17,741 words now (not including footnotes) (I edited a bit)

I’ve reviewed enough of those comms to know it absolutely wasn’t.

Also, it’s not a double cross. He’s too fucking holier than thou to actually become a Democrat. Right there that’s disqualifying.

The best repurposed Wilson jersey I’ve seen is the guy who has “draft picks” as the name.

I sympathize. This was the last leg of a round the world trip I had been on, during which among other excitements I got the flu while in China. Yes, I also wonder to this day whether it really was the flu.

Every time I see people talk about how rounding up undocumented people will have negative impacts on food pricing (a thing I’ve said myself, full disclosure), I hate the fact that American prosperity has relied on the presence of a large population of precariously non-indentured slave labor.

I suspect that's why she said "slightest".

The book has a little more on this, but my intuitions about COVID are a big part of why I left Pokémon. Their head of HR was completely incompetent and I didn't want to have to carry her for 18 months.

This is an excellent point. MAGA folks are well-known for having chosen their vehicles based on fuel economy.

My wife was in Mexico on vacation with a friend. I spent most of one day working with her to change her flight and come home early. She ended up on what turned out to be the last flight into the USA from Mexico.

I also drive an EV. At least I live in Seattle where our electricity doesn't come from hydrocarbons. But there are still food prices to consider, and I'm feeling smug about my full freezers.

I think many Americans haven't quite internalized that previous oil price shocks have been buffered by imports from elsewhere, and that Trump has pissed off all of the USA's traditional friends such that nobody is super-incentivized to help out.

"Nobody knows anything."

This. I was in Japan in January 2020. At my gate at Haneda, JAL had a sign up that said "we are wearing masks to protect you from COVID-19". I thought "huh, if people in Japan think they have to explain wearing masks, this COVID could be a fucking *thing*".

Turns out it was a fucking *thing*.

So the great William Goldman line applies in book publishing also?

I suppose that's a note I should make: I feel well-positioned to comment on executive leadership at Bluesky having spent enough years doing it myself.

True. Aaron may be positioning himself as a bullet sponge and tanking the aggro for his team and his boss. I did that enough times in my travels that I should recognize when it's done by others.

Jay has the weakness that a lot of people who have never held a senior job anywhere else often have: she overvalues her own skillset and undervalues the other ones. Example: find the best engineers you can, and for the other functions like Legal and Comms just get a warm body.

The only hire whose background suggests he was right for the role is Aaron Rodericks, an opinion I hold which I know is highly unpopular among users of this site. And Jay has let Aaron become a bullet sponge, which is a bad look for a CEO.

I'm also judging based on her conduct as CEO, which is a more fair way to judge a person with a thin background. She hasn't made a lot of senior hires that have been particularly impressive, for example, and she hasn't achieved much posting discipline on her team or herself.

Thank you for reminding me that I can probably get an offline version of this now. I read Matt as saying that these things happened contemporaneously and there must be *some* cause, but not that the one caused the other (except that spending is at some level rivalrous, which has to be true).

Seattle Seahawks fans are learning today why you never buy the jersey of an active player.

I will fess up to not having looked her up, which is why my questions started as questions and continued with notes about what I've been told. It's still a fairly thin resume, and I say this as a guy who went from mid-level attorney at Xbox to Chief Legal Officer of Pokémon.

Hey!

Somehow that’s simultaneously better and worse than I had expected.

Yep. So I’m told, at least.

At some point all money people want a return.

This is what I had thought: Bluesky is her first job. Not first time as CEO. First job.

Having spent 16 years as a Chief Legal Officer, I am not even slightly surprised by this.

This sentence causes me to ask: where else has she ever worked? “I've grown a lot as a leader and had the privilege of assembling the best team I've ever worked with.”

Admittedly, I don’t think the job of the comms guy is just to post for the sake of posting (which isn’t what I think you’re saying), but that person doesn’t seem to have had much influence over the rest of their posting either.