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The Senate budget billalso called the reconciliation bill, or Trumps One Beautiful Bill Act is making headlines for its drastic cuts to Medicaid, its rollback of clean energy tax credits, and the fact that it would raise the debt ceiling by $5 trillion. Its also threatening to take away millions of acres of public land. Nearly 150 groups, including the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Center for Biological Diversity, and local organizations like Alaska Wilderness League and New Mexico Wild, have urged Senate members to reconsider this unprecedented sell-off of public lands. The Senate budget bill would be a fire sale of Americas public lands and waters, Bobby McEnaney, director of land conservation at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said in a statement. The bill would force the sale of between 2 million and 3 million acres of public lands from the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management, acres that span 11 Western states. (The state of Connecticut is about 3.1 million acres, for comparison). [Screenshot: The Wilderness Society] The bill also makes even more public land eligible for salemore than 250 million acres, including hiking trails, ski resorts, wilderness study areas, national monuments, and critical wildlife migration corridors. New areas would also be opened for oil leasing and offshore drilling under the bill, including in the Gulf of Alaska. If passed, the bill would likely be largest single sale of national public lands in modern history, according to the Wilderness Society. Its a move Senate Republicans are making, multiple groups note, in order to pay for billionaire tax breaks. The bill trades ordinary Americans access to outdoor recreation for a short-term payoff that disproportionately benefits the privileged and well-connected, the Wilderness Society says. Senator Mike Lee, a Republican from Utah and chairman of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, has also said the bill would create opportunities for housing. But nature organizations say it would do no such thingand that it would bring more harm to the public. There is no provision to prevent lands sold under Lees bill from being developed into high-end vacation homes, Airbnbs, or luxury housing projects, the letter signed by dozens of organizations reads. Selling these lands, they add, threatens public access, undermines responsible land management, puts environmental values, cultural resources, and endangered species at risk along with clean drinking water for 60 million Americans and betrays the publics trust. That 250 million acres of public lands are at risk can be hard to visualize. The Wilderness Society made an interactive map, showing both the Bureau of Land Management and U.S. Forest Service lands the bill makes eligible for sale. The map illustrates how those 250 million acres span 119 congressional districts, reaching all the way from Alaska down through the Western United States, and over past the Rocky Mountains. This bill would lead to a wave of irreversible extraction that will rob future generations of public access to lands and waters that belong to all of usjust to bankroll tax cuts for the superrich, McEnaney said in his statement. As currently proposed, Americans will soon lose permanent access to the public lands close to home, their favorite trails, their parks, and their favorite recreation areas. Once these lands are sold, and the no trespassing signs go up, there will be no going back.
Category:
E-Commerce
Imagine you owned a bookstore. Most of your revenue depends on customers coming in and buying books, so you set up different aspects of the business around that activity. You might put low-cost “impulse buy” items near the checkout or start selling coffee as a convenience. You might even partner with publishers to put displays of popular bestsellers in high-visibility locations in the story to drive sales. Now imagine one day a robot comes in to buy books on behalf of someone. It ignores the displays, the coffee kiosk, and the tchotchkes near the till. It just grabs the book the person ordered, pays for it, and walks out. The next day 4 robots come in, then 12 the day after that. Soon, robots are outnumbering humans in your store, which are dwindling by the day. You soon see very few sales from nonbook items, publishers stop bothering with those displays, and the coffee goes cold. Revenue plummets. In response, you might start charging robots a fee to enter your store, and if they don’t pay it, you deny them entry. But then one day a robot that looks just like a human comes into the point that you can’t tell the difference. What do you do then? {"blockType":"creator-network-promo","data":{"mediaUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/03\/mediacopilot-logo-ss.png","headline":"Media CoPilot","description":"Want more about how AI is changing media? Never miss an update from Pete Pachal by signing up for Media CoPilot. To learn more visit mediacopilot.substack.com","substackDomain":"https:\/\/mediacopilot.substack.com\/","colorTheme":"blue","redirectUrl":""}} This analogy is basically what the publishing world is going through right now, with bot traffic to media websites skyrocketing over the past three months. That’s according to new data from TollBit, which recently published its State of the Bots report for the first quarter of 2025. Even more concerning, however, is that the most popular AI search engines are choosing to ignore long-respected standards for blocking bots, in some cases arguing that when a search “agent” acts on behalf of an individual user, the bot should be treated as human. The robot revolution TollBit’s report paints a fast-changing picture of what’s happening with AI search. Over the past several months, AI companies have either introduced search abilities or greatly increased their search activity. Bot scraping focused on retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), which is distinct from training data, increased 49% over the previous quarters. Anthropic’s Claude notably introduced search, and in the same period ChatGPT (the world’s most popular chatbot by far) had a spike in users, plus deep research tools from all the major providers began to take hold. At the same time, publishers increased their defenses. The report reveals that media websites in January were using various methods to block AI bots four times as much as they were doing in a year before. The first line of defense is to adjust their website’s robots.txt file, which tells which specific bots are welcome and which ones are forbidden from accessing the content. The thing is, adhering to robots.txt is ultimately an honor system and not really enforceable. And the report indicates more AI companies are treating it as such: Among sites in TollBit’s network, bot scrapes that ignore robots.txt increased from 3.3% to 12.9% in just one quarter. Part of that increase is due to a relatively new stance the AI companies have taken, and it’s subtle but important. Broadly speaking, there are three different kinds of bots that scrape or crawl content: Training bots: These are bots that crawl the internet to scrape content to provide training data for AI models. Search indexing bots: Bots that go out and crawl the web to ensure the model has fast access to important information outside its training set (which is usually out of date). This is a form of RAG. User agent bots: Also a form of RAG, these are crawlers that go out to the web in real time to find information directly in response to a user query, regardless of whether the content it finds has been previously indexed. Because No. 3 is an agent acting on behalf of a human, AI companies argue that it’s an extension of that user behavior and have essentially given themselves permission to ignore robots.txt settings for that use case. This isn’t guessworkGoogle, Meta, and Perplexity have made it explicit in their developer notes. This is how you get human-looking robots in the bookstore. When humans go to websites, they see ads. Humans can be intrigued or enticed by other content, such as a link to a podcast about the same topic as an article they’re reading. Humans can decide whether or not to pay for a subscription. Humans sometimes choose to make a transaction based on the information in front of them. Bots don’t really do any of that (not yet, anyway). Large parts of the internet economy depend on human attention to websites, but as the report shows, that behavior drops off massively when someone uses AI to search the webAI search engines provide very little in the way of referral traffic compared to traditional search. This of course is what’s behind many of the lawsuits now in play between media companies and AI companies. How that is resolved in the legal realm is still TBD, but in the meantime, some media sites are choosing to block botsor at least are attempting tofrom accessing their content at all. For user agent bots, however, that ability has been taken away. The AI companies have always seen data harvesting in the way that’s most favorable to their insatiable demand for it, famously claiming that data only needs to be “publicly available” to qualify as training data. Even when they claim to respect robots.txt for their search engines, it’s an open secret that they sometimes use third-party scrapers to bypass it. Unmasking the bots So apart from suing and hoping for the best, how can publishers regain some, well, agency in the emerging world of agent traffic? If you believe AI substitution threatens your growth, there are additional defenses to consider. Hard paywalls are easier to defend, both technically and legally, and there are several companies (including TollBit, but there are others, such as ScalePost) that specialize in redirecting bot traffic to paywalled endpoints specifically for bots. If the robot dosn’t pay, it’s denied the content, at least in theory. Collective action is another possibility. I doubt publishers would launch a class action around this specific relabeling of user agents, but it does provide more ammunition in broader copyright lawsuits. Besides going to court, industry associations could come out against the move. The News/Media Alliance in particular has been very vocal about AI companies’ alleged transgressions of copyright. The idea of treating agentic activity as the equivalent of human activity has consequences that go beyond the media. Any content or tool that’s been traditionally available for free will need to reevaluate that access now that robots are destined to be a growing part of the mix. If there was any doubt that simply updating robots.txt instructions was adequate, the TollBit report blew it out of the water. The stance that “AI is just doing what humans do” is often used as a defense for when AI systems ingest large amounts of information and then produce new content based on it. Now the makers of those systems are quietly extending that idea, allowing their agents to effectively impersonate humans while shopping the web for data. Until it’s clear how to build profitable stores for robots, there should be a way to force their masks off. {"blockType":"creator-network-promo","data":{"mediaUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/03\/mediacopilot-logo-ss.png","headline":"Media CoPilot","description":"Want more about how AI is changing media? Never miss an update from Pete Pachal by signing up for Media CoPilot. To learn more visit mediacopilot.substack.com","substackDomain":"https:\/\/mediacopilot.substack.com\/","colorTheme":"blue","redirectUrl":""}}
Category:
E-Commerce
When youre job-hunting for the first time, that old adagewho you know matters more than what you knowcan seem daunting. In my two decades of helping new professionals access their desired industries, Ive learned that creating meaningful networks can start from scratchbut conventional networking advice doesnt always hold up. Instead, you need to emphasize your value. Heres how to tackle it. 1. Launch an Outreach Campaign: The 100-Connection Method The most successful networking strategy I have observed requires a deliberate approach to building professional relationships. Develop a list of future workplaces within your industry, then aim to reach out to 100 of their professionals. How to execute this: Use LinkedIn, company websites, and industry publications to find professionals who work at your target organizations. Build a system with a spreadsheet to handle your outreach efforts over a period of 36 months. Develop specific connection requests that show your serious interest in their professional development, with personal messages via email or LinkedIn. Dont request employment opportunities; rather, ask to hear about their professional path. The majority of experts are willingand even eagerto discuss their careers with young professionals who make thoughtful approaches to them. When your outreach is authentic and specific, Ive seen a positive response rate of up to 40%. Once you start, make it scalable: Aim for 23 new connections per week. 2. Offer Value Before Seeking It Young professionals fail to understand that networking requires them to provide value first before expecting anything back. Heres how to do it. Offer industry trends to relevant professional networks during face-to-face interactions. Connect professionals to contacts in your existing network, regardless of their network size. Write blog posts, LinkedIn articles, or research summaries that demonstrate your understanding of the industry. People naturally feel compelled to give back to you when you help them. When youre reaching out to 100 people, that multiples. 3. Use Technology to Remove Traditional Barriers Modern technology has made networking more accessible to all people than ever before. Use these tools strategically: Virtual meeting platforms: Geographic limitations no longer exist. Through video calls you can establish business relationships with leaders from across the country (or beyond). AI-powered research tools: The combination of LinkedIn Sales Navigator and company websites and industry databases helps you find appropriate contacts and discover their professional backgrounds prior to making contact. Professional transcription services: Use tools like Otter.ai during informational interviews to generate precise recordings, which enables you to maintain full attention on relationship development during discussions. 4. Master the Art of Informational Interviewing The standard job interview places you in a position to request something from the interviewer. Through informational interviews, you provide an opportunity to acquire knowledge from professional expertise. Heres how to get the full use out of an informational. Create 57 well-prepared questions that focus on your acquaintances career development, professional understanding, and industry advice. Keep meetings to 2030 minutes maximum. During the conversation, ask for the names of three professionals who can provide valuable insights. Send a thank-you note to the participants right after the meeting. Not sure where to start? These are some helpful questions to ask. What changes has the industry undergone during your professional lifetime? What are the most important skills that are rising to prominence in your field? Who should I reach out to next in my industry exploration? 5. Transform Conversations into Lasting Relationships Young professionals who succeed maintain valuable relationships from their business contacts instead of just collecting business cards. Turn these conversations into assets. You should document the most important information that comes from your conversations. Write about the lessons youve learned and share it with your network. Develop a system for staying in touch with connections, whether that be quarterly check-ins, sharing relevant articles, or congratulating them on achievements. Look for ways to reconnect contacts with each other when it makes sense. Develop a personal advisory board from your 100 connections; 10 to 15 people will establish long-term mentorship roles. Nurture these relationships consistently. The Long-Term Payoff Recent graduates who focus on value creation instead of value extraction have successfully made industry-changing career transitions and built strong professional networks. Begin by establishing one professional connection during this present week. Focus on what you can learn from them and how you might be helpful. Strategic and consistent relationship building produces surprising opportunities that surpass your expectations. Remember: You’re not building a network to get somethingyou’re building relationships to contribute something. Its from there your network will grow.
Category:
E-Commerce
UX designers and product designers have very similar jobs. They both arrange digital parts. They both use Figma more than other designers do. And, according to a recent Fast Company analysis of design job listings, they start out with pretty much the same entry-level salary, around $70,000 a year. But as their careers progress, those salaries diverge. Among job postings asking that a candidate have between four and five years of experience, the average salary offered for UX designers was about $123,720, while the salary for product designers was $149,850. By the time these types of designers reach more developed stages of their careers, requiring at least eight years of experience, UX designers are offered an average of about $153,920, while product designers can earn $197,579. Thats about 28% more for product designers. !function(){"use strict";window.addEventListener("message",(function(a){if(void 0!==a.data["datawrapper-height"]){var e=document.querySelectorAll("iframe");for(var t in a.data["datawrapper-height"])for(var r,i=0;r=e[i];i++)if(r.contentWindow===a.source){var d=a.data["datawrapper-height"][t]+"px";r.style.height=d}}}))}(); UX design vs. product design To understand what might be driving the discrepancy in salary between UX and product designers over the course of their careers, it is helpful to look at differences in the actual duties that each type of worker performs, and how their careers typically progress. A UX designer is responsible for the feel and flow of a product, e.g. the user experience, while a product designer oversees both visual elements of an app or website and what types of features it should even have to begin with. Alexander Benz, a UX designer, product manager, and CEO of Blikket, a design and development agency for DTC brands, explains that people who start out as UX designers tend to go on become UX managers, involved in the production of a products design system, or they become other kinds designers. But as product designers develop in their careers, they begin branching out into other parts of the business, interfacing with stakeholders from across the organization. When you get into the product, he says, then you also have a bigger responsibility to . . . [take] in the ideas from stakeholders and manage more people in the whole process.” For example, while a UX designer might create a flowchart and visual style for a money transfer feature in a banking app, the product designer is closer to the metal, helping determine what components the app’s feature should actually containDoes it save a list of past transfer recipients? Does it autocomplete input fields?and so on, while considering the feature’s broader success metrics and technical constraints. “I think that is where the salary difference comes in. UX designers everywhere Another factor that could be contributing to the salary discrepancy is supply. There are simply more UX designers today than product designers. This may be because UX design boot camps, such as General Assembly and Springboard, proliferated in the 2010s, when interest rates were low, capital was cheap, and a new startup was seemingly being born every minute. These young companies all needed tech-savvy designers on staff to create their wireframes and user journeys, and boot camps minted them. Boot camps are based on the notion that certain jobs require practicing and perfecting a mostly fungible set of best practices that can be deployed to any client. Boot camps are accessible, cheaper than college or graduate school, and have created hundreds of thousands of additional workers in their respective fields. But while there were many boot camp options for budding UX designers, no such counterpart emerged for product designers. There is no oversupply, Benz says. Instead, product designers occupy roles in their companies that are more difficult to delineate. Their jobs require technical and soft skills that take more than a few months to master. There is no crash-course curriculum in product design. More good news for product designers Product designers are enjoying an extra advantage right now. Because their jobs cant be codified into a standard set of steps and principles, they are largely protected from LLMs. As language models become more sophisticated at performing junior- and, increasingly, senior-level coding tasks, they are threatening all sorts of jobs in tech. Its the jobs that LLMs dont understand that are arguably safest. In other words, the very qualities that make UX designers a target for easy boot camps also make them a target for AI. And the job description of a product designerthe fact that the role involves constant communication with individuals inside and outside an organizationmeans that it is relatively more protected from automation. For UX designers who might be looking for both a salary boost and a shovel to dig an anti-automation moat around their careers, it’s a great time to pivot. This article is part of Fast Company‘s continuing coverage of where the design jobs are, including this year’s comprehensive analysis of 170,000 job listings.
Category:
E-Commerce
Marcus leads a team of eight direct reports, and Jennifer is his star employee. While the other seven team members struggle to complete tasks on time or in the way Marcus asks for them, Jennifer seems to ace any task shes given. She asks questions when shes unclear and owns up to her mistakes. Any time the other employees mess up, Marcus wishes he could clone Jennifer seven times and save himself the hassle. Sound familiar? You may not be able to clone your star employees, but you can help your team replicate the cognitive habits of people like Jennifer to build the skill of accountability across your team. At the NeuroLeadership Institute, weve spent the past year reverse-engineering what accountable people do from a cognitive perspective. Quite literally, weve asked, what are the cognitive habitsthe habits of mindof people who do this well? Three have come into focus: syncing expectations, driving with purpose, and owning ones impact. In short, accountable people get clarity in what theyre supposed to do, execute tasks deliberately and intentionally, and learn from the outcomes they produce, whether good or bad. 3 HABITS OF ACCOUNTABILITY When people attend to these habits in the course of their work, we call it proactive accountability. That is, they see accountability as a way to grow, develop, and innovate. They take ownership of their responsibilities and learn from their mistakes. Proactive accountability stands in contrast to punitive accountability, a practice in which leaders create environments of fear, blame, or punishment that hinder learning and growth, as well as permissive accountability, in which leaders assume performance issues will simply work themselves out. Sync expectations A major factor in cultures with low accountability is a mismatch in expectations. The manager thinks the team member will do one thing, but the team member thinks theyre supposed to do something else. Disappointment and broken trust follow. In the brain, unmet expectations are processed as error signals. Levels of the neurotransmitter dopamine drop, sapping motivation and causing us to feel frustrated or angry, which forces us to adjust our expectations. When expectations are met, however, there is no error signal, dopamine levels hold steady, and trust and satisfaction remain strong. The first habit of proactive accountability, Sync expectations, involves the employee getting clear about whats expected of them. This is an important first step because shared understanding is the foundation of being effective. In the brain this is represented by a temporary synchronization of neural activity, known as neural synchrony. Relationship building During neural synchrony, neurons in both peoples brains are firing in the same patterns because their minds are processing information in nearly identical ways. For this to happen, both people need to discuss and eliminate any potential misunderstandings before moving forward. Syncing expectations also has benefits for relationships at the end of the project because fulfilled expectations breed trust, while unmet expectations erode trust. When two teammates sync expectations up front, they make an investment in sustaining the relationship long-term. Tactic: Encourage your team to sync expectations by communicating in a way thats succinct, specific, and generous (SSG). SSG communication uses a narrow focus to support working memory (succinct); it uses visual, explicit language to enhance processing (specific); and its tailored to create ease of understanding (generous). Its not Get me this report by 5 p.m.rather, its Email me this report by 5 p.m. Eastern Time, and please attach the report as a PDF. SSG communication creates clarity, which promotes synchrony and aligns expectations. Drive with purpose Once the leader and employee have synced expectations, the employee must own the responsibility to execute the task at the highest level. Highly effective people often do this by connecting the goal at hand to a higher purpose, and then working to create the right outcomes with that purpose in mind. Purpose ignites motivation. When we know why were asked to do something, and we can see how the work creates a meaningful impact, were more intrinsically motivated to act. Compared to extrinsic motivators, such as money and status, intrinsic rewards, like a sense of accomplishment or mastery over a task, are much more powerful. Consciously or not, effective people find deeper meaning in their work to summon the energy to keep pushing. They also act deliberately, rather than hastily, investigating as many possibilities as they can and assuming almost nothing. In addition, they check their biases to avoid making rash judgments. Since cognitive biases act as mental shortcuts, they pose risks for an employee completing a task effectively. Someone who acts with an expedience bias, for instance, might move too quickly and miss a crucial part of the work. Tactic: Help your employees identify the impact this work will have on them. Perhaps the project is an opportunity for them to build a new skill or to contribute to an important organizational goal. Asking questions that elicit a clear why will help the employee form a stronger sense of purpose and ownership over their work. Own the impact Accountability doesnt just involve getting things done as expected; it means seeing how those actions play out going forward. Even the best laid plans can produce unexpected results. Accountable leaders own their teams impact, regardless of peoples positive intentions, and then they devise new plans to keep pushing toward success. Proactive accountability requires us to maintain a growth mindset, or the belief that mistakes are chances to improve rather than signs of incompetence. When people always seem to get things done, its because theyre not getting mired in failure or basking in success. They may pause to experience their emotions, but ultimately theyre focused on achieving the next set of goals in front of them. Tactic: The most important time for leaders and team members to own their impact is when things dont go as planned. Help your team apologize well by following (and modeling) a three-step approach: taking responsibility, saying how youll fix things, and asking for others input. Choosing to learn from our mistakes preserves trust and promotes growth: two outcomes that sit at the heart of proactive accountability. DEMYSTIFYING ACCOUNTABILITY With these three habits, Marcus feels more empowered to help his team build the skill of accountability. Jennifer may have a natural talent for getting things done at a high level, but theres no secret to her efficacy. When a new project comes her way, she merely goes through the prescribed steps that neuroscience shows will naturally produce accountability. It will take time to develop the behaviors of proactive accountability and make them habits. But with the right focus, you can help everyone on your team, including yourself, become the kind of person who meets or exceeds expectations in whatever they do. What seems like magic will really just be brain science at work.
Category:
E-Commerce
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