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What had saved Ukraine is precisely what made the United States the most vulnerable nation on earth. Ukraine wasn’t fully automated. In the race to plug everything into the internet, the country was far behind. The tsunami known as the Internet of Things, which had consumed Americans for the better part of the past decade, had still not washed up in Ukraine. The nation’s nuclear stations, hospitals, chemical plants, oil refineries, gas and oil pipelines, factories, farms, cities, cars, traffic lights, homes, thermostats, lightbulbs, refrigerators, stoves, baby monitors, pacemakers, and insulin pumps were not yet “web-enabled.” In the United States, though, convenience was everything; it still is. We were plugging anything we could into the internet, at a rate of 127 devices a second. We had bought into Silicon Valley’s promise of a frictionless society. There wasn’t a single area of our lives that wasn’t touched by the web. We could now control our entire lives, economy, and grid via a remote web control. And we had never paused to think that, along the way, we were creating the world’s largest attack surface.
This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends
Nicole Perlroth
THE RESULTS ARE very consistent. Drugs that raise insulin levels cause weight gain. Drugs that have no effect on insulin levels are weight neutral. Drugs that lower insulin levels cause weight loss. The effect on weight is independent of the effect on blood sugar. A recent study29 suggests that 75 percent of the weight-loss response in obesity is predicted by insulin levels. Not willpower. Not caloric intake. Not peer support or peer pressure. Not exercise. Just insulin. Insulin causes obesity—which means that insulin must be one of the major controllers of the body set weight. As insulin goes up, the body set weight goes up. The hypothalamus sends out hormonal signals to the body to gain weight. We become hungry and eat. If we deliberately restrict caloric intake, then our total energy expenditure will decrease. The result is still the same—weight gain. As the insightful Gary Taubes wrote in his book Why We Get Fat: And What to Do about It, “We do not get fat because we overeat. We overeat because we get fat.” And why do we get fat? We get fat because our body set weight thermostat is set too high. Why? Because our insulin levels are too high.
The Obesity Code
Jason Fung and Timothy Noakes
Anyone can rebuild your product today. Especially with the rise of “low-code” and “no-code” platforms, the ability to write code is no longer a requirement for starting a software company. Then there's the rapid rise of coding bootcamps and schools that are churning out more engineers every day. If you were counting on getting a head start on building technology as your competitive moat, you're likely to be disappointed. Community, on the other hand, can't be copied, because community isn't software. Someone can copy the look, feel, and functionality of your forum, but they'll lack the people, relationships, emotional investment, and social identity that an established community has. Community takes time to build, which can be a concern for companies who like to move fast and want to get results right away. A realistic timeline for a community to drive value for a business is more like 6–12 months. And it can take years for a community to truly mature. But what that means is that it will take a competitor just that long to build their own community. And if you've already owned a topic in the mind of the consumer by building community, it's very hard to get someone to leave a community they already feel emotionally invested in.
The Business of Belonging
David Spinks
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