Elizabeth Lopatto

After an executive retreat in February, he [CEO Marc Benioff] proposed in a draft of a year-ahead strategy plan that the company rank employees based on metrics, including how much money salespeople bring in. Those in the bottom 5% would be routinely dismissed, according to a draft of the policy posted on the company’s Slack channel and described to The Wall Street Journal.

The Instagrammer on holiday learns how to increase follower engagement by monitoring the reactions that their images receive; the delivery company keeps track of its logistics (and surveils its drivers) on the basis of the customer feedback it receives; the financial analyst scours their Bloomberg terminal for the all-important price movement. The most important thing about feedback isn’t whether it’s positive or negative, but that you get it in the first place, and sustaining a constant feedback loop requires constant vigilance and work.

The other day was the final straw. Someone in my household made a request, and during the follow-on prompt, in a terrifying concert, my wife, my 3 and 6 year-olds, and me, all, in a tone that no parent should ever encourage for their kids, yelled, “Alexa, NO!!!!”

Analysis of the computer code underlying Forsage’s smart contracts allegedly revealed that, consistent with a Ponzi scheme, as soon as an investor invested in Forsage by purchasing a “slot” in a Forsage smart contract, the smart contract automatically diverted the investor’s funds to other Forsage investors, such that earlier investors were paid with funds from later investors.

“The sorts of people who are into effective altruism are not the sort of people who would flourish” in investment banking, William MacAskill, a British philosopher who is considered a leader of the movement, said in an April interview with The New York Times. “But Jane Street has this very nerdy, intellectual culture, so it’s a better fit.”