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[pinkpastelcalesti]

LANDSCAPING LOVE || Bakugou Katsuki x Reader || Chapter I.

SUMMARY -> Tired of bouncing back and forth between the U.S. and Japan after graduating college, you’ve finally secured the career of your dreams: You’re Japan’s first heroics cartographer, a title bestowed upon you due to your quirk and specialty, that creates geographic maps for hero agencies across the country. While your work is highly respected and sought after, you’re known for a more niche reason among your coworkers at the Dynamight Agency: the food you make is fucking amazing. When Dynamight himself inevitably gets word that you’re coming for his cooking title on his own turf, chaos ensues and you find yourself competing against your boss for not only best chef, but also to win over his heart.

CONTENT/WARNINGS -> Pro hero AU, agency reader, reader with a quirk, fem/AFAB reader, reader is originally from America, reader is bilingual (English and Japanese), strangers (more like coworkers that don’t get a chance to speak much) to friends to lovers, fluff & chaos, minimal angst, suggestive humor.

LENGTH -> 7.9K

MASTERLIST

Running late for your first agency project presentation was not on your bingo card this year.

Because of nerves and the constant fear that you were going to tumble over your words during your presentation, you pulled a semi-all nighter and stayed up until 3 a.m. rehearsing your slides and your speech for the Dynamight Agency’s meeting on your current geographic project.

You’ve been working for the company for 7 months now, and this project is the first large-scale assignment you’d been given since you started. You’ve worked on smaller, personal projects for Dynamight and other pro heroes, but this project was your pride and joy, seeing as it was requested by Dynamight himself.

Your quirk, landscape, allows for you to create an entire mental map, in very graphic detail, of the area around you within five miles. This includes the visualization and relative scale of buildings, sidewalks, roads, and alleyways. Your quirk works when you place your bare hands on the ground, which sort of sucks because the city’s grounds weren’t exactly the cleanest. In order for you to utilize your quirk correctly, you grew up practicing cartography of all sorts. One could say your quirk opened up doors to many different career paths, such as engineering or urban planning, but you had decided early on that the best way you would be able to help people is by utilizing your maps for heroes.

Heroes use maps for everything, and you were going to profit off of that no matter what. Your quirk could expand past the five mile radius if you kept bouncing around to different areas, drew their maps from your memory, and combined all maps to create one whole map of a specific city or town. During your time in undergrad, you majored in and graduated (Summa cum laude, may you add) with a degree in geography, your main focus of research being urban cartography. Heroics cartography didn’t exist, so you figured the next best thing would be urban areas.

Your undergraduate research consisted of said urban cartography, and because of your academic standing, you were offered a study-abroad program for geographers that was located in Tokyo, which you took without a second’s hesitation. You always dreamed that you’d be helping U.S. heroes, however, during your time in Tokyo, you fell in love with the entirety of Japan and the vast landscapes you got to visit and draw. Your research professor oversaw your projects, which consisted of city maps, data collection, and utilizing GIS software to create digital maps that could be used for multiple different areas, whether that be infrastructure planning, evacuation routes, or heroics, your main focus.

Your current job as a heroics cartographer is a first in Japan. While it’s not that well-known that you’re the first person to ever have such a title, the pro heroes around you seem to understand its importance. Your job at Dynamight’s Agency allows you to create maps for Dynamight and his sidekicks to use for patrol routes, monitoring high crime areas across the city, and visualizing the areas where property damage occurs most. Not only do you work for Dynamight, but your skills have been requested and used by other pros across the city, including but not limited to Deku, Shouto, and Red Riot.

You really got into this career out of sheer luck and fate. While you were drawing up maps for the city during your third year of undergrad, pro hero Red Riot had reached out to you after he accidentally destroyed one of your maps at the post office in Musutafu during a fight with a villain. He’d picked up the broken display and noticed your name in the corner and contacted you through your professor. Initially pissed off because you’d just finished that map literally a week and a half prior to its destruction, you gave him grace and told him you’d be in touch with the post office to create a new one.

He ended up paying you back for the damage, and upon realizing how detailed your maps were, inquired about your skills in cartography. It was quite jarring, sitting in Red Riot’s agency at the ripe age of 20, sweat dripping down your back through your blouse as one of the top heroes in the nation asked if you’d be able to draw up a map of a large electrical facility for him to use for an upcoming mission. He’d apparently been trying to find an up-to-date map of the interior, but had no luck. Within a week, you were being driven in a fancy company car to the facility so you could use your quirk and recreate the building’s interior infrastructure.

After you’d created the map for him, Red Riot, or Eijiro, as you now get to call him, had asked that you look into working for the pros after you graduated. He was under the impression that you were actually a Japanese university student, so you had to break the news that you actually worked in the U.S. Upon realizing, Eijiro explained that he would be more than happy to get you in contact with plenty of heroes that could use your work and give you a job abroad for almost double the pay you’d be receiving if you stayed in America.

Turns out that keeping in contact with a top hero in Japan that destroyed weeks of your work within 3 minutes of a fight was a good idea after all. Eijiro was the one who ultimately hooked you up with a job under the roof of Dynamight’s agency. Once you’d graduated, you decided that you’d work in the U.S. for a little while longer to build up your experience and resume before you decided to go abroad.

You ended up staying in America for two more years after graduation, traveling across the country and working with urban geographers in cities like Los Angeles, Detroit, Chicago, New York City, and Washington D.C. During this time, you were given full travel privileges to fly to Japan and help Red Riot and his pro hero allies develop brand new patrol map routes across different cities. You loved this part of your job most, and after finishing up your second year post-grad, decided to make it official and asked Eijiro if the job position was still on the table.

He would go on to give you one of the prettiest smiles you’d ever seen and excitedly tell you that yes, it was always available to you. Being friends with Eijiro meant not only a once-in-a-lifetime career connection, but it also meant realizing your potential early on.

You absolutely adore the work you do for Dynamight and his peers and wouldn’t trade it for the world. However, if you don’t hurry the hell up and get to your building in the next 7 minutes, your dream job might as well go poof. Dynamight absolutely hates when people are late, and you’ve had the pleasure of watching him blow up on company execs for showing up 15 minutes late and “wasting his fuckin’ time.”

Working for a man like Bakugou Katsuki was definitely a wakeup call the first two months you were at his agency. Turns out that while he approved your position that would inevitably change the way cartography was viewed in the modern world of heroes, Bakugou didn’t exactly care to look into what you specialized in, or so you thought. You really hadn’t had a chance to actually speak with him aside from filling him and his manager in on upcoming projects and maps you were in the process of making. After 7 months of working for the agency, you’d spoken to your boss a whopping four times, all lasting under three minutes.

This presentation you were about to give is the first one where Dynamight would be present, and fuck if you weren’t about to shit your pants from not only nerves, but fear that you might not get in the door on time for its start.

Racing past the front desk and haphazardly greeting the security guards before flashing your badge to be let through the agency gates blocking visitors from reaching the elevators, you managed to press the button for the remaining elevator on the ground floor that was being sent up.

You probably looked like an absolute atrocity in front of your fellow coworkers, with windswept hair and panting in the virtually silent elevator, save for the whirring of the machine as it took you up to the fourteenth floor of the building.

As soon as the doors of the elevator opened, you booked it down the hall to the meeting room, with 43 seconds to spare before the clock hit 9 a.m. sharp. “So sorry I’m running late! I was supposed to be here setting up earlier but some big stupid bitch tried hijacking the bus I was going to take-” you began in a rush, placing your bag and coat on your chair in the large room with a round table full of your team members and other coworkers from the analytics department.

Your team member Carl, one of only three others in the cartography department at the agency, hit your foot from under the table while calling out your name. “You’re speaking in English, we have no clue what you’re saying,” he whispered, with you quickly muttering out an apology. “Shit— sorry about that— slips my mind to switch back and forth sometimes. Apologies for not being here sooner,” you bowed to the ten workers in the room, suddenly realizing Dynamight himself nor his manager had shown up yet. Thank god, you let out a small breath of relief.

“Is Dynamight going to be in soon or should I begin without him?” You asked as your other team member Kanako grabbed your computer out of your bag and plugged it into the projector while you began pulling out your speaker notes.

“Said he’d be in soon, had to catch up with Red Riot about an ongoing police chase outside the city,” your last team member Naomi spoke out loud. Naomi was your resident work bff, and was also the one that regularly reached out to Dynamight for you to inquire about starting new projects or letting him know of recent updates. She honestly didn’t even like having to email her own boss that much, but she was more than happy to run into his manager and talk about the highs and lows of cartography if it meant staring at the poor man like he was on the lunch menu.

“Well that at least gives us some time to set it up. Sorry you all had to wait on me to get here to pull up the slides.” You felt guilty that your team had to sit in awkward silence with a department that rarely ever interacted with your own for probably a solid 20 minutes, but at least you got to the room before Dynamight so you didn’t risk a verbal ass beating in front of everyone.

As soon as you’d finished laying out the hand-drawn maps of your project out on the round table, Dynamight himself opened the large oak door and walked into the meeting room, glancing at you for a split second before sitting in the chair that was opposite of you, towards the back of the room and for him to be able to see everyone clearly. His manager trailed in behind him, scolding him for not slowing down and hearing his run down of how the meeting would go. Dynamight only waved his hand in the air at his manager before casting his sharp gaze back to you.

You felt a twinge of anxiety race up your body. You really hadn’t been expecting him to come to this meeting until Naomi filled you in two weeks ago that he wanted to attend. Guess it meant he actually did pay attention to what he hired you and your team for. Regardless, you bowed to him and began speaking, not waiting for him to tell you to start, as he wasn’t one that gave directions to grown adults.

“Thank you for joining us today, Dynamight. The project that my team and I have been working on recently is one you formally requested for us to start three months ago,” you clicked the presentation remote that flipped to the next screen on your slideshow. “As you requested, the cartography department created digital and physical choropleth maps of the districts within Musutafu and their relative crime rates within the past year.” You pointed towards the round desk. “The top map is the same as the map you see on our slideshow,” you spoke in a quick, easy-to-understand manner and glanced at everyone’s faces to gauge their reactions throughout your presentation speech.

The maps that Dynamight had asked for were so that he would be able to see if his patrol routes needed to be changed in order to monitor areas of Musutafu that were still unresponsive to patrols by heroes in terms of crime decreasing. If there was one thing your boss prided himself on, it was his patrol routes and his ability to cut crime and villain attack rates in his designated areas in half. However, recently there was an uptick in petty crime rates, and in order for him to not get shit on by the public for a “lack of appropriate response,” he put in a formal request for your department to create maps relating to recent data changes in crime rates across the city.

You and your team were more than happy to fulfill this request, as it meant working with real, recent data and meant you got to visit neighboring hero agencies and compare their patrol route crime rates with Dynamight’s. Any excuse to get out of your department’s office on the fifth floor was a godsend because your back really couldn’t handle anymore work days where you were hunched over the large workbench mapping out the city for hours at a time.

As you continued on with your presentation, you periodically glanced towards Dynamight to check his facial expressions for any annoyance or confusion at your maps. Seeing none, you internally LETS FUCKING GOOOO’d because you knew it meant at the very least that if he was understanding the maps, everyone else most likely could too.

Once you reached the last slide, you made a small noise of dissatisfaction. “When we took a look at certain districts, we did notice that the victims of the crimes committed were young women who regularly walked home by themselves later at night. They seemed to be around their early 20s to their late 30s.” Naomi nodded at you, a silent way of saying to continue on.

“I’m sure that you don’t like when many do this, and forgive me if I’m stepping out of bounds,” you began, feeling your hands sweat. “But please do take this information seriously. I know you’re a hardworking hero, so I trust your skills. But I sincerely hope the next time I check the data that the rates will have fallen. People deserve to walk home without fearing for their lives.”

Dynamight’s eyes seemed to bore into your skin, wanting to bark a clipped response back, but he managed to nod silently. You didn’t want to outright mention you yourself were scared of the trend in crime since you fit the statistic, often walking home by yourself late after all-day shifts, but it seems like he’d caught on by the look on your face.

You wrapped up the presentation and answered a couple different questions that the analytics department had about the data collection and resources you used. After your coworkers began packing their bags to leave, you noticed that Dynamight had gotten up out of his chair and walked over to you, who currently stood beside your bag, closing all the tabs you had open that were starting to overheat your little computer.

Glancing up, you nearly choked on your spit at the proximity between the two of you. He was in his winter hero suit, with the black turtleneck beneath his chest piece being pulled tight against his arms, making his muscles pop out unnecessarily in your face, but you definitely were not complaining. Bim..g… muscles… you thought, trying not to stare too long.

“Y-Yes, Dynamight sir?” You managed to sputter out, all too aware of your team members looking at the two of you now. Dynamight managed to grunt in acknowledgement before speaking. “Wanted to ask if you could make one of your fuckin’ maps for Deku. The shithead keeps begging me to ask, he wants one to hang up in his office of his patrol routes.”

Your eyes widened in surprise. Of course you would make him one, but you didn’t expect for Dynamight to ask you directly. Typically he forced his manager Atsuno to write out emails of requests he had. You managed to nod eagerly to him. “Yeah, no problem. I can email him later and ask about details. Thanks for letting me know.”

Dynamight only grunted once more before turning on his heel and leaving the room, leaving Atsuno to give chase to his boss as he bowed quickly at you and gave his appreciation for your presentation before leaving the room himself.

The only ones left in the room now were your teammates, and all it took was one glance between the four of you before you all let out a holler in excitement. “We did it! You did incredible up there girl,” Naomi slung her arm around you as you pulled her in for a hug. “I was shitting bricks the whole time, I don’t think I realized how intense Dynamight’s stare can be.”

Kanako and Carl high fived you as you all made your way to the elevator to take back down to your department. “Our first big project presentation and we didn’t get screamed at for a minuscule error? I think we deserve to celebrate tonight,” Carl wiggled his eyebrows towards you and Kanako, with Naomi agreeing excitedly.

“Bar or at someone’s place? Should we drink? Oh we’re totally drinking.” You couldn’t help but smile at your coworkers beside you. You were so grateful to have them beside you while you’d adjusted to the agency life the past couple months. All three of them had come from a specialized area in the analytics department that related to gathering information data on the public, which included things like crime rates and damage assessments.

When your job had been approved, Atsuno told you that you’d be working in a new department in your own section within the agency with some people taken from the analytics department, taking you off guard. You’d surely thought you’d be thrown into analytics too, seeing how geography and cartography could squeeze into it somehow.

Meeting your team for the first time, you were more than grateful to have them work with you as you’d expected to be alone in your department for a while. You helped walk them through the basics of cartography and digital mapmaking using current software, quickly realizing the talent each one had for different areas. While you were technically the head of your department, you felt like everyone pulled their weight equally and deserved to be held on the same level.

“We can go out or I can make us something,” you spoke out loud as the elevator dinged open. “I know you guys have been bugging me about cooking since I bring my own lunches everyday.” Naomi cheered beside you, agreeing as Carl and Kanako hummed in thought. “I’ll pitch in for ingredients if Carl and Naomi buy the alcohol,” Kanako said, casting a glance to her coworkers that were chanting, American food! American food! Over and over again to one another.

All in agreement, you quickly got off on the fifth floor and entered your department room. Located towards the right hand corner in the back of the large office floor, the department itself wasn’t noticeable to the general eye unless you went looking. You each had respective offices lining a small back hallway, with the room at the very end of it being your workshop that expanded into a large open-area space containing desktops, workbenches, and cartography supplies strewn around the place. Atsuno had been kind enough to order a custom nameplate to go above the awning of you and your team’s hall, with Heroics Cartography Department written out in beautiful gold lettering, contrasting nicely against the cool grey paint of the wall.

“Let’s lock in on the rest of the requests and orders today so we can leave at a decent time,” you said, closing the door to the workshop as everyone spoke in agreement. Carl called out your name as you were booting up the desktops to pull up emails from your clients. “We doing hard liquor shit tonight or going with something like wine? Need to pair it well with whatever you’re making.”

You hummed in thought. “We could definitely do cocktails. I was thinking about making gumbo since it’s still cold outside.” You grabbed your phone that was situated in your bag and opened up the Notes app to create your grocery store list. Luckily Japan kept up with their spices and typically had an American section in larger stores where you could grab some of the spice mixes needed for your food.

“Make it spicy as fuck girl, I wanna feel tears pouring out of my eyes to your incredible cooking,” Naomi said, sending you a dreamy look. “If I make it too spicy, Carl’s gonna shit his pants. We all know this man can’t handle spice to save his life.”

“Hey! Will not,” Carl scoffed in surprise. “I just got dunked on by my ancestors because they thought it was funny to give me no spice tolerance in a country that literally eats spicy food in almost every meal.” Kanako managed a laugh at that, sending Carl a sympathetic glance before speaking to you. “If it’s not too much trouble, you could always split it into one pot being spicy and one pot being milder.”

“Fair point, but y’all better eat every morsel of my food. Southern cooking isn’t for the weak,” you mentioned as you scrolled through your finished grocery list, checking for any missing items. Naomi sent you a questioning look before asking you, “you’re from the south U.S. right? Isn’t that like hella country?” You sighed as you nodded. “Yeah, but I lived in the city, not necessarily rural. Didn’t stop me from cooking all types of recipes though.”

“Well wherever you were, you managed to become a pretty kick ass chef on your own. Your lunch always looks god tier.” Kanako said as Carl and Naomi nodded in agreement. You felt your face heat up in embarrassment at the compliment. “Living on your own in college will make you think of some wild new recipes in the name of using up all your groceries to not waste food.”

“That’s for sure, I lived off 20 different cup ramen recipes I created myself with random items from the dining halls I could snag before I got caught.” Carl muttered out loud while he pulled different sized calipers from his desk drawer to begin sketching up a project for Chargebolt.

“Food is food, for real,” you nodded in solidarity. There’s been one too many times where you felt too lazy to make full meals during school, which meant being stuck with random microwave food you kept for low energy days in your apartment kitchen. “Can’t wait to get shitfaced and discuss the existential dread of fucking up on expensive mapping paper,” you mused. Being an absolute geek over geography and cartography, you’ve caught yourself in too many drunken rambles about work-related topics when out with college friends after finals and papers were finished up for the semester.

“Let’s do our best so we can enjoy our Friday into the weekend!” Naomi pumped her fist in the air as she spoke, all of you cheering in agreement.

ೄྀ࿐ ˊˎ-

Later that night, after you all managed to finish up your progress for the day and headed out to grab your respective supplies for your celebration, you found yourself humming to a random 2010s playlist that Kanako had thrown on randomly while you cooked in the kitchen of your apartment. You lived not too far from the agency, a 25 minute walk or an 8 minute bus ride, in a nice neighborhood adorned with townhomes along the street, away from the major roads but still comfortably accessible. The salary you had now had blessed you with the opportunity to live in a nicer place, but you still opted for a more homey feel rather than all the modern bullshit that people were raving for. You really hated the idea of solid white walls and no color in your living space.

Your apartment was on the smaller side but it was just you who lived there. Naomi actually lived in the townhome across the street on the second floor. You both had found out early in your job at the agency, walking home at the same time and going from that awkward “going the same way, sorry” to “oh word you live here?” It meant that you had regular girls nights together and grew close, the friendship between the two of you falling into place naturally. Kanako and Carl were actually roommates in a flat that was a 10 minute train ride away. It truly was fate that all of you managed to not only work well, but vibe with each other outside the office too.

As you finished plating your dishes in bowls, you could hear the conversation flowing between your team in your living room. A couple drinks had already been thrown back and you were more than aware that drinking before you had food in your system was probably a bad idea, but you were about to eat anyways so fuck it. You were already two Moscow mules deep by the time you’d finished up the gumbo.

“Food’s ready!” You called out from the kitchen, the open floor plan making it easy for you to get the attention of everyone else sitting on the couch watching Love is Blind. That show was a debatable one, but you enjoyed watching Carl’s bewildered expressions at the absolutely heinous jokes Kanako would throw out about the men and women of the show and some of their horrible personalities.

“Girl get in here and tell me whether or not you think Gigi needs to up and leave ugly ass Damian,” Naomi said, helping you grab two of the four plates you were bringing out to the coffee table. “I can tell you right now that she does, she’s way too good for someone that looks like a chad version of Ed Sheeran.”

Kanako busted out laughing at your remark, agreeing at the resemblance. As you ate, everyone poured endless compliments into your food, making your chest swell with pride in your hobby. You absolutely loved to cook, and it helped you get through the more rough parts of life when you were struggling to keep up with the demands of school and research. Cooking was your safe space and you made sure you perfected staple recipes from home so you could share them with others, like you were doing now.

Kanako threw back another shot as she chased it with a can of Dr. Pepper before speaking your name. “You do know that your cooking could rival Dynamight’s, right?” You paused mid chew, throwing up an eyebrow at her to continue. You didn’t strike your boss as a cooking connoisseur, but you yourself didn’t look like one either, so you kept an open mind.

“He brings food to the potlucks we have during holidays sometimes. When I tell you that man can damn well cook, believe me,” she slurred slightly, the alcohol already hitting her. Naomi nodded in agreement. “Trust us when we say his cooking is top tier. He’d never admit it, but he likes cooking for others if it means feeding into his ego.” Naomi said, letting out a huff of laughter.

“I tried his signature mapo tofu once and it was so good but I literally had to call in sick the next day because I could not handle the spice he puts in his recipes,” Carl’s forehead thudded against the wood of the coffee table as he grimaced at the memory. “If he ever found out I nearly passed out on the toilet from what he called ‘baby shit spicy’, I think he’d fire me.” You barked out a laugh at that, imagining Dynamight drilling it into your teammate about not appreciating his food and getting sick from it.

Your team had been working with the Dynamight Agency for almost 2 years before you’d joined. It was always jarring to hear the stories of Dynamight from them. Your initial reactions to him early on were anything but pleasant, and still sometimes lean on the side of moderate annoyance. He sounded like a total dick at the beginning, but had apparently mellowed out after high school. You heard he’d bullied the hell out of the current number 1 hero during his time in middle school and a little bit of high school, which had made you livid.

You grabbed the handle of Tito’s sitting in front of you all and poured it into your glass before cracking open a new can of ginger beer and pouring it into the glass as well. You could feel the warmth of the alcohol spreading through you, loosening up your tongue the more you drank.

Retrospectively, you really shouldn’t have said the next thing that you did if it meant saving your ass in the workplace that following Monday.

“I could definitely kick Bakugou’s ass if we had a cook off, I mean I’m basically a god tier hobby chef at this point,” you muttered, missing the expressions of your coworkers, specifically the smirk Naomi had on her face. “You think so?” Carl nudged your leg with his own, casting you a tipsy glance. “Fuck yeah I could, I don’t think you realize how hard some southern cooking can be. If I can keep making the recipes without screwing them up, I’m pretty much a god in the kitchen.”

Naomi snickered as Kanako sighed out. “Don’t let Dynamight hear you say that. He gets competitive fast, especially when it comes to food. He was known in high school as the chef of his dorm, didn’t trust others to cook as well as he could.” You definitely could see that, as he struck you as the type to call his friends’ cooking skills trash compared to his own. You hadn’t had the chance to try anything by him yet but could assume it was pretty good if your coworkers spoke of it so highly.

“He can bring it on, I’m not scared of his ass, I bet he couldn’t cook a Cajun recipe if he tried,” Your mouth was moving before you had a chance to realize the words you were saying. “Yeah yeah, big talk for a girl that stuttered after taking one look at her boss’ biceps.” You nearly choked on your drink as Naomi absolutely obliterated you with one sentence. Damn, I really thought I was slick with the look. You sighed as Kanako simply whistled in your direction.

“Don’t tell me you’re falling for him already? His good looks are hard to miss,” she said as she handed you a napkin to wipe your mouth with. Muttering out a thanks, you tried to save yourself some embarrassment. “Oh please, if I wanted to torture myself by falling for a narcissist, I’d go for Shindou instead.” You shuddered at the thought of working for someone like him, suddenly grateful at the fact that you were working for Dynamight instead.

“Don’t deny yourself. I bet you probably had a Dynamight wall in your dorm room at some point.” Carl was an absolute menace when he got tipsy, clearly not skipping out on poking fun at you. You groaned at his comment, shaking your head. “Nah, it was a Deku wall, actually.” You weren’t lying if you thought about it, you did have a lot of respect for the hero as you’d learned more about him during your study abroad. He came from a humble background, what was there not to like about someone as sweet as the number 1?

“You always struck me as the type of person to go for someone batshit crazy though. I bet you’d probably like it if Dynamight was mean to you.” Kanako sent you a look that made you shiver. “How dare you accuse me of such nonsense,” you tutted, sipping on your drink before muttering a small, “I probably would.” Naomi slapped her hand on the table, yelling out, “I heard that you freak!”

You couldn’t help but laugh as your team members switched the topic to their picks for hottest heroes, with Carl sighing dreamily as he named Red Riot his number one choice, Uravity being a close second. During the chaos of the conversation, you forgot all about your quip towards Dynamight’s cooking.

You really should have remembered, because remembering would mean you could have prepared yourself more for your conversation with him later.

ೄྀ࿐ ˊˎ-

After the eventful weekend and nursing a massive hangover from the sheer amount of vodka you managed to drink together, your team trudged their way into the workplace again and began the process of uploading and creating new maps on ArcGIS to send over for clients’ approval. You were all lucky you got weekends off when there wasn’t a high demand of requests for maps and geographic data.

You were midway through a rough sketch of Deku’s patrol route, taking a small break to grab a water bottle from the vending machine on the second floor when you heard the first whispers.

“— she definitely wouldn’t,” a man from the finance department whispered to his coworker who was shaking his head enthusiastically. You recognized the guy who was speaking as Leo, a coworker you’d met early on that helped you budget out what was needed in terms of supplies in your current workspace. He often chatted with Naomi, who regularly contacted him to put in new orders of pencils and ink for the maps you all drew by hand. “I think she could. She’s from the west, they tend to take home cooking pretty seriously over there. No doubt she could beat him.” The other coworker beside Leo spoke. Now that caught your attention. It sounded like they were talking about you, but you couldn’t be sure. You didn’t know how many other people were in the agency that were also from the west, they could be talking about anybody, right?

As soon as they saw you, Leo nudged his coworker to shut up before waving at you with an uneasy smile. “What are y’all talking about over here? Something about cooking?” You said, walking over and greeting both of them. Leo nodded, slightly caught off guard. “Yeah, we— uh, we were talking about a cooking show we both watch! One of the chefs is from the west and she’s competing with other chefs to win a national title.” You raised an eyebrow at him, not really buying it but not really caring too much to think that hard about it. “Well remember that westerners can be pretty goated at cooking all kinds of food. She’s probably got a chance,” you shrugged before excusing yourself, waving at them as you walked back to the elevator once you purchased your water bottle.

You continued to flutter in and out of your workspace throughout the day, stopping for lunch and eating in your office with Naomi before returning back to work. However, you weren’t stupid; there were way more eyes on you today than you’d ever experienced, even more than when you first joined. You knew Naomi was sort of a gossip guru in the office, but you’d assumed she was probably flexing your cooking to anyone that crossed her path during the day.

You didn’t mind it, but the attention on you was definitely kind of concerning, especially because people kept whispering about something to do with an upcoming agency event that would include food. You figured you could probably whip up some good appetizers to bring to it, whenever it was.

As you were finishing up your sketches and scaling them correctly with the notes on your computer, Atsuno hurriedly burst through the door of the workshop, looking slightly disheveled. Your coworkers all glanced up at him at the same time before he coughed awkwardly and straightened his posture.

“New request sent in? Surely it’s not that important for you to have to run in here for,” You asked him as you wiped your hands on a towel to get rid of the ink stains along your palms. You definitely couldn’t risk messing up the paper now that you were this far along. He sighed heavily before shaking his head. “No, I uh— I had to come in here and ask that you go meet with Dynamight before you get off work. He wants to check in on the progress with Deku’s patrol route map.” You raised an eyebrow. Couldn’t he just shoot us an email? you wondered before nodding, asking if he was in his office. Atsuno nodded, offering to walk with you there, filling you in on the progress that’s about to be made with the maps your team had created relating back to crime rates along the districts in the city.

You missed the slightly concerned glance Naomi cast your way as you exited the shop.

After taking the elevator up to Dynamight’s office located on the 10th floor, you stepped off the lift and looked around the interior. You rarely ever came to this floor since it was mainly Dynamight’s office, the rest of the floor filled with smaller offices that were for his sidekicks, Atsuno, and his other head managers from different departments.

Turning right out of the elevator, Atsuno walked you to Dynamight’s office, adjacent from his own. Upon knocking, a gruff “come in” came from the other side of the door. Dynamight’s office was fucking nice.

It was as large as your own workshop, if not larger, and contained Dynamight’s desk, shelves full of memorabilia and other items, a couch in the center of the room, and what seemed to be an en-suite bathroom. His office overlooked the rest of the city, large window panes lining the wall his back was turned to. Along the rest of the non-windowed walls were frames of photos that contained Dynamight in his younger years, from when he was in high school to now. He was still in his mid 20s, but the photos along the wall told an interesting story of his life the past few years as he climbed the hero ranks.

Turning towards him, Atsuno cleared his throat before bowing to you and leaving, citing that he had to go sit in on a phone call with a sports clothing brand that was looking to sponsor Dynamight. He sure did clear out of here fast. You figured he was probably just busy, as all Mondays are.

Dynamight was staring into your soul again as you turned back to him and awkwardly shifted your weight onto your other foot. You began the conversation with, “you wanted to check in on Deku’s request, right?”

“Yeah. Nerd’s looking forward to it and won’t shut the hell up every time he calls me. Enjoys your work a fuckin’ ton,” he spoke, his gravelly voice sending a pleasurable hum through your body. If he wasn’t a hero, he could definitely be an ASMR YouTuber, you mused.

You gave him a small smile. “I’m surprised he’s heard of me. My work isn’t exactly groundbreaking,” you began to fiddle with your work jacket’s zipper. It was cold as shit in your office, so you had Leo sneak in an order for your team to have matching work jackets by Carhartt since they were durable and warm. “Yeah, well get used to the recognition. Your job is a first for the country. Constantly gettin’ questions about why I hired you.” You felt a small spark of annoyance work through your system. “Not sure you mean that in a good or bad way.” You huffed, walking towards his desk and sitting across from him in one of the plush seats. He eyed you with mild curiosity before explaining.

“Not a bad thing. People just don’t understand why yer work’s so important.” You nodded in acknowledgement. He wasn’t wrong. Cartographers are uncommon in the modern world now that technology has dominated the industry. You remember the times in college where people would always ask why you got into your field. You had to explain that cartography wasn’t just hand drawing maps; it related back to software and digital images too.

“I get to create anything I want on a map. My quirk’s a weird one, but it helps a lot of different people, so I’m not complaining.” You eyed the pack of pink sparkly sticky notes and glitter pens sitting next to Dynamight’s keyboard. Pinky probably brought him her new stationary set that launched recently, you thought to yourself with amusement.

“Speakin’ of, been wantin’ to ask you a question.” Dynamight caught you eying his stationary and scratched his neck in what you could assume to be embarrassment. “Shoot,” you replied, noting that the sun was finally beginning to set later in the day now that the winter solstice happened a month ago.

“Why didn’t you become like— a fuckin’ underground hero or some shit? Your quirk isn’t that niche. Could use it for raids n’ infiltrating places.” You didn’t know whether or not to take his commentary as a compliment or not, but you figured that if he was questioning your avoidance of the hero career path, it meant he noticed something in you that you didn’t.

“It wasn’t for me. My quirk is exhausting. Five miles sounds like a pretty small radius, but when I’m visualizing the area, everything is visualized. Buildings, roads, you name it. Drawing it from memory takes a lot out of me,” you spoke. “I take a while to draw and digitize my maps. It wouldn’t be easy to keep up with the hustle of hero work, let alone working within a time crunch.”

Dynamight hummed in acknowledgement. You really didn’t expect to be conversing with him about your life choices, but it was a nice break, and it meant you got to learn more about him, even if he was asking about your life.

“You still chose to work with heroes though.” You let out a small laugh. “I guess you’re right,” you began, meeting his stare. He was really pretty now that you were looking closer at him. “I figured if I couldn’t handle the stress of real hero work, that working behind the scenes is the next best thing. My maps are almost always accurate and to scale; I pride myself on it. Means that heroes can rely on the information for a multitude of things.”

He nodded, seemingly hesitating before speaking again. “Know we ain’t had a chance to talk much since y’started working here. Red begged me to put you in my agency because he figured you’d be easier to reach here and your name would get recognized if it was associated with my office.” You hadn’t really thought of that before, but he was right. Red Riot’s office was packed as it was, and you figured everyone else’s was too. It was a lucky shot that you got placed with Dynamight, since he was still looking for workers to fill in his office due to it being newer than most.

“I really appreciate Eijiro being able to start my career off like this. I never would have imagined moving across the country to start my dream job so soon, if at all,” you said, casting your gaze to the pictures on Dynamight’s shelves behind his desk. “First name basis, huh?” the hero smirked as you let out a small noise of shock. “Y-Yeah, we kept in contact a lot and he would regularly help me gain clients in different cities. Told me that we were friends and to stop addressing him by his hero name every time we talked.”

“That’s Eiji for you.” A pregnant pause followed before your boss let out a groan of frustration. “I’m not— I fuckin’ hate small talk like this. Don’t know how people do it,” Dynamight said finally, pinching the bridge of his nose before speaking again. “Couldn’t figure out how to speak to you without sounding like a dick ‘cause I didn’t do it sooner. Atsuno was grilling me about not even having a functional conversation with you yet, even though I’m the one that hired you.”

You let out a laugh at that. You had been a little mad at him for not even properly greeting you since you began your work for the agency, but you assumed that being the number 2 hero in Japan was busy as shit. “I get it, you’re a top hero. I’m sure you’re busy enough as it is, can’t blame you for not being able to talk to a cartographer of all people,” you shrugged as you spoke, Dynamight leaning back in his office chair and giving you a small nod.

“Yeah. Sorry for steering the conversation elsewhere. How’s Deku’s shitty map comin’ along?” He asked as you began going through the details of your progress.

After you explained the gist of it, he grunted in response before standing up. He’s tall as fuck, you realized as you hurriedly stood up as well, assuming your talk was over with. Dynamight walked you to his office door before stopping once you turned around to thank him again. “Thanks for uh— earlier. When you were complimenting my work. It means a lot, truly.”

“Don’t let it inflate yer shitty ego. Can’t handle another person that gets a big head after someone compliments them,” he spat. You could tell he wasn’t used to being given a sincere thanks very often. “Hey. One more thing.”

You raised an eyebrow at him as his face turned blank for a moment before he sighed and his signature scowl returned. You should have known the conversation you were having earlier was too good to be true.

“You would not be able to win against me in a fuckin’ cook off. My cooking probably beats yours by a shit ton. Watch your mouth next time you run around all bark and no bite.” You nearly fainted on the spot as your body ran as cold as ice. What the fuck. What the fuck? WHAT THE FUCK? You repeated in your head, eyes going wider than dish plates as Dynamight’s glare sent another chill down your spine.

“Shit.” Is all that came out of your mouth after he all but pushed you by your back out the door and closed it in your face.

It’s official, you think as you trudge your way to the elevator, the beginning of a migraine creeping into your skull. You were going to kill Naomi.

[growueditsus]

Podcast Editing Service vs DIY: What’s Best for Your Brand?

With the rising popularity of podcasts and video content across nearly every industry, standing out means delivering not just great ideas, but high-quality production. As a result, many creators face a common dilemma: Should you edit your podcast or videos yourself (DIY), or hire a professional editing service? The answer largely depends on your goals, time, budget, and technical skill level. Let's break down the pros and cons of each approach to help you decide what’s best for your brand.

The Case for DIY Podcast and Video Editing

Many new podcasters and YouTubers choose the DIY route, especially when starting out with a limited budget. With free or low-cost software like Audacity, GarageBand, DaVinci Resolve, or Reaper, editing your own episodes or videos can seem manageable—and even empowering.

Pros of DIY editing:

Cost-effective: No need to pay for professional services, which can range from $50 to $500+ per episode or video.

Creative control: You can tweak every second to your liking, from pacing to transitions and effects.

Learning opportunity: Gaining editing skills can be valuable, especially if you plan to scale your content production.

Cons of DIY editing:

Time-consuming: Editing a 30-minute episode or YouTube video can take several hours, especially for beginners.

Steep learning curve: Poor editing can result in distracting quality issues, which hurt audience retention and credibility.

Less time for content creation or promotion: DIY editing pulls time away from growing your brand and audience.

The Case for Professional Editing Services

Professional editing services specialize in turning raw content into polished, professional-grade media. Whether you need a podcast editing service or a video editing service for YouTubers, these providers handle everything from noise reduction and color correction to music integration and show notes.

Pros of using a professional editing service:

Professional quality: Experienced editors ensure your podcast or video is crisp, clean, and engaging.

Time-saving: Outsourcing frees up your schedule to focus on content creation, marketing, or running your business.

Brand consistency: Many services offer packages that include intros, outros, visual branding, transcripts, and publishing support—keeping your image polished across platforms.

Cons of hiring a service:

Cost: A quality podcast editing service or YouTube video editing service is an investment and may not fit every creator's budget.

Less direct control: You may have to rely on someone else to understand your tone and voice, which can take some adjustment.

Dependency: Relying on an editor may delay production if timelines or expectations aren’t managed clearly.

What’s Best for Your Brand?

If you’re just starting out and working with limited resources, DIY editing may be a great short-term solution. However, if your goal is to grow a professional brand, scale your YouTube channel, or attract sponsors, investing in a podcast editing service or video editing service for YouTubers can be a smart move.

As your channel or show grows, you’ll likely want to hire editors for YouTube or podcasts to help you maintain quality and consistency. Whether you're creating episodes or producing content for a growing audience, a trusted YouTube video editing service can save time and elevate your brand.

[altaqwaelectric]

The Importance of Cable Management in Electrical Panels

In modern electrical installations, particularly in industrial, commercial, and residential applications, cable management in electrical panels plays a critical role. Poor cable organization can lead to inefficiencies, overheating, safety hazards, and costly downtime. Implementing proper cable management is not just a technical necessity — it’s a long-term investment in the performance, safety, and scalability of your electrical system.

What is Cable Management in Electrical Panels?

Cable management refers to the planning, installation, and maintenance of cables within an electrical panel to ensure neatness, organization, and optimal functionality. It includes the use of accessories such as cable ties, ducts, cable trays, wire markers, and labeling systems.

Common Components Used:

· Cable trays and ducts

· Cable ties and clips

· Wire markers and labels

· Conduits and sleeves

· Cable management panels and grommets

Why is Cable Management Important in Electrical Panels?

1. Enhances Electrical Safety

Proper cable routing reduces the risk of:

· Short circuits

· Arc flashes

· Fire hazards due to overheating or overloading

· Accidental disconnections or loose terminals

Safety is non-negotiable in any electrical system, and disorganized wiring is a known contributor to accidents and failures.

2. Improves System Reliability and Performance

A clean layout ensures stable voltage and current flow by minimizing electrical interference (EMI/RFI). It helps in:

· Preventing signal loss

· Reducing cross-talk in data cables

· Maintaining consistency in power distribution

3. Simplifies Maintenance and Troubleshooting

With labeled and properly routed cables:

· Technicians can quickly identify circuits and connections

· Downtime during maintenance is significantly reduced

· Errors due to wrong connections are minimized

4. Optimizes Space and Panel Layout

Efficient cable arrangement allows:

· Better airflow and heat dissipation

· Accommodation of future upgrades or expansions

· Reduced clutter and stress on terminal blocks

5. Compliance with Standards

Organizations such as IEC, NEC, and IEEE provide guidelines on wiring practices. Adhering to these standards not only ensures safety but also legal compliance during audits and inspections.

Best Practices for Cable Management in Electrical Panels

✅ Plan Before You Install

· Design the cable layout during the panel design phase

· Use CAD software for accurate visualization

✅ Use Quality Cable Management Accessories

· Invest in fire-resistant and durable cable trays and ducts

· Use color-coded wire markers for quick identification

✅ Ensure Proper Bending Radius

· Prevent cable damage by maintaining manufacturer-recommended bend radii

✅ Label Everything Clearly

· Use laser-printed or pre-numbered labels for durability and readability

✅ Separate Power and Signal Cables

· Avoid EMI by isolating high-voltage and low-voltage cables

✅ Secure Cables Firmly

· Use cable ties, clamps, or holders to prevent movement or vibration

✅ Regularly Inspect and Maintain

· Schedule routine inspections to spot frayed, loose, or overloaded cables

Industries Where Cable Management is Critical

· Manufacturing Plants — High-voltage systems and automated machinery

· Data Centers — Dense cable infrastructure and sensitive equipment

· Commercial Buildings — Office automation, security systems

· Healthcare — Life-support systems and diagnostic machines

· Renewable Energy — Solar inverters, battery management panels

Conclusion

Cable management in electrical panels is more than just a matter of aesthetics — it’s a critical component of a safe, reliable, and future-proof electrical system. From enhanced safety to easier maintenance and compliance, the benefits far outweigh the costs. Whether you’re an installer, facility manager, or system designer, investing in organized and well-planned cable management is a smart, long-term decision.

[mariacallous]

NextCity recently published a hot take by Steffen Berr tying the ways in which the US is failing at reducing pedestrian deaths to the misaligned training that most transportation engineers in the US receive. Berr explains that a transportation engineer “is a really a civil engineer who has received a little exposure to the transportation sector.” Due to the structure of accredited degree programs, “In a best-case scenario, a civil engineer will only take three transportation classes during their bachelor’s degree. In the worst case, they’ll only take one: Introduction to Highway Engineering. To put this into perspective, the most educated professionals we entrust to design and run our roads and streets have received only half of a minor with a handful of credits on the topic.”

Berr goes on to address the reasonable objection that in many fields, people learn on the job. But what transportation engineers learn on the job, per Berr, is not things like how to choose the most appropriate intersection for the desired use, how the road system should be laid out at a network/route level, or how to fix congestion (none of which, he argues, they learn in school either.) Instead, they learn “how to navigate the impressive amounts of bureaucracy that have been built up in the industry, memorize an impressive vocabulary of technical jargon, practice with design software like AutoCAD to produce engineering plans, and how to copy the current engineering standards. There is no exposure to deep levels of theory that can help our future professionals create original solutions to fundamental problems like safety, congestion, emissions and ethics.” 

I’m less interested in Berr’s point about the wrong degree requirements than I am in his observation about what the job of transportation engineer actually is. As Stafford Beer observed, “the purpose of a system is what it does,” and by analogy, the purpose of a job is not its stated goals but what the people who do it actually do day to day.1 When talking to people who’ve never worked in government, the biggest disconnect is usually a lack of understanding of the actual jobs of public servants. A rather dramatic illustration of this comes from a Mercatus Center podcast with Lant Pritchett in which he shares an anecdote about advocating for evidence-based policy in the Indian bureaucracy. 

After they had done the RCT [random control trial] showing that this Balsakhi program of putting tutors in the schools really led to substantial gains and learning achievement and reading outcomes, he took it to the secretary of education of the place in which they had done the RCT. And he said, “Oh, by the way, I have the solution to your problem of low learning levels, or at least part of the solution. Look, we’ve got this powerful evidence that this works to improve leading outcomes by putting these volunteer tutors and pulling their low learning kids out.” The response of the secretary of education was, “What do you think my job is? Why do you think that this is a solution to a problem I have? Look around my office. See these piles and piles of files that keep me busy 60 hours a week and not one of these files is about a child not learning. I’m under no pressure about that problem. If I try and transfer a teacher, I’ve got a court case on my hand. If I try and close a school, I got a court case on my hand. My job is to administer the existing education policy such that there’s policy compliance. Super kudos to you for this cute little study you’ve done. It has nothing to do with my job as secretary of education.”

Ouch. And that’s a secretary of an agency serving a county with 1.5 billion people.

I suspect a lot of public servants in the US will read that and think “My job is not quite as bad as that but it sure feels that way a lot.” The people I know maintain enough connection to the actual mission to avoid such a meltdown (though I find the secretary’s frankness refreshing.) But both these stories help explain a conundrum that many who care about effective government (or, shall we say, state capacity) struggle to explain: the contradiction between the dedication, smarts, and creativity of most public servants and the sometimes terrible outcomes they are associated with, like the recent tragic lapses in administering student loans by the US Department of Education. (Or in Berr’s world, the 40,000 traffic deaths we’re stuck with every year while countries like the Netherlands have dropped their own already low number by 46%.2) To be sure, there are often extraordinary outcomes (hello Direct File!), and we notice them far less often, to our own detriment. But while it’s impossible to give government a meaningful overall grade, if its job is to meet challenges we face (national security, climate change, an effective safety net, etc.), we are at risk of falling dangerously short. The problem isn’t that public servants are doing a bad job, it’s that they’re doing a great job — at the wrong jobs.''

The (unnamed in this context) Indian Secretary of Education seems to agree: “My job is to administer the existing education policy such that there’s policy compliance.” I highly doubt that’s the job he thought he was getting, or the job he wanted to do. Berr is on the same general theme when he says that what transportation engineers learn on the job is “how to operate in the industry effectively as it has been currently set up.” Note his use of the word effectively. Effective towards what? Not towards reducing traffic deaths or congestion levels. “All the experience in the world of copying and pasting a standard invented fifty years ago is useless when the problems that the standard was invented to resolve have changed,” he says. “Understanding this sheds a lot of light as to why 40,000 people are still dying on our roads every year and why your local city insists on laying down sharrows [which are known to be ineffective and often dangerous] in their latest round of “safety improvements.” Quite frankly, it’s because we have no idea what we are doing.”

This is a useful nuance as I develop a framework for building state capacity. One of my admittedly obvious and oversimplified tenets is that systems have both “go energy” and “stop energy,” much as a car has a gas pedal and a brake. You wouldn’t drive a car without a brake, but you also wouldn’t drive a car in which the brake was pressed all the time, even when you were trying to accelerate. This is a good metaphor for how we’re dealing with the implementation of CHIPS, IRA, and the Infrastructure Bill, for example, where the clear intent is speed and scale but the public servants responsible are held back from that by the brakes of overly zealous compliance functions. I hear a version of this at every agency I visit: “Congress tells us to do something. Then the compliance offices keep us from doing that very thing.” (And side note for further discussion: This is an issue of representation, voice, and democracy.) The stop energy in our government is currently a lot bigger than it should be. We’re hitting the gas but we’re not accelerating because we’re pressing the brake at the same time. 

Lots of people in government have “stop energy” jobs. We need them, and we need them to be good at them. I don’t want to live in a country where our government doesn’t exercise “stop authority.” I try to remember not to complain when my flight is delayed because I really don’t want to die in a plane crash, and a rigidly implemented checklist is a big part of how we keep safe (the current epidemic of doors and engine cowlings blowing off notwithstanding). I also really like being pretty confident that a pill I’m taking has been tested and not tampered with. I like thinking our nuclear arsenal is protected. You know, little things like that.

Stop energy is critical. Rigid adherence to protocol is usually lifesaving. But it must exist in balance. I recently learned the Navy concept of “front of sub/back of sub.” The back of a nuclear submarine, where the nukes live, is run by the book. You don’t deviate from the checklist. You don’t innovate. You don’t question. The front of the sub, on the other hand, is responsible for navigating through dark waters. You have to improvise. You have to make judgment calls. There are manuals and checklists, for sure, but the nature of the work calls for a different approach, and the Navy recognizes that the cultures of front and back have evolved appropriately to meet distinct needs. 

There are times, of course, when you’ll need front of sub judgment in a back of sub context. If the plane I was on was about to be bombed by an enemy combatant (unlikely in my life, I hope), I would be okay with the pilot using her discretion to cut a corner or two on the takeoff checklist, because the very thing that checklist is there to protect (the lives of the people on board) would under threat from a different vector. Taking every precaution in that scenario could be reckless. That’s a bit how I feel about the NEPA reviews and other bureaucratic processes that are holding back building the infrastructure we need to move to a low-carbon economy. I wish for the public servants in charge to see the threat of inaction – those species the checklist is trying to protect are threatened by temperature rise as much or more than they are by the project in question – and make good judgment calls about getting the plane off the runway a lot quicker, so to speak. This feels like a domain where back of sub culture has more hold than it should given the circumstances. And to Berr’s point, we can’t rely on back of sub culture when the checklist and protocols it uses no longer serve the purpose.

Of course, “stop energy” roles can themselves be balanced – if only I had a dime for every discussion about the value of lawyers who get to yes and the frustrations with those who seem to do nothing but block. The analogy breaks down a bit here because the items on a pre-flight checklist are binary – they are either red or green – whereas the ad hoc checklists that lawyers assemble to ensure compliance before signing off on an action are almost always shades of gray – they can be open to lots of interpretations. Any given lawyer, or compliance officer, or ethics cop can treat their role with appropriate balance, reserving their stop authority only when the risks truly outweigh the benefits. But getting the culture of a team, department, or agency to balance stop and go correctly at a macro level is extremely difficult. It’s rare to see leadership really change that balance, or for it to stick. It’s a retail approach, hugely dependent on personalities and circumstances.

What would a wholesale approach to getting back into balance look like? One answer should be a simple matter of top-down workforce planning, of the kind our Office of Personnel Management should be empowered to do: fewer stop energy jobs relative to go energy jobs. Hire more doers than brakers, both in how the position is defined and in the characteristics of the people selected for the job. But that proposal needs several important caveats. Of course, every great employee is some mix of these energies – a “go only” employee would be exhausting and dangerous in all but the most extreme circumstances – so we’re talking about a general orientation. More importantly, having fewer brakers will only result in enormous backlogs if they have the same stopping power. But there are plenty of functions where its possible to safely move from default no to default yes, possibly with an after the fact correction mechanism.3 Instead of requiring form redesigns to go through a long White House approval process before they can be made available to the public, for instance, allow agencies to apply the appropriate level of scrutiny and sign-off for the form at hand and develop a process for catching and quickly fixing anything determined to be detrimental. This example speaks to the issue of multiple levels of safeguards. Loosening a safeguard that operates at the top level of federal government may not make much difference to overall stop energy if agencies, or in turn their subcomponents, or even teams, react by strengthening their own safeguard processes. There might be something like a Law of Conservation of Safeguards at play here. But it’s still worth considering the value of moving to default yes processes where appropriate. 

Of course, the question of the nature of the job public servants are tasked with is about much more than just stop vs go. It’s about what kind of work we’ve decided to invest in. I go into some depth about this in Chapter 5 of Recoding America as it relates to our lack of investment in digital competencies and how ideologies about private sector superiority led to a big outsourcing push just as digital was beginning to massively transform society.

…these internal competencies in digital became necessary just as we were jettisoning internal competencies of all sorts, not developing them. Instead of digital competency, government has developed extensive processes and procedures for procurement of digital work, and the ins and outs of procurements sometimes seem more complex and technical than the latest programming languages.

This points to another way to understand the disconnect between high employee performance and the outcomes our government produces (or fails to), especially relative to the investment made.4 Take procurement. I know a lot of people in procurement who are really good at their jobs. Some of them are considered really good because they’re great at the “back of sub” tasks of making sure every box is checked, and a manager might feel compelled to give them a high performance rating because of their thoroughness and dedication, even if the people who need the thing being acquired are frustrated by the slowness and rigidity of the process, and even if the thing that is ultimately acquired has checked all the boxes but doesn’t actually work. (For an example of this, see Chapter 4 of Recoding America.) But many of these procurement professionals operate according to “front of sub” principles, and are enormously creative and mission-driven. The other public servants who rely on them to procure things value them enormously. They may or may not receive high ratings, if the manager is judging them based on a “back of sub” approach. But procurement processes simply should not be as complex and burdensome as they have become. Both of these kinds of procurement professionals are doing a job that simply shouldn’t exist in its current form.

Especially with the looming threat of the return of Schedule F under a possible Trump administration, there’s a lot of talk of public sector employee performance and protections. I agree strongly with Donald Kettl, who has said about the left’s silence on civil service reforms in the face of Schedule F: “You can’t fight something with nothing.” I hope to be part of proposing a something there, something that improves government’s ability to fill many open positions and to effectively and ethically manage the workforce. But we could succeed entirely at that and still fail to meet the challenges in front of us if the jobs we fill are the wrong jobs.

Another of my admittedly obvious and oversimplified principles of how to build state capacity is that there are really only three things you can do:

You can have more of the right people

You can focus them on the right things

You can burden them less.

There is obviously quite a lot to say about each of those things, and they are all deeply intertwined. A big reason we don’t have more of the right people is that we overburden both the people responsible for hiring and the applicants, focusing both on the wrong things. We overburden public servants generally because we have designed too many of their jobs to stop bad things instead of to enable the things we desperately need. We are too often asking if public servants are doing a good job instead of understanding and questioning the nature of the jobs they’ve been hired to do. 

We need a much more robust understanding of how to fix the problem of hiring the right people to do the wrong jobs. We need wholesale strategies for tuning the dial between front of sub and back of sub, between stop and go, between brake and gas, and refocusing the job of public servants on the work that’s most directly meaningful towards the outcomes we want. We need staffers in agencies who act as if the climate crisis is the enemy plane that’s about to bomb us. We need transportation engineers whose actual job – as practiced on a daily basis, at scale – is to reduce congestion and pollution and improve and save lives. We need Secretaries of Education who have time in their day to look at the study on improving learning achievement, and maybe even take action on it. We need all of this now.

Imagine a world in which this — not just enforcing rules, not even just helping agencies fill open jobs, but ensuring that federal government fills the right jobs — was the mandate of an empowered and deeply collaborative Office of Personnel Management. They couldn’t do it alone, of course — it’s agencies that define the jobs they think they need and Congress that throws down law after law they must comply with, feeding the need for compliance. The White House Office of Management and Budget adds its own reporting and compliance burdens. Each would need to buy in on an agenda of building state capacity and do their part. But this is what workforce planning should really be, and in 2025, we will need it more than ever. If Biden gets a second term, this is the kind of ambitious agenda he should set.

1

Please read Dan Davies’ excellent new book The Unaccountability Machine for a lot more on Beer and why this is important.

2

The US has 12.8 traffic deaths per 100,000 people, the Netherland 3.6 per 100,0000.

3

I think this is a Guarino-ism… if I’m misattributing it, someone will correct me.

4

Some will point out that perverse incentives in the performance management practices can sometimes make it hard to give public sector employees poor ratings, which may skew the data. I don’t quite know how to evaluate that claim, but I also don’t think it’s all that relevant if you’re trying to

[kellyscabin]

Hey I love ur amvs!! I was wondering if you had advice for someone that's interested in making their own? I'm not sure what the best programs are for editing or getting clips. Ty! :)

this is so flattering thank you so much!!!!! I LOVE making amvs…… favourite thing in the world to do so this is gonna be probably longer than you wanted…..

I’ve bounced around just about everything in the last couple years so I can give you a few different ideas!!

For clip sourcing:

initially, I used episodes that I had downloaded as supernatural was airing so the quality was iffy and there were logos on a lot of them… THEN I went the screen recording route (for when I was on my phone, I’ve never tried this on desktop but I know this works well for others!!) but I found that the quality still bugged me AND I ended up with nearly 2000 supernatural clips on my phone…… which was a nightmare to sort through… NOW I use this which is very fabulous and easy to use… you can select which eps to download if you don’t need all of them!! (and no vpn needed)

For editing:

I’ve used a lot of different programmes til I found one that worked well for me so definitely shop around…. youtube tutorials are your friend…. when I started, I was using sony vegas pro…. which worked fine even though my laptop was the first one ever made… but I didn’t want to pay for it and it got blocked on my laptop forever and windows would notttt let me get it back…….. SO, as I mentioned, for a while I was editing on my phone which I would personally nottt recommend for full length amvs… smaller edits would be completely fine!! I used splice which was very basic but it got the job done!! actually. looking through my videos- everything from mr perfectly fine to dean movies was made on my phone which is about 30 videos- so this works!! it’s just much more difficult and harder to polish up…. I personally make amvs much quicker and cleaner on my laptop.. and noticed a big big difference in my own quality since I switched….. NOW I use capcut since it’s free and my laptop can run it without any issues. I’m genuinely very impressed with it as a free software- lots of really good tools and effects, I find it so easy to alter colours and subtitle as well!! which I struggled with on other platforms!! very user friendly too!!! would be very beginner friendly!!

fun stuff :)

PLANNING is my absolute favourite part of making an amv…… normally I hear a song and can very easily picture shot by shot how I would amv it - once I’ve got the song and general theme I’m going for- I normally print out the lyrics and annotate them - jotting down timings, voiceovers, season, arcs and clips.. I can sometimes skip this if it’s just a simple video but if it’s anything complicated I HAVE to write it down. I also find it’s easier to make a video have a ‘point’ if I do this??? idk.. I think it helps but idk if this is something everybody does :)

there’s the spn transcript searcher which is very useful as well if there’s a line you’re looking for but can’t remember where it’s from!!

and of course homeofthenutty which is great for thumbnail stuff!!

editing things:

honestly… I don’t think there’s a wrong way to do this if you’ve got a really fabulous idea….. timings are the trickiest thing to get the hang of- I do dashes on my printed plan to kind of show where I need cuts and if it’s fast cuts I write down how long each clip should be so it looks cleaner. I find that my videos don’t really look finished until they’re subtitled either- so that always helps!! everybody kind of does that differently so definitely play around until you find a style you like!!

I wouldn’t worry too much about colouring when you’re just starting out- sometimes I find that filters can be distracting but I know others who swear by them so that’s just personal preference!! I really just tweak certain clips to make them less saturated or green-looking….

for posting:

I really recommend posting simultaneously on tumblr and youtube!! I have videos with basically no notes on tumblr but did really well on yt and vice versa!! the yt algorithm can be funny- I find that as long as it has a custom thumbnail and a few comments it does alright!! on tumblr- I always link the yt video since the tumblr player doesn’t always work for everybody…. also don’t be afraid to use taglists!!! I’m sure your mutuals would love to be tagged and please definitely tag me in anything you make!!! genuinely owe so much to my mutuals for their support 🫶🫶 and also don’t be afraid to self-reblog!! chronological dashboard means people WILL miss things if they aren’t online!!!

but genuinely the most important thing is to have fun…… I seriously love amvs…. I think they’re the best thing in the world and spend probably at least half an hour minimum a day watching amvs…….. and we need more of them!!!!! so thank you!!! and please please tag me when you make one!!! and feel free to dm me if you need anything at all!!! like all technical aspects aside… an amv made with so much love and to a fabulous song is a gift to the world…… 🫶🫶

[iri-desky]

Number 6 for... ALL your works HAHA. I love hearing about antagonists <3

6 - A song that describes your villain / antagonist

THE WAY I STARTED VIBRATING WHEN I READ THIS ASK HEHEHEHE. THANK YOU RAVEL FOR LETTING ME YAPPP I WILL GLADLY PROVIDE YOU WITH MY MUSIC

This one is kinda weird to answer because I'm not the kinda person who often writes direct villains? Like, not in the "disney post twist villain era" way, but moreso I'm not the kinda person who usually thinks "Okay, but who's gonna be the villain" and instead "Okay, how do I write this character that opposes these characters". So technically, yeah, I do write villains, just not that directly.

Anyway I had to do some thinking for this one and for the sake of clarity I'll at least give the name of each of the villains / villain groups + a brief description for each music assignment 👍🏽👍🏽👍🏽

YAPFEST AHEAD!

🔔 - The Stall

The Stall really isn't a sentient being, moreso a strange force that seems to be fucking with the timeline. Though it does beg one to wonder how it managed to spread to the first place...

Gee, I wonder if this song has a clue towards their reasons...

🚗 - The Ansaldo Family

Poor Tom and Roxy, trying to take a rocking retro road trip (in 2017) ...only to totally not be hunted down by a weird mafia-cult (?) that was originally out for Tom's missing, declared dead father way back in the 70s and 80s and 90s and all that...surely nothing will go wrong?

🦈 - Cha

Doug just wanted to live a normal life up on the surface as the single dad of his kid and leave his past behind, until an old "friend" came calling from down in the hellish world of the deep below the surface...such an underwater hellscape is terrifyingly easy to find.

And Cha sure knows how to handle the place.

💤 - Sandy

If you're wondering, this is also the protagonist.

There really is no enemy in this one other than the protagonist themselves. Half the story happens in their own head. And they have to deal with all their own issues.

💾 - EnCrypt

Yknow, maybe creating those six realistic AI individuals as "perfect" beings (or rather, the protagonists of the story) that they decided to send out on the streets for an experiment wasn't the best idea...

👢 - Vihaan

Can't find it on Spotify sooo;

God Shattering Star - Fire Emblem: Three Houses Soundtrack

There really isnt much of a villain in this work other than geographic conflict between two kingdoms, though you really should question the validity of the Hero God's actions, who promises to bestow the most random of magical, *literal*, tangible gift items upon people in the kingdoms at SOME point in their life, whether it be moments after their birth or hours before their death.

🎭 - The Narrator

Man, you're sick if you think it's okay to assemble a bunch of actors in a mansion and wait for whatever unsuspecting pair of kids (you know, like a certain wannabe detective girl named Emma or a certain shy theatre kid girl Toni) stroll into its depths to start the most traumatizing game of "Who Am I?" in the history of mankind. I mean, who knows about Commedia Del Arte anymore !? Or Shakespeare's stuff..........smh....or theatre conventions....

⚔️ - ...

This one depends.

The Gilded Gallant is a story that challenges the usual good/evil, hero's journey thing. But not in an edgy "oh, we're all grey and evil" thing. But more in a "it's not as easy to define" or "labels suck" kinda way. It's very irreverent kinda unserious about making fun of tropes and such at the start but slowly gets darker as the story goes on.

I plan on this one to be a game, so there'd be multiple routes. Since I don't wanna spoil it, lemme just give you the theme for the "villain" chatacter of this story who I absolutely ADORE, Mischa;

🔮 - Also depends. This one's meant to be episodic so there's constantly a "villain of the week" but lemme just give you a song for the villain lady whose name I won't disclose who's an arc villain at one point; (or maybe at least just kinda a dick)

This ones also pretty unserious but it's got a great aesthetic, I'll tell ya that.

I mean, in a world where magical girls...oh, I mean magical witches and knights, are such a popular thing to the point that people expect them to come around and they're all treated like your run of the mill celebrities and fashion icons for those glitzy and unique outfits, who can you trust?

🧸 - Let's be honest, the enemy here is the entire environment. So lemme give you a song I think just fits the world;

(fun fact, little nightmares did indeed inspire this one!)

Can you really survive in a world as someone who's still (mostly) flesh where most of the world decides to modify their body somehow with mechanical and plastic modifications? Science got a little too advanced. Now everyone can be whatever they want! To...horrifying degrees.

🌕 - Depends on what you consider the "enemy" from the narrative here; is it scientists for accidentally creating a method of contriving authentic life that eventually fell into the wrong hands, letting freaks of nature run rampant and terrorize the earth? The people who took advantage of that? Or is it the strange, ethereal being that's been sighted around town that is making these things much bigger than they logically should be, and making things much stranger...

Either way, this ought to describe it;

HOPE YOU ENJOYED !! :DDD THIS WAS SO MUCH FUN TO WRITE

^ Wanna join the ask game? It's right here!

[everfastfrieght]

How to Optimize Transportation Management in Logistics for Cost Efficiency

Introduction Transportation is a key component of logistics and supply chain management, often making up as much as 50% of total logistics expenses. As fuel prices fluctuate, regulatory demands increase, and supply chains face disruptions, businesses must prioritize optimizing transportation management to lower costs and enhance efficiency. By implementing strategic transportation solutions, companies can reduce operational costs, improve delivery timelines, boost customer satisfaction, and increase profits.

This guide delves into effective strategies to optimize transportation management, reduce costs, and drive operational improvements.

Why Transportation Management is Crucial for Logistics

Efficient transportation management provides significant benefits to businesses, including:

Lower Operational Costs – Reduce fuel, labor, and storage expenses.

Improved Supply Chain Efficiency – Ensure timely deliveries and minimize delays.

Better Fleet Utilization – Optimize vehicle capacity and route efficiency.

Increased Profit Margins – Use resources effectively for greater cost control.

Enhanced Customer Satisfaction – Offer faster, reliable deliveries.

Without effective transportation management, businesses risk delays, increased costs, and reduced profitability.

Key Strategies for Optimizing Transportation Management and Reducing Costs

1. Embrace Route Optimization and Smart Planning

Inefficient routing leads to higher fuel consumption, longer delivery times, and escalated transportation costs.

Best Practices for Route Optimization:

Utilize AI-powered software to determine the most efficient routes.

Avoid traffic congestion and toll roads to save on time and costs.

Optimize multi-stop routes to enhance delivery efficiency.

Monitor road conditions and weather to prevent potential delays.

Technology to Use:

Google Maps API – Real-time traffic updates and optimized route suggestions.

AI-driven Route Planners (Locus, Route4Me, OptimoRoute) – Smart routing solutions to reduce fuel consumption and improve delivery times.

2. Leverage Multimodal Transportation for Cost Efficiency

Multimodal transportation combines different transport methods (road, rail, sea, air) to create more cost-effective logistics solutions.

Benefits of Multimodal Transport:

Cost Savings – Rail and sea transport lower long-distance shipment costs.

Sustainability – Rail and sea transport are more eco-friendly than road transport.

Faster Shipments – Combining air and road transport expedites urgent deliveries.

Example:

Shipping from Mumbai to Delhi:

Use rail for bulk shipments (cost-effective).

Use trucks for last-mile delivery (ensures timely service to the customer).

3. Reduce Fuel Costs with Effective Fuel Management

Fuel is one of the highest expenses in logistics, and minimizing fuel consumption can have a significant impact on overall transportation costs.

Tips for Reducing Fuel Costs:

Switch to fuel-efficient vehicles, such as electric or hybrid trucks.

Monitor driver behavior to reduce idling, speeding, and harsh braking.

Plan routes with lower fuel costs by avoiding high-price fuel areas.

Implement fuel card programs to get discounts and rebates on bulk fuel purchases.

Technology to Use:

Geotab Fuel Management Software – Tracks fuel usage and driver performance to improve efficiency.

Fleet Complete – Provides real-time tracking and fuel efficiency insights.

4. Optimize Fleet Utilization & Maintain Vehicles

Inefficient fleet management, including underused vehicles and poor maintenance, can lead to higher operating costs.

Fleet Optimization Tips:

Consolidate shipments to fill vehicles to capacity and reduce unnecessary trips.

Use predictive maintenance to prevent breakdowns and costly repairs.

Ensure regular vehicle servicing to extend the life of the fleet and minimize unplanned downtime.

Track idle time and driver efficiency to reduce fuel waste.

Technology to Use:

Fleet Management Systems (Samsara, Verizon Connect) – Monitor fleet utilization in real-time.

Predictive Maintenance Software (Uptake, Pitstop) – Avoid breakdowns by identifying potential issues early.

5. Improve Warehouse & Distribution Efficiency

Reducing the distance between warehouses and end customers can significantly lower transportation costs.

Warehouse Optimization Techniques:

Set up regional distribution centers to shorten delivery distances.

Optimize inventory storage for faster order fulfillment.

Automate warehouse processes using robotics and AI to improve efficiency.

Technology to Use:

Warehouse Management Systems (WMS) – Automate inventory and dispatch (Fishbowl, NetSuite, SAP EWM).

Automated Sorting and Packing Solutions – Improve warehouse operations (Honeywell Intelligrated, GreyOrange Robotics).

6. Negotiate Better Deals with Logistics Providers

Businesses often overpay for transportation services due to poor negotiations with logistics providers.

How to Reduce Freight Costs:

Compare multiple logistics providers before making final agreements.

Negotiate discounts for bulk shipments or high-volume contracts.

Explore third-party logistics (3PL) options for more flexible and competitive pricing.

Leverage freight bidding platforms to secure the best deals.

Top 3PL Providers in India:

Everfast Freight Pvt. Ltd. – Offers a range of logistics solutions.

Verfast Freight Forwarders Pvt. Ltd. – Specializes in customs clearance and freight forwarding.

Blue Dart Express Ltd. – Reliable air and road freight services.

7. Enhance Supply Chain Visibility with Real-Time Tracking

Limited visibility into shipments can cause delays, lost goods, and higher costs.

Ways to Improve Visibility:

Use GPS and IoT sensors to provide real-time tracking updates.

Offer customers live tracking features to increase transparency.

Utilize data analytics to predict delays and make proactive adjustments.

Technology to Use:

IoT Logistics Trackers (Roambee, Intel IoT Fleet Management) – Real-time monitoring of shipments.

AI-Powered Predictive Analytics (ClearMetal, FourKites) – Forecast and prevent shipment delays.

How Everfast Freight Pvt. Ltd. Helps Optimize Transportation Management

Everfast Freight Pvt. Ltd. specializes in innovative logistics solutions to help businesses optimize transportation management:

AI-Based Route Optimization – Reduce fuel costs and delivery times with advanced routing.

Multimodal Freight Solutions – Combine Road, rail, air, and sea transport for the best pricing.

Customs Clearance & Compliance – Streamline global trade with efficient customs processes.

Real-Time Tracking & Fleet Management – Full transparency across your supply chain.

Affordable 3PL Services – Bulk shipping discounts and flexible logistics options.

Emerging Trends in Transportation Management

Autonomous Vehicles & AI-Driven Fleet Management – Self-driving trucks to reduce labor costs and improve efficiency.

Hyperloop & High-Speed Rail – Faster intercity freight transport.

Sustainable Logistics – Adoption of electric trucks and alternative fuels for greener operations.

Blockchain in Freight Management – Increased security and transparency in logistics records.

Conclusion

Optimizing transportation management is essential for lowering costs, improving supply chain efficiency, and boosting profitability. By adopting advanced technology, data-driven planning, and strategic partnerships, businesses can significantly reduce transportation expenses while improving operations. Partnering with Everfast Freight Pvt. Ltd. ensures access to AI-driven optimization, multimodal transport services, and cost-effective logistics solutions.

Looking for a trusted logistics partner? Contact Everfast Freight Pvt. Ltd. today!

[being-kindrad]

hey, i just found out about the forum, and while i admit i haven't checked it out myself yet, i have a couple questions that i'd love to ask.

how is the forum in terms of user privacy? are passwords stored in plaintext? (please tell me they aren't.)

related to that, how can we be sure the website won't be an easy victim to attacks? if the forum were victim of a cyber attack, would user accounts be compromised?

lastly, what do you think of implementing a rule similar to 4chan's "don't talk about 4chan"? if we want to keep the website hush-hush and less vulnerable to male infiltrators, it might be good to promote secrecy in some degree, maybe even encourage willful misnaming of the website (but i'd like to know what you think).

Hi. Please check out the cybersecurity page for tips on how to stay safe on the internet and especially when using the forum. If people are not comfortable with any chance of a database breach, I would recommend not making an account. While I would love people to join, I care about being honest and making sure people are aware and okay with the risks of participating.

how is the forum in terms of user privacy? are passwords stored in plaintext? (please tell me they aren't.)

Passwords are not stored in plaintext. However, I will say MyBB's (the forum software I'm using) password encryption algorithm is not the best, so if the database were breached, it would be relatively trivial for a hacker who knew what they were doing to decrypt user passwords. MyBB plans to use a better encryption algorithm in its next release, and switching to that once it is out will be a top priority for me. This is why I suggest using a unique password for this forum (and tbh on any website it is best to use a unique password, you never know where the next database breach will come from).

related to that, how can we be sure the website won't be an easy victim to attacks? if the forum were victim of a cyber attack, would user accounts be compromised?

All passwords for all administrative accounts/logins related to the forum, its database, its server, etc. are very long and randomly generated, and are completely different from each other. Password hacking would be extremely difficult, likely impossible.

The biggest way I could see user accounts becoming compromised would be through a database breach (getting access to the database). There are two ways I see this could happen:

Someone directly uses the server account credentials to log in and breach the database (highly likely impossible as they would need to know where the server is located and the password for the server).

Someone hacking into an administrator account on the forum and downloading the database. This would be the more likely route, but they would need to know the password of an administrator account. This is how Kodi, a MyBB forum with 400k users, got its database breached. However, there are multiple ways to avoid this. 1.) I found instructions on how to lock down the MyBB Admin CP (Control Panel) with an additional password, which would mean a hacker would need to not just hack into an admin's account, but also know the password to the Admin CP. 2.) There is another option of editing the forum source code so that the ability to download databases from the Admin CP is completely disabled. 3.) If any additional administrators are needed, I could give them adjusted permissions which would not allow them to create database backups. Overall though, I don't think I will need to add administrators any time soon, if ever. (Moderators are different than admins.)

In the worst case scenario of a database breach, what would be leaked is similar to the Kodi breach above. This is why on the Cybersecurity page, I say: use a unique password, don't use an important email, be wary of the private messaging system, etc.

lastly, what do you think of implementing a rule similar to 4chan's "don't talk about 4chan"? if we want to keep the website hush-hush and less vulnerable to male infiltrators, it might be good to promote secrecy in some degree, maybe even encourage willful misnaming of the website (but i'd like to know what you think).

Hmm, well I've already announced the forum on Tumblr, so it's not very hush-hush already. :') My view is that male infiltrators would try to get in regardless. I don't think I can stop people from talking/sharing the forum, and I would prefer feminist women be able to find it easier. I would like to hope the application process would weed out most bad actors.

[avaalin]

Transportation Management System 

Navigating Efficiency: The Benefits of a Transport Management System (TMS)

In an increasingly globalized and fast-paced world, effective transportation is key to business success. Companies are constantly seeking ways to streamline operations, reduce costs, and improve service quality. Enter the Transport Management System (TMS)—a software solution designed to optimize transportation logistics. We’ll explore what a TMS is, how it benefits businesses, and why investing in a TMS might be one of the smartest moves you make for your supply chain.

What is a Transport Management System?

A Transport Management System (TMS) is a specialized software solution used to plan, execute, and optimize the movement of goods. It provides a comprehensive platform to manage transportation processes, including route planning, carrier management, shipment tracking, and freight payment. By integrating with other supply chain systems, a TMS offers a centralized hub for managing logistics operations and improving overall efficiency.

Key Features of a TMS

 Route Optimization:

The features of a TMS are its ability to optimize routes. By analyzing factors such as traffic conditions, weather, and delivery windows, a TMS helps businesses select the most efficient routes, reducing transportation costs and delivery times.

Carrier Management:

A TMS simplifies the process of selecting and managing carriers. It provides access to a database of carriers, allows for rate comparisons, and facilitates carrier negotiations. This feature ensures that businesses can choose the best carriers based on cost, service quality, and performance metrics.

 Real-Time Tracking:

With real-time tracking capabilities, a TMS allows businesses to monitor shipments as they move through the supply chain. This visibility helps in proactively addressing any issues that arise, such as delays or disruptions, and provides customers with accurate delivery estimates.

Freight Audit and Payment:

A TMS automates the freight audit and payment process, ensuring that invoices are accurate, and payments are processed efficiently. This helps in identifying discrepancies, reducing billing errors, and managing transportation costs effectively.

Reporting and Analytics:

Advanced reporting and analytics tools within a TMS provide valuable insights into transportation performance. Businesses can analyze key metrics such as delivery times, costs, and carrier performance to make data-driven decisions and improve operational efficiency.

 Benefits of Implementing a TMS

Cost Reduction:

A TMS helps businesses reduce transportation costs through route optimization, carrier management, and efficient freight auditing. By streamlining these processes, companies can achieve significant savings on fuel, labor, and other transportation-related expenses.

Improved Efficiency:

By automating routine tasks and providing real-time visibility, a TMS enhances operational efficiency. Businesses can reduce manual paperwork, minimize errors, and speed up the decision-making process, leading to smoother and more efficient logistics operations.

Enhanced Customer Service:

With real-time tracking and accurate delivery estimates, a TMS improves customer satisfaction. Customers can receive timely updates on their shipments, leading to greater transparency and trust in the delivery process.

Better Decision-Making:

The data and insights provided by a TMS enable businesses to make informed decisions. Analyzing transportation performance and cost data helps in identifying areas for improvement, optimizing supply chain strategies, and enhancing overall operational performance.

Scalability and Flexibility:

A TMS is designed to scale with your business. Whether you’re expanding operations, adding new transportation modes, or entering new markets, a TMS can adapt to changing needs and support growth.

 Choose Right TMS of Your Business

When selecting a TMS, it’s important to consider your specific needs and objectives. Look for a system that aligns with your business size, industry requirements, and budget. Key factors to evaluate include ease of integration with existing systems, user-friendliness, customer support, and the scalability of the solution.

The Future of TMS

As technology continues to evolve, the future of TMS is bright. Innovations such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, and blockchain are set to further enhance the capabilities of TMS. These advancements promise to offer even greater efficiency, accuracy, and security in transportation management.

Conclusion

A Transport Management System (TMS) is a powerful tool that can transform transportation logistics, delivering substantial benefits in terms of cost savings, efficiency, and customer satisfaction. By leveraging the advanced features and capabilities of a TMS, businesses can navigate the complexities of modern supply chains with greater ease and confidence. Investing in a TMS is not just about keeping up with industry trends it's about staying ahead and achieving operational excellence in a competitive market.

[gps-tracker1]

How To Choose The Right Telematics Software Solution For Your Fleet?

Telematics is a combination of telecommunication and informatics that provides real-time information about vehicles through GPS systems, sensors, and onboard diagnostics. The telematics software solution provides many benefits including improved productivity, reduced costs, increased safety, enhanced customer service, and better compliance. 

This article will provide a comprehensive outlook on what to look for and how to pick the perfect telematics software for your fleet, supported by its features. 

Tips to Choose the Best Telematics Software Solution 

 At its most basic level, a telematics system consists of a vehicle tracking device installed in a vehicle that allows the sending, receiving, and storing of telemetry data in real time. This data is processed and then sent to end-users over a network.

Telematics systems can provide real-time data about vehicle location, fuel usage, speed, idle time, and driving behavior, all of which can play crucial roles in fleet management. This information can be invaluable for improving efficiency, and productivity, reducing operational costs, and ensuring the safety of drivers.

Selecting a suitable telematics system for a fleet-dependent business with these tips. 

Consider Your Requirements

For starters, you need to understand what you need from a telematics system. Are you focused on tracking location only? Or are you also interested in managing fuel efficiency, driver behavior, and fleet maintenance?

Features

When you know what you need, start evaluating different software. Go for the features that meet your fleet operations. Some might have features you don't currently need but could be useful in the future, providing room for growth.

Provider Reputation

Consider providers that have a robust track record and are known for excellent customer service. 

Cost

While not always the top priority, cost is always a significant consideration. Consider the total cost including purchase, installation, and ongoing monthly or yearly service fees. Ensure that all the features you need are included in the price, rather than as pricey add-ons. 

 Integration

 A telematics solution should be able to integrate with your existing systems.

Test Drive

If possible, give the software a test run before buying it and integrating it into your vehicle.

Customized

Every business has unique needs, and your telematics software should be able to cater to these. Also, look for a custom telematics software solution that is flexible to meet your current and future goals. 

Customer Support

Look for a provider with responsive customer support, particularly if you’re new to telematics. 

Read Blog : Maximize Your Fleet Safety with Video Telematics Solutions

Features Provided By the Vehicle Telematics Solutions 

As we know telematics uses GPS technology to collect data on various aspects of a vehicle's performance.

This data, ranging from speed and fuel consumption to engine diagnostics and driver behavior, is then sent via a telecommunications network to a server where it can be assessed using telematics software. 

Video telematics, on the other hand, adds the functioning of video recording to telematics devices. The video telematics system, therefore, also captures visual data while the vehicle is in motion, providing a more comprehensive view of the road and driver behavior.

1) Fleet Optimization: With reliable data on vehicle performance and driver behavior, companies can improve fleet efficiency. For instance, companies can plan optimal routes to reduce fuel consumption or ensure that deliveries are made on time. 

2) Vehicle Maintenance: Telematics data also aids in detecting vehicle maintenance needs timely. It can notify the fleet manager when vehicles are due for service, or when parts need replacement, thereby minimizing unexpected and costly breakdowns.

3) Driver Behavior Monitoring: Video telematics, particularly, comes in handy in providing real-time telematics insights into driver behaviors like speeding, harsh braking, or using a cell phone while driving. This data can be used to provide feedback to drivers, thereby improving safety. 

4) Real-Time Tracking: This allows fleet managers to track the location of their vehicles in real-time, which can help ensure drivers are following the planned routes and sticking to their schedules. It can also aid in the recovery of stolen vehicles.

5) Maintenance and Diagnostics: OBD-II telematics can provide comprehensive vehicle diagnostic reports, helping prevent breakdowns and unnecessary wear and tear by alerting fleet managers to any needed repairs or maintenance.

6) Fuel Management: The software can monitor and record fuel consumption, helping identify inefficient vehicles or potential fuel theft.

Wrap Up! 

Selecting the right telematics software requires careful consideration and a clear understanding of your fleet's needs. Importantly, it should help streamline your operations, improve productivity, and ultimately, increase your profits.

Always try before you buy, check on reliability, and ensure what is promised is delivered. Regularly reviewing your needs and the performance of your existing telematics platform is also important in keeping your software up-to-date and beneficial for your fleet.

So, why not give it a try at TrackoBit? Hurry, and contact us now!

Source : How To Choose The Right Telematics Software Solution For Your Fleet?

[routesavvy]

Routing software for deliveries

Routing software for deliveries can significantly optimize logistics operations, reducing costs, saving time, and improving overall efficiency. you can find the best routing software to enhance your delivery operations. Visit us: https://www.routesavvy.com/

[thepodcasthoard]

How to Start a Podcast | Complete Step-by-Step Guide for 2024- Riverside FM

Part 1 l Part 2 l Part 3 l Part 4 l Part 5 l Part 6 l Part 7 l Part 8 l Part 9 l Part 10 l Part 11

The twelfth article Sydney gave me is from riverside FM, which is a recording and editing site for podcasters.

This article has a video accompanying it.

The article lists ten steps.

Plan your podcast

Think about why you want to make a podcast.

Choose a niche topic, with a linked article with ideas of categories. I say categories and not niches because they're 'true crime,' 'health and fitness,' 'business,' and others like that.

Think about what you're both knowledgeable and passionate about, who your target audience is, how you can help that target audience, what gaps you can fill in the podcasting market, and what will make your podcast stand out.

This article gives you over a hundred topics to think about, which I actually found interesting. Some of the really grabby ones I saw were 'day in the life' where you interviewed everyday people, 'mystery theme' where each episode in a season is seemingly unconnected or only loosely connected before you reveal the underlying theme at the end, a music podcast where you take calls or emails and suggest new artists based on what they already listen to, a scavenger hunt where you ask your listeners for specific audio cues both spontaneous and planned, a sports podcast about the history of that sport, interviewing kids, riddles, different personal challenges like how long you can go without watching TV, flashbacks to old trends and inventions that didn't stand the test of time, a poetry podcast, and where a quote is from. For the last one, all I could think of was 'who's that pokémon?'

Choose a name. This article goes into more detail.

Choose a format. This article lists descriptions of popular ones.

Structure your podcast. This includes length and schedule.

Sequence your podcast. Keep to a set order- hook and intro, main body, and conclusion. Now that I'm writing that out, I'm reminded of learning how to write an essay in grammar school. Hamburger poster showing the buns as introduction and conclusion, and the meat as the body, anyone?

2. Set up equipment

A microphone is a must, as are headphones and a computer.

3. Software

Both recording and editing software are needed for a podcast.

4. Prepare your first episodes (two or three is a good start)

Schedule and prepare interviews, if you're going that route. If you do, keep a record of who you've reached out to so you don't double dip, send them an approximate interview length so they know what to expect, plan your interview questions and put them in an order that makes sense, ask unique questions, and keep the questions tailored to what your audience wants to know

If you script the episodes out, this is a handy article with templates to help you out

Test your equipment and software so you know what buttons to press

5. Record

If you're recording in person, using a mixer for multiple people is your best bet

If you're recording remotely, you'll need software and to send your guests guidelines on how to set it up

For a hybrid setup, where some of your guests are present and some are remote, you'll need to think more about how to record. This video will be helpful in that respect.

6. Edit

You're going to need software to do this if you're doing it yourself, or an editor if you're outsourcing. Whichever way you choose, there are some basic things to keep in mind- narrative (meaning make sure everything flows naturally from one thought to the next), spice it up (any sound effects or music), do the detail work (background noise), export, and create smaller promotional bites. This article gives more of a tutorial.

7. Artwork

This video goes into creating artwork. Keep in mind a few things- make sure the art represents the podcast clearly, think about what will attract your audience, keep the dimensions in line with directory guidelines, and don't overwhelm the image with detail.

8. Publish

Once you're done, you'll need a hosting site. Like I've said in previous posts, you need an RSS feed to submit to directories, and the hosting site creates one for you.

Create show notes and an episode description- think of a hook to get them to read more, keep them clear and short, and incorporate keywords naturally

Get your podcast on a directory from your hosting site.

9. Promote and monetize

Promotion:

Use search engine optimization (SEO) wisely

Make teasers and share them on your social media

Make a podcast website

Join a network

Monetize:

Get sponsors

create subscription tiers/ask for donations

Make merchandise from your podcast

Affiliate

10. Assess

Keep an eye on data and adjust your course accordingly, depending on what brings in more viewers. But, as I've cautioned in previous posts, don't get too hung up on numbers.

[lunaavaa]

Best Logistics Fleet Management Software

In the rapidly evolving world of logistics, effective fleet management is the key to success.

 Whether you oversee a fleet of trucks, delivery trucks, or a combination of vehicles, having the right logistics fleet management software can be a game changer. These software solutions are designed to streamline operations, reduce costs and improve overall efficiency. In this article, we'll explore some of the best logistics fleet management software options available, each offering unique features to help businesses navigate the path to efficiency.

1. Geotab: 

Geotab is a comprehensive fleet management software known for its real-time tracking, route optimization, and maintenance tracking. It's a versatile solution suitable for fleets of all sizes.

2. Samsara: 

Samsara offers a robust fleet management platform with features like real-time GPS tracking, driver safety monitoring, and vehicle diagnostics.

 It's a favorite among businesses looking to enhance safety and compliance.

3. Teletrac Navman: 

Teletrac Navman provides fleet management software focused on real-time tracking, compliance and driver behavior monitoring.

 This is the preferred choice for companies looking to improve driver performance and reduce fuel costs.

4. Fleet Complete: 

Fleet Complete offers a comprehensive suite of fleet management tools, including GPS tracking, dispatching and asset management. It is highly adaptable and can cater to different industries.

5. KeepTruckin: 

KeepTruckin is known for its user-friendly fleet management software. It offers features like electronic logging, IFTA reporting, and vehicle inspections, making it a great choice for small to medium fleets.

6. Verizon Connect: 

Verizon Connect provides GPS fleet tracking software focused on route optimization, fuel management and field service automation. It is ideal for businesses looking to reduce costs and increase productivity.

7. Route4Me: 

Route4Me offers advanced route optimization software, perfect for last-mile delivery operations. It offers real-time tracking, geolocation, and route planning capabilities, making it an essential tool for businesses delivering  to customers.

8. WorkWave Route Manager: 

WorkWave Route Manager is a cloud-based fleet management solution designed for mobile workforces. It offers route optimization, GPS tracking, and reporting, making it an ideal choice for delivery businesses.

Selecting the right logistics fleet management software is crucial for businesses seeking to stay competitive and efficient in the logistics industry. These software solutions cater to a wide range of needs, from real-time tracking and route optimization to driver safety and compliance.

As the logistics landscape continues to evolve, having the best fleet management software can put your business on the path to success.

[lazyflower48]

I'm bored but I like your posts so please excuse me for the mini interview TT. I hope its okay.

What's your favourite piece of fiction?

What's your favourite mode of fiction? (movies, novels, manga, etc?)

Who's your favorite BSD character and why?

What's your dream job?

Do you have a best friend?

Girl sorry for all the questions, I'm just bored, curious and have nothing else to do 😭

I'm glad that you liked my posts! Thank you! And it's totally fine cause right now, I don't have much to do either.

There are so many shows and books I've liked, but I guess for the sake of picking a few - when it comes to anime - I'll say, currently I absolutely LOVE BSD (I'm obsessed). And AOT is one of my all-time favourites as well. Spirited Away is one of my favourite anime movies - it's basically my comfort movie, and this applies to almost every ghibli movie. And when it comes to books- I haven't read many since i mostly stick to fanfics these days lol, but I really enjoyed the Harry Potter series. (I used to be obsessed back in the day).

Okay, this one is quite hard to pick because I love all of them. I suppose I'll have to go with movies.

My favourite BSD character is Dazai. He has been my favourite since s1, and I could write a whole essay on why I love him so much. I love him because he's such a complex character. He's not exactly a good guy, but you understand the reasoning behind his actions even if they're questionable (though I do believe that he is changing for the better). He also adds to the comedic relief of the show while at the same time being one of the most mysterious and terrifying characters, so I love his duality. Other than Dazai, I love Chuuya, Atsushi and Odasaku. (Honestly, 90% of the BSD cast is loveable, so it's kinda hard to pick a favourite)

Well I'm planning to major in Computer Science so following that route, I'd like to work as a software engineer!

I have quite a handful of close friends, but I wouldn't exactly call them my best friends.

[enskiftetpunk]

The Reason Why Pick a SOCKS5 Proxy for Secure and Anonymous Browsing?

A SOCKS5 proxy is a powerful tool that assists enhance your online privacy and safety by transmitting your web web traffic with an intermediary server. Unlike normal proxies, SOCKS5 provides higher adaptability and supports multiple kinds of web protocols. Whether you're worried about privacy, accessing geo-restricted content, or handling multiple accounts, a SOCKS5 proxy can supply a trustworthy solution. This article explores what a SOCKS5 proxy is, how it works, and why it may be the best selection for your online activities.

What Is a SOCKS5 Proxy?

A SOCKS5 proxy is a kind of proxy server that routes your net website traffic through a third-party server to mask your genuine IP address. It operates at a reduced level than HTTP proxies, handling any type of sort of traffic, including web browsing, emails, and peer-to-peer links. SOCKS5 supports various procedures such as TCP and UDP, making it highly versatile. This versatility indicates it can be utilized with several applications and tools, unlike standard proxies restricted to web website traffic only. By utilizing a SOCKS5 proxy, individuals acquire improved personal privacy while preserving quick and secure connections.

Advantages of Making Use Of SOCKS5 Proxies

SOCKS5 proxies use numerous key advantages, making them preferred among individuals and businesses alike. Initially, they offer high anonymity by concealing your IP address, protecting against websites and third celebrations from tracking your real place. Second, SOCKS5 proxies support verification techniques, enabling just certified individuals to attach, which includes a layer of safety. Their capability to handle various procedures and information types means they are less most likely to be found or blocked by host or safety and security systems. Additionally, SOCKS5 proxies generally have better speed and performance contrasted to other proxy types since they do not revise data packages, maintaining the original web traffic honesty. For fast, encrypted SOCKS5 proxy servers, pick check on bookipi.com to get budget friendly, devoted options with adaptable plans and payment techniques.

Usual Usages of SOCKS5 Proxies

Individuals utilize SOCKS5 proxies for a variety of functions. One usual use is bypassing geo-restrictions to gain access to content obstructed in specific regions. By connecting with a SOCKS5 proxy located in a different nation, customers can appear as if they are searching from that location. An additional essential application is handling several accounts on platforms such as social media or e-commerce websites without causing protection flags. Businesses typically use SOCKS5 proxies to safeguard information scraping activities and automate jobs while preserving privacy. They are additionally popular for boosting privacy during tasks like torrenting or pc gaming, where standard VPNs may trigger downturns.

How to Pick and Make Use Of a SOCKS5 Proxy?

Selecting the best SOCKS5 proxy involves thinking about elements like server area, speed, dependability, and pricing. Choose companies providing proxies organized on steady and safe servers to make certain nonstop performance. Residential SOCKS5 proxies are generally much more relied on by host and internet sites considering that they originate from genuine tools instead than information centers, minimizing the opportunity of blocks or bans. When utilizing a SOCKS5 proxy, configure your gadget or application settings to route web traffic via the proxy server. Numerous proxy providers supply in-depth overviews and software program to simplify this process. Always check your proxy after configuration to confirm that it is functioning appropriately and keeping your privacy.