Simplest way for corporate journalists to get blue checks en masse would be for their organizations to go gold and affiliate them. Stop pretending this is a personal expense. It’s a business expense.
Similarly, it would be a smart idea for Hollywood talent agencies to pay for their celebrities via the Verified Org Affiliates feature. Celebs would get blue checks. The agencies would get the benefit of the association.
Same thing is true for sports leagues etc. It’s dumb that Orgs aren’t competing to affiliate their celebs. Benefit far outweighs the cost.
At @craft_ventures, we’ve been paying for blue checks for our employees for awhile now, and they also display the Craft affiliate badge. Good deal for both sides.
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On the latest episode of @theallinpod (29:40), I demoed @GlueAI using ChatGPT-4o. Much has already been written about the conversational and multimodal abilities of GPT-4o but I wanted to highlight how good the performance is for SaaS apps like Glue.🧵
Glue is a new work chat app that is based on threads rather than channels and makes AI a full-fledged member of the team. We created a new workspace for the All-In Pod and added all of our episode transcripts so the AI would have that context.
GlueAI (using ChatGPT-4o) did a remarkable job summarizing each Bestie's personality and contributions to the pod. (Glue shows clickable "Sources" for the AI's answers, which is nice.)
In 1991 the Soviet Union fell apart and NATO faced an existential crisis: its reason for being no longer existed. But rather than disband, it came up with a new mission: to expand. And in a self-referential loop, NATO expansion would create the hostility needed to justify itself.
Bureaucracies often take on a life of their own and end up causing the very problems they were supposed to solve.
NIH was supposed to prevent pandemics, so it funded gain-of-function research, causing a pandemic.
NATO was supposed to prevent a war, so it expanded to Russia’s border and sought to encircle it, provoking a war.
People outside the bureaucracy believe its job is to solve problems. People inside the bureaucracy understand that their job is to expand their power. That typically happens when problems get worse.
The U.S. can only produce about 1,000 artillery shells per day. The Europeans even less. The Russians are producing & using around 10,000/day. This is one of the reasons Ukraine is losing the war. Congressional action won’t fix this.
Another reason is air defense. Ukraine has run out, and the U.S. can’t deliver more without putting our own troops in the Middle East at risk. The Russians have total air superiority and are precision-bombing Ukrainian targets at will.
The third issue is that the Ukrainians are running out of manpower. One of Zelensky’s close aides told TIME Magazine that even if the U.S. and its allies come through with all the weapons they have pledged, “we don’t have the men to use them.”
This is John F. Sopko, one of America's most dedicated and effective public servants. As Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), Sopko and his team rooted out billions of dollars of waste, fraud, and abuse in Afghanistan. They generated 427 audits, 10 comprehensive Lessons Learned reports, and 160 criminal convictions. With the Afghanistan mission winding down, Senator @RandPaul proposed that Sopko and his team pivot to Ukraine. They were ready to take on the assignment. But that idea was rejected by the White House and Senate. If Sopko were working in the private sector, I have no doubt that he would be promoted for his efforts. But in government, he might just be a little too effective for his own good. After all, if he was place in charge of Ukraine oversight, what do you think he would find?
In lieu of Sen. Paul’s proposal, the Department of Defense named the Hon. Robert Storch as first Lead IG and then Special IG for Operation Atlantic Resolve, a role in which he will provide Ukraine oversight for DoD. He will also coordinate with IGs from the State Department and USAID with respect to their oversight efforts. While I have no reason to doubt that Storch will do a fine job, the advantage of the Paul proposal is that it was both more sweeping and more focused, creating a single office for all Ukraine oversight with the proven track record of the SIGAR team.
This article does a good job explaining the difference between having a bulldog like Sopko and an agency-specific approach.