Christopher Smith

@aakashgupta Now Do Vaccines

Amazon's internal metrics said customers waited under 60 seconds for customer service. Jeff Bezos picked up the phone in a meeting and waited more than 10 minutes. The head of customer service had been defending the number. Bezos said "Ok, let's call." He dialed Amazon's 1-800 line on speaker. The room sat there for over ten minutes before a rep answered. The metric didn't survive the meeting. Bezos has a saying: when the data and the anecdotes disagree, the anecdotes are usually right. Metrics don't measure reality. They measure what you designed them to measure. Customer service dashboards commonly filter out abandoned calls, cap hold time at the IVR timeout, and start the clock after the menu tree completes. Every one of those choices pushes the average down. The customers hanging up at minute 9 are not in the denominator. The 60-second number was technically accurate and practically wrong. That call broke through a defended metric in a way no spreadsheet could have. The head of CS had dashboards and a team whose job was to report that number going down quarter over quarter. Bezos had 10 minutes of hold music and a room full of people watching. This is the executive test almost nobody runs. Call your own 1-800 line. Try to buy your own product in incognito. Every senior leader can do it in under 15 minutes. Almost none do, because the dashboards feel like the truth and the dashboards say things are fine. The measurement got redesigned. Wait times actually fell. When your data says you're winning and your customers say you're losing, the customers are right. The data was built by people whose job depends on it going down.

@walterkirn He does care. Just not much matters. Not much actually changes real votes. Two big bets. Fraud is so massive the smallest vote fix is enough of a swing. This is still the Charley Kirk revolution. Ask young men. They are red.

Why does Trump seem unconcerned about the midterms? Creative thinkers only.

@libsoftiktok Not just useful but seen as the cause that the jungle primary was heading to red on red.

Wild that banging a Chinese spy wasn’t what got Swalwell out of Congress, rather it was the democrat ruling class machine deciding he isn’t useful to them anymore

@TCNetwork So Muslims support the re settlement of Christian’s to Iran and the Middle East to pre 79 populations?

The people in charge don't want you to know this, but Muslims love Jesus. Islam reveres Him as a major prophet and messenger of the Lord, believes He performed miracles, and states that He will return to Earth to defeat the Antichrist. That's why Donald Trump's painting depicting himself as the Son of God offended the president of Iran. It was an attack on his religion as well as Christianity. Today's Morning Note newsletter covers Masoud Pezeshkian's condemnation of Trump's “desecration of Jesus,” the Iran War's gutting effects on America's housing market, Colombia's plan to murder Pablo Escobar's hippopotami, and more. Read below. watchtcn.co/4stA1RL

@MattWalshBlog @NancyMace My daughter fell in love with a man from half way around this tiny world. He has visit her periodically for the last three years and she him. He applied for visa over three years ago. He arrives Friday. The line takes time. There is a legal way for rule followers.

The illegal immigration issue is not difficult or complex or nuanced. If they came here illegally, they need to leave. That's it. End of story. "But what if they've been here for 10 years???" They need to leave. "But what if they haven't committed any other crimes???" Leave. "But what if they have a family???" Leave. This isn't hard at all. We have laws in this country. You broke the law. You don't belong here. Nothing personal. But get the hell out. It should not be hard for elected Republicans to articulate this point. If they do have trouble articulating it -- if they take any position on illegal immigration except for this -- they can also go. That's not complicated either.

@WashTimes @brithume And this is the major X factor for mid terms. A man was killed and a movement was accelerated

The U.S. Catholic Church experienced an estimated 38% increase in adult converts over the Easter weekend, driven by young men in their 20s, according to an analysis of data from 140 of the nation's 175 dioceses. trib.al/6UIbgvh

@CaitlinPacific Ez cart come, ez cart go!

Everyone relax. Laura Bush ran a stop sign when she was 17 and killed someone. For all we know, so did Bess Truman.

@TheRewatchables @BillSimmons @VanLathan @ChrisRyan77 It’s the music. We used to follow beaver brown around R I New England; a couple very memorable road trips to toads place New Haven.

Words and music, Doc. Words and music. 'Eddie and the Cruisers' with @BillSimmons, @VanLathan, and @ChrisRyan77. Today at 6 PM PT.

@ciceroexsul Bolstering …aiding thru padding. Literally adding soft filling. Dems are so far gone they can’t see the deliberate male display of weakness will never be seen as a strength. The word is literally admitting it’s all padding.

But she is bolstering his chances of winning the Dem primary, which you have to do first.

@catturd2 Can’t wait for the judicial cease and desist orders hopefully before midterms

Unreal.

@CaitlinPacific Interesting misspelling Modicum

@CaitlinPacific That would require a modicrum of self awareness

All I can think is that she’s intentionally torpedoing her husband’s presidential campaign.

@joerogan Admit a mistake? Misremembering? Crimes of the century!

Honestly I just remembered it wrong. I was elk hunting when Jimmy Kimmel was getting people angry at him for joking about the assassination and blaming it on MAGA. I would never “lie” about that. I just had a dumb memory moment.

@Gandalf_da_Grey @DrJStrategy Or your wrong. Do you ever think thru that possibility

This is very interesting thesis but has one big flaw: Trump is a moron and isn’t thinking about any of that. He is vain, self centered, greedy, thin skinned, and extremely emotional with no discipline or self control. He’s just going off his gut feelings and then reacting to what the Iranians (and to a lesser extent, the Israelis) are doing. He’s not playing 4D chess, he’s putting the pieces in his mouth. And before the MAGA cultists show up ask about Biden, yes, I also thought he was a moron.

Food for thought. Trump, Hormuz and the End of the Free Ride For half a century, Western strategists have known that the Strait of Hormuz is the acute point where energy, sea power and political will intersect. That knowledge is not in dispute. What is new in this war with Iran is that the United States, under Donald Trump, has chosen not to rush to “solve” the problem. In Hegelian terms, he is refusing an easy synthesis in order to force the underlying contradiction to the surface. The old thesis was simple: the US guarantees open sea lanes in the Gulf, and everyone else structures their economies and politics around that free insurance. Europe and the UK embraced ambitious green policies, ran down hard‑power capabilities and lectured Washington on multilateral virtue, secure in the assumption that American carriers would always appear off Hormuz. The political class behaved as if the American security guarantee were a law of nature, not a contingent choice. Their conduct today is closer to Chamberlain than Churchill: temporising, issuing statements, hoping the storm will pass without a fundamental reordering of their responsibilities. Trump’s antithesis is to withhold the automatic guarantee at the moment of maximum stress. Militarily, the US can break Iran’s residual ability to contest the Strait; that is not the binding constraint. The point is to delay that act. By allowing a closure or semi‑closure to bite, Trump ensures that the immediate pain is concentrated in exactly the jurisdictions that have most conspicuously free‑ridden on US power: the EU and the UK. Their industries, consumers and energy‑transition assumptions are exposed. In that context, his reported blunt message to European and British leaders, you need the oil out of the Strait more than we do; why don’t you go and take it? Is not a throwaway line. It is the verbalisation of the antithesis. It openly reverses the traditional presumption that America will carry the burden while its allies emote from the sidelines. In this dialectic, the prize is not simply the reopening of a chokepoint. The prize is a reordered system in which the United States effectively arbitrages and controls the global flow of oil. A world in which US‑aligned production in the Americas plus a discretionary capability to secure,or not secure, Hormuz places Washington at the centre of the hydrocarbon chessboard. For that strategic end, a rapid restoration of the old status quo would be counterproductive. A quick, surgical “fix” of Hormuz would short‑circuit the dialectic. If Trump rapidly crushed Iran’s remaining coastal capabilities, swept the mines and escorted tankers back through the Strait, Europe and the UK would heave a sigh of relief and return to business as usual: underfunded militaries, maximalist green posturing and performative disdain for US power, all underwritten by that same power. The contradiction between their dependence and their posture would remain latent. By declining to supply the synthesis on demand, and by explicitly telling London and Brussels to “go and take it” themselves, Trump forces a reckoning. European and British leaders must confront the fact that their energy systems, their industrial bases and their geopolitical sermons all rest on an American hard‑power foundation they neither finance nor politically respect. The longer the contradiction is allowed to unfold, the stronger the eventual synthesis can be: a new order in which access to secure flows, Hormuz, Venezuela and beyond, is explicitly conditional on real contributions, not assumed as a right. In that sense, the delay in “taking” the Strait, and the challenge issued to US allies to do it themselves, is not indecision. It is the negative moment Hegel insisted was necessary for history to move. Only by withholding the old guarantee, and by saying so out loud to those who depended on it, can Trump hope to end the free ride.

@mikepat711 It works for me

Tesla Self-Driving sucks and doesn't work. This compressed video shows 90 minutes of Tesla's V14.2.2.5 moving through the heart of Philadelphia, and back to the suburbs for some errands. As you watch this clip, you'll start to realize that Tesla's goal of autonomy at-scale is very far from here, and probably won't ever actually happen. The entire charade is nonsense. Tesla cars have level 2 ADAS just like SuperCruise and BlueCruise. Yes, your Chevy Silverado does do this. More music by the homie @StainlessOne

@JoeMac7345 @CaitlinPacific Lots of people want it

@CaitlinPacific Trump starts a war no one wants, but Caitlin Flanagan thinks the real crime is a governor’s wife giving her sons dolls. Priorities, Cait, priorities.

@elonmusk Cumming to see how cunning Lingus air can be!

Some might call this a cunning move 😉

@elonmusk I’m in

Stand By Me

@CaitlinPacific Or aimed.

There is no such thing as an “aimless hippy” thecut.com/article/how-a-…

@CaitlinPacific “Prize for criticism” always sounded like a contradiction of terms to me but I do think I knew some nuns who are likely still doing purgatory time for excess!

@Chritmit They sort of do! Near miss

Understandable. The pay is so high, some people can’t resist the temptation to cheat.. thewrap.com/media-platform…