Davemichels

What’s going to happen to the office space we no longer need?

Part of Back to the Future, from The Highlight, Vox’s home for ambitious stories that explain our world.

If the future of work is online, the future of the office is something else. While people are considering a wide variety of new lives for office spaces — distribution centers, schools, data centers, hospitals, and, most prominently, apartments — labs might be the most promising reincarnation for struggling offices, thanks to tectonic shifts in the market since the start of the pandemic.

Anyone who’s seen a church become a retail store or a mall transform into an apartment block can attest that the built environment, though constant, is never stagnant. The number of office buildings that are being converted into something else in major markets like Boston, San Francisco, Raleigh/Durham, Denver, and New York is slated to grow 50 percent this year, according to data commercial real estate services firm CBRE shared with Recode. While these buildings still represent just a small share of office stock in the US, what happens with them could help guide what happens to unwanted office space for years to come.

Currently, nearly half of Americans are doing at least some work from home. Thirty percent are working hybrid, meaning they work both at home and in the office, while another 15 percent are fully remote. And experts say these rates should hold once the pandemic is over. September was supposed to be the month people returned to the office, but office occupancy rates are still at less than 50 percent, according to Kastle, which makes keycard systems for workers to swipe in and out of the office. As a result, offices are experiencing their highest vacancy rates in three decades: nearly 17 percent, CBRE data shows. When people’s offices are their living rooms, there’s simply less need for commercial office space. Extrapolating from New York City data, one recent study estimates that the value of offices around the country could decline about 40 percent, or $453 billion, as remote work lowers the demand for office space. Just how much office space will go unused is so far unclear, but if that dollar figure is any indication, there could be a lot of empty offices.

Meanwhile, major cities where these offices are located are otherwise flourishing. People are flocking to live there, to hang out there, and even to work there — but not exactly to go to their old offices. That leaves a big open question as to what to do with office buildings that are idling amid what’s otherwise some of the most in-demand real estate in the country. In dense cities, it’s often easier and faster to turn one type of real estate into another, rather than build it from scratch.

What exactly these conversions will look like depends on the area, the structure of the building, and the needs of tenants. The most obvious conversion would be to affordable housing, since there’s a national shortage. The problem is, apartment conversions aren’t always possible given the sheer size of some office buildings. Even if developers overcome all the issues with zoning and adding separate bathrooms and kitchens in every apartment, they still run up against the niggling realization that people need windows in their apartments, and that can be impossible to achieve in large buildings. Importantly, apartments rent for way less, making the move less financially attractive to building owners.

For the empty offices that can’t become housing, labs are increasingly their second life.

In many ways, it makes sense. Offices and labs both command high rents, and they’re both places people go to work (labs just have a lot more cool stuff inside, like centrifuges and safety showers). A significant amount of the vacant office space is also located in cities where, thanks to their proximity to universities and their ample talent pools, demand for lab space is on the rise.

“They prefer to be able to do an easy commute from their apartment building a couple blocks away, as opposed to jump in a car and drive,” Scott Davis, vice president and director of the mechanical department at consulting engineering firm Bala, said about young scientists.

Labs also don’t run the risk of becoming unnecessary under remote work, making them a much more certain bet.

“It would be very difficult to do lab work not in a dedicated lab building,” said Mike Lee, life science lead for workplace strategy and human experience at real estate firm Newmark. “As long as there’s capital to spend on improving the human condition, there will be a place for labs.”

And the need for lab work isn’t going anywhere.

Even before the pandemic, the life sciences sector was growing briskly, thanks to increased spending on new drugs meant to help an aging population deal with age-old problems. But private and public investment in biotech surged even more during the pandemic, as the world brought its resources to bear against Covid-19. In turn, employment in life sciences has marched in lockstep with investment and vastly outpaced overall employment. In the past decade, life science employment grew nearly 7 percent a year on average, compared with 1 percent across industries, according to a Cushman & Wakefield analysis of BLS data.

Office owners and developers were converting office buildings into labs before the pandemic, but interest in the idea has taken off since. And conversions that were planned during the pandemic are now opening their doors, showing would-be developers that it’s possible. From the former Boston Globe newspaper office to a vacant WeWork in Durham to the one-time headquarters of Old Navy in San Francisco, offices across the country are becoming labs.

Commercial real estate services firm Newmark is tracking nearly 17 million square feet in lab conversions and another 25 million of new lab space under construction in top US life science markets. That’s roughly equivalent to more than 20 football stadiums and would make up about a quarter of all the lab space already out there.

“Every project is being considered for a life science conversion,” said Daniel Hackett, managing director of life science and medical technologies at Cushman & Wakefield. That’s not to say that all vacant office space should be converted to life science, or that it’s always possible.

Engineers have to figure out how to fit tons of heavy equipment in office buildings that aren’t as strong or whose stories aren’t as tall as in traditional labs. They need elevators that can haul much more than people, printers, and reams of paper (and preferably, elevators where lab rats aren’t sharing space with people carrying their lunches). The converted lab spaces also need much more robust power, plumbing, and air filtration systems than a conventional office, which typically just needs to keep computers running.

But where there’s demand, there’s a way. Engineers are coming up with ingenious work-arounds that make more office spaces life science contenders.

How to make an office a lab

Let’s say you’re in the commercial real estate business and have an increasing amount of vacant square footage in an office building. Or maybe you’re the chief operating officer for a life sciences company with a growing number of employees who need more space. Converting office to lab space is probably on your radar.

A lab, at its basic level, is a heavily controlled environment in which scientists can research, experiment, and explore. It sounds simple, but a lot goes into making that happen.

One of the biggest issues when converting offices to lab space is that the height of each floor — usually about 12 feet — often isn’t enough to accommodate the various needs of a lab space, which requires about 15 feet between floors. (Developers think in terms of floor height, rather than ceiling height, because it represents all the possible space in which they can cram stuff.) First, lab spaces need to fit huge pieces of equipment like biosafety cabinets and fume hoods. These spaces also need to fit a lot more mechanical, electrical, and plumbing than an office. Labs, for example, need to recirculate air at least five times more frequently than an office, and that air needs to be filtered, tempered, and dehumidified. They also need to deal with stuff like chemical waste.

Typically, all that infrastructure would run through the ceiling or floors, but in shorter office floors that’s not always feasible.

Another big consideration is the stability of a building. While offices were built to handle movement from people working within them, lab spaces have to be much more stable to keep machinery from shaking the building or to keep the movements of the building from affecting lab equipment like electron microscopes. That’s not as much of a problem with older, sturdier buildings. But many newer office buildings that were created only with office use in mind need to install steel reinforcements.

Naturally, developers look for buildings that require the least amount of change, for the sake of time and money. Brandywine Realty Trust chose the location of its life science incubator, B.Labs, based on its proximity to transit, universities, and where new life science grads live. The design and development firm also picked it because it wouldn’t take as much overhaul as some other office buildings. Engineers found that the structure could already support the weight and vibration needs of a life science space.

Located in three floors of former office space in a Philadelphia skyscraper, the “plug and play” lab and research space was already fully leased when it opened in January. Unlike the rest of the building, which is rented predominantly by typical office tenants like investment and law firms, the lab houses life science companies specializing in things like gene and cell therapy. It’s also now home to equipment like liquid nitrogen freezers, tissue culture rooms, and steam sterilizers.

But even in what the developers considered an ideal spot, floor heights were still an issue.

The building’s 13.5-foot floors, while tall for an office, were a bit of a challenge for a life science space. Engineers leaned on the industrial-looking open ceiling concept and careful positioning to eke out precious inches that would have otherwise gone into building a ceiling.

Courtesy of Jeffrey Totaro

Courtesy of Jeffrey Totaro

Developers in other buildings have had to resort to more drastic solutions. Engineers at Bala are routing pipes, electric, and ductwork in adjacent corridors or rooms rather than in the ceiling above. In some cases, they even utilized parts of the floor above to accommodate it (of course, then, you can’t use those parts of the next floor for lab space).

Floor heights and stability were less of an issue with 95 Greene Street, a Jersey City building recently converted from an office into move-in-ready lab space. That’s because the eight-floor building, constructed at the start of the 20th century, had an even earlier life as a manufacturing facility for toothpaste. Still, Thor Equities, which bought the building in early 2020, had to perform a number of upgrades to the building’s mechanical systems, including the installation of a new ventilation system. They also had to play a bit of Tetris to fit all the necessary mechanical, electric, plumbing, and fire protection equipment on the roof. Current tenants include an urgent care center and a company that specializes in lab-produced meat products.

Another major improvement that offices frequently need in order to become viable lab space is the addition of freight or service elevators. Life sciences companies get an immense number of shipments, many of which — perhaps it’s animals for a vivarium or dangerous gases like liquid nitrogen — aren’t suitable to ride alongside the rest of us.

Newmark’s Lee typically advocates for office-to-lab conversions to add a service elevator if there isn’t one.

“It’s just better for biocontainment issues,” he said. “If you have someone coming up with some lunch, you don’t want that person to be next to someone who’s bringing something up that’s gonna go directly into the lab.”

Other improvements are a matter of planning and operations. Lee suggests placing labs on interior walls to avoid as much temperature variation as can happen at the exterior. Varying temperatures could affect the substances used in labs or affect the outcomes of research. Placing typical offices on exterior walls creates a “sweater,” or a barrier, for labs that are then placed in more interior locations.

All of these conversions can be very expensive — hence buildings that require less work are more appealing. Many developers are willing to stomach those costs, however, in return for the higher rents that lab spaces command. Lab space rented for a record $58 per square foot in the second quarter of 2022, compared with $37 for office space, according to Cushman & Wakefield.

But as is the case with all real estate, it’s possible to build too much. That hasn’t happened yet, but it’s something developers should be wary of. In the first half of 2022, life science venture capital funding dropped 18.5 percent, and investment in life science real estate dropped as well, according to a midyear report by Newmark. Still, even as more and more lab space opens up and investment has slowed, people’s thirst for lab space is still high. Vacancy rates at labs have remained incredibly low, while rents and demand for lab space in major markets have remained elevated. While the need for growth in the life science space won’t always be as robust, it’s not going away.

The continued growth of lab space across the country, either converted from other real estate or newly built, will have profound impacts not just on the buildings where we live and work, but also on our future. Labs are where scientific discoveries are made and where the future of medicine is built. Out of old offices comes something new.

The Conservative Party has picked its next leader. Now comes the hard part.

After a week — or, really, months — of tumult, the United Kingdom will have a new prime minister: Rishi Sunak.

When Sunak, the son of immigrants of Indian descent, officially becomes prime minister, in the next 24 hours, he will be Britain’s first prime minister of color. It’s a historic victory, and Conservatives are celebrating what they hope will be his steadying tenure in an incredibly difficult moment for Sunak’s party and country. In addition to the UK’s most dramatic currency crisis in recent memory, the country is also facing a cost-of-living crisis and staggering inflation that the Bank of England has yet to significantly curb.

Sunak, who served as chancellor of the exchequer (basically, finance minister) under former Prime Minister Boris Johnson, won the contest among his fellow Conservative Party members of Parliament (or MPs) after Johnson and Penny Mordaunt, his closest rivals, withdrew from the race. That means regular party members won’t vote, and Sunak is now the Tories’ new leader — their third in seven weeks.

Sunak has vowed to “fix our economy, unite our Party and deliver for our country.” Given the steep economic headwinds the UK is facing and the Conservative Party’s sagging popularity, whether he can deliver on that remains unclear.

The incredibly wealthy 42-year-old former Goldman Sachs banker criticized the policy proposals that sparked the currency crisis. He has emphasized the need to bring down public debt and advocated for cutting taxes — but only if it’s affordable. His next policy moves aren’t clear, but in remarks both public and private, “stability” has been his key message.

How Sunak became the UK’s next prime minister — and how he might govern

In the last three months, UK politics have been incredibly chaotic. First, in July, Boris Johnson’s longtime ability to defy the political odds finally failed him. After a number of slow-burning scandals, Johnson’s fellow Conservative MPs lost faith in his leadership. Sunak, then Johnson’s finance minister, actually helped kick off the Cabinet rebellion that prompted Johnson’s resignation.

Sunak’s play, however, didn’t immediately pay off for him individually.

The race to replace Johnson culminated with a head-to-head campaign between Sunak and Foreign Secretary Liz Truss for the votes of regular Conservative Party members. While Sunak was preferred by his fellow members of Parliament during the earlier rounds of voting, Truss won the wider vote.

She governed for just over six weeks — during which time her administration introduced and then abandoned a tax plan that rocked British financial markets so thoroughly that ultimately she announced she would resign. That plan, dubbed Trussonomics, called for the biggest tax cuts in 50 years, aimed primarily at Britain’s wealthiest and corporations; a cost increase for national insurance; and other changes.

Now, after a weekend of jockeying within the party, Sunak is ascendant.

As Vox’s Jen Kirby previously noted, the former banker represents what the Tories may see as their future. The Conservative Party “has made an effort to diversify its representation in Parliament, and Sunak’s ascent is a testament to that.”

Sunak on Monday preached unity when addressing Tory MPs in a private session, reportedly greeting Johnson supporters warmly and saying he would focus on policies, not personalities.

It’s not entirely clear what those policies will be, however. Over the summer while running against Truss, Sunak criticized her economic proposals, calling them “fairytale economics” in a debate and warning that they’d cause exactly the kind of chaos that unfolded. He also released a 10-point plan at the time that included calls to cut illegal immigration, deliver on Brexit, and scrap a tax on domestic energy bills.

But in this incredibly truncated leadership contest, he hasn’t said much else. He gave no interviews or public speeches before clinching the win, and his first comments afterward were incredibly brief.

“There is no doubt we face a profound economic challenge,” he said Monday outside party headquarters. “We now need stability and unity. And I will make it my utmost priority to bring our party and our country together.”

His private remarks offer a bit more clarity. One Conservative MP told the Guardian that Sunak promised they’d get “back to serious, pragmatic traditions of Conservative government.” That could include spending cuts, though he didn’t say definitively; he believes the party is ideologically “low taxation,” that MP told the Guardian, but only if it’s affordable.

The current political crisis is years in the making

Although all the recent departures have been shocking, the political and economic crises in the UK have been brewing since the 2008 financial crisis.

Liam Stanley, a politics lecturer at the University of Sheffield and the author of the book Britain Alone: How a decade of conflict remade the nation, told Vox in an interview last week that some of the seeds for today’s crises were planted with David Cameron, the former prime minister who headed the Conservative Party from 2005 to 2016. “He took over at a time when ... you could basically campaign on the idea that there would be constant economic growth, albeit at a moderately low level,” he explained. “That meant that politics, in a way, was quite easy. It was just a case of making relatively small decisions about how you share those proceeds from growth.”

Cameron was a centrist, and his opposition government agreed to back the ruling Labour Party’s social spending on the National Health Service and education. Then the financial crash of 2008 happened. Cameron and the Tories painted Labour “as to blame for the financial crisis, the recession, and everything that came with it,” Stanley said. When Cameron assumed the premiership in 2010, the Tories instituted massive fiscal austerity, degrading institutions like the NHS and failing to deal with underlying issues like stagnant wages and an affordable housing crisis.

Those problems have persisted in the intervening years, during which the Conservative Party has held power. Now the UK is in a cost-of-living crisis, tied partly to those long-term factors and exacerbated by current global inflation, the war in Ukraine, and the West’s ensuing sanctions against Russia.

British politics also effectively become a two-party system under Cameron; the Liberal Democrats, once a potent, moderate opposition force to both the Tories and Labour, formed a coalition with the Conservative Party. Then, during the Brexit vote and subsequently Johnson’s campaign, the Tories picked up constituents who had previously voted Labour, giving them a 71-seat working majority that has arguably contributed to their downfall.

Part of the Conservatives’ problems stem from an identity crisis; without Brexit to unify wildly divergent types of voters, the Tories have major issues with factionalization. But as long as Conservatives held on to their majority and believed Labour to be unelectable, Tony Travers, the director of LSE London, told Vox last week, they could behave in an “undisciplined” manner — like Johnson flouting his own government’s Covid-19 laws and Truss rolling out an illogical and nakedly political economic agenda.

Sunak appeared to recognize the extent of the discontent, reportedly telling his fellow Tory MPs in a closed-door meeting that the party was facing an “existential threat.”

What happens next?

The first order of business is, ostensibly, to stabilize the UK’s economy, which Trussonomics threw into deep disarray.

“Stability would go a long way toward helping things right now, but even that stability is only going to help certain people,” Stanley said. That’s because the most trenchant and intractable issue will still be the cost-of-living crisis.

And amid rampant inflation, Chancellor of the Exchequer Jeremy Hunt is already asking government agencies other than the health and defense ministries to reduce their budgets by as much as 15 percent, Bloomberg reported last week, as well as putting an April deadline on Truss’s planned energy support payments.

The financial crunch for most Britons will only get tighter, as the value of the pound remains low while inflation is still quite high. The Bank of England has also raised interest rates seven times in recent months to combat inflation, which has led to soaring mortgage rates, causing fears of a coming housing market crash.

“Whichever government comes in, they’re going to be faced with a difficult situation; they’ve already been shown on the one hand that markets aren’t to be messed with and so you can’t just offer unlimited support to the economy,” Nikhil Sanghani, managing director of research at the Official Monetary and Financial Institutions Forum, told Vox last week. “The flip side is if you stick to more prudent fiscal policies and fiscal austerity, that’s going to be difficult to implement politically when you’re already facing a weak economy, high inflation, and people wanting support to pay their bills or mortgages, and the government unable to step in and provide that because their finances aren’t really in order right now.”

All that has led to opposition parties from all sides of the aisle redoubling their calls for an early general election, as they see the Conservative Party as one without enough popular support to maintain their hold on the government. The Conservative Party, however, is projecting an air of almost celebratory unity.

Enhances Bandwidth’s already resilient, 5x-redundant toll-free offering to protect against an unprecedented disruption for high-value call traffic

RALEIGH, NC – October 20, 2022 – Bandwidth Inc. (NASDAQ: BAND), a leading global enterprise cloud communications company, today announced Call Assure™, a first-in-the-industry comprehensive disaster recovery solution designed to give Bandwidth’s customers complete peace of mind for their high-value U.S. toll-free calls. Call Assure expands Bandwidth’s already highly resilient, 5x-redundant toll-free offering by adding the new capability of alternative routing that is fully insulated from the core network to protect against an extraordinary disruption, such as a fire, natural disaster or cyberattack.

“Call Assure is an innovation that upgrades our already redundant toll-free solution to secure the ultimate resiliency and reliability for traffic that just can’t go down,” said John Bell, Bandwidth’s Chief Product Officer. “Bandwidth is now the first and only provider to offer a complete toll-free disaster recovery solution of this kind in our industry. It’s another example of how everything we build is enterprise-grade.”

Toll-free calling contributes to a better overall customer experience for important transactions, like taking out a mortgage, interacting with a home security monitoring service, discussing a health condition or resolving a credit card dispute, because consumers can get direct answers from customer service agents. In fact, a voice call is still the most preferred communication channel (68 percent) when consumers are having a problem and need help, up 8 percent since 2021, according to research from Invoca. That’s why businesses that receive mission-critical toll-free calls can depend on the added reliability that comes from Bandwidth’s Call Assure innovation and toll-free voice solution.

In addition to providing the ultimate reliability, Call Assure greatly simplifies the management of mission-critical toll-free service. All customer toll-free numbers with Call Assure are managed end-to-end on the Bandwidth platform. Constant 24/7 monitoring and near-instantaneous re-routing eliminates the need for multiple networks or porting numbers to other carriers in the event of a disaster. Monthly pricing is simple and transparent, based on capacity and usage.

Learn more about Call Assure here.

About Bandwidth Inc.

Bandwidth (NASDAQ: BAND) is a global communications software company that helps enterprises connect people around the world with cloud-ready voice, messaging and emergency services. Backed by a network reaching 60+ countries covering 90 percent of global GDP, companies like Cisco, Google, Microsoft, RingCentral, Uber and Zoom use Bandwidth’s APIs to easily embed communications into software and applications. Bandwidth has more than 20 years in the technology space and was the first Communications Platform-as-a-Service (CPaaS) provider offering a robust selection of APIs built around our own network. Our award-winning support teams help businesses around the world solve complex communications challenges every day. More information is available at www.bandwidth.com.

The post Bandwidth Announces Call Assure, the Only Comprehensive Toll-Free Disaster Recovery Solution for Maximum Reliability appeared first on Cloud Communications Alliance.

Amazon will stop supporting its Glow video calling device for kids on December 31st, 2022. The innovative projector-powered gadget with a screen built-in was designed to make it easier for children to communicate with friends and family remotely by making games and activities part of the process. Last month, the company announced it was discontinuing sales, and it recently confirmed in an email to users that Amazon Glow devices, accessories, and the companion app will stop working entirely at the end of the year.

Launched a little over a year ago, the $300 Glow struggled to find an audience, possibly because kids can once again play with friends and family in real life. If you bought one, expect to see a refund by the end of October,...

Continue reading…

We’re still contemplating the thorny brilliance of throwing soup on Sunflowers.

“What is worth more, art or life?”

This question — and what would normally be an obvious answer — got a lot more complicated on October 14 when two protesters for the climate activism group Just Stop Oil threw tomato soup on Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers at London’s National Gallery. Immediately after the stunt, the protesters challenged onlookers with this query.

“Is it worth more than food? Worth more than justice?” the protester continued. “Are you more concerned about the protection of a painting, or the protection of our planet and people?”

Just Stop Oil made international headlines for this incident, with the onslaught of publicity leading to more attention than the group had ever before received. Yet much of the media and public attention was negative, with many questioning the efficacy of the protest and criticizing the protesters for hurting their own cause. By jeopardizing one of the most beloved works of art in the world, the group had obscured and overshadowed its actual message. True, millions of people were hearing about Just Stop Oil for the first time, but it was now likely in the context that reckless protesters had ruined van Gogh’s Sunflowers just to make a point.

But the protesters hadn’t ruined van Gogh’s Sunflowers. The painting, enclosed by glass, was completely unharmed; the National Gallery later confirmed that only the frame had been slightly damaged and that the protesters had been arrested.

Still, the real damage — to the urgent cause of battling the oil industry in the fight to save the planet — seemed to have been done. “Throwing soup at paintings won’t save the climate,” ran a typical media response, while TikTok immediately memed conspiracy theories that the protesters were actually hired by the oil industry to turn the public against oil protests. Multiple friends I spoke with following the incident had only heard that Sunflowers had been targeted, not that the painting was just fine. And few media write-ups even bothered to mention Just Stop Oil’s ultimate goal: to halt new oil licensing across Great Britain. So: Was it a successful protest?

When I heard that the painting was unharmed, my reaction rapidly shifted from “This is horrifying” to “This might be the best protest ever.” At least, it’s one I’ll be thinking about for a long time to come.

These kinds of protests are perhaps having a moment; on October 23, the German environmentalist group Last Generation threw mashed potatoes on one of the paintings in Monet’s famous Haystacks series at the Museum Barberini in Potsdam. The artwork sold for a record $110 million in 2019. As with the van Gogh protest, the painting was enclosed behind glass, and the museum later confirmed it was unharmed.

“If it takes a painting ... to make society remember that the fossil fuel course is killing us all,” the group later tweeted, “Then we’ll give you #MashedPotatoes on a painting!”

There’s a huge difference between a climate protest that destroys art in the name of saving the planet and a climate protest that threatens the destruction of art but doesn’t actually go through with it. The former treats the art and the cultural value we ascribe to it as incidental in the fight to save the planet, ignoring that a civilization without art is an incredible loss.

The second kind of protest, however, raises all kinds of questions in the absence of actual destruction. What would it have meant if we had lost Sunflowers? Such an act would have generated a period of international collective mourning, a unified sense of loss that no amount of urgency over the climate crisis has been able to equal. But what could the loss of one great painting — the reported $81 million value of which derives not only from its beauty and historical import but from the deeply subjective and often-fraught methods of the art market — mean to a civilization that doesn’t exist? The prospect of that loss, averted, allows us to seriously confront the degree to which we as a society collectively dismiss and downplay climate change.

One reason for this might be the sheer scope of the crisis: It’s so huge it’s almost impossible to fully wrap our heads around — the planetary version of one death versus a million deaths. It’s hard to look head-on at the real destruction climate change is already causing, and even harder to know how to make meaningful changes individually while battling climate anxiety. That can all lead to dismissiveness.

Serious reports of climate change often get misinterpreted and misunderstood, leading to more confusion and less clarity on what the real stakes are. Media depictions of individuals who confront the climate crisis — think S-Town or First Reformed — capture their desperation in ways that border on frightening. Such narratives use climate change to provoke a personal existential crisis, framing their subjects as mentally disturbed or perhaps just obsessed with the apocalypse. This stereotype carried over to reality when, on April 22 (Earth Day) of this year, the longtime climate activist Wynn Bruce died by self-immolation on the steps of the Supreme Court, in a final act of protest. The media, when it wasn’t ignoring Bruce’s death, portrayed him as mentally and emotionally unstable.

Meanwhile, Just Stop Oil, formed at the beginning of 2022, had been ramping up its protests for months. The group emerged from a cloud of controversy over the inflammatory climate activism group Extinction Rebellion (XR). XR’s founder, Roger Hallam, came under fire in 2019 after an interview published in Der Spiegel in which he compared climate change to the Holocaust and repeated a watered-down version of his extremist talking points, suggesting elites were withholding climate action as a form of maintaining power and predicting that the climate crisis would lead to mass rape. Hallam was accused of cultivating a “death cult” mentality about the climate crisis among XR members. But Just Stop Oil, begun by Hallam as a coalition of different activist groups, touts the more optimistic goal of taking its message directly to the oil industry.

The group had generated reams of negative press for blocking traffic in actions across the UK and Europe. In April, a week before Bruce died, one Just Stop Oil protester went viral for an interview with Good Morning Britain which strongly resembled the parody dramedy Don’t Look Up. In the interview, protester Miranda Whelehan attempted to focus on recent calls for strong, swift climate action — specifically a report released earlier in the month from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change which called for “now or never” urgency to reduce global energy emissions. Instead, the pundits spent the interview deriding her and her fellow activists, criticizing them for blocking traffic and calling the crusade “playgroundish.”

“My fear is that they will only understand the reality of the climate crisis when it is on the doorstep,” Whelehan wrote later, “perhaps when the floodwater is uncontrollably trickling into their homes, or when they can no longer find food in the supermarkets.”

Just Stop Oil has been ramping up the creativity of its protests as well, taking to the astroturf to briefly interrupt Formula One racing events and, in June, creating a climate-apocalypse version of The Hay Wain, by 19th-century English painter John Constable, and draping it over the original. This protest, also in the National Gallery, saw multiple activists gluing themselves to multiple paintings in the gallery, and seems in retrospect like a trial run for the big event with Sunflowers. Once again, the Constable painting was undamaged.

More importantly, all of these actions on the part of Just Stop Oil have been peaceful — disruptive but not harmful. And up until the van Gogh protest, little of it has generated much public interest or sympathy.

In their quest to level up effective protesting, why did Just Stop Oil turn to art? Why involve one of the most famous paintings in the world — and what does it say about the relationship of art to modern consumerism that this one protest garnered more attention than all of their other protests combined?

The connection between art and political protest has a long history; as Jezebel noted after last week’s protest, “Destroying art is its own genre of political theater.” In 1913-14, numerous British suffragists destroyed or vandalized multiple paintings, including Velasquez’s famous nude Rokeby Venus, in response to the government’s attempt to suppress the work of their leader, Emmeline Pankhurst. Their logic was that if the government was going to destroy women, they would destroy art depicting women: “You can get another picture, but you cannot get a life,” one of the suffragists told the press.

In 2012, a man went to prison for punching a hole in a Monet (the painting was repaired) in a vague protest against “the state;” earlier this year, an individual smeared cake across the glassed-in Mona Lisa (a frequent target of politically motivated attacks) in another climate protest. The implied or actual destruction of art has also been a political weapon, most notably during World War II, when Nazis destroyed or lost major artworks during the systematic looting of art across Europe.

The collective cultural value of that lost and looted artwork is inestimable, but the subjective nature of art means that fixing a value on individual artworks can feel slippery and arbitrary. For example, in 2013, a John Constable painting sold for $5,200 only to sell again two years later for $5.2 million. Art increasingly has become a convenient form of exploitation; the contemporary art scene is teeming with fraudsters, forgers, and money-laundering schemes, with buzzy art generating astronomical sales at auctions. All of this can make the buying and selling of art feel more like a con game and less like a reverent process of preservation.

Artists like Banksy have built their careers on challenging the relationship between art and consumerism, questioning at what point art begins to have meaning and monetary value and at what point it starts to feel like a grift, sold to you in, say, the form of a $50 million balloon dog. When Banksy half-shredded his famous Balloon Girl in 2018, he did it as a way of calling out empty consumerism, while also knowingly participating in the consumerist game, with his work immediately increasing in value because of his prank. More recently, in September, a Mexican NFT investor allegedly set a $10 million painting by Frida Kahlo on fire in a scheme to increase its value as a digital asset. Such stunts reveal how mercurial our cultural reverence for art can be: In one context, art becomes an incendiary political weapon; in another, even its destruction is just another route to make a profit.

In light of all this, throwing tomato soup on a protected, glassed-in copy of Sunflowers — one of the world’s most expensive paintings — seems like a counteractive to the exploitative excesses of art culture. Does a burning Frida Kahlo drawing matter more to us than a self-immolating climate activist? Why not put that juxtaposition into even starker relief: Does the immediate destruction of a van Gogh matter more to us than the destruction of all life?

This seems to be the ultimate utility of throwing tomato soup on van Gogh’s Sunflowers: not to grab attention or cause mayhem, but to activate our love of art, our sense of wonder and awe and reverence. The earlier art protest didn’t work in the same way because few works of art evoke the same instant universal emotional response as Sunflowers. The shock and dismay you may have felt when you heard Sunflowers might be damaged is all of a piece with the way you grieved when you heard that Notre Dame was on fire. If you can mourn the prospect of losing these beloved cultural artifacts, you will perhaps mourn, too, when you learn that on average, overall animal populations have declined by two-thirds over the last half-century, a warning sign of ecosystems in peril. Or you will hopefully really internalize the reality that 2025 is the absolute latest year we can continue to increase global energy emissions if we want to cap global warming at 2ºC and thus hopefully stave off planetary destruction.

Apollo 9 astronaut Russell “Rusty” Schweickart, who performed the first Apollo series space walk, once memorably described his five minutes spent contemplating the earth from space: “You realize that on that small spot is everything that means anything to you,” he wrote: “All history, all poetry, all music, all art, death, birth, love, tears, all games, all joy — all on that small spot.”

These, at last, are the real stakes: an artistic masterpiece now — or everything that inspires artists to create in the first place.

Update, October 24, 10:20 am ET: This story was originally published on October 20 and has been updated, most recently to include mention of another climate art protest in which mashed potatoes were put on a Monet.

It’s not just the Senate. State treasurers, attorneys general, and county elections matter too.

Some of the most consequential elections for climate change on Tuesday aren’t in the Senate. They’re for an Arizona regulatory body, a Texas city council, and the Ohio Supreme Court.

These offices play a key role in climate policy. Even the most optimistic economic modeling on the impacts of the Inflation Reduction Act estimates the law won’t get the country close to slashing climate emissions in half by 2030 (the bare minimum the US needs to do to keep global warming to under a disastrous 2 degrees Celsius) without a big boost from state and local governments. An October paper by Energy Innovation, a climate modeling group, notes that states will be “central actors” in implementing the Inflation Reduction Act and determining how much emissions will fall.

There’s no level of government that is untouched by climate change. Local officials have to grapple with the consequences of raging wildfires, floods, and grid failures. And down-ballot races for city councils or states are “often nail-biters” that “literally come down to dozens or hundreds of votes,” said Whit Jones, an organizer of the climate campaign group Lead Locally.

Jonathan Ernst/AFP via Getty Images

Here are some of the races that could end up mattering most for climate change.

A pivotal election for governor in Oregon

Governor races matter because they can make appointments to the regulatory bodies and set the direction of state climate goals. Although there are races in Arizona, Nevada, Wisconsin, Georgia, Maine, Michigan, New Mexico, and Pennsylvania that will determine the course of climate policy, one election arguably with the most at stake is Oregon.

Oregon’s climate goals depend on who is controlling the governor’s office. In March 2020, Gov. Kate Brown issued a Climate Action Plan that pledges 45 percent greenhouse gas cuts by 2035. The state’s agencies and governor-appointed commissions have been at work trying to implement these targets in transportation, land-use, and energy sectors ever since. They have also enacted a Clean Fuels Program that sells carbon credits to in-state producers and importers of oil, diesel, and gasoline to offset carbon emissions.

At the time of Brown’s order, there was little reason to fear that a Republican governor would challenge the status quo. Democrats have comfortably controlled the Oregon governor’s office since the 1980s. But this cycle, Republicans have an ally in Phil Knight, Nike’s co-founder and richest man in the state, who has funneled millions to the Republican candidate, Christine Drazan, and an unaffiliated candidate, Betsy Johnson. Recent polls have shown Drazan with a narrow lead over Democratic candidate Tina Kotek. The unaffiliated candidate, Johnson, trails behind both of them, but her presence as a former Democratic lawmaker in the race has helped to draw support away from Kotek.

Drazan already promises if she wins to reverse Oregon’s climate orders on day one and suspend the Clean Fuels Program. In 2020, Drazan even led a GOP walkout of the Democratic-controlled legislature that stopped a vote on climate legislation before it could come to a vote. Whoever wins will also hold the power to appoint positions that will help shape the state’s climate rules over the next four or more years.

State legislatures could gain supermajorities or flip

State legislatures can push forward climate policy, or they can obstruct it. Multiple legislatures could change party control, but contests in North Carolina and Minnesota are notable.

North Carolina General Assembly

In North Carolina, Republicans are just a handful of seats away from a supermajority in both houses, giving them the two-thirds margin they need to overturn any vetoes from the governor. Even with Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper in office until at least 2024, a supermajority GOP state legislature could deliver some serious setbacks to clean car and clean energy goals.

North Carolina is unique among Southeastern states because it has a plan to tackle climate change and advance clean energy. But implementing it will require the governor to appoint climate officials to statewide positions like the utility regulatory commission. A supermajority of Republicans in control makes it much more difficult to get any appointees through.

If Republicans gain just five seats, then the state would also be the next to join the 20 others that have preemption laws blocking climate action by cities. Last year, Cooper vetoed the preemption bill passed by the Republican-controlled legislature. Preemption bills, aligned with the American Gas Association’s priorities, forbid cities and municipalities from passing rules that transition buildings off of gas appliances. While there aren’t any North Carolina cities with rules on the books blocking gas yet — gas overall is less common to heat homes in the Southeast than cities like New York — residential demand has been growing over the past decade, and preemption would limit cities’ options in the future.

Minnesota state Senate

Democrats control one chamber in Minnesota but are vying to gain control of the state Senate this cycle. If they do, they’ll have a Democratic governor and a Democratic legislature with potentially enough votes to finally pass climate legislation. Democrats need to pick off just two seats from the Republican majority to flip the state Senate.

Minnesota’s governor has unrolled a climate plan to accelerate pollution cuts faster than the law the state already has on the books. Many of the priorities will require legislation to enact, including new spending on public transit; boosting the number of electric vehicles on the road from under 1 percent to 20 percent by 2030; restoring forests, grasslands, and wetlands; and requiring all new commercial and multifamily buildings to hit a net-zero carbon target by 2036.

Steve Karnowski/AP Photo

Utilities are well aware of the climate stakes of the state Senate, too. According to tracking from Energy and Policy, in one race, utility interests from inside and outside the state, including Xcel Energy, the Edison Electric Institute, Florida-based NextEra Energy, and Florida Power and Light, have lined up to support Republican candidate Kathleen Fowke, the wife of a former Xcel chair, against Democrat Kelly Morrison. (NextEra Energy is based in Florida but has wind projects in Minnesota; it’s the parent company of Florida Power and Light, which has been swept up in scandals for opposing expanded rooftop solar policies.)

Local officials with a say over what gets built, and how, in Texas

Cities are major laboratories for climate policy and adaptation, especially when it comes to what gets built, or not, in major hotspots for fossil fuel drilling. Cities can make progress on climate change even in a red state like Texas.

Harris County, Texas, judge

The Harris County judge is more like a CEO with broad jurisdictional power over the nation’s largest county in the Houston area, home to sprawling oil and petrochemical industrial operations.

Lina Hidalgo is fighting to stay in her seat as county judge for Harris County, after her surprise win in 2018.

Her opponent Alexandra del Moral Mealer has focused primarily on crime and law enforcement in her campaign, in contrast to Hidalgo’s emphasis on her environmental priorities — including incorporating climate flood maps into city planning and hiring environmental prosecutors. Hidalgo’s expansion of the county’s pollution budget and air monitors has earned her a strong reputation among climate advocates, including the endorsement of the down-ballot-focused PAC Climate Cabinet. Mealer, for her part, told the Houston Chronicle (which ultimately endorsed her) that climate change isn’t her priority. Mealer’s website says: “County is not the appropriate entity to solve Climate Change - let’s fix potholes first.” The race has been in a dead heat.

Corpus Christi, Texas, City Council

Another Texas race has huge stakes because of its geographic location. The Port of Corpus Christi — which gets most of its oil from the Permian Basin, the most active oilfield in the US — has become the US’s No. 1 exporter of crude oil. The city council has a big say over what gets built and what oversight is in place in a state that’s otherwise overrun by oil industry interests. The climate group Lead Locally lists four endorsed candidates running for city council, as part of a slate pledging to oppose a local desalination plant, put more attention on preparing for climate change, and increase focus on clean energy.

Callaghan O’Hare/Bloomberg via Getty Images

State treasurers can fight or encourage clean energy investments

A growing number of state treasurers have moved to pull any state investments from banks that “boycott fossil fuels,” haphazardly identifying certain companies that have made public commitments on climate change and ESG (a framework for incorporating environmental, social, and corporate governance values into company strategy).

Even some fossil fuel companies have considered aligning with ESG standards, but the growing anti-ESG movement has cherry-picked which companies they will divest from, and the investment fund BlackRock has become a poster child for the backlash. Texas, Florida, Louisiana, and West Virginia have all pulled or pledged to pull state pensions from BlackRock.

ESG has factored in the Arizona state treasurer race, where incumbent Kimberly Yee (R) is up against Martin Quezada (D). Yee has vowed to ignore ESG standards going forward, saying it’s “inappropriate for the investment room.” Quezada takes a different view that ESG isn’t about politics, but about sensible investment decisions. “I think it’s really irresponsible of any manager or investor of public money to oppose any type of risk analysis for your investment strategy,” he’s said.

An October 17 poll by the research firm OH Predictive Insights showed Yee holding a comfortable lead, 46-35, over Quezada.

Contests that matter for legal cases

Attorneys general and the courts have played an increasingly high-profile role in climate fights throughout the country. At least seven attorneys general are in lawsuits against the oil industry for its role in creating climate pollution and spreading disinformation, and are also locked in battles over the fate of fossil fuel infrastructure. More of these cases are going to hit state Supreme Courts, several of which are elected directly by the people.

Ohio Supreme Court

The Ohio Supreme Court has been controlled by Republicans for decades, but there are three seats open this cycle. The candidates who win will play an important role deciding the future of energy accountability and climate lawsuits in the state. The court has played a particularly pivotal part in the ongoing FirstEnergy bribery scandal, where the company has paid $230 million in fines over bribing state politicians to protect the utility’s nuclear and coal investments.

The court will eventually decide a number of issues, including whether ratepayers will recover up to $1.4 billion for the scandal. Another important issue the court will decide is who has the right to sue and block renewable energy permitting in the state. The nonprofit outlet Energy News Network has a more detailed rundown of the race, which polling from late September by Spectrum News/Siena College showed to be about even.

Michigan attorney general

The fate of a 1950s-era liquid gas and crude oil pipeline may be up to who wins the attorney general seat in Michigan. Michigan’s incumbent AG Dana Nessel, a Democrat, has an ongoing complaint against the pipeline company Enbridge Energy over Line 5, which transports 22 million gallons of crude oil and natural gas liquids through Wisconsin and Michigan. Her lawsuit is trying to shut down the Michigan portion of the pipeline because of its role in dozens of spills and potential to wreak havoc on natural areas and tribal lands.

Nic Antaya/Bloomberg via Getty Images

She’s up against Republican challenger Matthew DePerno, who has promised that one of his first priorities will be to dismiss a legal fight with Enbridge over the Line 5 pipeline. DePerno rose to national prominence for claiming Donald Trump’s election loss in 2020 was fraudulent, and is under state investigation himself for allegedly plotting to tamper with voting machines. Polling by WDIV/Detroit News in October has Nessel with a 12-point lead over DePerno.

State regulators can make sure utilities are hitting clean energy targets

Utility commissions can make or break a state’s climate goals. “They can approve or block the stuff that needs to get built to deliver a clean, electrified future, from renewable plants and batteries to transmission lines to electric-vehicle charging infrastructure,” explained Julian Spector of Canary Media.

Governors appoint commissioners in 37 states, and the state legislature appoints them in two. In the last 11 states, commissioners have to run for election, setting up a situation where the utility regulators can be surprisingly pro-climate in unexpectedly red territory.

Arizona Corporate Commission

This five-seat commission has two openings up for grabs. There are two Democrats, Sandra Kennedy and Lauren Kuby, running against two Republicans, Nick Myers and Kevin Thompson. Most of Arizona’s statewide races have looked like toss-ups, per polling.

If Democrats win, they could flip the commission’s majority, 3-2, creating a solid bloc of more ardent clean energy advocates to advance reforms. While the Republican candidates have argued for an all-of-the-above energy mix that maintains reliance on fossil (natural) gas, the Democratic candidates argue the state’s overdependence on natural gas is a problem. “We replaced one dirty fossil fuel with another by switching from coal to natural gas, and the recent spike in natural gas prices has hit Arizona ratepayers hard as a result,” Kennedy told the Arizona Republic.

Louisiana Public Service Commission

Louisiana, which voted overwhelmingly for Trump in 2020, doesn’t seem the likeliest climate battleground. But as the third-ranked state in gas production and home to a growing number of liquid natural gas terminals, Louisiana has outsize influence beyond its borders. The state’s position on clean energy is especially important because it is part of the mid-continent system operator, the biggest interstate grid operator by land that encompasses 15 states.

Luke Sharrett/Bloomberg via Getty Images

The Louisiana Public Service Commission, which regulates utilities, could become less deferential to the utility Entergy and more open to regional transmission projects for renewables, depending on who wins the commission’s two open seats. “If one or both of these seats flips to someone — regardless of party — who is active on clean energy and climate, you’re going to see a lot of movement from Louisiana,” said Daniel Tait, who has tracked these races for the utility watchdog Energy and Policy. Two of those utility-friendly incumbents, Lambert Boissiere (D) and Mike Francis (R), are in reelection campaigns against challengers, progressive favorite Gregory Manning and Republican Keith Bodin, respectively.

Boissiere has had a comfortable lead, but an Environmental Defense Fund-affiliated PAC has just entered the race with $500,000, a huge sum for a down-ballot race, to spend on ads against him.

Texas Railroad Commission

Climate activists also spent last cycle making a failed bid to gain control of the Texas Railroad Commission, which is technically not a utility commission but an important environmental regulatory body in the state. Though he is considered an underdog, Democratic candidate Luke Warford has made a bid for a seat on the commission by focusing on clean energy and climate issues. He’s focused on Texas’s overreliance on gas to power its grid, which was one factor that led to massive blackouts in winter 2021.

“Texas is the largest greenhouse gas emitter in the country, and Texas’ oil and gas industry is the largest contributor to those emissions,” Warford wrote in a column for Data for Progress. “Put differently, the Texas Railroad Commission regulates the industry that produces the most greenhouse gasses in the highest greenhouse-gas-emitting state in the country. And every year, millions of tons of greenhouse gasses are emitted into the atmosphere because the Texas Railroad Commission fails to enforce existing regulations.”

The limited polling on the race, conducted by KHOU/Texas Hispanic Policy Foundation in September, found Warford trailing Republican incumbent Wayne Christian by at least 7 points.

Correction, October 21, 10:20 am ET: A previous version of this story misstated the proximity of the Permian Basin to Corpus Christi.

Update, November 7, 12:50 pm ET: This story, originally published on October 20, has been updated to include the Oregon governor’s race.

Coining a new term of art for the cloud-based IT infrastructure community is always a challenge. Rightfully so. At Opus Research, we’re partial to “Conversational Cloud”, as a concept that captures the consumption model executives in charge of IT, Contact Centers or “Digital Transformation” pursue as they turn to cloud-based solution providers that enable them to migrate legacy systems off-premises, while adding just the right amount “AI”. The core menu of capabilities that support their objectives include advanced analytics (to extract insights from conversational between and among prospects, customers and employees), natural language understanding (to recognize the context of each conversation), machine learning (to provide for constant improvement of results).

At its recent Analyst Summit, NICE Ltd trotted out a term of its own, “Suiteform” which it expects to become a de facto standard for combining the suite of services described above into a software “platform”, which is a term that most often refers to the underlying operating system (OS) or framework that can run multiple, purpose-driven applications. NICE refers to these as CXi, the abbreviation of “Customer Experience interactions”. Their purpose is to support the sort of “inter-app workflows” (quoting NICE CEO Barak Eilam) that are required to support digital self-service and employee productivity over time and across every channel and device that customers, agents and departmental employees put to use.

“Suiteform” or Splatform? It’s all in the Execution

One nice aspect of “Suiteform” as a name is that it is a homophone for “Sweet Form”. Following a “you catch more flies with honey” tactic, the idea is to lure a large community of developers into an ecosystem of cloud-native applications, tools and infrastructure. This was the foundational value statement for the prototype Communications Platform as a Service (CPaaS) specialist, Voxeo and Twilio, about a decade ago as they conceived of what Opus Research called “The Telco API” in this report from a decade ago.

NICE is pursuing a packaging and pricing strategy that integrates its contact center solutions (CXOne) with a range of applications and workflows that are informed by its brand of Conversational AI, called Enlighten. Its buyers invest in a comprehensive suite that features predictable billing (based largely on the number of agent seats but adjusted to account for additional applications. They claim that it provides for predictable bills, zero-cost migrations, guaranteed SLAs and the ability to toggle applications on or off an an as needed basis. All of these actions are supported by “highly-specialized, yet unified” sales and support personnel.

The alternative to a comprehensive, purpose-driven Suiteform, is a less advantageous approach that is more like a “Splatform”, or haphazard array of native and third-party applications in a marketplace that is loosely coupled to a core CCaaS offering. Over the past five years or the path to Conversational AI has been largely unpaved with different departments launching pursuing their own “bot strategy” Without reference to any specific CXOne/Enlighten competitors, the problems presented by such an approach are made manifest by the fact that it is commonplace for large enterprises to have dozens of solution providers offering everything from chatbots/voicebots,

By organizing a suite of services into a unified platform, NICE addresses the first-order needs of enterprises that want to address the full spectrum of challenges involved with digital CX. It starts with providing more responsive self-service by recognizing each customer’s intent based on knowing who they are, where they’ve been and the words they use in chat or over the phone. Then it involves being more proactive and pre-emptive in rapidly addressing those needs, employing automated resources as required. In NICE’s case, the proactive elements (largely outbound alerts and reminders) are supported by the integration of ContactEngine. Pre-emption is accomplished natively by relying on SEO-enhanced understanding that was acquired through Mindtouch. Complex automation is handled through an OEM arrangement with Intelligent Virtual Assistant specialist Amelia, dubbed SmartAssist. Plus, tools and resources to create or orchestrate self-service bots are accomplished through the NICE Virtual Agent Hub or the NICE Agent Assist Hub, respectively.

The suiteform approach also mitigates much of the pain, effort and expense associated with configuring systems that need to accommodate complex workflows and APIs associated with identity management, intelligent transfers with context and real-time access to the back-end systems needed to inform interactions. None of these efforts are simple, but the complexities can be better addressed when the suite of services are integrated into a single platform.

The post The Conversational Cloud by Another Name: “Suiteform” appeared first on .

Building on its history of public safety advances, and leveraging its extensive 911 network and infrastructure experience, Intrado empowers teachers and other professionals with this potentially life-saving device

ISLANDIA, NY – October 19, 2022 – Intrado Corporation (“Intrado”), a global leader in technology-enabled services, today announced an innovative wearable safety device featuring a customizable panic button with unrivaled redundancy, precise location identification data, and detailed incident information. The badge-sized device is part of Intrado’s Safety Suite Solution, an end-to-end incident management tool for K-12 schools, higher education institutions, and businesses of all types.

Upon activation, Intrado Safety Suite instantly transmits the device location and incident details to the correct 911 emergency communications center (ECC) while simultaneously notifying administrators and staff. Additional features deliver a thoroughly modern approach to wearable safety devices:

• Triple redundancy (Bluetooth Low Energy, WiFi, and Cellular/LTE) for 100% coverage on or off campus
• Dual SIM cards for enhanced Cellular/LTE connectivity
• Programmable to differentiate the type of incident and response required
• Instantly initiate building or campus lockdowns and easily cancel false alarms
• Haptic device with synced vibration across all connected wearables
• Daily device health checks performed by Intrado with status updates available via a dashboard system
• Commercial-grade battery requires only one charge per year

Intrado Safety Suite is a comprehensive set of solutions that address incident prevention, response, and recovery for complete risk management. It encompasses Enterprise E911; unified alerts over IP-based screens, alerts, sirens, and other endpoints; mass notifications; visitor management; reunification; and more. In addition to the wearable device, the Safety Suite panic button is also available in desktop, mobile, and mounted versions, all of which can be configured to provide specific event details including whether the emergency is a fire, medical, active shooter, or other type of incident. In K-12 settings, the benefits extend beyond the school grounds to include daily transportation, field trips, or athletic and other events that occur off-campus.

“Many solution providers claim to save emergency responders’ time—which can undoubtedly save lives,” said Jeff Robertson, President of Intrado Life & Safety. “But very few are as uniquely positioned as Intrado to help locate emergencies and expedite responses. Thanks to our Automatic Location Identification (ALI) database, connectivity to Public Safety Answering Points (PSAPs), and extensive 911 infrastructure, we can automatically share the critical data first responders want and need even before a 911 call is answered.”

With Intrado Safety Suite, PSAPs can immediately access school information including emergency contacts, floor plans, video feeds, and more. Additionally, Safety Suite can pinpoint exact call locations within a larger campus and receive details about what kind of incident response is needed without triangulating multiple systems to obtain the critical data needed to quickly dispatch the appropriate response. The solution enables schools to conduct drills, address reunification needs, digitize SOPs and checklists, and fully comply with Alyssa’s Law requirements.

To learn more about how Safety Suite and the new Wearable 911 Panic Button can help organizations reduce risk and respond quickly to any type of emergency, visit intrado.com/safety-suite.

About Intrado Corporation

Intrado Corporation is an innovative, cloud-based, global technology partner to clients around the world. Our solutions connect people and organizations at the right time and in the right ways, making those mission-critical connections more relevant, engaging, and actionable – turning Information to Insight.

Intrado has sales and/or operations in the United States, Canada, Europe, the Middle East, Asia Pacific, Latin America, and South America. Intrado is controlled by affiliates of certain funds managed by Apollo Global Management, Inc. (NYSE: APO). For more information, please call 1-800-841-9000 or visit www.intrado.com.

The post Intrado Announces Innovative Wearable 911 Panic Button, Part of the Intrado Safety Suite Solution for Schools and Enterprises appeared first on Cloud Communications Alliance.

The Expedited Process Enables Carriers and Service Providers to Become Fully Compliant with Microsoft and Zoom Ecosystems

Annapolis, MD – October 18, 2022 – SIPPIO, a leading voice enablement platform for global business, announces the launch of its Fast Track Accelerator program developed to enable expedited cloud voice deployments for carrier and service provider’s customers using Microsoft and Zoom cloud-based services including Microsoft Operator Connect, Microsoft Direct Routing, Zoom Peering, as well as the Zoom Provider Exchange. Through the program, carriers and service providers become fully compliant with the architecture and automations required for wholesale certification into the Microsoft Operator Connect and Zoom Provider Exchange ecosystems. For resellers, the program provides a rapid pathway to begin selling retail voice subscriptions.

SIPPIO has been a leader in enterprise voice enablement since 2019. The Fast Track program allows network operators and carriers to become Microsoft and Zoom providers, with a fully customizable – white labeled platform – offering prebuilt services and infrastructure for complete enablement. The accelerator program spans 74+ countries, offering service providers and carriers the opportunity to enable voice in  Microsoft and Zoom to their enterprise customers through a single unified platform. Partners are able to quickly activate customers through automated end-user experiences to increase the return on investment into their collaboration suite.

“We’ve created an easy to follow onboarding process to expedite the required architecture and technical requirements to enable global operators the opportunity to offer Microsoft and Zoom solutions through a single platform. In addition, SIPPIO guides carriers through the readiness process to develop marketing, outreach, collateral, and more,” comments Dawn-Marie Elder, COO and General Manager of SIPPIO. “When people look to purchase a vehicle, they don’t look for vehicles that they need to build themselves, they want a prebuilt vehicle they can hop right into and drive off the lot as quickly as possible. Our Fast Track Accelerator program allows carriers to do just that with Microsoft Operator Connect and Zoom Provider Exchange solutions. Our partners can speed off the lot as quickly as possible with their voice enablement and customer experience programs – quickly, proactively, and efficiently.”

SIPPIO guides the carrier through the entire process to maximize engagement with the customer. The comprehensive program covers building offers, working with partners to develop compelling value propositions, go-to-market strategies, prospecting, sales training, marketing assets, and more. SIPPIO helps the carrier identify the components they need to complete their cloud voice enablement offer and quickly get to market.

“Early on, we identified that carriers were struggling to build their customer experience and automation programs. Our Fast Track program is the vehicle we use to guide our carriers through the entire process and build their confidence in accelerating their efforts in the new world of voice,” continues Elder.

Microsoft and Zoom enablement solutions include 360-degree full-stack integrations to API-only access – partners can also pick and choose the components of the SIPPIO platform they need to build or augment their future-proof phone service.

For information about SIPPIO’s Fast Track Accelerator program, click here.

About SIPPIO

SIPPIO is the world’s leading voice enablement platform, the easiest and fastest way for resellers and carriers to bring PSTN calling into Microsoft Teams and Zoom Phone. Available in over 74+ countries, organizations across the globe rely on SIPPIO to keep their people connected. With flexible subscription plans, SIPPIO deploys in minutes and ensures a reliable, secure, compliant, and redundant voice solution.

The post SIPPIO Launches Fast Track Accelerator Program For a Collaborative Microsoft and Zoom Voice Solution appeared first on Cloud Communications Alliance.

Before I set up the iPhone 14, I’d never used an eSIM. Whenever possible, I put my personal physical SIM card into whatever phone I’m reviewing rather than using a SIM provided by the manufacturer. When I’m done, my SIM comes out and goes right into the next phone that I’m testing — or, as a rare treat, into my personal iPhone 11. It’s a system that usually works just fine, but after reviewing the iPhone 14, those days are over. I ditched my physical SIM for eSIM when I set up the iPhone 14, embracing the chaos of a digital-only lifestyle. And I wish I hadn’t.

Apple forced my hand here — the versions of the iPhone 14 sold in the US come without a SIM tray. If I wanted to get my personal number onto the new iPhone I was reviewing, I’d...

Continue reading…

Some experts say it never really broke.

At first glance, it might look like the pandemic-era supply chain chaos is nearly over.

Headlines bemoaning shortages of everything from PlayStations and Care Bears to medical devices are no longer a daily occurrence. Just six vessels were waiting to dock at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach on Tuesday — a tiny fraction of the 109 that were stuck outside the San Pedro Bay back in January. Meanwhile, the cost of sending a 40-foot shipping container from Asia to the West Coast is now under $3,000, far below last year’s high of more than $20,000.

Still, the structural problems that enabled many of the delays, price hikes, and shortages over the past few years haven’t gone away. Shipping prices have not quite returned to their pre-pandemic levels, truck drivers are still in short supply, and some in the logistics industry are already predicting that there will be problems during the upcoming holiday season. More broadly, the capitalist system responsible for manufacturing and delivering goods throughout the world has not been “fixed.” In fact, it remains as vulnerable to disruption as ever. Consumers are still seeing widespread inflation, not only for energy and food but also for products that often depend on Pacific shipping routes, including apparel and new vehicles, according to the consumer price index summary published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics last week.

“If the supply chain is a patient coming into the ER, then it’s not bleeding to death anymore,” said Daniel Maffei, the chair of the Federal Maritime Commission. “But there are still a lot of issues with the supply chain. Some of them and maybe even the bulk of them predate Covid.”

Other problems, including the energy crisis created amid Russia’s war in Ukraine, mean that even if shipping costs continue to fall, those price declines won’t necessarily be passed on to average people. And plenty of products are still hard to find. Covid-19 shutdowns in China, which manufactures much of the goods sent to the US, has delayed the production of products from clothing to contrast media, a special dye needed for medical imaging. Packaging problems at a pharmaceutical manufacturing plant seem to have contributed to a nationwide shortage of Adderall. Disruptions in the US’s supply of carbon dioxide have made it more difficult to produce certain types of beer, while low water levels have slowed shipping on the Mississippi River and raised the cost of delivering corn and soybeans.

These challenges highlight the complexities and sheer vastness of the supply side of global economics. Although some refer to this system broadly as the supply chain, it’s actually made up of many interconnected and interwoven supply chains. A single company can rely on hundreds of different supply chains that each depend on many different products, components, and companies, sometimes located throughout the world. Every supply chain has its own strengths and vulnerabilities, and resolving bottlenecks in just one isn’t enough to eradicate shortages or bring down overall prices for consumers.

Recode asked eight experts to evaluate the state of the supply chain. Some acknowledged ongoing efforts to make different industries more resilient, but they said many of these projects are years in the making or rely on machinery and products that are affected by the same manufacturing and shipping problems that are impacting consumer goods. Companies aren’t necessarily financially incentivized to change their long-term approach, either. Others defended the supply chain and said that, while there certainly were delays, the system never really “broke” at all.

“Supply chains just adjust, but they were hit with a global pandemic,” said Chris Caplice, the executive director of MIT’s Center for Transportation and Logistics. “You saw all the warts and everything, but it kept working.”

Still, the vulnerabilities we saw throughout the pandemic could become a problem. While Covid-19 was certainly an unprecedented global event, there’s no reason to think future disasters won’t impact international trade all over again. Potential geopolitical conflict, and the devastating impacts of climate change, are already on the horizon. These interviews have been edited for clarity and length.

Is the supply chain making inflation less bad, or making things worse?

Willy Shih, Harvard Business School management practice professor: Retailers have too much of the wrong inventory, which they’re trying to unload. Demand has dropped, so the shipping rates have dropped, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t still bottlenecks or increased costs, whether it is labor costs or primary materials cost.

Shipping historian Marc Levinson: For many years, the [Federal Reserve] could count on imports to help keep down goods price inflation. We had cheap stuff coming in great volume from China, and that made it very hard to raise prices in the US market. That’s no longer the case. Globalization is no longer restraining inflation in that way.

Elif Akçalı, University of Florida industrial and systems engineering professor: These new numbers are worrisome for their implications for the supply chains in the near future. High inflation rates will not only increase the expenses associated with handling and storing inventory in a supply chain, but will increase the cost of borrowing money to acquire inventory for the supply chain in the first place. Hence, the total costs associated with acquiring, handling, and storing inventory will go up.

Shipping prices are declining, but what’s the overall state of the supply chain?

Daniel Maffei, Federal Maritime Commission chair: The bulk of the problem does seem to be more inland. It’s like a sink, right? If the sink clogs up, you say the sink is broken, but it’s not really the thing that’s broken. You don’t throw away the sink. It’s the pipes!

Our supply chain issues are now deeper in the supply chain — farther inland — and involve things like equipment shortages and lack of ability to get the equipment around, more than they have to do with the ports. Now it’s leading to congestion at some of our ports. We need more [empty containers] in the middle of America, and we have too many sitting at our ports.

Sharae Moore, president of She Trucking, a diversity-focused trucking nonprofit: The supply chain is in a state of transition. We are experiencing the supply chain pivoting into the 21st century of technology! We have noticed more companies testing autonomous vehicles and incorporating automation within their supply chain systems. Within the next five years, automation will dominate the industry. We also see the need for improvement in the area of shipping and receiving products to ensure that they get to the consumer faster. There is an urgent need to educate and train new drivers to meet this high demand.

Fiona Lowbridge, client success vice president at ALOM Technologies: The infrastructure is still struggling — ports, roads, bridges, airports, and other physical elements. We are also hurting from the lack of technology collaboration, more disjointed regulations, and disruptions. I am also troubled by the impact of climate change on the supply chains — for instance, our inability to move freight on barges due to low water levels in the rivers.

Why isn’t the supply chain back to “normal,” compared to before the pandemic? What issues remain?

Chris Caplice, executive director of MIT’s Center for Transportation and Logistics: Did you really not get everything you wanted during the pandemic? I would argue that supply chains never stopped working, even in the heat of the shutdown and lockdown. It took a little longer sometimes. … So we complain about toilet paper being out, but were you really ever that short?

Akçalı: Shipping accounts for only one aspect of supply chain operations. If a supply chain is being operated the way it was being operated prior to the pandemic … then this just means that the system is brought back up “as is,” with the vulnerabilities it had before the pandemic. It is as if the pandemic did not happen. It is as if we learned nothing from our experiences during the pandemic.

Moore: Compared to when the pandemic started, carriers both large and small were battling increased fuel rates, decreased freight rates, high insurance premiums, a lack of truck parking, and an increase in equipment costs. Before the pandemic, we saw mega-carriers going out of business and a driver shortage. I would like to see increased opportunities for professional truck drivers and minorities to advance into higher management positions within the supply chain.

Nick Pinkston, founder and CEO of Volition, an industrial components marketplace: People are trying to make factories to make things here, too. I’m thinking of one particular person right now who is making a sheet metal plant, and they are buying all these motors to make the machines. They’re five months behind. They’re having to either redesign their machine to accept different motors or they have to wait five months. It’s bad either way.

Shih: Some areas are getting better, and I think they’ll continue to get better rapidly. For example, the auto sector, where supplies and parts have been short — chips, in particular — is improving rapidly. There are some sectors where it’s still going to take a while.

Is the supply chain more resilient today than it was at the beginning of the pandemic?

Levinson: It’s hard to generalize about supply chain reliability. In general, yes, our supply chains are working much better than they were. But they’re not working smoothly in many cases.

Pinkston: If the pandemic were to happen today, I think we would actually be only a little bit better. This kicked off a bunch of initiatives that have yet to really play out. It’s going to take years to actually build this resiliency, and it’s always going to be a short-term profit to not do this stuff. … If you build this redundancy, and everyone holds more inventory, all the prices go up permanently. We can’t trust companies alone because they will always underinvest in this stuff.

Akçalı: Structural changes that are needed to truly build resiliency into supply chains — such as diversified supplier pools, increased emergency stockpiles for critical goods, increased visibility into supplier operations, thoughtful sharing of demand and supply risk throughout the entire supply chain, etc. — will not only take time but also require addressing the way business is done, and shifting the focus from cost minimization to the time needed for recovery.

Lowbridge: It has become increasingly clear that some raw materials are only produced in certain countries or regions. I think we should all worry about the impact of this concentration. It makes all of us vulnerable. I continue to be concerned about the physical infrastructure, as it will take a long time to fix it. We need to be able to scale our infrastructure where, right now, the infrastructure is crumbling.

Any advice for consumers?

Caplice: You’re gonna find discounts everywhere. Go to TJ Maxx, go to Marshalls. Target is taking millions of dollars right off inventory because stuff is coming in they couldn’t cancel fast enough. I think Black Friday this year is going to be a non-event. It’s probably already started early because retailers are getting nervous because demand is dropping. The same thing is going to happen with pickup trucks and cars that were mothballed because they didn’t have chips. Chips are going to come, and then there’s going to be a glut.

Go hug a driver or hug a worker in a distribution center. People who work on the front line are severely underappreciated, and they never stopped working.

On August 15th, an alarming email popped up in the inbox of Diana Pearl, a New York-based news editor. Someone in Moscow had logged into her verified Twitter account, it said. Pearl was familiar with the email content’s theme as it resembled previous automated correspondence from Twitter — featuring a minimal white background, black text, and blue links.

Fearing her account’s safety, Pearl clicked the link inside the email that supposedly would instantly let her secure her account and entered her existing password on the following webpage to update it.

Moments later, a message arrived in a Telegram group. All it contained was a screenshot of Pearl’s Twitter profile and a link. Three hours later, the admin texted, “Sold.”

Pearl had...

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Google is partnering with Coinbase to let customers pay for its cloud services in “select” cryptocurrencies (via CNBC). According to Coinbase and Google, crypto-based payments will become available to customers in the Web3 space early next year to start.

To enable these payments, Google will use Coinbase Commerce, a tool that lets businesses receive, accept, and convert cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin, Ethereum, USD Coin, Tether USD, Dogecoin, Shiba Inu, and others. As noted by CNBC, Coinbase will take a cut of transactions made through its commerce tool. Google plans on utilizing Coinbase Prime as well, an “institutional-grade” crypto trading platform primarily built for large companies, to store and trade cryptocurrencies.

As part...

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Cisco’s video conferencing hardware will be updated to let users set Microsoft Teams as the default video conferencing software, the two companies have announced. Initially six devices will be certified to work with Teams in the first half of next year, including the Cisco Room Bar (a combined speaker and webcam), the 55 and 75-inch versions of the Cisco Board Pro (a freestanding screen designed for video conferencing) and the Cisco Room Kit Pro.

Cisco’s press release stresses that its own Webex video calling software (which it paid billions for a little over a decade ago) isn’t going anywhere. “The devices will continue to support joining Webex meetings with all the features and functionality customers enjoy today,” the release notes....

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On Tuesday morning, an IPCC report author and climate scientist was taken into police custody while protesting  alongside activists blocking traffic in Bern, Switzerland.

The scientist, Julia Steinberger, is a professor of ecological economics at the University of Lausanne and contributed to the 6th Assessment Report from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, specifically its third chapter on emissions mitigation pathways that are still possible this century.

The protest was organized by Renovate Switzerland group, and advocated for improved energy efficiency in buildings. Activists glued themselves to the road as part of a blockade; it was the fifth action by the group in the last week, according to local news reports. In a video of the protest, Steinberger was carried off by police and placed in a van as she said in French, "non-violent civil action is important. We don't have much time left."

On its website, Renovate Switzerland paints a dire picture of the climate crisis. Its page on explaining the urgency behind climate protests opens up with a dark quote from the United Nations Secretary general, Antonio Guterres, who said in April that the IPCC report "is a litany of climate policies. It's a record of shame, cataloging the empty promises that set us firmly on the path to an unlivable world."

Renovate Switzerland also points to multiple IPCC reports, as well as a study that suggests that by 2070 some 3.5 billion people will be forced to migrate because of inhospitable living conditions thanks to climate change.

“This summer, Switzerland recorded the second hottest summer since measurements began in 1864. Record-breaking heat wave summers such as we have experienced this year will be the norm for an average summer by 2035,” the group's website states. “Such heat brings its share of disasters and suffering. In Switzerland, glaciers are disappearing at a breakneck pace, forests are burning or dying, agricultural land is drying up, harvests are failing, lakes and rivers are evaporating. Elsewhere in the world, millions of people are losing their place of residence or are already suffering from famine.”

In response to the Swiss government’s energy conservation plan in the face of gas and power shortages, Renovate Switzerland announced it will commit to protests to pressure Switzerland’s government to carry out an extensive housing renovation plan that would improve insulation and energy efficiency. “With regard to energy savings, [the government] discharges its responsibilities by counting on the small voluntary gestures of the population and businesses,” the group told local news.

"The thermal renovation of buildings… is logical, socially progressive… it creates jobs," Steinberger said at the protest in a video shared by Renovate Switzerland. "But the government does not do it. So we see that we are at an impasse."

The IPCC report, and the chapter worked on by Steinberger specifically, offer gloomy outlooks for the future beyond Switzerland. In it, scientists find that humanity will likely exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius within the next two decades unless steep cuts are made. By 2050, we can expect famines, droughts, and mass migrations as extreme weather events become more common.

Heatwaves, to take one example, already kill thousands and will only become deadlier as we surpass 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming. One recent UN and Red Cross report suggests that "projected future death rates from extreme heat are staggeringly high—comparable in magnitude by the end of the century to all cancers or infections diseases—and staggeringly unequal, with people in poorer countries seeing far greater levels of increase."

Over the years, IPCC reports have painted an increasingly grim picture for what needs to be done. Earlier this year, an author of the IPCC’s synthesis report—a compilation of what we’ve learned about climate change thus far—told The Atlantic that there are three broad buckets of scenarios to anticipate. One is that a third of Earth's total energy production goes towards removing carbon from the atmosphere while decarbonizing everything, a situation deemed nearly impossible. A second envisions that energy demand nearly collapses, decarbonization and carbon removal continue, and energy efficiency outpaces its historical rate of progress—all at the same time. The most likely one is that we fail to limit global temperature growth to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

In the face of all this, then, it makes sense that Steinberger decided to join protests to block traffic. There’s a growing debate over the best way to pressure governments and corporate actors to act, from civil disobedience to destruction of fossil fuel infrastructure, but what is clear is that something needs to be done to mobilize more action lest we find ourselves in some of the worst climate scenarios.

A photo posted by Renovate Switzerland later showed Steinberger standing alongside fellow activists outside a police building. "Today's 7 sympathizers are free again, they're fine and will do it again as long as BR doesn't have a plan to #RenovateSwitzerland," the group said.

Steinberger did not respond to Motherboard’s request for comment.

AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, the cloud megavendors, are set to command an ever-growing share of enterprise IT spend, according to Forrester.

Project Starline is the real deal. It makes a virtual call feel like a one-on-one conversation. But it’s unclear if it’s something most people will ever get to experience.

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Exciting news announced at Microsoft Ignite, the Neat Frame and Neat Bar Pro are now officially Microsoft Teams certified, which means their entire portfolio of devices is now certified for Microsoft Teams.

• Near Bar – Microsoft Teams Room for small rooms
• Neat Bar Pro – Microsoft Teams Room for medium rooms
• Neat Pad – Microsoft Teams Panel
• Neat Board – 65-inch multi-touch screen with Audio and Video – Microsoft Teams Room all in one
• Neat Frame – Microsoft Teams Displays

All of Neat’s devices are Microsoft Teams Rooms for Android.

Ilya Bukshteyn, vice president of Microsoft Teams Devices: “The certification process for Neat’s devices has not only been rapid but also delightful for our joint customers, who appreciated how Neat’s hardware and especially Neat Symmetry video shined with Microsoft Teams and Teams Rooms. Neat is an exciting addition to our Teams partner ecosystem, and we look forward to our joint customers experiencing Teams through these elegant and innovative devices.”

The Neat frame is really interesting It is a 450 NITS 15.6 inch Full HD portrait touch screen device. I’m lucky to have one in my home office I have been testing, and I think it is a great fit for the executive at home, being an always-on device that is ready to go with great video, people framing, 4X Zoom and really impressive noise suppression.

Microsoft has announced plans for hot desking on Microsoft Teams display. With hot desking, employees can locate and reserve a desk in advance or from the device. They can sign in for their personalized Teams experience, and leave no personal data after signing out. This is coming to the Neat Frame later this year.

The Neat Bar Pro has a wide-angle telephoto lens and image depth sensor, which combined deliver 16x zoom.

At Ignite Microsoft also announced IntelliFrame. IntelliFrame enhances the focus and framing of in-room meeting attendees, so that meeting participants in the room each have their own, individual frame in the video gallery. For Teams Rooms outfitted with an intelligent camera capable of producing multiple video streams, IntelliFrame delivers an enhanced video gallery experience. This experience will be available in early 2023.

Google announced on Wednesday morning that it has taken another step on the journey toward a passwordless future by rolling out support for passkey login to Android and Chrome. Passkeys, which let you use your phone or computer’s built-in authentication systems instead of a traditional password, have support from all the major tech companies, with Apple, Google, and Microsoft pledging to bring the feature to their OSes.

Essentially, passkeys are a credential stored on a device, like your phone or computer, that confirms to a website or application that you are who you say you are (though Google is still working on the passkey API for native Android apps). You verify your identity to the device, and it can then securely log in to sites...

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Going back many, many years, we’ve argued that paywalls are not a particularly sustainable model for most journalism enterprises. There are some exceptions. They seem to work in cases where breaking news and timely access are extremely important (e.g., financial news), and in cases where there is a strong community built up around the news provider (both small and large). A few months back I did a fun podcast discussion looking at why I was wrong when I predicted the NY Times paywall would fail. It’s worth listening to the whole thing, but the crux of it was that I didn’t expect the NY Times to be able to build up the kind of communal support that it eventually did — whereby many people felt that, in the age of Donald Trump, they had to be supporting media organizations like the Times.

But, still, I strongly believe that most general interest news orgs will find a paywall does not work and it actually harms the journalism the news organization is attempting to do. Over the years, we’ve seen various news organizations that gleefully put up a paywall back down and admit defeat as they removed the paywall, often noting how few readers actually paid, and how it actually tended to boost competitors without paywalls.

The latest to do so is the Chicago Sun-Times, which has announced that it has now dropped its paywall. What’s most interesting to me is that the newspaper seems almost joyous about this decision in its announcement, recognizing it can better serve the people of Chicago this way.

As a reader of the Chicago Sun-Times, you turn to us for the news you need to thrive. For timely, accurate and fairly reported stories on the issues that matter most. For stories that celebrate and honor the members of our community, from victories on the field to remembrances of lives well lived. Our journalists care about your community because it’s our community, too. And we strongly believe that everyone in the Chicago area should have access to the news, features and investigations we produce, regardless of their ability to pay.

So today, we are dropping our paywall and making it possible for anyone to read our website for free by providing nothing more than an email address. Instead of a paywall, we are launching a donation-based digital membership program that will allow readers to pay what they can to help us deliver the news you rely on.

It’s a bold move: Reporting the news is expensive, and the converging market forces of inflation and an anticipated (or possibly already here) recession could further endanger local newsrooms like ours. But we know it’s the right thing to do.

For the Sun-Times’ next chapter to be successful, it is essential for us to be truly open and inclusive so we can tell the stories that matter to all parts of our community. A membership program connects our revenue model more closely to how well we serve our community, holding us accountable to you, our readers. We think that’s a good thing, because if we’re not serving you, we’re not doing our jobs. So we’re taking a leap of faith and putting our trust in you.

This is a really open and honest announcement, noting that it still does need the support of readers to survive, but rather than beating people over the head with a paywall, and basically treating people who want to see the news as potential thieves, the Sun-Times is being open, and honest, and treating its community with respect. Hopefully it works out better than the paywall approach. It would be great to see more news organizations realize that locking up all your content is often a path to irrelevance.

Volvo’s upcoming flagship electric vehicle, the EX90 SUV, will feature bidirectional charging capabilities with enough battery capacity to power a customer’s home, the company announced.

Bidirectional charging is quickly becoming a highly sought-after feature in many electric vehicles. And it works exactly like it sounds: with unidirectional (one-way) EV chargers, electricity flows from the electric grid into the electric vehicle; with bidirectional (two-way) EV chargers, electricity can flow both ways.

Volvo’s EX90, which will have its official debut in November, is the latest to boast the capability. Customers in “select markets” will be able to use the car’s lithium-ion battery to “power their homes and portable devices,” the...

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Back in January, a particular stretch of freight rail line in Los Angeles made international news for being the site of a massive, ongoing train robbery, with empty boxes and packages blanketing the rail bed. Almost a full year later, Union Pacific, the freight rail company that runs trains along that track, has identified a solution: Slightly better locks.

In an announcement to its customers—the shippers who actually load and secure freight rail cars—the company declared that effective December 5 it will require freight car doors be locked with cables or bolts at least one-eighth of an inch thick in order to deter “ordinary seal removal techniques, such as bolt cutters.” The railroad will no longer consider tin or plastic seals sufficient. 

As someone who has had multiple locked bikes in New York City stolen, I have some bad news for Union Pacific. For an individual with bolt cutters, a one-eighth inch cable will provide approximately zero inconvenience or theft deterrent. Cable locks less than half an inch thick can easily be broken by a single squeeze of a bolt cutter. It actually takes less time to break a ⅛-inch cable lock with bolt cutters then it would to unlock the thing with a key. 

In June, Union Pacific was sued by a Singapore company whose goods were stolen off the train. In the announcement, Union Pacific said it has the right to refuse any container that does not comply with the new rules and is not responsible for any cargo loss that does. But it will happily notify customers via email if their goods are stolen.