2021's Best Inventions, the Truck Driver Shortage Myth and a Life Saving Advertising Idea

Highlights From TIME's 2021 Best Inventions of the Year List

I love lists of new inventions and this week TIME came out with their announce list of the top inventions of the year and as usual there are some wonderfully non-obvious winners. A new malaria vaccine that has been decades in the making, plant-based seafood, a Nespresso-like on-demand skin care dispenser, a one-button device that enables do-not-disturb on all your devices and flashes bright red to warn off any in-person distractors, a more accurate world map, wireless in-road charging, and a reusable shipping box. Scrolling through the full list of inventions is a worthwhile exercise just to spark some new ideas, no matter what industry you work in.

There Is No Truck Driver Shortage. The Truth Is More Complicated.

As we head into this holiday season, it seems almost everyone is worried about supply chain disruption. Consumers are doing holiday shopping early and retailers are panicking about their inventory. One element of this crisis that has received a fair amount of attention recently is the supposed shortage of truck drivers. The NY Times called it "the biggest kink in America's supply chain." And widely quoted research from the American Trucking Association suggests that the industry is short by 80,000 drivers today and the situation is likely to get worse.

Journalist Alana Samuels offers a different take. In her article this week, she suggests the conversation about a supposed driver shortage may be obscuring a bigger problem: driver retention. As she writes:

"There’s no trucker shortage; there’s a trucker retention problem created by the poor conditions that sprung up in the industry in the wake of 1980s deregulation. Turnover for truck drivers in fleets with more than $30 million of annual revenue was 92% at the end of 2020."

The truth is, the trucking industry is seeing a historic influx of new drivers. Unfortunately, their expectations around pay and working conditions don't match reality. One problem that got quite a bit of attention this week as well may be an inability for drivers to organize into a union to negotiate better conditions and pay. Late night comedian John Oliver explored the idea of "union busting" this week and suggested that notoriously greedy companies like Amazon have become brutally good at preventing their employees from organizing to demand basic rights such as a "living wage."

Perhaps the biggest irony here is that there was also a story this week about UPS and their highly paid union drivers and workers. It turns out their choice to prioritize their workers has been the secret to their high retention and why they are far outperforming rival Fedex.

The formula for success in the age of the "great resignation" seems fairly straightforward here. Treat your people better, don't give them bullshit jobs, and let them have a union so they can collectively negotiate for themselves.

YouTube's Forgotten Co-Founder Uses The Best Soapbox Ever ...

Jawed Karim is not a household name. As the third co-founder of YouTube, he does have one pretty notable accomplishment though ... he was the first user to ever post a video on YouTube. The clip, called "Me at the zoo" is more than 15 years old and this week when YouTube announced that they would be removing the dislike button from videos, he updated the comment on his original video to express his displeasure. It's a unique soapbox and he used it vocally:

"The ability to easily and quickly identify bad content is an essential feature of a user-generated content platform. Does YouTube want to become a place where everything is mediocre?”

It is a hard question to answer. The dislike button did encourage people to flag bad or misleading content. It also encourages people to focus on the negative - a large problem across social media right now. So I'm personally not sure if it was a good move or not. But I am sure that Karim just flexed by sharing his opinion through the coolest soapbox ever.

Instagram Wants You To Act Like A Toddler and "Rage Shake" Your Phone

Something go wrong when you're using Instagram? Now you can just "rage shake" your phone really hard and a screen pops up to report the problem. I'm so conflicted about this. On one hand, Instagram training consumers to have toddler-like temper tantrums in order to get service is a terrible precedent.

But on the flip side, there are just so many situations where being able to use a "rage shake" to express frustration would be brilliant. Can't get a waiter's attention? Rage shake. Having trouble figuring our your taxes? Rage shake. Got cut off in traffic? Rage shake. Now that I think about it, this could be the next billion dollar app idea. I'm literally rage shaking my phone right now that I didn't think of it first.

The Advertising Idea That Actually Saved a Life (Share This Story)

Canadian ad agency Juniper Park\TBWA worked with the Canadian Women’s Funding Network and Canadian Women’s Foundation to create a hand signal that could be used by anyone who was at risk for domestic violence. The powerful videos illustrating the symbol went viral on TikTok and earned an estimated billion impressions over the past year. A news story this week demonstrated that it works as a sixteen-year-old girl reported missing in Kentucky used the symbol with a passing car and that driver called the police. It is not often that an inspired advertising idea and campaign actually saves a life. This one did, and the news is already traveling around the world. The more people who know this symbol and can use it, the more lives it could potentially save. So please share this story as widely as you can.