Public Good

One man's squeegee route is keeping small restaurants alive

From clean windows to clean plates

Davis Roethler walks into struggling Kansas City restaurants, eats a meal, and offers to clean their windows for free. The Meta glasses on his face are recording the whole time. By the next morning, the dining room looks different.

The former social media manager turned window washer has been quietly turning his squeegee route into a small-business rescue operation, posting short, unscripted videos about the people behind the food. As Erik Barnes reports, one bakery owner watched daily sales quadruple. Another spot, fighting an incorrect Google address and empty tables, woke up to find customers "waiting for the restaurant to open" before the doors were unlocked. He's not an influencer. He's something better.

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Civic Life

Science just proved what you suspected about the coworker who loves "synergy"

A Cornell study links cognitive ability to how people actually talk at work.

"Leverage a strategic framework to optimize stakeholder alignment." Dense verbiage, apparently used by dense people. Actually smart people would just say, "This isn't working. Let's try something else."

As Mark Wales reports, a new Cornell study introduced a Corporate [BS] Receptivity Scale, yes, really, and found that the people most impressed by phrases like "mission critical" and "all hands on deck" tend to score lower on analytical thinking. The buzzword fans also rated their jargon-spewing supervisors higher, which goes a long way toward explaining why this language refuses to die.

The cognitive psychologist behind the study, Shane Littrell, puts it cleanly: corporate-speak "may sound impressive, but it is semantically empty." Translation: the emperor has no synergy.

And what did we learn?

Yesterday, we shared research into why people are so quick to give up their digital privacy.

Since going online is like going out for the night, how much ‘skin’ do GOOD readers show when it comes to their digital privacy? Almost half of you like to keep it formal, only sharing the data you really have to. The far ends of the spectrum were pretty evenly balanced, with 10% of you sharing everything and another 10% or so locking it down tight.

• Digital nudist. Everything's out there, and I don't care. (9.6%)

• Casual Friday. You can't have my SSN, but I'll share my location for a good restaurant. (33.7%)

• Business formal. I read the fine print, and I will decline your cookies. (46.2%)

• Full camo. VPN on, camera covered, nice try. (10.6%)

Nation

A cop ticketed her for texting with her right hand. Yeah, about that…

A Florida fitness influencer, a citation that defied anatomy, and body cam footage that left commenters speechless.

A long time ago I was accused of doing a backflip during a school assembly. Certainly the sort of thing I would do, if I could. But I was a gangly nerd-type who couldn't do a backflip to save his soul. That surreal feeling of being vehemently accused of something I was physically incapable of doing is as close as I can get to understanding how Katie Thomas must have felt when she got pulled over in Lake Worth, Florida and handed a citation for manipulating her cell phone with her right hand.

The trouble is that Thomas, a fitness influencer, does not have a right hand. She has no right arm below the elbow.

So she did the sensible thing: she started recording with her phone, calmly asked the officer to repeat exactly what he'd seen, and let the moment speak for itself. As Erik Barnes reports, she eventually held up her partially missing arm and offered the deputy an easy out, asking whether he wanted to just call it a day. What he said next, with his own body cam still rolling, is what turned this into a viral problem for the officer.

Thomas planned to fight it in court. Then, the day before her hearing, the citation took a turn she swears she could not have scripted. The official reason is three words long and a small masterpiece of understatement.

On May 28, 1936, Alan Turing, a 23-year-old Cambridge fellow who hadn't even started his PhD yet, submitted a paper to the London Mathematical Society that would quietly become the most important document in the history of computing. Its title was a mouthful: "On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem" (German for "decision problem"). Its implications were enormous.

Turing's professor, Max Newman, had been lecturing on that famous unsolved problem and mentioned offhand that the real question was whether a "mechanical process" could determine if certain problems were solvable. He may not have meant it literally. Turing took it literally anyway. What he described was an imaginary machine that could follow simple instructions to solve any computable problem. It was, on paper, a computer, decades before the technology existed to build one. The word "computer," at the time, just meant a person doing math at a desk. Turing reimagined the job title as a machine.

Turing would go on to help crack the Nazi Enigma code during World War II, propose his famous Turing Test for machine intelligence (which AI systems are now regularly passing), and be prosecuted by the British government for his homosexuality. He died in 1954 at the age of 41. The paper didn't make headlines. It made everything else possible.

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