Month: February 2019

Last year, Seattle’s city council repealed a tax on big employers less than a month after approving the legislation designed to raise funds to support homeless programs. The quick reversal came after Amazon, which employs around 45,000 people in the city, halted the construction of a new building and threatened to not occupy space it
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President Trump’s immigration policies have made it harder for tech companies to bring highly skilled workers to the US, according to newly released immigration data. That’s bad news for US tech companies as well as non-tech companies, which rely on third-party outsourcing companies to execute the growing technology sides of their businesses. It could also
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When Y Combinator accidentally admitted 15,000 people to its 3,000-person Startup School online program last summer due to an almost funny technical glitch, it was an embarrassing moment for one of Silicon Valley’s marquee brands, and a rollercoaster of an experience for emotionally vulnerable startup founders. The accepted founders should have been rejected. The rejected
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Guidebooks highlight San Francisco’s Hayes Valley neighborhood for its lively bars and restaurants, nurtured by the removal of an earthquake-damaged freeway and swelling tech industry salaries. At Uber’s headquarters nearby, data scientists working on the company’s food delivery service, Uber Eats, view the scene through a more numerical lens. Their logs indicates that restaurants in
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Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos thinks it’s wrong to be so fearful of his company’s outsize presence. He may have a point. At an internal all-hands staff meeting last March, an employee asked Bezos about the growing fear over Amazon potentially killing competition in many different industries, according to a recording CNBC has heard. The questioner
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Ajit Pai says the Federal Communications Commission’s annual broadband assessment will show that his deregulatory policies have substantially improved access in the United States. The annual report will also conclude that broadband is being deployed to all Americans in a reasonable and timely basis. The FCC hasn’t released the full Broadband Deployment Report yet and
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It’s been a long time since Ev Williams, one of Twitter’s four co-founders and its one-time CEO, was making any notable decisions within the company he created way back in 2006. But on Friday, when Williams announced that he is leaving Twitter’s board to “ride off into the sunset” and “focus on some other things,”
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A group of around 50 Microsoft workers signed a letter today demanding the company cancel its nearly half-billion-dollar contract with the US military to license its augmented reality HoloLens technology for use in military combat and training. The letter, addressed to Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella and President Brad Smith, was initially circulated internally and is
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Just before Valentine’s Day last week, Belgian security researcher Inti De Ceukelaire noticed something strange on Facebook. He found the social network’s search function treated pictures of men and women in dramatically different ways. Searching for “photos of my female friends” returned a hodgepodge of images, whereas a similar search for “photos of my male
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Even before the online gig economy existed, a simple truth defined life in the American workforce: full-time employees get a safety net—the benefits, the labor protections, the security—and everyone else goes without. Tech companies have revolutionized how people work in countless ways, but this benefits gap persists, especially among low-income workers. The question now is
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Google announced today it will end forced arbitration for current and future employees, a practice that waives workers’ rights to sue their employer in court. The changes will apply to current and future Google employees beginning March 21, for any new cases. The move comes after months of sustained pressure by employee activists demanding the
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Newly released court documents paint the clearest picture yet of what the joint health-care venture between Amazon, J.P. Morgan and Berkshire Hathaway is up to. The three companies created the still-unnamed, not-for-profit joint venture in January 2018. Since then, the venture, known as ABC, has named renowned surgeon, author and speaker Dr. Atul Gawande as
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The much anticipated remake of the cult classic sci-fi novel “Dune” finally got a release date last week, but the film’s Nov. 20, 2020 trip to theaters is upending another popular franchise’s next movie. “Fantastic Beasts 3,” the third installment of five in the prequel “Harry Potter” saga, had initially been slated for that spot
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Seven years ago, a smooth-talking associate of Peter Thiel promised that he had launched the “capstone” to Thiel’s investment empire, naming their new firm after a mythical metal in Lord of the Rings because it was flashy yet permanent. “It’s invaluable,” leader Ajay Royan told one interviewer about Mithril Capital. “It’s lifesaving. It’s sustainable. It
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Two years ago, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced a renewed focus on communities and its Groups feature, boasting that it would help create a more “meaningful” social infrastructure. It worked. Last month, Zuckerberg told investors that “hundreds of millions” of users reported belonging in “meaningful groups,” up from one million in 2017, when the company
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Humans pricked by info-hunger pangs used to hunt and peck for scraps of trivia on the savanna of the internet. Now we sit in screen-glow-flooded caves and grunt, “Alexa!” Virtual assistants do the dirty work for us. Problem is, computers can’t really speak the language. Many of our densest, most reliable troves of knowledge, from
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