I’m unemployed. My workload yesterday consisted of one YouTube exercise video, three episodes of an awful Netflix series, and the submission of one freelance invoice for $50. When I was laid off from my full-time job three months ago, I never could’ve imagined that these months would sweep by in a swift procession of days, coming and going without many job leads.

When you’re unemployed, an urgent sense of anxiety can cut through your daily 2 p.m. Netflix binge like a hot knife through butter. “Funemployment” stops being fun a month or so in, depending on your resources. So when, after applying for over 100 jobs, I finally received a message from a recruiter working with a startup just a few miles away from my apartment in Philadelphia, I jumped at the opportunity. It didn’t matter that I had never applied for the position in the first place. In fact, it felt good to be sought after.

Related:I Built A Bot To Apply To Thousands Of Jobs At Once—Here’s What I Learned

When you’re on top—you have a steady job, you know the date of your next paycheck, and you’re just passively shopping around for opportunities—one or two red flags will likely halt you in your tracks. But when you’re out of work, you’re tempted to flick these flags away in the hopes that they don’t reflect reality; you’re a desperate optimist, at least until you can’t be any longer.

Here are a couple of red flags I was almost able to overlook as an unemployed job seeker—and one very, very big one that I just couldn’t.

1. No Reputation To Speak Of

It didn’t matter that in a decade of living in Philly, I’d never heard of the company that had reached out to me, or its local founder. It didn’t matter that he was a guy who, as LinkedIn revealed, had held only a few internships before designating himself CEO. A quick internet search didn’t give me any real insight into how successful this company was or wasn’t, but I chalked up a lack of press or web presence as a result of being a startup. I even kind of convinced myself that no news was good news—that it was an opportunity for me, a potential marketing coordinator, to help build the company’s online footprint.

2. Salary Squeamishness

During my first in-person meeting with the business development director, I asked the standard interview questions. They were all answered sufficiently, except for my last one—about salary range. Now, some career coaches will tell you it’s déclassé or even dangerously premature to talk money on a job interview, and surely for some gigs, it is. But because this was a startup, where standard protocols didn’t seem etched in stone, and because the pay range and the position’s relative seniority had neither come up in the interview nor appeared in the job listing, I ventured to ask about it.

“We usually save that conversation for the second interview,” the man across the table in a stiff suit told me—and left it at that. No “we’re interested in offering competitive compensation” or even “we’re thinking of this role as a senior position.” He just quickly shifted the conversation to something else. I thought that was a little weird, but figured it couldn’t hurt to move forward for now. The office was literally a few blocks from my apartment, and my Netflix queue could wait.

Related: What I Learned From My Nightmare Job Interview 

To be honest, I was actually embarrassed: Maybe I had popped the question too early? I wondered whether it was appropriate for me, the unemployed candidate, to be so forward about my salary needs early on in the interview process. But if you, like me, feel awkward about asking for money, know this: It’s a good question. It’s why you’re sitting here. If you ask me, it’s important to be clear with your needs from the start. And usually, when there are no other red flags in the way, hiring managers will at least allude—even in general terms—to a salary range in the initial job description, the first phone screener or, if nothing else, the first in-person interview. At a minimum, they shouldn’t appear put off by the polite insinuation that the getting-paid part of the opportunity matters to you.

3. A Free Trial Period

I counted my red flags. So far, I had a few. But after convincing myself that they were really more of a pale pink than a crimson, I imagined I could wave them away after a clear conversation with the CEO. The following week, I had my chance.

About an hour into our interview, he tells me point-blank that he definitely sees me fitting in with his team. Great. He says he thinks I might be a fit for more of a senior role than we’d originally discussed. Even greater. And then, as if a lightbulb had just gone off in his head, he remarks, “You’re not working now, right? Why don’t you come in for two days next week and we’ll start you on a project to see how you work with the team.”

He says that a trial period, in order to gauge my management style, should prove whether or not I’m the right woman for the job. When I ask if these two full days—approximately 18 hours of work—would be compensated, he quietly mouths the word, “No.”

With this final flag, I’m seeing red. I quickly reply that I’m not comfortable working for free, and his response comes uncomfortably quicker. He thanks me for being honest and asks if I have any more questions. With this, I realize, he’s cutting the interview short.

Still, I do have one more question, and I figure I no longer have anything to lose by asking it: I inquire once more about that salary range. He tells me that isn’t something he’s willing to discuss until there’s an offer on the table. The flag flutters to the ground.

In retrospect, it was useful to see the intern CEO tear off his nicety mask after telling him that, as a 30-year-old professional with over seven years’ experience, I wouldn’t work for free—and therefore probably shouldn’t work for this company at all. I got up, thanked him for his time, walked out—and wrote a scathing Glassdoor review. Because sometimes when you’re unemployed and don’t have much leverage, that’s all you can really do to feel empowered during a tough job search.

That, and realize that despite filling your days with junky TV, your time is still valuable—dollars and cents valuable. And any company that doesn’t understand or respect that isn’t worth another minute of it.

Nikki Volpicelli is a freelance writer based in Philadelphia. Her writing has been featured in Teen Vogue, Nylon magazine, Noisey, Paste magazine, and Consequence of Sound.

At its Build developer conference in Seattle Thursday, Microsoft said it will be bringing a whole new batch of features to Windows 10 next fall in the form of a “Fall Creators Update.” These will include new app experiences that can flow from a Windows 10 device over to devices with different operating systems (Android or iOS)–a striking shift from the era when Microsoft aimed to kill other mobile operating systems rather than work with them. Microsoft defines the Microsoft Graph as “an intelligent fabric that helps connect dots between people, conversations, projects, and content within the Microsoft cloud.” A theme in the new updates is that this fabric must stretch across the Windows, iOS, and Android device platforms. Windows 10 will be getting a visual “Timeline” that shows users what they were working on at different times in the past. They can then recall documents, sites, and apps to continue their work. The Cortana assistant in Windows 10 will let users start working on one doc in Windows, then continue working on the doc on an iOS or Android mobile device. Cortana will ask the user if she wants to pick up where she left off in an app, doc, or website. A new cloud-connected clipboard lets users copy and paste things like photos, map links, paragraphs of text, animated gifs, and other elements from a PC running Windows 10 to a mobile phone running iOS or Android, using Microsoft’s SwiftKey keyboard as middleware technology. OneDrive Files on Demand lets users access all their files from the cloud rather than having them all taking up valuable storage space on a device. If users want to have a file ready for offline use, they can just download it to the device before going offline. All files, those stored in the cloud or on the device, can be seen in File Explorer, Microsoft says. Developers can use Microsoft’s Fluent Design System to create apps that support these cross-platform experiences. Also, a new Windows 10 app called Windows Story Remix will use the Microsoft graph to organize photos and videos. Actually, the app brings photos and videos together to create stories with a soundtrack, theme, and cinematic transitions, Microsoft says. The company says users will be able to create mixed reality effects by adding 3D objects that move naturally with photos and videos. Microsoft says more than 300 million people are using Windows 10 every day for more than 3.5 hours a day on average.

So your performance review didn’t quite go as expected, and now you’re getting a bad feeling that you might be on the chopping block. While your mind jumps to conclusions about heading straight to the front of the unemployment line, there are more options than just accepting the writing on the wall.

Here are some strategies for saving your job and using criticism to help shape you into a worker whose presence can hugely benefit the company.

1. You’re Slacking On The Job

We’re all guilty of over-promising and under-delivering on occasion, but you’re likely aware of the difference between that and straight-up slacking. This probably comes as no surprise, but poor job performance is one of the top reasons employees are fired.

Related:These 4 Hobbies Can Actually Improve Your Performance 

It seems so obvious, yet your smartphone, the internet, and social media all make it so easy to fall prey to distraction. But trust me, spending too much of the workday on social media isn’t likely to help you rack up any “likes” from your colleagues or supervisors in the near future.

How to turn it around: The worst thing about slacking is that you inevitably build a reputation of being lazy. And once you’ve earned the label, it can be hard to shake off. Hopefully, though, the fear that you might potentially lose your job will be enough to inspire change.

First you need to identify the root of the problem. Is it really just those pesky distractions like social media that are disrupting your workflow, or does it go deeper? Low motivation to complete certain tasks or duties can be a major issue and can hold you back from being successful even as you exceed expectations in other areas of the job.

Figure out what responsibilities you’re having a hard time meeting, and then devise a plan to help keep you on track for getting your work done (these questions can help you get started on that). It could be something as simple as reversing your order of operations so you do the work you like least when you’re feeling most productive.

You can’t change hearts and minds overnight, but if you find a consistent work groove that helps you deliver real results, eventually your slacker reputation (and that rumor you might be let go) will begin to fade.

2. You Failed To Deliver An Important Project On Time

Your Wi-Fi went out, you got in a huge fight with your significant other, Starbucks botched your morning coffee, and so on. Whatever the reason, little things in life can add up and keep us from getting our work done.

When you miss a deadline, it’s easy to get ahead of yourself, panic and think your professional life is over (if you do, that’s good—it means you care). We don’t always hit our mark, and that’s OK sometimes. But lose sight of too many due dates and you’ll find yourself in the hot seat in a jiffy.

How to turn it around: First and foremost, take responsibility when you miss a deadline. Let your manager know that you understand the business impact when you don’t deliver your work on time, and then lay out a solution to prevent it from happening again. Come up with a plan to help you snag some quick, easy wins before you start developing a reputation around the office for missing deadlines.

And definitely don’t point the finger at anyone else. If there’s one thing employers like less than someone who is unreliable, it’s someone who doesn’t take accountability for their actions (or in this case, lack thereof). Plus, throwing your coworkers under the bus makes you generally unpleasant to work with and is way more likely to get you fired than any individual missed deadline.

3. You Got Into An Argument With An Unruly Client

You give them special attention, make eleventh hour revisions per their request, and take “urgent” weekend calls on the reg—but no matter how much effort and time you sink into their business, you just can’t seem to make them happy. Maybe they’re even threatening to take their business elsewhere. If you’ve worked with a difficult client before, this situation probably sounds all too familiar.

When tired and stressed, your natural human instinct is to bounce into action, stand up, and fight for your work. But no matter how in the right you might be, you aren’t likely to win an argument with a customer—and now your little outburst has your client reaching out to your higher-ups threatening to pull their business.

How to turn it around: The first thing you should do is ask yourself how big of a screwup this was. Talk to your teammates honestly about what happened. Get an opinion you can trust on whether you were crossing the line or just sticking up for your team. Next, look to assess the business impact. Was this client simply one of hundreds, or a quarter of your company’s revenue?

Finally, come up with a strategy to explain it to you boss. Share your side of the story and any relevant facts to back up your case, but most importantly tell the truth. You were brought on board for a reason, and your manager will respect you candor—even if you just lost a big chunk of business.

4. You Got Caught Spreading Company Gossip

Every office has its gossip (and a group of workers who’ve gained a reputation for spreading it around). Knowing the perils, you tried to steer clear of that crew. But despite your initial best efforts to avoid it, you somehow got wind of an unflattering secret about a colleague.

Word got out about the rumor and who spread it, and now the entire company (not to mention your boss) thinks you are the source of all the gossip. Forget that opportunity for a promotion next month, now you’re just worried about holding onto the job have.

How to turn it around: The most difficult part about bouncing back after being outed as an office gossiper is regaining the trust of your peers and supervisors. Many managers view this kind of talk as poisoning the company culture, and might now see you as a potential liability.

Whether this was your first time or you’re a routine offender, once you’ve been caught you’ll probably only going to get one chance to change before your boss starts looking for your replacement (and if the rumor was really malicious, you may not even get that).

Related:What You Should Do After Getting Fired 

More than just holding onto a job here, it’s important to be an actual good person and offer a sincere apology to the subject of the gossip (especially if it’s embarrassing). You also definitely want to have a conversation with your supervisor to explain that you understand the severity of this type of behavior and make it clear that it won’t happen again.

The best way to keep to keep yourself off the unemployment list is to avoid falling behind in the first place (or getting caught up in an unfortunate interpersonal issue). Be proactive about your work before your get that poor performance review. But once you’ve gotten some candid feedback on where you stand, you can still turn things around by taking it to heart and communicating with your manager about where to go from here.

After all, if they really wanted you out then you’d already be gone. If they’re still bringing you in on company meetings, assigning you new responsibilities, and giving you coaching—then they see your value and want you to step up to the plate and succeed.

This article originally appeared on The Daily Muse and is reprinted with permission. 

More From The Muse:

• The Hard Conversation You Need To Prep For If Your Job’s On The Line
• 5 Common Reasons People Get Fired (And How To Easily Avoid Them)
• 4 Signs You Might Get Fired (And 4 Signs You’re Just Being Paranoid)

Ah, young love. So new, so exciting, so completely changed by modern technology. Here, an ad for Mexican mobile company Movistar serves up a typically sweet tale of a boy and girl, meeting over social media, and flirting until it’s time to take things to the next level IRL. And that’s when the story gets really creative. Watch it before reading further.

DAAAAAMN. The ad, created by Y&R Mexico, is now one every parent will want their kid to see, because social media is everywhere and those two old dudes are so, so, so creepy. Set to Flora Cash’s “You’re Somebody Else,” we’re all lulled into expecting a feel-good story that romanticizes the emotional potential of mobile tech. Instead we got a stark warning and severe case of the heebie-jeebies. The spot ends with, “150 million fake profiles live on social media. Not everyone is who you think they are.”

Creepy as all hell, but effective. The spot has already been viewed almost 10 million times. Director Andrew Lang told Adweek that the brand and agency gave him complete creative freedom. “We made the film with Movistar in mind, but we didn’t tell them about its existence until the edit was complete. There was no treatment and no PPMs. From a director’s perspective, it was a much better way to work than the one we’re all used to.”

Following retrospectives on the Rolling Stones in 2015 and David Bowie in 2013, London’s esteemed Victoria and Albert Museum is now hosting “The Pink Floyd Exhibition: Their Mortal Remains.” Opening May 13, the show spans the British psychedelic-prog-rock band’s entire career, beginning in London’s underground music venues in the late 1960s and snaking all the way to their last performance at Live 8 in 2005. The exhibit is an intricately curated gift to fans, packed with video interviews, live recordings, and treasures from the members’ own archives. But as much as it celebrates the past, it also embraces the future.

“Their Mortal Remains” is an overview of 50 years of music at the bleeding edge of technology. When Pink Floyd started out, the concept of recording music in stereo was a relatively new idea. Some of the first attempts took place at Abbey Road Studios a few decades before Pink Floyd first laid down tracks there in 1967. (That same year, the Beatles recorded Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in mono, which they preferred.) From the original Abbey Road recording console sitting in the lobby of the V&A museum to the immersive 3D audio that fills the exhibit’s final room, “Their Mortal Remains” spans quite a bit of music tech history.

Explanatory text printed on the wall guides your visit through the galleries—as does, of course, music. A soundtrack of well-known songs, live tracks, and interview clips plays through Sennheiser headphones. As you walk through the rooms, the audio goes with you, cueing up the right tracks no matter how circuitous your route (it’s all thanks to short-field radio frequency technology controlled by overhead sensors and a gadget you wear around your neck). Bored by the band’s middle period? Just keep walking. The whole experience is a bit like strolling through a documentary film that has come to life—with your feet as the fast-forward and rewind buttons.

Pink Floyd was known for using technology to its fullest, pushing the limits of studios and gear. “Their Mortal Remains” captures this deftly, showcasing recording equipment used for experimental tape loops and other audio tricks; vintage electronic synthesizers; and many of lead guitarist David Gilmour’s effects pedals. Today, such pedals are a staple for any guitarist, but in the early 1970s, Gilmour’s layered guitar tone and sound-bending were rare in popular music—one of several Pink Floyd innovations that have since been widely mimicked. Gadgets like Roger Waters’s Binson Echorec 2, known among music gear heads for the echo it added to his bass guitar, is on prominent display throughout the exhibit. Inside one glass case, you’ll find keyboard player Richard Wright’s Minimoog, Prophet-5, and other classic synthesizers rarely seen outside high-priced eBay auctions. The exhibit also includes the band’s custom-built quadrophonic speaker system, which was used to push the sonic limits of their live performances.

In the final room, a psychedelic video of the band performing the 1979 song “Comfortably Numb” at Live 8 in 2005 is enhanced with 3D audio in Sennheiser’s 9.1 channel Ambeo format. The Ambeo mix, which is required to achieve the format’s three-dimensional, surround-sound-esque effect, was created in collaboration with Sennheiser and Pink Floyd recording engineer Andy Jackson at Abbey Road Studios.

“With Ambeo, we try to create situations where there’s no difference between being there or not. If you close your eyes, your perception tells you its real,” says Daniel Sennheiser, who co-runs the German speaker and audio company with his brother Andreas. Participating in the exhibition, Sennheiser says, was a natural progression; Pink Floyd, the Beatles, and other bands used microphones manufactured by Sennheiser subsidiary Neumann at Abbey Road. A few can be seen among the vintage audio gear included in the exhibit.

The finished mix of “Comfortably Numb”—with 17 channels of audio, compared to just two channels on a standard stereo mix—is piped into the final room through 25 speakers, creating a near-perfect approximation of live music. If it’s recorded—or in this case, remixed—in an Ambeo-friendly fashion, a song can fill a much wider soundstage than stereo or traditional surround sound, with each instrument and track layer standing out in much finer detail than had previously been possible. Like Dolby’s Atmos standard and the DTS:X sound technology, Ambeo promises to push audio a step beyond the traditional 5.1 surround sound format.

This type of audio is frequently paired with virtual and augmented reality experiences, an area of growing interest in the music industry. But “Their Mortal Remains”—like the Rolling Stones and David Bowie exhibits—offers a glimpse into how the technology might be used outside of still-maturing VR platforms. “I think it is how we will consume audio in the future,” Sennheiser says.

Maybe, maybe not, but judging by the slack-jawed, sometimes tearful responses from people who attended the Pink Floyd preview this week, this likely isn’t the last we hear of 3D audio.

“Pink Floyd: Their Mortal Remains” opens at the Victoria and Albert Museum on May 13 and runs through October 2017. It is expected to tour other cities.

When the oceanographer Charles Moore first discovered the Great Pacific Garbage Patch–an area of the ocean where currents concentrate the plastic we throw into the ocean–in 1997, he was shocked by its magnitude and persistence. “It seemed unbelievable, but I never found a clear spot,” he wrote later in Natural History magazine. “In the week it took to cross the subtropical high, no matter what time of day I looked, plastic debris was floating everywhere: bottles, bottle caps, wrappers, fragments.” In the years since the plastic buildup has only worsened. In a recent article in the New York Times, Moore reported that the Patch, through a process of accretion, now contains “solid areas you could walk on.”

It’s, therefore, good news that a massive cleansing project is proceeding ahead of schedule. Boyan Slat, who first set out a vision of his Ocean Cleanup machine in a TED talk six years ago when he was just 17, today announced that he’ll begin hauling trash from the Patch in 2018. The news is vindication for the project, which has received plenty of TED-sized hype and millions of dollars in philanthropy, but which has also been criticized by some campaigners who say it’s sucked up resources and raised expectations to impossible-to-achieve levels.

Slat’s design involves massive booms that collect trash using the Pacific’s own currents. The booms act as an “artificial coastline” passively catching and then concentrating debris into the center, from where it’s offloaded to a boat that sweeps by periodically (probably once a month). The “breakthrough” is that Slat no longer thinks that the booms need to be grounded to the ocean floor. Rather, he plans to suspend the booms with large anchors that float in deeper water, so the booms shift around the ocean, though still more slowly than the trash at the surface. Research showed that tidal speeds are more than four times slower at depths a few hundred feet below and that the difference is sufficient to still get the accumulating effects that Slat envisaged with a fixed boom.

The anchors will be suspended on lines in four segments, each 40 feet tall and 13 feet wide. They have a total surface area of 328 feet square, enough to provide plenty of drag to slow down the booms as plastic trash circulates around the “gyre”–a swirling trash vortex within the Garbage Patch.

Using a floating system has advantages in both cost and time, Slat says. The team no longer has to dig foundations at up to 2.8 miles deep and it can skip a prototyping stage. “We thought ‘wait a minute, instead of fixing it to the seabed, we can fix it in that deep-water layer,” Slat says in an interview from his Delft base, in the Netherlands. “The massive sea anchor slows down the system so it travels slower than at the surface, and the plastic still accumulates along the barrier and toward the center the system.”

The Ocean Cleanup Foundation, now numbering 65 people, will begin testing a 0.6-mile prototype later this year, before full deployment in 2018. It recently announced it has raised more than $30 million for the effort, including $21.7 million since last November. Most of that has come from Silicon Valley apparently, including from Marc and Lynne Benioff, of Salesforce fame, and PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel (who is famous and infamous for many reasons). Other donations have come from the Julius Baer Foundation, Dutch multinational Royal DSM, and an anonymous benefactor.

Slat and I spoke over Skype, and toward the end of our chat he holds up some sunglasses made from ocean plastic. The long-term plan is to recycle all the plastic collected into items like car bumpers, chairs, and eyewear, and for companies to sponsor each boom with prominent logos. That will help defray the cost, he says. It’s a fail-proof, wonderfully imaginative, scheme. We’ll just have to hope it’s as seaworthy as Slat imagines.

MapLight is a nonprofit organization that reveals the influence of money in politics.

The nation’s tax lobbying industry, already the second-largest source of arm-twisting activity on Capitol Hill, could see its biggest payday in more than three decades if President Donald Trump’s plan to slash corporate taxes is taken seriously by lawmakers.

The centerpiece of the Trump plan, which was released in April, would slash corporate income tax rates to 15% from the current maximum of 35%. The White House complains that the U.S. has the highest corporate tax rates in the developed world. The Treasury Department, however, found that the typical U.S. corporation only paid a 22% effective tax rate between 2007 and 2011.

Even so, there’s a staggering amount of money at stake. A report by the Washington-based nonpartisan Tax Policy Center estimated that the Trump plan could reduce tax receipts by $9.5 trillion during the next decade. Although his plan calls for the corporate tax rate to be cut by more than half, Trump has also pledged to eliminate a number of deductions used by businesses to reduce taxes.

The president’s vow to “drain the swamp” by curbing the influence of Washington lobbyists will be tested during any attempt to overhaul the corporate tax structure for the first time since 1986. Multinational corporations and interest groups have spent $14.4 billion during the last decade to influence lawmakers and officials, according to a MapLight analysis of federal lobbying records.

So far, Trump has shown little interest in ridding Washington of the influence of lobbyists. And corporations aren’t likely to slow their lobbying, given the potential profits. A study by Kansas and Virginia researchers found that corporations that hired lobbyists to influence a 2004 tax bill reaped a 22,000% rate of return on their investment. In other words, corporations made $220 for every $1 spent on lobbyists.

Falling Tax Burdens

About 4,000 registered lobbyists work on tax issues in the nation’s capital, but spending is highly concentrated among large multinational conglomerates and trade organizations. Fifteen companies and organizations, ranging from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to the American Association of Retired Persons, have spent more than $2.7 billion while lobbying on tax issues since 2008, according to the MapLight analysis.

The lobbying activity has coincided with a continuing slide in the percentage of federal revenues collected from corporate income taxes. During the 1950s, corporate taxes made up 28% of federal revenue. By 2015, the corporate share had fallen to roughly 11%. Individual income tax receipts have remained relatively stable, accounting for almost half of federal receipts.

Deductions benefitting specific industries–and in some cases, specific companies–have helped push down corporate tax collections. The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy reported in March that 100 of 258 biggest U.S. companies paid no tax during at least one year between 2008 and 2015. At least 18 companies, including General Electric and Priceline, incurred either no tax burden or received a net refund during the entire period, according to the institute’s report.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit that claims to have 3 million members, has been the top employer of tax lobbyists during the last decade. The chamber has spent more than $910 million while lobbying on federal tax policy since 2008, according to lobbying records. The chamber’s coffers have been boosted by six- and seven-figure dues payments from companies that include Dow Chemical Co., Chevron Corp., Southern Co., and Merck & Co. Inc., according to the Center for Political Accountability, a nonprofit research organization.

The chamber, which spent almost $101 million alone while lobbying on tax issues in 2016, echoed the White House rhetoric about the need to cut the top corporate tax rate, calling Trump’s proposal “a once-in-a-generation chance to do tax reform, and if we do it right, it can be the single most important step our leaders take to drive economic growth.”

The National Association of Realtors was the second-biggest employer of lobbyists during the decade, spending $322 million while lobbying on tax policy. General Electric, the Boston-based multinational conglomerate, ranked third, spending $167.7 million while lobbying on tax issues during the 10-year period.

Revolving Doors

Possible alterations to the tax code are likely to raise the profile for lobbying and law firms that have profited from an arcane and complex tax code. The MapLight analysis found six lobbying firms have together collected more than $500 million in fees during the last decade while lobbying on tax policy.

Lobbying firms have prospered by making use of the “revolving door,” or hiring former Capitol Hill and federal agency staffers as lobbyists. The newly minted lobbyists are well-positioned to persuade their former colleagues to follow policies that benefit their new employers.

Capitol Tax Partners, which received $108.9 million in fees during the last decade while working on tax issues, is a prime example of a lobbying firm that relies upon the revolving door. Eleven of its 12 partners cite Capitol Hill experience on the firm’s website. Among the firm’s clients is Apple Inc., which has stashed more than $231 billion in offshore accounts to dodge U.S. taxes; a “repatriation holiday” pushed by Trump would allow the tech giant to return the money to the U.S. without paying major penalties.

More than two-thirds of the 28 members of Capitol Counsel, which received $69.6 million in lobbying fees while working on tax issues during the decade, cite congressional or other capital experience on the firm’s website. Its clients include Chevron Corp., whose chief executive said earlier this year that he supports Trump’s plan to overhaul the tax code.

Law firms also stand to benefit from potential tax legislation. Akin Gump Strauss Hauer and Feld, the Texas-founded law firm that claimed to be the biggest lobbyist in the Capitol by revenue in 2014, has received $93.2 million while working on tax-related issues during the last decade. Williams & Jensen, which notes that almost all of its partners “have come from high-level service with various administrations, congressional and Senate leaders, and critical departments and agencies,” has received $83.5 million.

Other top lobbying firms during the decade include Denver-based Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck ($54 million) and Ernst & Young ($92.2 million).

Major lobbying firms with well-known politicians also have raked in hundreds of millions for influencing tax issues over the last decade. The Breaux Lott Leadership Group, led by former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott and Sen. John Breaux, has reported $39.6 million in lobbying fees while working on tax issues since 2008. The Duberstein Group, founded by former Reagan White House Chief of Staff Kenneth Duberstein, has received $29.2 million while working on tax issues. The Podesta Group, cofounded by Anthony Podesta and his brother, former Clinton White House Chief of Staff John Podesta, collected $32.3 million while lobbying on tax policy during the decade.

Methodology:

MapLight analysis of federal lobbying disclosure filings from the Clerk of the U.S. House of Representatives that report lobbying activity on tax issues, as retrieved on May 3, 2017. Lobbying totals represent money paid by an organization to each lobbying firm for services on all issues (not just tax policy) and are reported on filings that included tax issues.

Organizations report total lobbying expenses as a lump sum, which includes both in-house lobbying expenses and amounts paid to (and reported by) lobbying firms that they hire. MapLight calculates in-house lobbying expenses by subtracting the total income reported by the lobbying firms that it hires from the organization’s total reported expenses. The in-house lobbying amounts are used for this analysis when the client organization reported lobbying on tax issues on their reports, in addition to registrant reports that include tax issues.

There were iPhones on the stage here at Build. Big graphics on the screens showed Surface computers lined up side by side with iPhones. Microsoft developer tools are coming for iOS and Android. And Apple’s iTunes is coming to the Windows Store.

The company that once held a mock funeral for the iPhone—complete with dedicated “iPhone trashcans”—now has a very different attitude about the company of Jobs. The Microsoft whose old CEO Steve Ballmer in 2007 famously predicted the iPhone had “no chance; no chance at all” of getting market share, now readily accepts and embraces a world where the iPhone and Android dominate personal computing.

Microsoft talked a lot here at its Build 2017 developer conference about extending Windows experiences over to iOS and Android devices. And it’s not just about fortifying Windows. Microsoft says it not only wants to connect with those foreign operating systems, but by bringing over functionality from Windows 10 (along with content) it hopes to “make those other devices better,” as one Microsoft rep said in a press briefing yesterday.

The developers here at Build cheered when Microsoft announced XAML Standard 1.0, which provides a single markup language to make user interfaces that work on Windows, iOS, and Android. In one demo, the company demonstrated how an enterprise sales app could be extended to an iOS device so someone could continue capturing a potential client’s data on a mobile device. Windows not only sent over the client data that had already been captured, but also the business-app shell that had captured it.

Windows PCs love all your devices. #MSBuildpic.twitter.com/CMbvLPNTsf

— Windows (@Windows) May 11, 2017

Microsoft has defined the Microsoft Graph as “an intelligent fabric that helps connect dots between people, conversations, projects, and content within the Microsoft cloud.” That definition seems to have shifted a little to include the idea that the graph can be used by developers as a connective tissue to extend Windows experiences to other platforms.

There are many examples in Windows 10. Extending to iOS and Android is a major theme in the features added in the Fall Creators Update coming up, logically enough, this fall.

Microsoft’s new cloud clipboard lets users copy and paste things like photos, map links, paragraphs of text, animated gifs, and a lot of other elements from a PC running Windows 10 to a mobile phone running iOS or Android. Apple built a Universal Clipboard that works across Apple devices, but did not build it to share data across devices from other ecosystems.

The new Windows Story Remix app, which creates photo and video presentations with 3D effects, syncs with the iOS and Android versions of the app. So users can capture video on an iPhone or Galaxy model and have it automatically show up in Windows for editing.

Microsoft talked up developer tools for using the Cortana assistant to sync up experiences among Windows, iOS, and Android. It demoed a newsreader app that allowed the user to start reading a story on Windows, then continue reading on the iOS version of the app. Cortana notifications helped the user transition between the two versions.

The truth is, neither Apple nor Google have much incentive to build bridges to Windows devices, services, apps, and bots. Apple has reason to avoid building bridges to Windows PCs: It wants to leverage the billion-plus iOS devices in the wild to push people toward using Macs.

Microsoft is the one company with the incentive to build bridges. Millions of users have a PC sitting on their desktop and an iPhone (or an Android phone) in their pocket. In the Satya Nadella era, Microsoft accepts this reality. It even seems to do so enthusiastically.

“Of course we compete with Apple, of course we compete with Google, of course we compete with Oracle and Box,” Microsoft spokesman Frank Shaw told me, “but we also share customers in common with them, and we have to act in their best interest—we have to meet customers where they are.”

By doing so Microsoft might also remove reservations people might have about using a Surface PC or some other Windows PC, and an iPhone for mobile. The better the two platforms play together, the more Surface computers and Windows operating systems Microsoft can sell.

iTunes is coming to the Windows Store by the end of this year. #MSBuildpic.twitter.com/WHM533S7Sv

— Windows (@Windows) May 11, 2017

Microsoft removed yet another drawback by announcing today that iTunes will be available in the Windows Store by the end of the year. This means users of the upcoming Windows 10 S will easily be able to sync music and other digital content with their iPhone.

This posture from Microsoft isn’t likely to change anytime soon. Even if the company gets back into the phone business in some form (Satya Nadella says it might, but the devices wouldn’t look much like other phones), it would have to capture a considerable amount of market share before building bridges to iOS stopped making strategic sense.

For now, Microsoft is all about playing nice with the Android and iOS worlds. It’s no longer the biggest dog in personal computing. It knows its place, and, based on the work it’s doing with Surface computers and Windows 10, looks quite comfortable with it.

In his short story “Shanghai in 48 Hours, a Weekend Itinerary for International Visitors by Roaming Planets Guides, 2116,” the author Ken Liu looks a century into the future, imagining  a Shanghai half submerged in water. His story calmly and matter-of-factly guides potential tourists through the watery city, advising that they arrive by hovercraft ferry, which cruises “at a stately place into the gentle waves over the submerged parts of the city.” From there, visitors “can watch the skeletal remains of the once-mighty skyscrapers of Pudong pass by on both sides”; the above-water ruins, he predicts, are now a nature preserve.

Liu wrote the story as part of the Shanghai Project–a 100-day-long, experimental exhibition hosted at Shanghai’s Himalayas Museum and curated by art historians Yongwoo Lee and Hans Ulrich Obrist as part of an ongoing series of linked installations. This iteration of the project, called Chapter 2, will run through July 30.

The Shanghai Project styles itself as more than just an art exhibition. It is that, but it uses art to present the research and ideas of scientists, philosophers, architects, filmmakers, and writers, who have pooled their interdisciplinary skills into creating the immersive exhibit. The museum installations, along with public programming like seminars and film screenings, are designed to engage the larger Shanghai community in tackling an overwhelming quandary. In the case of Shanghai Project Chapter 2, called Seeds of Time, that quandary is climate change.

In response to Liu’s story, the artist Qiu Anxiong used animation technology to create “Route of the Future,” an interactive installation imagining the submerged Shanghai from Liu’s work. The immersive experience of the work acts as a sort of brute-force reckoning with the inevitable effects of climate change–like rising sea levels–that we too often shove into some distant, intangible future.

“Art has the ability to emotionally connect with audiences, while also providing an alternative platform for addressing imminent catastrophes,” Lee tells Fast Company. Through the Shanghai Project, Lee and Obrist aim to bring audiences into direct conversation with the future, and inspire societal change now. “Although we have strong evidence indicating that human beings are at fault for global warming, our efforts remain passive,” Lee says. “The Shanghai Project is a call to action.”

The project convenes a wide array of artists and thought leaders to issue this call. It takes its name from the documentary Seeds of Time, which is included as part of the exhibition and follows American agriculturalist Cary Fowler as he champions the creation of the world’s first global seed vault in Svalbard, Norway. That sort of radical approach to addressing climate change now, the curators say, reflects the way we all should be thinking in preparation for our changing future.

A more conceptual approach to addressing our disappearing resources comes from the Chinese-American artist Maya Lin, perhaps best known for designing the Vietnam Veterans Memorial on the Mall in Washington, D.C. For her work “What Is Missing? The Empty Room,” she invites visitors to walk into a dark room, featuring nothing but brightly lit cutouts on the floor. By holding a screen over the cutouts, people can bring moving images of creatures that are endangered or extinct into focus. Because the screens must be held far away from the cutouts in order for the images to become clear, the work suggests how far we are from understanding the environmental devastation that’s happening now.

Alongside the installations in the museum, the Shanghai Project will host a series of public programs throughout the city. The philosopher and sociologist Bruno Latour will present a series of workshops entitled “Reset Modernity! Shanghai Perspective” in which he leads audiences in discussions on how to reframe our use of technology to promote sustainability, and how urban design and land use can adapt to our changing climate. The artist Daan Roosegaarde will present his innovative solutions to eradicating smog in cities, and Zhang Wei, a researcher at the Shanghai Library, lectures on how artists and writers living 100 years ago imagined our present time to inform how we might think about our environment a century from now.

“The Shanghai Project works with researchers from the fields of art and science to seek humanitarian solutions to imminent environmental disaster,” Lee says. “We must first ask what alternative behaviors can we implement collectively to solicit a conscientious coexistence? And then more pointedly, what can art and culture do to stave off the apocalyptic effects of human neglect? By combatting human materialism, thirst for power, and a desire for urban development we hope to facilitate a social reset.”

While Lee is careful to emphasize that the Shanghai Project, as a citizen-centered venture, is driven by the needs of the Chinese community, he says that the lens of art and conceptual thinking can and should inform the way communities across the globe approach climate change. Citing the poet Ezra Pound, who once defined artists as the antennae of the human race, Lee says that the observations of artists on daunting topics like climate change act “as a sort of early alarm system” to which we all need to pay more attention.

Every time she speaks at a conference, the humanitarian-worker-turned-entrepreneur Aline Sara asks her audience to close their eyes and think of the word “refugee.” What comes to mind for almost everybody, she tells Fast Company, are crowded camps or boats adrift in the Mediterranean. Almost nobody thinks of someone with a degree, someone with knowledge and skills to offer.

Through her startup, NaTakallam, Sara wants to shift that narrative and offer those same refugees–many of whom are, due to their circumstances, unable to work–a way to earn a living and connect with people around the globe. NaTakallam (which means “we talk” in Arabic), which launched in 2015, connects Syrian refugees with Arabic learners, who pay for hour-long chats held over Skype or Whatsapp to improve their conversational skills.

And for the refugees, NaTakallam offers a path toward the minimum wage or more–which is particularly significant for refugees in Lebanon, who are often not allowed to work. But when Sara sent a survey around the 55 refugees currently employed as “conversation partners” through NaTakallam in January, she learned that the most important aspect of the startup for them “is being connected to people around the world, making friends, and changing the often false and unfair narrative around what it means to be a refugee.”

Since the Syrian Civil War began in 2011, nearly 5 million Syrians have been forced to flee from their home country. Around a million and a half have come to Lebanon, where they now make up a full quarter of the country’s population. Fearing a tightening of the already limited job market, the Lebanese government has refused to offer work permits to Syrian refugees, many of whom, despite high skill levels and educational attainment, are forced to scrap together incomes through a variety of informal jobs. Stability is hard to come by, but for those far from the Middle East, the extent of the situation was hard to grasp.

As the thought about the situation of so many refugees in Beirut–many of them, like her, recent graduates–Sara hit on a solution. What if, rather than spending money on a private tutor to improve her conversational Arabic, she could pay a refugee to sit down with her for an hour and chat? What if anyone learning Arabic could do so by conversing with a refugee, and develop friendships and a job market in the process?

That was in September 2014. The idea stuck in Sara’s head, and despite having no experience in the tech or business sectors, she began to pitch what would become NaTakallam to several startup competitions over the next year. She didn’t win, but she didn’t get discouraged, and kept sending her website to her network of Middle East-focused journalists and NGO-worker friends. It eventually reached a prominent figure in the Middle East, whose post about Sara’s startup generated 5,000 shares of the website. That happened to be the same week that the haunting image of the three-year-old Syrian Kurdish boy who drowned off the coast of Turkey alerted the world to the severity of the crisis in Syria.

Within a few days, Sara saw 150 people sign up for language lessons through her site. “We were not prepared at all,” she says. But demand was growing, “so we just went with it,” she says. Her startup officially launched as NaTakallam in October 2015, and since then, over 1,200 language learners in 80 countries have signed up for conversations, and it’s employed around 50 Syrians in 11 countries, but mostly in Lebanon.

One is Moulham Ibrik, a 27-year-old who fled Syria to France, where he now is pursuing a degree in prosthetics engineering, while taking French classes on the side and sleeping between two and six hours per night. Through NaTakallam, he can earn enough of an income to support his studies, and has shared his story through the conversations he has with language learners around the world. Another refugee in Lebanon earned over $1,500 in a month through NaTakallam. The refugees that NaTakallam employs are mostly very well educated–architects, engineers, doctors, nutritionists. They have no formal language instruction training, which, Sara says, is the point of NaTakallam–it’s meant to provide conversation, not a lesson. When you sign up, you’re asked for your level of Arabic proficiency, but beginning students can also sign up.

The goal, Sara says, is to see every refugee conversation partner earning at least the minimum wage in whatever country they are living in. Regardless of where they are, refugees earn $10 per hour of conversation (the cost for Arabic learners is $16 for an hour). Lebanon’s minimum wage is around $450 per month, so a conversation partner there would need to work 45 hours throughout the month to make that. So far, around 13,000 hours of conversation have been hosted through NaTakallam, generating around $110,000 for displaced Syrians.

Sara hopes that by the end of 2017, NaTakallam will be supporting at least 100 refugees earning the minimum wage or higher. She’s also looking to other outlets apart from individual language learners to grow the platform’s audience. Universities have taken a keen interest in NaTakallam: Swarthmore, GW, Tufts, Boston College, and Northeastern are connecting students in their Middle East Studies and Arabic programs with refugee conversation partners, and Duke University this spring included NaTakallam sessions as part of a course on the refugee crisis. As those partnerships continue to proliferate, Sara says she’s also looking to begin outreach to Middle East-based companies, whose English-speaking employees could be in need of improving their Arabic skills.

NaTakallam is not a solution or even a stopgap for the lack of employment opportunities confronted by Syrian arrivals in many countries across the world. That will take coordination and innovation across governments and the private sector alike: various proposals have included the creation of separate economic zones for refugees, matching refugees with destinations based on skills and need, and following the lead of companies like Chipotle, which has partnered with the International Rescue Committee to recruit refugees. But for the refugees who have become conversation partners, NaTakallam is a flexible and interactive source of income. And for language learners, it’s a powerful reminder that “refugees are people just like you and me,” Sara says. “They just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

Last weekend Nike pulled off the seemingly impossible–no, it didn’t help a marathoner break the two-hour mark–but it did put on an event compelling enough to get people to watch what amounts to a two-hour sneaker commercial.

“Breaking 2” was a live broadcast across social media, where the brand enlisted runners Eliud Kipchoge, Zersenay Tadese, and Lelisa Desisa to attempt to break the two-hour marathon barrier on a closed Formula One track in Italy, wearing its specially engineered Nike Zoom Vaporfly Elite, with carbon-fiber plating for added propulsion. It was like Red Bull Stratos for the running crowd.

Ultimately, the effort fell short of its stopwatch goal–the fastest time was Kipchoge’s at 2:00:25, beating the current world record by two minutes and 32 seconds. But in terms of brand marketing, this was a hit.

According to Brandwatch, Nike had nearly 600,000 mentions on social media, with the hashtag #Breaking2 being used more than 400,000 times, garnering more than 2 trillion impressions. Next up? Well, Adidas may have congratulated the swoosh on its effort, but the German sports giant is working on its own marathon project set for later this year. On your mark, get set, advertise . . . Onward!

Nike “Breaking2”

What: A sports marketing event in which Nike attempted to design a shoe that would help marathoners break the two-hour mark.

Who: Nike, Wieden+Kennedy, Dirty Robber

Why We Care: Uh, see the intro above. The TLDR version? Making cool content that people actually want to watch, that also happens to naturally tie back into your brand and product, is always a good idea.

Interflora “The Great Mom Experiment”

What: Just in time for Mother’s Day, an unconventional take on a pretty conventional ad technique.

Who: Interflora, Brandhouse

Why We Care: The ol’ candid camera, add in some emotions, cue the waterworks. It gets used because it works. You’ve seen the Facebook updates. But here the Danish brand takes this concept to its inevitable end, with a perfect spoof of the advertising social experiment.

KFC “Tender Wings of Desire”

What: A 96-page romance novella “written” by Colonel Sanders, and available on Amazon as a free e-book for Mother’s Day. Yes, for real.

Who: KFC, Wieden + Kennedy Portland

Why We Care: The Colonel is apparently not just the jolly old fried chicken genius we all took him to be. Could it be that Colonel Sanders is more like another courtly Colonel than we might be comfortable with? Only your mom will know . . . if she reads it.

Movistar “Love Story”

What: A Mexican telecom ad that’s also a cautionary tale that will make you second-guess who’s on the other end of that text.

Who: Movistar, Y&R Mexico

Why We Care: So creepy, and so effective in communicating an important message. As the tagline says, “150 million fake profiles live on social media. Not everyone is who you think they are.” As advertising goes, this is a pretty good way to illustrate your brand values.

Polaroid Eyewear “The Fishbowl”

What: Forget the instant cameras, this is a fun, short history lesson on how Polaroid first became a household name.

Who: Polaroid Eyewear, Ming Utility And Entertainment Group

Why We Care: It’s tough to think of this brand without only thinking about James Garner and Mariette Hartley . . . or the Instagram logo. Here, the new campaign digs into the company’s roots to promote Polaroid Eyewear (now owned by Italy-based parent company Safilo). Sure, it’s just an ad, but a damn good-looking one thanks to director Nacho Gayan and cinematographer Stephane Fontaine (Jackie, Captain Fantastic). Plus, pretty cool fish trick.

Some companies offer internships that even mid-level careerists would covet. At others, interns end up doing menial tasks that no one else wants to do. But it’s also a way to evaluate inexperienced workers before taking the plunge to hire them full-time.

The challenge is that interns don’t often come in with knowledge of the company’s policies, products, and procedures and have to learn on the job. Neither do chatbots, which use machine learning to get smarter over time, but some companies have pressed chatbots into the front lines of customer service. Aspect Software, developer of cloud-based workforce optimization, recently found that 44% of customer service reps it surveyed said that if a chatbot was handling mundane support questions, human reps would be able to apply their intellect. So could a chatbot actually replace the annual cohort of summer interns?

Why Chatbots Might Be A Good Thing For Some Employees

Joe Gagnon, Aspect Software’s chief customer strategy officer, believes they already can. He explains that Aspect has a chatbot platform called CXP that works between companies and consumers, and between companies and their employees, mostly in marketing and customer service. Aspect uses Natural Language Understanding (NLU) technology to create natural, conversational experiences. “The chatbots improve employee satisfaction and enterprise efficiency by diverting mundane and easily asked questions to the chatbot,” Gagnon says. This not only creates a faster response, but allows agents to spend more time on complex customer inquiries that require a more personal, human touch.

WorkFusion, a company that combines robotics, cognitive automation, and chatbots for enterprise businesses, takes it one step further. They believe artificial intelligence has the potential to give every worker a virtual assistant.

Adam Devine, head of marketing at WorkFusion, says that customers expect to be able to reach a service provider at any time, through any channel, without waiting for more than a few seconds, and they expect to be understood without explanation. Yet staffing a business with enough customer service agents to handle every conversation with speed, accuracy, and personalization is too expensive, Devine says. That’s where chatbots come in.

Chatbots use data from previous conversations to answer questions like checking the status of an invoice or sending historical bank statements for a mortgage application. “A business powered, in part, by chatbots will improve its capacity by up to 25% within six months,” Devine contends.

Gagnon says his company doesn’t track actual numbers, but he estimates that thousands of customers have had interactions on Aspect’s chatbot platform. “The chatbot we designed for the Radisson Blu Edwardian, a collection of 12 luxury hotels across London, is seeing 60% of all their guests inquiries being made using ‘Edward,’ the name they’ve given their virtual host,” he says. There are a total of 1,000 different questions handled by Edward since he started answering questions across the chain.

Still Not The Same As A Human

There are limitations. Gagnon admits that 14% of guest-initiated chats to Edward in the first month were a simple “hello” or those with a desire to trip up the bot such as, “Do you have a girlfriend?” “Positive impact can be achieved in the bot not reverting to a, ‘I don’t understand the query’ response and coming back with a, ‘Sorry, I’m a computer so no girlfriend for me’ [which is the actual response from Edward],” says Gagnon. Getting questions referred to a human agent is a matter of linguistic analysis [looking for cues like words used when making an argument “however,” “nevertheless,” “despite,” etc.], combined with pulling in live data on what steps the customer has taken so far.

Gagnon contends that when calls tend to be very brief, little coaching-moment interaction takes place, so it’s not a missed opportunity for basic training for new hires or interns. “Question complexity then becomes a more fertile opportunity for skill growth and career advancement,” he says. “Over half of the agents (57%) feel they have a better chance of moving up in the organization if they can prove they can handle customer questions that require more subject matter expertise,” Gagnon adds.

Then there’s the matter of leaving it to the customer. There’s Servcorp, a provider of flexible workspace, investing more than $100 million into a hybrid technology infrastructure that ensures people will talk to a human. It enables onsite (no call centers) secretaries to answer phones with personalized greetings and handle office tasks such as making copies, ordering food, making reservations, etc., for up to 300 businesses–all tasks that tend to be passed off to an intern during summer or busy months.

But Gagnon argues that most consumers want to be able to serve themselves. He says, “They feel more satisfied when they have the power to get the information that they want when they need it.”

Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement last week that Facebook was hiring 3,000 content moderators to flag and remove inappropriate and violent videos and posts on its platform won praise but also raised plenty of questions. The social network already has a global team of moderators, but it can’t seem to keep up with the content posted by its 1.3 billion daily users. So, will this hiring spurt just increase the size of the army of moderators carrying out the same job as always—or are they being taught new skills and given new responsibilities?

In a Facebook post, Zuckerberg wrote that the new employees would “review the millions of reports we get every week, and improve the process for doing it quickly.”

But what will these jobs exactly look like? I emailed Facebook as soon as this announcement went live, but a spokesperson declined to provide more details. There are, however, potentially some clues on Facebook’s hiring page.

On the page, there are 74 open positions for the community operations team in seven countries. The jobs vary, but there are a few that specifically stand out.

One position is called “escalations specialist,” which is described as working with the “newly created global escalations team.” The role entails the employee investigating “reported escalations” as well as “triage low- to medium-risk situations to proper teams for review.” The job seems to focus on how create a more seamless system for escalating inappropriate posts and videos. It doesn’t go into detail about what constitutes an “escalating” situation.

There is very little information online about this new global escalations team, but I did discover a cached web page on Google that alluded to the same “newly created” team last February, so it’s unlikely recent events spurred its creation.

Most prominent, however, is the role of “market specialist,” for which there are 26 openings. Each market specialist represents a certain region. They include France, Georgia, Burma, South Korea, and many others—and the job is tailored to the needs of that region. For example, per the description, the market specialist in Thailand would “work with the Thai market to review content reported for potential abuse, resolve user account issues, improve the overall support experience for that market, as well as solve thematic global issues.” That’s a tall order.

It also should be noted that market specialist is not a new role. The company has had them for years–Glassdoor has a few details about the interview process that dates back to 2015. All the same, the role seems to have changed, judging by the way Facebook describes it. A 2014 description for a Thai market specialist explained that the employee would “sit within the Thai market team, and work to improve the overall user experience for that market, as well as solve thematic global issues.” There is only one mention of abuse moderation—that specialists will have to “proactively and reactively investigate reported abuse.” In the current postings described above, abuse moderation is much more prominently emphasized.

Both market and escalation specialist roles seem to overlap to some extent, and they seem part of an improved overall strategy for dealing with abusive content. Hundreds–if not thousands–of individual moderators sifting through thousands of posts would probably work under these new specialists. It’s not clear how these market specialists will coordinate with the global escalation team.

Another piece of the puzzle is that, despite the global reach of the responsibilities, many of these roles will be based in Dublin. The Irish Independentrecently wrote that Zuckerberg’s announcement “all but guarantees that [Facebook’s] Dublin facility is set for expedited expansion beyond the 2,400 people officially in its sights.”

If you know anything else about Facebook’s plans to better fight abusive content–or, if you work or have worked as a market specialist, escalation specialist, content moderator, or anything else under that umbrella–I’d love to hear from you. Anonymity guaranteed.

Graduation is an exciting (and scary) time; you’re leaving a world where you know all the rules and entering into a world where what’s expected of you often isn’t so clear cut. The rules that truly matter in the workplace are often not written anywhere—they’re simply things that those who have been in it for a while consider to be obvious.

Many learn these unspoken rules through trial and error, and some do it by observing others’ mistakes. But if you’re a recent graduate, there’s no reason why you can’t get a head start on day one of your entry-level job.

Rule No. 1: You Are There To Do Your Job

This might seem very obvious, but according to Lauren Berger, founder and CEO of InternQueen.com, graduates’ desire to go “above and beyond” can sometimes result in them being spread too thin and compromising the work that they were hired to do in the first place.

Related:The Skills It Takes To Get Hired At Google, Facebook, Amazon And More 

Berger tells Fast Company, “You might be good at everything, but when you’re hired for the job, you have to focus on the task at hand.” She recalls a conversation she had with a talented graduate who recently landed a sales job. He eagerly took on extra responsibilities, only to be told by his boss some time later that he was on the verge of being let go. 

He wasn’t meeting expectations when it came to his primary responsibilities. “Sometimes as a young employee, you have to hold back,” Berger asserts. 

Rule No. 2: It’s Up To You To Figure Things Out

When you’re in college, you’re given a syllabus of readings, assignments, and exam dates. You know exactly what you are supposed to do by which date, and you have a person who tells you what you need to learn, and who points you in the right direction when you’re completely lost.

This is not the case in the workplace, says Porter Braswell, CEO and cofounder of Jopwell, a recruitment platform that serves Black, Latino/Hispanic and Native American professionals. Braswell, who started his post-collegiate career as an analyst for Goldman Sachs, tells Fast Company that one of the things he wishes he’d done earlier on was to figure out what skill sets he needed to learn, and build relationships with those who can teach him those skills. “Learning doesn’t happen like it does in the classroom,” Braswell says. “Nobody is going to sit down and teach you.”

Rule No. 3: Feedback Will Not Come Automatically

Braswell also points out that school is structured in a way where immediate feedback is built into the grading system. But in the workplace, he says, “You’re not getting graded on every single task that you do. You might not know where you stand every single week.” This uncertainty, Braswell says, can come to a shock to many.

In many cases, it’s up to you to ask for feedback, but it’s also important that you pick the right circumstances and ask the right questions. Asking your manager “how I’m doing,” for example, might not elicit the most helpful response. It’s better to be specific and give your manager the opportunity to tell you what you’ve done well and what you could improve.

Rule No. 4: Attention To Detail Is Extremely Important

For Berger, who started her career as an assistant at an entertainment and sports agency, one of her biggest struggles was thinking about everything on a micro level. “The hardest thing for me was being able to think in a detailed-oriented manner. My brain just wasn’t set up to think like that.” She gives the example of booking a lunch meeting for her boss, and failing to consider the possibility that there might be seven different locations for the restaurant, or to check for parking spots.

As a junior employee, it’s highly likely that you’ll be tasked with administrative duties at some point, which might seem mundane but also equally easy to mess up. At times, the cost of these mistakes might be small, but there will be times where not paying attention to detail can hurt the company, and perhaps even put your job in jeopardy.

Rule No. 5: Understanding How You Fit In The Bigger Picture Goes A Long Way

When graduates are hired into an organization, they’re not always exposed to how their specific role helps the company as a whole. Braswell says, “When you come in as a new person, you’re very focused and you become specialized in what you do, and because you’re learning it for the first time, it’s hard to see a bigger picture.” Had he understood this earlier in his career, Braswell believed that he could have been more creative and effective in his job.

Related:Gen Z Is Starting To Graduate College This Year, With Lots Of Debt And Optimism

Understanding how your role fits into the bigger picture will also help you find more meaning in your work, because you know why what you do matters, even if it seems like a very tiny slice of the pie. Not only will you be better served to come up with solutions and initiatives that move the company forward (without compromising your main responsibilities), you’re more likely to be satisfied and engaged in your job. Given the amount of time you’ll spend at work in your lifetime, a happy work life is a crucial ingredient to a happy life.

Rule No. 6: Companies Are Not Obliged To Consider Your Needs And Interests

This one is perhaps the hardest to swallow, but other than what they’re required to do by law and what’s stated on your employment agreement, in most instances, companies don’t owe you anything. As an employee, your job is to bring value to the company, and at times, that might mean putting their needs ahead of yours.

Frida Polli, CEO and cofounder of predictive hiring startup Pymetrics, tells Fast Company that one of the biggest shocks she experienced as a new graduate was “going from an environment like school where you are the consumer and everyone is catering to you, to a place where you are a worker and people expect that you cater to them. It’s an important transition to learn how to manage well, because it’s a big change in how one is treated.”

Rule No. 7: No One Will Care About Your Career As Much As You

At the end of the day, organizations exist to make money or serve a specific mission, not to think about how they can best serve an employee’s career. Sometimes, that could mean figuring out how you want to grow, and designing that framework yourself if there is none in your job or your company.

Maria Ocampo, manager at talent management platform CornerstoneOnDemand, says that she sees a lot of graduates paralyzed and lost without a specific structure and instructions to succeed. “For the first time in your life, you don’t have a framework that somebody put together for you to grow.” 

As a graduate, it’s important to decide early on what success in the workplace looks like for you, and understand that no one will be as invested in the results as much as you will. It’s very rare that you’ll have someone looking over your shoulder every day to check on your career progress.

Both Berger and Braswell also stress the importance of asking questions during the interview process and talking to other employees to find out what it’s really like to work at the company before you start. If not, you might miss out on discovering “the unspoken truth about what it takes to succeed” at that company, Braswell says.

For Berger, it’s about really understanding your role, what that entails, and whether they align with your priorities in life. She sees a lot of graduates land jobs with certain expectations, only to be disappointed by the reality.

This spring, Tesla pulled ahead of General Motors to become the most valuable car maker in America. That’s despite GM breaking records in 2016 with 10 million cars sold and earning $12.5 billion in profit. Tesla, meanwhile, delivered 76,230 cars and lost $219.4 million. As dazzling as GM’s numbers are, investors are betting the upstart Tesla has the brighter future.

Is there some dark secret at the heart of GM’s business? A design flaw savvy investors have sniffed out? Not exactly. The simple truth is that incumbent businesses, even those as iconic as GM, are often at a chronic disadvantage. They’re victims of their own success—even while they’re busy succeeding.

Related:How To Make Sure Your Company Doesn’t Become Complacent

Technology has always accelerated change—that part isn’t new—but the pace of that acceleration is quickening. Industry leaders can find themselves industry laggards more suddenly than ever. To sidestep the incumbent trap, companies that are doing just fine sometimes need to ditch their business models and try something totally different. It isn’t easy, but I know from experience that it’s possible.

How My Company Set Its Own Trap

It’s not easy to think of new ways to do business that are different from everything you’ve done before—especially when what you’re doing is working. It’s even harder to follow through and take action. My company, BuildDirect, spent years growing quickly as an online seller of home-building supplies. The company was highly valued and we were doubling our sales every year. We had a great business. Then we changed it fundamentally—on purpose.

BuildDirect ordered goods from suppliers and sold them to customers across North America. We were, for the most part, simply transplanting a brick-and-mortar model online, rather than fully embracing technology to create a different way of doing business. Despite outward appearances, our model was quickly growing obsolete. But the way we could tell was because demand was high, not because it was flagging.

Customers wanted to buy more from us, but we were failing them because much of the time we didn’t have the inventory to make the sale. The data told us what our customers wanted. We’d try to pass that along to our suppliers, but it often got lost in translation. We tried for years to solve this problem but just couldn’t keep up with the growth. So at the end of 2013, I went to our board and told them our only way forward was to change almost everything about how we did business. If we didn’t, we’d eventually stagnate and fail. But if we did, we could create something exponentially more valuable.

Escaping From Success

Our idea was to become a fully open marketplace rather than a “traditional” online retailer. We’d open up everything in our system we’d long held close to our chests—our onboarding of new products, our predictive data about what would sell best, our logistics network for delivery, everything—so our suppliers could understand demand, quickly adjust their inventory accordingly, and give customers what they wanted. In short, we’d get out of the way and put our suppliers in the driver’s seat. What was once proprietary we would give away. Ultimately, this would mean wider selection and better results for customers.

I knew this would be a costly transition and much harder than any business challenge I’d faced before. The technical hurdles were daunting, but not as life-threatening as the loss of faith from key people around us as we went through the process of reinventing the company.

We launched the platform in February 2016 and it took off like a rocket—only to fall victim to its own runaway momentum. Suppliers loved it and added products to our site faster than we could’ve imagined. But parts of the technology that we needed to handle this growth were still in development. As a result, customers couldn’t easily discover the products they needed on our site. Best-sellers were being lost in an avalanche of new product offerings, as we raced to refine our platform to surface what users really wanted and show it to them.

But as hard as it was to pull off, it was the right thing. As lucrative as our initial business model had been, retail was a trap. Better, faster ways to satisfy customers were out there.

Related:A Grammy Winner, A Circus Master, And An Apple Veteran On Career Reinvention

Late last year, as the technology caught up to the demand, things began to coalesce. Suppliers can now add thousands of new products without hiccups and make the changes on their business in real time. Customers can find the products that they’re looking for faster than ever before. Most importantly, the reinvention has begun to pay off. We’re a more robust, scalable company that keeps our customers and suppliers happier. At the same time, I know I shouldn’t fall into the trap of thinking it’s the last time we’ll have to make a top-to-bottom transition.

It’s a truism in business that truly great companies make reinvention a habit—so much so that it’s kind of cliché to say so. But it’s a fact. GE has reimagined itself countless times since it began as a lightbulb maker in 1892, and is now one of the most diversified companies on the planet. IBM has a similarly storied history of self-transformation, which includes launching the PC revolution in the 1980s and then selling off much of its PC business in 2005. In a similar vein, much younger companies like Apple and Netflix fearlessly cannibalize successful parts of their businesses—think of Apple’s iPod and Netflix’s mail-order DVD business—to make way for greater innovations.

These kinds of reinventions are never easy, and require enormously costly sacrifices—including at times when they hardly appear necessary on the surface. But as I’ve now learned firsthand, they’re the only way forward.

This week, we learned why it’s important to look for job candidates’ weaknesses as well as their strengths, the habits and traits that seemingly “lucky” people tend to share, and how a small town in the middle of the Rockies became a thriving tech hub.

These are the stories you loved in Leadership for the week of May 8:

1. Why You Need To Hire Job Candidates With These Three “Weaknesses”

When you’re hiring a new employee, all advice and logic points to focusing on their strengths. After all, what good would it do to hire someone for their shortcomings? But psychologist Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic points out that as human beings, we’re all flawed in some ways. That’s why, in his view, it’s important to make sure a candidate’s weaknesses don’t cause more trouble for your company than their strengths can help it.

2. Six Simple Habits Of “Lucky” People

Some people just seem to have it all. They meet the right people at the right time and always come across opportunities the rest of us only dream about. From the outside, it might look like they simply have luck on their side. But if you look deeper, you might find that they’ve spent years cultivating certain traits and habits that bring more good things into their lives.

3. How Tiny Bozeman, Montana, Became A Booming Tech Town

Montana is known for its beautiful mountains and fly-fishing spots. But in recent years, the 43,405-resident town of Bozeman has become a tech hub. In 1997, engineer-turned-entrepreneur-turned-politician Greg Pianoforte started a customer relationship management firm that Oracle later acquired. Soon after, startup founders started flocking to Bozeman. But the boom times have also brought challenges—for starters, competition for talent remains high, and that talent isn’t always diverse.

4. Six Red Flags That Say Your Boss Is Going To Be A Nightmare

Work makes up a big chunk of how we spend our waking hours, so our relationships with our bosses decide a good chunk of our work satisfaction and well-being. Some researchers even claim the stress from a bad boss can be roughly as damaging as secondhand smoke. Here’s how to read the warning signs before you accept a job offer.

5. How To Save Money No Matter How Crappy Your Paycheck Is

Saving money can be hard, especially when you only get a measly paycheck that gets eaten up by bill payments every month. But it is possible—with a little bit of effort, some self-control, and advance planning. Here’s how to start trimming your monthly expenses so you can put more money away, no matter how small your salary.

I’m willing to bet you didn’t know that artificial intelligence can help sort cucumbers.

It can, and in fact it does. And while AI has gotten massive amounts of attention recently due to its role in making cars autonomous, doing facial recognition, and automatically translating languages, there’s one man in Silicon Valley who really wants everyone developing any kind of technology-based tool to know that AI has something to offer them as well.

Last year, Frank Chen, a partner at the A-list venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), published a primer on artificial intelligence. The 45-minute video took viewers through a history of the technology, from its “birthday” in the summer of 1956 through its years in the wilderness of technology and straight through current-day Silicon Valley, where it is dominating conversations at most of the largest tech companies there.

In fact, if the mobile cloud was computing’s previous major era, the next will be the era of AI, Jen-Hsun Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, one of the world’s largest makers of the kinds of graphics processors that power the computers behind today’s AI applications, told me last year. “It is the most important computing development in the last 20 years, and [every major technology company is] going to have to race to make sure that AI’s a core competency.”

Chen’s primer video went “unexpectedly viral,” he told Fast Company yesterday, becoming one of a16z‘s most viewed pieces of content ever. He began getting hundreds of inbound calls about AI, with everyone from policy makers to startup founders wanting him to help them understand this white-hot ecosystem. “The editor of Fashion Week called me,” Chen said, “and said, ‘Oh, will robots take all the fashion designer jobs?'”

Having been interested in AI since his days studying the technology at Stanford in the late 1980s and early 90s, Chen knew that it has now become mature enough that it’s applicable to a far wider range of people and companies than ever before. Indeed, his thinking on the matter has centered on the notion that, today, AI can help even an average product manager at Delta Airlines—the kind of role few would have imagined could benefit from artificial intelligence or machine learning—or a cucumber farmer.

That’s why Chen has now published both an AI playbook that helps just about anyone—especially non-technical audiences—understand how the technology can help them, as well as a second primer aimed at spelling out numerous ways AI has made its way into everyday life and spread well beyond the halls of the Facebooks, Microsofts, Amazons, and Googles of the world.

“AI isn’t some future thing,” Chen said, pointing to the fact that he’s seen demos of Star Trek-like language translators that you can “pop in your ear” and that should be on the market in a year or two.

In short, Chen’s explainers are offering the world his version of “Everything you wanted to know about AI, but were afraid to ask.”

CNNs And RNNs, Oh My

Many people find that trying to understand the technology underpinning AI can hurt the brain. Doing so requires digesting concepts like convolutional neural networks (CNNs), recurrent neural networks (RNNs), supervised learning, unsupervised learning, and so on. Chen is basically saying, relax, it’s okay, let’s unpack these concepts without math so that anyone can grok them.

Of course, for the more adventurous, he offers up more technical examples such as talking about what happens when you feed sentences into Baidu’s translator, or images into either Google’s or IBM Watson’s systems. He even walks people through writing a simple business card recognizer that uses an iPhone’s camera.

Yet he wants people to know that each company’s approach to AI is a bit different, with wildly different results to similar experiments. The AI wars are “the Wild West.”

Chen seems a bit amused that he’s ended up in the role of AI explainer, something he “sort of fell into it by accident.”

But having embracing that role, he’s now got an agenda: He wants people, not just hard-core technologists, to be inspired to try new things. He wants folks to see that AI has something for anyone building an application, that for everyone, there’s something AI can do to give their software a serious boost.

First, he says, it’s easier than ever to figure out how to make anyone’s software better, smarter, and more useful, and second, that it doesn’t take a PhD to understand how to incorporate AI into tools. Anyone who can figure out how to use an API can take advantage of AI, he argues.

“I want people to be excited [about AI] in the here and now,” he said. “I can’t wait for people to see what they can do once their software has superpowers.”

Yet Chen is also sensitive to how seriously confusing AI can be to some, and that many people assume the technology is “controlled by the priesthood.”

It’s not, at least not anymore, he says. And every new technology platform has felt the same way before it was democratized.

We’re just starting to get there, Chen believes, and when we do, AI will be everywhere, powering everything. And it won’t be a specialized technology anymore—once people allow themselves to really understand it and how it can work for them.

“Right now, AI’s kind of the hottest thing in Silicon Valley,” Chen said. “So every company I see represents themselves as an AI company. [In a few years] nobody will say they’re an AI company, because it’ll be assumed.”

In my eight years as a recruiter at an investment bank, I reviewed thousands of resumes. I’ve seen and learned a lot, from the importance of proofreading to the art of formatting. It’s enough to know that there isn’t one acceptable format or approach to creating an awesome resume.

There are, however, a few key strategies that can make your resume more effectively do what you intend it to: Catch someone’s eye, clearly communicate your qualifications, and help move you on to the next stage of the hiring process. You’re selling yourself and the value you can bring to an organization. Here are my top tips for using your resume as a marketing tool that will help you catch a recruiter’s eye.

1. It’s All On One Page

You’ve likely heard this one before, and for good reason: It’s real! Recruiters review very large numbers of resumes and will likely make an initial determination about your fit for a role based on a quick scan. If locating the relevant information about your background requires turning the page, we very well might miss it and move on.

Related:This LinkedIn Recruiter’s Tips For Showcasing Soft Skills On Job Interviews 

Note: There are a few exceptions. If you hold a PhD and need to cite relevant work (like published papers), for example, there may be an argument for a second page. No matter what, though, strive to keep your resume short, clean, and relevant to the position for which you’re applying.

2. The Formatting Fits (And Shows Off) The Content

If the one-page rule is proving challenging, start by making some simple formatting changes. Narrow your margins, restructure your header to span fewer lines, and reduce the indentations of any bullet points. Speaking of which, to make sure your key skills and experiences jump off the page, organize your content into brief, bulleted sentences or phrases instead of paragraphs.

While you’re at it, proofread and proofread again. Ask yourself: Are all fonts and font sizes uniform? Are all dates abbreviated the same way? Do titles and positions line up properly? Your resume is a sample of your work product and your attention to detail. Be certain that you are representing yourself well.

3. There’s Nothing There You Can’t Discuss In Depth

Often, the biggest challenge is deciding what to actually include on your resume. Use the job description of the position you’re applying for to guide you, and don’t be afraid to make tweaks for each application. Your resume should highlight your relevant education, skills you’ve learned on the job, and the value you’d bring to the target organization.

For each role you include, highlight projects in which you demonstrated leadership or accomplished something significant, being as specific and quantitative as possible. Did you lead an initiative that resulted in a 10% reduction in annual marketing spend? Or develop a program that led to doubling the growth in membership to an employee resource group?

Related:How To Write A Cover Letter That Doesn’t Just Recap Your Resume

Most importantly, do not exaggerate. Anything on your resume is fair game for an interviewer to grill you about and to ask your references to back up. The quickest way to end your chances of getting a job is to give a recruiter a reason to question your integrity.

4. Your Personality Comes Through

Beyond your education and professional experience, personal interests can help your resume stand out. For one, organizations want to work with interesting, passionate people, so whether you’re an avid soccer player, mountain climber, Eagles fan, or trombonist, don’t be afraid to show some personality. If you’re involved with any organizations, highlight those experiences as well, noting any relevant leadership positions. Interests can also help you connect with interviews on a personal level—which matters!

Finally, interests can serve as real estate for you to demonstrate those often harder-to-gauge qualities companies may be looking for. Curate your list wisely, and if think you don’t have room to include hobbies and interests, take a closer look at the other skills and attributes you’ve chosen to highlight. While hard skills like Advanced C++, SQL, and fluency in a foreign language are crucial, soft skills like being “hard working” and “a team player” don’t add much value. Revert back to the golden “show, don’t tell” rule and swap out those adjectives in favor of experiences and commitments that help tell the story of who you are and what you bring to the boardroom table.

This article originally appeared on The Well, Jopwell’s digital magazine, and is adapted with permission. Jopwell is the career advancement platform for Black, Latino/Hispanic, and Native American students and professionals.

In order to create the cash flow necessary to continue issuing grants year after year, most foundations reinvest the majority of their endowment in the open market. Historically, however, major funders haven’t thought a lot about how to use that process itself to do more good.

Earlier this year, the Ford Foundation rethought wasted financial impact by committing a large portion of its endowment toward mission-related investments, creating more capital for change. Now the Knight Foundation, which works to build engaged and informed communities, is trying to address a more creeping societal issue: discrimination against who exactly is enabled to make these investments.

According to a Knight Foundation report, women and minority-owned money management firms are getting shut out of the asset management industry–not just by philanthropies, but by public funds, high-net-worth individual and family offices, and especially corporate interests. The group hopes the change that practice across the entire investment landscape by calling more attention to it.

Knight spotted the problem within its own investment portfolio in 2010 and has since shifted tactics to bring far more diverse firms into their fold. The report, Diversifying Investments, highlights how the group isn’t alone: There is serious systemic discrimination at play across the financial markets.

In addition to being unethical, such behavior could potentially cost investors money, too. “It’s no secret that investment management has been a white-man’s club, and the homogeneity at the top levels can be self-reinforcing,” says Ibarguen. “People often choose folks like themselves without even thinking about it.” That gross bias is both immoral and complete nonsense, never mind it might lead to picking a less qualified candidate for a job.

About $71.4 trillion in assets under management exist within the U.S. market, generating $100 billion in returns annually. To figure out who was managing what, Knight commissioned an analysis of activity for the four main types of funds: hedge, mutual, private equity, and real estate.

That pot is about $67 trillion. In general women or minority-owned groups represent between 3% and 5% of the total players within those industries (The number is slightly lower for women in private equity, and both groups in real estate). All told, female minorities combine to manage just 1% of all funding.

Knight itself used to represent this problem: In 2010, diverse groups were appointed to manage just $7 million of its more than $2 billion endowment. Since recognizing the issue, the foundation has upped that share to $472 million or 23% of its total wealth.

That helps, but to make larger change more than just foundations will have to change behavior. On the mutual fund side, most endowment-backed organizations actually give a proportionately higher share to women or minority-owned money managers. It’s the same with public funds and high-net-worth individuals or family offices. While everyone could do better, the true giant tripping up change appears to be corporate clients” who have proportionately fewer investments in diverse-owned funds,” notes the report.

In fact, performance statistics show that investors who don’t seek equality among money handlers might be missing some good returns. In some asset classes, a proportionately higher number of women and minority-led groups appear to be looking the market differently, outperforming their peers.

Knight’s current hiring math is simple. “Our guiding principles have been that we will have a diverse set of managers and that we won’t compromise on performance,” adds Ibarguen. “We have and will drop firms of any type that don’t perform.”

In the opening monologue of her debut Saturday Night Live outing back in 2011, Melissa McCarthy said she’d dreamed of this moment her whole life. It showed.

As a star member of legendary West Coast comedy collective, The Groundlings, sketch work was already embedded in McCarthy’s DNA before she broke through in Bridesmaids. When she showed up to host later that year, she was game-tight, ready to handle anything the writers could throw her way. Although some scenes in that episode used her sparingly, and one sidelined her entirely, by the time she came back in 2013, every sketch was built around her. McCarthy, who is coming back for her fifth hosting gig this weekend, was then well on her way to becoming the best, most consistent host of the modern SNL era.

Historically, there have been many frequent visitors who’ve achieved “best host” status at one point or another. Steve Martin, who’s been around since the earliest episodes, certainly had his heyday. Alec Baldwin, who holds the top slot for most hosting duties ever at 17, can claim it as well. Christopher Walken, Tom Hanks, Tina Fey–these are all performers who deliver the goods time and time again. McCarthy, however, is another matter entirely. Never has someone emerged on the SNL scene and carved out her own specific niche in so short a time period. Over the four episodes she’s hosted in a span of five years, McCarthy has written her name on the floor of studio 8-H, and lit a match to it.

The first thing that should strike SNL viewers about McCarthy is her commitment. She is never afraid to look ridiculous, she’s up for absolutely anything, and you can count on her going all the way. In her very first episode, she squeezed a whole jug of ranch dressing on her face as an effervescent kicker to a sketch. She’s hit on Jason Sudeikis in a way that made his true self look slightly uncomfortable, beneath the layer of character. Her affinity for big, over-the-top moments, apparent in her films as well, lends a live-wire energy to a show that’s at its best when least predictable.

It’s more than those broad turns, though. McCarthy is such a consummate pro as a performer that even her more grounded sketches pulse with quiet intensity. One of the elements that made Mr. Show an all-time classic show was how Bob Odenkirk and David Cross’ acting transcended the realm of sketch acting. Viewers really bought ino their characters, even when those characters were objectively ridiculous. Melissa McCarthy has this same level of performance in spades, infusing even the role of a mom watching Terminator 2 on family movie night with formidable acting chops. You can’t take your eyes off her.

Those quiet moments are few and far between, though. They’re the glue that keeps her episodes steady. What McCarthy is most known for bringing to the SNL table, however, is loud, weird, physicality.

She established what she was capable of in that first episode, with the Lulu Diamonds sketch. It was a parody of an old Mae West character–only in this version, Diamonds’ seductive strut always ended with her falling ass-over-teakettle down a staircase. McCarthy is always game for doing wire-fu in an opening monologue, or teetering around on ridiculous Wizard of Oz stilettos. Watching her on this show makes it difficult not to ache with envy over L.A. audiences who got to see her just go for it, week to week, as a part of the Groundlings cast.

Although the wild-card unpredictability of not knowing who she’ll play next is an absolute strength, McCarthy even has a recurring character, like other “best hosts” before her. After playing explosively abusive, Bobby Knight-like basketball coach Sheila Kelly in an early appearance, McCarthy returned in 2014 to slot Kelly into a new role–that of a congresswoman modeled after Rep. Michael Grimm, who notoriously threatened a reporter. Kelly seems like a character that could be thrown into any situation. Of course, the real character fans want to see is the performer’s apoplectic press secretary, Sean Spicer, whom she immortalized back in February.

Good news, for those in suspense, video footage in New York today has confirmed there will be a Spicer in store this week.

Melissa McCarthy has the Sean Spicer podium on 58th Street right now #SNLpic.twitter.com/RO6GJExpkA

— Donie O'Sullivan (@donie) May 12, 2017

While McCarthy’s newfound SNL renown can be chalked up to Sean Spicer, her years of consistency provide a plethora of other reasons why her appearance this weekend is not to be missed.