Category: Business Insider

• Opening statements in Donald Trump's first criminal are set to begin Monday. 
• The former president's family has not attended this past week's jury selection.
• But their presence, especially Melania's, could have a powerful impact, legal experts say. 

Donald Trump enters his first criminal trial every day flanked by lawyers, court officers, Secret Service members, and political advisors.

But not his wife and children.

Melania Trump and the former president's children have not attended this past week as seven men and five women were chosen as jurors for his historic Manhattan hush-money trial.

And while it's not uncommon for family members of defendants to sit out the slogging jury-selection process, legal experts say their presence — especially that of Melania Trump — could have a strong positive impact on jurors once opening statements begin Monday.

'No question that Melania is the most important'

"There's no question that Melania is the most important family member to be there," Mark Bederow, a criminal defense attorney and former prosecutor for the Manhattan district attorney's office, told Business Insider.

Bederow explained that Melania Trump's courtroom support could be "potentially very powerful" given the salacious nature of the hush-money case against Trump.

Making Trump at least look like a wholesome, beloved husband and father might help him.

"Certainly, if Melania were there supporting him, that potentially sends a message that 'I support him, I'm OK, I believe, perhaps, this didn't happen,'" Bederow said. "I think that can only have a positive impact on the jury."

This is especially important in a trial where the words "porn actress" and "extra-marital affair" will be lobbed at Trump by prosecutors.

Prosecutors from the Manhattan district attorney's office say Trump falsified 34 business records to disguise a $130,000 hush-money payment to adult film star Stormy Daniels.

The payment to buy Daniels' silence over an alleged 2006 sexual encounter with a married Trump was part of an illegal scheme to influence the 2016 election, according to prosecutors.

Jill Huntley Taylor, a jury consultant, told BI that the presence of Trump's family will likely magnify the jurors' other impressions of the case.

If the jurors are inclined to side with Trump, thinking the case is lousy, then they'd understand why his family didn't show up, she said. If they side against Trump, they might wonder why none of his family members are supporting him.

"Trump doesn't want to be there," Huntley Taylor said. "I could see jurors, if they're favoring him thinking, 'Well, he's not going to make his family be there.' And I can see jurors who are not favoring him thinking, 'Well, wouldn't your family want to support you in this while you're on trial?'"

His family — or lack thereof

Courtrooms are, by design, "sensory deprivation tanks," joked Julia Vitullo-Martin, a criminal justice consultant and former director for the Citizens Jury Project, an initiative of the Vera Institute of Justice.

So when there's downtime in the courtroom, jurors, who don't have their electronics, have little else to do but study the defendant and whoever is with them.

"So you look around, and you assess the defendant's demeanor, his clothes, his family — or his lack thereof," Vitullo-Martin said.

Jurors have sworn they will judge Trump's case solely on the evidence. But their observations of the defendant — and any family present — will influence their eventual verdict, she said.

"They're human beings," she said of jurors.

"And defense attorneys have always known this, which is why they are so conscious of how their client is coming across to the jury."

'Kind of the elephant in the room'

Whether family shows up for Trump should not matter to the jury, but Bederow said it's only natural for jurors to wonder why Melania Trump or any other family member might not show their solidarity in the courtroom for the presumptive Republican presidential nominee.

"It's not evidence of anything, and it's not the kind of thing they're supposed to consider, but I think it's kind of the elephant in the room," Bederow said.

Even in criminal trials with more dire stakes — and where defendants have been accused of far worse — it's common for family members to attend and show support.

Fallen cryptocurrency mogul Sam Bankman-Fried had watched his parents in the front row of the gallery for every day of his monthlong trial. Even Ghislaine Maxwell, who trafficked girls to disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein for sex and sexually abused them herself, had two sisters and a brother attending her trial nearly every day.

Melania Trump did not show up for her husband's past Manhattan trials

But Melania Trump has been a no-show in Trump's other three Manhattan trials, all of which he lost, and at a cost of more than $600 million in judgments against him.

The former First Lady also did not attend either Trump's first or his second E. Jean Carroll federal defamation trials, in April, 2023 and in January of this year.

She was also a no-show at last year's civil fraud trial.

 Trump himself stayed away entirely from the first Carroll trial, at which a jury found him liable for sexual assault.

These absences likely do not make jurors' hearts grow fonder, according to legal experts.

"A defendant's demeanor and appearance in front of a jury is critically important, from the very start of jury selection through the return of a verdict," defense attorney and former federal prosecutor Justin Danilewitz told BI.

Danilewitz added, "And although a defendant cannot, of course, communicate directly with a jury, perceptive jurors will note the courtroom surroundings and the support of family a defendant may have."

Former Brooklyn prosecutor Arthur Aidala echoed those remarks.

"Typically, you want family members there to show the jury that the defendant has a lot of support," he said.

Aidala, a criminal defense attorney who has represented Rudy Giuliani and Harvey Weinstein, agreed Melania Trump's presence at the trial would be "key" but noted that he did not believe the attendance of family would have much of an impact in this case.

"It's not the kind of case where sympathy matters. Usually family matters when you want the sympathy of the jury for the defendant. That's not the case here," Aidala said. "People know Trump. Family will not change their opinion."

Danilewitz said Trump's defense team may have a different strategy in mind when it comes to Melania Trump.

"Ordinarily, in a case like this, the appearance of a spouse may well send an important signal of support," said Danielwitz. "But the defense strategy here is likely to signal that this trial is not worth the time of the defendant, and even less the time of his close family."

"Attending could suggest a level of importance the defense does not want to give the case," he said.

Instead of family, Trump has been surrounded in court by lawyers and support staff.

They include his four main criminal defense lawyers in the case — Todd Blanche, Susan Necheles, Emil Bove, and Gedalia Stern — and a rotating cast of political aides working for his 2024 presidential campaign, including Steven Cheung, Jason Miller, Margo Martin, and Natalie Harp.

On Friday, they were joined by Clifford Robert, one of Trump's family's lawyers in the New York attorney general's civil fraud trial against the Trump Organization last year.

Melania Trump is portrayed as the 'mistreated wife' in the hush-money case

They spend a lot of time together, but they're not the wife and kids.

Melania Trump "is the mistreated wife in this narrative that the DA is saying," Bederow said, explaining, "If she's not there, jurors may take note of that. Certainly the media will."

Given that the prosecution's narrative includes Trump having an affair, Trump's lawyers may have deemed it wiser to keep Melania Trump away, according to Huntley Taylor, the jury consultant.

"It seems like you would have to really think twice about whether you want to put her through that," she said.

The presence of Trump's daughter, Ivanka Trump, at her father's criminal trial could also be impactful, but the appearance of his sons, Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. likely wouldn't matter, according to Bederow.

"Let's be honest, if Donald Jr. and Eric Trump showed up, is that going to make it any better? No. Probably, if anything, it potentially makes it worse," said Bederow. "But it's a different story with Melania and Ivanka."

"People who are inclined not to like Donald Trump probably view the sons in the same way just because they're very vocal defenders of their father, which is natural and expected," Bederow continued. "But they're also very involved in the political game and the media game that surrounds everything involving Trump."

Melania Trump has privately called the charges against her husband "a disgrace," even though she was initially furious at him when news of the alleged affair broke in 2018, according to the New York Times.

If Trump's family does decide to show up Monday, they might want to wear sweaters. The temperature in the courtroom is very cold.

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• Can the Russian military can be reformed to better achieve Putin's revanchist aims?
• Yes, but the drastic changes will not be easy, an expert on Russia's military says.
• "The appearance of success may be more important than truly making progress," she argues.

Whatever the outcome of the Ukraine war, one thing seems certain: the Russian military needs drastic changes.

A country recently thought to be a top military power, with the jets, tanks and warships to match, has been forced to slog it out in conventional battle with a country a fifth its size and has suffered an estimated 500,000 casualties without victory in sight after two years. What few innovations the Kremlin has made, such as using convicts as suicide infantry, are dubious and ad hoc at best.

The question is whether the Russian military can actually change in the near-future, which would impact the current war in Ukraine and the wider grasp for conquest under Russian President Vladimir Putin. Armies tend to be conservative institutions that resist change, particularly in Russia's armed forces that date back to Tsarist and Soviet times and are rife with corruption and abuse. Yet Russia's enemies can't complacently assume that Moscow's military will always be stuck in a rut, warns a US expert.

"The Russian military is capable of reform, especially of a structural nature," wrote researcher Katherine Kjellström Elgin in a report for the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments think tank in Washington, D.C. "That does not mean, however, that reform will be easy. Indeed, Russia's tendency to seek top-down structural reforms matched with enduring characteristics of the Russian military suggest that a transformation of the Russian military will be difficult."

"The Russian military is unlikely to substantially reform in the short- to medium-term," predicted Elgin, who believes "it is unlikely that its future force will be drastically different in character from the Russian military that exists today."

It's not that Russia can't adapt to failure. Reforms occurred after the Crimean War of 1853-1856, yet the Soviet military was able to adapt quickly enough to transform the disaster of 1941 — when Nazi German troops reached the outskirts of Moscow — into the triumph of 1945. Today, Russia has displayed skill in waging drone and electronic warfare in Ukraine.

But these are small innovations compared to the agile, NATO-style army that some Western experts claimed Russia had created before the Ukraine war Putin ordered in 2022. "Instead, the early stages of the Russian invasion exposed low morale, brittle logistics, overly centralized command and control, deficiencies in equipment, rampant corruption, and an overreliance on esoteric doctrine, revealing that the reform efforts that began in 2008 had failed to fully deliver on many of their core objectives," Elgin pointed out.

Historically, when the Russian military does change, it tends to be top-down reforms such as reorganizing military districts or modernizing equipment, rather than low-level tactics, Elgin wrote. Even when leaders order reforms, change is blocked by "military culture that does not encourage authority, a lack of talented and empowered middle management, inaccurate information, and a lack of flexibility to adjust course."

The system also encourages pleasing superiors and "conveying the appearance of success may be more important than truly making progress." To be fair, such complaints about style over substance are not unheard of in the US or other militaries. But this problem is especially acute in Russia's highest echelons, where apparatchiks stifle the feedback and criticism needed to identify what's hampering its systems and operations, including the Ukraine war.

This doesn't rule out the unlikely possibility that Russia can change the overall culture of its military. However, according to Elgin, this can only happen if two conditions are met: high-level and sustained political support and adequate resources are made available.

Given that observers so misjudged Russian military capabilities prior to the Ukraine war, how can the West accurately determine whether reforms are occurring? One sign is whether top Russian leaders only make an occasional speech about military improvement, or whether they continually address the issue.

Another is the grievances and recommendations voiced by younger officers fresh from the battlefields of Ukraine and which officers are being promoted or ignored. And despite Russia's authoritarian crackdown on dissent, voices outside the military are a good indicator. "These voices could emerge from military blogs, the intelligence services, or private military companies," Elgin wrote.

However, it is also important to study not just Russian officers, but also how ordinary soldiers are trained, Elgin told Business Insider. "What are they teaching in military schools? How are troops being trained on a daily basis? In other words, how are reforms being rolled out not just at the top levels, but how are they affecting the experience of every service member?"

Reform doesn't necessarily translate into battlefield performance. Despite reforms instituted after the Crimean War, the Russian army still suffered from command control and other flaws in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878. "It is possible to successfully achieve the goals you set out in a reform program, but to reform in ways that do not result in success on the battlefield," Elgin said.

Any reforms today might only create a military with a new look but old problems. "It may have new equipment, new formations, and potentially new doctrine," said Elgin. "but its enduring weaknesses, vulnerabilities, and tendencies are likely to remain the same. And this is something that NATO, Ukraine, and others can prepare for and take advantage of."

Michael Peck is a defense writer whose work has appeared in Forbes, Defense News, Foreign Policy magazine, and other publications. He holds an MA in political science from Rutgers Univ. Follow him on Twitter and LinkedIn.

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We've all been there: staring down the price of a plane ticket, a new shirt, or a bag of chips and thinking angrily to ourselves, "Jesus Christ, this did not use to cost this much." And then … we buy it anyway.

Inflation has made a lot of things infuriatingly expensive, and consumer confidence isn't great. The economy is good on paper, but in the real world, a lot of people feel like they're trapped in place. Yet many of those same people continue to spend their way through it. Retail sales came in higher than expected in March, up 0.7% month over month to $709.6 billion. February's numbers were revised up, too. Consumers have proved themselves as the motor of the economy.

In short, America has become a nation of hate spenders.

"There is how consumers feel and what they're doing," Lydia Boussour, a senior economist at EY, said. "Consumers are not feeling great about inflation, but what the data is telling you is that even if they're not feeling great, they're still able to continue to spend."

That leaves the question: Why are we willing to spend through the pain? According to experts I talked to, the surge in hate spending can be attributed to various factors. For one thing, a lot of people still have the financial stability necessary to open their wallets. On a psychological level, many consumers are just throwing up their hands at the state of financial affairs. They're aware prices aren't going back to 2019 levels, and given everything everyone's just been through, they may as well live it up.

Take Jordan Hart, a writer in Illinois and self-described "cheap bitch." She told me that she often finds herself outraged by prices — and then ultimately succumbs to the forces of capitalism. Hart, 26, has developed a taste for Lululemon, despite previously scoffing at paying $100 for a pair of leggings. Most recently, she decided to spend $50 on a Stanley cup. She initially got a knockoff on Amazon, but it broke, so she's biting the bullet and going with the OG. It's cool and trendy, plus part of her New Year's resolution was to drink more water. She's channeling a familiar sentiment. Many consumers are still buying like crazy; they're just mad about it.

"I feel like, obviously, with inflation, everything is just getting obnoxiously more expensive," she told me. "But at the heart of it, our desire as a consumer and as people to have nice things has not gone away."

---

Some of what's happening here is simple macroeconomics: People's finances are in a good spot, so they can absorb the increased costs. The labor market is strong, and wage growth has been outpacing inflation for months. From 2019 to 2022, median household wealth, adjusting for inflation, grew by 37%. Some cracks have begun to emerge. People's savings have fallen after being boosted by stimulus checks and the lack of spending options during the pandemic, and credit-card and auto-loan delinquencies are on the rise. Lower-income households, in particular, are likelier to be struggling. Still, on the whole, Americans are doing well.

"We're looking at a consumer sector that's still in overall good financial shape," Boussour said. She thinks that moderation in spending will soon be on the horizon, though it's worth noting economists have been saying that for months now — eventually, something has to break, they've argued, but it's just not clear what or when that will be.

People have largely just accepted that the prices that are in the market right now are status quo. We've acclimated to these inflated prices.

Beyond the raw dollars and cents, there are a lot of mental and emotional factors going into people's willingness to suck it up in the face of higher prices. In American culture, consumerism is one hell of a drug. It's wrapped up in our identities, how we relate to the world and to each other. Many of us have a tendency to look at a problem or frustration and think, "What can I buy about this?"

Claire Tassin, a retail and e-commerce analyst at Morning Consult, told me surveys indicated that the sticker shock of inflation had worn off, meaning some of the hate spending comes down to resignation. Per Morning Consult, the share of people who say they're paying more for products now than they were a year ago is back to 2021 levels, even as prices continue to climb.

"People have largely just accepted that the prices that are in the market right now are status quo," Tassin said. "We've acclimated to these inflated prices."

There's also a level of YOLO splurging going on among a lot of consumers. They're buying tickets to see Taylor Swift and booking summer trips to Europe, deciding they deserve a treat (or several) after living through a pandemic. People figure, "Hey, if I can't buy a new home right now or upgrade my job or car, taking a vacation seems like a decent alternative, even if I am paying more than I'd like." The consumer COVID hangover is lasting longer than many observers expected, in a way that opens up the question of whether this you-only-live-once attitude will last forever. If consumers hadn't gone along for the ride on price hikes, companies couldn't have undertaken them in the way they did. Financial products such as buy now, pay later have also made it easier to buy something you can't entirely afford at this very minute.

"I don't know what would force us to hit the breaking point for this degree of consumer spending," Tassin said.

At the same time, conspicuous consumption — as in buying goods and services to show off a level of status — is back on the rise among demographics that are once again jonesing to try new brands and becoming less sensitive to prices. While lower-income consumers are trading down from expensive name-brand products to cheaper alternatives in an effort to save money, some younger and higher-income consumers are trading up and shrugging off the higher costs that come with that, even if it irks them.

"They want to achieve a higher social status. They want to live a life that impresses others, and being part of the popular crowd is important," Tassin said. "Part of it is just like, 'This is what it costs now. And yes, it's a lot more expensive than it used to be, but it's still important to me to keep spending.'"

The misalignment between people's stated attitude toward prices and their actual behavior isn't that outlandish — our intentions and emotions often don't match our actions. People say they want to eat healthy all the time and then find themselves in the ice cream aisle. It's easy to say you want to cut back on spending, given high prices, but when a friend asks whether you want to go shopping, it's hard to say no.

Ravi Dhar, a professor of management and marketing and the director of the Center for Customer Insights at Yale School of Management, told me there's a sort of decoupling going on between people's current situations and how they feel about the future. They see a headline about people getting laid off, or they know there's a global conflict going on, so they feel more pessimistic about the economy and worried about costs. But when it comes down to actually paying, they still have a job and maybe even got a raise, so they pony up.

"They have uneasy feelings about the future and how it might change, whereas expenditures and spending now is determined by the current state of affairs," Dhar said. "Their predictions have become more pessimistic, but not their behavior."

---

There is, of course, a needs vs. wants question here. Some items are necessities — a home to live in, food on the table, gas in the car, childcare, healthcare. Consumers are understandably frustrated at the costs of these things. But in some instances, people conflate what is a need, what's a reasonable expectation, and what sorts of trade-offs they perhaps should make to achieve their financial goals. None of us have to subscribe to six streaming services or escape to a lavish weekend getaway, even if we tell ourselves that's what we deserve for stomaching the workday and staring down a grocery bill that's much higher than it used to be.

"To the outside, that might look like a luxury but to them it says, 'Hey, this, I need all this for my sanity,'" Dhar said.

People are averse to loss, and having to change their lifestyle to fit newfound financial constraints feels like losing. There's an element of stubbornness here — of course, that dress in the closet is just fine to wear to that party, but getting the new one is more fun and exciting, even if the accompanying price tag is annoying. It'll be something interesting to complain about at said party later.

To the outside, that might look like a luxury but to them it says, 'Hey, this, I need all this for my sanity.'

Reporting for this story, I heard from all sorts of people about their hate-spending habits. One woman told me she despised spending over $1,000 on an iPhone, even as she insisted on replacing hers at least every two years (she figured she should have one that works "awesome"). And, like many people, she won't switch to another brand. One man said he'd really gotten into couponing and racking up points at his local grocery store, but sometimes, he's just got to have that bag of Doritos, even if it costs the price of two bags three years ago. People cited angrily buying dog toys, fancy chocolates, deodorant, and $9 Chex Mix at the airport. Some mentioned doing more inevitable — and even more rage-inducing — spending on big-ticket items like rent. Upon reflection, I've realized I have two categories of expenses I love to hate: martinis at half-decent New York restaurants and my internet bill.

Most people were aware that many purchases were things they could go without. The Doritos guy knows he could go without the premium channels in his cable package, but he doesn't think his bill would come down far enough to warrant the sacrifice. By the end of my conversation with the iPhone lady, she said she'd started to wonder whether it might be better to wait to make the purchase — the crack in her screen would be easy and cheap enough to fix. But she doesn't have a lot of other big expenses at the moment. It's not like her car's broken down, so she'll probably go ahead and buy a new phone. She feels like it's an investment in herself. Hart, the Illinois writer with a brand-new Stanley cup, sees some of her spending as a way to reclaim power.

"You don't have a choice in the economy and inflation and how that's affecting you, but you kind of have a choice in how much you let it alter your lifestyle," she said. "It feels like you're admitting defeat if you're just like, 'Well, now it's just expensive, so I won't do it.'"

In a hyperconsumerist society like the one we live in, it's a notion that tracks. Maybe we're all angry spending soldiers, refusing to be deterred.

---

Emily Stewart is a senior correspondent at Business Insider, writing about business and the economy.

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• Rose Almond is a fully self-employed freelance engineer after resigning from her office job in 2015.
• Almond shared the positive aspects, and challenges, of this career move.
• There can be quiet work periods, but she likes the flexibility of picking projects and when to work.

Rose Almond was over her 9-to-5 job as a mechanical engineer.

"It was not a good place to be for a young female engineer," she told Business Insider. "It didn't really suit me being in the office environment."

Plus, Almond said working a nights-and-weekends side hustle of freelance gigs was exhausting. So she quit her day job in 2015.

Now, she gets to choose her own schedule and which projects she works on.

"I knew something had to give," she said.

Almond lives in Canada and is fully self-employed as a freelance product design engineer. She said a lot of her work still falls under mechanical engineering. Almond didn't decide to become a self-employed freelancer lightly. To help prepare, Almond said she ensured she "had enough cash in my business to survive paying my bills" for a couple of months.

"Then I approached my employer to ask to switch to part-time hours so that I could ease softly into the freelance side," she added. "Honestly, I wasn't being utilized to the best of my ability, and I could have kept the same pace of work in half the time anyway, but they refused to even consider it. They got my resignation the same day."

For others hoping to identify when to make this lifestyle move, Almond said a main part of it comes down to recognizing both your strengths and weaknesses.

"Freelancing gives flexibility in scheduling your time, but comes with a responsibility for time management and a need to be able to self-motivate — even on the days it's hard to get going," she said. "Everyone has their own level of acceptable risk, which should be considered carefully in terms of financials, healthcare, and any other benefits that might be traded in."

Earning money through the freelance platform Fiverr

Since joining Fiverr in the summer of 2014, Almond has made around $288,000 through this freelance platform. This includes around a year of side work while still employed at her previous job. She has also done freelance work through Upwork.

In 2021, she made around $65,400 through Fiverr. Almond credits that partly to people looking to freelancers more amid the pandemic. Last year, her Fiverr earnings were nearly $36,000, based on documentation shared with Business Insider. Her total revenue from her self-employed work in 2023 was around 65,400 Canadian dollars, or over $47,500.

Almond offers product designs and creates concept sketches for clients. She said she helps clients "create the products that they're going to be able to sell." Based on her Fiverr profile, basic hand sketches for a product concept cost $750. Prices increase to $1,000 for digital sketches with color and $1,250 for 3D mockups. Those prices differ though if the delivery time is shortened. She also has prices listed for designing a client's product for 3D printing and prototyping.

"It's really fun to see the products actually getting launched and hitting the market," she said.

The pros and cons of working as a freelancer

Almond said choosing her own hours is a major upside; she likes working at night.

Location flexibility is another positive. Almond said she has completed projects while traveling. She also has done some work, such as answering people's questions, while waiting for school pickup.

"I love that the focus is firmly on the quality of what you deliver, not something arbitrary like your location," she said.

Almond has found flexibility in deciding the projects to work on another pro to being a freelancer.

"That wasn't so much there at the beginning because at the beginning it was, kind of, you take what you can get," she said. "And now that I'm more established, I'm able to choose what I want to spend my time on a little bit more."

There are also pros specifically with being a freelancer as a parent, Almond has found. She has two young children. She said this type of work gives her flexibility with their schedules as needed and to take care of them if they are sick.

She said that flexibility would be tough if she were still working as a mechanical engineer for an employer.

"Honestly, a lot of the office culture, it isn't fair to women in the workforce," Almond said.

There can be some negatives that come with being a self-employed freelancer. Almond has found that "the lack of face-to-face interaction" that comes with freelance work can sometimes get lonely.

Another con is the workflow "isn't always smooth," she said.

"Some weeks or even months, it might be really quiet. There's not much going on," Almond said. "And then, suddenly, on one day, you get five different orders from different people that you've quoted for the last six months, and they all want everything done tomorrow."

She said managing client expectations, communications, and personalities can also be hard, "especially in a field where outcomes are not always linear and perfectly predictable," and "there's no buffer via management."

"I've definitely gotten better at setting clear guidelines and boundaries over the years," she added and noted this has helped with customer relations.

Almond is ready to explore working on her own products amid freelance gigs

Almond's advice for other parents hoping to take a chance on freelance work is to keep trying at this kind of work.

"Definitely don't expect it to be all at once," she said. "It does take a little bit of time to kind of ramp up, especially on platforms like Fiverr that have really grown, and they've got more people offering services now. But just keep working at it, and it will happen eventually."

Something she wished she had known before entering the freelance world is to "make sure you know your own value."

"It's very easy in a competitive environment like freelancing to offer your services too low," she said. "And sometimes it's better to hold out for the people who really will value you because they're going to come in with a better attitude, and that makes for a better working relationship."

Freelance work has now given Almond a chance to explore another work goal.

"The flexibility of the hours working with clients is letting me explore some of my own personal projects on the side, so I'm really excited to try and get some of my own products launched within the next few months and year."

Have you resigned from a job to freelance? Reach out to this reporter to share at mhoff@businessinsider.com.

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• Los Angeles voted to invest in street safety after a two-decade high in traffic deaths.
• But the LA firefighters union opposed the policy, arguing it will slow emergency response times.
• Street safety advocates say fire officials' focus on speed is making roads more dangerous.

Los Angeles is the car capital of America. That also means it has some of the most dangerous roads in the country. In 2023, traffic fatalities in the city hit a two-decade high. Of the 337 people who were killed, half were pedestrians. And traffic accidents are a leading cause of death for kids in the city.

Many of the city's residents want to take action to make their streets safer. They're demanding improvements to pedestrian infrastructure, bike lanes, and mass transit.

But firefighters — the very people tasked with keeping them safe — are standing in their way.

In March, LA voted overwhelmingly for a street safety policy that will finally enforce a nearly decade-old mobility plan to make the city's streets safer for non-drivers. The Healthy Streets Los Angeles Ballot Measure will mean hundreds of miles of new bike lanes, 300 miles of improved bus lanes, and updated public transit stations.

But the union that represents LA's firefighters opposed the policy, also known as Measure HLA, and aggressively campaigned against it. They argued that wider sidewalks, protected bike lanes, fewer driving lanes, and other street safety measures will make it harder for their trucks to navigate through traffic, elongating emergency response times. "Vehicles will not be able to pull to the right, and we're stuck behind them," a firefighter said in a video opposing the campaign. The union didn't immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

Michael Schneider, founder and CEO of Streets For All, a nonprofit that ran the campaign in favor of Measure HLA, said his group reached out to the firefighters union to talk about the policy before they came out against it but didn't hear back. He noted that LA's fire department, which isn't allowed to engage in politics, signed off on the underlying mobility plan back in 2015. A study of the plan actually found that without the policy, emergency response times would get longer as vehicle traffic increased.

"They're very myopic in how they view public safety," Schneider said of fire officials. "A two-decade-high pedestrian deaths is a public safety crisis, too."

But this battle between fire officials and street safety advocates isn't unique to LA. Fire departments across the country have for decades opposed safer street design. But this battle is increasingly playing out across the country as traffic deaths skyrocket.

The supremacy of fire codes

When private vehicles began to dominate American roads in the 1920s, transportation engineers believed that wider streets were safer, as they give drivers a larger margin for error. But as American cities became more car-centric, traffic accidents skyrocketed and engineers began to understand that the opposite is true: wider roads encourage drivers to go faster, leading to far more accidents, injuries, and deaths.

Studies have found that vehicles traveling more than 20 miles per hour are far more likely to kill people they hit. In fact, a pedestrian is about 70 percent more likely to die if they're hit by a vehicle going 30 mph versus 25 mph, research has found. Streets with driving lanes that are nine or 10 feet wide are significantly safer than those with 12-foot wide lanes, a major Johns Hopkins study found last year. "That is the opposite of the general belief and what has been the foundation for street design and lane-width guidelines," the researchers noted.

These discoveries, however, aren't reflected in the fire codes that govern our streets.

The vast majority of US states follow what's called the International Fire Code, updated every few years by a Texas-based nonprofit called the International Code Council. For decades, the code has called for streets to have at least 20 feet of unobstructed width. With a parking lane and sidewalks, residential streets in the US tend to be around 50 feet wide — far wider than in many other countries. In Osaka, Japan, and Paris, France, for example, the typical residential street is less than 20 feet wide.

Roads that encourage speed are part of the reason the US has far more traffic deaths than its peer countries. At the same time, US traffic fatalities far outnumber deaths from fires — while 40,000 people died on American roads last year, fewer than 3,000 people die annually in the US in residential fires, on average.

The international fire code's name is a bit of a misnomer: it's used virtually nowhere outside the US. And it differs in key ways from fire safety regulations used by other advanced countries. American fire trucks and other firefighting equipment also tend to be much bigger and less able to navigate narrow streets than their equivalents in other countries.

The fire code's dangerous results reflect a failure to understand safety holistically, experts say. "If you become overly specialized and focus only on one problem without considering at all the effect that you might be having on other problems, you can very easily do a lot of harm while trying to do good," said Patrick Siegman, a transportation planner and economist.

A growing battle

Conflict between fire officials and street designers has become increasingly common. In most cases, cities and states bend to the will of their fire departments. Indeed, many in the government are unaware of how dangerous their policies are.

"Unless you've really gotten to know the issue, planners, even transportation engineers, often don't realize the implications of the fire code for street designs and ultimately for traffic safety," Siegman said.

But in some places, road safety advocates are winning out. In Baltimore, an attempt in 2018 to amend the city's fire code to make room for bike lanes erupted in an ugly public fight that included a firefighter assaulting a city planner. But the city's code was ultimately amended.

In 2013, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors changed its interpretation of the fire code so that sidewalks, pedestrian islands, and other curbs less than six inches high weren't considered an obstruction to emergency vehicles. It's allowed the city to build wider sidewalks and more protected bike lanes, among other features to boost street safety.

San Francisco's fire department has also adapted to safer streets in another way by buying smaller fire trucks. The California city's so-called "Vision Zero truck" — a reference to the road safety policy — is a bit shorter and skinnier than its older trucks and has a smaller turning radius, which makes it far more capable of traveling down narrow, windy streets.

Not to mention that fire trucks with full fire-fighting capabilities aren't necessary in most instances. Only about 5% of the 1 million calls to fire departments nationally are fire-related, according to the National Fire Protection Association. Instead, firefighters largely respond to medical emergencies, which don't require trucks carrying 500 gallons of water.

"There are other ways to put out fires and respond to emergencies," said Andy Boenau, a transportation engineer and urbanist activist. "Do you need to send the biggest fire truck when someone's choking on a walnut?"

Dan Burden, a veteran transportation planner who served as Florida's first state bicycle and pedestrian coordinator, works with and trains fire officials on road safety issues. He said fire departments can be convinced to support safer street design if they're heavily engaged by planners. "Too often, the fire administrator is brought in too late in the process," he said.

Burden, whose father was a fire chief, believes they can find common ground.

"My dad always said, 'Dan, don't over-build for our needs, build streets for people first, and we'll figure out a way to make things happen,'" Burden said.

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On a mild Tuesday evening in early 2022, some 150 people packed into the VFW hall in Tulsa to hear the Queen of Airbnb make her pitch.

Post-pandemic, with interest rates low and travel once again booming, Airbnb listings had been popping up all over the city. For average investors, the back-of-the-napkin math was irresistible. In Tulsa, you could buy a suburban-style home for less than $75,000 and rent it out for $117 a night. If you booked three-quarters of each month — as hosts were averaging at the time — you could bring in as much as $30,000 a year.

Tulsa had the feel of a rental gold rush. And Dani Widell was the city's self-styled Queen of Airbnb.

A small-time real-estate investor turned Airbnb property manager, Widell claimed to be nearing a total of 100 listings, more than anyone else in Tulsa. Tax returns would later show that Widell Renovations was generating over $1 million in annual bookings. She was a fixture on Facebook, where she doled out advice in short-term-rental groups and offered her services to turn homes into cash machines. She promised to give properties the look of a boutique hotel, handle the guests, and ensure there were fresh sheets and plentiful supplies of toilet paper. Investors could set it and forget it.

Now, after she made her pitch at the VFW hall, attendees clamored around Widell, eager to have her manage their Airbnb rentals. "At the time, the feeling was, if you weren't already in short-term rentals, it was too late," recalled Kathy Portley, the president of the Tulsa Real Estate Investors Association, which sponsored the event.

For Widell, though, it was already too late. Within a year, her Airbnb empire had come crashing down. Hosts weren't receiving their rent. Employees weren't being paid. Creditors came knocking. Her marriage had imploded. The sudden collapse — and the web of accusations that accompanied it — offer a cautionary tale of what comes from putting too much faith in a volatile market, an untested guru, and the promise of easy money. The reign of the Airbnb Queen of Tulsa was over — and her subjects were left to pick up the pieces.

---

Airbnb was one of the great turnaround stories of the pandemic.

In the early months of 2020, as the world shut down, the company lost nearly 80% of its business, laid off 1,900 employees, and watched its valuation slip from $31 billion to $18 billion. Experts mused that the pandemic might have permanently turned travelers off from the idea of home-sharing.

Instead, as lockdowns lifted and remote work became the new normal, Americans displayed an unprecedented itch to travel — assuming it could be done at a safe distance. Many found the space and security they were after in Airbnb. When the company went public at the end of 2020, it was the biggest IPO of the year. On the first day of trading, Airbnb's stock price doubled. As bookings soared, first-time real-estate investors rushed to get in on the action, transforming residential homes into short-term rentals. Before long, 260,000 new Airbnb and Vrbo listings had been added nationwide, according to the analytics firm AirDNA.

Tulsa, a city of 400,000 long known as the "oil capital of the world," looked to be a fertile ground for Airbnb. The city, with its Art Deco downtown and spacious Craftsman bungalows, was already a destination for homebuyers in search of affordability, a lively arts scene, and easy access to outdoor activities. What's more, Tulsa was actively courting remote workers, offering $10,000 to anyone willing to relocate to the city. Savvy investors were making healthy profits buying up homes and flipping them to the sudden influx of out-of-staters.

"I was not sleeping at that time," Emily Burke, an Airbnb manager in Tulsa, said. "I was up at two, three in the morning," taking phone calls and looking over properties.

Widell placed herself at the center of the boom. A former accountant who graduated from Oklahoma State University, she exuded polish and confidence. In 2017, she graced the cover of Tulsa People magazine, showing off the Brady Heights home she shared with her husband, Will Widell, a federal public defender. They'd bought it after flipping another house up the street, and Widell had spent hundreds of hours "salvaging every bit of the original craftsmanship" while infusing it with "21st-century functionality."

Now, as the Airbnb market accelerated, a rift opened between the couple: Will, who considers himself thrifty and risk-averse, wanted to cash out and retire, while Widell was consumed by the new opportunity to grow their business. "The more difficult the thing was, the more possibility it could fail, that's where she seemed to thrive," Will said. "She wasn't going to be happy if she was doing a project that was not risky." (Widell declined to be interviewed for this story.)

Widell started channeling her house-flipping expertise into managing short-term rentals. For a fee of a few thousand dollars, she would stage an Airbnb unit in tasteful shades of beige, hang some abstract art, and install remote locks. For a 25% cut, she would handle everything from booking reservations to fielding late-night calls from guests who'd been locked out. "To someone just getting into Airbnb," Logan Haskett, one of Widell's early clients, said, "this would be a dream."

The "Queen of Airbnb" label, which started off as Widell's Airbnb account name, helped create an aura of omnipotence. "Maybe she is the Airbnb queen," Burke remembered thinking. "It just seemed like she just must be killing it."

By all appearances, Widell certainly seemed to be thriving. She took business lunches at Mahogany Prime Steakhouse, a leading Tulsa destination. She was a member of the Summit Club — "Downtown Tulsa's Only Private Social Club" — perched atop the Bank of America Center, with its panoramic views of the Arkansas River. She hobnobbed with the local elite and claimed to have more Airbnb listings than anyone else in the city. She cut her hair short and, to her husband's annoyance, swapped out her conservative style for big sunglasses and more "flamboyant" fashions.

Widell, who hadn't had much growing up, also projected an image of benevolence. She made a point of hiring people with criminal records to work in her warehouse, and she talked about buying a church that had just come on the market and turning it into a women's shelter. She was making a mark, one of Widell's early employees, Knikki Nash, recalled Widell saying.

But then investors started asking questions. And soon enough, Widell would be turning on the very people she'd promised a second chance.

---

In May 2022, three months after Widell made her pitch at the VFW, the Airbnb market in Tulsa was at its height. That month, some 50,000 golf fans descended on Tulsa for the PGA Championship, which the city was hosting. Airbnb rentals were fetching as much as $1,000 a night. That May, according to tax returns, Widell Renovations took in $166,000 from Airbnb — its best month of the year.

It wasn't just Tulsa. Across the country, the Airbnb market was saturated. Demand was still surging, but as more and more people listed their homes with the company, the average occupancy rate plunged to 55%. Burke, who was managing 25 properties, sensed the market might be overheating. She decided to hold off on taking any new listings. "Tulsa jumped from like 600 to 1,500 listings in a very short time period," she said. "I just wanted to see how things kind of would shake out."

Widell, in contrast, showed no signs of slowing down — even as the money from Airbnb rentals dried up.

Investors began to complain that Widell was passing along lower earnings than they had expected. When pressed, Widell would blame the drop in revenue on unexpected cleaning costs or say that a guest had suddenly switched to a different rental.

But some investors grew suspicious. Mallory Massey, a local real-estate investor, had handed nine of her properties over to Widell in fall 2021 to list as Airbnbs. The largest, a five-bedroom home, was advertised at $249 per night. Then, Massey began to notice that reservations were mysteriously disappearing from her Airbnb hosting calendar. She started looking at the logs of messages between Widell and prospective renters — and was startled by what she found. Widell was offering "upgrades" to other properties, effectively steering renters away from Massey's units to other Airbnbs she managed, according to a lawsuit Massey filed in 2022. Massey has filed to put a lien on 11 of Widell's properties to recoup her losses in case they are sold.

"I don't trust the words that come out of her mouth," one investor's wife warned. "She tries to hype things up too much."

Another investor, David Brunson, started working with Widell in July 2022. He recalled being impressed by her enthusiasm and her experience. His wife, however, was more skeptical. "I don't trust the words that come out of her mouth," she told him. "She tries to hype things up too much."

But the promise of an easy source of passive income was too good to pass up. Brunson started by listing one of his properties, a two-bedroom home, with Widell. Then one night, he noticed that a three-week booking, totaling $2,200, had disappeared from his hosting calendar. After he and Widell argued over who was to blame for the cancellation, he withdrew his listing with her.

Other investors were also complaining that Widell was shortchanging them. Renee Brummett, who worked with Widell in the early days as head of housekeeping, had risen to serve as her right hand. In 2022, she started getting alarmed calls from investors. "We've had an Airbnb for two months, and Dani hasn't paid us anything," Brummett recalled them saying. "She's keeping our money. Or she says we owe her money."

According to those familiar with the business, Widell seemed to be shifting her focus away from Airbnb rentals to the house-staging business. She spent lavishly on furniture, filling her warehouse with expensive pieces. "The spending became excessive," Brummett said. "That was just the beginning of the end for her."

Then, in December 2022, staff confronted Widell. They, like the Airbnb hosts she managed, weren't getting paid. Unsatisfied with Widell's response, some quit on the spot. The following day, two employees doorstepped Widell at one of her properties. During the encounter, which was captured by security cameras, she offered a very different spin on why she had hired so many employees with criminal records.

"I can use the legal system to my advantage," Widell crowed. "Do you know how many people work here that don't want to go back to prison or jail? Fuck all of them."

---

As her reign unraveled, the Queen of Airbnb took measures to shore up her floundering business. Widell reached out to Nash, the former employee who had gone to work for a rival Airbnb manager, and offered her an all-encompassing role as operations manager. After checking Widell's Instagram account, Nash agreed.

"Everything looked all right, because Dani was just throwing money around," Nash said. "If you looked at Dani online, she's traveling and she's buying things and she's paying for advertisements. Everything looks on the up and up. It looked like she was trying to make this church thing happen with the women's shelter. It looked like she was trying to get everybody paid."

But when Nash showed up at the warehouse, she was taken aback. Employees were lounging around and smoking marijuana. The master spreadsheet for staging jobs hadn't been updated in weeks, and it was missing names and contact details for clients. Widell's behavior, meanwhile, struck Nash as increasingly erratic. She seemed preoccupied with renewing her vows with her husband, Will, rather than tending to the business. Nash couldn't understand where all the money from short-term rentals had gone, at a time when many Airbnb managers were still reporting strong profits. "I don't see how you're not making good money off Airbnb," she told Widell.

It didn't take long to get an answer. On February 3, Widell's husband filed for divorce.

Over the past six months, Will claimed in his filing, Widell had taken out $500,000 in loans and had racked up $350,000 in credit-card debt, much of it without his knowledge. A few days later, as Nash was staging a three-bedroom ranch home on a quiet street in Tulsa, she got an urgent call from the warehouse: Will was there, carting away documents. Widell had left Tulsa in a brand new Land Rover. As she'd tell Nash, she was "driving off into the sunset."

"There is no more business," Will told Nash when she got him on the phone. "She has squandered every penny."

The marriage had been souring since the previous fall. Widell seemed to be working constantly. "She would tell me, 'I don't need to sleep anymore. I just feel so much energy all the time. I just want to work,'" Will recalled. In January, Will cosigned a $100,000 loan against their property on the condition that Widell start coming home in time for dinner and agree to see a mental-health professional.

Eventually, multiple people would claim that Widell had taken out credit cards in their names and run up bills, some as much as $6,000. Brummet says her boss even took out a card in the name of Brummet's daughter, who had died a year earlier.

Widell "had gotten herself into a lot of trouble," Brummett said. "By December, a lot of owners were very unhappy. By January, there were threats of lawsuits. And by February, she had fled the state."

In the days after Widell left Tulsa, Nash got an urgent message from an Airbnb tenant who had stepped into the February chill to accept a DoorDash order — only to find herself unable to reenter the house. The unit's remote locks, it turned out, had been changed for nonpayment. Widell, it appeared, had taken the money and run.

---

The spectacular downfall of Tulsa's go-to savant for short-term rentals didn't dampen the city's passion for Airbnb. Widell's investors found new property managers. Her employees found other work, in some cases with Widell's old rivals. Today, her "Tulsa Airbnb Group" on Facebook remains active, with some 1,000 members.

But what happened with Widell sounded an alarm. "I don't think it gives the industry a good name," Burke said. "I remember speaking with a contact at the city who said, 'You know, it's unfortunate, because sometimes there's just, like, one or two people that are ruining it for everyone else.'"

Airbnb's cycle of boom and bust has also scared off some "naive, first-time operators," Meagan McCollum, a professor of real-estate finance at the University of Tulsa, said. "You hear stories about people who had a tough time with it, instead of just hearing the success stories when the market was hot. As those stories permeate, that definitely gives people pause."

Experts who watch the national market for short-term rentals now believe that the COVID-era boom was a once-in-a-lifetime event. "We don't expect that short-term rentals will ever see occupancies that high again, barring another pandemic," said Bram Gallagher, an economist at AirDNA, which tracks the performance and pricing of 10 million vacation rentals. Nationally, revenues per listing dropped by 6.6% last year, and the market is settling into a more stable equilibrium — one that won't be as lucrative as the market that emerged during a historic anomaly. But that won't stop people from trying to turn their property into a side hustle.

"It's so interesting, the whole pandemic, you know, what it revealed about human nature," Gallagher said. "I guess it's human nature to sort of capitalize on that."

As for Widell, she has failed to appear in court multiple times — or even explain what happened. In February and again in March, she showed up at the building where her husband and Brummett lived, and, according to Brummett, harassed them with a gun. Both have obtained restraining orders against her.

Those who believed in Widell, meanwhile, wound up paying a steep price for their faith in her. Nash, who said Widell owes her $8,200 in back pay, narrowly avoided being evicted from her home. "I felt sad about it," Nash said. "I made it through a hard time, so I guess I'll have to figure it out some other way."

Nash has picked up some work managing Airbnbs for other companies, but it wasn't enough to pay the bills. She was evicted by her landlord for falling behind on rent and moved out of her apartment with her 16-year-old son and her 7-year-old grandson. The only living arrangement they could find was in midtown — a 16-minute drive from where the kids went to school.

It was a two-bedroom Airbnb.

---

Dan Latu is a reporter on Business Insider's Real Estate team.

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• The government signed four million new contracts in 2023 and there are many ways to enter the field.
• Some large companies regularly sign contracts with the government and many roles require clearances.
• You can also bid on your own contracts and make deals directly with the government. 

The US is the nation's largest employer, according to the Department of Labor — and it needs a lot of goods and services. From supplying employees with basic needs like toilet paper to renovating government buildings or supplying weapons to the military.

The government can't do everything itself, so it hires contractors to help out. This lets the government tackle specific jobs and projects quickly without all the steps of regular government hiring and bureaucratic obstacles.

The White House has said that the US government signs 4 million new contracts and orders each year.

While pay is sometimes considered a drawback of public sector work, government contracting opportunities can offer better pay than federal roles, while still providing stability and other perks like flexible scheduling.

Even though the industry is vast and the pathway to enter isn't always clear, there's a lot of opportunity in the field. The federal government awarded about $765 billion in contracts in 2023, according to government market intelligence platform HigherGov.

To help make sense of the complex field, BI spoke to recruiters and individual contractors about how the system works and best practices to enter the field. We broke it down below to demystify the process.

You can work for a larger government contracting company

There are a wide range of large government contracting companies that the government regularly makes deals with.

Defense contractors are a good example of some of the biggest players in the space who secure massive government contracts regularly, such as Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, and Northrop Grumman. These are public companies that also sign contracts with the government.

There are also smaller to midsize companies that help serve the government's needs directly, such as helping with development and policy work in other countries.

Opportunities in tech and data are especially in demand. The Judge Group, a recruiting agency, told BI it has seen a 15% increase in opportunities in government aerospace and defense positions over the last couple of years.

Many government contractor roles require some level of clearance, which costs money and can take time to attain. Some of the larger companies may sponsor your clearance, though, so it can be a good place to secure a first job, according to Lauren Irizarry, a senior talent acquisition partner at A2 Federal.

Many companies favor those who have worked in the military or at a government agency previously, but you can still get a job without that background if you have the skills and clearances needed.

You can find many of these opportunities on Clearancejobs.com, a platform for jobs with security clearance. Even if you don't have a clearance, the site has thousands of jobs listed, contact info for recruiters, and a career fair page with upcoming events to meet employers.

If you're breaking into the field, you may want to browse through positions you're interested in and see what kind of clearance they require before applying.

While these opportunities are sometimes difficult to find, once you have experience under your belt it's easier to find work.

John Breth, 40, worked in government contracting roles for 12 years before starting his own contracting company. He said the perk to working for a large company is there are often other contracts that you can transition to when you finish the project you're working on.

You can establish your own contracting business

If you're interested in selling services to the government, you can start by registering your entity or getting a unique entity ID at Sam.Gov. To get a sense of available opportunities, you can search for different needs or supplies in "contract opportunities," which lists notices from federal contracting offices.

Once you find an opportunity, the next step is to bid on the contract. This involves submitting a proposal that outlines how you plan to meet the government's needs.

If awarded the contract, you have to meet specific requirements set by the government, which may involve getting clearances or certifications.

Kevin Jennings has been in the business for 15 years. He started out providing the government with commodities like toner ink, pencils, office furniture, and medical supplies. Once he got his foot in the door, he moved to construction.

"I could make as much money as I wanted to make or as little as I wanted to make," Jennings said. "I could find projects that fit what I wanted to do at the time."

He said he chose government contracting over private sector work because the government is consistent and pays on time.

The US Small Business Administration also has a small business program that reserves 23% of prime government contracts for small businesses. This may give some business owners an advantage in selling goods and services over other industries.

While some people manage the whole process themselves, others work solely in the bidding process. There are many different roles and nuances within the field, and you can go to sba.gov to learn more and receive free training online.

There's value in understanding the industry

The US government has client-contractor relationships like many other industries, but with government contracting, the client is the government. This brings unique requirements to the deals and complexities of getting paid.

You can explore help topics on Sam.gov or browse through different posts on FindRFP to find out more information about the industry at large.

If you research a specific sector, you'll have a better sense of the industry-specific requirements, pay scales, and other distinctions that add layers of complexity to the career path. Once you understand the landscape better, you'll be able to recognize which jobs you qualify for and define your path forward.

Are you a government contractor with an interesting story to share? Reach out to the reporter from a non-work device and email at aaltchek@businessinsider.com.

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• Amazon's packaging has been getting more efficient in recent years, thanks to AI.
• The e-commerce giant built an AI model that interprets pictures and text to choose the best shipping materials.
• The tool is key in helping the company cut out 2 million tons of plastic and cardboard since 2015.

While most of the tech world is focused on shiny new generative AI tools, Amazon has been chipping away at an ongoing challenge posed by modern consumerism: the proliferation of shipping materials.

For several years now, the e-commerce giant has been developing what it describes as a "multimodal AI model" called the Package Decision Engine.

The PDE's job is to do a smarter job of selecting the right box, bag, or wrapper for each of the millions of unique items sold through the company's warehouses.

Amazon's earlier packing strategy — chosen by humans and less intelligent computers — was frequently a source of confusion for customers and ridicule toward the company. Frequent Amazon shoppers have almost certainly received a shipment with a single small item in a comically large box.

Now, instead of humans doing physical tests, the company says products are sent through a computer vision tunnel that gathers dimensions and particular features (like whether it has fragile parts or already resides in a box).

Those images are then matched with a natural language processing of text-based description of the product, plus other quantitative data to match the item with its ideal shipping solution.

While there are some unexpected reasons for why larger packaging is in fact a smart choice, Amazon says it is committed to reducing the amount of cardboard it uses as part of its sustainability pledges.

It makes business sense too: when sending billions of parcels, taking even a little bit from each one can add up to some staggeringly large numbers.

The company estimates using correctly sized boxes, switching to softer mailers, or skipping packaging altogether now saves 60,000 tons of cardboard per year in North America alone.

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• Benedetto Vigna has been Ferrari's CEO since 2021, overseeing the company's transition to EVs.
• His background is in tech, with previous experience as an executive at a semiconductor company.
• Vigna likes the nimbleness of tech startups and removed layers of bureaucracy at Ferrari, per WSJ.

Ferrari's CEO would prefer if the company moved fast like its cars.

Since he assumed his chief executive role in 2021, Benedetto Vigna introduced changes to Ferrari so the more than 80-year-old company could move with the speed of a tech startup as it ventured into the competitive space of electric vehicles.

To do so, Vigna stripped away layers of bureaucracy, creating a flatter hierarchy inside the company, The Wall Street Journal reported — a move other CEOs have been exploring to improve a company's performance or ability to innovate.

Previously, there were six levels of employees between the CEO and test drivers, for example. Now, there are three.

"When the environmental condition is changing at high speed, you need to have a team that is able to adapt at high speed," Vigna told the Journal.

Vigna's leadership approach stems from his long background in tech, according to the outlet.

A trained physicist, Vigna previously spent about 25 years at STMicroelectronics, a semiconductor company, where he started as an engineer and later became an executive, according to a press release from Ferrari.

At Ferrari, Vigna saw what he called a high "bureaucratic mass index," where employees were too far removed from the CEO, the Journal reported.

Vigna has previously expressed his desire for Ferrari to work faster and with less corporate bloat.

In a 2023 interview with Bloomberg, Vigna said he believed that companies work more efficiently through smaller teams.

"In a big team you feel like a number," he told Bloomberg. "In a small team, you are a person that's contributing one way or another. Also, the speed of learning from mistakes is much faster."

So far, Wall Street has responded well to Vigna's arrival.

According to the Journal, the company stock price has nearly doubled since Vigna took control of the company.

Ferrari also plans to roll out its first electric car by the end of 2025.

A spokesperson for Ferrari did not immediately respond to a request for comment sent during the weekend.

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• Donald Trump said on Truth Social that absentee and early votes are "good options" for Republicans.
• The reversal comes after years of Trump sowing doubt in the voting system, arguing it's rife with fraud.
• The new stance, while unlikely to stick, won't reverse the damage he's done, a political scientist told BI.

Donald Trump has inexplicably flip-flopped from his years of previous remarks disparaging the voting system and is now supporting absentee and early voting.

"Absentee voting, early voting, and election day voting are all good options," the former president wrote on Truth Social on Friday afternoon. "Republicans must make a plan, register, and vote!"

Representatives for Trump responded to a request for comment from Business Insider, saying his Friday statement "speaks for itself," and declined to answer further questions.

The latest remarks split decisively from the rhetoric Trump has espoused over the better part of the last decade, in which he has repeatedly claimed the voting system is rigged and rife with fraud. The former president has even backed lawsuits trying to end the practice of mail-in voting in seven states.

While "vote-by-mail" and "absentee voting" are phrases often used interchangeably, there are minor differences in the procedures for each system. Most states that allow absentee voting require voters to request a ballot ahead of the election, with some requiring a reason they will be unable to vote in person on election day, while states with vote-by-mail systems proactively mail out ballots to registered voters.

Only eight states allow all elections to be conducted entirely by vote-by-mail systems. Both absentee and vote-by-mail systems allow voters to mail their ballots through the US Post Office.

Trump has previously targeted "mail-in ballots," claiming their widespread use in 2020 would lead to "the most RIGGED Election in our nations history," The Los Angeles Times reported.

Special Counsel Jack Smith, in his effort to prove Trump attempted to illegally overturn the 2020 election results, has pointed to social media posts as far back as 2012 — in which Trump claimed without evidence that voting machines switched ballots cast for candidate Mitt Romney to votes for then-candidate Barack Obama — as proof Trump has intentionally "sowed mistrust in the results of the presidential election" for years.

Nicholas Grossman, an assistant professor of Political Science at the University of Illinois, told Business Insider it's unlikely Trump will maintain his newfound position supporting absentee and early voting. He added that the Truth Social post sounds like a statement a GOP official or campaign staffer would encourage Trump to post to drum up enthusiasm for the coming election.

CNN reported that ranking Republicans have recently embraced early and mail-in voting — and Trump may be following suit in an attempt to have the strongest turnout during this year's election.

But even if Trump suddenly had a change of heart, Grossman said, it would be too late to reverse the damage he has done by sowing doubt in the electoral system. Trump's most stringent supporters, Grossman noted, aren't likely to suddenly have faith in our electoral procedures just because Trump changed his messaging on the topic a few months ahead of the election.

"Because the conspiracy theories have flourished in part from Trump, but also from a whole lot of media for the last decade or so, that damage is, to some extent, permanent," Grossman told Business Insider. "And even despite this latest statement, he's still casting doubt on the election in general. That's been his rhetoric for years at this point — trying to undermine democracy and especially undermine American's faith in the democratic system."

"If Trump loses, he's going to lie about it like he did in 2020. And if he wins, he will probably still lie about it — like he did in 2016 when he claimed millions of people voted illegally in California, and claiming he actually won California," Grossman added, "Even winning the election, he couldn't help himself with lying like that, so I expect that he will again."

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