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A new report has uncovered a community of Roblox players who digitally re-create and “play” through real-life school shootings. Known as “Active Shooter Studios,” or A.S.S., the group has attracted hundreds of fans on Roblox with detailed recreations of horrific mass shootings, including Columbine, Uvalde, and Parkland, according to a report published this week by the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism. The disturbing games are created by anonymous users using Roblox’s in-game tools and browser. In one game viewed by Bloomberg, more than 60 players surrounded a school holding pitchforks, chanting the white supremacist phrase “You will not replace us.” The game has since been removed. One of A.S.S.’s most popular maps re-creates the 1999 Columbine shooting, allowing players to take on the roles of mass murderers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. Players can maim and dismember others—something nominally prohibited by Roblox’s community standards—fighting to the death or eventually committing suicide when police arrive in the game. The A.S.S. is part of a darker corner of the internet known as the True Crime Community (TCC), an online subculture where followers idolize serial killers and mass murderers. The Columbine shooting is among the events most romanticized by TCC members. A Roblox spokesperson told Fast Company, “Roblox is committed to safety and civility, and our Community Standards explicitly prohibit any content or behavior that depicts, supports, glorifies, or promotes terrorist or extremist organizations in any way.” They confirmed that steps are taken to remove material and accounts that violate these standards. “We have a dedicated team focused on proactively identifying and swiftly removing such content, as well as banning the individuals who create it, and we will continue to diligently enforce our policies,” they added. This is not the first time such re-creations have been found on the platform. The ADL previously discovered re-creations of the 2019 mosque shooting in Christchurch, New Zealand. Despite Roblox’s efforts, removing these maps often becomes a game of whack-a-mole. According to the report, A.S.S. members have started hosting games on paid Roblox private servers to evade detection. With over 80 million active users logging onto Roblox daily—many of them children or teens—games that glorify mass violence risk desensitizing players and may serve as a gateway to other extremist content. However, Roblox insisted “the vast majority” of users on its platform do not seek out A.S.S. content and that it is not easily searchable. “Because of the swift, proactive safety measures we have in place, it is very unlikely users would be exposed to such content on our platform,” the spokesperson said. “Combatting content that supports extremist views is an internet-wide challenge, as these individuals constantly try to evade detection,” they continued. “We work closely with other platforms and in close collaboration with law enforcement to keep content that violates our policies off our platform.” View the full article

Discover the essential PPC KPIs, beyond CTR and CPC, to measure profit, incrementality, and real business impact from your paid media. The post The 8 Most Important PPC KPIs You Should Be Tracking appeared first on Search Engine Journal. View the full article

Doug Duncan may be retired from Fannie Mae, but not from the housing market—his new firm is ramping up with writing, speaking, and advisory work. View the full article

In the world of digital advertising, data is king. Yet, many PPC advertisers underutilize one of their most valuable sources of insights: their CRM data. Whether you’re a B2B or B2C marketer, your CRM is a gold mine of customer information that can significantly enhance your paid media strategy. To boost efficiency and scale, focus on the most impactful CRM data, such as: Job titles, industry, company size, and revenue for B2B. Age, gender, location, product preferences, and customer lifetime value (CLV) for B2C. This article tackles how to use CRM data to refine your targeting, craft compelling ad messaging, and create more relevant website content. Evaluate CRM data through clustering analysis First, you need to know how to organize your data to get the insights you’ll deploy in your paid campaigns. One powerful technique for organizing data is clustering analysis, which helps group similar customers based on shared characteristics. For this, I prefer the k‑modes algorithm, an extension of the k‑means method. The algorithm replaces means of clusters with modes – in other words, it replaces an aggregate average with attributes that appear frequently, which is much better for precise targeting. This allows you to identify primary audience segments that are most valuable to your business. For example: B2B: Clustering leads and opportunities by job role, industry, company size, and annual revenue. B2C: Segmenting customers based on demographics, interests, purchase behavior, CLV, and engagement levels. This analysis will help you uncover actionable insights to shape your advertising approach and ensure you focus on the right audiences. 3 ways to leverage CRM data for PPC advertising Once you’ve identified key audience clusters, apply those insights across Google Ads, LinkedIn Ads, Meta Ads, and other paid platforms. While there are additional use cases, let’s focus on the three mentioned above. 1. Refine targeting without hyper-fragmenting ad accounts A common mistake is over-segmenting ad campaigns, which can lead to inefficient ad spend, limited insights, and hinder platform algorithms from optimizing performance. Instead, leverage your CRM insights to refine audience targeting strategically: LinkedIn and Facebook audiences: Upload CRM data to create custom audiences and lookalike audiences, ensuring you’re targeting high-value prospects similar to your existing customers. (Note: A few significant new releases from LinkedIn add even more heft to this recommendation.) Keyword themes in Google Ads: Use CRM insights to identify the job titles, industries, or pain points that resonate most with your customers and optimize your keyword strategy accordingly. Get the newsletter search marketers rely on. Business email address Sign me up! Processing... See terms. 2. Craft messaging with ads geared toward primary personas Different customer segments respond to different messages. Use your CRM data to create tailored ad copy, imagery, and CTAs that align with the needs and interests of your primary personas: B2B example: If your CRM data reveals that C-suite executives respond best to finesse and expertise-driven content, create ads promoting whitepapers or exclusive webinars. B2C example: If your data shows that younger demographics prefer discounts while older customers value premium quality, adjust your ad messaging accordingly. 3. Creating relevant website content Your paid efforts shouldn’t stop at the ad level – your website must also reflect the personas you’re targeting. By using CRM insights, you can optimize your site to better convert visitors into customers: B2B: If your highest-value customers are from enterprise-level companies, make sure your website has dedicated pages for enterprise solutions and case studies, with messaging tailored to address their specific pain points and needs. A common issue I’ve seen with agency clients is that their landing pages lack depth; often, distinct personas would benefit from pages with more refined messaging. B2C: If a key demographic is young professionals interested in sustainability, highlight eco-friendly product attributes and include social proof from like-minded customers. These insights should extend beyond landing pages. It’s crucial to gather and evaluate whether your brand positioning across the entire site reflects the common themes that emerge when analyzing different personas. Final thoughts Your CRM isn’t just a database – it’s a strategic asset that can transform your paid media performance. You can drive more efficient and effective advertising campaigns by analyzing customer data through: Clustering. Refining targeting. Crafting tailored ad messaging. Ensuring your website content aligns with your audience. One final note here: this is not a one-and-done initiative. Use your judgment based on: How much and how quickly new data is entering your CRM. Any data cleanup projects that might alter the data. New product launches that could require fresh insights. Use this information to schedule regular and ad-hoc updates to your analysis. Don’t let your CRM data go to waste – use it to enhance your paid campaigns and increase your ROI. View the full article

Yesterday was an eventful day for shareholders and employees of Intel Corp. The American chipmaker reported its Q1 2025 results while its new CEO, Lip-Bu Tan, confirmed earlier reports that Intel would be laying off employees. Here’s what you need to know about those layoffs and the latest movement in Intel’s stock price. New Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan confirms job cuts The most devastating news to come out of Intel yesterday was that earlier reports were correct and the company would be laying off employees. On Wednesday, Bloomberg reported that Intel was preparing to lay off up to 20% of its current workforce. Given that Intel reported having 108,900 employees at the end of 2024, that 20% cut would equate to roughly just under 22,000 people being laid off. The 22,000 layoff figure, if accurate, would be larger than Intel’s last round of mass layoffs in August 2024, when then-Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger announced 15,000 job cuts. Intel’s CEO confirmed the new job cuts in an email he sent to employees on April 24, which Intel then later published on its website. In the email, Tan laid out his desire for Intel to once again become an engineering-focused company so it can better compete in the chip marketplace and begin innovating again. But in order to refocus the company to one that is engineering-first, Tan said Intel will need to find ways to reduce its existing costs. Some of that cost reduction will come from layoffs. In a poorly subtitled section of his email called “Flattening the Organization,” Tan said he was “a big believer in the philosophy that the best leaders get the most done with the fewest people.” In order to refocus the company on engineering, Tan said, Intel would need to remove its organizational complexity and unnecessary bureaucracy. To this end, Tan said there was “no way around the fact that these critical changes will reduce the size of our workforce.” However, Tan didn’t state the size of this workforce reduction—neither in terms of the number of employees that will lose their jobs, nor in the percentage of Intel’s workforce that would be let go. That means it is currently unknown if Bloomberg’s 20% figure was correct. Fast Company has reached out to Intel for comment on the number of upcoming layoffs. What Tan did confirm is that the layoffs would happen in Q2—which is Intel’s current quarter. He also said that the company “will move as quickly as possible [with the layoffs] over the next several months.” Intel stock price sinks after Q1 earnings results But Intel employees weren’t the only ones who got bad news yesterday. Investors did, too. After Intel released its Q1 2025 numbers yesterday, the company’s stock (Nasdaq: INTC) is currently down a significant amount in premarket trading this morning. As of the time of this writing, INTC shares are currently down around 6.7% to just above $20 per share. INTC shares had gained 4.3% yesterday to close at $21.49 before the company revealed its Q1 performance. Unfortunately, investors usually see layoffs as a good thing for a company because when a company lets go of workers, it can save a lot of money. Fewer employees mean fewer associated costs. Yet still, INTC shares are down after the company’s Q1 results and layoffs confirmation. But why? Intel announced that its Q1 revenue was $12.7 billion—essentially flat year-over-year. It also reported a loss equal to 19 cents a share. But those disappointing numbers didn’t seem to bother investors as much as Intel’s quarterly forecast for its current Q2. Intel issued revenue guidance for its Q2 of $11.2 billion to $12.4 billion. But as Reuters notes, the analysts’ average estimate was $12.82 billion. Many investors thus saw the guidance as an admission from Intel that its turnaround effort will take time. The company is largely seen to have fumbled the opportunity to take advantage of the AI boom in the early years of this decade, and thus seeded AI chip dominance to Nvidia. Intel’s Tan is now hoping to make Intel into an AI chip juggernaut, but the company’s guidance suggests that’s not going to happen overnight—and certainly not in the next quarter. Until yesterday, Intel was one of the few major tech companies in America whose shares were up for the year. INTC closed yesterday at $21.49, up 7.18% for the year. But with its nearly 7% premarket decline this morning, INTC shares are now essentially flat for the year to date. Looking out to a longer timeline, INTC shares have performed much more poorly. As of yesterday’s close, INTC shares had fallen nearly 38% over the past 12 months. Over the past five years, INTC shares were down nearly 64% as of yesterday’s close. View the full article

Let’s get one thing out of the way right now: If you’re taking photographs with a Polaroid camera in the 21st century, it’s not because pristine image quality is your overarching priority. In the digital age, the dreamy imperfection of Polaroid pictures is part of their appeal. They’re never that sharp, and no two come out exactly the same. Even Fujifilm’s Instax cameras—instant photography’s current market-share giant—produce more consistent results. Still, even people who love Polaroid’s analog soul and tactile immediacy have their limits. Each shot from an eight-photo film pack costs about $2.25, considerably more than Instax shots. That’s less than it did in instant photography’s golden age decades ago, once adjusted for inflation, and you can save by buying multipacks of film. But paying more than two bucks to take a photo is a shock to the wallet—especially given that digital ones are effectively free. So you’d probably like to get the best pictures your Polaroid camera can muster, or at least avoid outright misfires. That’s the idea behind the company’s newest camera, the Polaroid Flip. At $200, it’s pricier than the diminutive Polaroid Go ($95), entry-level Polaroid Now ($120), and slightly above-entry-level Polaroid Now+ ($140). The additional investment buys you several features designed to improve your odds of getting pleasing shots in a variety of shooting environments. (Meanwhile, the high-end Polaroid I-2, with its fancy lens and manual settings, is aimed at the select group of photographers who crave more artistic control and are willing to spend $450 on an instant camera.) The “Flip” in the camera’s name references its most obvious new element, a flippable bar that houses the flash and some LED indicators. Relocating the flash let Polaroid increase its size and distance from the lens, both of which can improve photo quality—just as they did back when original Polaroid models such as the Sun 600 sported a similar design. That is particularly critical given that instant photos benefit from turning the flash on in pretty much any environment except bright sunlight. The Flip upgrades the two lenses used by Polaroid’s cheaper models to a four-lens system capable of sharper results at a wider range of distances. It also has sonar autofocusing, a technology the company first used almost 50 years ago in one of the world’s first autofocus cameras that works equally well regardless of lighting. None of these features transforms the look and feel of the photos you’ll get, but they help eke out better image quality in tough conditions. Along with helping you take better pictures, the Flip has a new feature that prevents you from taking bad ones. If you try to take a photo of a subject that’s too close or insufficiently lit, a red light displays in the viewfinder. In extreme cases, the shutter button won’t fire at all. Stine Bauer Dahlberg, Polaroid’s chief product officer, reminded me that one of the most famous original Polaroid cameras, 1965’s Swinger, did something similar—though I like its approach even better: If its vetting confirmed you could take a good photo, you saw an affirmative YES in all caps. Compared to Fujifilm—which offers several hybrid Instax cameras melding digital sensors and film output—Polaroid seems happy, so far, to stick to its traditional roots. The Flip does connect to Polaroid’s smartphone app via Bluetooth, opening up options such as exposure compensation and manual control of aperture and shutter speed. But even if you adjust some of the settings on your phone, the resulting photos are still analog through and through. Functionally and aesthetically, most 21st-century gadgets bear little resemblance to gear of the 1970s and 1980s, unless they’re going out of their way to embrace a retro vibe. By contrast, a citizen of 1985 transported to 2025 would unhesitatingly identify the Flip as a Polaroid camera. Yet its striking resemblance to the models of yore doesn’t feel like an act of nostalgia. Why mess too much with something that still works? The classic Polaroid design did, and does. Pressing the red shutter button and listening to the whirring as the photo emerges from the slot in front is still a satisfying experience. Take someone’s photo, and they’ll be curious how it turned out in a way that’s less common with smartphone photos. Even a Polaroid camera that’s just sitting on your desk provokes questions and smiles. My biggest quibbles with the current Polaroid experience are with the film, not the camera. The company still hasn’t quite gotten its quality back to where it was before the old Polaroid’s near-death experience early in this century. Nor do photos develop anywhere near as quickly as the old ones did and Fujifilm Instax ones do today. Keeping up with demand for film packs also seems to tax Polaroid’s production capacity: Earlier this week, the classic white-frame version was out of stock on the company’s website. (It’s back as I write this, and usually seems easy enough to find at retail.) Dahlberg told me Polaroid is still working on film improvements: “There are a couple of things that we’re doing right now that are going to be more visible soon.” Now, at some point in every article about Polaroid in the 21st century, it has been obligatory to marvel at the fact that instant photography is still a thing and that the company—which went bankrupt twice and once abandoned camera and film production—remains extant. Such wonderment seems less and less essential. After all, it’s been almost two decades since a band of enthusiasts calling themselves the Impossible Project took over the only remaining Polaroid film factory. That last-moment gambit eventually led to it acquiring the Polaroid brand, launching new cameras, and securing shelf space in places such as Best Buy and Target. Fujifilm’s Instax, meanwhile, never stopped booming. Human beings, it turns out, still like to take instant film photos—including people who weren’t even alive in Polaroid’s heyday. At this point, it’s safe to say the medium isn’t going anywhere. If you want to partake in it, the Flip is one of the best options I’ve seen, and certainly worth the $60 premium over Polaroid’s Now+. It’s available for purchase on the company’s site and will be in stores next month. You’ve been reading Plugged In, Fast Company’s weekly tech newsletter from me, global technology editor Harry McCracken. If a friend or colleague forwarded this edition to you—or if you’re reading it on FastCompany.com—you can check 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 20 years ago, this simple video rewired the way we share our lives online Jawed Karim’s 2005 upload didn’t just launch YouTube—it helped usher in a share-all culture, where even the mundane became content. Read More → Bot farms invade social media to hijack popular sentimentGovernments, financial influencers, and entertainment insiders are using data center-like facilities full of phones to push narratives fabricated through fake social media engagement.Read More → AI coding tools could bring us the ‘one-employee unicorn’ As the tools, and other AI agents, gain functionality, billion-dollar startups with a single human employee–or even none–may become possible. Read More → Microsoft thinks AI colleagues are coming soon Microsoft is dubbing 2025 the year of the ‘Frontier Firm.’ Read More → Adobe releases ‘created without generative AI’ tag to label human-generated art Just as it’s introducing the option to use GenAI models like OpenAI, Runway, and Google, Adobe is letting creators draw a new line in the sand between their work and AI. Read More → How to delete your personal info from the internet for free Hiding your address, phone number, and other details from Google and people search sites is easier than you might think. Read More → View the full article

Job interviews are the fortune cookies of hiring—vague and often misleading. But companies keep using them, despite research suggesting that typical job interviews are mostly unreliable predictors of future job performance, because they give hiring managers the illusion of insight, and a convenient way to validate gut instinct with zero data. It’s not that all interviews are useless; some formats, like structured behavioral interviews with scoring rubrics, including AI-based scoring algorithms that match responses to actual outcomes and future performance, can be moderately predictive. But the typical unstructured interview? Oftentimes, it conveys the illusion of predictability by allowing hiring managers and interviewers to unleash their biases and subjective preferences during the interview, and then reactivate those same biases during their job performance ratings and evaluations of those candidates, once they become employees. It’s mostly a personality contest masquerading as a talent evaluation. The candidates who perform best in interviews are often the ones with the most confidence, charisma, and charm. Unfortunately, these traits are also the calling cards of narcissists, Machiavellians, and the occasional smooth-talking psychopath. What passes for “leadership gravitas” can often be ego dressed in a blazer. In fact, studies show that narcissists are more likely to be seen as competent in interviews—especially by less experienced, trained, or qualified interviewers who confuse bravado with ability.. So how do you stand out in an interview without sounding like you’re auditioning for a TED Talk titled “Why I’m Amazing (and You’re Lucky I’m Here)”? Here are five science-based recommendations: 1. Quantify your brilliance instead of announcing it It’s one thing to say you’re “a strong leader.” It’s another to say you managed a team that increased revenue by 35% in under a year during a hiring freeze. Guess which one gets remembered? Vague self-praise triggers skepticism. Data builds trust. Candidates who provided specific behavioral examples—especially with measurable outcomes—are generally rated significantly higher in competence and hireability. Swap generic lines like “I’m results-oriented” for “I led a cross-functional team that reduced churn by 28% in Q3.” And when you do this, resist the urge to sound smug. If your data is good, it speaks for itself. No need to add a drumroll. 2. Be confident enough to admit what you don’t know Ironically, one of the most confident things you can do in an interview is say, “I don’t know.” Not followed by silence, of course—but followed by “. . . but here’s how I’d go about figuring it out.” This signals humility and problem-solving, a combo that’s far more attractive than pretending you’ve mastered every domain from supply chain to quantum physics. As psychologist and author Tasha Eurich suggests, self-awareness—particularly awareness of one’s own limitations—is a key marker of effective leadership. If you mention a skill you haven’t mastered, follow it with a brief story of how you’ve successfully learned something similar. Now you’re not just self-aware—you’re coachable. In today’s volatile and unpredictable job market, people should care less about what you know, and more about your ability, disposition, and willingness to learn in the future. 3. Show you have empathy Narcissists tend to lack empathy. So, if you want to distance yourself from that ego-obsessed camp, demonstrate that you can see the world through someone else’s eyes. Empathy isn’t just about being “nice” in interviews. It’s about showing an ability to collaborate, manage conflict, and not derail an entire Slack thread with your emotional immaturity or self-centered delusional rants. Same rule applies to the job interview: When you describe past experiences, include others in the narrative. What were their challenges? How did they feel? How did you adapt your approach to help? How did you realize they felt and reasoned? Ask your interviewer thoughtful questions about the team dynamics, not just your potential title. It shows you care about humans, not just your LinkedIn profile. 4. Let your achievements shine, but don’t dwell on them for too long The bigger the accomplishment, the more chill you should be when you mention it. There’s a fine line between “that’s impressive” and “wow, do you talk about anything else?” We’ve all met someone who peaked in high school sports and never got the memo. Think of it this way: if you’re a big deal, you don’t need to say it—your story should do the heavy lifting. Let your success land quietly and let the interviewer be the one who leans in. For example, instead of “I turned around a failing division single-handedly,” try “I was fortunate to be part of a turnaround effort that ended up boosting performance by 40%.” In other words, same data, less ego. 5. Read the room Here’s a wild idea: Focus more on the people interviewing you than on your own performance. Read the room. Listen actively. Make eye contact. Nod (at appropriate times, not like a bobblehead). Pause to check if your answers are clear. It sounds basic, but narcissists are notoriously bad at this. They monologue. They steamroll. They mansplain. They “circle back” to points no one asked about. So if you want to distinguish yourself, be the person who not only speaks well—but listens even better. For example, after you answer a question, try asking, “Did that answer what you were hoping to learn?” or “Would you like more detail on that?” It’s called being a kind and socially skilled human, and it’s rarer than you think. Final thought: Be the antidote to the ego parade The truth is, narcissists can be magnetic in interviews. But so can people who are competent, thoughtful, and self-aware. The latter are just more unusual—and in far greater demand once the honeymoon phase is over and actual work begins. So, the next time you walk into an interview, remember: You don’t have to dazzle with hype. You just have to seem real, competent, and curious enough to connect. Confidence is great, but only if it helps you persuade others that you are competent. In contrast, humility in the face of complexity will make you stand out, because modest competence beats delusional confidence (most of the time). View the full article

Google seems to have added a new section to music knowledge panels named "Behind the music." It seems that this is generated using Google's Gemini AI and gives you a bit of background on the song.View the full article

Microsoft is now showing two rows of shopping ads at the top of the Bing Search results. There is even an option to expand them to show more ads.View the full article

Dubai, the go-to destination for influencers, is now doubling down on its biggest market with the launch of its very own “influencer academy.” Jointly funded by the Dubai Department of Economy and Tourism and a travel content creation agency, the “Beautiful Destinations Academy” offers three months of social media “training” for “students,” aimed at bolstering Dubai’s tourism industry. The academy is still accepting applications for four budding influencers, who will be paid to travel and live in the city starting next month. A promotional video by Beautiful Destinations describes the program as “an elite training environment where we invest in you to support Dubai’s unparalleled vision for the future of tourism.” Successful applicants will typically train five days a week, with modules covering photography and cinematography, editing and color grading, sound effects, AI tools, industry regulations, and professional development as a travel content creator. At the end of the course, students will receive a certificate from Dubai College of Tourism, with “the really special ones” offered a full-time job at Beautiful Destinations. All expenses, including flights and accommodation in a luxury serviced apartment, are covered, along with a livable income for the three-month program. Students will also have access to shoot at some of Dubai’s “most stunning and exclusive locations, normally reserved for celebrities and royalty.” Jeremy Jauncey, CEO and founder of Beautiful Destinations, told The Independent: “I want to share what I’ve learned with the next generation and give others the chance to experience the coolest career in the world. And there’s no better city than Dubai—which has inspired Beautiful Destinations’ creators since our earliest days—to do this in. You don’t need to be an expert to apply—we’re looking for raw, hidden talent.” He added: “We want to equip young people with the skills to build a solid future in travel content creation, to take advantage of this fast-growing sector. You don’t need expensive equipment or formal training – just a desire to turn your social media hobby into a dream career.” Issam Kazim, chief executive of Visit Dubai, told The Times UK that the academy’s launch is “a testament to our commitment to fostering creativity, innovation and ­excellence in the tourism sector.” Dubai welcomed a record 18.72 million international visitors last year and recently introduced the “golden visa” (a new visa that allows influencers to live in the UAE sponsorship-free), along with a Dhs150 million government support fund to aid influencers. Given that over half of Gen Zers aspire to be influencers, where better to make that happen than the influencer hotspot of the world? Applicants must upload a 60-second video on “travel culture or adventure” on Instagram, tag @BeautifulDestinations @VisitDubai #BDacademy, and complete an online form before April 24 to be considered for the first cohort. View the full article

If you optimize your articles for similar terms, your rankings might suffer from keyword or content cannibalization: you’ll be ‘devouring’ your chances to rank in Google! Especially when your site is growing, your content could start competing with itself. Here, we’ll explain why keyword and content cannibalism can harm SEO, how to recognize it, and what to do about it. Table of contents What is keyword cannibalization? What is content cannibalization? Is cannibalization harmful? How to identify cannibalization issues How to fix cannibalization issues Preventive measures Common mistakes in addressing cannibalization Final thoughts on keyword and content cannibalization What is keyword cannibalization? Keyword cannibalization happens when multiple pages on your website target the same or very similar keywords. This often occurs unintentionally, especially as your site grows and more content accumulates. Pages that are too similar in focus might confuse search engines, which may struggle to decide which to rank higher. As a result, your pages compete with one another, and all of them can rank lower. For example, if you publish two posts — one optimized for “does readability rank” and another for “readability ranking factor” — Google may see them competing for the same query. Instead of one strong result, both might hover around lower positions, weakening your site’s overall performance. What is content cannibalization? Content cannibalization is closely related but centers on the issue of multiple articles covering the same topic, regardless of whether they’re optimized for the same keyword. It’s a broader issue that affects thematic overlap more than exact keyword matching. Where keyword cannibalization focuses on duplicating keywords, content cannibalization involves too many pages delivering overlapping value. This undermines user experience, spreads authority thin, and can make your content performance uneven. Is cannibalization harmful? Both keyword and content cannibalization can hurt SEO. Lower rankings: Google often limits the number of results from a domain per query. When several of your pages try to rank for the same keyword, they could all underperform. This is especially true when neither page is clearly better in content depth, backlinks, or relevance. Diluted backlinks: Instead of one strong page getting all the backlinks, multiple weaker ones split the attention. If many pages discuss a similar topic, other sites may link to each inconsistently. As a result, no one page accumulates strong authority. This fragmentation makes it harder for your content to rank competitively. Confused crawlers: Search engines can’t always easily figure out which page they should prioritize. As a result, this could lead to inconsistent rankings. These days, Google is better at understanding topical relationships and can often see their differences. If content overlap is too high and intent is unclear, prioritization issues can still arise, especially on sites with thin or low-quality pages. Reduced Click-Through Rate (CTR): Spreading clicks across several similar listings may lower the collective performance. If multiple similar titles from your domain show in results, users may split clicks between them. Worse, one strong CTA title might appear further down the page than a weaker or outdated one. This can impact user engagement and CTR for both pages, especially if they fall further down the SERPs. In short, cannibalization limits your content’s potential by weakening each page’s authority and clarity. How to identify cannibalization issues As your site grows, you’ll have more and more content. Some of these articles are going to be about a similar topic. Even when you’ve always categorized it well, your content might compete with itself. You’re suffering from keyword or content cannibalization. Finding and fixing keyword cannibalization issues should be part of your content maintenance work to prevent all this. Identifying keyword cannibalization Start with a site search. Use site:yourdomain.com “keyword” in Google to surface all pages relevant to a particular term. If you see two or more of your URLs targeting the same term, they may be in conflict. Next, use tools like Google Search Console. Look under the Performance tab. Filter by query to view keywords that bring in impressions and clicks, then see which pages receive traffic from those terms. Then, use SEO tools such as Ahrefs or Semrush to track keyword rankings and expose overlapping URLs targeting the same terms. Look especially for pages that rank beyond the top five positions for the same term. When two of your URLs rank closely together outside the top spots, it’s often a sign that neither is performing optimally. Identifying content cannibalization Content cannibalization is subtler. You might not see overlapping keywords, but you may notice thematic overlap. Review URL structures and tags to catch duplicates Start by scanning your site’s URLs and content categories to catch pages covering the same topic in different formats. Look for similar slugs, repeated folder structures, or articles under the same tag or category. This quick check often reveals duplicate coverage, especially on larger sites or those with multiple writers. Use keyword/topic mapping tools Trace what each page is targeting. Create a list of your key pages and their target keywords or main topics. This helps you spot when multiple pages aim for the same term or cover the same subject. It doesn’t matter whether you use a tool or a spreadsheet, but keyword mapping helps explain the purpose of content. It also helps avoid overlap and ensures that all pages on your site have a place in your strategy. Use the page filter In Google Search Console, use the Page filter to see how each URL performs. The data gives insights into impressions, clicks, and average position. Look for pages that are getting traffic from similar queries. Multiple pages appearing for the same or closely related terms could signal content cannibalization. You can also use the Query filter to search by keyword and review which pages compete for it. How to fix cannibalization issues You should know your content, its performance, and where overlaps exist. Fixing keyword or content cannibalization means auditing, evaluating, and restructuring your pages. It doesn’t mean you should delete content blindly. Every page on your site should have a purpose and support your site’s overall SEO strategy. Below are practical ways to resolve both types of cannibalization. Fixing keyword cannibalization In many cases, solving keyword cannibalization means deleting and merging content. We will run you through some of that maintenance work as we did it at Yoast to show you how to do this. In particular, we’ll show you some thinking around a cluster of keywords related to keyword research. Step 1: Audit your content The first step is finding all the content on the keyword research topic. Most of that was simple: we have a keyword research tag, and most of the content was nicely tagged. This was also confronting, as we had many posts about the topic. We searched for site:yoast.com "keyword research" and Google showed all the posts and pages on the site that mentioned the topic. We had dozens of articles devoted to keyword research or large sections mentioning it. Dozens or so mentioned it in passing and linked to other articles. We started auditing the content for this particular group of keywords to improve our rankings around the cluster of keywords related to keyword research. So we needed to analyze which pages were ranking and which weren’t. This content maintenance turned out to be badly needed. It was surely time to find and fix possible cannibalization issues! Step 2: Analyze the content performance Go to Google Search Console and find the Performance section. In that section, click the filter bar. Click Query and type “keyword research” into the box like this: This makes Google Search Console match all queries containing keyword and research. This gives you two very important pieces of data. A list of the keywords your site has been shown in the search results for, and the clicks and click-through rate (CTR) for those keywords. A list of the pages that were receiving all that traffic, and how much traffic each of those pages received. Start with the total number of clicks the content received for all those queries, then look at the individual pages. Something was clear: just a few posts were getting most of the traffic. But we knew we had loads of articles covering this topic. It was time to clean up. Of course, we didn’t want to throw away any posts that were getting traffic not included in this bucket of traffic, so we had to check each post individually. We removed the Query filter and used another option: the Page filter. This allows you to filter by a group of URLs or a specific URL. On larger sites, you might be able to filter by groups of URLs. In this case, we looked at the data for each post individually, which is best if you truly want to find and fix keyword cannibalization on your website. Step 3: Decide on the next steps After reviewing each post in this content maintenance process, we decided whether to keep it or delete it. If we deleted a post (which we did for most of them), we decided which post we should redirect it to. For each of those posts, we evaluated whether they had sections to merge into another article. Some posts had paragraphs or sections that could be merged into another post. When merging posts entails more work (and time) than adding one paragraph or a few sentences, we recommend working in a new draft by cloning one of the original posts with Yoast Duplicate Post plugin. This way, you can work on your merged post without making live changes to one of your original posts. Step 4: Take action We had a list of action items: content to add to specific articles, after which each piece of content could be deleted from the articles it came from. Using Yoast SEO Premium, it’s easy to 301 redirect a post or page when you delete it, so that process was fairly painless. With that, we’d removed the excess articles about the topic and retained only the most important ones. We still had a list of articles that mentioned the topic and linked to one of the other. We reviewed them and ensured each was linked to one or more of the remaining articles in the appropriate section. Another example of fixing cannibalization by merging Another example: We once had three separate articles covering how to do an SEO audit, split into parts 1, 2, and 3. Each post focused on a different section of the audit process, but none of them ranked well or brought in meaningful traffic. On their own, the articles felt incomplete, and splitting the topic likely made it harder for users (and search engines) to find everything they needed in one place. We decided to take a step back. After reviewing performance data and gathering insights on what users were actually searching for, we merged the three posts into a single, more useful SEO audit guide. We rewrote outdated sections, expanded key points, added a practical checklist, included tool recommendations, and tightened up the structure. Since updating and combining the content, that article now ranks for more keywords than the separate posts ever did, draws more consistent traffic, and performs better overall. It’s a good example of how merging overlapping content, when done thoughtfully, can give users more value and improve SEO at the same time. Yoast Duplicate Post is a great free plugin Ever wanted to quickly make a copy of a post in WordPress to work on some changes without the risk of ruining the published post? You need Yoast Duplicate Post! Fixing content cannibalization Even if keywords differ slightly, topics may still overlap, and there are things you can do to improve that. Create a cornerstone/pillar or landing page Create a main page — a cornerstone article — that covers the broad topic in depth, then link to more specific articles that explore subtopics. This helps define a content hierarchy, improves internal linking, and signals which page should rank for the core topic to search engines. Supporting content can still rank independently, but will pass relevance and authority back to the pillar. Consolidate underperforming content If you have several pages covering similar ideas, but none are ranking well, combine them into one stronger, more complete resource. Prioritize the page with the most traffic or links, and bring valuable sections from the others. This helps reduce redundancy, improve content quality, and give search engines a clear page to index for that topic. Use 301 redirects Redirects are an important tool for your cannibalization actions. After deleting content, remember to use 301 redirects to send visitors from the old URLs to the updated one. Of course, you can also send them to the most relevant page as an alternative. This keeps existing rankings, backlinks, and traffic from the original pages intact. Plus, it also helps to avoid broken links or indexing issues. Preventive measures Another way to avoid future keyword or content cannibalization issues is to prevent them, of course. Audit your content regularly Analyze the content for your most important topics regularly. Look for overlapping pages, outdated posts, or content that doesn’t fit your keyword strategy. Regular audits will help you find issues early, which can help keep your site focused and maintain search visibility. Assign a unique target keyword to each page Before creating new content, please ensure no existing page targets the same keyword. Giving each page a clear, unique focus prevents internal competition and helps search engines understand which page to rank for a given query. Write with a clear content brief Start every piece with a brief that outlines the target keyword, search intent, key points to cover, and how it supports your existing content. Such a strategy helps your articles stay focused and avoids topic overlap. In addition, it ensures that the new content you add is truly unique to your site. Keep a keyword and topic map Maintain a simple record of which topics and keywords are already covered on your site. This makes it easier to spot gaps, avoid duplication, and plan new content that fits your overall strategy. A keyword map also helps when updating or pruning existing pages. Also, if you’re running an e-commerce site with many similar product pages, make sure category pages are well-optimized and that your products clearly support them through internal linking. Common mistakes in addressing cannibalization Cannibalization happens, and many site owners have tried to address it in one way or another. Of course, there are right and wrong ways to do this. Deleting pages without checking their value Don’t delete content because you think it no longer serves a goal. Before you do that, look at traffic data, backlinks, and search performance before taking drastic measures. For instance, a page may look outdated, while in reality, it still drives traffic or has solid external links. Simply deleting it could lead to unwanted ranking losses. Relying on canonical tags without checking content Adding a canonical tag isn’t always the right fix. If two pages are too similar, merging or redirecting them may be better. Canonicals help when content overlap is minimal and both pages still serve a purpose, not as a quick workaround for duplication without analysis. Merging pages that target different search intent Just because two pages cover a similar topic doesn’t mean they should be combined. If each one is aimed at a very specific audience or answers a different question, merging them could hurt relevance and rankings. Always consider the intent behind each page before deciding to consolidate. Overlooking internal linking opportunities Internal links help search engines understand which pages are most important. If you skip this step, you may weaken page authority and miss chances to guide crawlers — and users — to your key content. Linking related pages strategically can reduce confusion and support stronger rankings. Final thoughts on keyword and content cannibalization A growing website means a growing risk of content overlapping. This could be a risk to the visibility of all that content. To prevent this, perform regular content audits and carefully plan and structure your content. Whether you’re fixing overlapping blog posts or aligning product pages under a clear hierarchy, regularly addressing cannibalization helps search engines — and users — find the most relevant, valuable pages on your site. The post Keyword and content cannibalization: how to identify and fix it appeared first on Yoast. View the full article

Mel Robbins’s best-selling book, The Let Them Theory, has captured the imagination of millions of people, earning critical acclaim and resonating deeply with those seeking peace in a chaotic world. The core premise is simple yet powerful: let people be who they are, let them make their own choices, and most importantly, don’t waste your energy trying to change others. It’s a philosophy of radical acceptance—an invitation to stop being burdened by the expectations, behaviors, and opinions of those around us. At first glance, this mindset seems liberating. Who wouldn’t want to shed the weight of trying to control the uncontrollable? In a time where burnout is rampant and people are constantly drained by personal and professional obligations, the Let Them philosophy offers a reprieve—a way to step back and prioritize emotional well-being. And yet, as compelling as this idea may be, it raises an important question: Is “letting them” always the right approach? The Appeal of Letting Go There’s undeniable wisdom in Robbins’s message. Far too many people spend their lives tangled in the choices and behaviors of others, investing enormous emotional energy in situations they have no real power to change. Parents stress over grown children’s choices. Friends stay in draining relationships, hoping people will evolve. Professionals lose sleep over colleagues’ attitudes and behaviors. In these cases, Robbins’s philosophy is a wake-up call: Stop trying to fix what isn’t yours to fix. Let them. Let them be irresponsible. Let them be distant. Let them succeed, let them fail. Let them love you or walk away. Let them hold on to outdated beliefs. Let them go down a path you don’t agree with. The argument is that by surrendering control over others, you reclaim control over yourself—your happiness, your peace, your emotional freedom. It’s an enticing philosophy, and for certain moments in life, it’s the exact right thing to do. But what happens when letting go becomes an excuse for disengagement? What happens when “let them” is applied too broadly? When ‘Let Them’ Becomes an Excuse If Let Them is about relinquishing control over what we cannot change, then where does that leave the things we can change? What about the injustices in our world? What about the relationships that are worth fighting for? What about the responsibilities we carry toward our families, our communities, our workplaces? There are times in life when “letting them” isn’t the right answer—when stepping back is an abdication of responsibility, not a path to freedom. If a colleague is sabotaging team morale, do you simply let them? If a friend is struggling with self-destruction, do you let them spiral? If a system is broken, do you let it stay that way? The truth is, some things are worth our time and effort. Some battles are worth fighting. Some people are worth engaging with, even if change isn’t immediate or easy. To withdraw entirely under the banner of Let them is to risk apathy in moments that require action. A Luxury Not Everyone Can Afford Then there’s another reality—Let Them is a philosophy that, in some ways, is easier for those who have already secured success, influence, or financial stability. For a young professional trying to establish a career, the idea of simply letting things happen may not be practical. For parents raising children, letting them doesn’t always work—you can’t let a child make every decision unchecked. For leaders steering a company, a community, or a movement, stepping back at the wrong moment can mean failure, chaos, or even harm. The ability to disengage from unnecessary drama is a privilege, one that grows more accessible with financial independence, career success, and age. It’s no coincidence that many of the most enthusiastic adopters of this philosophy are those who have already reached a place where they can afford to say, “Time is precious. I won’t waste it.” In fact, this may be the true strength of Let Them—not as a universal directive, but as a philosophy particularly well-suited for those in the later stages of life. For those who have already built their careers, raised their children, fought their battles, and established their reputations, Let Them can be a tool for cutting away unnecessary distractions and spending their remaining years in peace. But for those still climbing, still building, still fighting? “Let them” might not always be the right answer. Be Selective, Then Commit So where does this leave us? If we reject a total embrace of Let Them, do we go back to exhausting ourselves in battles we cannot win? Do we spend our lives trying to fix people who don’t want to be fixed? Of course not. The balance lies in discernment—in knowing when to let go and when to lean in. Not every battle is worth fighting, but some are. Not every relationship is worth saving, but some are. Not every system is worth engaging with, but some demand our full attention. The key isn’t to detach from everything but to be highly selective about where you invest your energy. And once you decide something is worth your time, you don’t go halfway—you go all in. I’ve never been one to do things halfway. I don’t believe in a life of passive observation. I believe in engagement, in purpose, in fighting for what matters. And while I agree that some things—some people—are best left to their own devices, I also know that meaningful change requires effort. If everyone simply “let them,” where would progress come from? Lead Them There’s real value in Let Them, but like all philosophies, it’s not one-size-fits-all. It works best when applied strategically—when used to free ourselves from unnecessary burdens while still engaging with the things that truly matter. For those in the final chapters of life, those who have earned the right to be selective, it may be a mantra of peace. But for those still in the fight—building, growing, leading, advocating—the call isn’t to let go entirely. The call is to choose wisely, and when the moment demands it, to step in fully. Because sometimes, the answer isn’t Let Them. Sometimes, the answer is Lead Them. View the full article

It has taken a little over five months and has been anticipated for several weeks, but it now appears increasingly likely that the bromance between Elon Musk and Donald The President is nearing its end. Musk is reportedly planning to step down from his role overseeing the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). During Tesla’s latest earnings call this week, Musk said, “my time allocation to DOGE will drop significantly” next month—though he noted that he still intends to dedicate some time to government issues going forward. The announcement came as Tesla reported surprisingly poor results, and Musk’s pivot appeared to serve as a parachute for a business in freefall. Following his remarks and amid expectations that he would now refocus on Tesla, the company’s share price rose. “This was an off-ramp for Musk out of the The President White House,” says Dan Ives, managing director and senior equity research analyst at Wedbush Securities. “The global brand damage, political firestorm, and perfect storm chaos over the past few months will now end this volatile political chapter for Musk.” What Musk’s departure means for the quasi-governmental agency he’s leaving behind remains uncertain. The President has heavily promoted the potential cost savings DOGE would deliver to U.S. taxpayers—though it’s unclear whether Musk’s actions have genuinely produced the savings touted by the administration. “If The President hasn’t got bored with DOGE, there’s still a chance that he might send a check to voters with a nominal saving,” says Bruce Daisley, a former Twitter executive. “He’s never expressed much interest in the midterms, so it’s possible this won’t be of interest by then.” Cary Cooper, professor of organizational psychology at the University of Manchester, believes The President will continue DOGE’s work by appointing another entrepreneur or business titan to lead the agency. “He’ll appoint another business guy, no question about it,” he says. Any new head of DOGE may not feel bound by Musk’s infamous ‘five things’ email, which demanded government workers justify their roles by reporting five achievements from the past week. Still, Cooper believes the mission will carry on. “It may have been Musk who led the way, but I think The President wants that to happen as well, because he perceives the civil service to be left of center,” Cooper says. DOGE remains The President’s tool for pushing that agenda. As for the businesses Musk is returning to, opinions are divided. Tesla’s reputation—and share price—have suffered amid sweeping layoffs and controversial decisions that have impacted many American families. Ives and Wedbush Securities believe Musk’s stint in government and his perceived callousness will reduce long-term demand for Tesla’s electric vehicles by as much as 10%. (Musk did not respond to Fast Company‘s request for comment.) Still, despite Tesla’s recent financial setbacks—including a near-10% drop in revenue—Ives remains optimistic about the company’s future. “This was the time to close one dark chapter and open a brighter one for the Tesla story, with autonomous and robotics front and center,” he says. Some view Musk’s exit from government and return to the private sector as a strategic move to salvage his personal brand. “His brand is damaged,” Cooper says. “He is seen as an extreme right-wing person who cares nothing except about helping the wealthy like him to survive.” While Musk may have held such views for years, it was his highly visible government role that solidified them in the public eye. Because of that, the challenges facing the entrepreneur and world’s richest man are only growing. But Musk has faced crises before—and is likely to try everything to turn things around. “Musk is almost certain to try to pull a rabbit out of a hat of merging xAI with Tesla to position Tesla as an AI business,” Daisley says. “There’s a much bigger multiple [there], and his talk of robotics gives another horizon to chase rather than the EV one that he’s currently losing ground on.” View the full article

The way mortgage firms address distressed military borrowers will become less regimented as the Veterans Affairs Servicing Purchase program gets phased out. View the full article

Senior Russian military officer assassinated as US envoy’s plane approached capital View the full article

The world of work has undergone a seismic shift, with remote collaboration no longer a niche but a mainstream reality. As global teams navigate time zone differences, communication preferences, and the inherent challenges of working at a physical distance, a powerful ally has emerged: artificial intelligence (AI). View the full article

The Requirements Traceability Matrix (RTM) “traces ” the project’s deliverables by establishing a thread for each requirement—from the project’s initiation to the final implementation. The post What is a Requirements Traceability Matrix (RTM)? appeared first on project-management.com. View the full article

The AI revolution is redefining business and tech leadership—and no one is standing more squarely on the front lines than product leaders. Once seen as a behind-the-scenes role, the CPO is now one of the most powerful voices in the executive suite. In 2020, only 4% of the Fortune 1000 had a CPO, a number that has since ballooned to almost 50%. In the next few years, we expect to see that figure grow to 70%. At Products That Count, the nonprofit for product managers I chair, we’ve spent the past year talking to almost 1,000 CPOs at companies ranging from startup unicorns to Fortune 100 giants like Salesforce, Walmart, and Microsoft. What we’ve heard is clear: The organizations that are winning with AI aren’t just using it to move faster. They’re rethinking how product is fundamentally built, who builds it—and who leads the charge. Here’s what the top product leaders are doing differently to get and stay ahead in the AI era. 1. They see AI as acceleration, not just automation While headlines focus on job replacement, leading CPOs are focused on capability expansion. They’re not asking, “How can we do the same work with fewer people?” They’re asking, “How can we build something completely new and disruptive in a fraction of the time it used to take?” One CPO at a global retailer told us that PMs using their internal generative AI platform are “almost doubling their efficiency.” These AI-powered product managers are running competitive research, generating specs, mocking up interfaces, and even writing basic code—without waiting for a 10-person engineering team to get looped in. This shift is also reshaping org charts. The once-standard 10-to-1 engineer-to-PM ratio is giving way to a new reality where PMs are full-stack strategists. AI isn’t replacing the workforce—it’s supercharging it. 2. They’re hiring business builders, not tech nerds Today’s most effective PMs aren’t former engineers. They’re high-context thinkers who know how to ask the right questions, not necessarily write the code themselves. “A computer science background was pretty important 20 years ago,” one B2B SaaS CPO told us. “Now? Only one of my PMs has one.” This new breed of generalist “Super PM” blends product instinct, customer obsession, and AI fluency. They’re cross-functional by design and comfortable leading without a road map. And they’re rising fast because they can adapt fast and they deliver business value right off the bat. 3. M&A is central to their strategy Product velocity has become the currency of innovation—and most CPOs know they can’t build everything in-house. More than 75% of the CPOs we surveyed say M&A will be a critical growth driver in the next one to three years. But unlike in the past, product leaders aren’t just involved after the deal closes—they’re often the ones scouting, evaluating, and sponsoring acquisitions. As one healthcare CPO put it, “AI and data are fast becoming the central focus. M&A will be critical to assembling that solution suite.” Another said, “As CPO, I’m the sponsor of acquisitions.” That shift—from M&A as a finance function to M&A as product acceleration—marks a massive evolution in how CPOs are expected to operate. 4. They’re obsessively focused on success metrics Revenue still matters. As Checkr CPO Ilan Frank told us, “At the end of the day, most of us are working for a for-profit company. If that’s the case, then the metric is profit. That’s what we’re here to drive.” Particularly when assessing how to implement and leverage AI, product leaders are keenly aware of the bottom line. And they know that revenue and profit are not the only numbers that tell the story. Today’s top CPOs are expanding their focus to include metrics like time-to-value, customer retention, and long-term engagement. They’re not just looking at quarterly ARR—they’re looking at how quickly customers see value, and how long they stick around once they do. That shift isn’t just philosophical. It’s structural. It encourages smaller, faster product experiments, tighter feedback loops, and stronger cross-functional alignment. As Frank put it, “NPS won’t tell me if we have the right pricing or packaging,” but time-to-value will. Defining the AI Era All told, product leaders are winning the AI era by working smarter, not harder. They’re moving fast—but not just by working more. They’re reimagining what the product function can be: a strategic growth engine, a talent magnet, and a seat at the very top of the company. They’re prioritizing adaptability over pedigree, collaboration over control, and outcomes over ownership. Rather than stripping down head counts, they’re doubling down by investing in more generalists and product professionals to keep their feet on the accelerators. They’re blending human instinct with AI horsepower—and building teams that can ship smarter, not just faster. The companies that empower this kind of leadership aren’t just navigating the AI era. They’re defining it. View the full article

Branded is a weekly column devoted to the intersection of marketing, business, design, and culture. This week Chipotle Mexican Grill announced plans to crack a market that already has plenty of Mexican-food options: Mexico. Specifically, the Colorado-founded, California-based burrito concern said it would work with Mexican firm Alsea—which operates Latin American and European locations of various chains, including Starbucks, Domino’s Pizza, and Burger King—to begin opening Chipotle restaurants in Mexico by early 2026. It’s a confident move at a time when many fast-casual chains are struggling, and businesses in general are scrambling to game the fallout from the The President administration’s ever-evolving tariff regime. On Wednesday Chipotle posted mixed results for the first quarter of 2025 that it attributed mostly to economic headwinds as consumers remain cautious about spending in the volatile trade atmosphere: Comparable-store sales are slightly down, and the revenue of $2.88 billion fell slightly short of analyst estimates. Still, the chain’s quarterly revenue was up 6.4% over last year, thanks mostly to opening new locations—and expansion abroad is one way it says it will continue that strategy. Chipotle currently has more than 3,700 locations, and while most are in the U.S., it also has a presence in Canada, the U.K., Germany, France, and the Middle East. In short, the chain clearly seems focused on international growth. Still, while plenty of U.S. restaurant brands have gone global, selling an Americanized version of local cuisines hasn’t always played out well. Domino’s Pizza spent several years trying to hook Italians on its speedily delivered pies before concluding that infiltrating one of the world’s proudest culinary cultures wasn’t going to happen. And in a more direct comparison to Chipotle’s plans, Taco Bell has made two attempts to sell an American version of Mexican food to actual Mexicans. Both fizzled. Taco Bell’s first venture into Mexico began in 1992, when it already had thousands of U.S. locations but relatively few abroad. The problems, according to a Vice timeline of the chain’s Mexican forays from 2017, included a mismatch between its menu offerings and the expectations of Mexican diners: Crisp-shelled tacos were “an anomaly” there, for instance, and had to be rebranded as “tacostadas” in an attempt to reference tostada crunch. The bigger problem may have been a lack of demand—like “bringing ice to Antarctica” as one Mexican cultural critic put it at the time. Within two years, the chain withdrew. It tried again in 2007, this time opening in a higher-end shopping mall (next to a Dairy Queen) near Monterrey and making no particular attempt to be authentic, even keeping french fries on the menu. As one Taco Bell marketing executive put it, the chain would “not pretend to be Mexican food.” It would simply be Taco Bell food, with an emphasis on value and convenience. “Foolish gringos,” one Monterrey food writer commented dismissively at the time. Taco Bell withdrew again. Chipotle hasn’t addressed this comparison directly (and declined to comment to Fast Company), but its statement about the Mexico venture alludes to an emphasis on authenticity in its appeal to the Mexican palette, promising its offerings “will resonate with guests in Mexico,” according to Nate Lawton, chief business development officer at Chipotle. “The country’s familiarity with our ingredients and affinity for fresh food make it an attractive growth market for our company.” Alsea CEO Armando Torrado added that his firm would leverage its “vast knowledge of the Mexican consumer.” Chipotle’s menu doesn’t seem to have tacostada-level issues, but some Mexican-food experts have questioned the chain’s authenticity in the past, complaining that its burritos are a mass-market take on the form, emphasizing heft over variety. And its current hit offering, a honey chicken burrito, sounds suspiciously tailored to American palettes. Still, it’s worth acknowledging that, Mexico aside, Taco Bell today has more than 8,000 locations around the world, including hundreds in Central and South America. And U.S. chains have of course spread across the planet, sometimes adjusting their menus market by market (McDonald’s famously tweaks its menu in different markets to add local flavor, like teriyaki chicken sandwiches in Japan and a dosa masala burger in India). Chipotle has reportedly worked for years to diversify its ingredient and farming supply chain across the Caribbean and Latin America as well as the U.S., but still sources roughly half its avocados from Mexico, making them tariff vulnerable. Given how unpredictable global trade rules are becoming, and Chipotle’s stated growth goals and strategy, it makes sense that the chain would try to diversify its customer base beyond the United States. What’s less certain is whether Mexican diners are looking to add Chipotle’s burritos to their diet. View the full article

Leaders of today’s workplace recognize coaching as a core leadership skill. More and more companies are expecting managers to actively develop their employees and support their growth through regular development conversations. For leaders who embrace this responsibility, coaching can be incredibly rewarding. But it’s not always clear how to do it well. Most managers feel comfortable helping employees build technical skills or prepare them for their next role. But when it comes to coaching social and emotional skills, leadership qualities, or behavioral changes, many leaders get stuck. Because the path to success is less clear-cut, more complex, and requires sustained effort over time. How to coach for behavioral change As companies increasingly expect managers to step up as coaches, we’re seeing more and more resources that help leaders build their coaching skills. Doing that requires leaders to learn how to build trust, ask open-ended questions, actively listen, and provide constructive feedback. Frameworks like the GROW model provide a structured approach to coaching conversations. But when it comes to coaching employees on behavioral changes and social-emotional skills, many managers hit a wall. Traditional coaching methods don’t always work. That’s where an evidence-based framework—originally used by executive coaches—can help. The Development Pipeline The Development Pipeline, created by David Peterson and Mary Dee Hicks, breaks down the often complex process of personal growth into five essential conditions for lasting development. It’s a game-changer for managers because it helps them diagnose and address where employees might be stuck in their development process. This method relies on five key elements to facilitate behavioral development: Insight, Motivation, Capability, Practice, and Accountability. Think of them as interconnected pipelines—each one needs to stay open and balanced for growth to happen. If one element is blocked, progress can stall. As a manager, keeping these five conditions in mind will help you guide your direct reports through meaningful conversations. Here’s how you can help facilitate the presence of these conditions in your regular coaching chats as part of your one-on-ones 1. Insight: Do they understand what to develop and why it matters? Development starts with awareness. Employees must recognize the gap between their current behaviors and desired outcomes. Sabina, a Customer Success Director, wanted to help one of her team members exude more confidence in high-stakes meetings. In their one-on-one, Sabina highlighted specific moments where this happened and discussed the impact. This helped her direct report see why building confidence was crucial—not just for herself, but not to undermine her credibility and influence. They made it a specific development goal. 2. Motivation: Are they motivated and committed to making a change? Even with insight, change won’t happen without motivation. Employees need to see personal value in their development goals. One way to gauge motivation is to ask, “On a scale from 1 to 10, how motivated do you feel to work on this?”. Pay attention to verbal and nonverbal responses to gain a greater understanding of how motivated your employee feels to put in the time and effort it takes to change. The key is ensuring the goal aligns with what matters most to them. That means their values, career aspirations, and measurement of success in their role. 3. Capability: Do they know how to improve? Employees need clear, practical ways to develop a skill or shift a behavior. Without knowing how to improve, insight and motivation alone won’t lead to progress. Naomi, a Product VP, needed to coach an employee on receiving feedback without shutting down. The employee wanted to handle feedback more gracefully but didn’t know where to start. Together, they broke down the goal into small actionable steps: proactively asking for feedback, deeply breathing while listening, taking notes, visualizing feedback landing in front of her, and looking at it more neutrally from a distance. Doing this allowed the employee to move from awareness to action. 4. Practice: Are they actively experimenting and refining? New behaviors require practice and repetition. Employees need opportunities to test, tweak, and refine their skills in real situations. Michael, an Engineering VP, wanted to support his direct report in being more positive and encouraging in team discussions. So they worked on being more positive in meetings. First, he focused on recognizing team contributions. Later, he practiced framing ideas more constructively—acknowledging a colleague’s perspective before sharing his own. Over time, this intentional practice made positivity more of a habit. 5. Accountability: Are they following through? Progress stalls without follow-ups. You need to conduct regular check-ins to keep the momentum going. Simple questions like “How is it going with [goal]? What’s getting easier? What’s still challenging? What do you want to focus on next?” help reinforce commitment. The importance of keeping development on track At any given time, your employee may be stuck in different parts of their development. As their manager, your job is to identify the bottleneck and provide specific support. Are they lacking insight? Do they need a clearer action plan? Do they require more practice opportunities? By focusing your coaching conversations on the specific condition that needs reinforcement, you can help them sustain progress. You don’t need to know this ahead of your conversation, but you can explore this together by asking open-ended questions and fully listening to what emerges. Remember, meaningful development doesn’t happen overnight. It requires your support along the way. Regular, short coaching conversations—rooted in curiosity and attentive presence—can make a significant impact over time. View the full article

Last week, scientists from the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Washington shocked the internet by announcing they’ve discovered a new color that can be experienced only when firing a laser into your retinas. Only five people have seen this color, a blue-green shade called “olo.” But over the weekend, artist-provocateur Stuart Semple decided to widen the pool by synthesizing olo into an acrylic paint color he named Yolo. Ironically, Yolo is a color you cannot see—at least not accurately—unless you buy a bottle of the acrylic paint and see it with your own eyes. A 150-milliliter bottle costs $10,000 ($35 if you’re an artist) and is decidedly more accessible than olo. But can it ever be the same? Liberating color This isn’t Semple’s first foray into the superlative world of colors. Over the past few years (fueled by various feuds with the artist Anish Kapoor) Semple has created the world’s pinkest pink, followed by the world’s blackest black. In 2021, he hacked Tiffany’s trademarked blue and made his own version, Tiff Blue, which everyone could buy. A self-described color nerd, Semple has been on a mission to “liberate” color, as he puts it. If olo really is a new color—a claim that’s been contested—he believes more than five people should be able to experience it. “Can’t everyone have a go?” Apparently, they’d like to. “Within minutes, my DMs were crazy,” he says of the requests that poured in from artists and friends alike. Semple spent all night developing Yolo and put it up on his website on Saturday. “My sister messaged me about it the following day, and I was like, ‘already done it,’” he says with a laugh. Within 48 hours of launching Yolo, Semple had sold close to 500 bottles. From lasers to pigments The human eye can perceive about 10 million colors known as the visible light spectrum. We see these colors thanks to three kinds of cone cells in our retinas that respond to three specific bands of light: long (red), medium (green), and short (blue). But we don’t just see the world in RGB. Our brains blend signals from these cones to fill in the gaps, conjuring colors like oranges, teals, and purples. To re-create olo, Stuart pored over the recent study, which was published in the scientific journal Science Advances, and pulled the color’s chromatic coordinates. These told him where on the visible light spectrum his own color should sit. Then, he set out on a surprisingly low-tech journey of mixing bases and pigments until he landed on the right formula. “It’s like baking a cake and tasting it,” he says, except instead of his taste buds, he used a spectrometer to see how close each swatch came to olo’s coordinates. But Semple didn’t focus only on pigments—he also looked at texture. In the world of paint, a glossy finish reflects more light than a matte finish, which scatters light in all directions. If you shine a light on a smooth snooker ball, it will bounce off a very small point; but if you shine that same light on a fuzzy tennis ball, the light will get diffused, flattened. Semple’s Black 3.0 paint—the blackest, flattest acrylic paint available on the planet—absorbs 99% of all the visible spectrum. Yolo does the opposite. It reflects 96% of light, but only in the narrow green-blue slice of the spectrum. The other wavelengths are absorbed by the paint. “That’s why it looks like it’s glowing,” Semple says. You have to see it to believe it The color you see on this screen comes close, but you can’t fully experience it here, or even in a book, because neither can reproduce the exact wavelength the paint captures: Screens use red, green, and blue pixels; printers use cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. To truly experience Yolo, you have to see it in person, which suits Semple just fine: “I make things for people with eyes, not computers,” he says. Still, the artist claims Yolo is the closest we can get to olo without having a laser fired into our eyeballs. He acknowledges that the litmus test would be to show Yolo to one of those five people, but the scientists did not respond to our requests for comment. If a screen can’t fully capture Yolo, then what kind of color can we expect? Over the course of a 30-minute phone call, Semple used the word weird four times until, finally, he landed on “a weird luminous teal.” View the full article

On Main Street in the village of Freeville, New York, on a 2.8-acre lot where a dilapidated single-family house once stood, there are now a dozen tiny storybook-like cottages surrounded by the property’s pine trees. The development, completed last year, is helping bring new life to the village. It’s one example of what’s possible when towns don’t have overly restrictive zoning. It’s charming. The design encourages neighbors to know one other. And it offers housing for far more people on the same amount of land. The project is the third tiny house village in the region from a local developer, Bruno Schickel. His career started as a typical general contractor—he built and renovated single-family homes. But in the late 1990s, while reading a children’s book to his daughters, he was inspired by an illustration of a Gothic cottage in Maine. “I said, ‘You know, I gotta design something that looks like this,’” he says. “And so that’s what I set out to do.” 140 fairy-tale cottages on 40 acres Schickel owned a large property in a rural area nearby that had been part of a farm. One winter 29 years ago, when regular work slowed down, he asked his crew to build three rental cottages on the site, each with the same gingerbread design as the house in the children’s book. People loved them, so he built another three the next winter. The cottages range in size from 540 square feet to 1,100 square feet, but even the smallest units have a second-story loft for a bedroom and feel relatively spacious. There are now 140 of the homes, called Boiceville Cottages, on the 40-acre site. “The more I built, the better people liked them,” he says. “It was an interesting dynamic, because originally people were drawn to the fairy-tale cottage. And then people started being drawn to the community that was created.” A sense of community When I visited on a recent spring day, a group of neighbors was sitting at a picnic table next to the community’s meeting house while children played on a playground. While I was talking to a retired woman, teenagers playing basketball called out a greeting to her. Everyone seemed to know one another. “I lived in a suburb of Chicago for 45 years,” one resident, Christine Uliassi, told me. “My husband and I raised our kids there. But I know my neighbors here much better than I knew my neighbors there.” The cottages in the development are clustered in groups of three, each carefully angled so that when someone looks out their own window, there’s still a sense of privacy. But they’re so close together that people continually run into each other. At the meeting house, neighbors pick up their mail, use the on-site gym, and gather for book clubs and other events. The road between the cottages winds around curves, so people drive slowly, and it feels safe to walk. Despite the rural location, there’s also a bus stop at the property, so it’s technically possible to live there without a car. The development doesn’t have the density of a large apartment complex. But the specific layout—and the bucolic country setting, which draws people outside—makes it more likely that neighbors become close. ‘Zoning chokes off innovation’ In many places, it would be impossible to build. “The one reason why I ended up building there was because there was no zoning in Caroline [the rural town where the site is located],” says Schickel. “I am a guy who thinks zoning, by design, just chokes off innovation, creativity. It creates uniformity. If you go to existing cities or towns or villages around the country and you say, ‘Oh, look at this, this is great,’ I can almost guarantee you their zoning would not allow that to be built today.” It also wouldn’t be possible in Caroline now. Last year, after a bitter fight, the town passed a zoning law that required large lots for any new home. Longtime rural residents opposed the law; wealthier transplants to the area tended to support it. “People said, ‘We love Boiceville. We want to make sure Boiceville can be built.’ But the fact is that they don’t,” Schickel says. “The result will be that they’ve preserved it for large suburban housing.” In Freeville, a zoning ordinance existed, but was flexible enough that it allowed for the conversion of the single-family lot. Neighbors were happy to see the former rundown house replaced, Schickel says, even if they were initially taken aback to learn that they’d suddenly be living next to 12 tiny houses. (The Freeville houses, in a departure from the original gingerbread design, are inspired by old railway stations and Freeville’s rail history.) In a third location nearby, where Schickel built 60 tiny cottages on a hillside overlooking a lake, the community passed a zoning law after the project happened. “There’s a complete discrimination against rentals,” he says. “And there’s a discrimination against small [houses].” Tiny house villages can help struggling communities—and the housing crisis In the rural areas where Schickel built, the neighborhoods can help struggling economies. Caroline would have lost population without Boiceville Cottages; a popular local store, Brookton’s Market, probably couldn’t survive without it. And the approach can add more housing as rents continue to rise. (To be fair, the cuteness of the cottages means that Schickel can charge a premium for rent, but as in any housing market, adding supply helps moderate prices.) It’s a model that Schickel says others want to replicate in other parts of the country. He continually fields calls from potential developers and city officials. “I just heard from a senior planner on Long Island,” he says. “He called me up and said, ‘How can we do something like that down here?’ I said, ‘I can tell you right now, your biggest problem is zoning.’” View the full article

People are often under the false impression that making their language complex or using jargon enhances their credibility. That might be true in certain circumstances. If you’re an academic talking to other academics or a software engineer talking to other software engineers, using jargon makes sense. However, if you‘re talking to people outside of your field of expertise, it can alienate them. And when you alienate someone, it can cause them to switch off. It also reduces the likelihood that they take away anything useful or do what you’d like them to do. That’s probably the last thing you want to happen when communicating with someone. So if you’re prone to using jargon, you might want to consider taking the time to figure out how to communicate in simpler language. Why people use complex language Many people often use complex language because they’re insecure. When a person ties a big part of their identity to academic prowess, but they don’t feel particularly successful, they can use complexity to serve as a “security blanket” that hides them. It’s a way of making people perceive them as clever, or even obfuscate the truth. After all, it’s a lot harder to question or challenge something that your conversation partner doesn’t understand. Secondly, many gifted executives simply lack social awareness. Unfortunately, many leaders don’t give emotional intelligence the same weight they assign to developing technical expertise when climbing the corporate ladder. Quite simply, that means that there’s a disconnect between what you find meaningful and important as the communicator, and what your audience finds meaningful. And when you choose to ignore the audience’s perspective in your communication, issues arise. If you want the audience to listen to what you have to say, you need to consider how your audience would prefer to consume the information. Once you have that information, you can present the information in a way that will engage them and make them more likely to listen to you. The best communicators communicate simply I’ve heard the argument before that history, physics, software engineering, and so on, are too complex to explain in a nontechnical way. I disagree. It is always possible distill complex subject matter down to simple language for a nontechnical audience. My argument is to look at Professor Brian Cox, who is a professor of particle physics at the University of Manchester. Few subjects are as complex as astrophysics. Yet Professor Cox explained it so well and so simply that he filled auditoriums on a Friday night with people wanting to learn about physics. If he can do it, anyone can do it. It simply comes down to whether you’re prepared to put in the effort to learn the art of simple communication. The “acid test” for simple communication I often use this question with my clients: “Would a 10-year-old child understand what you just said?” If the answer to that question is no, then, I encourage my clients to go back to basics. In the same way that children’s stories often contain an underlying message, you can use analogies and stories to engage your audience, evoke emotion, and simplify complex topics. Understanding what matters to your audience If you’re trying to convince people to take a specific course of action, it will benefit you to walk people through it in a clear, step-by-step way. To do that well, you need to get into the mind of the audience and use the language that they use, not the language that you are comfortable with. Whether you are talking to the board or trying to convince a customer to buy—you need to understand the factors that will convince them. Make sure to find out what’s important to them and structure your communication around those key things. Being a successful executive shouldn’t be about being the smartest-sounding person in a room. Rather, it’s about being able to persuade and influence others to buy in and work towards your vision. No amount of jargon is going to do that, but distilling complex concepts down in a way that your employees understand can go a long way. View the full article

Less than a year after announcing plans to establish a hydrogen-based aviation fuel hub at Pittsburgh International Airport, Pennsylvania-based natural gas producer CNX has quietly taken down the website on which it advertised the hub. The move comes as the fate of the much-vaunted hydrogen industry—seen by the Biden administration as a way to power America while reducing climate-altering emissions—is in upheaval. While a Biden-era rule dealt a blow to those in the gas and oil industry hoping to invest in hydrogen technology and offered greater financial incentives to the renewable energy sector, President Donald The President is showing preference for fossil fuel-powered hydrogen. Meanwhile, the fate of those Biden-era tax credits—whether for renewable energy or fossil fuel—is up in the air as Congress wades through the budget reconciliation process. Under The President’s guidance, the Department of Energy has indicated it plans to kill Biden-era funding for four renewable-powered hydrogen hubs in primarily Democratic regions while retaining funds for fossil fuel-powered hubs in mostly red states, such as South Dakota, Ohio, and Kentucky. California, along with Oregon, Washington and other regions, are on the Department of Energy’s “cut” list, according to Politico, which said it obtained a spreadsheet of the projects. If the recommendations are ultimately adopted by the The President administration, Pennsylvania would very much become a state divided. While a proposed hub in the Appalachian region that would run on fossil fuels is marked for approval, a hub mostly reliant on renewable energy near Philadelphia is marked for denial. The seven Regional Clean Hydrogen Hubs were a main plank of former President Joe Biden’s climate agenda, a $7 billion effort to establish a national network of hydrogen producers to slow the use of the fossil fuels largely blamed for global warming. But with four of the hubs eliminated, the envisioned national hydrogen grid would become a patchwork, seemingly drawn along political lines and primarily powered by polluting sources of energy. “The hydrogen hubs program was intended to spur innovations and demonstrations on how best to advance hydrogen as a tool in the clean energy economy,” said Julie McNamara, associate policy director for the Climate & Energy program at the nonprofit Union of Concerned Scientists. “Blatantly co-opting these funds for use as handouts to political supporters and favored polluters would be shameful, and fully undermine the program’s ability to achieve those aims.” While the Pennsylvania hub fueled by natural gas would use methane to provide energy for the production of so-called blue hydrogen, the other hub would use renewable energy such as wind and solar to produce what’s known as green hydrogen. By itself, the burning of hydrogen doesn’t produce carbon dioxide emissions. CNX was originally involved in the former hub, known as ARCH2, but told the Pittsburgh Business Times in March that it had paused involvement in the project because of the uncertainty surrounding federal funding. CNX’s name was also deleted from the ARCH2 website. CNX did not respond to requests for comment on the status of the hydrogen hub and the sustainable aviation fuel site in Pittsburgh. A spokesperson for the airport said it “is continuing to move forward with its plans to become one of the first airports to have sustainable fuel production on-site.” CNX was initially one of 15 companies enlisted in the hub, with plans to contribute “low carbon” natural gas to power hydrogen production, which entails using steam to draw off the hydrogen atoms from methane molecules, an expensive and energy intensive process. But the company’s evolving relationship with the hydrogen industry appears to have soured when the Biden administration finalized a long-awaited federal rule on a tax credit for hydrogen production called 45V. That final rule, CNX argued, was “overly restrictive,” and failed “to create sufficient economic incentives” for the company to expand its production of methane released from abandoned coal mines, which it said was key to the growing hydrogen economy. CNX pitched its involvement in the Sustainable Aviation Fuel project in Pittsburgh as being dependent upon the outcome of the 45V rule. “We saw the fossil fuel industry view 45V as a lucrative chance for profit,” McNamara said. “Not by truly reducing emissions, but by introducing loopholes that made it easier to qualify.” CNX had previously lobbied for the intricacies of 45V to work out in its favor. A little more than a year ago, a CNX lobbyist pushed Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro’s office to lobby the federal government to ensure the Treasury Department’s hydrogen rule was lucrative for coal mine methane—a request to which the Shapiro administration agreed, Capital & Main reported at the time. The value the rule gave to coal mine-derived natural gas came down to a series of arcane specifics in a formula that measures life-cycle emissions from beginning to end of the creation of a single kilogram of hydrogen. CNX urged the Treasury Department to treat coal mine methane as carbon-negative with the assumption that it would otherwise leak into the atmosphere from inactive coal mines, releasing a more potent greenhouse gas than if it were captured and burned, which would release carbon dioxide. (Both are greenhouse gases, but methane is well understood to be around 80 times more potent in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide over a 20-year timeframe.) By ascribing to this captured methane a negative value, a tiny portion of it could be blended into a natural gas hydrogen feedstock and qualify for the highest tier of the 45V tax incentive, the same level as hydrogen produced with renewable energy. But the final rule went against the pleas of CNX and companies like it, including the ARCH2 hub itself, which urged the Treasury Department to pass a methane-friendly rule in 2024, arguing it could “lead to a loss of $6 billion in private investments” otherwise and have “far-reaching consequences” for the hydrogen industry. “It’s like the Treasury Department went out of its way to say, ‘We hear what you’re saying. And the answer is no,’” said Sean O’Leary, senior researcher at the nonprofit think tank Ohio River Valley Institute. The ruling was seen as a win for environmentalists, who urged the Treasury Department to ensure that any projects receiving subsidies under the guise of being “clean” were in fact clean. They feared CNX’s proposal, and that of other fossil fuel producers, would’ve given natural-gas based hydrogen a tax boost equal to that for renewable, emissions-free sources of hydrogen. How and whether the rule will be upheld by the The President administration—which has shown strong support for fossil fuels and a general disdain for renewable energy—remains an open question, and one of concern to environmentalists. According to Bloomberg, the American Petroleum Institute, a national oil and gas trade group, has lobbied the White House to ensure fossil fuels can qualify for the highest tier of the hydrogen tax credit. O’Leary sees CNX’s apparent exit from ARCH2 as a sign of the hub’s strained economics. In October, O’Leary authored a paper in which he noted that the hub had lost four of its development partners, while a handful of others were showing signs of financial stress. “This is not a resume that inspires confidence among prospective investors,” O’Leary wrote. CNX’s reluctance to move forward signals a broader trend within the industry, O’Leary said in an interview with Capital & Main. “The wheels are coming off,” O’Leary said. “Even after subsidies are taken into account, the economics still aren’t there to make many of these projects work.” Another project development partner for ARCH2, KeyState Energy, is also showing signs of uncertainty. In February, a primary customer for its blue hydrogen, Nikola Corporation, a transportation company that had planned to use the hydrogen for a zero-emission truck fleet, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The company plans to sell its assets. KeyState CEO Perry Babb told Capital & Main the company had pivoted from its energy production project with Nikola to a new ammonia fertilizer project that has a committed customer, and will still rely on hydrogen and receive funds from ARCH2. The first payment from the hubs program has been doled out and KeyState will invoice for reimbursement soon, he said. Babb said he still meets regularly with the remaining ARCH2 project partners, who are “all positive in expressing a way forward.” But he noted that, for years, he’s weathered regulatory uncertainty; the final 45V rule was the nail in the coffin for Keystate’s original plans to produce blue hydrogen under ARCH2. He said the company has also put its participation in the Pittsburgh Sustainable Aviation Fuel hub “on pause.” “Last May, I began to notice dozens of hydrogen projects being canceled,” he said. “I had thought that it was essentially because the business case wasn’t sound. “With the continued uncertainty around tax credits through the end of the Biden administration . . . we said, ‘That’s it. We’re done. We’re going to go where there’s a market that’s predictable.’” While failing to find a partner in the Biden-era Treasury Department, CNX could soon turn to the state, where Gov. Shapiro is reupping a $49 million tax credit for hydrogen production as part of his “Lightning Plan,” a six-pronged portfolio of legislation designed to speed up the commonwealth’s clean energy economy. Though supported by some state environmental groups, the plan caught the ire of others, like Karen Feridun, cofounder of the grassroots Better Path Coalition, who said in a statement that the Lightning Plan would “continue and even expand fossil fuel production.” On March 11, a group of Democratic senators and representatives introduced 12 cosponsorship memos, six in each chamber, carrying out Shapiro’s plan. “He’s going to do whatever he needs to do to try to keep [hydrogen] going,” Feridun said of Shapiro in an interview with Capital & Main. “It’s a nice way to kind of provide cover for having a continued fossil fuel plan,” one that “sounds really good to voters.” Should ARCH2 unravel, Feridun fears grassroots environmentalists would be tasked with tracking individual projects, without the cohesion of a hub offering guidance. Even so, she said there never was “a clear map that defined what the footprint of all of this was,” which left frontline communities in the dark. Like O’Leary, Danny Cullenward, senior fellow at the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy at the University of Pennsylvania, said he now sees the hydrogen “hype” bubble beginning to burst. Though he believes hydrogen has an important, if niche, place in the clean energy transition, its economics don’t make sense in all uses unless heavily subsidized. “We basically set up a structure that said, at the end of this rainbow is a giant pot of gold. And everybody said, ‘We’d all like to do that. That all sounds great to us,’” he said. “I think now the cold, hard reality of, ‘Does hydrogen make sense? And in what applications would it make sense?’ is becoming a little bit more real.” The whiplash of all this impacts Pennsylvania communities, many that are former oil, gas, and coal towns learning that major projects they’d once planned for are no longer. “It’s immensely damaging,” O’Leary said. “State or even county and municipal level governments, they’re making economic development choices based on these expectations.” “The distraction impact of what’s going on is just staggering.” This piece was originally published by Capital & Main, which reports from California on economic, political, and social issues. View the full article

To help a North Carolina community recovering from Tropical Storm Helene, a tulip farm in the Netherlands gave the gift of flowers. Dutch Grown runs a tulip farm in Voorhout, South Holland, and a warehouse in West Chester, Pennsylvania, where it ships out its flower bulbs to customers across the U.S. After Helene devastated western North Carolina last September, Marco Rosenbruck, a Dutch immigrant who moved to the region, reached out to the company with photos of the devastation asking for a few boxes of bulbs. Dutch Grown ended up sending 31 boxes filled with 10,000 bulbs for tulips, daffodils, and peonies. “At Dutch Grown, our motto is: ‘To plant a garden is to believe in tomorrow.’ When tulips bloom in spring, they bring hope and joy to the entire community. Dutch Grown co-owner Ben Rotteveel tells Fast Company. The company’s generosity has now helped Rosenbruck’s new home of Swannanoa, North Carolina, beautify a local park. Rozenbroek engaged the help of a local student for some landscape design to plant the bulbs, and they’re expected to bloom for the first time this spring. “Flowers give hope,” Rozenbroek told Blue Ridge Public Radio. North Carolina officials estimate Helene did $59.6 billion worth of damage in the state, and Swannanoa, a community of more than 5,000 people about a hour north of the South Carolina border, was especially devastated. The storm took out a bridge and damaged homes, but in the aftermath of the storm, Grovemont Park, where the flowers were planted, became a hub for the community where meals were distributed. Gardening can have unexpected benefits for communities recovering from disasters. Research into community gardens in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and New York City after Hurricane Sandy found these spaces help build resilience because they empowered residents and helped connect them with each other, strengthening the social bonds needed to rebuild together. Grovemont Park has already done that for Swannanoa, and now the flowers will serve as a reminder. Landscape design can make our public areas more welcoming. By beautifying and intentionally designing outdoor spaces that people are meant to spend time in and enjoy, landscape design gives a physical dimension to community. Through this massive planting endeavor in North Carolina, Rozenbroek created an inviting, functional, and visually harmonious space as the community continues to rebuild from Helene. “After the storm, we figured out that community is the basics of everything,” says Rozenbroek. “People are willing to help each other and to make beauty. Isn’t that where humanity is meant to be?” Tulips don’t help build bridges or homes, but that doesn’t mean Dutch Grown’s gift won’t have an impact. The tulip garden shows the practical benefits of beautification; creating a relatively low-lift project that allows those recovering from disaster to grow closer and rebuild together; and allowing community members to rest their eyes on the perennial joys and habits of spring. View the full article