Every three months, Wall Street watches with anticipation for bumper results from Big Tech companies. Over the course of a little more than a week, Snap, Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta, Spotify, Amazon, and Apple all announce to investors how well they’ve performed. For years, it’s been a tale of untrammeled success, with earnings, profits, and user
Month: July 2022
Hello, friends. My name is Kate Knibbs, and I’m a senior writer at WIRED covering culture and media. I’ll be your substitute Plaintext guide this week, as my colleague Steven Levy has generously lent me his newsletter. “Have fun doing my newsletter, please don’t go off on a tangent about the Kardashian-Jenner Industrial Complex,” he
But the rush for free or heavily-discounted tickets can have the opposite effect. In Germany, the first long weekend of the 9-euro-a-month tickets led to overcrowding, service disruptions, and thousands of hours of overtime for staff. In Spain, Muñoz Nieto warns that if train frequencies aren’t increased, services will become overcrowded; plus, making one mode
It’s not children who are committing these heists, of course. It’s people running jobs on the inside and the outside. Internet-connected cell phones and electronic money transfers through Green Dot prepaid cards, or mobile payment services like Cash App—often with an advance cut to outside conspirators who receive the balance on delivery–make them much easier
“There is a really deep interconnection between the chip industry and the US defense industry,” says Chris Miller, an assistant professor at Tufts University and the author of Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology, a forthcoming book about the race between the US and China to dominate chips. “Both countries have
Martin Shkreli—the notorious ex-pharmaceutical executive fresh from prison after his 2017 fraud conviction—announced his latest, eyebrow-raising venture this week: the creation of a blockchain-based Web3 drug discovery platform that traffics in his own cryptocurrency, MSI, aka Martin Shkreli Inu. The platform, still in the early development phase, is called Druglike, according to a press release
An equine-assisted psychotherapist, a renowned organic farmer, and a Rockefeller are among 34 people named in a bizarre real estate case that could delay Google’s long-awaited Silicon Valley expansion. The suit centers around the disputed ownership of four small patches of roadway in San Jose, where Google wants to build a futuristic campus for tens
At a roundtable that Bowles attended in May, a meeting leader said they were going to answer “questions from the team,” despite the fact that he was unaware of questions having been solicited. “If we form a union, could we lose our benefits?” read one anonymous question, to which the leader answered yes. The meeting
“Yeah, I think that was,” Republican senator Thom Tillis says of Cornyn’s unscientific news clipping. JFK’s Legacy For Tillis, what truly unified the disparate group of progressives and conservatives was data—just not gun data. Instead, he says, their negotiations were most influenced by former president John F. Kennedy. On October 31, 1963, Kennedy signed into
In countries like Norway, EVs are expensive, and that means families often have the budget for just one car, says Sovacool, whose research shows that men use cars more than women and are less likely to use public transport. In countries like the US, women may be more likely to have range anxiety, suggests Philipp
But the turnaround is far from uniform. Everstream’s data shows that lead times for some advanced chips needed for medical devices, telecommunications, and cybersecurity systems is around 52 weeks, compared to a prior average of 27 weeks. Automotive companies that were badly affected by the pandemic because they initially canceled orders for components were then
Tülay McNally, director of inclusive design at Electronic Arts, chooses her words carefully as we chat about creating diverse characters for video games. Raised in Germany, McNally is no stranger to the international video game industry. She worked at Square Enix, Sega, and Bioware before joining EA. McNally’s team at EA assists with the development
Now that Congress has failed to pass a bill that would guarantee a right to travel across state lines to obtain an abortion, many are worried that conservative states that have started restricting abortion rights could soon decide to block people seeking abortions from leaving their own state for that purpose. Many Republican lawmakers are
Hi, folks. The winner of the week is Reed Hastings, who lost a million subscribers but saw Netflix’s stock skyrocket because he didn’t lose more. What a showman! The Plain View I got an email from Google the other day. “Dear Steven,” went the text, “This is a reminder that any existing Location History data
In the lead-up to the 2018 midterm elections in the United States, law enforcement, intelligence, and election officials were on high alert for digital attacks and influence operations after Russia demonstrated the reality of these threats by targeting the presidential elections in 2016. Six years later, the threat of hacking and malign foreign influence remain,
Under the new version of the ADPPA, Butler says, some forms of targeting would remain common, particularly targeting based on first-party data. If you shop for shoes on Target.com, Target could still use that information to show you ads for shoes when you’re on another site. What it wouldn’t be able to do is match
Certain departments at tech companies outside engineering, such as business development, customer success, communications, and marketing, also tend to be more heavily stacked with women and historically underrepresented ethnic minorities. Brown says these types of roles have garnered increasing respect and prominence in recent years. But Mimi Fox Melton, CEO at Code 2040, a nonprofit
All of the companies included in the investigation were asked to explain “the impacts of your facilities on energy costs to local families and businesses,” but none could describe any existing estimates or models that tracked those impacts. Those who engaged with the question said this was because they didn’t expect to have a noticeable
TikTok has begun a global restructuring of its business that includes layoffs, according to five people with knowledge of the process. The short-form video app, owned by Chinese parent company ByteDance, has rapidly expanded both its user base and workforce in recent years. Despite tensions with the Trump administration over fears it could be a
The other two outcomes, which are together much more likely, Ives says, would see Musk either buy Twitter for the agreed $44 billion, or walk away after reaching a settlement in which he pays the company damages of between $5 billion and $10 billion. “The stock is factoring in some significant chance that Musk will
The panic started as soon as Jayda took the test in early July. It came back positive, and a quick calculation suggested she was seven weeks pregnant. It was a bad time. Her mom had just died, and Florida, the state where she lived, had introduced restrictions in April that prohibited people from using telehealth
Hi, folks. If inflation makes everything more expensive, why are stock prices falling? Asking for a 401(k). The Plain View In all the months since Elon Musk has been maneuvering to control Twitter, not once have his impulses seemed to make any sense. Here is a guy who has concentrated on leveraging big science to
The other important thing I’ll say is, if the Comey quote is true, then actually he needed to listen to good election forecasts that showed the number was more like 70 percent. So that becomes an argument for further forecasts. Well, what is a “good” forecast? If we go back to 2016, as you say,
It took only eight months for Jokr, the superfast delivery startup, to become a unicorn, and just six months more for its strategy to start coming apart. Jokr had plastered New York City with splashy ads promising to deliver groceries within 15 minutes—For free! With no minimum order!—and raised a total of $430 million in
The problem with powering any form of transport with electricity is it requires heavy batteries. That’s a particular problem for boats, as they suffer drag in the water. To address this Candela uses hydrofoils, legs that extend down into the water and act like wings, propelling the boat up into the air as it picks
The click-per-payment model, DiResta says, may also change influencers’ behavior—creating the “incentive to produce and amplify content in the most inflammatory way possible in order to drive the audience to take an action.” But at the most fundamental level, researchers voiced a concern about the potential for deception in civic discourse. DiResta said, “I don’t
In June, Twitter received an ultimatum from the Indian government to remove some 39 accounts and content from its platform. Sources familiar with the order say it outlined that if Twitter refused to comply, its chief compliance officer could face criminal proceedings. They say it also stated that the company would lose its “safe harbor”
New products often come with disclaimers, but in April the artificial intelligence company OpenAI issued an unusual warning when it announced a new service called DALL-E 2. The system can generate vivid and realistic photos, paintings, and illustrations in response to a line of text or an uploaded image. One part of OpenAI’s release notes
This week’s big news in tech: Uber behaved badly. A massive document dump reveals that it knowingly broke laws to roll out its services as widely and quickly as possible. Of course, the company can blame its disgraced former CEO. “We ask the public to judge us by what we’ve done in the last five
A number of executives have already left the company in the wake of Musk launching his takeover bid, impacting countless others further down the food chain. “The feeling internally is that people have been applying for jobs, and they’re going to keep applying for jobs,” says the first Twitter staffer. Employees say they felt particularly