extra costs in recruiting contractors, and may struggle to build the separate control room (they are splitting from sharing the control room with Cambridge, which causes confusion on 999/112 calls due to widely duplicated street names) #EmergencyServices
University of Arkansas: New Research Identifies Ideal AI System Types for Managers. “As managers face more pressure in implementing artificial intelligence (AI) into the workflow, a study from researchers at a trio of universities offers insights to help managers adapt. By distinguishing between managers who are risk-averse and those who are more risk-taking, the study sheds keen insight into […]
As Louise Murphy (Resolution Foundation) points out:
'When we asked what young people would change about the world of work, they didn’t ask for big, flashy reforms. They wanted to have more human, understanding managers'!
Its a sad indictment (but no surprise) that young people entering work find managers are not friendly or supportive people... I've said for years many of the UK's workforce problems are linked to rubbish managers & this is what the young find out!
Health insurance companies are notorious for exploiting prior authorization schemes to avoid paying for care and have denied claims at alarming rates in recent years.
However, corporate consolidation of industry “middlemen” that experts say are partially to blame for the prescription drug affordability crisis has received less scrutiny from the general public,
despite efforts by lawmakers and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to shine light on the notoriously opaque and confusing corporate bureaucracy that determines the cost of medicine.
We often hear about Big Pharma selling drugs at high prices
and insurance companies dragging their feet when it comes time to pay the bill,
but the prices patients pay out of pocket for pharmaceuticals is largely shaped by the connective tissue between insurers and drug manufacturers: #pharmacy #benefit #managers, or PBMs.
PBMs have been around for decades, but the largest PBMs have merged with major insurance companies to form conglomerates,
including UnitedHealth Group’s #OptumRx.
In theory, PBMs negotiate discounts and rebates paid by drug makers that are passed onto insurance companies and their patients,
but the lack of transparency in that process has long frustrated lawmakers and regulators attempting to contain the skyrocketing cost of medicine.
The PBMs say their secret negotiations with drug companies make prescriptions more affordable for consumers,
but this system has not shown to protect patients from sticker shock at the pharmacy counter.
Nearly 30 percent of Americans say they haven’t taken prescribed medication due to cost,
and an estimated 1.1 million Medicare patients alone could die over the next decade because they cannot afford the drugs prescribed by their doctors,
according to the American Hospital Association.
The FTC reports that in 2023, the U.S. spent more than $722 billion on prescription drugs, 
nearly as much as the rest of the world combined.
Clearly the system is not working for patients or public health,
and policy makers in both parties have increasingly focused on the PBMs
and their recent mergers with major insurance companies.
According to a two-year FTC investigation on health care conglomerates released in July,
PBMs are “powerful middlemen inflating drug costs and squeezing Main Street pharmacies.”
“We’ve heard accounts of how the business practices of PBMs may deprive patients of access to the most affordable medicines
and how doctors find themselves having to subordinate their independent medical judgment to PBMs’ decision-making at the expense of patient health,”
FTC Chair Lina Khan said in a statement at the time.
https://truthout.org/articles/its-not-just-denied-claims-insurance-firms-are-hiring-middlemen-to-deny-meds/
Il y a un #regard qui met mal à l'aise, au cause d'eux.
Celui des #riches/ #managers et autres #bourgeois envers les travailleurs-euses dont leur #confort a absolument besoin, mais mal payé-e-s, voire au black : #nounou, #domestique, livreur...
Ou dans l' #hôtellerie : femme de #chambre, #commis de cuisine, #réceptionniste, #concierge, #plongeur...
En plus d'être payé au SMIC ou proche, ce genre de métier est souvent physique, aux #horaires décalées ou coupées, voire le WE & JF.
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→ -2000 Lines Of Code (via @nitot)
https://www.folklore.org/Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.html
In 1982, managers of the Lisa software team began tracking engineers' progress by the number of lines of code written weekly. Bill Atkinson, a key implementer, optimized Quickdraw's region calculation, reducing code by 2,000 lines and making it six times faster. He reported "-2000" lines of code on the form. Soon after, managers stopped asking him to fill it out.
#France: professional class overworked, underpaid and discriminated against, face severe sanctions for calling out employers
https://www.eurocadres.eu/news/worrying-state-of-play-for-french-professionals/
And — oh, here’s an interesting cash windfall — #Texas #Instruments raised about $2.5 billion by selling stock over these five years.
Wait, what?
Selling stock, not buying stock? 
Selling stock to whom?
Hold that thought …
Put it all together and I figure the company generated about $25 billion in truly free cash flow over this 5-year span. 
What is management going to spend this treasure chest on?
Well, surely you’re going to spend a healthy amount on #capital #expenditures, right?
I mean, you took a $5.2 billion depreciation and amortization charge over this time span,
and we all know that semiconductor manufacturers need to stay on that bleeding edge of technological innovation to keep earnings growing in the future, right?
Nope.
Texas Instruments spent $3.3 billion on fixed assets from 2014 through 2018, one-third of that total in 2018.
Some significant proportion of that was maintenance capex as opposed to growth capex.
Well, if you didn’t spend your money on property, plant and equipment, then surely you spent a healthy sum in #MandA, right?
Nope. $1.6 billion over five years. Tuck-in stuff.
I guess you were paying down debt, then. #Deleveraging up a storm, right?
Nope. Paid down debt by $500 million a year in 2014, 2015 and 2016, but increased debt by $500 million in 2017 and $1 billion in 2018.
So it’s #dividends, right? This is where all the cash went?
Now we’re getting there: 
️$9.1 billion in dividends over five years. A healthy direct return of capital to shareholders.
But it’s just a warm-up to the main event:
$15.4 billion in #buying #back #stock from 2014 through 2018.
️Between stock buybacks and dividends, that’s $24.5 billion in cash “returned to shareholders”,
essentially 100% of the free cash flow generated by the company over the past five years.
️
Now here’s the kicker.
What sort of share-count reduction would you think that this $15.4 billion in buybacks gets you?
I mean, that is the logic here, that investing $15.4 billion in the company’s own stock is the best possible capital allocation that the company can make.
I would have guessed that surely
$15.4 billion would retire anywhere from 20% to 25% of the shares outstanding over this time frame,
with the stock price ranging from $40 to $100.
In truth, Texas Instruments retired only 10% of its outstanding diluted shares with its $15.4 billion investment,
going from 1.1 billion shares to 990 million shares.
But wait, there’s more.
From 2014 through 2018, Texas Instruments bought back 228.6 million shares for $15.4 billion.
That works out to an average purchase price of $67.37.
Over that same span, Texas Instruments sold 90.8 million shares to management and board members as they exercised options and restricted stock grants, for a total of $2.5 billion.
That works out to an average sale price of $27.51.
The difference in average purchase price and average sale price, multiplied by the number of shares so affected, is $3.6 billion.
In other words, 40% of Texas Instrument’s stock buybacks over this five-year period 
were used to sterilize stock issuance to senior management and the board of directors, who received $3.6 billion in direct value from these buybacks.
But wait, there’s more …
As of Dec. 31, 2018 there were still 40 million shares outstanding in the form of options and restricted stock grants to management and directors,
at an average weighted exercise price of $55.
At today’s stock price, that means an additional $2.6 billion in stock-based compensation has already been awarded.
Well golly, these surely must have been #amazing #managers and directors to warrant that sort of stock-based compensation in addition to their cash compensation.
This is the performance of Texas Instruments (in white) and the iShares PHLX Semiconductor ETF (in gold) over the same five years.
Texas Instruments is the fifth-largest position in that ETF and that underlying index, with a 7.1% weight.
For the past five years, Texas Instruments has been nothing more than a tracking stock for a passive semiconductor index.
And for this privilege, shareholders have rewarded management and directors with
$6.2 billion in stock, plus a couple of billion in cash compensation.
That’s why it’s never been a better time in the history of the world to be a senior manager of a publicly traded company.
It’s a crying shame, because here’s the thing … the total return on owning Texas Instruments is, in fact, 
15% higher than the ETF over this five-year span.
Because of the dividend.
Do you want to run your company for cash generation?
Do you want to return that cash to shareholders?
Great!
Use a special dividend, not buybacks.
There, fixed it for you.
"VCs who haven't been founders themselves don't know how founders should run companies, and C-level execs, as a class, include some of the most skillful liars in the world."
A Window Manager (WM) is a crucial component of a graphical user interface (GUI) in operating systems, particularly in Unix-like systems such as Linux. It controls the placement and appearance of windows within a desktop environment, providing the user with the means to interact with different applications.
More at: https://machaddr.substack.com/p/window-managers-and-cwm-overview
Manager Antipatterns by Ted Neward.
#managers #managing #antipatterns #management
https://blogs.newardassociates.com/blog/2024/management-antipatterns.html
To everyone their liking of Gnome, for me this system started to become unusable when they started to **remove** configurable features which is more than a decade and a half ago
So I haven't seen #Gnome for more than a decade and a half and I do not miss it at all
However their work is vital and crucial because the diversity is important for our desktop managers there obviously are a lot of people who still like the way it works
