• PHONE SCAMS GENERALLY SUCCEED BY CREATING A SENSE OF URGENCY to make the person who answers act quickly, without thinking, to hand over money, banking & credit card numbers, or personal information. Popular scams continue to involve fake prize notification, urgent ‘frozen account’ alerts, bogus loan offers, phony home services, even false job recruitment.  Strategy to avoid most is starts with paying attention to Area Codes frequently used in phone scams – most coming from Caribbean countries with prefix 232, 234, 246, 284, 441, 473, 649, 758, 856; but also from 91 India, 92 Pakistan, and 7 Russia.

 

  • “IN HUMAN INTERACTION, THE REQUIRED AMOUNT OF COMMUNICATION IS INVERSLY PROPORTIONAL TO THE LEVEL OF TRUST.” In businesses which are growing or contracting, transparency with employees can be a critical factor in productivity, as well as retention, while communication can become a major challenge. Trust in leadership is the core factor in work ethic and comfort of job safety, so when an organization discourages the spread of important facts (good or bad), the gossip lines flourish with incomplete or wrong information which frustrates workers and diminishes their productivity, versus being informed and sharing the impact of changes – especially if they can directly provide help to optimize or mitigate impacts – which can often motivate their work commitment.  [BIG THINK]

 

  • “ALGORITHMIC ECHO CHAMBERS ARE DISSOLVING OUR SHARED CULTURAL TOUCHPOINTS, as Pop culture – once a powerful unifying force of shared references that bridged generations and communities – seems to have fragmented into countless niche silos, each catering to hyper-specific tastes. Disintegration can be traced to several interconnected forces, starting with the transformative role of technology & algorithms, a shift to on-demand viewing, and infinite scrolling. Cultural and social fragmentation further accelerates this divide, as globalization and diversity expand the range of available media but dilute any sense of consensus.” A fascinating analysis: https://futuristspeaker.com/social-trends/the-disappearance-of-pop-culture/

 

  • LOS ANGELES RANKS LAST AMONG MAJOR U.S. CITIES IN POST-COVID RECOVERY, with current visitor levels still down more than 20% from 2019 levels. Recovery forecasts after the 2028 Olympics now appear unlikely, since the L.A. City Council has just approved a new ‘Minimum Wage & Benefit Ordinance’ that would boost hotel & airport employee hourly wages to $30 comp plus $8.35 healthcare by Olympics time. With 11,000 hotel jobs lost in 2024 and correlated with cost increments, a consortium of hotels which had agreed to discount rates for Olympic attendees (based on $17/hr projected wages) is now “poised to withdraw” from that Agreement unless the Bill is rejected by the Mayor.   [HOTAIR.COM] 

 

THOUGHTS FOR THE WEEK

  • This month’s expected Supreme Court decisions will have major impact on America for possibly decades. They include: Birthright Citizenship, Nuclear Waste Storage, ‘Gender-affirming’ Care for Minors, Sex & Gender in School Libraries, Obamacare Regulations for Employers, and Medicare funding of Planned Parenthood. Expect a fun summer of political and social protests & whining.  

 

  • NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, is a military alliance of countries from Europe and North America, with its primary purpose to provide a security framework founded on “collective defense,” stating that an attack against one member is an attack against all and requiring all members to assist, including the use of armed force if necessary. However, the clause allows each member to determine its own “course of action in response,” leading to high uncertainty about the extent of collective military support.

 

  • ‘Poetry’ has been a form of communication since the 10th Century B.C. when Chinese recognized that rhyme and rhythm were effective in capturing thoughts by the ‘hardwired’ brains of humans, well before literacy had developed. Based on latest analysis of some eleven thousand poems, by the early 1900s, 80% of poems contained rhyme. However, as English literacy expanded over a dozen decades, the percentage of rhyming poetry has dropped below 5% with modern-day poetry produced by a new generation of Social-Media poets, “designed to be shared online and often accompanied by line drawings of birds.”  [ECONOMIST]