In 2019 two New York Times opinion writers obtained cellphone app data “containing the precise locations of more than 12 million individual smartphones for several months in 2016 and 2017.” (It’s data that they say is “supposed to be anonymous, but it isn’t. We found celebrities, Pentagon officials and average Americans.”) Now they’ve obtained a remarkable new trove of data, “this…
Tag: Economy
Coursera Receives B Corp™ Certification
By Jeff Maggioncalda, CEO Coursera Today, we are proud to announce that Coursera has received B Corp certification from B Lab, an independent non-profit organization, for meeting rigorous standards of social and environmental performance, accountability, and transparency. We have also converted to a Public Benefit Corporation. Now we have a legal duty not only to […]
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US Intelligence Officials Say Chinese Government Is Collecting Americans’ DNA
schwit1 shares a report from CBS News: The largest biotech firm in the world wasted no time in offering to build and run COVID testing labs in Washington, contacting its governor right after the first major COVID outbreak in the U.S. occurred there. The Chinese company, the BGI Group, made the same offer to at least five other states, including New…
GM Will Sell Only Zero-Emission Vehicles By 2035
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: General Motors said Thursday it would phase out petroleum-powered cars and trucks and sell only vehicles that have zero tailpipe emissions by 2035, a seismic shift by one of the world’s largest automakers that makes billions of dollars today from gas-guzzling pickup trucks and sport-utility vehicles. The announcement could put…
Why using rare metals to clean up the planet is no cheap fix
Demand for rare metals can only increase in the move to a zero-carbon economy. The Rare Metals War by Guillaume Pitron lays out the terrifying cost Source: https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24933190-400-why-using-rare-metals-to-clean-up-the-planet-is-no-cheap-fix/?utm_campaign=RSS%7CNSNS&utm_source=NSNS&utm_medium=RSS&utm_content=home…
Our world is losing ice at a record rate
The rate at which ice is disappearing across the planet has been speeding up, with 65% since the 1990s, a survey of global ice loss using European Space Agency satellite data reveals. Source: https://earthsky.org/earth/esa-satellites-show-record-rate-ice-loss…
BP Slashes Its Oil Exploration Team by 85%, Starts Switching to Renewables
Reuters reports on big changes at BP (the company formerly known as British Petroleum):
Its geologists, engineers and scientists have been cut to less than 100 from a peak of more than 700 a few years ago, company sources told Reuters, part of a climate change-driven overhaul triggered last year by CEO Bernard Looney. “The winds have turned very chilly in the…
Andrew Yang Proposes a Local Currency, Sees Growing Support for Universal Basic Income
In March Andrew Yang’s nonprofit gave $1,000 one-time grants to a thousand residents in the Bronx. This week a new article in the New Yorker asks one of those grant recipients how they feel about Yang’s newest proposal as he runs to be New York’s mayor: to give the city’s public-housing residents billions of dollars in a “Borough Bucks” currency that…
Instacart To Cut 1,900 Jobs
Instacart plans to terminate about 1,900 employees’ jobs, including the only unionized positions in the U.S., representing a fulsome embrace of the gig economy. From a report: The grocery delivery company already classifies most of its workers as independent contractors, whose ranks have ballooned to more than 500,000 during the coronavirus pandemic. But starting in 2015, the company hired a small…
Robert Cringley Predicted ‘The Death of IT’ in 2020. Was He Right?
Yesterday long-time tech pundit Robert Cringley reviewed the predictions he’d made at the beginning of last year. “Having done this for over 20 years, historically I’m correct abut 70 percent of the time, but this year could be a disappointment given that I’m pretty sure I didn’t predict 370,000 deaths and an economy in free-fall. “We’ll just have to see whether…