Latest news with #Lafayette
Yahoo
16 hours ago
- Climate
- Yahoo
2 tornadoes touched down in Indiana on June 18, NWS says. Here's where
Two tornadoes touched down near Lafayette as part of a line of storms that swept across several states June 18, the National Weather Service's Indianapolis office has concluded. The strong thunderstorms that knocked out power across Indiana the afternoon of June 18 spawned two EF0 tornadoes west and northwest of Lafayette as they skipped along a path across much of Tippecanoe County, the NWS said June 19. Most of the damage in the county was from straight-line winds, but the two tornadoes damaged trees and caused minor damage to two houses, according to the weather service. The tornadoes were a third to half a mile in length with estimated maximum winds of 75-80 mph, the NWS said. This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Tornadoes touched down near Lafayette, Indiana, on June 18, NWS says
Associated Press
4 days ago
- Health
- Associated Press
ProMD Health Expands Its Footprint with New Med Spa in Lafayette, Colorado
New location brings advanced aesthetic and wellness services to Boulder County and Broomfield County residents. 'Our mission at ProMD Health Lafayette is to empower people to feel confident in their own skin'— Martha Townsend, PA-C, co-owner and board-certified Physician Assistant LAFAYETTE, CO, UNITED STATES, June 16, 2025 / / -- ProMD Health, a leading provider of aesthetic and wellness treatments, today announced the opening of its newest med spa location in Lafayette, Colorado. The facility, which opened to the public in February 2025, is located at 380 Empire Rd., Suite 101, and represents the company's continued expansion across the Western United States in response to growing demand for expert-driven, non-surgical cosmetic care. The Lafayette location offers a comprehensive suite of services including Botox® and Dysport® injections, dermal fillers, microneedling, hormone replacement therapy, and weight loss management. Patients can conveniently schedule appointments online or by calling the clinic directly at (720) 592-0380. The clinic is staffed by highly trained medical professionals who specialize in developing customized treatment plans focused on delivering natural, refreshed results. 'Our mission at ProMD Health Lafayette is to empower people to feel confident in their own skin,' said Martha Townsend, PA-C, co-owner and board-certified Physician Assistant. 'We take pride in delivering safe, high-quality aesthetic care that's rooted in clinical expertise and personalized to each individual's unique needs. I'm thrilled to bring this level of care to the Lafayette community.' To celebrate the new location, ProMD Health Lafayette is offering a limited-time summer promotion featuring 20 units of Botox® for $169 (includes Dysport and Daxxify equivalent) through July 31, 2025, providing an accessible entry point for new patients to experience the clinic's expert care. This introductory offer reflects the company's commitment to making high-quality aesthetic treatments available to the broader Lafayette community. The Lafayette expansion represents a strategic milestone for ProMD Health as it continues to deliver its signature combination of aesthetic treatments and preventative wellness services to new communities throughout the region. About ProMD Health Lafayette ProMD Health Lafayette is a premier med spa offering non-invasive aesthetic and wellness services tailored to individual patient needs. Backed by the established ProMD Health brand, the Lafayette location provides cutting-edge treatments in a welcoming, professional environment. The clinic serves patients throughout Boulder County and surrounding areas. Location: 380 Empire Rd., Suite 101, Lafayette, CO 80026 Martha Townsend, PA-C ProMD Health Lafayette +1 720-592-0380 email us here Visit us on social media: Facebook Legal Disclaimer: EIN Presswire provides this news content 'as is' without warranty of any kind. We do not accept any responsibility or liability for the accuracy, content, images, videos, licenses, completeness, legality, or reliability of the information contained in this article. If you have any complaints or copyright issues related to this article, kindly contact the author above.
Yahoo
6 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Senators want Risk Rating 2.0 repealed to lower flood insurance premiums
LAFAYETTE, La. (KLFY) – Several U.S. senators, including Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy, are asking for the Biden's Risk Rating 2.0 to be repealed due to wanting more transparent flood risk assessment and help to lower flood insurance premiums. Cassidy, along with Senator John Kennedy and members from Texas, Mississippi, Alabama, and West Virginia, sent a letter to the Trump administration asking for Biden's Risk Rating 2.0 to be repealed. 'I have sent a letter urging the Trump administration to finally end Risk Rating 2.0 and make flood insurance affordable again,' Cassidy. said Cassidy pointed out that flood insurance plans under the federally backed National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) have seen skyrocketing premiums. Disaster relief loans available for parishes impacted by flooding Close Thanks for signing up! Watch for us in your inbox. Subscribe Now 'NFIP premiums have increased in every state,' Cassidy said. 'Seventy-seven percent of all NFIP policies pay more under this system than they did in the old system.' Risk Rating 2.0 changed the way NFIP assessed flood risk for properties. It focuses on individual properties, instead of zones. However, Louisiana Deputy Insurance Commissioner John Ford said the lack of transparency in the program has made oversight hard. 'We don't know if the risk is being assessed properly and there is no way to determine or challenge whether your insurance premium is accurate based on that,' Ford said. Lafayette Parish LCG launches LafayetteNOW app; emergency alert system For this reason, Ford said he and the Insurance Commission agree Risk Rating 2.0 needs a second look. 'Our office and the commissioner completely agree that Risk Rating 2.0 has a major problem and that is the lack of transparency and how FEMA and NFIP are determining the risk for each property they're accessing,' Ford said. The majority of Louisiana residents with flood insurance plans are covered by the NFIP. 'It's about 90 percent of the market so roughly 9 out of every 10 Louisiana resident who have a flood policy have it through NFIP,' Ford said. Youngsville nursery flooded, owner calls for long-term fixes Ford hopes these changes can be made at the federal level, since the Louisiana Department of Insurance has no regulatory power over the Federal program. 'It's important to have flood insurance if you're in Louisiana, so obviously we want to be doing everything we can to make sure flood insurance is properly priced and affordable for the people of Louisiana.' Ford said. Senators want Risk Rating 2.0 repealed to lower flood insurance premiums Youngsville nursery flooded, owner calls for long-term fixes Power mostly restored after Slemco outage in Lafayette Parish Vermilion Parish flooding rainfall over six inches Church Point residents are no strangers to floods Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Yahoo
12-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Maj. Gen. Lafayette returns to Connecticut River Valley
WARE — Western Massachusetts towns from Pittsfield to Ware this weekend will celebrate the bicentennial journey of America's favorite fighting Frenchman — bringing music, costume balls and reenactment fanfare. Reenactor Mark Schneider of Colonial Williamsburg will portray the Marquis de Lafayette, as he races across the state to lay the cornerstone of the Bunker Hill Monument in Charlestown at a celebration certain to draw thousands Tuesday on the 200th anniversary, to the day, of his historic visit. 'Lafayette is a most modern hero,' Schneider told The Republican. 'In addition to leading us to victory in the Revolution, he lent his voice, his right arm, his pen, and his purse to fight against the institution of slavery, and he was a great friend of the Native Americans.' Starting Friday, Pittsfield will host a ceremony, 4 to 6 p.m., featuring a concert choir, marching band and local dignitaries. Worthington will then hold a period, costume-optional grand ball, 7 to 11 p.m., in a tent at Town Hall. On Saturday morning, Northampton will welcome Schneider for ceremonies at the Historic Clapp House including the dedication of stop on the Lafayette Trail from 9:30 to noon. In the afternoon at 2 p.m., at Belchertown's Lawrence Memorial Hall, Lafayette, with horse and carriage, will reenact his visit with an aging doctor he knew. At the Stone House Museum, 20 Maple St., the Green Valley Homestead Reenactment Group will portray 18th century life from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Lafayette will move onto Ware for ceremonies at 4 p.m., then Worcester, for ceremonies the following day, Sunday, at 10 am. Between 1824 and 1825, Lafayette was the last living major general of the American Revolution and, at age 67, visited all 24 states in a whirlwind 'Farewell Tour' that spanned 13 months. As a young man, he volunteered in the Continental Army and led troops to the victory that secured the nation's independence at the Siege of Yorktown in 1781. That was long before actor Daveed Diggs turned Lafayette into a rapping cultural icon in the Broadway hit 'Hamilton' in 2015. For many along the route, historical accuracy is a source of pride. Belchertown's Stone House Museum contains the diary of Dr. Estes Howe, which mentions Lafayette, according to archivist Cliff McCarthy. Plus, a local tavern owner's brother ran the carriage for the general. 'So it would have been logical that Lafayette would have stopped here to change horses and get himself some refreshments,' McCarthy said. Another source, from 1874, states that Lafayette, 'on being told … that there lay sick and feeble old officer,' ordered 'the carriage to stop and went in to shake hands with the invalid veteran.' 'He did not stay long,' McCarthy said. 'He was behind schedule, and they were plowing through Western Mass., trying to get to Boston for the Bunker Hill ceremony.' Beginning last August, events across the country celebrated the precise order of places Lafayette visited on his original 'Guest of the Nation' tour, Schneider said. Five reenactors are used on the current tour, including Schneider. The tour is made possible by local chapters of the Daughters of the Revolution and, in large part, by the American Friends of Lafayette, a nonprofit group promoting the life and legacy of Lafayette and the Franco-American Alliance. Alan Hoffman, president of the friends and the Massachusetts Lafayette Society, said he compares the man to 'Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and Nelson Mandela in terms of his human rights activities and philosophy.' The American Friends of Lafayette's Peter Reilly, who organized events in Massachusetts, said that Lafayette was 'the full package' of the 'Enlightenment ideals,' like reason, individualism and progress. 'He was always bugging General Washington about slavery,' Reilly said. 'And also (was) known as a ladies' man.' 'Gentlemen are ready to throw by their business to shake him by the hand, and ladies forget their lovers to dream of him,' one New York newspaper wrote in 1824. 'If a man asks, 'Have you seen him?' you know who he means.' Wayne Phaneuf, former executive editor of The Republican, wrote a remembrance in 1976: as he walked down the streets of Northampton, 'school children, their aprons filled with flowers, strewed petals in front of him.' All told, Lafayette traveled 6,000 miles and left behind scores of streets, schools and towns named in his honor. At one point, he was pulled from the Ohio River. The Republican reported on June 22, 1825, that 'the trunk, supposed to contain the papers of Gen. Lafayette, which sunk with the steamboat Mechanic, has been recovered.' Research assistance for this article was provided by Joseph Carvalho III. Read the original article on MassLive.
Forbes
11-06-2025
- Business
- Forbes
How AI Is Exposing The Great SaaS Mediocrity Machine
Close-up of a person's hand holding an iPhone and using Google AI Mode, an experimental mode ... More utilizing artificial intelligence and large language models to process Google search queries, Lafayette, California, March 24, 2025. (Photo by Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images) The software-as-a-service industry has grown into a three hundred billion dollar colossus, powering everything from Fortune 500 customer relationships to your neighborhood coffee shop's inventory system. Yet beneath this impressive facade, a growing chorus of industry insiders suggests something troubling: much of this growth may have been built on a foundation of what the late anthropologist David Graeber termed "bullshit jobs" – roles that add little genuine value but consume enormous resources. Now, as artificial intelligence begins automating many of the tasks that filled these positions, the emperor's new clothes are becoming visible to all. David Graeber's 2018 book "Bullshit Jobs: A Theory" argued that modern capitalism had spawned entire categories of meaningless work – jobs that even their holders secretly believed were pointless. His taxonomy included "flunkies" (who exist mainly to make superiors feel important), "duct tapers" (who solve problems that shouldn't exist), and "box tickers" (who create the appearance of meaningful activity). Sound familiar to anyone who's worked in SaaS lately? Consider the typical Series B software company today: layers of growth marketers optimizing conversion funnels that users abandon, customer success managers managing relationships with customers who don't renew, and product managers shipping features that solve no real problems. Industry veteran Charles Grant Powell-Thompson recently wrote that the sector has become "a bloated ecosystem of recycled playbooks, unoriginal hires, and shallow growth hacks." At the heart of what Powell-Thompson identifies as SaaS mediocrity lies an over-reliance on playbooks. Visit any early-stage startup or public SaaS company, and you'll encounter identical practices: OKRs, product-led growth strategies, "land and expand" sales models, and user journey funnels copied wholesale from previous companies. "Product teams build features to meet roadmap commitments, not user needs," Powell-Thompson observes. "Sales teams push demos and discount paths based on generic conversion data. Marketing teams copy HubSpot's inbound strategy from 2014 and declare victory after publishing fifteen listicles." The 2021 wave of startups flooding the "Notion for X" and "Figma for Y" space exemplifies this template thinking. Nearly all adopted identical growth strategies: bottom-up freemium entry with vague "community" layers. Most failed because they misunderstood what made the originals successful – deep product design and obsessive iteration, not surface-level copying. Perhaps nowhere is the bullshit jobs phenomenon more visible than in SaaS hiring patterns. The industry has developed what Powell-Thompson calls "the SaaS hiring loop" – continuously recycling talent from the same pool of failed or plateaued startups. Competence gets assumed based on LinkedIn logos rather than demonstrated outcomes. "A growth marketer who scaled vanity metrics at one mediocre tool is hired to repeat the cycle elsewhere," Powell-Thompson notes, "without ever proving they can build sustainable customer retention or profit." This creates a carousel of recycled talent carrying identical playbooks and assumptions but rarely delivering results that justify their roles. The industry favors "SaaS-native" professionals who speak fluent ARR and OKR but don't question fundamentals or challenge assumptions. The venture capital boom masked much of this inefficiency. When Zendesk launched Zendesk Sell in 2018 – an acquisition of Base CRM – the company spent years trying to wedge it into a Salesforce competitor before sunsetting it in 2023. Evernote, once beloved, spent a decade chasing premium users with poorly built features while ignoring performance and user experience. These weren't scams – they were built by intelligent people. But as Powell-Thompson points out, they 'hired too fast, grew too shallow, and learned too late that real markets don't behave like pitch decks. When capital dried up in 2022-2023, widespread layoffs revealed how many SaaS positions had been consuming resources without contributing meaningful value'. Artificial intelligence isn't just changing how software works; it's revealing which human roles actually mattered in the first place. When AI can generate marketing copy instantly, what value does the growth hacker who spent weeks A/B testing subject lines provide? When algorithms can analyze user behavior patterns in real-time, what's the point of analysts who took days to produce similar insights? The numbers are telling the story. SaaS companies have eliminated hundreds of thousands of positions since 2022, yet many report improved productivity metrics. This suggests that much of what looked like essential work may have been what Graeber would recognize as elaborate theater. Graeber's categories map remarkably well onto modern SaaS organizational charts: The Flunkies: Business development representatives who exist primarily to make actual salespeople feel important, spending days sending LinkedIn messages nobody reads. The Duct Tapers: Customer success managers whose primary function involves fixing problems created by poorly designed products or misaligned sales promises. The Box Tickers: Growth marketers who obsess over vanity metrics like email open rates while customer churn rates remain stubbornly high. The Taskmasters: Middle managers who exist solely to manage other managers, creating elaborate OKR frameworks that nobody follows. Powell-Thompson identifies a particularly troubling aspect of SaaS culture: the near-complete lack of self-awareness. Workers confuse busywork with impact, treating twelve-slide strategy decks and Miro boards as substitutes for real execution. The industry has developed what he calls "a language of legitimacy that sounds impressive but says little." Phrases like "We're building an extensible platform for enterprise workflows" or "Our ICP is mid-market GTM teams in the post-series B range" mask fundamental confusion about customers and value propositions. LinkedIn amplifies this dynamic. The average SaaS employee presents themselves as management guru, life coach, and visionary simultaneously, while often unable to ship a bug fix, close a sale, or explain their product's API in plain English. Ironically, as AI eliminates some forms of meaningless work, it may be creating others. A new class of "AI prompt engineers" has emerged, with some commanding six-figure salaries for sophisticated search operations. Companies are hiring "AI ethics officers" and "automation specialists" who spend more time in meetings about AI than implementing it. This suggests we may be witnessing the birth of what could be called "AI bureaucracy" – jobs that exist primarily to manage, oversee, or optimize interactions with AI systems, potentially as divorced from real value creation as the roles they're replacing. The bullshit jobs critique isn't without its limitations. What appears inefficient may serve important functions that aren't immediately obvious. Redundancy in complex systems often provides resilience. The customer success manager scheduling seemingly pointless check-in calls might prevent million-dollar churn through relationship management that AI cannot replicate. Some of the most successful SaaS companies – Slack, Notion, Figma – emerged from overcrowded markets. The process of hiring diverse perspectives, even if some prove redundant, may be necessary for breakthrough innovation. And behind every critique of meaningless work stands a real person with real financial obligations. The growth marketer whose role seems pointless represents someone's mortgage payment, someone's child's college fund. The solution isn't eliminating all potentially redundant roles – that would be both cruel and counterproductive. Instead, the industry needs conscious evolution guided by several principles: Honest Performance Metrics: Moving beyond vanity metrics to measure actual business impact. Roles that can't demonstrate clear value creation over reasonable time periods should be restructured or eliminated. Skill Depth Over Buzzword Fluency: As Powell-Thompson argues, the industry needs "fewer growth hackers and more grown-ups. Fewer decks, more decisions. Fewer generalists, more expertise." Human-AI Collaboration: Rather than viewing AI as human replacement, smart companies are determining how to combine human judgment with AI capability for genuinely valuable outcomes. Cultural Honesty: Developing organizational cultures capable of honest productivity assessment without corporate speak or fear-based defensiveness. The SaaS industry's AI-driven reckoning previews what's coming for knowledge work broadly. As artificial intelligence becomes more capable, every industry will face similar questions about which roles create genuine value versus which exist primarily to create the appearance of activity. Graeber's insight about bullshit jobs revealed a moral crisis – people trapped in roles they knew were meaningless, maintaining economic survival through elaborate performance. The AI revolution offers an opportunity to escape this trap, but only through honest assessment of what we're escaping from. The SaaS industry's three hundred billion dollar scale means getting this transition right matters far beyond Silicon Valley. The sector employs millions globally and underpins much of the modern economy's digital infrastructure. If Graeber was correct about bullshit jobs' prevalence, then AI's arrival represents more than technological disruption – it's an opportunity for work reform. A chance to align human effort with genuine value creation benefiting both workers and customers. But realizing this opportunity requires something both the SaaS industry and broader business world have struggled with: courage to be honest about what actually works, what doesn't, and why. As Powell-Thompson concludes: "The truth is simple, and brutal. SaaS didn't just scale software – it scaled mediocrity." The question now is whether the industry will use this moment of AI-driven disruption for genuine transformation or simply automate meaningful work while preserving meaningless jobs through increasingly elaborate justifications. The three hundred billion dollar question is which path the industry will choose.
