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Cory Joseph has been blind since birth. So hes among the people Apple aims to serve with an addition to its App Store called Accessibility Nutrition Labels, one of a raft of features the company announced earlier this week to mark Global Accessibility Awareness Day. Once the labels go live later this year, each apps listing will detail the accessibility features it supports, such as the VoiceOver screen reader, voice input, options to adjust text size and screen contrast, and captioned audio. These enabling technologies can be the difference between an app being essential and unusable: Having this level of transparency from the App Store is huge, says Joseph. He isnt just one of the users who will benefit from that information, though. As a principal accessibility solutions architect at CVS Health, Joseph is in the business of making sure software works for everybody. Given his employers scaleits the worlds second-largest healthcare company by revenue and reaches 100 million people a dayits a job with the potential for deep real-world impact. When using CVSs apps, everyone’s trying to find the best care, and we want to make sure that’s barrier-free for everyone, explains Joseph. The 6-year-old team hes on has been responsible for achievements that go well beyond taking advantage of the core accessibility features offered by Apple and other platform providers. Spoken Rx uses RFID technology to identify prescription meds and read the vital details about them out loud. [Photo: Courtesy of CVS] In 2020, for instance, the company introduced a CVS Pharmacy app feature called Spoken Rxa baby of mine, Joseph says. Special radio-frequency identification (RFID) labels on prescription containers enable it to read aloud vital information such as dosage instructions. CVS Health has also made some of its investments in accessibility freely available to other developers by open-sourcing them, including iOS and Android code, an automated system for testing website usability, and tools for annotating web designs in Figma. As a field, accessibility has come a long way since Apple first dedicated a team to it, initially known as the Office of Special Education. Over 40 years, the company has built a wealth of functionality into its products to facilitate their use by people with disabilities, including the technologies that make the iPhone useful even if you cant see its touchscreen interface. Some of its recent advances, such as on-device generation of custom synthetic voices, would have been unimaginable just a few years ago. This weeks announcements even include support for brain-computer interfaces. By contrast, theres nothing gee-whizzy about the Accessibility Nutrition Labels themselves. They just summarize the features that a given app has enabled. But by doing that in such a straightforward, prominent way, theyll not only aid millions of users but also give some glory to the software makers who take accessible design seriously. Rather than be embarrassed by listings that make their lack of effort obvious, developers who dont yet have much to brag about might finally get with the program. Accessibility Nutrition Labels will clearly indicate which features for inclusive design an app supports. [Photo: Apple] Joseph hopes that the labels associations are only positive. It’s easy to think about this sort of thing as a badge of shame, and I think that’s not the right way to think about this, he told me. This is an opportunity for independent developers, large organizations, and everyone in between to highlight the good work they do. Even though Joseph works for a company that has dedicated significant mindshare and money to that good work, hes up front about the obstacles to rapid progress that large companies face, even when they have all the right intentions. I would be lying if I said that there aren’t challenges, he told me. We’re a gigantic organization. There are challenges in every gigantic organization. Of course, we balance all of our work and plan everything out as best as we can, and we deliver the most successful experience that we can across our applications. The good news, he adds, is that CVS Health-size resources arent necessary to make software accessible. Realistically, it’s easier for smaller developers, he says. They can move more quickly, they can update their code faster, and they can adapt to and take in their user feedback in real time and make those changes by engaging directly. For independent and smaller developers, this shouldn’t be a burden. I find that take heartening. And if Joseph is right that app creators dont have to be humongous to get inclusive design right, Accessibility Nutrition Labels will soon prove it. Youve been reading Plugged In, Fast Companys weekly tech newsletter from me, global technology editor Harry McCracken. If a friend or colleague forwarded this edition to youor if you’re reading it on FastCompany.comyou can heck out previous issues and sign up to get it yourself every Friday morning. I love hearing from you: Ping me at hmccracken@fastcompany.com with your feedback and ideas for future newsletters. I’m also on Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads, and you can follow Plugged In on Flipboard. More top tech stories from Fast Company Donald Trump says he’s our ‘crypto president,’ but he’s tanking its best shot at adoptionThe president’s deep involvement in the crypto industry is raising red flags in Washington, leading to the collapse of a key stablecoin bill. Read More AI is printing the rocket engine that could beat SpaceX at its own gameLeap 71 is developing AI to build rocket engines faster and cheaper than ever before. Read More Couples are saying ‘I do’ in ‘Minecraft’ as virtual weddings become more popularMore couples are tying the knot in digital worlds, saving money and celebrating love in the places they met online. Read More Apple teams up with a brain-computer startup to turn thoughts into device controlThe tech giant is working with Synchron to develop neural interfaces that let users control Apple devices with their brains. Read More Meta is building a new data center in Louisianaand this Senate committee wants to know why it’s being powered by gas (exclusive)The local utility says Meta’s AI data center requires three new natural gas plants. The Senate Environment and Public Works Committee is asking how this fits with Meta’s climate goals. Read More These 5 free AI-powered Chrome extensions make Gmail so much betterSignificantly improve your Gmail experience without breaking the bank.Read More
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E-Commerce
It has been an odd few weeks for generative AI systems, with ChatGPT suddenly turning sycophantic, and Grok, xAIs chatbot, becoming obsessed with South Africa. Fast Company spoke to Steven Adler, a former research scientist for OpenAI who until November 2024 led safety-related research and programs for first-time product launches and more-speculative long-term AI systems about bothand what he thinks might have gone wrong. The interview has been edited for length and clarity. What do you make of these two incidents in recent weeksChatGPTs sudden sycophancy and Groks South Africa obsessionof AI models going haywire? The high-level thing I make of it is that AI companies are still really struggling with getting AI systems to behave how they want, and that there is a wide gap between the ways that people try to go about this todaywhether it’s to give a really precise instruction in the system prompt or feed a model training data or fine-tuning data that you think surely demonstrate the behavior you want thereand reliably getting models to do the things you want and to not do the things you want to avoid. Can they ever get to that point of certainty? I’m not sure. There are some methods that I feel optimistic aboutif companies took their time and were not under pressure to really speed through testing. One idea is this paradigm called control, as opposed to alignment. So the idea being, even if your AI wants different things than you want, or has different goals than you want, maybe you can recognize that somehow and just stop it from taking certain actions or saying or doing certain things. But that paradigm is not widely adopted at the moment, and so at the moment, I’m pretty pessimistic. Whats stopping it being adopted? Companies are competing on a bunch of dimensions, including user experience, and people want responses faster. There’s the gratifying thing of seeing the AI start to compose its response right away. Theres some real user cost of safety mitigations that go against that. Another aspect is, Ive written a piece about why it’s so important for AI companies to be really careful about the ways that their leading AI systems are used within the company. If you have engineers using the latest GPT model to write code to improve the company’s security, if a model turns out to be misaligned and wants to break out of the company or do some other thing that undermines security, it now has pretty direct access. So part of the issue today is AI companies, even though they’re using AI in all these sensitive ways, haven’t invested in actually monitoring and understanding how their own employees are using these AI systems, because it adds more friction to their researchers being able to use them for other productive uses. I guess weve seen a lower-stakes version of that with Anthropic [where a data scientist working for the company used AI to support their evidence in a court case, which included a hallucinatory reference to an academic article]. I obviously don’t know the specifics. Its surprising to me that an AI expert would submit testimony or evidence that included hallucinated court cases without having checked it. It isnt surprising to me that an AI system would hallucinate things like that. These problems are definitely far from solved, which I think points to a reason that its important to check them very carefully. You wrote a multi-thousand-word piece on ChatGPTs sycophancy and what happened. What did happen? I would separate what went wrong initially versus what I found in terms of what still is going wrong. Initially, it seems that OpenAI started using new signals for what direction to push its AI intoor broadly, when users had given the chatbot a thumbs-up, they used this data to make the chatbot behave more in that direction, and it was penalized for thumb-down. And it happens to be that some people really like flattery. In small doses, thats fine enough. But in aggregate this produced an initial chatbot that was really inclined to blow smoke. The issue with how it became deployed is that OpenAIs governance around what passes, what evaluations it runs, is not good enough. And in this case, even though they had a goal for their models to not be sycophanticthis is written in the company’s foremost documentation about how their models should behavethey did not actually have any tests for this. What I then found is that even this version that is fixed still behaves in all sorts of weird, unexpected ways. Sometimes it still has these behavioral issues. This is what’s been called sycophancy. Other times it’s now extremely contrarian. It’s gone the other way. What I make of this is its really hard to predict what an AI system is going to do. And so for me, the lesson is how important it is to do careful, thorough empirical testing. And what about the Grok incident? The type of thing I would want to understand to assess that is what sources of user feedback Grok collects, and how, if at all, those are used as part of the training process. And in particular, in the case of the South African white-genocide-type statements, are these being put forth by users and the model is agreeing with them? Or to what extent is the model blurting them out on its own, without having been touched? It seems these small changes can escalate and amplify. I think the problems today are real and important. I do think they are going to get even harder as AI starts to get used in more and more important domains. So, you know, it’s troubling. If you read the accounts of people having their delusions reinforced by this version of ChatGPT, those are real people. This can be actually quite harmful for them. And ChatGPT is widely used by a lot of people.
Category:
E-Commerce
Since President Donald Trump took office, one of his fondest pastimes has been firing off randomly capitalized social media posts lambasting various laws asand this is a technical termtoo woke to be legal. Among his targets last week was the Digital Equity Act, which he deemed RACIST, ILLEGAL, and totally UNCONSTITUTIONAL. He wrapped by promising to (attempt to) end the program immediately. No more woke handouts based on race! he wrote. Other than the name of the Digital Equity Act, basically everything about Trumps post is wrong. Overall, the vast majority of Americans use the internet96% of adults, according to Pew Research Center data. Yet there remains a persistent digital divide in this country, which breaks down on lines that will be unsurprising to anyone with a passing familiarity with its history. As recently as 2019, for example, only 71% of people who didnt graduate from high school said they used the internet, and less than half46%subscribed to home broadband. In 2021, 85% of households making less than $25,000nearly 23 million householdshad a computing device (desktop, smartphone, or tablet) at home, compared to over 99% of households earning $150,000 or more, per U.S. Census Bureau data. Among those households making less than $25,000 a year, 16% had internet access only through a smartphone, compared to just 5% of households at the other end of the income spectrum. The Digital Equity Act, introduced in 2019 by Washington state senator Patty Murray, a Democrat, and passed as part of President Joe Bidens bipartisan infrastructure law two years later, aims to narrow these gaps, if not close them altogether. The law established a trio of grant programs that allow states, Tribes, and other organizations to apply for money they can use to get people online and provide them with the tools necessary to make safe, effective use of the web. (The ability to log on is not especially useful if, for example, you are unfamiliar with the hamfisted phishing scams that will start landing in your Gmail inbox two minutes after you create it.) By passing the DEA, Congress acknowledged the simple fact that it is more or less impossible to find jobs, do homework, obtain healthcare, apply to college, pay taxes, and otherwise fully participate in modern society with limited and/or unstable internet access. The law set aside a total of $2.75 billion over five years for its purposes, which, in the context of the federal budget, is roughly analogous to a thimbleful of Evian poured into the infinity pool on a megayacht. Why, then, is Trump so incensed about the Digital Equity Act? Regrettably, the answer is as stupid as it is cynical: It has the word equity right there in the title, and he and his fellow Republicans are constitutionally incapable of understanding the term outside of the context of the right-wing culture wars they are obsessed with fighting at every turn. His preoccupation with ferreting out racial handouts via clumsy CTRL+F search is now so all-consuming that he is trying to cut government spending that has nothing to do with race, and that would meaningfully improve the lives of millions of voters, many of whom cast their ballots for him six months ago. Some DEA funding recipients have already received notices purporting to cancel their grants. But as is the case with all of Trumps unilateral threats to revoke duly enacted federal laws, ending the DEA is not as simple as the president doing a post on a social media network he controls. Federal judges have spent the last several months blocking many of his illegal attempts to withhold congressionally appropriated funding from those who are entitled to it. Here, too, any would-be recipient of DEA funds who takes the administration to court should have a decent chance of prevailing. But the mere fact that Trump is attacking the DEAa modest, targeted, flexible attempt to extend an essential service to people who do not yet have itdemonstrates just how uninterested he is in doing anything resembling the basic work of governing. In a press release, Senator Murray described Trumps attempts to withhold resources meant to help red and blue communities[to] close the digital divide as absolutely insane. A good rule of thumb in politics is that when a 74-year-old Democratic senator is angry enough to use phrases like absolutely insane in their official communications, the characterization is probably accurate and more than appropriate. The text of the DEA acknowledges that the digital divide, like many problems in this country, affects members of racial and ethnic minority groups, and frames digital equity as a matter of social and economic justice. But the law does not define the concept solely (or even primarily) in terms of race, as Trump asserts. Instead, it emphasizes that the law is intended to cover lower-income people, veterans, people with disabilities, and people living in rural areas, among other demographic groups whose members face systemic barriers to getting on the internet. It is not different from any number of federal programs that identify the intended beneficiaries with specificity; doing so is, one might say, efficient. To the extent that the DEA touches on race, it does so only in the sense that, as is the case with every multibillion-dollar grant program Congress creates, some number of people whom the money helps will, in fact, not be white. The Digital Equity Act should be the sort of policy that conservatives, who treat any invocation of diversity as a form of illegal discrimination, nevertheless enthusiastically support: The law doesnt aim to provide some greater, privileged level of internet access to anyone, but only to establish a baseline level of internet access for everyone. Already, deep-red states like Alabama, Indiana, Arkansas, and Iowa have completed their digital equity plans, which repeatedly affirm the urgent need for federal intervention, especially in rural areas. Alabamas plan, for example, notes that 14.3% of its residents who do not have broadband at home say the service still isnt available where they livenearly twice the national figure. Other states are even further along in the process. During the last few weeks of the Biden administration, the Department of Commerce approved a total of $85 million in funding for initiatives to educate users about the basics of cybersecurity and digital privacy in North Carolina; to make interne access more affordable in Kansas; and to provide web devices and skills training in Mississippi. In 2024, these states voted for Trump by 3, 16, and 23 points, respectively. Republicans who supported the DEA in 2021 had no problem with its basic premise. For example, at the time, Ohio Senator Rob Portman emphasized the impact of limited web access on overlooked and underserved communities, and touted the potential for comprehensive digital equity plans and digital inclusion projects to close these access gapsa quote that might get him run out of the party on a rail if the White House finds out about it. Four years later, GOP lawmakers are happily seizing on the Trump administrations ongoing anti-integration crusade to rail against the DEA for its state-sanctioned anti-white bigotry. Texas Senator Ted Cruz, for example, hailed Trump for ending the DEAs impermissible discrimination, which he described as part of the Biden-Harris administrations woke spending spree. For him, preserving the availability of $55 million in federal funding allocated to his state is less important than complimenting his partys leader in public. Conservatives often criticize diversity, equity, and inclusion principles by focusing on ostensibly zero-sum resources: well-paying jobs, prestigious college admissions offers, and so on. But this framework makes absolutely no sense in the context of the DEA, which does not deny anything to anyone on the more online side of the digital divide. A wealthy suburban family with four laptops, four smartphones, and a tablet or two does not need more resources to use the internet; the provision of government-subsidized mobile hotspots for rural middle school students wont affect the ability of white-collar employees living in major cities to get online and do their work. Calling the DEA discriminatory because it benefits people without internet access is like a person with 20/20 vision complaining because their optometrist didnt write them a new glasses prescription: Sure, technically, you arent getting something that others are getting, but thats only because you can see perfectly well already. In a functioning democracy, the Digital Equity Act would be obscure because it is uncontroversialthe product of a bipartisan consensus that making the internet available to everyone is a simple, efficient, and inexpensive method of ensuring greater equality of opportunity. If Trump gets his way, people who remain marginalized by their limited internet access will remain that way for the foreseeable future, all because a reactionary octogenarian encountered statutory language that he didnt understand, and that made him upset.
Category:
E-Commerce
On weekdays, you could easily walk right past Knockdown Center, housed on an industrial stretch of road in Maspeth, Queens. The only thing that sets it apart from the neighboring auto body shops and wholesale warehouses is a rust-colored fence and a beat-up marquee that looks like its announcing a church rummage sale. But when Knockdown Center opens its gates at night and on summer weekends when its outdoor stage is set, the crowds of clubgoers streaming through its gate and pouring out of taxis, rideshares, and city buses is impossible to miss. The three-acre venue can accommodate up to 3,200 people inside and another 1,200 in its outdoor space, called the Ruins. [Photo: courtesy Knockdown Center] This year has been especially busy. The nine-year-old Knockdown Center is hosting the fourth installment of its three-day Wire Festival from May 16 through 18, bringing together 55 artists for more than 50 hours of music across four stages indoors and outside. It will be the biggest iteration of the event yet and comes on the heels the venue’s recent hosting of the first U.S. installment of the C2C Festival, a 24-year-old dance and experimental music event held in Italy. Electronic music is booming, and everyone from tiny clubs to mega-festivals wants a piece of the action. At Coachella this year, 39% of the artists on the bill were electronic actsnearly double the representation of indie-rock artists and almost four times the proportion of pop and hip-hop/rap acts each. At the 20,000-seat Sphere in Las Vegas, DJ Anyma sold out eight shows for a residency that began New Years Eve 2024, then added four more dates to accommodate demand. Later this year, storied Dutch EDM festival Tomorrowland will bring Unity (a joint effort with promoter Insomniac) to Sphere for a 12-date run, a length that doubled after the initial slate of shows sold out. Nick León at C2C 2025 [Photo: Kevin Condon/@weirdhours/Knockdown Center] Knockdown Center is proof that not every venue has to be on the same scale as Sphere to thrive in the electronic world. In 2024, it hosted 470,000 guests, says Tyler Myers, cofounder and executive director, adding that the venue has been profitable since 2019. After the standstill of live events in 2020 and 2021, Knockdown’s ticket sales grew 144% between 2022 and 2024. The venue has sold many of those tickets on a steady roster of global electronic artists. Operating a club in New York is not for the faint of heart: The rewards are high, but so are the risks. (Many are closing, and the nearby Brooklyn Mirage is struggling to open after ambitious renovations.) But by filling its lineup with a mix of recognizable acts and budding DJs and bands from around the world, Knockdown Center is pulling in steady audiences and a building a loyal community. Weve always been the right size for the business were doing, Myers says. Weve worked really hard to get ourselves into a position where riskiness is less risky. LCD Soundsystem [Photo: Kevin Condon/@weirdhours/Knockdown Center] From Doors to DJs Opened in 1903 as a glass factory, the space became the home of the Manhattan Door Factory some three decades later. (In the 1950s, Manhattan Door owner Michael Sklar invented the knockdown-style door frame that gives the venue its name.) Myers and his two cofounders, working with owner David Sklar, took over the 50,000-square-foot space in 2016, renovating it into an events space. It’s since become a showcase for an ascendent electronic music scene that’s less akin to the over-the-top spectacle of the longstanding American EDM festival Electric Daisy Carnivaland more like the no-frills approach of Berlins legendarily cavernous techno club Berghain. I had worked for a large entertainment company before this, and wed always been looking for venues [this size] in New York Cityand over the course of five years we never found one, says Myers. So with this space, it was like, holy shit this is unusualand wouldnt it be nice if we could figure out a sustainable way to support people who were taking risks with this kind of space. Yaeji [Photo: Kevin Condon/@weirdhours/Knockdown Center] After early efforts to showcase dance performances, theater, art installations, and murals, Myers and fellow organizers saw an opportunity to pair the venues scope with an ambitious music scene. Some of the natural things we picked up early on were things that aspired to a sort of Detroit nostalgia for warehouse parties, he says, adding that DIY festivals focused on electronic music were cropping up around the same time. In particular, he highlights Dripping and Sustain-Releaaseannual events that take place in the woods outside of New Yorkas upstarts that have grown by centering music and inspired Knockdown Center’s approach. “A lot of the innovationa lot of the punk rock attitude in New York and globallyis in electronic music right now,” he says. “Our program is a reflection of [that] world.” Maria BC at Outline 2024. [Photo: Kevin Condon/@weirdhours/Knockdown Center] An International Outlook Over the course of nine years, the venue has had its share of notable headlinersLCD Soundsystem played a 12-night residency in December; Fatboy Slim is set to reprise a 14-hour day-to-night set at the outdoor Ruins stage at the end of May. But a big part of Knockdown Centers appeal has been built on its ability to bring a wide range of international acts to its stages. Thats been helped by events like Wire Festival. [Photo: courtesy Knockdown Center] By design, the festival has included a growing number of international artists. Téa Abashidze, cofounder of Wire, says different collectives are invited to curate the festival’s second stage each year. Its about creating spaces where different communities can meet, share experiences, and start building new collaborations and ideas, she says. This year, the stage is curated by Amsterdams queer techno organizers Spielraum and Berlins queer-focused art collective Pornceptual (don’t worry, that link is mostly SFW). [Photo: courtesy Knockdown Center] Beyond Wire, Abashidze has played a key role in bringing international artists to Knockdown Center year-round. In 2019, she cofounded Basement, Knockdown Centers underground, European-style nightclub that can hold up to 600 people. The space’s steady mix of local and international talent has been popular enough that Basement opened a second room in 2022, allowing for two performances to happen simultaneously. Wire Festival was initially an offshoot of the Basement project and its global vision. But when that vision involves crossing international borders, things can get complicated for artists given the expense and time required to get the proper visassomething fans don’t realize impacts their ability to see the artists they want to. [Attendees] can be frustrated that theyre not getting access to events with some of the younger talent thats coming up in Europe,” Myers says. “And are simply unaware that to do so legally is substantially expensive, time intensive, and risky.” Oneohtrix Point Never + Freeka Tet at C2C 2025 [Photo: Kevin Condon/@weirdhours/Knockdown Center] The visa headache In April, British avant-garde artist FKA Twigs canceled her tourwhich included two sold-out dates at Knockdown Centerdue to visa issues. Though it was due to her team not submitting her documents with enough time for the application to clear, the episode underscored the way a complex process can keep even well-known arists from playing global shows. Myers wants Knockdown Center to be a resource for the artists who don’t have teams to assist in going international. We continue to look for less resource-intensive ways that people could get a shorter visa or some other kind of visa to come play legally in the United States with less risk. Myers says. “President Trump’s policies and platform menace the artists we book from abroad, just as they do the artists we book at home, just as they do to the community we serve, and the employees we count on. But the process itself hasn’t suddenly become worse. Its a big problem, but not a new problem. Last summer, to make the process of getting a visa more straightforward, Wire and Basement partnered with online music and community site Resident Advisorto launch Artist Visa Guide, a site that helps demystify what’s required to obtain an O-1 artist visa. Nala Sinephro at C2C 2025 [Photo: Kevin Condon/@weirdhours/Knockdown Center] To give smaller international artists exposureand to help them offset the cost of a visaKnockdown Center’s events that feature eclectic bills, even acts that might be unfamiliar to the venue’s audience. Since 2021, Jeff Klingman, Knockdown Centers lead talent buyer, has curated Outline, a series of single-day festivals that bring together slates of performers from different genres and with different reach. Broad programs like C2C and Outline are a nice way to showcase artists who need to go through that expensive visa process but arent necessarily going to sell 3,000 tickets on their own,” Klingman says. “But you need a broader framework to allow itand thats not going to happen at a bigger festival where you want your opening act to have 50K Instagram [followers] minimum.” C2C 2025 [Photo: Kevin Condon/@weirdhours/Knockdown Center] Klingman has programmed 15 Outline events so far. The most recent installment, held in April, was headlined by established American post-rock band Explosions in the Sky, who shared the bill with Icelandic electronica act Múm, Guatemalan cellist and vocalist Mabe Fratti, Philadelphia shoegazers They Are Gutting a Body of Water, Danish electronic artist Upsammy, and Mexico City experimental band Diles Que No Me Maten. Putting together the artists combinations that we do has become a beacon to the international community. Klingman says. “It allows us to take modest chances in the spirit of art that we really believe in.”
Category:
E-Commerce
As a lifelong pop culture aficionado, I have a tendency to connect my favorite media to whatever Im currently doing. When I purchased a secondhand easy chair a few weeks ago, my husband and I spent a sweaty 30 minutes struggling to get it up the stairs. With the chair still wedged at an impossible angle, we paused to catch our breath and I said, Youre gonna need a bigger boat. Similarly, anytime I use up the last of the milk or take the last cookie from a package, my brain always bellows FINISH HIM! But the pop culture in my head is more than just a running commentary on mundane moments. My favorite entertainment has also been an excellent teacher. In particular, the pop culture of my childhood taught me a number of financial lessons that Ive never forgottenincluding instruction on how to be an investor. Here are the timeless investing lessons I learned from 1980s pop culture. Lemonade Stand: the risk of playing it safe While the majority of my fellow late Gen Xers have deep and visceral memories of dying of dysentery on the Oregon Trail, my early childhood gaming trauma stemmed from the lesser-known Apple II game Lemonade Stand. This simple game teaches the basics of business planning by simulating a childs lemonade stand. The player receives a weather report for the day and has to decide what to spend on lemonade ingredients and advertising as well as determine the price for each glass of lemonade. As a frugal and business-minded 7-year-old, I invested heavily in lemons and sugar when the game predicted a hot summer day on my first turn. I also set a reasonable per-glass lemonade price, knowing that it was folly to overcharge my customers. Though it seemed unnecessary on such a beautiful, 8-bit sunny day, I also splurged on a single advertising poster. Once my preparations were complete, I leaned back in my chair, ready for profits to rain down on me. To my shock, I only had two customers all day. I didnt even make back the money I spent on cups. Pop culture lesson: know where to invest To little Emily, it made sense to spend money on ingredients, since you cant sell lemonade without them. But I balked at the expense of advertising, which seemed unnecessary compared to lemons and sugar. I couldnt predict or measure advertisings return on investment, so I assumed it was a waste of money. (Unfortunately, I continued to make this mistake into adulthood. When I first started freelancing, I only owned a desktop computer. Investing in a laptop seemed like an unnecessary expense with no potential upside for my fledgling writing careerexcept that I traveled at least once a month and had to move heaven and earth to either work ahead or find a computer at my destination every single time.) The shock of losing my Lemonade Stand money taught me that playing it safe cant protect you from loss. There is a risk to investingwhether youre investing in advertising, a new laptop, or in the stock marketbut theres also a risk to playing it safe. You could lose your business because no one knows about it, lose your time (and your mind) because you dont have the equipment you need, or your uninvested money could lose buying power over time because of inflation. There is no such thing as a risk-free financial decision, and playing Lemonade Stand in second grade taught me that better than anything else. The Westing Game: invest independently Ellen Raskin may as well have written her 1978 Newbery Medal winning book The Westing Game specifically to appeal to me. The novel begins after Westing Paper Products tycoon Sam Westing is found dead. Westings lawyer invites his 16 heirswho all happen to be the only tenants of the newly constructed Sunset Towersto the reading of the will. Once there, the heirs are paired off and given $10,000 and an envelope of mysterious clues written on paper towel scraps. They are invited to figure out who has taken Sam Westings life, and the winner will receive his $200 million estate. As much as that set up is more than enough to get my attention, it was the character of Turtle Wexler that really established this book as one of the pop culture giants of my childhood. This 13-year-old budding entrepreneur and investing genius captured my heart by being smart, funny, and financially confident beyond her years. Turtle and her partner, a 60-year-old dressmaker named Flora Baumbach, receive the incomprehensible clues SEA, MOUNTAIN, AM, and O, which the teen girl believes to be stock symbols. Since Westing was known to be a business wizard, Turtle thinks the stocks indicated by the clues must be clear winners. The pair invests the $10,000 in the clue stocks and in Westing Paper Products (stock symbol WPP). The clue stocks dont perform as well as Turtle had hoped. Her daily perusal of The Wall Street Journal indicates that the Westing Paper Products stock is likely to go up, so she dumps the clue stocks and puts all their money in WPP. By the end of the game several weeks later, Turtle and Floras $10,000 stake has grown to $11,587.50. Pop culture lesson: lean into your knowledge Turtle taught me the importance of investing based on my own knowledge, expertise, and instincts, rather than following someone elses lead. She starts her investing journey with the knowledge that Westing was a remarkably astute investor. She assumes the clue stocks must have been handpicked by Westing. But when the clue stocks dont do well, she pulls her money from them and invests in something she has direct understanding of, rather than doubling down on her assumption that Westing must have known better. She changes her investing tactics once she has new information. Turtle also shrugs off Flora repeatedly asking if she is sure about her investing choices. She doesnt let the concerns of her 60-year-old partner sway her, because she knows Flora doesnt understand the stock market as well as she does, even though she is much older. All together, Turtles example made it clear to me that successful investing requires knowledge and a willingness to trust yourself. Its helped me avoid following the crowd into decisions that dont fit my investing strategies. Trading Places: anatomy of an investing scheme I loved the 1983 film Trading Places for Eddie Murphys brilliant comedic timing, but I was even more fascinated by the movies portrayal of revenge via short sale. It took me several rewatches to fully understand how the investing scheme resulted in financial doom for the films villains, the Duke brothers. To exact their retribution, Murphys character Valentine and Dan Aykroyds inthorpe show up to the New York Commodities Exchange ready to trade. Their goal: sell as many orange juice concentrate futures as they can before the U.S. Department of Agriculture report on the nations orange crop. Meanwhile, the Dukes are buying as many OJ concentrate futures as they can before the report, essentially trying to corner the market. Between the heroes feverishly selling and the Dukes feverishly buying, OJ future prices skyrocket until the moment trading pauses for the crop reportwhich reveals the orange harvest will be strong. In the aftermath of the announcement, the Dukes are stuck with all the futures they purchased at inflated prices. To fulfill the margin call, they must pay $394 million. At the same time, Valentine and Winthorpe busily purchase futures from everyone but the Dukes at a greatly reduced price. This allows them to fulfill the orders they sold before the report droppedand make a ridonculous profit. This scene fascinated me as a kid, but it also confused me. I knew that successful investing was about buying low and selling high. But I couldnt understand how the characters could sell high then buy low. How could you sell something before you bought it? Pop culture lesson: stock sales aren’t always linear After many years of catching the movie on TBS reruns, I finally grasped that stock and commodities sales dont have to follow a linear progression of cause then effect. Its possible to buy low after selling high, provided you plan your investment strategy carefully. Thats because you dont have to own something you sell. You can borrow a stock (or an OJ future, for that matter) for a fee. As long as you return it or an identical asset before the margin call, you can sell the borrowed asset even though you dont own it. This is what Valentine and Winthorpe did to ruin the Dukes. They took their pooled money to pay the borrow fees of the futures, sold those futures at inflated prices before the crop report, then bought back the futures at the rock-bottom price afterwards so they could return the borrowed assets. While short sales like the one in Trading Places are unlikely to ever be part of my own investment strategy, understanding the fluid nature of ownership in stock and commodities trading has made me a better investor. It broke me out of the rigid cause-and-effect thinking that limited my investing creativity. Learning through story Despite being a lifelong money nerd, stories are my first love. So its no wonder the most enduring lessons I learned about finance come from the pop culture I loved as a child. Playing Lemonade Stand in my elementary school computer lab disrupted the story Id told myself that it was possible to make a profit without risking an investment. Reading The Westing Game gave me the story of a confident financial heroine to remember when Im tempted to follow the crowd. And Trading Places folded a satisfying revenge story into a creative investing scheme, which helped me feel smart and savvy when I finally wrapped my head around the details.
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