Whisper Web, 50-hour Weeks and Trendy Takebacks 🕰️

How It Works? 

• Callisto lets a survivor enter their name in a database, together with identifying details of their assailant, such as social media handle or phone number. 
• These details are obviously encrypted, meaning the identities of the survivor and the perpetrator are anonymous. 
• If the same perpetrator is named by two or more people, the website will trigger a match and send emails to two lawyers.
• The lawyers then contact the survivors to let them know of the match and that there are other victims out there assaulted by the same person. 
• The lawyers offer to help coordinate with other survivors and pursue a combined action should they wish it. There’s strength in numbers.

In short, Callisto acts as a “whisper network”  for survivors to discover if their abuser is a repeat offender without identifying themselves to the authorities. 🗣️

The website isn’t new though. It has testimonials from survivors in several universities across - Florida State University, Syracuse University and University of South Carolina, to name a few. 

It was also launched in Stanford University a few years ago, but shut down in 2020 due to lack of popularity. Data from the AAU survey indicate that only 9% of Stanford students were even aware about Callisto.

This is obviously not a good thing because assault survivors definitely need a tool like this on campus. Among undergraduate students, 26.4% of females and 6.8% of males experience rape or sexual assault through physical force, violence, or incapacitation. And hopefully, more students will know and explore the tool soon enough to make college campuses safer.

But more hours definitely doesn’t mean the quiet quitting trend is over. 

The truth is, the pandemic hasn’t affected our quantity of work as much as did our style of work. Even those who pivoted towards part-time and contract work in the last two years have worked at least 45-hour weeks, according to Gallup.

Most workers, of course, don’t have the choice of actually reducing their hours, so they “quiet quit” by lowering their productivity or adjusting their ambitions to be more personal than professional. Which is why, while average work hours may be rising due to inflation and recession fears, the trend of quiet quitting might still remain for the foreseeable future.

Halloween decorations make up an increasingly large portion of retailers’ fall inventory. 🧟‍♂️

Reason: It’s the first step into the winter holiday season that brings in billions of dollars in revenues for retailers.

Now that Halloween is over, we now dive into the winter holiday season. And this year, the holiday shopping spirit has reached record levels. According to NRF, this year, 91% of consumers plan to celebrate the winter holidays of Halloween, Thanksgiving, Hanukkah, Christmas and Kwanzaa. 🎁

In fact, even before Halloween, people had already started shopping for Christmas and Thanksgiving. This is ironic, because ideally a recession would be a deterrent for holiday spending. For instance, Halloween season was pretty muted during the 2008 recession. 

So what’s behind this uptick in shopping?
According to NRF, several reasons drove up the October sales (see graph below). 

Big box retailers have stocked shelves full and started offering discounts lasting until the new year. But it seems, the majority is more interested in online shopping.