The pointless exercise of predictions

You’ve probably been spending at least part of the holidays checking out forecasts for 2023. But, even if they’re interesting, there’s not much point in the exercise — because it is driven by the calendar. The planet takes 365 days to circle the sun, and it’s understandable that a year is an important unit for many of us. But it’s not clear that anyone should care much about exactly what will happen between January 1 and December 31. They’re arbitrary dates. Even if you’re correct in your predictions for 12 months hence, you might still be very wrong. For example, an energy analyst who predicted a rather dull and flat year for the oil market, with prices ending the year much where they began, would have been right. Except that this only worked out because the massive and largely unforeseen shocks of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine invasion and China’s draconian Covid-Zero lockdowns largely cancelled each other out. Both seemed unlikely as the year began.

(Adapted from “Be Careful, Here Come the Predictions for 2023,” by John Authers, published on December 7 2022, Bloomberg)

Failing to deliver on worker advancement

Everyone benefits from an upwardly mobile workforce. But a recent study of 3m workers at Fortune 250 companies showed that even top-ranked firms fail to deliver consistently on worker advancement. The study identified six key ways companies are falling short when it comes to worker development. 1) They don’t train properly, leading careers to stall. 2) Their workers don’t advance internally or even after they leave for a new company. 3) They have high turnover because they fail to give employees much more than a paycheck, such as learning opportunities. 4) Advancement varies widely, with some employees getting promoted quickly and some stalled for years. 5) Their workers in jobs that don’t require a degree fare far worse than employees whose jobs do. 6) Their applicants are attracted to the corporate brand, thinking it will be a great place to work — but there isn’t substance behind that reputation.

(Adapted from the article, “6 Ways Companies Fail to Help Workers Grow,” by Joseph Fuller et al, published by the Harvard Business Review)

Netflix’s password sharing

The end of password sharing is coming to Netflix soon — and it will be a challenge for both viewers and the streaming giant.⁠ The company has put off this moment for years. Researchers inside Netflix identified password sharing as a major problem eating into subscriptions in 2019, people familiar with the situation say, but the company was worried about how to address it without alienating consumers. Then Covid lockdowns hit, bringing a wave of new subscribers, and the effort to scrutinise sharing petered out.⁠ Netflix didn’t pursue a plan to crack down widely on the practice until this year, as subscriber losses mounted. More than 100m Netflix viewers now watch the service using passwords they borrow — often from family members or friends. Netflix has said that it will put an end to that arrangement starting in 2023, asking people who share accounts to pay to do so.

(Adapted from “The End of Netflix Password Sharing is Nigh,” by Sarah Krouse and Jessica Toonkel, published on December 21, 2022, by The Wall Street Journal)

The dangers of Brazilian butt lift

A few days after her cosmetic surgery, Chelsea was in a Philadelphia emergency room with what looked like a third-degree burn. The skin around her thighs had turned black, hardened and blistered, causing pain so intense she was struggling to breathe. She’d had a Brazilian butt lift, where fat is removed from one part of the body — usually the abdomen or thighs — and injected into the buttocks in hopes of giving the patient an hourglass figure. “I was hoping to do a mommy makeover and it turned into a complete nightmare,” she says. In 2017, the Brazilian butt lift had the highest death rate of any cosmetic surgery in the US, according to a group of leading clinical plastic surgery societies. Patients have been left paralysed or experience long-term pain due to nerve damage. Despite this, the procedure has only grown more popular.

(Adapted from “How the Brazilian Butt Lift Became One of the Deadliest Cosmetic Surgeries,” by Fiona Rutherford, published on July 18 2022, Bloomberg)

Published in Dawn, The Business and Finance Weekly, January 9th, 2023