Feed aggregator
Vimeo is laying off employees around the world just months after Italian software company Bending Spoons completed its $1.38 billion acquisition of the video hosting platform. Dave Brown, Vimeo's former brand VP, described the cuts on LinkedIn as affecting "a large portion of the company." One video engineer claimed "almost everyone" was laid off, "including the entire video team," and another software engineer said he lost his job alongside "a gigantic amount of the company."
This marks Vimeo's second round of layoffs in less than six months. The company cut 10% of its workforce in September, just one week before Bending Spoons announced its acquisition plans. Bending Spoons has a history of post-acquisition layoffs at companies including WeTransfer, Filmic, and Evernote.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The United States formally withdrew from the World Health Organization on Thursday, making good on an executive order that President Trump issued on his first day in office pledging to leave the international organization that coordinates global responses to public health threats. The New York Times: While the United States is walking away from the organization, a senior official with the Department of Health and Human Services told reporters on Thursday that the Trump administration was considering some type of narrow, limited engagement with W.H.O. global networks that track infectious diseases, including influenza.
As a W.H.O. member, the United States long sent scientists from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to participate in international decision-making about which strains to include in the flu vaccine. A W.H.O. meeting on next year's vaccine is scheduled for February. The official said the Trump administration would soon disclose how or whether it will participate.
On Thursday, the administration said that all U.S. government funding to the organization had been terminated, and that all assigned federal employees and contractors had been recalled from its Geneva headquarters and its offices worldwide.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: TikTok has finalized a deal to create a new American entity, avoiding the looming threat of a ban in the United States that has been in discussion for years. The social video platform company signed agreements with major investors including Oracle, Silver Lake and MGX to form the new TikTok U.S. joint venture. The new version will operate under "defined safeguards that protect national security through comprehensive data protections, algorithm security, content moderation and software assurances for U.S. users," the company said in a statement Thursday. American TikTok users can continue using the same app. [...] Adam Presser, who previously worked as TikTok's head of operations and trust and safety, will lead the new venture as its CEO. He will work alongside a seven-member, majority-American board of directors that includes TikTok's CEO Shou Chew.
[...] In addition to an emphasis on data protection, with U.S. user data being stored locally in a system run by Oracle, the joint venture will also focus on TikTok's algorithm. The content recommendation formula, which feeds users specific videos tailored to their preferences and interests, will be retrained, tested and updated on U.S. user data, the company said in its announcement. The algorithm has been a central issue in the security debate over TikTok. China previously maintained the algorithm must remain under Chinese control by law. But the U.S. regulation passed with bipartisan support said any divestment of TikTok must mean the platform cuts ties -- specifically the algorithm -- with ByteDance. Under the terms of this deal, ByteDance would license the algorithm to the U.S. entity for retraining.
The law prohibits "any cooperation with respect to the operation of a content recommendation algorithm" between ByteDance and a new potential American ownership group, so it is unclear how ByteDance's continued involvement in this arrangement will play out. Oracle, Silver Lake and the Emirati investment firm MGX are the three managing investors, who each hold a 15% share. Other investors include the investment firm of Michael Dell, the billionaire founder of Dell Technologies. ByteDance retains 19.9% of the joint venture.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
alternative_right shares a report from ScienceAlert: A systematic review of 85 studies has now found good reason to differentiate between 'active' sitting, like playing cards or reading, and 'passive' sitting, like watching TV. [...] "Total sitting time has been shown to be related to brain health; however, sitting is often treated as a single entity, without considering the specific type of activity," explains public health researcher Paul Gardiner from the University of Queensland in Australia. "Most people spend many hours sitting each day, so the type of sitting really matters ... These findings show that small everyday choices -- like reading instead of watching television -- may help keep your brain healthier as you age."
Across numerous studies, Gardiner and colleagues found that active sitting activities, like reading, playing card games, and using a computer, showed "overwhelmingly positive associations with cognitive health, enhancing cognitive functions such as executive function, situational memory, and working memory." Meanwhile, passive sitting was most consistently associated with negative cognitive outcomes, including increased risk of dementia. The study was published in the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The late Jack Bogle was often credited with the saying: “Don’t look for the needle in the haystack. Just buy the haystack.” If you look at the entire “haystack” of the overall market as hundreds and thousands of individual companies, over time there are a lot of losers and a few big winners, or “needles”.
In addition, I’d also add the saying that “The haystack is always changing.” Check out the table above of the top 10 largest US companies in different decades, updated as of 12/31/25 as collected by JP Morgan Asset Management (this is a useful resource that is updated every quarter).
Notice that all the 1985 Top 10 companies are marked as green. There are fewer and fewer left in the top 10 after each decade that passes, and there are none in 2025. Most likely, by the time 2045 or 2065 rolls around – when you might be retired! – the Top 10 will include companies that don’t even exist today.
Investing in a simple market-cap index fund will always be criticized as “dumb” or “overweight this” or “underweight that”. I think weighing by the company value is a perfectly fine system for the patient, long-term investor. In the end, things shakes themselves out. If you buy the entire investable US stock market, or even extend this to the entire investable world stock market, you can be sure that you own all the eventual winners.
I enjoy not having to worry about things in the long term. If I feel like doing some active trading, I can, but I can also go weeks without checking a single stock ticker if I’m not in the mood.
|