These slides miss most of the point of meetings. You don't just go to talk, you go to listen.

Generally if you have enough information that you know what you will share and can expect to receive at a meeting, it should be an email. People can share things on their timetable in the style they are most comfortable with and the information can be reviewed without anyone needing to worry about meeting minutes.

Even when you are uncertain exactly what will be required or gained, email is still generally the better option. People can look up the answers to questions instead of speaking off the top of their head about something they were unprepared for, and people with low stakes can skim the conversation for the bits that are relevant.

Meetings are for highly unstructured, free-form communication where you really need to talk through something. That's not to say an agenda can't be useful, but it should be nothing more than a starting point. Meandering discussions that don't really accomplish anything besides sharing information no one realized they needed are the point. If the meeting doesn't efficiently accomplish what you wanted, that's because you used the wrong tool for the job.

Meetings are best when the communication is multiplicative. For example in a brainstorming session where people build off eachother's thoughts in rapid succession. The more people contribute, the more everyone benefits. Even very low value contributions may be key catalysts. You don't get creativity and emotional investment and comradery by keeping a tight schedule.

All too often people will try to lump a bunch of different things together into a single meeting which really should be handled separately, and then try to use the agenda to recover the specificity of the various portions of the meeting. This never works well. Because everything gets improperly handled in one meeting, you need more meetings to revisit the various parts, and oftentimes those too have other things mixed in. Often you'll have a meeting to prepare for the meeting with a select group, and a meeting to follow up the meeting with a different select group, and of course the results of these meetings beget even more meetings. The ubiquitous feeling that a meeting was useless is almost always because you had a legitimately useful reason for holding or attending the meeting that was not accomplished. You don't fix this by holding better organized meetings, you fix this by eliminating the need for these meetings.

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As an aside, I find it funny that there is a slide stating meeting attendance is a choice and then a subsequent slide listing optional meetings as a red flag.

Signal keeps cranking out brilliant crypto papers, but from a product perspective, it feels like they're throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks. We've got post-quantum handshakes, stories and money transfer experiments, but still no SDK, no APIs, no bots. The official libsignal library is undocumented and incomplete. Large parts of functionality are still buried on clients. Don't get me started on "but they have published all protocol specs on their website, go on and roll your own library"! That's not how you run a product. It's borderline negligent for a platform used by millions.

Every other major messaging app exposes something to developers, but Signal is allergic to the idea. Makes me wonder if they even have a head of product because whatever they're doing now is a far cry from a coherent product strategy. Signal is basically a pile of hot cryptography duct-taped to a messenger that's more hostile than any product in Apple's walled garden. And that's from a day one user who's been advocating for them the whole way.

</rant> thanks to everyone involved in building the product <3

At my ex employer, every employee had an hourly rate in the system, I had thought of pulling the rates from the internal system into Microsoft teams, to display the cost of every meeting.

They are probably testing stolen/hacked PayPal accounts. Probably doing a dispute to ensure the owners don’t suspect anything is going wrong, until they use it for bigger transactions. Unfortunately with PayPal there’s no way to ascertain ownership of an account (like 3DS).

This used to happen to us, eventually after haggling with PayPay support for over a year on who should bear the cost, we just shut down PayPal payments. Don’t have anything better to offer, sorry.