SUMMARY
RESEARCHERS COMPLETE FIRST-EVER DETAILED MAP OF GLOBAL CORAL WHAT IS APPLE DOING WITH ITS APP STORE? MISSION CONTROL: APPLE HEALTH INSIGHTS ABOARD INSPIRATION4 DO WE NEED HUMANS FOR THAT JOB? AUTOMATION BOOMS AFTER COVID
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FORD HIRES EXEC FORMERLY IN CHARGE OF APPLE’S CAR PROJECT 16 SOLAR COULD POWER 40% OF US ELECTRICITY BY 2035 32 AMAZON TO OPEN 2 CASHIER-LESS WHOLE FOODS STORES NEXT YEAR 60 UNTIL 2023? PARTS SHORTAGE WILL KEEP AUTO PRICES SKY-HIGH 80 ELIZABETH HOLMES’ TRIAL TO DISSECT DOWNFALL OF A TECH STAR 92 SILICON VALLEY FINDS REMOTE WORK IS EASIER TO BEGIN THAN END 102 AS FLOOD ALERTS LIT UP PHONES, DID ‘WARNING FATIGUE’ SET IN? 114 5 WAYS TO REIN IN IMPULSE SPENDING 124 COLLECTIBLE PRICES SKYROCKET, TO THE DISMAY OF HOBBYISTS 132 ‘SHANG-CHI’ ADDS A THRILLING HERO TO MARVEL UNIVERSE 162 IN ‘WORTH,’ WEIGHING THE PERSONAL LOSSES OF 9/11 168 NO CASHIERS, PLEASE: FUTURISTIC SUPERMARKET OPENS IN MIDEAST 186 CHINA’S ALIBABA PROMISES $15.5B FOR DEVELOPMENT INITIATIVES 192 BITCOIN BRINGS HOPES, DOUBTS FOR SALVADORANS SENDING MONEY 198 2 ALASKA TOWNS ALLOW TEXTS TO 911 WHEN CALLING NOT AN OPTION 210
MOVIES & TV SHOWS 146 MUSIC 154 TOP 10 ALBUMS 176 TOP 10 MUSIC VIDEOS 178 TOP 10 TV SHOWS 180 TOP 10 BOOKS 182 TOP 10 SONGS 184
RESEARCHERS COMPLETE FIRSTEVER DETAILED MAP OF GLOBAL CORAL
Researchers have completed a comprehensive online map of the world’s coral reefs by using more than 2 million satellite images from across the globe. The Allen Coral Atlas, named after late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, will act as a reference for reef conservation, marine planning and coral science as researchers try to save these fragile ecosystems that are being lost to climate change. The group announced completion of the atlas this week and said it is the first global, highresolution map of its kind. It gives users the ability to see detailed information about local reefs, including different types of submarine structure like sand, rocks, seagrass and, of course, coral. 08
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The maps, which include areas up to 50 feet (15 meters) deep, are being used to inform policy decisions about marine protected areas, spatial planning for infrastructure such as docks and seawalls and upcoming coral restoration projects. “Our biggest contribution in this achievement is that we have a uniform mapping of the entire coral reef biome,” said Greg Asner, managing director of the Atlas and director of Arizona State University’s Center for Global Discovery and Conservation. Asner said they relied on a network of hundreds of field contributors who gave them local information about reefs so that they could program their satellites and software to focus on the right areas. “And that lets us bring the playing field up to a level where decisions can be made at a bigger scale because so far decisions have been super localized,” Asner said. “If you don’t know what you’ve got more uniformly, how would the U.N. ever play a real role? How would a government that has an archipelago with 500 islands make a uniform decision?” The atlas also includes a coral bleaching monitor to check for corals that are stressed due to global warming and other factors. Asner said about three quarters of the world’s reefs had not previously been mapped in this kind of in-depth way, and many not at all. The project began in 2017 when Allen’s company, Vulcan Inc., was working with Ruth Gates, a Hawaii researcher whose idea of creating “ super coral ” for reef restoration was funded by the philanthropic foundation.
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Gates and Vulcan brought in Asner because of his work with the Global Airborne Observatory that had been mapping reefs in Hawaii at the time. Allen, who said he wanted to help save the world’s coral reefs, liked the idea of using technology to visualize data, so Gates connected the group with a satellite company called Planet, and Allen funded the project for about $9 million. The University of Queensland in Australia used artificial intelligence technology and local reference data to generate the layers on the atlas. Anyone can view the maps for free online. Both Allen and Gates passed away in 2018, leaving Asner and others to carry on their work. “Ruth would be so pleased, wouldn’t she?” Asner said. “She would just be tickled that this is really happening.” He said about a third of the calls he is getting are from researchers who hope to use the maps to “be sure that their planning and their reef restoration work is going to have its max efficacy.” When Gates found out she was sick, she selected friend and colleague Helen Fox from the National Geographic Society to help communicate with conservation groups about how to use the tool. “It really was a global effort,” said Fox, who is now the conservation science director for Coral Reef Alliance. “There were huge efforts in terms of outreach and helping people be aware of the tool and the potential scientific and conservation value.”
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Allen Coral Atlas https://allencoralatlas.org
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FORD HIRES EXEC FORMERLY IN CHARGE OF APPLE’S CAR PROJECT
Ford Motor Co. has hired a former executive from Apple and Tesla to be the company’s head of advanced technology and new embedded systems, a critical post as the auto industry moves to adopt vehicles powered by electricity and guided by computers. Before Doug Field joined Ford, he was a vice president of special projects at Apple and a engineer at Tesla. Apple has been rumored to be working on its own car project for some time, but the details have been kept under tight wraps. Field also worked on Tesla’s Model 3 vehicle. Field will be in charge of building out passenger systems like navigation, driverassist technology, connected systems and cybersecurity across all of Ford’s products. He will also be in charge of making sure Ford products work well with other pieces of technology, such as a smartphone or watch. 16
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“I’m thrilled to be joining Ford as it embraces a transition to a new, complex and fascinating period in the auto industry,” Field said in a statement. “It will be a privilege to help Ford deliver a new generation of experiences built on the shift to electrification, software and digital experiences, and autonomy.”
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WHAT IS APPLE DOING WITH ITS APP STORE?
Image: Patrick Semansky
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Over the past week or so, Apple has eased some longstanding restrictions that helped make its App Store into a big moneymaker for the company. The company has long required app developers to pay high commissions to Apple on the sales of paid apps as well as purchases of subscriptions or digital items inside their apps. Apple is facing some significant pressure to open up the App Store further. A federal judge is soon expected to return a verdict in an antitrust lawsuit filed by Epic Games, the maker of Fortnite, that seeks to strike down much of Apple’s commission system. And earlier this week, the South Korean legislature passed a law that would allow developers to sidestep payment systems run by both Apple and Google — and the commissions of 15% to 30% they charge. But Apple hasn’t always explained its moves very clearly, leaving some iPhone users with unanswered questions as to what exactly Apple is doing and whether and how they’ll be affected.
SO WHAT EXACTLY IS APPLE DOING? Last week, Apple agreed to App Store changes starting next year to resolve an investigation by Japanese regulators. For the first time, Apple will allow Spotify, Netflix and other apps that sell digital subscriptions to music, video, magazines, newspapers, books and audio to include an in-app link to their own sites, where users can sign up outside Apple’s payment system.
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Image: Chris Velazco
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Apple took a more limited step in the same direction last week when it agreed to let app developers email their users about ways to sidestep Apple when signing up for subscriptions. Such efforts could previously have gotten apps kicked out of Apple’s store. That change resulted from a preliminary settlement in a class-action lawsuit that still requires court approval. Spotify CEO Daniel Ek applauded the move as a “step in in the right direction” in a tweet. But he lamented that Apple isn’t granting the same freedom to all apps, including those that make video games. “Our goal is to restore competition once and for all, not one arbitrary, self-serving step at a time,” Ek tweeted.
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WILL THIS MAKE APPS CHEAPER FOR USERS? Probably not. In theory, subscription apps could lower their prices, although there’s little reason to think they will. Netflix, for instance, has been steadily raising prices for reasons that have nothing to do with Apple’s commissions. The video streaming service says the price increases help it pay for a steady stream of new original programming. But the changes could make life easier for some users of services like Spotify and Netflix, which had simply blocked sign-ups in their iPhone apps because they didn’t want to share that revenue with Apple. Instead, users have had to visit the companies’ websites to start a subscription they could then use with their iPhone app.
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WHY DOES APPLE RUN ITS APP STORE WITH AN IRON HAND? The company maintains the fees it charges help it recoup the more than $100 billion it has spent on its iPhone ecosystem. And it notes that most of the 1.8 billion apps on its store pay nothing because they rely on ads instead of subscriptions and other user purchases. Apple also insists that control over its app ecosystem helps protect the privacy and security of its customers. Critics, however, say that’s just a pretext for preserving a commission system that unexpectedly turned into a gold mine, even though company co-founder Steve Jobs didn’t envision making money from the store when it opened. Apple doesn’t disclose the app store’s financial performance in its financial results but it is major component of the company’s services division, which generated $54 billion in revenue the last fiscal year.
WILL APPLE’S ACTIONS AFFECT THE RULING IN THE EPIC LAWSUIT? It’s unlikely, although Apple’s changes appear to address one of the key concerns that U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers raised during the Apple-Epic trial in May. During the trial, she had seemed troubled by a provision that forbids in-app notifications pointing out that purchases can also be made through web sites and other means, not just within the app. Such notices, she mused, wouldn’t be much different than a merchant’s display of the different credit cards — Visa, Mastercard, America Express or Discover — that has long been a staple at cash registers. 28
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SOLAR COULD POWER 40% OF US ELECTRICITY BY 2035
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Solar energy has the potential to supply up to 40% of the nation’s electricity within 15 years — a 10-fold increase over current solar output, but one that would require massive changes in U.S. policy and billions of dollars in federal investment to modernize the nation’s electric grid, a new federal report says. The report by the Energy Department’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy says the United States would need to quadruple its annual solar capacity — and continue to increase it year by year — as it shifts to a renewable-dominant grid in order to address the existential threat posed by climate change. The report released this week is not intended as a policy statement or administration goal, officials said. Instead, it is “designed to guide and inspire the next decade of solar innovation by helping us answer questions like: How fast does solar need to increase capacity and to what level?” said Becca Jones-Albertus, director of the Energy Department’s solar energy technologies office. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said in a statement that the study “illuminates the fact that solar, our cheapest and fastest-growing source of clean energy, could produce enough electricity to power all of the homes in the U.S. by 2035 and employ as many as 1.5 million people in the process.” The report comes as President Joe Biden declared climate change has become “everybody’s crisis” during a visit to neighborhoods flooded by the remnants of Hurricane Ida. Biden warned Tuesday that it’s 33
time for America to get serious about the “code red” danger posed by climate change or face increasing loss of life and property. “We can’t turn it back very much, but we can prevent it from getting worse,” Biden said before touring a New Jersey neighborhood ravaged by severe flooding caused by Ida. “We don’t have any more time.” The natural disaster has given Biden an opening to push Congress to approve his plan to spend $1 trillion to fortify infrastructure nationwide, including electrical grids, water and sewer systems, to better defend against extreme weather. The legislation has cleared the Senate and awaits a House vote. The U.S. installed a record 15 gigawatts of solar generating capacity in 2020, and solar now represents about just over 3% of the current electricity supply, the Energy Department said. The “Solar Futures Study,” prepared by DOE’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory, shows that, by 2035, the United States would need to quadruple its yearly solar capacity additions and provide 1,000 GW of power to a renewabledominant grid. By 2050, solar energy could provide 1,600 GW on a zero-carbon grid — producing more electricity than consumed in all residential and commercial buildings in the country today, the report said. Decarbonizing the entire energy system could result in as much as 3,000 GW of solar by 2050 due to increased electrification in the transportation, buildings, and industrial sectors, the report said. To achieve such an increase, the U.S. must install an average of 30 GW of solar capacity per year
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between now and 2025 — double its current rate — and 60 GW per year from 2025 to 2030, the report said. Abigail Ross Hopper, president and CEO of the Solar Energy Industries Association, said the study “makes it clear that we will not achieve the levels of decarbonization that we need without significant policy advances.” The solar group sent a letter to Congress from nearly 750 companies spelling out recommended policy changes. “We believe with those policies and a determined private sector, the Biden administration’s goals are definitely achievable,” Hopper said.
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MISSION CONTROL APPLE HEALTH INSIGHTS ABOARD INSPIRATION4
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Apple might be best known for its consumer electronics like iPhones and iPads, but behind the scenes, the Cupertino company is extending its interests far beyond. Right now, health is a key priority, with Apple investing billions in research and development to create products that help us live longer. However, Tim Cook and Co are now looking further afield: to space.
MONITORING HEALTH WITH THE APPLE WATCH In recent years, Apple has transformed the health and wellness landscape with its Apple Watch. Once considered a gimmick and something exclusively for fitness fanatics, the wearable is now one of the company’s biggest product categories, and it’s directly saved dozens of lives around the world. As Apple continues to introduce new technologies into the smartwatch, like blood oxygen level monitoring, Apple Watch is now an indispensable part of many people’s lives, with governments and health bodies actively integrating their services into the Apple Health app to utilize the data collected. iOS 15 introduces the ability to share health data with family and care networks to monitor trends like heart rate and cholesterol, and as future Apple Watches add even more important technology, like the reported blood glucose monitoring that could come in 2022, Apple’s tech is lightyears ahead of its rivals. Some of the biggest players in aerospace are taking notice. Apple has begun using its advanced health technology to expand studies for physiology in low or no gravity, the first step towards an exciting new chapter for the company. Whilst 42
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Join The First All-Civilian Space Mission | Inspiration4
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it’s true that Apple will likely never compete with SpaceX or Blue Origin when it comes to space exploration, it can still partake and play a significant role in successful missions. The idea of life on Mars is no longer exclusive to a David Bowie song - entrepreneurs including Elon Musk are committed to colonies on the planet in the coming years and decades, and with the right health monitoring technology from companies like Apple, the race could be sped up even further. SpaceX, for instance, will fly four private citizens to orbit on a three-day mission called Inspiration4, designed to help research. What’s most interesting is that, for the first time, Apple hardware will be key in a first-of-its-kind research study. The Apple Watch Series 6, iPhone 12 Pro, and iPad mini 4 will be used throughout the mission, funded by Shift4 Payments founder Jared Isaacman. Mission Commander Jared Isaacman, Mission Pilot Dr. Sian Proctor, Medical Officer Hayley Arceneaux, and Mission Specialist Chris Sembroski will all take part in health research studies whilst they’re in space in a collaborative study between SpaceX, the NASA-sponsored Translational Research Institute for Space Health (TRISH) at Baylor College of Medicine to see how risk can be minimized when it comes to human health and performance in space environments. As it’s external to NASA, TRISH researchers can be more risk-tolerant when using technology, and that’s perhaps why Apple products have been chosen over something cruder such as an in-house electrocardiogram. During the mission, each crew member will wear an Apple Watch Series 6 so that their ECG activity can be monitored, alongside their 47
movement, sleep, heart rate, and rhythm, as well as their blood oxygen saturation, and cabin noise. Researchers back at base can use the vitals from the Apple Watch as well as data captured from other sources, and the crew will be tasked with cognitive tests performed on an app on an iPad mini 4. Cognitive and physiologic data will be collected to improve understanding of how the general population will behave and perform in space travel, which becomes more relevant as more spaceflight passengers explore our solar system. The study will be led by Dr. Mathias Basner at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine, and although the Inspiration4 crew sample size is very limited to just four members, the data that’s collected from the research study can be combined with data from participants on future private spaceflights as well. As well as an Apple Watch and iPad mini, the study will use an iPhone 12 Pro as the data acquisition platform and screen for viewing images from an AI-guided organ scanning system called Butterfly IQ+. This tool will help to determine if non-medical experts can “selfacquire clinical-grade images without guidance from ground support” while also providing a “timeline of biological changes before and during spaceflight.” The mission is expected to launch on September 15 from the historic Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, using a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule that previously flew NASA astronauts. It will likely be some time before we hear the results from the study, and indeed how Apple’s technology helped the researchers, but it’s the surest sign yet that Apple’s innovative 48
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Everything You Need to Know | TIME | Inspiration4
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hardware can be deployed in a number of space-specific cases.
THE FUTURE OF SPACE EXPLORATION AND APPLE Although Apple is not directly involved in the SpaceX mission, the company is undoubtedly keen to boost its activity in the field. Indeed, researchers estimate that space tourism will be worth around $8 billion per year by 2030, with consumers able to travel to faraway lands, and as Apple further diversifies its product portfolio, we’ll likely see more product announcements that not only benefit consumers here on Planet Earth but indeed in markets that we’re yet to hear about. One of those features is already in development with a rumored release this year, and that’s LEO satellite capabilities from the upcoming iPhone 13. Indeed, the company is reportedly set to introduce low earth orbit (LEO) satellite communication connectivity that would allow consumers to make calls and send text messages without 4G or 5G coverage. A new Qualcomm X60 baseband chip would support satellite communications, similar to SpaceX’s Starlink internet program. It’s thought that individual network operators will work with Globalstar and it wouldn’t cost consumers or network operators any additional fee. The technology would initially be used exclusively for emergencies, such as to call 911 or to send a text message to a family member in the aftermath of a disaster, but it could be rolled out further in the years and decades ahead. Apple is reportedly “optimistic” about the idea of satellite communications and has even set up a research 51
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and development team at its Cupertino, California headquarters, suggesting it sees LEO as a future priority. Another piece of kit that has long been rumored is Apple Glasses. Apple has been working on its own wearable headset technology for a number of years, and although the concept has changed several times over those years, from a successor to the iPhone to a gaming device to now something in between, it’s clear that Apple could make glasses work in the concept of space. The augmented reality glasses could overlay graphics in the real world around you, ideal for astronauts who need to be kept upto-date on the latest goings-on, and whilst it’s been reported that the glasses won’t be coming for many years, Bloomberg has suggested that Apple could even lift the lid on Apple Glasses this year, or later in 2022. It’s thought that Apple Glasses will run on glassOS, a forked version of iOS, and a patent has revealed Apple will use “rings” for tracking finger and hand movements. The glasses will help to protect users’ privacy with a removable camera module, and a mixed VR headset could be available in 2022 for around $1,000. The full Apple Glasses concept could come by 2025, according to experts, and it’s this product that excites those working in the aerospace sector. There are already a number of successful augmented reality deployments in the aerospace and defense world, but an affordable, consumer-friendly device would no doubt make space travel safer and more accessible to all, from NASA astronauts to Joe Bloggs who wants a vacation on Mars.
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The future of space travel has never been more exciting, and whilst Apple might not have a central role in new developments, its consumer technology will no doubt help to bridge the gap and help edge the world ever-closer to an intergalactic future Apple in Space is coming.
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AMAZON TO OPEN 2 CASHIERLESS WHOLE FOODS STORES NEXT YEAR
There will be something missing at two Whole Foods stores opening next year: the rows of cashiers. Amazon, which owns the grocery chain, said this week that it will bring its cashier-less technology to two Whole Foods stores for the first time, letting shoppers grab what they need and leave without having to open their wallets. Cameras and sensors track what’s taken off shelves. Items are charged to an Amazon account after customers leave the store with them. But there will be an option for those who want to shop the old-fashioned way: Self-checkout lanes will be available that take cash, gift cards and other types of payment. Image: RJ Sangosti
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The company first unveiled the cashier-less technology in 2018 at an Amazon Go convenience store and has expanded it to larger supermarkets. But it will be the first time it has appeared at Whole Foods, a chain of more than 500 grocery stores Amazon bought four years ago. One of the new stores will be in Washington, D.C.; the other in Sherman Oaks, California. They will be stocked with the typical Whole Foods fare, including seafood, fresh-squeezed orange juice and organic vegetables. Even with the technology, Amazon said it will still hire about the same number of workers for the stores that it normally would, except they will have different roles, helping shoppers in the aisles or at counters instead of standing behind a register. The company declined to say how many people it will hire. The company also declined to say if it plans to bring the technology to more Whole Foods locations.
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DO WE NEED HUMANS FOR THAT JOB? AUTOMATION BOOMS AFTER COVID
Ask for a roast beef sandwich at an Arby’s drive-thru east of Los Angeles and you may be talking to Tori — an artificially intelligent voice assistant that will take your order and send it to the line cooks. “It doesn’t call sick,” says Amir Siddiqi, whose family installed the AI voice at its Arby’s franchise this year in Ontario, California. “It doesn’t get corona. And the reliability of it is great.” The pandemic didn’t just threaten Americans’ health when it slammed the U.S. in 2020 — it may also have posed a long-term threat to many of their jobs. Faced with worker shortages and higher labor costs, companies are starting to automate service sector jobs that economists once considered safe, assuming that machines couldn’t easily provide the human contact they believed customers would demand. 67
Past experience suggests that such automation waves eventually create more jobs than they destroy, but that they also disproportionately wipe out less skilled jobs that many low-income workers depend on. Resulting growing pains for the U.S. economy could be severe. If not for the pandemic, Siddiqi probably wouldn’t have bothered investing in new technology that could alienate existing employees and some customers. But it’s gone smoothly, he says: “Basically, there’s less people needed but those folks are now working in the kitchen and other areas.” Ideally, automation can redeploy workers into better and more interesting work, so long as they can get the appropriate technical training, says Johannes Moenius, an economist at the University of Redlands. But although that’s happening now, it’s not moving quickly enough, he says. Worse, an entire class of service jobs created when manufacturing began to deploy more automation may now be at risk. “The robots escaped the manufacturing sector and went into the much larger service sector,” he says. “I regarded contact jobs as safe. I was completely taken by surprise.” Improvements in robot technology allow machines to do many tasks that previously required people — tossing pizza dough, transporting hospital linens, inspecting gauges, sorting goods. The pandemic accelerated their adoption. Robots, after all, can’t get sick or spread disease. Nor do they request time off to handle unexpected childcare emergencies. 68
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Economists at the International Monetary Fund found that past pandemics had encouraged firms to invest in machines in ways that could boost productivity — but also kill low-skill jobs. “Our results suggest that the concerns about the rise of the robots amid the COVID-19 pandemic seem justified,” they wrote in a January paper. The consequences could fall most heavily on the less-educated women who disproportionately occupy the low- and mid-wage jobs most exposed to automation — and to viral infections. Those jobs include salesclerks, administrative assistants, cashiers and aides in hospitals and those who take care of the sick and elderly. Employers seem eager to bring on the machines. A survey last year by the nonprofit World Economic Forum found that 43% of companies planned to reduce their workforce as a result of new technology. Since the second quarter of 2020, business investment in equipment has grown 26%, more than twice as fast as the overall economy. The fastest growth is expected in the roving machines that clean the floors of supermarkets, hospitals and warehouses, according to the International Federation of Robotics, a trade group. The same group also expects an uptick in sales of robots that provide shoppers with information or deliver room service orders in hotels. Restaurants have been among the most visible robot adopters. In late August, for instance, the salad chain Sweetgreen announced it was buying kitchen robotics startup Spyce, which makes a machine that cooks up vegetables and grains and spouts them into bowls. 70
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It’s not just robots, either — software and AI-powered services are on the rise as well. Starbucks has been automating the behind-the-scenes work of keeping track of a store’s inventory. More stores have moved to self-checkout. Scott Lawton, CEO of the Arlington, Virginiabased restaurant chain Bartaco, was having trouble last fall getting servers to return to his restaurants when they reopened during the pandemic. So he decided to do without them. With the help of a software firm, his company developed an online ordering and payment system customers could use over their phones. Diners now simply scan a barcode at the center of each table to access a menu and order their food without waiting for a server. Workers bring food and drinks to their tables. And when they’re done eating, customers pay over their phones and leave. The innovation has shaved the number of staff, but workers aren’t necessarily worse off. Each Bartaco location — there are 21 — now has up to eight assistant managers, roughly double the pre-pandemic total. Many are former servers, and they roam among the tables to make sure everyone has what they need. They are paid annual salaries starting at $55,000 rather than hourly wages. Tips are now shared among all the other employees, including dishwashers, who now typically earn $20 an hour or more, far higher than their pre-pandemic pay. “We don’t have the labor shortages that you’re reading about on the news,” Lawton says. 73
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The uptick in automation has not stalled a stunning rebound in the U.S. jobs market — at least so far. The U.S. economy lost a staggering 22.4 million jobs in March and April 2020, when the pandemic gale hit the U.S. Hiring has since bounced back briskly: Employers have brought back 17 million jobs since April 2020. In June, they posted a record 10.1 million job openings and are complaining that they can’t find enough workers. Behind the hiring boom is a surge in spending by consumers, many of whom got through the crisis in unexpectedly good shape financially — thanks to both federal relief checks and, in many cases, savings accumulated by working from home and skipping the daily commute. Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, expects employers are likely to be scrambling for workers for a long time. For one thing, many Americans are taking their time returning to work — some because they’re still worried about COVID-19 health risks and childcare problems, others because of generous federal unemployment benefits, set to expire nationwide Sept. 6.
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In addition, large numbers of Baby Boom workers are retiring. “The labor market is going to be very, very tight for the foreseeable future,” Zandi says. For now, the short-term benefits of the economic snapback are overwhelming any job losses from automation, whose effects tend to show up gradually over a period of years. That may not last. Last year, researchers at the University of Zurich and University of British Columbia found that the so-called jobless recoveries of the past 35 years, in which economic output rebounded from recessions faster than employment, could be explained by the loss of jobs vulnerable to automation. Despite strong hiring since the middle of last year, the U.S. economy is still 5.3 million jobs short of what it had in February 2020. And Lydia Boussour, lead U.S. economist at Oxford Economics, calculated last month that 40% of the missing jobs are vulnerable to automation, especially those in food preparation, retail sales and manufacturing. Some economists worry that automation pushes workers into lower-paid positions. Daron Acemoglu, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Pascual Restrepo of Boston University estimated in June that up to 70% of the stagnation in U.S. wages between 1980 and 2016 could be explained by machines replacing humans doing routine tasks. “Many of the jobs that get automated were at the middle of the skill distribution,” Acemoglu says. “They don’t exist anymore, and the workers that used to perform them are now doing lowerskill jobs.” 76
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UNTIL 2023? PARTS SHORTAGE WILL KEEP AUTO PRICES SKYHIGHMONEY
Back in the spring, a shortage of computer chips that had sent auto prices soaring appeared, finally, to be easing. Some relief for consumers seemed to be in sight. That hope has now dimmed. A surge in COVID-19 cases from the delta variant in several Asian countries that are the main producers of autograde chips is worsening the supply shortage. It is further delaying a return to normal auto production and keeping the supply of vehicles artificially low. And that means, analysts say, that record-high consumer prices for vehicles — new and used, as well as rental cars — will extend into next year and might not fall back toward earth until 2023. The global parts shortage involves not just computer chips. Automakers are starting to see shortages of wiring harnesses, plastics and glass, too. And beyond autos, vital components for goods ranging from farm equipment and industrial machinery to sportswear and kitchen 81
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accessories are also bottled up at ports around the world as demand outpaces supply in the face of a resurgent virus. “It appears it’s going to get a little tougher before it gets easier,” said Glenn Mears, who runs four auto dealerships around Canton, Ohio. Squeezed by the parts shortfall, General Motors and Ford have announced one- or two-week closures at multiple North American factories, some of which produce their hugely popular fullsize pickup trucks. Late last month, shortages of semiconductors and other parts grew so acute that Toyota felt compelled to announce it would slash production by at least 40% in Japan and North America for two months. The cuts meant a reduction of 360,000 vehicles worldwide in September. Toyota, which largely avoided sporadic factory closures that have plagued rivals this year, now foresees production losses into October. Nissan, which had announced in mid-August that chip shortages would force it to close its immense factory in Smyrna, Tennessee, until Aug. 30, now says the closure will last until Sept. 13. And Honda dealers are bracing for fewer shipments. “This is a fluid situation that is impacting the entire industry’s global supply chain, and we are adjusting production as necessary,” said Chris Abbruzzese, a Honda spokesman. The result is that vehicle buyers are facing persistent and once-unthinkable price spikes. The average price of a new vehicle sold in the U.S. in August hit a record of just above $41,000 — nearly $8,200 more than it was just two years ago, J.D. Power estimated. 83
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With consumer demand still high, automakers feel little pressure to discount their vehicles. Forced to conserve their scarce computer chips, the automakers have routed them to higherpriced models — pickup trucks and large SUVs, for example — thereby driving up their average prices. The roots of the computer chip shortage bedeviling auto and other industries stem from the eruption of the pandemic early last year. U.S. automakers had to shut factories for eight weeks to help stop the virus from spreading. Some parts companies canceled orders for semiconductors. At the same time, with tens of millions of people hunkered down at home, demand for laptops, tablets and gaming consoles skyrocketed. As auto production resumed, consumer demand for cars remained strong. But chip makers had shifted production to consumer goods, creating a shortage of weather-resistant automotivegrade chips. Then, just as auto chip production started to rebound in late spring, the highly contagious delta variant struck Malaysia and other Asian countries where chips are finished and other auto parts are made. In August, new vehicle sales in the U.S. tumbled nearly 18%, mainly because of supply shortages. Automakers reported that U.S. dealers had fewer than 1 million new vehicles on their lots in August — 72% lower than in August 2019. Even if auto production were somehow to immediately regain its highest-ever level for vehicles sold in the U.S., it would take more than a year to achieve a more normal 60-day 85
supply of vehicles and for prices to head down, the consulting firm Alix Partners has calculated. “Under that scenario,” said Dan Hearsch, an Alix Partners managing director, “it’s not until early 2023 before they even could overcome a backlog of sales, expected demand and build up the inventory.” For now, with parts supplies remaining scarce and production cuts spreading, many dealers are nearly out of new vehicles. On a recent visit to the “Central Avenue Strip” in suburban Toledo, Ohio, a road chock-full of dealerships, few new vehicles could be found on the lots. Some dealers filled in their lots with used vehicles. The supply is so low and prices so high that one would-be buyer, Heather Pipelow of Adrian, Michigan, said she didn’t even bother to look for a new SUV at Jim White Honda. “It’s more than I paid for my house,”she said ruefully. Ed Ewers of Mansfield, Ohio, traveled about two hours to a Toledo-area Subaru dealer to buy a used 2020 four-door Jeep Wrangler. He considered buying new but decided that a used vehicle was more in his price range to replace an aging Dodge Journey SUV. Mears, whose Honda dealership is running short of new inventory, said dealers are managing to survive because of the high prices consumers are having to pay for both new and used vehicles. He doesn’t charge more than the sticker price, he said — enough profit to cover expenses and make money. Nor does he have to advertise as much or pay interest on a large 86
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stock of vehicles. Many vehicles, he said, are sold before they arrive from the factory. Chip orders that were made nine months ago are now starting to arrive. But other components, such as glass or parts made with plastic injection molds, are depleted, Hearsch said. Because of the virus and a general labor shortage, he said, autoparts makers might not be able to make up for lost production. Some tentative cause for hope has begun to emerge. Siew Hai Wong, president of the Malaysia Semiconductor Industry Association, says hopefully that chip production should start returning to normal in the fall as more workers are vaccinated. Though Malaysia, Vietnam, Taiwan, Singapore and the United States all produce semiconductors, he said, a shortage of just one kind of chip can disrupt production. “If there is disruption in Malaysia,” Wong said, “there will be disruption somewhere in the world.” Automakers have been considering shifting to an order-based distribution system rather than keeping huge supplies on dealer lots. But no one knows whether such a system would prove more efficient. Eventually, Hearsch suggested, the delta variant will pass and the supply chain should return to normal. By then, he predicts, automakers will line up multiple sources of parts and stock critical components. “There will be an end to it, but the question is really when,” said Ravi Anupindi, a professor at the University of Michigan who studies supply chains.
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ELIZABETH HOLMES’ TRIAL TO DISSECT DOWNFALL OF A TECH STAR Just six years ago, Elizabeth Holmes seemed destined to fulfill her dream of becoming Silicon Valley’s next superstar. She was the subject of business magazine cover stories describing her as the youngest self-made female billionaire in history, former President Bill Clinton was reverently quizzing her about her thoughts on technology, and then Vice President Joe Biden was hailing her ideas as an inspiration. Now Holmes is about to head into a San Jose, California, courtroom to defend herself against criminal allegations depicting her as the devious mastermind of a fraud that duped wealthy investors, former U.S. government officials and patients whose lives were endangered by a blood-testing technology that never came close to fulfilling her bold promises. If convicted by a jury in a trial, Holmes could be sentenced to 20 years in prison — a stunning reversal of fortune for an entrepreneur whose wealth once was pegged at $4.5 billion. That amount represented her 50% stake in Theranos, a Palo Alto, California, biotech startup she Image: Nic Coury
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founded in 2003 after dropping out of Stanford University at the age of 19. Besides rehashing Holmes’ stunning rise and fall, the three-month trial may also shine a light on how style sometimes overshadows substance in Silicon Valley, which prides itself on an ethos of logic, data and science over emotion. Holmes’ saga has peeled back the curtain on a “fake it until you make it” strategy that’s been adopted by other ambitious startups who believe that with just a little more time to perfect their promised breakthroughs they can join the hallowed ranks of Apple, Google, Facebook and other tech pioneers that sprang up in the 50-mile corridor from San Francisco to San Jose. “I came away thinking she was just a zealot who really believed her technology would really work so maybe she could fudge just a little bit,” said author Ken Auletta, who has written extensively about Silicon Valley and was given behind-thescenes access to Holmes for a 2014 profile in The New Yorker magazine. “I came away thinking she really believed what she was doing was a public good. And if it had worked, it would have been a public good.” If nothing else, Holmes proved to be a master marketer while pitching the premise that Theranos would help people avoid having to tell their loved ones “goodbye too soon.” Theranos — a name derived from the words “therapy” and “diagnosis”— claimed to be perfecting a technology that could test for hundreds of diseases by extracting just a few drops of blood from a quick finger prick done at “wellness centers” across the U.S. 94
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Holmes promised the samples would be tested in a specially designed machine named after famed inventor Thomas Edison. In her spiel, they would cost a fraction of traditional tests that require a doctor’s referral and vials of drawn blood before lab processing that could take days to deliver results. Told in Holmes’ husky voice, the story sounded so compelling that she could assemble a wellconnected board of directors that helped burnish Theranos’ credibility. The board included former U.S. Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and George Shultz, former U.S. Defense Secretary James Mattis, former Sen. Sam Nunn, former Wells Fargo Bank CEO Richard Kovacevich, and her former adviser at Stanford, Channing Robertson, who quit his tenured job as a chemical engineering professor after deciding she had Beethoven-like qualities. Holmes tried to cast herself in the mold of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, even adopting his habit of wearing mostly black turtlenecks. Besides recruiting an impressive board, Holmes also raised nearly $900 million before Theranos’ collapse, triggered by a series of explosive Wall Street Journal articles that revealed serious flaws in the company’s technology. The Journal articles spurred an inquiry by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and a civil lawsuit filed by the Securities and Exchange Commission. The SEC case resulted in a $500,000 settlement without an admission of wrongdoing, but still proved to be the end of Theranos, which shut down in 2018. Significant amounts of the money pouring into Theranos came from billionaire investors, 97
including media baron Rupert Murdoch, Walmart’s Walton family, the DeVos family that included former U.S. Education Secretary Becky DeVos, Mexico business mogul Carlos Slim and former Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. Some of those investors, as well some of Theranos’ former board members, are expected to testify during the trial presided over by U.S. District Judge Edward Davila. Holmes may take the witness stand, based on court documents filed leading up to the trial. If she does, her lawyers have indicated in recently unsealed filings that she will testify that some of her statements and actions while running Theranos were the result of “intimate partner abuse” inflicted by the company’s chief operating officer and her secret lover, Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, who faces multiple fraud charges in a separate trial scheduled to begin next year. “That will be extraordinary,” predicted Auletta, who observed and interviewed Holmes and Balwani together on multiple occasions while he was writing his profile. “My impression was she was the dominant one in that relationship. If she started a sentence, he would wait for her to finish it.” Balwani’s lawyer has denied Holmes’ allegations. It remains to be seen if the license plate on the car that Balwani used to drive to Theranos’ former headquarters will be become part of the evidence submitted during the trial. It read: “VDVICI,” an abbreviation for the triumphant words Julius Caesar is supposed to have once written to the Roman Senate, “veni, vidi, vici” — Latin for “I came, I saw, I conquered.” 98
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SILICON VALLEY FINDS REMOTE WORK IS EASIER TO BEGIN THAN END
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Technology companies that led the charge into remote work as the pandemic unfurled are confronting a new challenge: how, when and even whether they should bring long-isolated employees back to offices that have been designed for teamwork. “I thought this period of remote work would be the most challenging year-and-half of my career, but it’s not,” said Brent Hyder, the chief people officer for business software maker Salesforce and its roughly 65,000 employees worldwide. “Getting everything started back up the way it needs to be is proving to be even more difficult.” That transition has been complicated by the rapid spread of the delta variant, which has scrambled the plans many tech companies had for bringing back most of their workers near or after Labor Day weekend. Microsoft has pushed those dates back to October while Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon and a growing list of others have already decided wait until next year. Given how they set the tone for remote work, tech companies’ return-to-office policies will likely have ripple effects across other industries. Employers’ next steps could redefine how and where people work, predicts Laura Boudreau, a Columbia University assistant economics professor who studies workplace issues. “We have moved beyond the theme of remote work being a temporary thing,” Boudreau says. The longer the pandemic has stretched on, she says, the harder it’s become to tell employees to come back to the office, particularly full time. Because they typically revolve around digital and online products, most tech jobs are tailor made for remote work. Yet most major tech companies 105
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insist that their employees should be ready to work in the office two or three days each week after the pandemic is over. The main reason: Tech companies have long believed that employees clustered together in a physical space will swap ideas and spawn innovations that probably wouldn’t have happened in isolation. That’s one reason tech titans have poured billions of dollars into corporate campuses interspersed with alluring common areas meant to lure employees out of their cubicles and into “casual collisions” that turn into brainstorming sessions. But the concept of “water cooler innovation” may be overblown, says Christy Lake, chief people officer for business software maker Twilio. “There is no data that supports that really happens in real life, and yet we all subscribe to it,” Lake says. “You can’t put the genie back in the bottle and tell people, ‘Oh you have to be back in the office or innovation won’t happen.’“ Twilio isn’t bringing back most of its roughly 6,300 employees back to its offices until early next year at the earliest, and plans to allow most of them to figure how frequently they should come in. This hybrid approach permitting employees to toggle between remote and in-office work has been widely embraced in the technology industry, particularly among the largest companies with the biggest payrolls. Nearly two-thirds of the more than 200 companies responding to a mid-July survey in the techcentric Bay Area said they are expecting their workers to come into the office two or three days each week. Before the pandemic, 70% of these employers required their workers to be in 107
the office, according to the Bay Area Council, a business policy group that commissioned the poll. Even Zoom, the Silicon Valley videoconferencing service that saw its revenue and stock price soar during the pandemic, says most of its employees still prefer to come into the office part of the time. “There isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach to returning to the office,” Kelly Steckelberg, Zoom’s chief financial officer, recently wrote in a blog post. But the biggest tech companies, which have profited even more than Zoom as the pandemic that made their products indispensable for many workers, aren’t giving employees much choice in the matter. Apple, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft have made it clear that they want most of their workers together at least a few days each week to maintain their culture and pace of innovation. That well-worn creed sounds like backward thinking to Ed Zitron, who runs a public relations firm representing technology companies — and which has been fully remote since it launched in 2012. The only reason to have an office, he says, is to satisfy managers with vested interests in grouping people together “so that they can look at them and feel good about the people that they own ... so that they can enjoy that power.” Switching to hybrid work is ideal for people like Kelly Soderlund, a mother of two young children who works in offices in San Francisco and Palo Alto, California, for travel management company TripActions, which has about 1,200 employees worldwide. She couldn’t wait to return when the company partially reopened its offices in June, partly because she missed the built-in buffer that her 108
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roughly one-hour commute provided between her personal and professional life. “When I don’t have that, I wake up in the morning, I start doing work and I take my kids to their camp or their daycare,” Soderlund says. “And then I come back and I work and then we pick them up, make dinner and then I go back to work. So, it feels like it’s just work all the time.” Soderlund believes being together in an office leads to more collaboration, although she also learned from the pandemic that workers don’t need to be there every day for teamwork to happen. Camaraderie and the need to separate work from home are among the top reasons employees at business software maker Adobe cite for coming back to the office, said Gloria Chen, chief people officer for one of Silicon Valley’s older companies. Working from home “is here to stay, but we also continue to value people coming together,” she said. The transition from the pandemic should enable smaller tech companies to adopt more flexible work-from-home policies that may help them lure away top-notch engineers from other firms more insistent on having people in the office, says Boudreau, the Columbia University scholar. “Labor markets are relatively tight now, so employees have more bargaining chips than they have had in a while,” Boudreau says. Ankur Dahiya, who launched his software startup RunX last year during the pandemic lockdowns, believes that remote work has helped him hire employees that otherwise may not have been candidates. The eight-worker startup rents a San 110
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Francisco office one day a week so Dahiya can meet with employees who live nearby, but other employees are in Canada, Nevada, and Oregon. The workers living outside of California have been flying in once every three months for “super productive” meetings and brainstorming, says Dahiya, who has previously worked at Facebook and Twitter. “I’ve worked in offices for the last 10 years and I know there’s just so much time lost,” Dahiya says, recalling all the random conversations, lengthy meetings, aimless wandering, and other disruptions that seem to occur in those settings. Twilio’s Lake is hoping the remote-work experience will transform employee behavior in the office, too, once they come back. She hopes that the remote experience will have given employees a chance to better understand how their teams work. “I think more than anything it is going to cause us to become more intentional about when, why and how we come together,” she says.
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AS FLOOD ALERTS LIT UP PHONES, DID ‘WARNING FATIGUE’ SET IN?
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Cellphones across New York and New Jersey pulsed with urgent warnings of catastrophic flooding as the fury of Hurricane Ida’s remnants, carrying torrential rains, upper New Jersey and New York City. The first alerts of severe weather blared across millions of phones at 8:41 p.m. that night when the National Weather Service warned of dangerous flash flooding from the looming storm. Officials would issue three more alerts, late into the night, urging people to immediately head for higher ground and to stay out of rising floodwaters. A barrage of other alerts from a litany of apps lit up phone screens throughout the night — prompting some to wonder if people were just too inundated with information to take the threat seriously. Experts call it “warning fatigue,” and no one can be sure what role it might have played in a tragedy that killed scores of people across the Northeast, including more than two dozen in New Jersey and at least 11 in New York City — many drowning in their basement apartments or in cars trapped in submerged roadways. The weather service acknowledged that in the past, alerts were being pushed out too often. There’s been lots of handwringing over how to get more people to heed warnings. “It’s either they don’t believe the information that they’re hearing — they can’t verify it — or there’s some other reason that is completely out of anybody’s control,” said Ross Dickman, the meteorologist in charge of the National Weather Service in New York.
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“It’s up to that individual,” he said, “but I think we need to do more work in understanding why people make the decisions that they do when they receive information and help get them to understand the impacts.” In some cases, people tried to flee too late and became trapped by floodwaters gushing so quickly, and with such force, that they could not open their doors to escape. Others might not have fathomed that flash flooding could also transform roadways into raging, impassable streams. Last year, the federal weather service revamped its criteria for issuing alerts, mindful that it might have been overusing the Wireless Emergency Alert system, which first went into operation in 2012 and now broadcasts urgent warnings to more than 300 million cellular devices. The weather service established a three-tier system in which alerts would only be sent out for the most severe flooding. Was the first time it issued an alert for the most catastrophic level for flash floods in New York and New Jersey, Dickman said. The ubiquity of cellphones makes the devices a key tool for urgently informing the public of dangerous weather, including hurricanes and tornadoes. It’s also used for Amber Alerts to enlist the public to help locate missing children. Authorities have also used cellphone alerts to help authorities nab dangerous people, including a terrorist who set off a bomb four years ago in New York City’s Chelsea district. New York City now has a million people subscribed to its wireless alert system that informs of a host of developments, including flooding but also disruptions in subway and other city services. 119
“People drowning in their basement apartments, in cars and so on is not something we typically would ever see in New York, ”said Irwin Redlener, a founding director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University who says officials have to have plans to accompany warnings. “So if we have warnings that we’re going to see very severe, rapid rainfall with flash flooding,” he said, “what is it that we actually want people to do? Other than advise people it’s going to happen, do we want them to go to shelters? If so, do we have shelters for them to go?” The city’s alert system, Notify NYC, launched as Hurricane Sandy approached nine years ago. The storm killed dozens in New York City and caused massive flooding. “We do put a lot of thought into when we push that button — and we know the weather service does, as well — because we don’t want to over warn and we want people to take our warning seriously when we when we’re issuing messaging,” said Benjamin Krakauer, an adviser to the Office of Emergency Management commissioner. James Mielke, a video game designer who lives in downtown Manhattan, found the alerts more aggravating than useful. “They sound like somebody just blew a soccer horn in your ear,” Mielke said. “It actually got to the point where I Googled it and figured out how to turn off those alerts so I could just, you know, not have a heart attack every time the big siren went off on my phone,” Mielke said, adding that he thought he had turned off all the emergency alerts on his phone after Tropical Storm Henri blew through two weeks ago. 120
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“This time they weren’t as bad, but a few still got through,” he said. Henri brought lots of rain and fury but very little loss of life. That might have prompted complacency, said Jeannette Sutton, a disaster and risk expert specializing in communication at the University of Albany. “So they got a message last week that said it’s really really bad and then nothing happened. And then this week they get a message that’s really really bad — do they take it seriously?” Sutton asked. That’s a question on the minds of weather and public safety officials, she said, adding that the seemingly simple act of pushing out alerts is actually complicated. “We have been thinking about alerts and warnings since the 1950s, and how to increase their effectiveness, and thinking about how to help people make really good decisions when they’re faced with life-threatening situations,” she said.
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5 WAYS TO REIN IN IMPULSE SPENDING
Since the COVID-19 vaccine started becoming available in the U.S., there have been more opportunities to impulse spend on items and experiences that you didn’t get to enjoy early in the pandemic. With the freedom to do more, consumers are spending more. For the first seven months of 2021, retail sales were up 15.5% compared to that same period in 2020, according to calculations by the National Retail Federation. As some restrictions have eased, it’s likely that you’ve had new spending needs: returning to work, visiting with friends and family, and partaking in other back-to-normal activities. But when the nonessentials threaten to put your finances in jeopardy, it’s important to keep your financial goals on track. Here are five strategies to help you navigate impulse spending. 125
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1. WAIT A DAY OR TWO When you feel that overwhelming urge to spend, wait 24 to 48 hours to see if you still want an item, suggests Brad Klontz, a financial psychologist based in Colorado. “Ask yourself: Can I afford this? Where am I going to put it? How am I going to feel about this purchase tomorrow? How am I going to pay for this?,” he says. He adds that this pause can help calm the “emotional brain” and activate the “rational brain,” the one that holds you accountable tomorrow. If you can’t bring yourself to wait, a store’s return policy may prove useful should regret set in. The return protection benefit on a credit card, if available, can also offer a backup option. When you make a purchase with the card that offers the benefit, it can provide a window of time to file a claim and receive a refund when a retailer’s return policy fails.
2. PRACTICE SAFE CREDIT CARD HABITS Credit cards may help or hurt, depending on how you spend. Klontz says that people spend significantly more money when using their credit cards instead of cash. He suggests keeping a cash envelope to use in areas where you tend to overspend, like dining out, for example. Also, minimize impulses by not storing credit card information on websites or apps, says Kathy Longo, a certified financial planner and president of Flourish Wealth Management, a financial planning firm in Minneapolis.
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“It’s much easier to be like, ‘I’ll look at it later because I’m not going to go find my purse and get my credit card,’” she says. That time can indirectly make you rethink a purchase. Once you do charge a purchase to a credit card, pay it off in full to avoid interest and save money. For large purchases, consider using a card with a 0% introductory APR.
3. USE CURBSIDE PICKUP Many retailers have offered curbside pickup since the start of the pandemic. It’s one option that Lauren Miller, a Massachusetts resident, uses to stay on track in her debt-free journey. Avoiding the inside of the store means “you’re not seeing those seasonal items and those flashy marketing strategies,” she says. These can often lead to impulse buying. Some retailers may charge for curbside pickup or require you to spend a certain amount to waive the cost. You’ll have to weigh whether it’s worth paying a few dollars to avoid the potential cost of impulse spending. If you have to go into a store and the urge wins, do an online price comparison of the item, suggests Longo. “See if you can find something similar at a better price or maybe on sale,” she says.
4. GIVE YOURSELF A SPLURGING ALLOWANCE Build a personal allowance into your budget for potential must-have purchases. When Miller first started to curb impulse spending, she gave herself $20 to use at each store. 128
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Over time, that amount lowered to $5 per store as she embraced the habit. Since she frequents only about four stores per month, the total doesn’t dent her budget. “The desire to make impulse purchases lessens, I think, because I know I have the permission to make an impulse purchase if I choose to,” she says. If you exceed your allowance, take that amount out of next month’s budget, or supplement it by redeeming credit card rewards for cash back or statement credit if it makes sense. (Some credit cards lessen the value of rewards when you redeem for certain options.) But if impulse spending is constantly causing you to stray from your budget and get into debt, it may be time to reevaluate spending habits or speak to a credit counselor or financial therapist.
5. GET AN ACCOUNTABILITY PARTNER An accountability partner can help you dissect your reasoning for a purchase. They don’t have to offer an opinion, just an ear. The goal is to hear yourself talk about it out loud and make a decision that aligns with your goals and values, Klontz says. He suggests choosing a spending limit that merits discussion. For instance, if a purchase exceeds $100, then it may be worth running by an accountability partner. Another option is to use social media followers to stay accountable. Miller, as a content creator on YouTube, documents her progress on social media platforms by sharing her plans to stick to a shopping list.
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COLLECTIBLE PRICES SKYROCKET, TO THE DISMAY OF HOBBYISTS
Americans have become obsessed with collectibles, bidding up prices for trading cards, video games and other mementos of their youth. The frenzy has brought small fortunes to some, but a deep frustration for those who still love to play games or trade cards as a hobby. Among the items most sought after — and even fought over — are the relics of millennials’ childhoods. These include copies of trading cards such as Pokemon’s Charizard and Magic: The Gathering’s Black Lotus as well as Nintendo’s Super Mario Bros. game cartridges. Some cards are selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars and an unopened Super Mario game recently sold for an astonishing $2 million. This is more than a case of opportunistic collectors looking to cash in on a burst of nostalgia triggered by the pandemic. Everyone seemingly is angling for a piece of the pie. 132
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The corporations who own franchises such as Pokemon are rolling out new editions as quickly as they can print them; internet personalities are hawking the products and raking in advertising money; companies that tell collectors how much their possessions are worth are doing unprecedented businesses — and in at least one case getting financial backing from a prominent private equity firm looking to get in on the action. But while some collectors and investors see dollar signs, others complain about the breakdown of their tight-knit communities. Players looking to play in-person again after the pandemic are unable to find the game pieces they want; if the pieces are available, prices have gone up astronomically. Critics of rising prices have become targets of harassment by those who now consider trading cards, comics and video games no different than a stock portfolio. “Prices are going up, and access is going down,” said Brian Lewis, who operates a YouTube channel under the name Tolarian Community College. The collectibles frenzy has been fueled partly by a self-fulfilling cycle of YouTube personalities driving hype around collecting and the rising prices of collectibles. This can lead to big paydays as advertisers notice the frenzy stirred up among the influencer’s dedicated followers. With more than 23 million subscribers, Logan Paul made several videos where he simply opens up boxes of vintage Pokemon cards, hyping the prices he’d paid and bringing in millions of views. Australian YouTube personality Michael Anderson, who goes by the moniker UnlistedLeaf, has garnered millions of views doing similar videos. 135
“It may be a burgeoning industry, but this is still big business. Brands want to reach these audiences,” said Justin Kline, co-founder of Markerly, an influencer marketing agency. Based on standard industry metrics, he estimates Anderson earns upward to $50,000 in advertising revenue doing unboxing videos, while Logan Paul may earn six figures per video. The hype has sent collectors scrambling to find out if their Pikachu, Charizard, Mox Emerald or Ancestral Recall cards might be worth a fortune. To do so, they turn to grading services, which have been flooded with orders. The grading service Beckett’s has effectively stopped accepting any cards to grade unless the customer is willing to pay $250 per card for its ultra-fast turnaround service typically reserved for the costliest collectibles. The turnaround time for basic grading services is more than a year, the company says. In response to record demand, companies are releasing new versions of the games, including premium products that command higher prices. Whether the momentum is sustainable, at least when to comes to prices, is unknown. Other fads like Beanie Babies or Pogs blew up in the ’90s only to crater, leaving most collectors holding worthless junk. Pokemon and Magic have been around for decades, and have seen surges of interest before. In the meantime, auction companies and grading companies are making fortunes riding the current speculative frenzy. Based in Portland, Brian Lewis produces several videos a week under the nickname “The Professor,” in hopes of teaching new and existing 136
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players about his favorite hobby, Magic: The Gathering. With more than 600,000 subscribers, he also comments on the state of the game, particularly the issue of rising prices, both on the secondary market (cards purchased from shops) as well as the prices companies are charging for products like Magic. “I worry deeply that these rising prices will have an impact on the average person’s access to the game,” he said. “There’s a growing class of investors in Magic, and I think it’s not having a positive impact on the game.” But the frenzy goes beyond trading cards. The U.S. Mint released a 100th Anniversary collection of the Morgan silver dollar, considered by coin collectors to be one of the most beautiful designs ever made, early this summer. The products sold out in minutes. Three weeks ago, an unopened copy of Super Mario Bros. for the Nintendo Entertainment System sold for $2 million, making it the most expensive video game sold. Only a few weeks earlier, a copy of Super Mario 64 sold for a then-record $1.6 million. An unopened copy of Nintendo’s Legend of Zelda from 1987 sold for $870,000 in early July. Some members of the video game collecting community have questioned whether the prices paid have been exaggerated by the involvement of third parties like Rally, which sells “shares” in collectibles. Meanwhile, the trading card community is seeing its own lofty prices as players scramble to find coveted pieces for their collection. A mint condition Black Lotus from Magic: The Gathering’s first set known as Alpha, sold in 139
January for more than $510,000. That price is double what a card in similar condition sold for six months before in July 2020. Austin Deceder, 25, primarily buys and sells cards on Facebook and Twitter as a middleman between players wanting to get out of their games and new players. Based in Kanas City, he now travels the country buying collections as his full-time job, having to balance his enjoyment of the game with now being involved financially. Deceder had a used Black Lotus card that he says he sold for $7,000 in September 2020. “Here we are now and the price on that same card has doubled.” It’s not just the ultra-rare cards seeing inflation. Take the widely available Magic: The Gathering card named “Ragavan, Nimble Pilferer.” The card, depicting a bespectacled monkey sitting on a hoard of treasure, was $30 earlier this summer. The card now sells for closer to $90, Deceder says, as game stores have reopened after the pandemic. “Now that people can play in person, card prices are moving up again,” he said. Not everyone is happy, however. Some enthusiasts say the frenzy has brought out the worst in fans and speculators. Nowhere is this more evident than among collectors of Pokemon cards, with its motto “Gotta Catch ’Em All!” The frenzy in Pokemon began late last year when Logan Paul did his first unboxing videos, which only led other content creators to make similar videos and collectors to bid up prices on cards new and vintage, said Lee Steinfeld, 34, a long-time collector in Dallas who does videos, including unboxings, under the name Leonhart. 140
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“That’s when things went super crazy,” he said. Since then, boxes of Pokemon trading cards have been routinely sold out at hobbyist shops and big-box retail stores. Fistfights have broken out, requiring chains like Target to restrict the number of packs an individual customer can purchase. The Pokemon Company says it is trying to print as many cards as possible to keep up. “Pretty much the entire Pokemon community has deteriorated,” said Shelbie, a creator of Pokémon videos under the name Frosted Caribou on YouTube. While most of Shelbie’s content features unboxings or discussions about upcoming products, one of her most popular uploads was an hour-long video focused on the problems in the Pokemon collecting community since the frenzy began last year. Shelbie, who declined to give a last name to avoid being a target of harassment, said some harassment in the past has come from some of the community’s biggest collectors, particularly when she has talked about prices. Later this year, Pokemon will be releasing a set to celebrate its 25th anniversary. While typically an anniversary set would garner interest from any collector, this time Shelbie said she’s hesitant. “The set is going to be amazing. It’s also going to be impossible to get. It’s going to be awful actually,” she said. But the surge of interest has been good for the corporations and Wall Street. Hasbro’s Wizards of the Coast division makes the tabletop role-playing game “Dungeons 142
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& Dragons” as well as Magic: The Gathering. Wizards reported second-quarter revenue of $406 million, more than double year-ago revenue. Hasbro executives told investors in July they would soon be raising product prices. Wizards has introduced premium packs of cards with harder-to-find game pieces that sell for four to five times more than a regular packs. Wall Street has also ridden the wave of interest. Private equity giant Blackstone purchased a majority stake in Certified Collectibles Group, a company that grades collectibles like trading cards, in July for $500 million. The company has doubled its employee count since last year and is buying another 30,000 square feet of office space, President Max Spiegel said. Whether that’s good for the players who have long participated in these hobbies is unknown. Long-time collectors likely stand to make money in the future, but those who recently entered these communities may be purchasing overpriced cards hyped by those who stand to benefit the most, community leaders said. It’s not unlike the stock market craze that drove prices of GameStop and other “meme” stocks higher earlier this year. “There’s now a whole subculture who are using Pokemon as a stock market. I don’t know how those people can look at the community and say this is healthy,” Shelbie said.
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Disney’s Jungle Cruise | Official Trailer
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&TV Shows
Jungle Cruise Scientific researcher Dr. Lily Houghton (Emily Blunt) and her brother and assistant MacGregor Houghton (Jack Whitehall) are led through the Amazon jungle by riverboat captain Frank Wolff (Dwayne Johnson) on a mission to find an ancient tree unparalleled in its healing abilities.
FIVE FACTS: 1. This film is inspired by the attraction and ride of the same name at various Disney theme parks. 2. Many of the corny puns used by Frank in the film have been lifted straight from the Jungle Cruise attraction.
by Jaume Collet-Serra Genre: Action & Adventure Released: 2021 Price: $29.99
3. The name of Blunt’s character references Katharine Hepburn, who starred in the similar 1951 film The African Queen and had the full name of Katharine Houghton Hepburn. 4. On that occasion, Hepburn co-starred with Humphrey Bogart, whose look in The African Queen inspired Johnson’s look in Jungle Cruise. 5. This is Blunt’s fourth Disney film after 2011’s The Muppets, 2014’s Into the Woods and 2018’s Mary Poppins Returns.
Rotten Tomatoes
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