Kathy

@Art71Rachael Im so glad :)

Morning… I cannot tell you the joy I felt of seeing a formed solid poop from Dots on her walk 🐶 & she’s eaten a tiny amount of plain chicken for her breakfast. I hope we are on the right path & it’s onwards & upwards. Thank you everyone for your well wishes. 🧡😘

@Art71Rachael I hope she feels better soon .

Morning update on Dots she ate a small amount at 1am which surprised me. She’s very quiet this morning not wanting to do much. I’m hoping as the day goes on she improves. It’s been very scary. I’m so anxious with it all. 🥹

@MediawatchNw @Magoo72810763 Mine came from England also , we could be related 😋

@Magoo72810763 My dad’s ancestors came to America from England in the 1700s, settled in the Arkansas valley, and were living in abject poverty 150 years later picking cotton. Hard pass.

I love watching people find their roots! If you're interested in your ancestors history this is a great show to watch!

@MediawatchNw Take care .

Been a long day marked by difficult issues with family. But I got out and enjoyed the sunshine and nature. It was a beautiful day and I a grateful for all that is good 😌 🙏❤️

I am updating the whiteboard. It used to say DEPOSIT VELOCITY. Now it says, "I DON'T THINK ABOUT AMERICANS' FINANCIAL SITUATION." This is the most honest mission statement in the history of American commerce. His net worth went up $3 billion in one year. His memecoin insiders made $320 million while 764,000 wallets lost $4.3 billion. His family takes 75 cents of every WLFI dollar. His tariffs cost households $3,800 a year. Consumer credit card debt hit $1.28 trillion. The dollar dropped 10.7% in six months. 590,000 people paid $100 each for a gold phone that does not exist. The version history, updated: 1.0 — Had to rent a room. Had to settle. 2.0 — Had to mint. Didn't have to build. 2.1 — Didn't even need new customers. 3.0 — Didn't have to deliver. They couldn't leave. 4.0 — Didn't have to promise. They paid for the flag. 5.0 — Doesn't have to think about it. He is not thinking about their financial situation. He is their financial situation.

@TheAdam027 Im sorry to hear that .

Update: surgery got cancelled. Too risky. Hospice next. -Adam

I am the VP of Workforce Strategy at Meta and I built a spreadsheet called the Replacement Ratio that is, without exaggeration, the most elegant financial instrument in this building. Column A is headcount. Column B is quarterly CapEx allocation. Column C is what I call the Narrative Yield — how much each layoff announcement moves our price-to-earnings multiple. At Meta, cutting 8,000 people generates approximately 2.3x more shareholder value as a story than the $27 billion those people actually cost us. Like a controlled demolition where the dust cloud is worth more than the building ever was. I discovered this by accident in November 2022. We announced the first round on a Thursday. 11,000 people. The stock jumped 4% before market close. Our share price was $90 that week. I pulled up the actual savings — roughly $2.3 billion in annual compensation — and compared them to the market cap movement and the ratio was so disproportionate I thought I'd made an error. I had not made an error. I had discovered the Narrative Yield. The announcement IS the product. The terminations are just the input cost of producing it. Then Mark sent the second memo in March 2023. 10,000 more. "Flatter is faster," he wrote. "Leaner is better." "Keep technology the main thing." My team built talking points around each phrase. I remember testing "returning to a more optimal ratio of engineers to other roles" and watching three analysts independently upgrade the stock within 48 hours. Not because the ratio mattered. Because the sentence contained the word "optimal" and the word "ratio" and both of those words trigger the part of an analyst's brain that releases dopamine. We cut 21,000 people total. Our stock went from $90 to $600. Mark's net worth grew by approximately $170 billion. That is $9 million per fired employee. I calculated that number on a Tuesday afternoon and then went to get a coffee from the espresso bar in Building 40 that still operates at full capacity. The barista's name is Diego. He makes a very good cortado. He was not in any of the rounds. Our entire global payroll is $27 billion. Every engineer, every content moderator, every cafeteria worker who restocks the oat milk refrigerator in Building 21 next to the motivational poster that says EFFICIENCY IS CARING in Helvetica Bold, which was printed four days before we eliminated the internal print shop. All of them. $27 billion. Our CapEx guidance this year is $60 to $65 billion. Susan Li said it on the call in January — two weeks after we announced the latest round. The combined Big Four spend is $350 billion on AI infrastructure in 2025. Up from $165 billion just two years ago. If I fired every single employee tomorrow, all 72,000, the savings would cover maybe 42% of one year's data center buildout. The humans are a rounding error in the budget of machines that replace them. So what are the layoffs paying for? They are paying for the sentence. The one Susan Li reads on the earnings call: "These actions help us move more quickly while also helping to offset the substantial investments." That sentence is worth $40 billion in market cap. I know because I A/B tested the language with investor relations in March. We tested seven versions. Version C outperformed Version A by 340 basis points. Version C is the one with "actions" instead of "terminations." Version F used "workforce adjustments" and tested even higher but Legal flagged it as too close to the phrasing in the severance agreements. So we went with C. Turns out the market doesn't mind what you do. It minds what you call it. We call it a lot of things. "Flattening the org." "Removing redundancies." "Focusing our investments on our highest priorities." "Raising the bar on performance management." That last one was January 2025. Mark's memo. 3,600 people. He called them "lowest performers." The memo went out on January 14th. The earnings call announcing $60-65 billion in spending went out on January 29th. Fifteen days. My team scheduled both. The proximity is not accidental. You announce the human cost first so that when you announce the machine cost, the narrative is "disciplined" rather than "reckless." Sequencing is everything. We tested the reverse order once, hypothetically, in a simulation. The model predicted a 2.1% stock dip. Discipline first. Ambition second. Always. The performance framing was my suggestion. If you call them layoffs, it triggers severance obligations and unemployment benefits in thirty-seven states. If you call them performance-based terminations, it triggers nothing. Same people. Same desks cleared. Same badge deactivated at 5 AM before they woke up. Different word. Different $180 million in severance liability. I keep a legal pad in my desk where I track the savings per euphemism. "Performance management" saves approximately $50,000 per head in reduced severance. At 3,600 heads, that is $180 million. The cost of drafting the memo was forty minutes of Mark's time and sixteen hours of my team's time. That is approximately the best ROI in the history of corporate communications. Better than the Narrative Yield itself. Each phrase tests differently with different analyst cohorts. Growth-focused analysts respond to "investing in AI." Value analysts respond to "disciplined cost management." Same 8,000 people. Different sentence. Different $40 billion. The notification protocol is standardized now. Laptop access revoked at 5:47 AM Pacific. Badge deactivated at 5:48. Slack channels disappear at 5:49. Calendar cleared at 5:50. Personal email notification sent at 6:00. The thirteen-minute gap between systems going dark and the employee being told why is not cruelty. It is security protocol. We cannot have 3,600 people with simultaneous access to internal systems and knowledge that they have been terminated. The window for sabotage is too wide. So we close the window first and explain later. Some of them find out from the press release. Some of them find out because their phone loses work email at 5:47 and they check Twitter. I do not love this part. But I respect the engineering of it. Thirteen minutes. Clean. We announced the January cuts the same week Mark said "people will be more important than ever." My team wrote both statements. There is no contradiction if you understand that "people" and "headcount" are different financial instruments. People are the future. Headcount is the cost of having had a past. I keep a framed printout of both quotes side by side on my office wall. Not as irony. As a reminder that language is architecture. Meanwhile: we spent $77.86 billion buying back our own stock between 2022 and 2024. $27.96 billion. $19.77 billion. $30.13 billion. Each buyback inflates the share price. Each share price increase makes the layoff announcement look more justified in retrospect. The stock went up because we cut. We used the cash from cutting to buy back stock. The buyback made the stock go up more. The stock going up proved the cuts were correct. I mapped this loop on a whiteboard in January 2024 and one of our financial planning analysts took a photo of it and made it her laptop wallpaper. The total severance bill for 21,000 employees was approximately $2.5 billion. We spent 31 times that amount buying back stock. The humans cost less to remove than the stock cost to inflate. That is not a metaphor. That is the actual ratio. I have it in Column E. Reality Labs lost $60 billion between 2020 and 2024. Sixteen billion in 2023 alone. It was never subjected to the "Year of Efficiency." No one asked the metaverse division to be leaner or flatter or faster. The humans were asked to be efficient so the machines could be profligate. I did not design this asymmetry. I just maintain the spreadsheet that tracks it. The rehire pipeline is my favorite part. Half those roles reopen in Hyderabad and São Paulo within nine months at 31% of the loaded cost. Revenue per remaining employee went from $1.3 million in 2022 to $2.7 million in 2024. Each survivor now generates more than double what their predecessor generated. Not because they work harder. Because the denominator shrank and the numerator — AI-driven ad revenue — grew independently of human effort. We call it geographic rebalancing. The Workforce Transitions team keeps a Lucite tombstone on their shelf from the 2023 round, 11,000 MANAGED DEPARTURES etched in Helvetica, right next to a half-empty bottle of Clase Azul someone brought back from the offsite in Cabo where we planned the 2024 round. The same team is hosting a culture workshop next month called "Our People, Our Purpose." I wrote the talking points. Amazon is doing 30,000. Intel cut 21,000. Microsoft invented "voluntary departures" for 125,000 people, which is the most inspired euphemism since "rightsizing," because it implies the 125,000 chose this. Google cut 12,000 and called it a "moment of clarity." Salesforce eliminated 4,000 customer support roles and cited AI directly. Combined across the industry: 644,000 tech workers laid off since 2023. Combined CapEx on AI infrastructure: $350 billion this year alone. They spent seven to ten times more on GPUs than on severance for the humans those GPUs replaced. The layoffs are the press release for the spending. The spending is the excuse for the layoffs. It is a perpetual motion machine that runs on the difference between what a person costs and what their departure is worth. The free food budget for remaining employees is approximately $800 million per year. $10,000 to $12,000 per person. Artisanal pizza. Sushi bar. Pour-over coffee stations. The campus amenities operated without interruption during every round. Nobody asked the cafeteria to be efficient. I eat lunch there every day. It is very good. The oat milk is organic. Column D is the one I'm most proud of. It tracks average severance duration against local unemployment rates and cross-references media coverage density by market to optimize announcement timing for minimal news cycle disruption. January announcements get buried in earnings season. September announcements get lost in back-to-school cycles. I have mapped every dead zone in the American attention span and they are all on my calendar. January 14th — two weeks before Super Bowl coverage saturates every newsroom — was not an accident. The 3,600 number was calculated to stay below the threshold that triggers a WARN Act filing in California. 3,600 across twelve states. Below the threshold in each. That was also Column D. I presented the Replacement Ratio at our Q2 planning offsite last Tuesday. Someone from Legal asked if we'd modeled the human impact. I said yes. Column D. That's what Column D is. They promoted the spreadsheet to a standing dashboard. It refreshes hourly. Net income last year was $62.4 billion. Headcount is 72,000. The dashboard calculates revenue per head in real time. Every departure makes the number go up. Every departure makes the announcement worth more. Every announcement makes the stock go up. Every stock increase makes Mark $4.7 billion richer per percentage point. I named the Slack channel #narrative-yield. It has 340 members. None of them are in Column A.

@MediawatchNw Im sorry Rob , that must have been a difficult childhood .

Mothers’ Day is hard for me. My mom is still here but we haven’t spoken in years. She was an abusive monster who never should have had kids. God bless all you wonderful mothers out there.

@MediawatchNw Cannot do the animal movies , I know how he feels 😢

Just took Kelsey to see The Sheep Detectives. It was very well done with a great story. I loved it but Kelsey got overwhelmed with emotion. He came home and went straight to his room.

Book Update!!!!!!!!!! My new book, The Fairways of Wisdom is now available in Paperback and Hardback on Amazon. So far it's the number 1 book on love, fantasy and compassion. You don't have to be a golfer to love the book. It's also a great Father's Day gift. Log Line: “Imagine standing alone on the first tee during a violent Florida thunderstorm. The sky cracks open… lightning strikes… and when Michael Harding wakes up, the storm is gone. But so is the world he knows. Time has stopped. The golf course around him feels ancient… silent… impossible. And waiting beside him is a man in knickers with a calm smile. Bobby Jones. One of golf's greatest golfers who had been dead for almost 55 years! Jones tells Michael he’s been given something very few people ever receive — another chance. Not to relive his life… but to finally understand it. He must play nine mysterious holes of golf that exist nowhere on Earth. Each hole reveals a lesson about love, regret, forgiveness, mortality, and the man he became while trying to survive life’s storms. But there’s one catch… He cannot leave the course until the round is finished. As the journey unfolds, Michael encounters legends, memories, heartbreak, humor, and truths he spent a lifetime avoiding. What begins as a mystical golf story slowly becomes something much deeper — a meditation on why we’re here, what truly matters, and whether grace can still find us before the final hole. The Fairways of Wisdom blends magical realism, sports mythology, and deeply human storytelling in the spirit of Field of Dreams, The Shack, and The Five People You Meet in Heaven. But at its heart, this isn’t really a book about golf. It’s about all of us. About aging. Loss. Second chances. And the quiet hope that it’s never too late to find peace. So step onto the most extraordinary course ever imagined… And take the walk.”

@verynormalman Sook

Obsessed with this reddit post where everyone agrees some random town in Tasmania has a deeply sinister and malevolent vibe and nobody can figure out why

@ape_descendent It’s probably just begun .

Crying to a Karen Carpenter song for the second time this week. I'm starting to think this may be making a different issue.

@MediawatchNw Very decadent .

Took a while but finally managed to get the romex from the upstairs bathroom down through the garage ceiling and into the breaker box. Lots of holes to patch but it all works. Now I can have a heated bathroom floor.

#42 in Substack Rising News. Turns out there's a market for the news nobody will say plainly, delivered in first person by the people causing it. Thank you to everyone who subscribed, shared, and recognized the structural truth underneath the story everyone else was just reporting. We're just getting started. @petergirnus" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">substack.com/@petergirnus

@anthon7yandrews Looks like you have had 5 💁

I have breaking info. Give me minute.

@AJamesMcCarthy Cut those ends down so he can get in , 🤨

His sad eyes came back because the box my stuff came in was too small for him to play in

Ok - here we go! Mixed opinions abound - I decided I’ll give it whirl if I can raise the funds to do so. I have never done one of these before - if anyone is worthy of it, it’s my husky princess. Please donate and repost if you can - or just repost to get the word out. TIA 💙🤘 gofund.me/a53f6fe77

@MarkMantis Just love and spoil him till he cannot get up anymore then have vet at home to humanely send him over the bridge . ( a f-cking poll 😐)

Call me crazy but - I’m curious. What say u, X? 11 yr old dog with bad hind legs - difficulty walking. Life expectancy 12-14yrs. Has splenic mass. Choice is a 50/50 $8k surgery (may be cancer) or euthanasia. Decision must be made SOON to avoid mass rupturing / bleeding out.

@gothburz @WhiteHouse 🔥

YES. YES. I HAVE BEEN SAYING THIS. I started a spreadsheet in 2019 tracking every category where America is number one globally and people keep asking me to stop bringing it to Thanksgiving. We lead the PLANET in medical debt. Not the developed world. The PLANET. There are countries where "medical bankruptcy" doesn't translate because the CONCEPT doesn't exist in their language. We invented it. We EXPORTED it as a field of academic study. German researchers fly here to observe it happening in real time. They take NOTES. We are a living laboratory and the experiment is "what if you made people choose between insulin and rent." We chose. Exposed. This is the thing we're best at. We lead in incarceration. More humans in cages than China. China has 1.4 billion people and an authoritarian government and we STILL have more prisoners. We beat AUTHORITARIANS at their own game using FREEDOM. We did it with both parties cooperating across NINE administrations. Name ONE other bipartisan project that lasted fifty years. You can't. This is our moon landing. We just don't film it. We lead in insulin pricing. $300 for a vial that costs $30 in Canada. Canada is VISIBLE FROM DETROIT. You can see Canada from a Walgreens parking lot where someone is deciding between half-doses. The same molecule. The same manufacturer. The border adds $270 of LEADERSHIP. That's what leading looks like. It looks like a 900% markup on not dying. We lead in mass shootings. Not per capita. Not adjusted. RAW TOTAL. We have so many that researchers had to invent subcategories. School. Workplace. Concert. Grocery store. We have a TAXONOMY. Other countries have incidents. We have a CLASSIFICATION SYSTEM with peer-reviewed SORTING CRITERIA. That's infrastructure. That's RIGOR. We lead in healthcare spending AND in maternal mortality among rich nations. Simultaneously. We spend $4.3 trillion a year and mothers die at rates that would concern a developing nation. We spent MORE money to get WORSE outcomes so consistently that it can't be incompetence. Incompetence wouldn't be this RELIABLE. This takes PLANNING. This is an ACHIEVEMENT of systems working exactly as designed across multiple industries cooperating to extract value from the specific biological event of someone trying not to die. We lead in per-capita spending on our military while our veterans sleep in tents. We allocated $886 billion to defense and our soldiers come home to a VA waitlist so long that some of them die on it. We spent the money. We just didn't spend it on THEM. The money went somewhere. It led the way. Just not toward the people who fought. I printed this tweet on a 24x36 poster. It's in my living room. My wife moved out last month but she didn't take the poster so I think she agrees.

America leads the way.

$8 billion to build 550 homes. That would mean that it would cost $14.5 million to build each home. Is the ATO going to approve $14.5 million expense to build each home as a tax deduction?