January’s never much fun. Holiday hangover. The weather is drear. This January seems less salubrious than most. The world is coming apart at the seams a bit. We’re not supposed to notice, of course. We’ve been informed that the seams are popping open because we’re getting fat, not because we’re fishing through dumpsters for our daily bread. All is well! I am beset by doubts on that score. Luckily, in a few days, the press will flip the script, and everything will be bad again, a welcome relief.

Back in high school, Ecclesiastes used to sit behind me muttering stuff like, “A feast is made for laughter, and wine maketh merry; but money answereth all things.” But he used to eat library paste, and cheat off me in English class. I mean, come on Eccles — “answereth?” There’s lots of stuff money won’t answereth. All that more money seems to do these days is give people a larger budget for making themselves miserable. If you give a panhandler a dollar he’ll probably blow it on drugs and booze, but he’ll survive it. Give him a thousand dollars and narcan won’t save him. Let’s see if we can find some other bums who got a figurative thousand dollars, and OD’d on it:

Sonos CEO Patrick Spence steps down after app update debacle

In May 2024, Sonos launched a new app that was plagued with significant issues, with users not able to perform essential functions like accessing or searching their music libraries, setting sleep timers, or even downloading the app.

Sonos makes speakers. Soundbars to annoy your neighbors. I went to their website. They charge $250 for a little cylinder that’s stereo in name only. They had $1.5 billion in sales last year, and somehow managed to lose $38 million on it. And this fruitcake loses his job over an app update.

The spectacular rise and surprising staying power of the George Foreman Grill

Workers at the QVC Studios called it “going red.” Dreimann says he looked on as janitors, accountants, and warehouse workers stopped what they were doing and grabbed the nearest phone, taking sales calls to assist the overwhelmed operators — the fervor induced entirely by the boxer’s snap decision to eat a hamburger.

A fascinating success story. Of course even cash cows get grilled. The company that sold the grill, Salton, sold 200 million dollars-worth of George Foreman grills in 1999 alone. But somehow or other, they got swallowed up by a hedge fund because they were deep in debt.

The Case for Letting Malibu Burn

Malibu, meanwhile, is the wildfire capital of North America and, possibly, the world. Fire here has a relentless staccato rhythm, syncopated by landslides and floods. The rugged 22-mile-long coastline is scourged, on the average, by a large fire (one thousand acres plus) every two and a half years, and the entire surface area of the western Santa Monica Mountains has been burnt three times over the twentieth century. At least once a decade a blaze in the chaparral grows into a terrifying firestorm consuming hundreds of homes in an inexorable advance across the mountains to the sea. Since 1970 five such holocausts have destroyed more than one thousand luxury residences and inflicted more than $1 billion in property damage. Some unhappy homeowners have been burnt out twice in a generation, and there are individual patches of coastline or mountain, especially between Point Dume and Tuna Canyon, that have been incinerated as many as eight times since 1930.

From 2018. Be careful what you wish for. By the way, when does mudslide season start?

FTC Proposes Rule Changes and New Rule to Deter Deceptive Earnings Claims by Multilevel Marketers and Money-Making Opportunity Sellers

This proposal would expand the Business Opportunity Rule to cover money-making opportunities, such as business coaching and investment opportunities, which claim to assist consumers in building a business or otherwise earning income. Such operations proliferate, using deceptive tactics—and in particular, deceptive earnings claims—to take consumers’ money. They cause significant financial and other harm to consumers. Under the proposed amendments, sellers of these types of opportunities would be, among other things, prohibited from making material misrepresentations, including about earnings.

All internet empires are built on fake it til you make it business plans. It was always fraud. You didn’t need new rules. Enforce the old one.

Meta Is Planning to Cut 5% of Lowest Performers, Memo Shows

The company expects to reach 10% of “non-regrettable” attrition by the end of the current performance cycle, which includes roughly 5% non-regrettable attrition from 2024, the memo shows. “This means we are aiming to exit approximately another 5% of our current employees who have been with the company long enough to receive a performance rating,” the company said.

Man, I stared at the bizarre use of “exit” in that sentence long enough to wish Bloomberg was also going to cut the lowest performers, too.

1 in 5 Online Job Postings Are Either Fake or Never Filled, Study Finds

The Wall Street Journal cites internal data from the hiring platform Greenhouse that shows one in five online job postings—or between 18% and 22% of jobs advertised—are either fake or never filled. That data was culled from Greenhouse’s proprietary information, which the company can access because it sells automated software that helps employers fill out job postings.

That number is way, way low. There’s another explanation for this phenomenon that never gets any attention. The kind of girls who infest HR can’t make up their minds, and the jobs disappear in the interim.

U.S. Employee Engagement Sinks to 10-Year Low

Among the 12 engagement elements that Gallup measures, those that saw the most significant declines in 2024 (by three points or more in “strongly agree” ratings) include:

Clarity of expectations. Just 46% of employees clearly know what is expected of them at work, down 10 points from a high of 56% in March 2020.

Hint: What’s expected of you at work is all that stuff you lied about on your resume.

Men exhibit stronger sunk cost bias than women when mating motives are activated

The sunk cost bias refers to the tendency to persist with a decision or investment based on resources already spent, even when abandoning it might be the more rational choice. For example, someone might continue watching a movie they don’t enjoy simply because they’ve already invested an hour of their time. It is often viewed as irrational because the resources already invested (the “sunk costs”) cannot be recovered, and decisions should ideally be based on future outcomes rather than past expenditures.

Women switch faster because they’re certain they’ll get to touch a boob no matter what. The man knows he has to put in the work.

Hang in there ’til Wednesday, people.