November 2, 2020
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Technology
From Software to Hardware: This week two technology companies announced their first forays into hardware, with devices we don’t expect anyone was calling for. Yahoo has announced the release of its first branded (purple) phone, debuting from its parent Verizon. Yahoo Mobile launched in March with unlimited talk and text, and now the $50 phone will be added to the mix.
Bytedance (the parent of TikTok), on the other hand, is debuting a smart lamp (we might understand a smart ring light, but this has us stumped). The lamp is part of a push toward education technology, as it features a digital assistant meant to help kids finish their homework. Bytedance previously entered digital education software services with programs aimed at teaching English and replicating the classroom experience.
Painting Change: Purdue University engineers have created an ultra-white paint that can keep surfaces up to 18 degrees cooler than their surroundings. The paint effectively reflects 95% of sunlight and radiates heat. This paint would be both cheaper to produce than its commercial alternative and could save about a dollar per day that would have been spent on air conditioning for a one-story house.
This is not the first paint to make news. Vantablack is the darkest pigment ever created, and it absorbs 99.965% of visible light. Vantablack has its own creation story and controversy leading to copyright fights by artists and the creation of the “Pinkest Pink.” BMW even created a Vantablack car (we suspect this car will need a lot of A/C fluid). For more history on the technology behind the colors and the controversy, have a listen to 99 Percent Invisible.
Foursquare merges with Clippy: This is how Foursquare described their new Marsbot for Airpods: a lightweight virtual assistant that proactively whispers local recommendations into your headphones or earbuds as you’re walking around. The “proactive walking assistant” is a new app for AirPods that can be downloaded from the AppStore. Users can also leave geo-cached audio snippets for other Marsbot users to find. While this sounds like a great idea if we were tourists and taking a virtual walking tour, we prefer to keep the extraneous voices in our heads to a minimum these days.
Airbnb Takes Care of its Hosts: Airbnb announced the creation of an endowment fund for its hosts as it heads toward an IPO. The fund will hold 9.2M shares, and hosts will be able to apply for grants once the value of the fund tops $1B. The grants would cover a broad swath of hosts’ financial needs, such as educational support, safety tools like noise detection controls inside rental properties or aid in natural disasters. Airbnb is also creating a host advisory board, which will be made up of 10 to 15 hosts from around the world who will provide input monthly on how the endowment is used. Seems like an interesting way to effectively give hosts ownership and a voice, and quite the opposite of most other gig economy companies.
SpaceX Creates its own Laws: SpaceX has some interesting Easter Eggs buried in its terms of service for its Starlink satellites. “For services provided on Mars, or in transit to Mars via Starship or other colonization spacecraft, the parties recognize Mars as a free planet and that no Earth-based government has authority or sovereignty over Martian activities,” the governing law section states. “Accordingly, disputes will be settled through self-governing principles, established in good faith, at the time of Martian settlement.” Starlink services provided on the Earth and Moon are, however, governed in accordance with the laws of the State of California.
Independent Booksellers: Bookshop.org is a “socially conscious alternative” to Amazon that allows readers to support their local independent bookstore, when buying books online. It allows independent bookshops to create their own virtual shopfront on the site, with the stores receiving the full profit margin – 30% of the cover price – from each sale. All customer service and shipping are handled by Bookshop and its distributor partners. The site launched with 250 bookshops, which has now grown to over 900 in the US, and plans to expand to the UK (with already 130 shops online).
Media
British Etiquette: The BBC has issued new social media guidelines for its staff including a ban on “virtue signaling.” Staff should not criticize their colleagues on social media, and are also warned that emojis can “undercut an otherwise impartial post.” The guidelines apply to both official and personal accounts. News and current affairs staff have been banned from taking part in protests, marches or demonstrations about controversial issues. The new guidelines also resulted in some push back, with our favorite being Sue Perkins’s (of the Great British Bake Off) rainbow flag tweet.
Research Shutdown: Facebook demanded that the NYU Ad Observatory, a project launched last month by the university’s engineering school, cease collecting data about its political-ad-targeting practices. The project already has 6,500 volunteers that use a specially designed browser extension to collect data about the political ads Facebook shows them. Facebook said the project violates provisions in its terms of service that prohibit bulk data collection from its site, although academics are often given special permits.
Politics
National Forests: President Trump will open up more than half of Alaska’s Tongass National Forest to logging and other forms of development, stripping protections that had safeguarded one of the world’s largest intact temperate rainforests for nearly two decades. The decision reverses protections put in place by Clinton in 2001, and is one of the most sweeping public land rollbacks Trump has enacted. “While tropical rainforests are the lungs of the planet, the Tongass is the lungs of North America,” Dominick DellaSala, chief scientist with the Earth Island Institute’s Wild Heritage project, said in an interview. “It’s America’s last climate sanctuary.”
Civil Service: The Trump administration has issued an executive order that would make it easier for the government to fire thousands of federal workers, while also allowing political and other considerations to affect hiring. The executive order would affect the professional employees in policymaking positions at the very top of the civil service — people like lawyers and scientists who are are not political appointees and serve from administration to administration regardless of which party controls the White House. There are questions as to the motives here — whether Trump is preparing to remake the government ahead of his second term or handicapping a new Biden administration. Regardless, it is a huge attack on the apolitical federal workforce (over 2M employees).
ECB Stimulus: While many European nations are going back into some form of lockdown to stop the threat of COVID, European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde has cleared the path for governments to do whatever is necessary to counter the economic blow from Covid-19’s second wave. Lagarde pledged to “recalibrate” monetary support, which was understood to mean that more stimulus is in the pipeline. Unfortunately, talks on an unprecedented €1.8T budget and jointly-financed recovery fund are currently deadlocked.
Chemical Weapons: On October 15, 2020, the European Union imposed sanctions on six senior Russian officials and a leading Russian research institute over the alleged use of a nerve agent from the Novichok family in the poisoning of opposition leader Alexey Navalny. The Russian government continues to deny any involvement. In 1997, Russia had agreed to discontinue its chemical weapons program, and Putin has said he personally watched over the destruction of the chemical weapons stash. A year long investigation by several European investigative journalists, including Der Spiegel, have discovered evidence that Russia continued its Novichok development program, and since 2010 the R&D and weaponization has continued.
Culture
Troll Island: You may have missed the invite to Kim Kardashian’s 40th birthday party, but the celebrity influencer self-owned herself with an attempt at “performative quarantine.” Kardashian announced on her social media feeds that she had surprised her friends and family with two weeks of quarantine, and then shipped them off to a private island where everything could feel “normal.” Kardashian could have easily just had the party, and stayed silent with her friends, but instead she had to show off, and her insensitivity to what most people are experiencing during COVID was quickly turned into many memes: Jurassic Park’s private island, Dungeons and Dragons and even the MoMA successfully trolled the clan.
Not to be outdone, Kardashian’s husband, Kanye West, decided to give his wife a bizarre birthday gift: a hologram of her late father (who happens to complement Kanye in his deepfaked message). We thought Kanye was in the middle of a presidential campaign, but we’d certainly prefer him to stay a hologram on a private island.
Troll on another Island: Bill Gross, the former bond king of Pimco fame, is enmeshed in a battle with his neighbors in Laguna Beach, California. Gross installed a 22-foot Chihuly sculpture on his property and then surrounded it in netting, to save it from the elements. His neighbors claimed the netting (and sculpture) blocks their view, and the city claims Gross doesn’t have the proper permits. In retaliation, Gross is apparently playing the theme song from Gilligan’s Island non-stop in order to torment them. We new Gross was devious, but the music choice seems directly out of the Zero Dark Thirty playbook.
Eagle Scouts: Nineteen-year-old Beatrix Jackman is making history as a member of the Scouts BSA’s inaugural class of female Eagle Scouts. Jackman will also be the first out trans woman to ever hold the rank of Eagle Scout in the nationwide organization. Jackman had been a Boy Scout growing up, and then returned to the troop in 2019 when the organization officially allowed girls to join. She is joined by 14-year-old Abby Winkelman, both of whom are the first girls in Texas to achieve the elite Eagle Scout rank, which only 6 percent of Scouts achieve on average.
Saved by the Bell: Missing the 1980s? The iconic series Saved by the Bell will be revived with most of its original cast on Peacock, including Zack and Kelly as the first family of California.
Not to be Outdone: The Creators of South Park have created a weekly satire show using deepfakes, called Sassy Justice. All all the footage in the first episode that is meant to be “real” is deepfaked, while all the footage labeled fake is either real or played by puppets.
We ❤️ New York: 2020 tops itself, and the Pizza Rat: a New York City man fell about 15 feet into a pit of rats when a sidewalk sinkhole opened under his feet. The ground simply split and swallowed its victim, 33-year-old Leonard Shoulders, as he waited for a bus on Saturday afternoon. Shoulders survived, albeit with a few broken bones, but his family says he is “deeply traumatized.”
2020 in a Headline: A Russian oligarch, nicknamed The Sausage King, has been murdered with a crossbow in an outdoor sauna.
Sinister Sounds: Just in case Halloween plus the election has heightened your anxiety enough, NASA has released a SoundCloud of eerie sounds generated from outer space. Or if you are up for some new wall art, NASA has released a new series of “cosmic frights” inspired by vintage movie posters.
— Lauren Eve Cantor
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