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Corporate America has historically believed in the power of the company offsite. Executives are whisked away to remote locations where they sip mediocre coffee in meeting rooms and strategize before catered lunches arrive. Meanwhile, parents, quite possibly the most overworked and understaffed management team on earth, rarely get more than a solo run to the grocery store. If theyre really lucky, they might get to enjoy five minutes in the shower before someone is pounding on the bathroom door. I say its time to correct the imbalance. Parents need offsites too. Not just the once-in-a-decade vacation you take after a major anniversary or a milestone birthday. I am talking about regular, kid-free weekends scheduled with the same urgency as a company budget review. The reason? For many of us, the home teams long-term growth plan is being held together with caffeine and prayer. The power of short breaks This idea isnt frivolous. Research consistently shows that parents experience higher daily stress levels than their child-free peers, reporting more fatigue, less leisure time, and higher rates of burnout. A 2022 study aptly titled Give me a break! found that short breaks from duties can boost mood and reduce fatigue. Think of it as mental maintenance. You wouldnt run your car for 100,000 miles without an oil change so why run yourself ragged without pausing to recharge? {"blockType":"creator-network-promo","data":{"mediaUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2015\/08\/erikaaslogo.png","headline":"Girl, Listen: A Guide to What Really Matters","description":"Ericka dives into the heat of modern motherhood, challenging the notion that personal identity must be sacrificed at the altar of parenting. ","substackDomain":"https:\/\/erickasouter.substack.com\/","colorTheme":"blue","redirectUrl":""}} And collapsing on the couch after the bedtime routine doesnt count. An offsite is different. Its a deliberate escape from your usual day-to-day, designed to give you space to reflect, restore, and maybe even remember who you were before you became a chauffeur, short order cook, and 24/7 project manager for both home and work. The logistics So how do you make this happen? Arranging childcare for a weekend is tough. But this is a time to call in favors or rely on grandparents, godparents, and other extended family. Some parents even negotiate a swap with other families they are close to: You take my kids for a weekend next month and I will return the favor. And for those already formulating counterarguments, lets address: Its expensive. What you do with this free time doesnt matter and there is no need to go far away. Book an Airbnb in a nearby town and wander through bookstores, take naps, eat dinner in front of a hotel TV. Its hard to find time. You find time for everyone else. Put yourself on top of the to-do list for a day or so. Besides, protecting your own mental health is an insurance policy. Ill feel guilty. Guilt is the ever-present background music of parenthood. You might as well let it play while sipping your coffee in peace someplace. Your family will survive without you for a couple days. Rested and recharged You are stepping away to ensure your team keeps functioning smoothly. Every parent needs a moment when no one is demanding crayons, asking you to cut their chicken, or provide a market update for the morning meeting. You will come back recharged, patient, and more capable of tolerating the next crisis.There is also the added benefit of positive parental modeling. When your kids see you prioritize your own well-being, they learn that self-care isnt optional. Everyone around you will see that rest is part of a sustainable life, not a luxury. And dont you want them to grow into adults who know how to step back before they break down? Besides, the world doesnt need another burned out parent. It needs you at your sharpest, and sometimes that means packing a bag. {"blockType":"creator-network-promo","data":{"mediaUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2015\/08\/erikaaslogo.png","headline":"Girl, Listen: A Guide to What Really Matters","description":"Ericka dives into the heat of modern motherhood, challenging the notion that personal identity must be sacrificed at the altar of parenting. ","substackDomain":"https:\/\/erickasouter.substack.com\/","colorTheme":"blue","redirectUrl":""}}
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A New York man has been charged with cyberstalking a family member of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, allegedly leaving threatening voicemails that expressed glee about the insurance executive’s killing, federal prosecutors said Wednesday. Shane Daley, 40, is accused of placing multiple calls to Thompson’s family member after the shooting, justifying the killing and saying that the person deserved to die in a similar manner, according to a criminal complaint. Daley, of Galway, New York, a small town north of Albany, was arrested and had an initial court appearance Wednesday. He was released with GPS monitoring and is scheduled back in court Thursday afternoon, a spokesperson for the U.S. attorney’s office in Albany said. Daley’s attorney, Samuel Breslin, said they are reviewing the allegations and evidence. In a statement, Acting United States Attorney John A. Sarcone said that Brian Thompson was gunned down in midtown Manhattan. Daley, as alleged, gleefully welcomed this tragedy and did all that he could to increase the Thompson familys pain and suffering.” Thompson was fatally shot outside a hotel in New York City in December by a man who was angered over what he viewed as corporate greed, according to prosecutors. The suspect, Luigi Mangione, has pleaded not guilty. The killing of Thompson, who led one of the biggest health insurers in the U.S., resulted in a vast outpouring of public frustration with the country’s health care system. Many Americans reacted to the shooting by relaying personal stories about difficult experiences with insurance companies. Mangione himself has been lionized as a sort of vigilante hero by those who are critical of the insurance industry.
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Welcome to AI Decoded, Fast Companys weekly newsletter that breaks down the most important news in the world of AI. You can sign up to receive this newsletter every week via email here. Why Nvidias and AMDs China deal with Trump could backfire The companies making the most money from the AI boom are the ones selling the processors, such as Nvidia and AMD. On Monday those two chip giants cut a deal with the Trump administration that will allow them to sell their products into the China market. For Nvidiathe dominant provider of AI chips powering the generative AI boomthe agreement means that it can once again sell its H20 chip to Chinese developers. Its the latest chapter in a long saga. The Biden administration blocked the sale of Nvidias most powerful AI chips to China in 2022, but deemed the sale of the less powerful H20 chip an acceptable national security risk. The Trump administration continued blocking sales of Nvidias H200 and Blackwell chips. But in April, it went a step further by effectively blocking the sale of the H20 chips, too. The new deal shows that Nvidia CEO Jensen Huangs charm offensive in Washington, D.C., convinced the Trump administration that the U.S.s technological, economic, and national security goals are best served when the worlds AI models and apps are built to run on chips made by U.S.-based companies (like Nvidia). Or maybe the Trump Administration just wanted a piece of the action all along. The administration exploited its jurisdiction over export policy to extract a percentage of Nvidia and AMDs Chinese sales payable to the U.S. Treasury. I said, Listen, I want 20% if Im going to approve this for you, for the country, Trump said during a press conference on August 12, describing his negotiation with Nvidias Huang. He added that Nvidia negotiated the percentage down to 15%. That cut could amount to as much as $3 billion this year, given the high demand for the H20 chips. Trumps demand for 15% is something new in U.S. trade policy. The 15% take indeed sets a precedent, Columbia Business School professor Lori Yue tells Fast Company. It may encourage other companies to adopt similar strategies, viewing profit-sharing as a work-around to government bans. This could lead to a paytoplay arrangement where only the richest corporations can afford to pay the government for permission to sell into a foreign market. Indeed, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent hinted during a TV interview that the approach could spread to other products in other industries. The administrations tax will very likely translate into higher chip prices for Nvidia and AMDs Chinese customers, such as Tencent. The Chinese government has recently blasted Nvidias H20 chips over security concerns, and the new 15% tax is likely to rankle Beijing even more. The Chinese government would like to see AI developers building their models and apps on top of AI chips from China-based Huawei. The Trump aAdministration may be driving some of Nvidias Chinese customers to do just that, even if it requires rebuilding their infrastructure and tech stacks. Musks Grok chatbot is making noise but falling behind Grok, xAIs chatbot, has had a rough week. The model that powers the Grok chatbot on X is Grok 4, which was announced July 9. At the time, xAI said the new model was the most intelligent one in the world. And the model did achieve state-of-the-art performance on several benchmark tests, including the superhard Humanitys Last Exam, on which it scored 25.4%, three points higher than Googles Gemini 2.5 Pro. As of August 11, the Grok chatbot is available free to all X users, even those on the free tier. In one sense, it marked an immediate improvement. The social platforms permissive environment has made it a clearinghouse for all kinds of misinformation and unsupported claims. Now far more people are using Grok to quickly fact-check those statements. But on August 7 OpenAI released its new GPT-5 model, which outperforms the Grok 4 models on many independent benchmarks. GPT5 shows state-of-the-art reasoning, math and coding skills, visual understanding, creative writing, and health-related question performance. However, GPT5 scored poorly on SimpleBench, ranking 5th behind Grok4 and others in humanlike reasoning and social intelligence. While the benchmark results were circulatingand a GPT-5 backlash was growingxAI CEO Elon Musk threatened to sue Apple for giving OpenAIs ChatGPT app the top ranking among free apps in the App Store (the Grok app ranks fifth). Must presented no evidence, appearing to simply be lashing out. And to make matters worse, Groks problems with inappropriate content resurfaced this week. After being taken offline for spewing antisemitic rhetoric in July, the chatbot was again briefly taken offline Mondaythis time for reasons not divulged by X. The chatbot had an opinion, however, telling one user that it had been taken offline after angrily stating that the U.S. and Israels war on Gaza was a genocide. One user demonstrated that after Grok had been turned on again, it no longer stated that Gaza should be classified as a genocide. Report: Trump Administration stopping tech enforcement During the 2024 presidential campaign, Donald Trump won the support of some tech billionaires, such as Marc Andreessen and Elon Musk, by promising to use a light-touch approach to regulating tech companies, including AI companies. Now Public Citizen is out with a report detailing the extent to which the administration has dialed back oversight and enforcement actions on the tech industry. In just six months with Trump in the Oval Office, the U.S. government has withdrawn or halted 47 of 143 federal enforcement actions against tech companies, the report states. At the start of Trumps second term, 104 technology companies faced 143 federal investigations and enforcement actions. The administration has withdrawn 38 actions and halted 9 others against 45 companies. Beneficiaries include eBay, Meta, Microsoft, PayPal, SpaceX, and Tesla. The report suggests that political spending generated returns through dropped prosecutions and policy changes. Tech corporations, executives, and investors spent $1.2 billion during the 2024 election cycle, including $863 million in donations to super PACs, $222 million in payments to Trump businesses, $76 million in lobbying efforts, and $25 million in inauguration donations, Public Citizen reports. Companies still facing ongoing investigations include Amazon, Apple, ByteDance, Google, Meta, OpenAI, Snap, Uber, Zoom, and various Musk companies (the Boring Co., Neuralink, SpaceX, Tesla, X, and xAI). More AI coverage from Fast Company: Most people are using ChatGPT totally wrongand OpenAIs CEO just proved it AI startup Anthropic is betting on a human editorial team Inside the looming AI-agents war that will redefine the economics of the web AI data wars push Reddit to block the Wayback Machine Want exclusive reporting and trend analysis on technology, business innovation, future of work, and design? Sign up for Fast Company Premium.
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