Andrew

The whizz-kids at Daimler Research Group have done something that’s equal parts silly and ingenious: they’ve adapted a version of Mario Kart to work on the MBUX infotainment system of a Mercedes-Benz CLA. It plays the game on the screen to the right of the driver, who can control it with the car’s steering wheel and pedals. The interior lighting system activates in sync with the starting signals in the game, the seatbelt tightens anytime you crash in the game, and the air conditioning blows cool air at you with an intensity matched to your speed in the game.

I played it and I loved it.

The game’s frame rate isn’t perfect, and by the time I got to Daimler’s MWC booth, the seatbelt integration wasn’t working, but what I saw felt so...

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Check out this incredible photo of the moon. It may look like it was captured using some ultra-advanced (and expensive) equipment, but it was actually created by astrophotography enthusiast Andrew McCarthy by capturing and combining 50,000 photos.

The Sacramento, California-based McCarthy shot the photos using two cameras: his Sony a7 II mirrorless camera and his ZWO ASI224MC (a $250 astro camera).

“The lit side of the moon was processed using 25 ’tiles’ that were stitched together in Photoshop,” the photographer tells PetaPixel. “Each ’tile’ was a stack of the best 50% of 2000 images captured with the ZWO.”

The stars and the dark portion of the moon were captured with the Sony a7 II.

“The dark side is around 13 tiles, each with the best of around 50 images,” McCarthy says. “The stars were captured with a stack of 50 shots with the Sony.”

The stacks were blended using AutoStakkert!, and McCarthy then turned to Photoshop to process and stitch together the photo.

“A lot of selective masking, histogram stretching, and contrast adjustments were necessary to get the look I wanted,” he says.

You can find more of his amazing work on his Instagram account, @cosmic_background. McCarthy is the photographer who recently shot a beautiful Solar System family photo from his Sacramento backyard.

Carlson to historian Rutger Bregman: “Go fuck yourself.”

Tucker Carlson, the Fox News host, has lately been trying to rebrand himself as a different kind of conservative — one who’s open to government intervention to help American workers, who cares more about stable families than free markets and low taxes, and who opposes both immigration and laissez-faire economics as forces hurting the American working class.

That, I suppose, explains why he offered to have Rutger Bregman on his show. Bregman is a Dutch leftist writer and historian who shot to stardom after he told attendees at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland — to their faces — that their taxes needed to go up, saying, “It feels like I’m at a firefighters conference and no one’s allowed to speak about water, right? Just stop talking about philanthropy and start talking about taxes.”

That fits well with Carlson’s new brand. But Bregman is also a vocal advocate of open borders and views Carlson’s change of heart as a convenient last-minute bait and switch by a right-wing network that’s ultimately out for its own interests. So their interview went … well, just watch:

The interview starts off calmly enough, but ends with Carlson telling Bregman to “go fuck yourself”:

BREGMAN: You’re a millionaire funded by billionaires. That’s what you are. I’m glad you finally now jumped the bandwagon of people like Bernie Sanders and AOC, but you’re not part of the solution, Mr. Carlson. You’re part of the problem, actually.

CARLSON: But AOC — but could I just say, and …

BREGMAN: It’s true, right? That all the anchors on Fox …

CARLSON: You would have to be a moron …

BREGMAN: … they’re all millionaires! How is this possible? Well, it’s very easy, you’re just not talking about certain things.

CARLSON: Fox doesn’t even play where you are!

BREGMAN: “It doesn’t play where you are”? Well, have you heard of the internet? I can watch things, whatever I want, you know.

CARLSON: You haven’t even seen Fox before!

BREGMAN: I have, actually. I can’t say I’m a great fan of your show, but I do my homework when you invite me on your show. So you’re probably not going to air this.

CARLSON: I doubt it.

BREGMAN: But I went to Davos to speak truth to power, and I’m doing exactly the same thing right now. You may not like it but you’re a millionaire funded by billionaires, and that’s the reason why you’re not talking about these issues.

CARLSON: But I am talking about these issues.

BREGMAN: But only now, come on, you jumped the bandwagon. You’re like, “Oh, I’m against the globalist elite, blah blah blah.” It’s not very convincing, to be honest.

CARLSON: I want to say to you — why don’t you go fuck yourself, you tiny brain — and I hope this gets picked up because you’re a moron, I tried to give you a hearing but you were too fucking annoying …

BREGMAN: You can’t handle the criticism, can you?

If Carlson had actually read Bregman’s book Utopia for Realists, or read his interview with Vox where he condemns right-wing anti-immigrant populists like Donald Trump and Geert Wilders (and, by extension, Carlson), none of this would be surprising. Matching him up against Carlson — who has railed against “gypsies,” decried immigrants for making America “dirtier” and California a “third-world country,” and said that America’s changing racial demographics represent “more change than human beings are designed to digest” — was bound to end in a fight, one for which Carlson apparently wasn’t prepared.

Before the video leaked, Bregman posted an email from Carlson’s staff calling Bregman an “asshole”:

For what it’s worth, a landmark paper in the American Economic Review in 2017 found that Fox News meaningfully shifts votes to Republicans in presidential elections, and that the network chooses to be more right-wing than it would be to maximize viewership. That is: The network’s billionaire owners and the management they’ve selected appear to be sacrificing some number of viewers, and potentially some amount of profit, in order to persuade more people to vote Republican and hold conservative beliefs.

I doubt they’re merely doing that to get tax cuts for Rupert Murdoch and the network’s other rich shareholders. But Bregman isn’t raising the possibility out of nowhere.

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The first thing I saw on Twitter this morning was a video of a cat letting out sweet, little T-Pain yowls. Joaquin Baldwin, a Disney animation artist, had auto-tuned his cat Elton and then made a compilation video of his suddenly quite musical meows.

I sent it to everyone. Then, I decided I had to know what was used to auto-tune the cat: partially because I plan on auto-tuning my own cat, Crouton, but mostly because the auto-tune effect used in the video is actually quite good.

The app Baldwin used is called Voloco — a free iOS and Android app for...

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Jessica Jones and The Punisher have been canceled by Netflix, bringing an end to all five of Marvel and Netflix’s live-action TV series.

“Marvel’s The Punisher will not return for a third season on Netflix,” a Netflix spokesperson told The Verge. “In addition, in reviewing our Marvel programming, we have decided that the upcoming third season will also be the final season for Marvel’s Jessica Jones. We are grateful to Marvel for five years of our fruitful partnership and thank the passionate fans who have followed these series from the beginning.”

Both shows will remain on Netflix for subscribers, even as Disney begins to move its original series and films over to its own streaming service, Disney+, which is set to launch this fall....

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Nintendo ended its latest Direct presentation with a surprise: a new, 3D remake of the Game Boy classic The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening.

While details are slim, Nintendo did have a trailer to show off the remake, which will see the 8-bit Game Boy graphics redone in a bright, colorful, and absolutely adorable-looking 3D style that wouldn’t look out of place in a Pixar movie.

Link’s Awakening was originally released back in 1993 for the Game Boy, marking the first time that the franchise had made the jump to a portable console — a fitting match for the Switch, which has taken the place as Nintendo’s current handheld king.

The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening remake is set to release later in 2019.

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If you love fonts or National Parks (or both), you’re in luck—you can download the typeface found on park signs for free.

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Mars One Ventures — the company that claimed it was going to send hundreds of people to live (and ultimately die) on the Red Planet — is now bankrupt, according to Swiss financial notices. It’s an unsurprising development, as many experts suspected that Mars One has been a scam for years, preying on people’s desires to travel to space without having a real plan to get them there.

News of the liquidation first came to light over the weekend, thanks to a Redditor who spotted a notice for the company’s bankruptcy on a website for the city of Basel, Switzerland — where Mars One’s parent company is based. The source indicated that the the city declared the company bankrupt on January 15th, which then dissolved the organization. Mars One’s...

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But they’ll be back in 2020.

Three weeks from Valentine’s Day, we’re facing a mild catastrophe: We will not be telling each other “I Love You” or “Fax Me” or “LOL” with Sweethearts conversation hearts this year. There will simply be none for sale anywhere in 2019.

As is so often the case these days, we can blame this crisis on corporate drama we had no hand in: Necco, the candy company that has been making the little pastel sugar-and-grout Valentines since the mid-19th century, was purchased by a new parent company at the end of last year and simply did not have enough time to set up the manufacturing process for its yearly 8 billion hearts.

We will not be permitted to suck down affection in the classic flavors of chalk-powder-infused cherry, banana, wintergreen, lemon, orange, and grape, and it’s all because of the shuttering of what was — by all accounts — a gorgeous and longstanding candy factory by the ocean.

The hearts will be back in 2020, but this year, there will be none.

To back up: Necco has been struggling for a long time, with profits sliding steadily south over the past 15 years. In May 2018, it was purchased at bankruptcy auction by Round Hill Investments, a Connecticut-based company that had previously purchased and buoyed dying brands like PBR, Chef Boyardee, and Hostess. Things seemed to be looking up.

Then in July, the Necco factory shuttered without warning, sending all 230 of its employees home permanently in the middle of the week and providing only a vague explanation of why.

Round Hill, apparently reconsidering the acquisition, had sold Necco to a mysterious new owner, which was never publicly named. That company sold Necco again in September, to the Ohio-based Spangler Candy Company. Spangler is best known for Dum Dum lollipops, circus peanuts, and candy canes, and CEO Kirk Vashaw announced at the time, “Sweethearts and Necco wafers are iconic brands with rich hundred-year-plus histories. These are perfect additions to our portfolio of traditional candies.”

Less pleasantly, he also announced, “There are a lot of manufacturing challenges and unanswered questions at this point, and we want to make sure these brands meet consumer expectations when they re-enter the market. We look forward to announcing the Sweethearts relaunch for the 2020 Valentine season.” Which brings us to our present dilemma.

In this year without Sweethearts, your best romance-candy options are, as People Magazine so helpfully suggests: the Brach’s knockoff of conversation hearts (so much flirtier), the Sour Patch Kids knockoff of conversation hearts (they don’t look right), or Oreos with words on them (fine). Alternatively, you can order last year’s conversation hearts online in bulk, which isn’t as bad an idea as it sounds. A history of Necco published by Eater’s Daniela Galarza in 2015 notes that the company has always been known for candy recipes that prioritize form and function over flavor:

Necco Wafers were shipped to battlefields during the Spanish-American War and during World War I. In 1917, the U.S. government bought one entire year’s production of Necco Wafers and packed them into soldiers’ ration packs. Why Necco Wafers? Because the product is nearly indestructible: It has a two-year shelf life and it’s not subject to heat or cold.

Or as a more recent Wall Street Journal article puts it, “Necco wafers have been around since before the Civil War — and plenty of detractors would argue they taste like it, too.”

Yes, conversation hearts are a little bit of a joke, but they’re our joke. They’re a cultural shorthand for the pretty facade and ultimate disappointment of romantic conventions. They are not pleasant to eat, and yet we want them. They’ve been around for more than a century: The technology to slice wafer candy was invented by Oliver R. Chase in 1847, and his brother Daniel created a machine that could print words on candies in 1866.

Their early message wafers had text like “Married in white, you have chosen right,” and “Married in satin, love will not be lasting,” and were mostly given out at weddings, so I wouldn’t exactly call the Chase brothers a pair of feminist allies, but they did correctly latch on to the idea that romance is big money.

What you would recognize as Sweethearts conversation hearts debuted in 1901 and were available every year — until now. Nothing lasts forever! Except the dull pain of the heartbreaks you will accumulate over the course of your life. And now, here is another.

When you think of competitive gaming and e-sports, your mind probably drifts toward massively popular online games like Fortnite or Overwatch. But there are plenty of less-heralded games making their way in the space, including games about farming. Today, developer Giants Software announced a new Farming Simulator League, which is exactly what it sounds like: a competitive tournament for the enduringly popular PC series Farming Simulator.

It will consist of 10 tournaments across Europe, including big events like Gamescom and Paris Games Week, culminating in a grand final at FarmCon 2020. The developer is putting up €250,000 in prize money (around $280,000), and it has lured big-name sponsors like Logitech and Intel. The new league will...

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Slack’s old identity had at least three good things going for it: they owned the letter “S” (much like how Netflix owns “N” — something Netflix has doubled-down on as their identity has evolved), they owned the “#” hash mark, and unique among technology companies, they owned plaid. When you saw plaid with those primary colors on a white background, you thought Slack. And plaid isn’t part of any sort of design trend right now. Slack simply owned plaid, to such a degree that Slack company socks — which simply used colors and plaid, no “Slack”, no “S” were necessary to make it instantly obvious these were Slack socks — became coveted swag.

I guessed before this blog post even revealed it that their new identity was done by Pentagram. What Slack needed was a refinement of their existing design. Identify what was good, fix what was bad. What Pentagram seems to do these days, though, is throw babies out with the branding bath water. They only build new identities; they don’t tweak existing ones. There is nothing that says Slack to me about this new identity — no hash mark, no “S”, no plaid. And what they’ve replaced it with is painfully generic. There’s nothing wrong with it per se, but there’s nothing quirky or charming or distinctive about it either. Scratch that — given that it’s not distinctive, there is something wrong with it. Just another sorta-Futura-ish geometric sans serif and a mark that doesn’t look like anything and makes for an utterly forgettable app icon. (This new mark is supposed to evoke a hash mark but it doesn’t — what the hell are those squirts? The Nike swoosh this busy little blob is not.)

Was there anything about Slack’s previous identity worth building upon? I say yes, quite a bit actually. Pentagram said no. Slack lost something very valuable today.

Show this video to politicians who say Democrats want to take away 70 percent of your income.

A few weeks ago, we published a quick visual explainer on how tax brackets actually work. It was in reaction to this tweet from Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA), who implied that Democrats — specifically Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) — want to take away 70 percent of Americans’ income:

Scalise was pushing a common misunderstanding of how tax brackets actually work. But it turns out many prominent conservatives found his argument useful.

Here’s conservative activist Grover Norquist pushing a similar argument:

And here’s Fox & Friends host Ainsley Earhardt putting forward the same error on the president’s favorite morning show:

And finally, here’s former Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker saying that even fifth-graders believe it’s unfair, since they wouldn’t want their $10 allowance taxed.

To be clear, Ocasio-Cortez floated the idea of a 70 percent top tax rate on the superwealthy, which is a pretty popular position.

Now, one could argue that a top rate of 70 percent is too high, even for high earners. But that’s not what these conservatives are saying. Rather, they’re saying that raising the top tax rate will actually take money away from “Americans,” or “you.”

This is just not how tax brackets work in America; these political actors are entrenching a common misunderstanding about taxes to further an ideological agenda.

So to make this crystal clear, we used construction paper to explain marginal tax rates in the short video at the top of this post.

For more videos, subscribe to Vox’s YouTube channel.

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Lithuanian filmmaker and musician Saulius Jegelevičius has a creative and unusual YouTube channel called Backward Picnic. Instead of complex editing or effects, each of the videos is simply footage played backwards… and Saulius talks backwards while recording to speak “forwards” English in the videos.

For example, here’s a video in which Saulius removes a nail from a wooden plank using a “statically charged hammer”:

And here’s the original video he actually recorded before reversing it for the version above:

Here’s another one showing how to build a house of cards without using your hands:

And here’s the forward version:

Here are some other of the more popular videos Saulius has created so far:

You can follow along with Saulius’ ongoing project by subscribing to the Backward Picnic YouTube channel.

(via Backward Picnic via Laughing Squid)

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A new sneak peek at Captain Marvel that aired during the College Football Playoff National Championship game between Alabama and Clemson brought back one of Marvel’s most beloved characters within the Marvel Cinematic Universe — Agent Coulson.

Coulson appeared to die in the first Avengers film in 2012, but continued to live on in ABC’s Agents of SHIELD. Although, like Agent Nick Fury, played by Samuel L. Jackson, Coulson (Clark Gregg) is much younger than we remember in Captain Marvel. Captain Marvel takes place before the majority of the current MCU films — with the exception of Captain America: The First Avenger, which took place during the Second World War.

The new Captain Marvel trailer also provides a better glimpse into the...

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OtterBox today announced that it is partnering with PopSockets for a new series of "Otter + Pop" Symmetry cases for iPhone, which come equipped with a built-in "PopGrip" compatible with removable, swappable "PopTops" at the back of the case.

PopSockets have become extremely popular over the course of the last year, with the stick-on holders available in a range of colors and patterns. The new Otter + Pop cases will also be available in a range of colors for what OtterBox says is a variety of "swappable, unstoppable combinations" to fit "every look, style, scene, or vibe."

"OtterBox and PopSockets collaborating on an integrated case was a no-brainer," said Jim Parke, OtterBox CEO. "Our fans love variety, customization and sleek protection. With Otter + Pop, we can deliver that in one thin iPhone case that combines our legacy of protection with all of the unique attributes that PopSockets delivers."

Otter + Pop cases combine OtterBox's protective Symmetry cases with a PopGrip with the aim of making the iPhone easier to hold with one hand than ever before. When not in use, the integrated PopGrip lays flush with the case, so it's not in the way.

Otter + Pop will be coming soon to the OtterBox and PopSocket websites, with the cases to be priced starting at $59.95. Additional PopTops will be available for $8 each.


This article, "CES 2019: OtterBox Teams Up With PopSockets for New 'Otter + Pop' iPhone Cases" first appeared on MacRumors.com

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Western Digital revealed recently that it has begun to sample its next-generation hard drives based on microwave assisted magnetic recording (MAMR) technology. The sampling is a prelude to mass production, which will see the first commercial HDDs based on the tech released this year. Meanwhile, the company is working on hard drives featuring two actuators that will arrive in 2020 or later. Overall, Western Digital remains confident in MAMR and expects to launch multiple generations of such drives. In the meantime, the firm is also admitting that it has continued to invest in development of alternative heat assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology.

“We are sampling our 16 TB [MAMR-based] product today,” said Michael Cordano, president and CEO of Western Digital, at the company’s meeting with financial analysts last month.

As expected back in 2017, the first MAMR-powered drives will feature 16 TB capacities and will use eight platters, which was confirmed by the executive during the event. Western Digital’s 16 TB HDD will be aimed at nearline applications and are intended for cloud datacenters as well as enterprises that require massive storage capacities. However Mr. Cordano did not clarify whether the MAMR-powered HDDs were only sampling with select customers (for example, Western Digital’s SMR-based HDDs are available only to select clients), or if they were being offered to a broader spectrum of clients.

Not Happy with 16 TB? How about 18 TB?

Western Digital has learnt a number of things while developing MAMR and plans to use the technology for many generations to come. For example, one of the company’s slides shows 18 TB HDDs also being planned for 2019. Meanwhile, 20+ TB drives with two actuators to increase per-TB IOPS performance are set to hit the market in 2020 (or beyond), with higher capacities following on later. 

In general, Western Digital seems to be confident of its implementation of MAMR. The process will use a combination of heads made using its Damascene process, Spin Torque Oscillators (STO) to generate the 20-40 GHz microwaves that lower the coercivity of the media, and the new media itself. The tech has passed all the company’s milestones and it is ready to ramp it this year.

But while MAMR will be used for years to come, Western Digital continues to invest in development of its own HAMR technology. HAMR has been investigated by multiple firms, and rival Seagate will be using it for commercial products in 2019. This is a curious step on Western Digital's part, as in initially rejecting HAMR for MAMR, the company once claimed that HAMR was costly to implement and it posed reliability issues. By contrast, Seagate said that HAMR had better scaling when it comes to areal densities. Given this revelation, while Western Digital's path with MAMR seems to be set for the near future, it would seem that the company is going to hedge its bets in the longer term. In which case we may still see a HAMR Western Digital drive yet.

Related Reading:

• Western Digital Stuns Storage Industry with MAMR Breakthrough for Next-Gen HDDs
• Seagate’s Multi Actuator Technology to Address HDD IOPS Woes
• Seagate Starts to Test 16 TB HAMR Hard Drives
• Seagate Ships 35th Millionth SMR HDD, Confirms HAMR-Based Drives in Late 2018
• The Evolution of HDDs in the Near Future: Speaking with Seagate CTO, Mark Re

Source: Western Digital

Credit card perks — and smart consumers — are costing banks billions of dollars.

The Chase Sapphire Reserve. The American Express Gold. The Marriott Rewards Premiere. To people who are a part of the growing subset of credit card enthusiasts, these aren’t just cards that facilitate everyday spending: They’re an essential way to score things like free flights and cash back.

So what’s in it for the banks? Essentially, banks offer patrons a line of credit with the expectation that they’ll make money off interest rates when bills aren’t paid on time or in full. It’s an incredibly lucrative field: There are 364 million open credit cards in the US, according to the American Banking Association, and these have contributed to the country’s collective $1 trillion in credit card debt.

Over the past few years, banks have competed with each other by sweetening deals for customers, offering advantages like points systems and cash-back deals. The Chase Sapphire Reserve card, for example, debuted in 2016 with a whopping 100,000 point sign-up bonus after customers spent $4,000 during their first three months, a move AmEx called a “full frontal assault.” The American Express Platinum Card, to that end, offers access to global airline lounges and free credit toward airfare, while the Discover It card offers 5 percent cash back without any annual fees. These type of rewards have fueled a crazed and dedicated faction of spenders, who carefully optimize their spending and sign up for multiple credit cards in order to accrue points.

Now, though, banks seemingly aren’t too happy they’re footing the bill for free flights, lounge access, and triple points for your dining habits, and soon, credit card rewards could be headed for a slowdown. Sources have told the Wall Street Journal that companies like Citigroup, JPMorgan, and American Express are currently talking about reassessing their credit card rewards program because they’ve realized they’ve been offering too many rewards. Their cards were supposed to lure in big spenders and bring in tons of profit, but the rewards programs are actually costing the banks.

Why banks want to pull back rewards

Since the Great Recession, bank spending on credit card rewards has more than doubled, according to a 2017 survey from the financial products site MagnifyMoney. In 2010, banks were spending about $10.6 billion a year on their credit card rewards, but in 2016, that number jumped to $22.6 billion.

The biggest spender is Chase, whose spending on rewards has grown 123 percent since 2010. Chase today outspends AmEx, but the financial services corporation still spends plenty — $9.2 billion last year, to be exact.

Every year, banks rely on credit cards to bring in 14 percent of their revenue, according to the Journal. That might not sound like such a big deal, but it is now that the credit card rewards business has become a major thorn in their side. Big companies are now stuck paying billions of dollars for flights and other perks for credit card holders who aren’t paying high interest rates or late fees.

Part of the problem is that consumers are savvier than ever. Plenty of credit card holders have figured out how to game the system: Some are signing up for credit cards specifically for the bonus points and then abandoning the card (which doesn’t hurt a credit score the way closing a card would), while others are making sure to pay their bills on time and in full. Some even pay one credit bill with another card so that they can cash in on as many rewards as possible. These “gamers,” who work the system to accrue miles and points as well as for the thrill itself, are a costly byproduct of the credit card ecosystem

Of course, this type of gamifying isn’t for everyone — many of the Americans who deal with personal debt aren’t able to toggle between cards or shuffle around hefty bills.

”It requires a lot of organization and spreadsheets,” Ben Schlappig, one credit card obsessive, told me in 2015. “ It’s not meant for people who can’t afford to travel. It’s meant for people with disposable income.”

The world of credit card fanatics has also grown exponentially. It was once considered fringe to be a part of a community of card churners and deal hunters, and probably also a dirty secret to own dozens of cards. Today, though, it’s practically mainstream. There are tons of credit card blogs out there that teach spenders how to play the game, from creating complicated spreadsheets to setting up automatic payments. One cult blogger, an Ohio-based rabbi named Dan Eleff who runs the blog Dan’s Deals, has proudly owned more than 500 credit cards and runs annual seminars to teach readers his tricks.

”There are people who think it’s a time trap and that it’s extremely stressful. I love it,” Oren Wachstock, a full-time dentist and part-time credit card and money blogger, told me. “This is my hobby and the more intense it gets, the better I feel about it. It’s kind of perverse logic. I get tremendous satisfaction out of helping people get cash back, get more income, and be able to travel.”

Perks are already being scaled back

Last year, Chase and Citi stopped offering price protection on their cards, which previously let cardholders file a claim to the bank if they bought something on their card for one price, only to find it later at a lower price. In August, Discover cut credit card benefits like product warranties, as well as flight accident and auto rental insurance coverage. AmEx has been pulling back on cards that come with big bonus points for signing up, and sources told the Journal that Chase is considering not allowing cardholders to pool points accrued across multiple credit cards.

“There’s no question that banks are concerned about the credit card rewards arms race eating into their profits,” one credit card analyst told the New York Post over the summer.

These credit card companies are trying to skimp on rewards in order to save money, but pulling back on perks might not necessarily be the best move, especially if they want to continue to court millennials. A subset of spenders who are weighed down with student debt and a general distrust for the financial industry, millennials are more likely to ditch credit cards than older Americans. Without perks to set them apart, it’s likely shoppers could turn away from credit cards with these legacy banks, especially considering Venmo has pretty much become a verb as the fast-growing money app makes spending and paying frictionless.

As one disappointed credit card user commented when Discover announced it would stop offering price protection a few months ago, “I’m extremely disappointed to hear that they have canceled this benefit, which frankly was the only reason I bothered having a discover card. Time to cancel.”

US companies got about $54 billion.

Next week marks the one-year anniversary of the Republican tax bill. On December 22, 2017, President Donald Trump signed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, shrinking the corporate tax rate from 35 to 21 percent and cutting taxes on private businesses by about 20 percent.

When Trump signed the bill that morning in the Oval Office, he boasted about the gains it would provide for all Americans. He claimed that corporations were already “giving billions and billions of dollars away to their workers” as a result of the $1.5 trillion tax cut package and pointed to a handful of big companies that promised to raise wages and give employees $1,000 cash bonuses — among them Walmart, Bank of America, and Comcast.

A year later, economic data shows that the tax bill’s benefit to workers was largely a mirage.

The left-leaning Economic Policy Institute recently crunched compensation data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, showing that the much-touted bonuses did little to boost workers’ paychecks. In the past 12 months, cash bonuses only gave workers an extra 2 cents in average hourly compensation, adjusted for inflation. (This does not include bonuses tied to productivity goals.)

Economic Policy Institute

The reason is simple: Not enough money from the tax cuts has trickled down to employees. The exact amount is hard to pin down, as companies are not required to report how they used the tax savings, but one analysis shows that only about 4.4 percent of US workers got a wage increase or bonus as a result of the tax bill.

Instead, US companies have spent a record amount of money this year buying back shares of company stock — an effort to inflate their value for shareholders. US corporations have announced spending $1 trillion on stock buybacks so far this year. That’s a 64 percent increase from 2017, according to CNN Business. So it’s no mystery why the savings from the GOP tax bill didn’t trickle down to workers. Only a handful of companies (34 from the Fortune 500) said they are using the tax savings to invest in US operations.

Wages are rising, but so is inflation

Sluggish income growth remains one of the most persistent problems in the US economy, which is otherwise doing quite well. Unemployment is down, corporate profits have soared, and the economy is growing faster than it has in more than a decade. But wages are barely keeping up with the cost of living.

In the past 12 months, average hourly earnings have only increased 81 cents, or 3.1 percent, according to the Labor Department. That’s the biggest increase since 2008, yet it’s not really much to celebrate because it doesn’t take inflation into account. In the past year, prices have been rising, so paychecks have to stretch further. When taking the 2.2 percent inflation rate into account (based on the Consumer Price Index), workers’ wages only grew about 0.9 percent within the past year.

Frustration over stagnant wages is the underlying factor behind widespread worker strikes across the country. Marriott workers in eight cities recently ended the largest hotel strike in US history. Housekeepers, bartenders, and other hotel employees told their unions that low wages made it hard to afford to live in expensive cities like Boston and San Francisco, and told their unions they needed to work multiple jobs to pay their bills. After two months on strike, hotel employees negotiated larger pay raises and other benefits and returned to work earlier this month.

In some states, voters have forced business to give low-paid employees a raise. In the recent midterm elections, voters in Missouri and Arkansas overwhelmingly approved ballot measures that will raise the minimum wage for nearly 1 million workers across both states.

They join nearly two dozen other states that have raised the minimum wage in recent years. That includes Arizona, Colorado, and Maine, which boosted their minimum wage this year to about $10 an hour, and will reach $12 an hour by 2020. Next year, House Democrats plan to push for a $15 minimum wage.

Companies were expected reap an extra $54 billion in total savings from the tax bill during 2018.

If workers do get raises in 2019, it will have little to do with the GOP tax bill.

Back in 2014, iPhone user Garrett Wilhelm was using FaceTime on his iPhone 6 Plus while driving, causing him to crash into the back of another vehicle.

The crash resulted in the death of five-year-old Moriah Modisette, and her father, James Modisette, launched a lawsuit in 2017 against Apple for not offering safety warnings or a feature that disables FaceTime while a person is driving.


The lawsuit contended that Apple had, at the time, patented technology that would have prevented FaceTime from being used while a vehicle is being operated, but had not installed it in the iPhone 6. The plaintiffs requested damages from Apple for its "wrongful failure to install and implement the safer, alternative design for which it sought a patent in December 2008."

"At the time of the collision in question, the iPhone utilized by Wilhelm contained the necessary hardware (to be configured with software) to automatically disable or 'lock out' the ability to use [FaceTime] ... However, Apple failed to configure the iPhone to automatically 'lock out' the ability to utilize FaceTime while driving at highway speeds, despite having the technical capability to do so."

The lawsuit against Apple was dismissed after a court decided that Apple was not at fault for the crash, and as of today, a California appeals court has agreed with that decision.

According to the BBC, the appeals court ruled Apple "did not owe the Modisettes a duty of care," and that it was not up to Apple to take responsibility for the actions of individuals using its apps. The family, said the court, could not establish that the design of the iPhone was the cause of the injuries suffered.

Garrett Wilhelm, the driver of the vehicle who killed the girl, was indicted on manslaughter charges. His trial has been delayed several times because the FHI has not yet been able to gather data from his iPhone, but if he is found guilty, he could serve up to 20 years in prison. Wilhelm is set to be tried before a jury on June 3, 2019.

While Apple was not found to be responsible for the crash, the Cupertino company has since implemented a Do Not Disturb While Driving feature designed to prevent iPhone users from accessing apps like FaceTime while operating a vehicle.


Do Not Disturb While Driving was implemented in iOS 11 and it is designed to block incoming messages and phone calls if a phone is not connected to a car via Bluetooth.


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Earlier this week, stock-trading app Robinhood announced that it would offer a new feature to users in early 2019: a checking and savings account that didn’t have any fees attached to it. But after the feature received intense criticism, the company appears to have backtracked, saying that it plans “to work closely with regulators as we prepare to launch our cash management program.”

Launched in 2014, the company allowed users to trade stocks on companies listed on the US stock exchanges for free. A year later, its user base had grown to “hundreds of thousands” of customers who had “transferred $1 billion” on the platform. Earlier this year, it launched a new feature that allowed users to trade cryptocurrencies, and reportedly began...

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If you need a chuckle today (or a nightmare tonight), there’s a strange new photo project you can check out called Babies With Teeth. As its name suggests, each of the bizarre photos shows an infant with grown-up teeth ‘Photoshopped’ into their tiny mouths.

The project is the brainchild of Texas photographer Ashley Evans, and it all started while she was playing around in an app called YouApp.

“I had an app and wanted to see what my son looked like with teeth,” Evans tells PetaPixel. “It was hilarious so I did it to my daughter. I then posted in a Facebook group and it just blew up from there.”

After seeing Evans’ photos, a lot of people began sending her baby photos to add teeth to. She then started a dedicated Facebook page for the project and began writing captions about each baby as if they were an adult.

Some of the babies are edited in Photoshop, while others are roughly teeth-ified using the app.

“I like that it makes everyone laugh,” Evans says. “I think it would be cool to start selling mugs, cards, calendars, etc. and use the money to help fund dental treatment for people who can’t afford it. I definitely don’t want to profit from it.

“I keep it going because it seems like a lot of people think it’s funny and I think it’s important to laugh.”

You can find more of these photos and follow along with the project on the Babies with Teeth Facebook page.

The company behind the Alexa-enabled Big Mouth Billy Bass has created the most Spencer’s Gift-y item of them all: an Alexa-enabled twerking bear that dances to music and lip-syncs responses. It comes in three variations — Twerking Bear, Twerking Bear (seasonal), and Santa — all of which sell for $40. It’s a small price to pay for an animated plush that cheerfully lip-syncs responses to your questions, in addition to handling timers, alarms, reminders, and notifications.

Twerking Bear comes from novelty toy and inflatables company Gemmy, which already has an entire army of stuffed animal twerkers. Gemmy released its Alexa-enabled line of passionate dancers last month, but we somehow missed them amid the excitement of seeing an...

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Trump’s lawyer and former cybersecurity adviser seems confused about how hyperlinks work.

Rudy Giuliani, the former New York City mayor and current lawyer to President Donald Trump, seems to have been bamboozled by a prank website set up after he made a typo in a tweet about the G20 summit. Reminder: In 2017, Trump appointed Giuliani as a cybersecurity adviser.

Giuliani confounded many online on Tuesday evening when he accused Twitter of allowing someone to “invade my text with a disgusting anti-President message.”

“The same thing – period no space – occurred later and it didn’t happen,” Giuliani wrote. “Don’t tell me they are not committed cardcarrying anti-Trumpers.” He also took a swipe at Time magazine and called for “FAIRNESS PLEASE.”

The tweet was threaded to another tweet Giuliani sent on Friday regarding special counsel Robert Mueller that complained about the timing of his deal with former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, which was announced in a New York federal court just before the president left for the G20 in Buenos Aires. In Giuliani’s tweet, he apparently forgot a space and therefore typed “G-20.In” — a sequence of characters that turned into a hyperlink.

Someone then appears to have bought the website g-20.in, which now directs to a page that reads: “Donald J. Trump is a traitor to our country.” As of Wednesday morning, it also links to a Reddit page on Mueller’s sentencing memo for former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, released late Tuesday evening.

CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski flagged the timeline behind Giuliani’s confusion on Twitter.

So, no, Twitter didn’t allow someone to “invade” Giuliani’s text, as he claimed. As Henry Farrell at the Washington Post points out, if you write text that has a word followed directly by a period and then a combination of letters that could be a website domain (.com, .gov, .net, .org, etc.), “Twitter will think you are writing a website’s domain name, and will then try to turn what you have written into a clickable link.”

Because .in is a top-level domain for websites in India, Twitter generated a link. In the same tweet, Giuliani also left out the space between “Helsinki.Either.” But because .either isn’t a valid domain, a link wasn’t created.

The New York Times reports that 37-year-old Jason Velazquez, who owns a web design firm in Atlanta, is behind the g-20.in website. He bought it for $5 and created the page in about 15 minutes, he told the Times.

It’s not clear what Giuliani was referring to with his reference to Time magazine.

Giuliani is playing into the anti-conservative bias narrative many Republicans employ

Whether Giuliani actually understands what happened with the hyperlinks or he’s genuinely confused isn’t clear.

He was, after all, named as a cybersecurity adviser to Trump in 2017 and runs a cybersecurity firm, so maybe he gets what’s going on and was just trying to get people riled up (or perhaps making a joke). Or perhaps he actually thinks Twitter was out to get him.

The White House did not return a request for clarification of Giuliani’s tweet.

Giuliani is hardly the first conservative to make disingenuous claims about bias on social media. Right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and conservative provocateur Laura Loomer, both of whom have been banned from Twitter for violating its terms of service, have complained that the social media company is out to get them. House Judiciary Committee Republicans brought Diamond and Silk, two famous black women Trump supporters, to Capitol Hill for a hearing in April on social media platforms censoring conservatives. (The pair claimed that Facebook had censored them, though that was debunked.) One Democratic representative called the hearing “stupid and ridiculous” at one point.

Republicans at hearings with Facebook and Twitter executives this year pressed Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey on potential political bias. Some conservatives have proposed turning Facebook and Twitter into public utilities so that they are subject to more government oversight.

Companies such as Twitter and Facebook are private entities, and they — unlike the US government — do not owe their users First Amendment rights. They are allowed to police speech on their platforms that violates their terms of service, though both companies, admittedly, often make missteps on that front.

But what Giuliani is talking about isn’t even related to speech. His typo created a hyperlink, and someone apparently bought that website and decided to make a bit of a joke. He’s just mad because he wasn’t in on it.

Paradise, California lies just 90 minutes north of Sacramento, in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountain range. Home to 26,000 people, Paradise includes several mobile home parks and is known as a retirement haven.

A fire that started in Pugla, California on November 8, 2018, swept west and raced toward Paradise. With flames moving at speeds up to three football fields per-minute, the town was quickly decimated. With short, or even little notification, many residents never made it out.

Passing through the CHP checkpoint with my press credentials at the intersection of Neal Road and Highway 99 shortly after dawn on Friday, November 16, I was shocked by the destruction that lay before me.

Spending time working alone, then with a remains recovery team, here is some of what I saw.

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About the author: Preston Ehrler is a freelance photojournalist with the Associated Press who’s based in Milford, Pennsylvania. The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author. Ehrler leads private photo walks in NYC and also teaches workshops. You can find more of Ehrler’s work on his website.

Dog lover and animal photographer Grace Chon has expanded her ongoing project Hairy, which features portraits of dogs before and after they receive haircuts.

“All the dogs have been groomed in a Japanese grooming style,” Chon says. “Japanese dog grooming does not follow the rules of traditional, breed-standard grooming. In fact, it only has one mission ― to bring out the dogs’ individual personalities and make them look as adorable as possible!

“With extreme attention to detail and careful consideration of a pup’s best attributes, Japanese dog groomers and salons achieve the perfect transformations by forgetting the uniform looks and getting creative.”

As with the dogs in the first series that we shared a couple of years ago, these dogs were groomed at Healthy Spot in Los Angeles, where many groomers specialize in Japanese grooming.

You can find more of Chon’s work on her website and Instagram. Chon has also published her work in a book titled Puppy Styled.

The days of Google Hangouts for consumers may be coming to an end in 2020, according to a report from 9to5Google today. Hangouts has been suffering from an identity crisis since Google launched it as a replacement for Gchat in 2013, and it’s actually been losing features in recent years as the company stopped updating the app and took away SMS messaging. That change was part of Google’s new focus for Hangouts, which will stay safe for now as a workplace communication tool in the form of G Suite’s Hangouts Chat, as well as video conferencing platform Hangouts Meet.

Google hinted at “giving up on having its own consumer messaging app” back in April, when it announced a new RCS Chat feature within Android Messages. Chat hasn’t officially...

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“Your success now is our country’s success,” Bush wrote on Inauguration Day 1993. “I am rooting hard for you.”

Following the overnight death of President George H.W. Bush, many are sharing online the touching letter that he left for his successor Bill Clinton on Inauguration Day 1993.

In the letter, written on White House letterhead and signed “George,” Bush Sr. shares the wonder and respect he felt for the office, and wishes success and happiness for the man who defeated him in his bid for reelection.

“I wish you great happiness here,” Bush wrote. “I never felt the loneliness some Presidents have described.”

The gracious letter provides a marked contrast to the current era, with many pointing out that it recalls a more respectful time. While personal letters to presidential successors are by now an ongoing tradition, there is something particularly heartfelt and honest about George’s to Bill.

Later in life, the two former presidents became something of a political odd-couple, developing a close relationship as they raised tens of millions of dollars for victims of natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina and a tsunami that swept across the Indian Ocean in 2004.

Read the letter in full below:

Dear Bill,

When I walked into this office just now I felt the same sense of wonder and respect that I felt four years ago. I know you will feel that, too.

I wish you great happiness here. I never felt the loneliness some Presidents have described.

There will be very tough times, made even more difficult by criticism you may not think is fair. I’m not a very good one to give advice; but just don’t let the critics discourage you or push you off course.

You will be our President when you read this note. I wish you well. I wish your family well.

Your success now is our country’s success. I am rooting hard for you.

Good luck—

George