Obama Claims Evangelical Latinos Disregarded Trump’s Racism Because of Views on ‘Abortion,’ ‘Gay Marriage’

8 min readNov 27, 2020

Then, it’s gone. It seems McDonald’s releases the McRib only to pull it from the menu quickly after its arrival. If history tells us anything, the McRib really isn’t that good, nor is it inherently popular.

In the 1990s, I liked to rent VHS videos from the Blockbuster down the street from our house. I’d take two or three at a time and return them quickly to avoid late fees. Then one day I moved a pile of papers on the dining room table and saw a cassette that I’d watched weeks ago and forgotten to return. When I took the movie back to the store, the woman told me the fee: $40! I felt so stupid.

First and foremost, it’s a serious phone. It’s not a trinket. It’s not a refreshed version of an older model, like the iPhone SE. It’s a serious phone for serious people. The display extends all the way to the edges of the device, as modern phones do, and it’s camera and processor are on par with modern phones. When I get this phone, I know all my apps will run just as smoothly as they should on a brand-new device.

“While the performance of many masks is a bit better as ‘source control,’ protecting people around the wearer, it is also clear that such masks can reduce the likelihood of infection to the uninfected wearer as well,” says Aronoff, who was not involved in the research. “This is a well-done study that should provide more rationale for us each to do our part and wear face coverings when around others in public.”For the first time in eight years, McDonald’s will release the McRib on a national scale. The sandwich has been cycled in and out of the restaurants for nearly four decades now. It’s gotten to the point where the McRib has a bit of a cult following, and every time it pops up on menus people gobble up the sandwich.Despite some outlier claims that masks don’t work, leading experts on the transmission of airborne viruses are unified in proclaiming the value of masks for lowering risk of Covid-19 spread. A new study from the CDC adds to the evidence by showing that infection rates in Kansas were lower in counties that enforced mask mandates.

But a friend told me about a new invention called DVDs, which would be coming that fall. “They’re like CDs but hold a movie,” he explained. I raced to the post office and mailed myself several CDs (I couldn’t find an actual DVD for my test). Each cost thirty-two cents to mail. Then I went back to my place in Santa Cruz and waited anxiously for them to arrive. Two days later they dropped through the mail slot, unharmed.
The McRib isn’t just a sandwich to McDonald’s. It’s a form a publicity and their wild card marketing scheme. By limiting its availability, McDonald’s has turned low demand into a big buzz. It’s not a strategy unique to McDonald’s, but the restaurant has made it work time and time again.

By early 2001, we’d grown to 400,000 subscribers and 120 employees. I tried to avoid the leadership fumbles of my Pure Software days, and although we avoided implementing excessive rules and controls this time, I also couldn’t characterize Netflix as a particularly great place to work. But we were growing, business was good, and work for our employees was OK.I sat down with Marc and Patty McCord — Patty had come with me from Pure Software and was head of Human Resources — and we studied the contribution of each employee. We didn’t have any obviously poor performers. So we divided the staff into two piles: the 80 highest performers who we would keep and 40 less amazing ones we would let go. Those who were exceptionally creative, did great work, and collaborated well with others went immediately into the “keepers” pile. The difficulty was that there were many borderline cases. Some were great colleagues and friends but did adequate rather than great work. Others worked like crazy but showed uneven judgment and needed a lot of hand-holding. A few were exceptionally gifted and high performing but also complainers or pessimists. Most of them would have to go. It wasn’t going to be easy.Then, in the spring of 2001, crisis struck. The first internet bubble burst, and scores of dot-coms failed and vanished. All venture capital funding stopped, and we were suddenly unable to raise the additional funds we needed to run the business, which was far from profitable. Morale in the office was low, and it was about to get lower. We had to lay off a third of our workforce.

The first time it left the menu, it wasn’t a marketing tactic, nor was it due to a supply shortage. It was due to poor sales, because McDonald’s really isn’t a place to buy ribs. If the demand was there, McDonald’s could get the pork supply to keep the McRib on the menu. The scarcity is an intentional tactic to have a sandwich that’s hard to find.

In May 1998, we launched Netflix, the world’s first online DVD rental store. We had 30 employees and 925 movie titles, which was almost the entire catalog of DVDs available at the time. Marc was the CEO until 1999, when I took over and he became one of our executives.

The McRib debuted in 1981 but was released nationwide in 1982. However, their history really begins in 1979 with the release of another product. This was when McDonalds introduced the Chicken McNugget, and it was a huge hit. McNuggets sold so well that McDonald’s couldn’t keep up with the demand, so they wanted customers to feed their hunger with another McDelicacy.

“While the performance of many masks is a bit better as ‘source control,’ protecting people around the wearer, it is also clear that such masks can reduce the likelihood of infection to the uninfected wearer as well,” says Aronoff, who was not involved in the research. “This is a well-done study that should provide more rationale for us each to do our part and wear face coverings when around others in public.”
Mornings don’t have to be rough and unproductive. By doing a few focused things when you wake up and knowing what not to do, you can set yourself up for more productivity throughout the day.
Later, that got me thinking. Blockbuster made most of its margin on late fees. If your business model depends on inducing feelings of stupidity in your customer base, you can hardly expect to build much loyalty. Was there another model to provide the pleasure of watching movies in your own living room without inflicting the pain of paying a lot when you forgot to return them?

Prinarily, big phones don’t fit in pockets. The largest iPhone Apple sells requires a small purse for me to carry around. The reason I own an iPhone X is that when the iPhone X came out, it was the smallest phone in Apple’s lineup — and it’s still too large for my pocket most of the time. This makes it that much harder for you to put down your phone and live your life.

The other issue I was dealing with was that there weren’t any options for smaller iPhones anyways. Apple sold the iPhone SE, which was a glorified iPhone 5s, but I was always doubtful of whether it would be able to power all my apps without skittering, as older iPhones have always done.

The results from Marr’s team support other studies suggesting cloth face coverings indeed provide two-way protection, says David Aronoff, MD, director of the Division of Infectious Diseases at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine.

In early 1997, when our startup Pure Software was acquired, Marc Randolph and I started thinking about opening a movies-by-mail business. Amazon was having good luck with books. Why not films? Customers would rent VHS cassettes from our website and be able to return them via the mail. Then we learned it would cost $4 to mail the VHS cassette each way. There wasn’t going to be a big market. It was too expensive.

In the days before the layoffs, my wife remarked how on edge I was, and she was right. I worried that motivation in the office would plummet. I was convinced that, after I’d let go of their friends and colleagues, those who stayed would think that the company wasn’t loyal to employees. It was bound to make everyone angry. Even worse, the “keepers” would have to shoulder the work of those let go, which seemed certain to lead to bitterness. We were already short on cash. Could we bear a further collapse in morale?

“No one intervention — masking, social distancing, hand washing, indoor ventilation — will stop the spread of Covid-19 alone,” Marr says. “The mask is one of the many interventions that we need to combine together.”

Obama Claims Evangelical Latinos Disregarded Trump’s Racism Because of Views on ‘Abortion,’ ‘Gay Marriage’

Written by thu xsadas