The other day I was complaining to a friend how I've been spinning my wheels lately, having trouble finding any projects or gigs I could work on.

He came back with a quick, short, smart response:

Who cares? Just make weird shit.

KPMG surveyed U.S. CEOs of companies turning over at least $500 million and found that just one-third expect a full return to the office in the next three years.

So it's official: Leaders who believe that office workers will be back at their desks five days a week in the near future are now in the small minority.

It's a complete 360 on their stance last year, when 62% of CEOs surveyed predicted that working from home would end by 2026.

At the time, 90% of CEOs even admitted that they were so steadfast on summoning staff back to their vertical towers that they were sweetening the pot with salary raises, promotions, and favorable assignments to those who showed face more.

But now, bosses are backtracking: Nearly half of CEOs have concluded that the future of work is hybrid—up from 34% last year.

[...]Seabound found BLOQS, a 32,000-square-foot converted warehouse in the north London suburb of Enfield, fully kitted out with £1.3 million (around $1.7 million) worth of light industrial equipment for all kinds of manufacturing, including wood processing and metal fabrication, laser cutting and engraving, 3D printing, sewing machines, spray painting and more. If that didn’t already make the case for moving in, the flexible membership structure then quickly sealed the deal for Fredriksson and Wen.

The initial sign-up is free, with members simply paying a daily rate for the machinery they need to use, as well as for flexible office and storage space if they need it. Raw materials are available to purchase too, price-matched with local suppliers. And if members need to learn to use a particular piece of equipment, they can pay for training. An added bonus is the on-site restaurant, where an award-winning chef serves a seasonable and affordable Mediterranean menu. Yet the biggest draw for the Seabound team was the community of 1,000 other like-minded members.

Just outside St. Louis, in the inner-ring suburb of University City, there’s a little neighborhood often called the region’s unofficial Chinatown. Growing up in the area, it was one of my favorite places to be; reflective of the city’s diversity and vitality, it opened up the world to me. This past December, when I went home for the holidays, I discovered that what was once a beloved strip of immigrant- and minority-owned businesses there — a Korean grocery, a pho shop, a Jamaican joint with vegetarian options, a Black-owned barber shop — had been bulldozed and replaced by a double-lane drive-through Chick-fil-A.

“Drive-throughs have been around a long time,” Charles Marohn, a former traffic engineer and well-known critic of America’s car-dependent urban planning, told me. Today, he said, “they’re becoming bigger and more obnoxious.”

That trend conflicts with a key objective that US cities are increasingly prioritizing: creating a safer, cleaner, walkable, livable urban environment that’s less dependent on cars. St. Louis and its suburbs, for example, in recent years have been building out bike lanes and walking and biking paths, including a segment that runs right up to the site of the new fried chicken and Chipotle drive-throughs. Where, exactly, are the people walking or biking that path supposed to go when they arrive at a development designed to be navigated only by car?

This was a really good article that I wanted to share.

SCCF is one of four Tennessee prisons currently operated by for-profit contractor CoreCivic, the second-largest private prison operator in the country. For every person it incarcerates, the company makes around $90 per day.

Australia spends the equivalent of over $5 on food per prisoner per day. Canada spends over $6. In the US, especially in the South, many prisons spend under $2. And increasingly outsource operations to private contractors promising to find ways to keep us alive for less. CoreCivic did not respond to Filter‘s inquiry about nutrition standards or food expenditures.

archive link: https://archive.ph/Mn7Ui

Ötzi the Iceman's many tattoos were made by "hand-poking" — a manual version of the tattooing technique usually used today — and not by cutting his skin as some researchers have suggested, according to a new study.

Ötzi died in Europe's Alps about 5,300 years ago, and his body remained mummified there for thousands of years until tourists discovered it in 1991 on a mountain pass near the border of Italy and Austria. Studies have since revealed many aspects of his life, including the tools and weapons he carried, his clothes and his last meal.

There have also been studies of Ötzi's 61 tattoos; but while it's often reported they were made by cutting the skin and rubbing soot into the incision, that doesn't seem to have been the case, according to study first author Aaron Deter-Wolf, an expert on ancient tattooing who works for the state of Tennessee's Department of Environment and Conservation.

Instead, "within reasonable doubt they are hand-poked, rather than being incised or being done in any other style," Deter-Wolf told Live Science.

The cost of specialized farm equipment is one of the biggest barriers for small-scale and beginning farmers. Cooperatives are springing up around the nation to help bridge the gap.

Linguists studying the Southern American Dialect reckon that it ain't what it used to be, y'all. I do declayuh!

Otherwords is a PBS web series on Storied that digs deep into this quintessential human trait of language and finds the fascinating, thought-provoking, and funny stories behind the words and sounds we take for granted. Incorporating the fields of biology, history, cultural studies, literature, and more, linguistics has something for everyone and offers a unique perspective on what it means to be human.

see also: list of rejected female names and list of rejected male names

One of the more distressing qualities of humanity, in my mind, is the emphasis we collectively put on “efficiency.”¹ It saturates our professional existence. It haunts our socioeconomic barometer. And it drives our current approach to both creating and appreciating art. It’s insidious, the inordinate amount of power “efficiency” holds over our daily lives, without even drawing much attention to itself, creeping up in unanticipated ways: the life hacks bombarding us on TikTok; the large language models we use to reduce the amount of effort we need to put into writing an email to our colleague; the Trim Silence feature on our podcast player of choice.

[...]I will admit that this is perhaps a weird hill to die on, but I truly believe that Trim Silence is an abomination that should be fully eradicated from existence, as it not only spits in the face of the people who take the time and effort to produce their shows, but also, more broadly, encourages a way of interfacing with art that can only be described as gluttonous.

Many perfumes and fragrances are unsustainably extracted from plants and animals or made from synthetic chemicals. I wanted to find another way.