Bruce Hoffman on a creative way of Dealing With Terrorism. So approximately a hundred of these beautiful young women were brought to Beirut. There, in a sort of PLO version of a college mixer, boy met girl, boy fell in love with girl, boy would, it was hoped, marry girl. There was an additional incentive, designed to facilitate not just amorous connections but long-lasting relationships. The hundred or so Black Septemberists were told that if they married these women, they would be paid $3,000; given an apartment in Beirut with a gas stove, a refrigerator, and a television; and employed by the PLO in some nonviolent capacity. Any of these couples that had a baby within a year would be rewarded with an additional $5,000. Both Abu Iyad and the future general worried that their scheme would never work. But, as the general recounted, without exception the Black Septemberists fell in love, got married, settled down, and in most cases started a family. To make sure that none ever strayed, the two men devised a test. Periodically, the former terrorists would be handed legitimate passports and asked to go to the organization's offices in Geneva or Paris or some other city on genuine nonviolent PLO business. But, the general explained, not one of them would agree to travel abroad, for fear of being arrested and losing all that they had - that is, being deprived of their wives and children. "And so," my host told me, "that is how we shut down Black September and eliminated terrorism. It is the only successful case that I know of."

Organization models based on primarily line-of-business (more)

Division of labor based on grouping people by function/specialty

Actually Richard Forthrast From REAMDE (more)

OutSourcing tasks to a cloud of people? (more)

John Taylor Gatto, a rebel against institutionalized education (Factory Schooling). (more)

see Alexander Patterns: Network Of Learning, University As A Marketplace, Master And Apprentices (more)

How Many Microcovids Would You Spend on a Burrito? Six nerdy roommates used public health data to create an online Covid-19-risk points system for every activity—and protect their pandemic pod. (more)

do you get your choice of food and breeding partner? (more)

Fear of COVID-19 in Kids Is Getting Ahead of the Data. As a practicing primary-care doctor... I understand why many parents were alarmed when, on July 27, the CDC’s director, Rochelle Walensky, said that vaccinated people infected with the Delta variant could transmit the virus “with the same capacity as an unvaccinated” person. (more)

Jorge A Caballero: America shouldn’t be sending unvaccinated kids back to school. A study by Imperial College London found that Covid-19 test positivity among UK children five to 12 years was two- to six-fold higher than for persons 45 and older. As of Wednesday, one in 10 Covid-19 test results for US children five to 11 years are positive, and the week-over-week rise in test positivity is climbing fastest for this age group. Covid-19 test positivity among US children 12-17 (12.3%) is higher than for any other age group. (more)

A Major New Index Fund Should Unnerve Climate-Skeptical CEOs. Last month, a tiny hedge fund called Engine No. 1 staged a coup of sorts at ExxonMobil—a shareholders’ revolt that unseated three members of the oil company’s board of directors and replaced them with more climate-concerned candidates. The putsch was the first centered on climate change at an American oil company. (more)

Jason Shen: 065: Massive, Aspirational, and Public Goals. I’ve been thinking about the value of publicly declaring massive aspirational goals. (BHAG) (more)

Ben Thompson: Metaverses. Satya Nadella, for the record, was first: on May 25, 2021, during the keynote for Microsoft’s Build developer conference, he characterized a collection of Azure offerings as a metaverse. (more)

We need to start thinking more critically about long Covid. What media stories about long Covid and the people who call themselves long-haulers describe is frightening. Ed Yong, a writer for The Atlantic, has been particularly influential in sculpting this narrative. In “Long-Haulers Are Redefining Covid-19,” he describes a mysterious syndrome that strikes even those with mild Covid-19 (more)

Emily Oster: A Credo for the Classroom. Last week, Lucy McBride and I got an email from camp director Steve Baskin of Camp Champions in Texas. He and I met last summer when we were all studying how to operate schools safely (more)

The Rise of the Content Capitalist. Today I would like to share with you a different path to quality venture capital careers. This is a path that is less reliant on getting past gatekeepers. (more)

The Delta Variant Has Warped Our Risk Perception. Your chance of being crushed in bed tonight by a falling satellite is minuscule. It is also nonzero. Ronald Howard, a Stanford engineering professor and founder of a discipline called decision analysis, made a point of noting the latter, the risk of splat. Perhaps best known for studying questions of dangerous thrills (more)

Objectives and Key Results - is a framework for defining and tracking objectives and their outcomes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OKR (more)

Zvi Mowshowitz: Covid-19 8/12: The Worst Is Over. Good news, everyone! Andrew Cuomo has resigned, and Andrew Cuomo is the worst. The title this week does not as reliably or fully refer to the Delta variant or the Covid-19 pandemic. Things are still steadily getting worse. (more)