The Phoenix Project
The Outsider
Top 20 things that make me happy
- Sweat Lodges
- Hot Springs
- Tubby Times
- Snuggling with my wife in the camper
- Kombucha
- Peppermint Tea
- Float Tanks
- Snuggling with Dill Pickle
- Sitting in the woods and shooting with Jason
- Scooting around a city with Mike or Paul
- Listening to an awesome live band
- Laughing with my parents
- Movies with Micheal
- Cooking for my bride
- Teaching my team new things
- Serving people food
- Cutting the lawn
- TV Naps at home
- Smooth and calming CBD
- Gardening
Top 10 Moments of 2019
- Surprise 40th Birthday
- Chicago Brother Adventure, Scootin ’round Chicago
- Lake Tahoe
- Weekend Cottage Projects
- Getting my new job at BCBSM
- The Basement Reno Project
- Float Session at Motor City Float
- Connecting with Kris / Bro Time
- Sitting with my Dad on the patio and laughing
- Learning from Keith / Work Ethic
40 for 40 List
Forty items for daily, weekly and monthly focus. I am 40, it’s 2020, my company is 80 years old. I love how all the number mean something? 🙂 Looking forward to the next decade!
UPDATE – updated for year end
2019 Book List
- Still of Night: Dead of Night Series, Book 4
- The Mind of the Leader: How to Lead Yourself, Your People, and Your Organization for Extraordinary Results
- Dune
- True West
- Area X: The Southern Reach Trilogy – Annihilation, Authority, Acceptance
- Dimension of Miracles
- Comedy Sex God
- Heads Will Roll
- Delta-v
- Recursion: A Novel
- Doctor Sleep: A Novel
- Rhett & Link’s Book of Mythicality: A Field Guide to Curiosity, Creativity, and Tomfoolery
- Rage: A Joe Ledger and Rogue Team International Novel: Rogue Team International Series, Book 1
- Scrum -The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time
- The Institute – A Novel
Should you say ‘please’ to an AI?
Yes, I think you should, and I try to as much as I can…
There are two reasons we say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’. The first is pretty obvious. It gives the other person dignity. It acknowledges their humanity. It implies that at some level, this engagement is voluntary. But of course, none of this is true when we’re talking to Siri or Alexa.
WordPress 5.0 is here!
From iThemes
WordPress 5.0 just landed with a new post and page editor called Gutenberg. Because WordPress 5.0 is a major version release, you’ll want to have a proper update checklist in place so the update goes smoothly
At least pickup trucks are selling, right?
From Axios
GM is laying off 14,300 employees. It’s shuttering five factories in the U.S. and Canada, and says that two more closings will be announced internationally. By next year, it will no longer make the Buick LaCrosse, the Chevrolet Impala, or the Cadillac CT6 sedan. It’s even killing the Chevy Volt plug-in hybrid.
- Welcome to the modern car industry, which is full of bad news, report Axios’ Felix Salmon in New York and Joann Muller in Detroit.
The big picture: All the top-selling sedans in America — the Toyota Camry, Honda Civic, Honda Accord, Toyota Corolla, Nissan Altima, and Nissan Sentra — are Japanese.
- Why it matters: American carmakers can’t compete, and are giving up that segment of the market. Instead they’re concentrating on trucks, SUVs, and crossovers, which have higher profit margins and growing demand.
What’s next? Almost certainly, even more job losses.
- Car factories are at their most efficient when they run at full capacity. Right now America is capable of producing many more vehicles than there’s demand for — roughly 3.2 million vehicles per year, according to Kristin Dziczek, vice president of industry, labor and economics at the Center for Automotive Research. (GM accounts for about 1 million of that.)
- The logic of efficiency means that yet more factories are likely to close.
President Trump’s trade war and steel tariffs are costing the industry billions, including roughly $700 million in higher steel prices at GM alone. Very few big automakers have avoided problems:
- Ford has already announced that it is effectively getting out of the car business. By 2020, it will no longer sell the Fiesta, Taurus, Fusion or Focus in North America. Only the Mustang will remain, along with a crossover called the Focus Active.
- Tesla CEO Elon Musk told “Axios on HBO” that the entire company was “within single-digit weeks” of death — in need of layoffs or new financing — earlier this year.
- Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn, after trying to push through a merger with France’s Renault that neither company really wanted, is now sitting in a Japanese jail. A Nissan whistleblower told Japanese authorities that Ghosn was being paid tens of millions of dollars in undeclared income. (Wall Street Journal editorial: “The Ghosn Inquisition“)
- Fiat Chrysler is struggling after the death of its charismatic leader, Sergio Marchionne, who never achieved his longstanding dream of merging with GM.
- Volkswagen, which has also seen a senior executive arrested, has set aside $30 billion to cover costs associated with its Dieselgate scandal.
What to watch: The future of car-making might be grim, but stock market investors are excited about self-driving cars and mobility as a service.
- That market logic is putting pressure on carmakers to pour billions into R&D. It’s also driving strategic investments in everything from AI to electric scooters.
- The result: A major secular employment shift away from unionized factory workers and Detroit middle-management lifers. Expect the United Auto Workers, still GM’s largest shareholder with a $3.6 billion stake in the company, to remain extremely unhappy for the foreseeable future.
