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For the Pentagon, films like Top Gun: Maverick are more than just a movie.

It came like a bolt from the blue, a gift from the heavens. In 1986, audiences flocked to theaters to see Tony Scott’s Top Gun, starring a fresh-faced Tom Cruise as Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, a hotshot Navy aviator bent on stardom. They kept coming for seven months. When the dust settled, the film had brought in over $176 million. Unlike its protagonist, who came in second at the eponymous elite flight academy, the film ended 1986 the top earner of the year.

But for the Navy, Top Gun was more than just a movie. It was a recruitment bonanza.

Military recruiting stations were set up outside movie theaters, catching wannabe flyboys hopped up on adrenaline and vibes. Others enlisted on their own. Interest in the armed forces, primarily the Navy and the Air Force, rose that year, though it’s unclear just how much. Naval aviator applications were claimed to have increased by a staggering 500 percent.

Hollywood knows how to sell the life of a soldier. Top Gun paints the life of an elite pilot as mostly a real-life video game, with young men competing to top the charts at the academy. (The rankings were a fiction invented for the film, though the school is real.) In a sort of coda to the story, the pilots do engage in real combat — but we never know who the enemy is, barely get an explanation as to the mission, and mostly see them pulling off daring maneuvers to great acclaim. And in 1986, the US wasn’t engaged in a real-life war. Vietnam was becoming a more distant memory for young people. Who wouldn’t want to be a hero?

So Top Gun was more than a gangbusters earner for Paramount; it was a coup for the Pentagon. In exchange for the enlistment bounce and a sexy, exciting perspective on the pilot’s life being presented to the general public, the military lent considerable aid to the production, from locations and equipment to personnel. Producer Jerry Bruckheimer has said that Top Gun would not have been made without the military’s assistance.

This is far from an anomaly.

Paramount Pictures

The American movie industry and the American military have had a long, well-documented, and, on the whole, mutually beneficial relationship since before World War II. Certainly, movies about war and its effects have been made without the aid of the military. But the military has often seen opportunity in the movies: for boosting the morale of the public, altering the popular image of wars and soldiers, and encouraging young people to enlist. In a film industry concerned primarily with profits and technology rather than ideology — which is to say, one essentially conservative in orientation — the partnership has often been an ideal match.

But the nature of the collaboration has changed over time, with shifts in the US military’s role in the world as well as Hollywood’s aims. A movie like Top Gun: Maverick enters a very different world from its predecessor, and comes from an industry that has set its sights on raking in profit from not just America, but the whole world. It’s not just entertainment. It’s the apex of a lengthy and complicated history.

The Pentagon and Hollywood go way, way back

What happens when a large group of people immerse themselves in the same metanarrative over time? They begin to be directed by its implications, to see what it tells them as, essentially, true. In the case of the movies — for decades the mode of entertainment in America — that means there was a reality to cinema’s implications about the heroism of soldiers, the reasons for the struggle, the rightness of their cause. That has made Hollywood an attractive and powerful resource to the American military — and vice versa.

The first Academy Award for Best Picture was awarded in 1929 to Wings, a silent war drama directed by World War I combat pilot veteran William Wellman and made with substantial support from the War Department (the Pentagon of its time). Wellman dedicated the film “to those young warriors of the sky whose wings are folded about them forever.” It was a massive hit.

Thus a pattern was set, with filmmakers concerned about authenticity — and hoping to use some authentic equipment — soliciting help from the military.

The relationship became even tighter when World War II began. The War Department needed to sell the war to the public, boost morale, and make the Allies’ case. They realized that Hollywood represented what might be an untapped resource. Mark Harris, a critic and film historian, wrote the book Five Came Back about the contributions that five legendary directors — Frank Capra, John Ford, John Huston, George Stevens, and William Wyler — made to the WWII propaganda effort at the government’s behest. The work ranged from those intended for troops (like Capra’s Why We Fight series, which was eventually shown to the general public as well) to documentaries made for the general public with the intention of influencing public opinion. It was effective.

That the government was the driving force behind these films — which were called propaganda briefly, before the word took on a pejorative sense — seems, to our ears, pretty sinister. But, as Harris explains, things were a little more complex during that time. The military saw the opportunity to support “morale films” or “educational films” that would help the American public understand what we were fighting for and against. Capra’s Why We Fight “makes the point over and over again that these three entities, Germany, Japan, and Italy, have people in the thrall of lunatic dictators, and that those guys were trying to create a slave world and what we were fighting for was a free world,” Harris explained. So this was an ideological aim, one on which Hollywood and the War Department were largely aligned.

Yet the War Department rarely dictated the exact message they wished the filmmakers to convey — they weren’t “stenographers,” as Harris puts it. That means military support in this era was mostly a handing over of the reins, with relatively little input into the final results. “What they had the ability to do was say to John Ford, ‘We’re going to send you to Midway and we want you to film this battle,’” Harris said. “But they didn’t say, ‘This is exactly what we want you to do. This is the message we want you to get across.’”

That doesn’t mean the military had no interest in the message they were sending. Huston’s documentary Let There Be Light — shot in 1946 and showing soldiers in a hospital living with the trauma of war — was banned by the Army, who feared it would have a demoralizing effect on post-war recruitment. Let There Be Light was suppressed until a belated release in 1980.

U.S. Army Pictorial Services

In the post-War decades, however, ideological harmony between much of Hollywood and the military disappeared. So, you see a pivot, Harris says. “After Vietnam, the Pentagon would never say to Hollywood, ‘We’re all in the same business,’ which was basically the argument that was made during World War II. That came to an end with Vietnam, and what replaced it was this more transactional relationship.”

It’s not that things got bad. They just became about business rather than ideals. The situation, Harris says, went “from the military saying to Hollywood, ‘We need you to help us,’ to the military saying to Hollywood, ‘We’ll help you. We’ll give you access.’”

That transactional relationship is highly evident in the string of Reagan-era blockbusters that aimed to not just turn out audiences, but — implicitly or not — rehabilitate the image of the military in a post-Vietnam time of mistrust. Top Gun might be the most successful in that attempt.

So you want to make a movie

Say you’re a Hollywood filmmaker (or TV creator) who wants to tell a story that involves the military in some manner, even if your movie is about aliens or zombies or superheroes. In some countries, you’d have to submit your script or your movie for approval to the government before it could get made or distributed. But this is America. You can exercise your First Amendment right and tell any story you want.

Except, hang on. Making a movie or a TV show is expensive. One way to get a studio to agree to produce your script is to trim the budget, and you can do that by cutting down on paying for equipment or extras. Maybe you’re concerned with making sure everything looks authentic, or with getting the Army’s response to disciplinary matters correct. Or maybe you just want to make sure you’ve got rank details straight.

So you decide to ask for help. Depending on what you need, you might liaise with the designated entertainment coordinator in a particular branch of the military, or with the Pentagon generally. A tiny number of military personnel spend years, even decades, in the liaison role — reading scripts, working with directors, giving notes, and ultimately deciding if the military will lend its aid to the project.

Todd Breasseale was one of them, a career Army officer who worked as the Army’s motion picture and television entertainment industry liaison for about six years beginning in 2002. He retired from the Army to join the Obama administration in 2014, and is now deputy assistant to the Secretary for Public Affairs at the Pentagon. In his liaison capacity, he told me by phone, his duties ranged from reading scripts for accuracy at the request of filmmakers to determining whether the Army would lend equipment, location, or personnel support to productions.

“Sometimes it was entire scene rewrites that they needed help with,” he said. Other times, he might advise Steven Spielberg on technical details for a sequence in War of the Worlds, or work with the Transformers production to access locations that the Army owns.

Often the role of the military comes in making equipment not currently in use available to production companies at cost — “every time you see a piece of military hardware that is not created through CGI, that cost is borne out by the production company,” he said. The company pays about how much it costs to keep a plane in the air hourly, far cheaper than renting commercial aircraft. “Unless a specific training mission was prescheduled and planned to be flown anyway, the production company would pay the hourly rate for that aircraft.”

Soldiers are sometimes used as extras or pilots, too — perhaps if a filmmaker wants to shoot footage of a flyby. “Soldiers are paid anyway,” Breasseale said, because active duty service members receive a 24/7 salary. So the cost to the production company isn’t the union-mandated salary of a professional actor, stunt pilot, or extra; it’s just a per diem. “For instance, we shot a picture up in Canada and we brought in actual soldiers because they needed to be able to fly the Blackhawk helicopters. So they paid for the soldiers’ transportation up there, they paid a rate field cost for the Blackhawks, they paid the hourly rate for the Blackhawks, and then they paid the per diem and hotel expenses for the service members who are on set.”

In other words, the taxpayer isn’t directly paying for the production costs, since the equipment and personnel would be getting paid for either way. The studio, however, gains a huge benefit if a deal is struck.

That said, the trade-offs can be high. Frequently, notes are returned to filmmakers, asking them to change plot points in ways that make the film more palatable to the military, and specifically to the liaison who is working with the production. And the issues with this have been well-documented, perhaps most notably in reporter David L. Robb’s 2004 book Operation Hollywood: How the Pentagon Shapes and Censors the Movies. Robb documents cases in which prominent filmmakers agreed to substantial rewrites to paint military personnel in a more positive light, or, at times, excise material in historical films that don’t fit the military’s official narrative. As he puts it:

Millions of dollars can be shaved off a film’s budget if the military agrees to lend its equipment and assistance. And all a producer has to do to get that assistance is submit five copies of the script to the Pentagon for approval; make whatever script changes the Pentagon suggests; film the script exactly as approved by the Pentagon; and prescreen the finished product for Pentagon officials before it’s shown to the public.

Some filmmakers refuse to comply with the notes, and they usually end up going their separate ways. But in many prominent cases, they agree, incorporating the military’s suggested changes into the script.

For instance, as Robb writes in his book, the Navy agreed to let the original Top Gun production shoot on a naval base near San Diego, but that meant making some changes. Maverick’s love interest, played in the movie by Kelly McGillis, was originally written as a fellow soldier. But the navy forbids officers and enlisted personnel from fraternizing, so the script was changed in order to gain access to the naval base.

Robb also writes (from 2004) that a sequel to Top Gun was thought to be impossible to make because the Navy feared it might hurt recruiting. The massive Tailhook scandal in 1991, in which navy pilots molested women at the Las Vegas Hilton Hotel, cast the movie’s womanizing and drinking in a new light. The new film was, of course, eventually made, with considerable involvement from the military — and both drinking and sexual relationships (and the homophobic slurs of the original) are handled far differently. (It’s also very good, the rare and exhilarating sequel that transcends its original and doesn’t seem purely invented to build up excitement for the next installment.)

So is the Pentagon censoring cinema?

Even if you take a dim view, as many do, of the process of adopting military notes into scripts in return for support, it’s part of a long history of Hollywood self-censorship, often aimed at keeping the government from censoring them directly. In 1934, for instance, the major Hollywood studios voluntarily adopted a “Production Code” that banned, among other things, showing interracial marriage, or story lines in which clergy are disparaged or criminals are shown not being punished for their actions. Conformity to the Code lasted into the 1960s, when it was eventually replaced by an early version of the MPA ratings system we’re familiar with today.

You could see productions’ willingness to bend on these matters as a continuation of that tradition. Breasseale, for his part, sees this as a reasonable accommodation to request for productions seeking not just accuracy in storytelling, but an economic advantage. “The rules that I operated when I was out there is that it needed to be plausible,” he said. “So if you’re going to show a soldier committing a war crime, then you’re going to also need to show how the uniform code of military justice deals with that, and the punishment that they would suffer.”

You might reasonably ask why the military even bothers getting involved when they just as reasonably could refuse to ever participate in a film production. Breasseale cited several reasons. The first is recruitment. “If you see positive representations of your military — well, frankly, it doesn’t even have to be positive,” he said. Seeing the military in action, sometimes portrayed as heroes and sometimes portrayed as members of an organization with a strict code of military justice, can be immensely appealing. It sure was for those who saw Top Gun.

There’s another reason, particularly in our time, when despite having been at war for two decades, Breasseale pointed out, a sizable number of Americans haven’t had much contact with the military in real life. “There’s a lot to be said about the necessity to educate the American public about the military they’re paying for,” he said.

In Breasseale’s view, the reason to participate in a production was that it would help provide a “substantive military portrayal.” If, during negotiations with a production, he felt that the studio “just wanted cheap props, essentially, that would typically get rejected out of turn.” He might tell them to work with unions, rather than just trying to get nearly-free soldiers. He’d also reject a production that was asking for the kind of equipment that could imperil “the believability of a picture” if not shown the way the military would use it — that they wanted to “bring a knife to a gun fight.”

The whole process, he says, is reasonable and humane. He started working as the Army liaison in 2002, when “we were just starting a new era of war by politicians who had failed to find other alternatives,” as he puts it. “A lot of the scripts I was receiving at the time, even if they were set in contemporary settings in Iraq or Afghanistan or on a contemporary time period, were really movies about Vietnam. There were no substantive, decent, high-quality movies [about the military] between eras. There was an aura of the broken, crazy military vet who’s just one argument away from snapping and losing his shit.”

“So,” he says, “a lot of what I did was help humanize a military that people have no touch with.”

Robb sees this through a different lens; after all, both Hollywood and the military are selling something. He writes that “in the movies, when companies pay producers to show their products on screen, it’s called ‘product placement.’ But when the government provides incentives to producers to make the military look good in their movies, it’s known by a different name. It’s called ‘propaganda.’”

Disney

Furthermore, he argues, “the military’s approval process … isn’t about making movies more authentic, it’s about creating positive images; it’s about making the military look better than it really is; it’s about making the military more attractive to potential recruits, taxpayers, and Congress.”

You can see the point. The most popular movies on the planet currently are those in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, produced by Marvel Studios, which was acquired by the Walt Disney Company in 2009. Disney has a long, long history of working with the Pentagon, stretching back to public information and training cartoons as well as insignia produced during World War II.

From the launch of the MCU, even before its Disney days, the same has often been true. All three Iron Man movies received military support. So did Captain America: The First Avenger. When Captain Marvel arrived in theaters in 2019, featuring a main character who is an Air Force pilot, it had been preceded by a flurry of cross-promotional materials with the Air Force, including an ad in which filmmakers and stars praised their collaboration:

Though the US military plays a prominent role in many MCU films, they haven’t always worked together. Conflict arose, for instance, during production of The Avengers, in which the Pentagon found S.H.I.E.L.D., the shadowy fictional espionage organization that works closely with the Avengers, to be too “unrealistic.” The Avengers went ahead without Pentagon support.

Should we be worried about this partnership? Depends on who you ask.

Whether you agree more with Breasseale’s perspective or Robb’s depends on your answer to a fundamental question. From TV and movies to video games and more, the entertainment industry and the military have long seen one another as partners, ideologically and economically — but should they?

And if your view of the military is generally positive — as it is for most Americans — does this still count as propaganda?

In his foreword to Robb’s book, Jonathan Turley, a public interest law professor at George Washington University Law School, notes that “propaganda denotes a certain product; a packaged news account or film developed by a government or an organization to shape opinion … yet this is not traditional propaganda since the military does not generate the product itself and does not compel others to produce it. Rather, it achieves the same result through indirect influence; securing tailored historical accounts by withholding important resources.”

It’s that “tailored historical accounts” part that troubles me, at least in principle. For many people, movies are their most direct access point to the tales of war and heroism and history; think about World War II, and the images that spring to your mind are almost certainly culled from films. In the future, when those involved have passed away and our cultural relationship to truth has only gotten more corrupted, how will we access the truth about the ethically murky wars of the past several decades? Even if we know the facts and the films differ, will we care?

What does it mean if the military has the financial power to say what version of history gets made?

I ask Breasseale about this. “If I am party to a picture being made that I know presents only the wrong side, but an unfactual version of demonstrably provable events, then that’s propaganda. And so, if you can stay on the right side of those topics, to me, that is simply recruiting, or education. But it’s not propaganda.”

“There have been academics, very serious academics, who’ve written books about this sort of thing, who believe that any support whatsoever to the motion picture industry is necessarily propaganda,” he concludes. “I just can’t get there. I can’t get my head around it, because it is not a black-and-white issue.”

He’s right that it’s not a black-and-white issue — not at all. For one, Turley and Robb both note that some legal minds argue this use of military equipment, even if it’s not at taxpayer expense, is unconstitutional.

Furthermore, at times (as in the case of the 2002 film Windtalkers) the military requires a film about an otherwise marginalized group to run against the established historical record. If a few military officers (who may have variable political agendas) hold that much power with relatively low accountability, how dangerous is the whole collaboration in the long run?

Ironically, we may not be asking this question all that much longer. The development of high-quality computer-generated effects and even performers could eventually eliminate or greatly reduce the need on Hollywood’s side to strike a deal with the military to get a picture made. Lower-budget films may find themselves more readily in a place to tell all kinds of stories about history.

Meanwhile, a film like Top Gun: Maverick’s charm comes, in part, from its almost nostalgic feeling, a film about heroism and military prowess that isn’t tethered to a particular war or enemy. But it also feels like the natural endpoint of that military-movie marriage, one that’s graduated from the Reagan-era, post-Vietnam rah-rah of Top Gun and into a geopolitically sticky world in which Hollywood wants to make movies for the whole globe.

The film’s nearly three-year delay between production and distribution gave journalists plenty of time to dig into the ways the military and Paramount had cooperated. We still don’t know who they’re fighting in Top Gun: Maverick, and early reporting noted that the Japanese and Taiwanese flags on Tom Cruise’s iconic leather aviator jacket had been shifted to more generic symbols.

It may just be that Hollywood has moved beyond its desire to work with the US military at all. It’s not that they’re no longer on America’s side; it’s just that they have to be on everyone’s side. And the transactional partnerships that come from that need are what will shape the future of Hollywood.

Top Gun: Maverick premiered at the Cannes Film Festival and opens in the US on May 27.

While a lot of the scandals surrounding “big tech” have been overblown, one that hasn’t been discussed enough is Silicon Valley companies’ abuse of user two-factor authentication data. If you’ve been napping, two-factor authentication (preferably of the email variety) helps protect your accounts from being compromised by hackers.

But when both Facebook and Twitter implemented it, company executives apparently thought it would be a great idea to use the email and phone data collected for marketing purposes. That’s a massive problem, as it completely undermines trust in the two-factor authentication process (and these companies’ security standards in general), making it less likely that users would protect themselves.

For much of the last decade, Twitter told its users that it was collecting their phone and email addresses for account-security purposes. But they didn’t inform users that they would also use this information to send targeted ads to customers. When it was revealed, Twitter claimed it didn’t know this was happening, which if true is still… sloppy and bad in terms of both privacy and security standards.

In 2020, reports emerged that the company would likely be fined up to $250 million for the behavior by the FTC. This week the long-looming action finally dropped, with the FTC announcing that Twitter had struck a $150 million settlement with the DOJ and FTC:

from May 2013 to September 2019, Twitter told its users that it was collecting their telephone numbers and email addresses for account-security purposes, but failed to disclose that it also would use that information to help companies send targeted advertisements to consumers. The complaint further alleges that Twitter falsely claimed to comply with the European Union-U.S. and Swiss-U.S. Privacy Shield Frameworks, which prohibit companies from processing user information in ways that are not compatible with the purposes authorized by the users. 

It was underplayed in the scope of other concerns, but big portion of the $5 billion fine levied against Facebook by the FTC also involved this same exploitation of information provided specifically for 2FA.

There are obviously numerous other companies that have chosen to undermine user security by monetizing 2FA information, but given the FTC is too underfunded and understaffed to handle them all, these fines have to be large enough to act as a warning shot over the bow in the absence of federal legislation.

While the tech giant is still plagued by current supply chain challenges, Cisco stayed in first place for the third consecutive year in Gartner’s Global Supply Chain Top 25 report thanks to its ability to adapt internally and externally, Gartner said.

Google has announced that it’s adding the ability to use keyboard shortcuts to cut, copy, and paste files in Drive, as long as you’re using Chrome. The feature will use th— okay, hold on just a minute here. Are you really trying to tell me that we couldn’t already do this?

Sure enough, when I went to Google Drive on the web and pressed Command + C on a file, then went into a folder and pressed Command + V, nothing happened. And this December 2021 archive of Drive’s list of keyboard shortcuts doesn’t say anything about the functions. Which is fine, really — it’s not like keyboard shortcuts for copy, cut, and paste have been around since the functions’ invention in the 1970s.

The feature’s rolling out now, though, and Google’s post says...

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Google Docs is getting an absolutely lovely feature that could cut down a lot of busywork when it comes to properly formatting your document: the ability to select multiple sections of text at once. If you’ve got two sentences separated by a heading, or want to apply the same effect to three different words throughout a paragraph, you can now do so by simply selecting the text all at once, and applying your changes.

Selecting multiple text sections is extremely simple: select the first bit of text however you would normally, then press either the Command (⌘) or Control key, depending on whether you’re using a Mac or Windows machine. Keep holding it down, and select the other bits of text you want. After you’ve got everything selected,...

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Developing countries have more than double the amount of people positive that the Metaverse will impact their lives, and they’d use it daily in comparison to de...

‘Combining our assets and talented team with Broadcom’s existing enterprise software portfolio, all housed under the VMware brand, creates a remarkable enterprise software player,’ says VMware CEO Raghu Raghuram.

In January 2020, Elizabeth Milbauer’s house caught fire. No one was home at the time, but the house was a total loss due to smoke damage. After the insurance payout and moving in with her mother for seven months, she and her family bought a new house not far from the old one in Lodi, California, a city of some 65,000 people outside Stockton.

A Navy veteran and financial analyst, Milbauer still wrestles with the fact that the house fire was, in retrospect, a sort of blessing. Well-insured, the family had the resources to buy a brand new house and replace any losses, even upgrade. Milbauer picked out everything for her new home, each piece of furniture, appliance, and tile. In almost every respect, she says, the family came out of the fire better off than it had been before.

After moving in, Milbauer spent nights decorating the new space. Once the kids went to bed, she would move furniture and photos, or hang decorative pieces in different places, sometimes until the early hours of the morning. But while the inside of the house was constantly changing, the outside, and Lodi, were still the same, a classic California suburban community with houses close together and streets she didn’t feel comfortable with her two sons playing in. So Milbauer and her husband Brian, a paramedic, started house shopping again.

“I would say we started looking because we realized that we finally had everything we wanted inside of the house, but we had nothing that we wanted outside of it,” Milbauer told Motherboard in a recent interview. “I just want to be able to wake up and look out of a window and like what I see.”

Milbauer created a basic Zillow filter with no price restrictions just to see what was out there: More than five acres, three bedrooms and two bathrooms. Then, if she found a property she liked—that wasn’t outrageously out of her price range—she looked for the nearest coffee shop as a sign of “life and vibrancy.” Next came searches for hospitals, schools, and jobs nearby.

It didn’t take long for her to find a house she fell in love with, and one surprisingly affordable given their budget of around $500,000—hardly a princely sum in California’s housing market. Nestled on a ridge in a northern California forest, the house was just minutes from a pristine lake with a bald eagle nest, scenic hiking, and abundant nature views. It was also just a few minutes’ drive from a town the Milbauers took to immediately, a place with the community feel they desired while also having lots of opportunity to start their own business. The town is named Paradise.

If you have heard of Paradise, California, it is likely because in November 2018 the town burned down. The Camp Fire wildfire swept through Paradise—then a town of some 25,000 people, about a quarter of whom were 65 or older—causing an urban inferno survivors described in apocalyptic terms and which was the subject of multiple emotionally devastating documentaries. 85 people died and 87 percent of the town’s homes were destroyed.

In the years since the fire, media coverage has largely focused on two separate but related questions: How will the town rebuild? And is it possible to do so in a way that potentially makes it less susceptible to another cataclysmic fire? These were and remain important questions. But as the U.S. housing market, and California’s in particular, continues to make home ownership in many places financially untenable to huge swaths of residents, Paradise—a place that recently burned down and could well burn down again—has become yet another semi-rural, bucolic town experiencing a housing price boom, one that’s actually outpacing adjacent towns and cities.

Paradise is still in the early rebuilding stages, but to the people moving there, it offers something other places do not, something that is worth the risk despite the ever-present reminder of what could be lost.

Since the fire’s immediate aftermath, who would move back to Paradise has been an open question. Some were determined to rebuild a place they loved. Others were too traumatized to ever set foot there again.

Katie McConnell, a PhD candidate at Yale School of the Environment, has been doing some of the only research into the human migration impacts of wildfires, and the Camp Fire specifically. It’s an under-studied subject, McConnell says, because wildfires typically devastate vast areas of wilderness but relatively few human-made structures, typically fewer than 2,500 a year, although there has been an exponential increase in buildings destroyed in wildfires since 2017. It’s a trend experts like McConnell warn is likely to continue as climate change makes wildfire-inducing conditions more frequent and extreme.

As a result, experts don’t have a great understanding of what people tend to do when a wildfire destroys their town, which in itself is a rare occurrence. For one study, McConnell interviewed members of 24 households who decided not to move back to Paradise. Most, she found, were retired and didn’t want to spend years rebuilding a home when they didn’t even know how much longer they had to live.

Even those whose homes miraculously survived worried what the future would hold. Sheri Palade, a local realtor, has lived in Paradise her entire life. She managed to evacuate the morning of the fire and her house somehow survived. She told me about this while sitting in the Paradise Starbucks with her friend and fellow realtor Doug Speicher, also a lifelong Paradise resident, who lost his house in the fire (but not his Toyota 4Runner, which he abandoned on the side of the road next to a half dozen other vehicles only to later find all the vehicles destroyed except for his).

GIF credit: Peter Hansen

“I remember, within a couple days of the fire, we found out her house was standing,” Speicher recalled, “and it was like, ‘Oh my God, who is ever going to want that house?’” Because, as he remembered thinking, “Who wants to live in a town that’s burned out?”

“Yeah, it was like we lost our life savings,” Palade said. They both thought Palade’s surviving house would crater in value.

But, as it turned out, they were wrong. “It’s worth more,” Palade laughed.

Almost four years after the fire—four unpredictable years of a pandemic, the rise of remote work, an inflationary housing market, and the emergence of wildfires across the western United States as a bleak annual tradition that now threatens some 80 million people’s homes every year—Paradise is rebuilding, faster than some imagined it could. The town has granted 2,139 building permits, according to its website keeping track of the rebuild on a weekly basis, with 1,358 having received certificates of occupancy. Plus, the town received grant money for major infrastructure improvements like fiber optic internet and burying some power lines and sewers under the street.

Paradise also has an understandable newfound zeal for fire prevention measures, including so-called “defensible space” requirements that require property owners to clear the land around the house of dead vegetation, brush, and tall grass, among other measures. Accordingly, tree removal and other types of landscaping have become big business in Paradise. There is open debate about how effective such measures, as well as the town’s effort to buy and clear vulnerable properties around the ridge, would truly be in a cataclysmic scenario like the Camp Fire or even less catastrophic but still dangerous wildfire scenarios. Regardless, however effective such expenses would be in making Paradise fire-resistant, all that building and land-clearing comes with contractors, subcontractors, and jobs to support them.

Speicher and Palade testify to the boomtown feel and how it contrasts with Paradise’s pre-fire vibe. Paradise experienced its first growth spurt in the 1960s and 1970s when its population quadrupled to more than 20,000 people in about 15 years and the town was officially incorporated in 1979. Much of the new population relocated from the more expensive coastal areas of the state which were rapidly losing their rural pockets to suburban development in the postwar years.

It’s easy to understand why thousands of families chose Paradise. It is indisputably gorgeous. The town gets four seasons but a mild winter usually without much snow. Until the fire, it was a picturesque mountain town that ceased to be rural in the mid-20th century and afforded such conveniences like local grocery stores, hardware stores, restaurants, and a hospital. But, thanks in part to dense pine tree cover, it never felt suburban. Countless hiking, mountain biking, kayaking, and other outdoor activities are close by.

And, most importantly, it was affordable to families without salaries from one of California’s booming industries like aerospace, military defense contractors, or tech. In her interviews, McConnell asked those who left why they had moved to Paradise in the first place.

“A lot of people moved there because it was a place where they could own a home while not having a tech job salary,” she said. “You can be a builder or custodian or a teacher, earning a middle income, lower income salary, and still own a home. And I think that's almost impossible in probably much of the rest of California, much of the rest of the U.S. West at this point. And so I think the trade off then becomes, like, yes, you can live here, it's a beautiful place to live, you can buy a home. But there's also sort of a known fire risk.”

At the time of Paradise’s population boom, the term “wildland urban interface” did not exist in the U.S., but Paradise was a perfect example of the now-widely recognized wildfire management concept. The U.S. Fire Administration describes WUI as “the zone of transition between unoccupied land and human development.” To many prospective homeowners, including many of the ones I spoke to in Paradise, that is essentially the selling point, the best of both worlds.

They were hardly alone. In his 1997 book World Fire: The Culture of Fire on Earth, Stephen Pyne tracked this migration. Between 1950 and 1990, the U.S. added 100 million people, more than the entire U.S. population in 1910. Most of those people went to what the Census Bureau calls metropolitan statistical areas encompassing virtually all exurban development around a city. Those areas expanded into the wilderness. By 1987, such areas accounted for 16.2 percent of the U.S. land, up from 5.9 percent in 1950.

Pyne’s assessment of the people who live in these areas was blunt. “Their income comes from elsewhere, as do their values and expectations. Typically they want urban amenities but without an urban setting. They expect urban services such as sanitation, police, education, and fire protection but not urban bureaucracies, taxes, and hassles. They want a rural setting without having to rely on a rural economy. They want the best of both worlds, and are willing to fall through institutional cracks to get them. They assume that fires occur elsewhere. And when fires do strike, often they expect that someone else will fight them.” From the perspective of fire protection, he calls these “intermix” environments “the worst of all worlds.”

At least some people who lived in Paradise understood this. “I grew up here the whole time knowing the town could burn down,” Speicher said. “Every year we had fires in the canyons. It’s always been at the forefront of my mind.”

When the fire did come, it was worse than anyone imagined the worst could be. Some buildings like the Palade house and the Starbucks survived, but the vast majority did not. The destruction was so complete that the entire shape and feel of the town changed. Empty lots abound. Many tall pines survived with the canopies never having burned. But others did burn. A once healthily shaded community is now sun-drenched. Suddenly, some lots had new, sprawling views of the canyons.

Gradually the scope of the rebuilding project came to view. Damaged trees had to be cut down and removed by the tens of thousands before they fell onto roads or temporary homes. And, of course, businesses and homes had to be rebuilt.

The money didn’t come flowing in right at first. “It was very slow at the beginning. People were skeptical. Contractors were skeptical,” Palade said. But, right around the start of the pandemic, that dynamic gradually changed. Contractors and, soon, prospective homeowners started to see opportunity in what was once devastation.

With the boomtown comes boomtown prices. Paradise used to have significantly cheaper homes than Chico, a city of about 100,000 people about a 15-minute drive down the canyon from Paradise, not to mention Sacramento (about an hour away) or the Bay Area (two to three hours). But, in the last two years, the gap has steadily narrowed to the point where there isn’t much price difference between Paradise and Chico anymore for the same house square footage, although Paradise lots still tend to be larger.

Driving around the town now, it is hard for the fire to not be at the forefront of the mind. Most lots are still in some state of clearance, vacancy, or rebuild. The trees that remain standing are mostly bare below the greened upper canopies. Stray details like closed iron gates guarding an empty lot haunt the landscape. Most houses look new because they are.

But what has changed is the relative risk Paradise presents compared to other areas of the country. Coastal regions are more at risk of extreme flooding—of houses literally falling into the ocean—than they were during Paradise’s first population boom. Larger areas of the western U.S. are at extreme fire risk, not just especially fire-prone areas like Paradise. And extreme, deadly heat threatens places like Portland and the rest of the Pacific Northwest that until recently have rarely experienced triple digit temperatures.

“Almost everyone in this country is living in hazardous areas, and for many people, that's not a first order concern for them,” McConnell said, adding that she sees similar attitudes dominate on coastal cities where people are moving to places like Miami despite facing existential threat from climate disasters. “I just want to push back on the idea that people are uniquely choosing to overlook or ignore fire risk when I see that happening, frankly, in a lot of coastal very large cities as well.”

The broader societal events since the fire like the pandemic, housing price inflation, and rise of remote work all contribute to a town that is rebuilding even as it finds out what kind of place it will soon become.

There are 145 listings on Zillow for lots and finished homes in Paradise as of this writing, compared to 200 in Chico, a city with some 20 times Paradise’s current population.

Finished home listings sometimes allude to the fire without mentioning it directly. “Tall evergreen trees that are still standing,” one listing for an 1,800 square-foot 3 bed, 2 bath for $559,500 says, before advertising the fire insurance cost ($876 per year) before any other attribute about the house. Many lot listings mention a "prior home" that existed there before: "Driveway still intact. This is a wonderful home site. Come and be part of rebuilding Paradise!"

It is rarer to directly mention the Camp Fire, as this lot formerly with a 3,000 square-foot home on it for $157,000 for two acres does ("Prior to the Camp Fire there was a 3 bedroom/2 bathroom, 3,056 square foot home located here. Lot has been cleared and hazardous trees removed, but still with an abundance of evergreen trees and foliage." But, more commonly, listings for new homes—such as this one for a 1,500-square foot farmhouse-style 3 bed 2 bath for $475,000—read like a home listing any other place in the country, as if there is nothing noteworthy about the land at all. But even these listings provide overhead view photos in Zillow that can’t help but make one wonder what happened to the place and why the surrounding lots are so empty and trees scarred. "Come to Paradise and build your dream," another says.

Because of the sudden and extreme disruption the fire caused, it’s difficult to easily determine who is moving back to Paradise and where they lived before the fire, a dynamic highlighted by the anecdotes Palade and Speicher have from selling hundreds of properties there. Some people swore they would never move back to Paradise after the fire, cashed out and moved away, only to find they missed Paradise and returned. Others look in Paradise knowing nothing about the area only to find out about the fire while they’re house hunting. “Now, we’re like experts in how to deal with people’s emotional roller coasters,” Speicher said.

Jacquelyn Chase and Peter Hansen, professors at California State University, Chico, have gotten closest to answering this question by tracking building permits. They found that in the first two years after the fire, most building permits were granted to the same person who owned the land pre-fire. But starting in 2021, more permits started going to new owners. That trend continued for the rest of 2021 when Chase and Hansen did their study. Overall, 44 percent of the permits issued have been for people who did not own the parcel at the time of the fire.

That trend of more and more buyers coming from out of the area matches the estimates Palade and Speicher offered. Of the properties she sells in Paradise these days, Palade estimated 75 percent of the buyers did not live in Paradise at the time of the fire. Speicher said 50 to 70 percent.

“I think that there’s not a lot of gray, it’s black and white,” Palade said about whether prospective buyers think the town could burn down again. “Either they absolutely think it and they’re not wanting any part of it or they’re like, ‘What’s the problem? It’s fine.’”

In disaster migration research, McConnell says people who all have a shared behavior—such as not moving back to the town they lived in or moving to a town that just suffered a natural disaster—tend to have other similarities, too. For example, many of the families she interviewed that didn’t return are elderly (so were nearly all of the deaths in the Camp Fire). And, they took the opportunity of the fire to move to a politically conservative state such as Idaho which they felt better reflected their values.

Likewise, McConnell added, there may be shared traits among the people moving to Paradise, ones that McConnell said “are part of this larger process of population change after a fire that’s really interesting but not well documented.”

The sign next to Taylor Tanner’s front door says “Home Sweet Home.” As she waved me in on a 63-degree and sunny spring morning as her four-year-old son Easton watched TV, she told me it didn’t take long for Paradise to feel like that.

“The people at the grocery store knew my husband’s name within the first week,” Tanner said. “My son just had his birthday last Saturday and my coworker came over. There were tons of kids here, 14 kids. And she said, ‘Didn’t you just move here? How do you know so many people?’ I don’t know.”

The Tanners moved to Paradise in August from Texas. Due to her husband Kristofer’s job as a power lineman, they relocated several times in Texas, with the most recent stint in west Texas. Taylor, who works as a dental hygienist, was looking forward to leaving the area because there were few opportunities for the outdoor activities they love. She also found it hard to make friends, always feeling distant from the rest of the community.

When Kristofer became an instructor at a technical school for power lineman, they had a choice of where to live next among the school’s locations: Boise, Idaho and Oroville, California. Taylor meticulously compared living costs of both areas as well as schools, job opportunities, recreational areas, and other prospects. Ultimately, they settled on Oroville, and Paradise specifically. Housing prices were essentially the same—Boise has undergone its own pandemic housing price boom—but there were many more on the market to choose from in Paradise. Plus, she could make more as a dental hygienist in Chico than in Boise. And while Boise also has mountains for great mountain biking and hiking, Paradise is only a few hours from the coast, Sacramento, Reno, and other destinations, whereas Boise felt relatively isolated.

But, driving through in April 2021, they also fell in love with Paradise specifically. Not just for what the town currently is, but what it will be. “The town has so much potential,” Tanner said. “It’s a big thing for us.”

Fulfilling that potential is what brought Jen Goodlin back, too. She grew up in Paradise but lived in Colorado Springs with her family at the time of the fire. Her brother lost his house, so she came back to help. Even amidst the devastation, she said it still felt like home. “Just the whole sense and feel of the town was very strong.” Her husband, likewise, saw the opportunity in Paradise and the “potential in the area over the long term,” as Goodlin put it.

As we hiked down a canyon, Goodlin compared Paradise to Colorado Springs, which she described as “very nice.” Among its pros, her kids could walk to school and there was a Super Target about a mile away. But she also felt “a shift in how I wanted to raise my children. When you hear people complaining about the trash company changing, I can try and parent away from that, but if you move somewhere hardship has happened, there’s natural learning for my children…Like, the trash company doesn’t matter. The town just burned down.”

The Goodlins bought a vacant lot and set about building on it. When I visited in late April, the frame was up. The family is living in a trailer on the property until the house is ready, an experience she says has hopefully taught her kids “how to live with less and appreciate more.”

After moving to Paradise, Goodlin took a job with The Rebuild Paradise Foundation, a nonprofit that helps with guides, grants, and advice. Goodlin has recently started her own survey about why people are moving to Paradise, but didn’t have enough responses yet to draw any preliminary conclusions.

People like the Goodlins, Tanners, and Milbauers may have their individual reasons for moving to Paradise, but there is an undeniable link between not just them but everyone else in the town: Despite the risks, they all chose to be there because it is different where they came from.

In his book on fire, Pyne recognized a fundamental paradox for those living in the wildland urban interface. “Narrow roads to sheltered homesites, rustic wooden houses with shake-shingle roofs, lush vegetation dripping over walls and roofs, distance from prying officials and taxes—all this is why the exurban communities were created,” he wrote. “To render them fireproof is to begin to re-create the environments from which the residents fled in the first place.”

Sitting in a lounging chair by a window overlooking the tall pines, a hummingbird fluttered by the window as Milbauer took in her new home. The sun filtered through the trees and through the window, a beam of light illuminating the corner of the bedroom. As her son Elliot played Kirby in the living room, I asked how Milbauer felt heading into her first fire season in the new house. The area immediately surrounding her home did not burn in the Camp Fire, for reasons some people ascribe to decent forest management and others to blind luck, the same luck that saw Palade’s house or Speicher’s car survive when everything around them didn’t.

“It’s not like it won’t happen again,” Milbauer said. “Anything could happen again. But this town is more aware,” she thinks, “the same as we are aware for any house fire, for any trauma.”

“It just seems regressive to choose to be afraid to do something that will make you happy,” Milbauer said. “So, we’re happy here.”

By Ryan Daily
In this No Jitter Roll, we share the latest news from Vyopta, Ooma, and Pure IP.

The bad news: Your startup is on the ropes. The good news: Here’s an offer for a discounted subscription.

On the morning of May 10, the Information published a hard-hitting story about Gopuff, a much-hyped startup competing in the much-hyped “instant delivery” industry. The company, most recently valued at $15 billion, is bleeding cash and has been struggling to raise new funding. Now, its employees are openly questioning whether its 29-year-old co-founders are in over their heads.

A few hours later, the Information published another item. But this one was emailed directly to some Gopuff employees: Would they like to subscribe to the Information — so they could read other articles like the one it just published about their company?

“Because you work at COMPANY, we thought that you might be interested in this exclusive feature on Gopuff,” read the automated marketing message, which presumably meant to replace “COMPANY” with “Gopuff.” The email included a link to the original piece and an offer for a 25 percent discount for a one-year subscription to the Information, which normally goes for $400.

Welcome to the other part of the subscription boom, the part that’s rarely mentioned in the many stories about Substack and other subscription-based media startups: The difficult, grinding work that goes into finding people who might want to pay for your stuff, getting in front of them, and getting them to take out their credit card.

And yes, in the case of the Information, that can sometimes lead to pitches sent to people working at companies you’ve just written difficult stories about, says Jessica Lessin, the company’s founder and CEO.

“We intentionally reach out to people we think are interested in our articles,” using custom-built software to predict what kind of readers might be interested in a story, she told me. And that could certainly include people who work at a company the Information had just written about. “It’s like Netflix recommendations,” she said.

I do think Lessin and her team are going to have plenty of opportunities to repeat the Gopuff playbook in the coming months, assuming widely held predictions about a tech industry reversal pan out: Easy investor money turns scarce, companies that used to spend wildly become manic cost-cutters, and layoffs turn tech startup employees into ex-startup employees.

At the Information, there are plenty of examples of high-flying tech companies quickly reassessing their plans, halting new hires, or even letting people go as the market convulses: Gorillas, a Gopuff competitor, is laying off 300 people — about half of its headquarters staff; Cameo, a once-buzzy company that lets you hire celebrities to create personalized videos, is cutting 25 percent of its staff; even Amazon is canceling plans to expand its empire of warehouses.

The question for the Information: Is the tech pullback bad for business? Or is it an opportunity?

Lessin is a former Wall Street Journal reporter who launched the Information in 2013, and explicitly set out to compete with the most established business publications in the world: the Financial Times, the New York Times, and her former employer. Her staff of 50 routinely publishes scoops and timely analysis other publications need to follow up on. (Disclosure: I’m such a fan that I asked her and Information reporter Wayne Ma to collaborate with me on a recent season of Recode’s Land of the Giants podcast series, about Apple.)

But as Lessin’s Gopuff fast-twitch marketing underscores, running a successful subscription business requires a lot of work. Simply typing something up and hoping someone pays you to read it is a nonstarter. “One of the big differences between us and different news orgs is we don’t just publish that article on the homepage and hope people find it,” she said.

Earlier in her career, Lessin was obsessed with breaking news; now she is consumed with figuring out how to bring in paying subscribers. She’s tried all kinds of experiments: bundling her publication with others, like Bloomberg; offering student discounts; letting existing subscribers recruit new blood by sending them free articles. She also tries to spread the gospel of the subscription media model, an effort that includes an “accelerator” program for people trying to launch their own subscription-based companies.

The person who sent me the Information’s Gopuff marketing email also added a concern-troll commentary: What if Lessin spends her time chasing stories about wobbly startups so she can sell them subscriptions?

But ick factor aside, I don’t worry about that at all. The obvious truth about journalism biases — one that routinely eludes critics across the spectrum — is that most journalists are biased in favor of novel stories people haven’t heard before. Right now, that’s going to mean focusing on layoffs and cutbacks in a tech sector that has been up and to the right for more than a decade. But the more we see of these, the less novel they’ll be.

Which isn’t to say that layoff and collapse stories don’t bring in eyeballs in the short run. Back when I worked for Insider CEO Henry Blodget in 2007, at what was then called Silicon Alley Insider, we had zero traffic at launch and for months after that.

Then Blodget got a tip that AOL — at the time, still a digital company that people cared about — was going to have significant layoffs. After he published it, traffic spiked, and much of it was coming from IP addresses in Dulles, Virginia — AOL’s headquarters at the time — and we responded by writing story after story about AOL. In theory, our publication covered the business of the internet; in truth, for a time, we were essentially an updated version of Fucked Company (look it up) for a single company.

I don’t see the Information headed that direction. Even if things get very grim in tech, there’s still going to be plenty of other stuff to write about. But if I get a customized email telling me her staff has written a new story about Vox Media, I may have my own worries.

The state of New York will distribute robot companions to the homes of more than 800 older adults. The robots are not able to help with physical tasks, but function as more proactive versions of digital assistants like Siri or Alexa — engaging users in small talk, helping contact love ones, and keeping track of health goals like exercise and medication.

The scheme is being organized by the New York State Office for the Aging (NYSOFA), and is intended to help address the growing problem of social isolation among the elderly. An estimated 14 million Americans over the age of 65 currently live alone, and this figure is projected to increase over the next decade as the boomer generation ages. Studies have suggested that long-term loneliness...

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CVS pharmacies will no longer fill prescriptions for controlled substances like Adderall from telehealth companies Cerebral and Done Health, The Wall Street Journal reported. It’s the latest blow to Cerebral, which is facing investigations from the US Department of Justice and the Drug Enforcement Administration.

Cerebral said last week that it was going to stop prescribing controlled substances to new customers, and would transition existing customers off of the service by the fall. The company told The Wall Street Journal that it was “doing everything possible to ensure these patients get access to medications that their healthcare providers have determined they need.”

Done Health is an ADHD-specific telehealth platform, and like...

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In the midst of a "crypto winter," VC firm Andreessen Horowitz is still burning cash to keep the industry warm. 

On Wednesday, the firm—also known as a16z—announced it had raised $4.5 billion for its fourth crypto fund despite an ongoing price crash that has wiped out over $1.6 trillion of value from the markets.

“We’re going to use these funds to invest in promising web3 startups at every stage,” a16z co-founder Chris Dixon wrote in the Crypto Fund IV announcement blog. “We are excited about developments in web3 games, DeFi, decentralized social media, self-sovereign identity, layer 1 and layer 2 infrastructure, bridges, DAOs & governance, NFT communities, privacy, creator monetization, regenerative finance, new applications of ZK proofs, decentralized content & story creation, and many other areas.”

There are few firms that have been as bullish on crypto as a16z, which has raised a grand total of $7.6 billion. A16z led a $450 million funding round for Yuga Labs, valuing the company behind the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT collection and disastrous Otherside “metaverse” NFT launch at $5 billion. Last October, a16z financing for Axie Infinity, the play-to-earn digital sharecropping game that was lauded by the industry before its in-game economy collapsed and North Korea hacked it for $600 million, leading to a16z helping raise a partial bailout to the tune of $150 million.

It's no surprise that crypto funds are some of the industry's largest advocates despite the downturn. As Hannah Miller pointed out in Bloomberg's Crypto newsletter, the largest 9 out of the industry's top 10 investors are "crypto-native" firms, meaning investors that bought crypto before other asset classes—as a result, "they need to keep believing, because for them it's the only game in town." Still, a16z isn't your average crypto-native venture capital firm. With its own media company, research arm, and investment portfolio full of poorly-performing public companies, Andreessen Horowitz has doubled down on crypto in a way that other funds and investors haven’t.

Just last week, the firm published its first State of Crypto annual report—a document that described the $1.6 trillion worth of value crypto markets have lost over the past six months as "dark days" and a "winter," but painted the downturn as a time to build. 

"Markets are seasonal, crypto is no exception. Summers give way to the chill of winter, and winter thaws in the heat of summer," a16z wrote in its report's summary. "Advances made by builders during the dark days eventually re-trigger optimism when the dust settles. With the recent market downturn, we may be entering such a period now."

In that report, as well as on its website, a16z clings to the oft-repeated "thesis" that these are crypto's early days or its development is analogous to that of "the modern internet."

“We are now beginning the third era of the internet—what many call web3—which combines the decentralized, community-governed ethos of the first era with the advanced, modern functionality of the second era,” Dixon wrote in the Crypto Fund IV blog. “This will unlock a new wave of creativity and entrepreneurship.”

Bitcoin has been around for more than a decade, and many of the technologies hailed as central to web3—from stablecoins, to NFTs, and smart contracts—have been with us for nearly as long In the meantime, the industry has continued to be rife with exploits, scams, fraud, and a struggle to find use cases outside of crypto’s ecosystem that don’t amount to risky gambles on speculative assets. 

But maybe, this time, throwing billions of more dollars will change that. A16z certainly seems to hope so.

Klarna, the Swedish “buy now, pay later” service (BNPL), announced that it’s laying off 10 percent of its global workforce in a prerecorded video message, according to reports from Protocol and TechCrunch. The company currently has about 7,000 employees, and a 10 percent cutback puts the number of affected workers somewhere around 700.

BNPL services like Klarna, Affirm, and Afterpay allows users to purchase a product for nothing or a small fraction of its full price. Customers can then make incremental payments over a set period of time but will face a typically interest-free fee for any late payments. BNPL businesses soared at the height of the pandemic when many people were strapped for cash and had nothing else better to do than shop...

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The first full trailer for Thor: Love and Thunder has arrived, and somehow found a new angle on the journey of Chris Hemsworth’s titular hero. This time around we’re also getting a solid look at Christian Bale as Gorr the God Butcher, a galactic killer “who seeks the extinction of the gods.”

There are also more shots of Valkyrie (Tessa Thompson), playing up some interactions she’ll have with Jane Foster (Natalie Portman), who, as we saw in the teaser trailer, is wielding Mjolnir, and even a quick flash of some Guardians of the Galaxy friends.

Image: Marvel

So, who is holding the title of Mighty Thor, and what has Jane been doing for the last eight years, seven months,...

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We are excited to announce that we are adding Crosscall devices to our frontline devices ecosystem. The Walkie Talkie app in Teams now works seamlessly on a wide range of Crosscall rugged smartphones and tablets with a dedicated push-to-talk (PTT) button: Core-X4, Core-M5, Action-X5, Core-X5, and Core-T5. Walkie Talkie is the digital push-to-talk solution in Teams that enables clear, instant, and secure voice communication over the cloud. With Walkie Talkie in Teams, frontline workers can now securely communicate with a familiar PTT experience without needing to carry bulky radios, and Walkie Talkie works anywhere with WiFi or cellular internet connectivity.

 

Walkie Talkie is available to all customers with an active Microsoft 365 subscription. Learn more about Walkie Talkie and see the list of devices that have now been validated to work with Walkie Talkie.

 

Core Range Series: built for performance in harshest environments

• Ultra-rugged devices built for drop-proofing up to 2m and waterproofing IP68 (resistance against all kinds of liquids up to 6ft for 30 min)
• Programmable buttons and screens are easily used with wet hands and gloves (up to 4mm thick)
• Communicate loudly and clearly with the powerful 100dB waterproof loudspeaker
• Ideal in harshest working conditions and environments in industries such as Public Sector, Logistics, Construction and Manufacturing

 

Learn more about Core-X5, Core-M5, and the Core-T5 tablet.

Action Range Series: built for bring-your-own-device scenarios

• Slim yet rugged design with waterproofing, long-lasting batter and 120° cameras designed to have professional and personal profile on the same device with a triple SIM tray
• Ideal for an individual assigned personal device and customer-facing industries such as Retail, Banking, and Insurance

 

Learn more about Action-X5.

To meet the various needs of frontline workers across industries, Crosscall has also designed a wide range of accessories with the X-LINK technology using the smart magnet placed on the back of the device for easy mounting, charging, and transferring of data.

 

At some point U.S. regulators effectively declared that it was okay to rip off consumers with a dizzying array of bogus fees, letting companies falsely advertise one rate, then sock you with a bunch of additional surcharges when the bill comes due. That’s particularly true of the cable and broadband industry, which has saddled consumers with billions in fees for decades, with little real penalty.

Case in point: since 2013 or so, AT&T has been charging its wireless subscribers an “administrative fee.” AT&T openly admits this isn’t a government tax or surcharge; it’s just a completely bogus bit of nonsense AT&T says “helps cover a portion of costs to AT&T related to wireless service.” But that’s what your full bill is for. What it really does is allow AT&T to nickel-and-dime you beyond the advertised price.

With regulators completely AWOL (a common theme on this front) a class action lawsuit attempted to hold AT&T accountable. But that lawsuit (Vianu v. AT&T Mobility) was quietly settled last week for $14 million, netting each impacted user a one-time payment of between $15 and $29:

that’s only a fraction of what AT&T’s own records show it charged: $180 per customer on average since 2015, according to documents. The settlement “represents a refund of approximately 6-11 months of the average fees,” they read. Meanwhile, the lawyers are likely to get $3.5 million.

This is, of course, why this kind of behavior never changes. The closest AT&T gets to any meaningful penalty here is a payout that’s a small fraction of the money it earned from the sleazy behavior over nearly a decade. Class action lawyers get a new boat, consumers get a tiny credit, and U.S. regulators remain too afraid to challenge AT&T, a trusted intelligence gathering ally.

This was a rare case where AT&T wasn’t able to kill the lawsuit entirely. And this, of course, was a class action lawsuit, which are usually blocked by AT&T’s fine print forcing binding arbitration, a process where the consumer usually winds up getting even less. Federal regulators, meanwhile, remain underfunded and underpowered (something AT&T lobbies routinely for), and around and around we go.

By Dana Casielles
CEO catches up with No Jitter since taking the stage during Enterprise Connect’s Innovation Showcase in this Q&A.

The shooting in Buffalo calls into question the effectiveness of the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism.

Canada has banned the use of Huawei and fellow Chinese tech giant ZTE’s equipment in its 5G networks, its government has announced. In a statement, it cited national security concerns for the move, saying that the suppliers could be forced to comply with “extrajudicial directions from foreign governments” in ways that could “conflict with Canadian laws or would be detrimental to Canadian interests.”

Telcos will be prevented from procuring new 4G or 5G equipment from the companies by September this year, and must remove all ZTE- and Huawei-branded 5G equipment from their networks by June 28th, 2024. Equipment must also be removed from 4G networks by the end of 2027. “The Government is committed to maximizing the social and economic...

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There’s nothing quite like settling into a hotel room bed and dozing off to sleep — only to be woken up by the sound of your neighbor in the room next door trimming their nails at a hundred decibels or doing some late-night furniture rearranging.

For just these kinds of occasions, seasoned travelers will sometimes pack a travel white noise machine or use an app to help get a little peace. But if you’re carrying an iPhone running iOS 15, you’ve already got a white noise feature built right into your phone’s operating system. Here’s how to set it up. (For this article, I used an iPhone 11 running iOS 15.4.1.)

• Go to Settings > Accessibility > Audio/Visual (under Hearing) > Background Sounds (basically, Apple’s term for white noise).
• Tap...

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A Meta executive told employees on Thursday that they are prohibited from talking about abortion on Workplace, an internal version of Facebook, citing “an increased risk” that the company is seen as a “hostile work environment.”

The policy, which Meta put in place in 2019 but hasn’t been reported until now, prohibits employees from discussing “opinions or debates about abortion being right or wrong, availability or rights of abortion, and political, religious, and humanitarian views on the topic,” according to a section of the company’s internal “Respectful Communication Policy” seen by The Verge. Some employees have called on management to do away with the policy in the aftermath of a leaked Supreme Court draft opinion that would...

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Ransomware — and particularly the Conti ransomware gang — has become a geopolitical force in Costa Rica. On Monday, the new Costa Rican president Rodrigo Chaves – who began his four-year term only ten days ago – declared that the country was ”at war” with the Conti cybercriminal gang, whose ransomware attack has disabled agencies across the government since April.

In a forceful statement made to press on May 16th, President Chaves also said that Conti was receiving help from collaborators within the country, and called on international allies to help.

“We’re at war and this is not an exaggeration,” Chaves told local media. “The war is against an international terrorist group, which apparently has operatives in Costa Rica. There are very...

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How do we cool people without heating up the planet?

The world is now 1.1 degrees Celsius — 2 degrees Fahrenheit — warmer on average than it was at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. But baked into that seemingly small change in the average is a big increase in dangerous extreme temperatures. That’s made cooling, particularly air conditioning, vital for the survival of billions of people.

The devastation of extreme temperatures is playing out right now in several places around the world. A gargantuan heat wave over India and Pakistan, where 1.5 billion people live, is now in its third week. Just 12 percent of India’s population has air conditioning, but even those people are suffering. The heat has triggered power outages, created water shortages, and killed dozens, although the true toll may not be known for weeks.

Swaths of western Europe are also facing a heat wave, with temperatures forecasted to breach 40°C, or 104°F, later this week.

Closer to home, Texas is currently facing a record-breaking heat wave just as six power plants suddenly went offline. The state’s grid operator, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, asked residents to avoid using large appliances and set thermostats to 78 degrees Fahrenheit between 3 pm and 8 pm.

These searing temperatures are just the latest in a pattern of increasingly hot weather. A heat wave that would have been a once-in-a-decade event in the 1800s is now hotter and happens nearly three times as often. Heat waves that used to occur once every 50 years are now nearly five times as frequent and reach higher temperatures. Heat records are broken so often they barely register as news. In its latest review of climate science, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said it is “virtually certain” that heat waves have become more frequent and intense across most land areas since the 1950s.

Extreme heat events are also occurring over a wider region of the globe, from the depths of the ocean to the icy reaches of the Arctic. Heat waves are now such devastating events with long-lasting wounds that some countries say they should be named like hurricanes.

But the most severe risks from high temperatures are in places like India and Pakistan, regions closer to the equator that are already hot and have dense, growing populations. They also have less wealth, so fewer can afford cooling when thermometers reach triple digits.

The planet is only going to heat up more, rendering parts of the world unlivable. The most optimistic scenario is that global average temperatures will rise 1.5°C (2.7°F) this century, which will lead to even more intense and frequent heat waves. Right now, though, the world is on course to shoot well past this target.

Regardless of whether humanity gets its act together and drastically cuts emissions of the greenhouse gases that are warming up the planet, billions of people today and into the future desperately need to cool off. Their lives and livelihoods are at stake, making this one of the most urgent technology and policy challenges.

But staying cool amid the heat poses a paradox: The tactics for cooling can end up worsening the very problem they’re trying to solve if they draw on fossil fuels, or leak refrigerants that are potent heat-trapping gases. And the people who stand to experience the most extreme heat are often those least able to cool off.

Manish Swarup/AP

Solving this conundrum requires untangling issues of equity and justice, as well as developing better tools for cooling beyond just ACs. It also requires rethinking the role of cooling in society. It is not a luxury, but a necessity for living in the world that we’ve created for ourselves.

Heat is dangerous and costly, even before it reaches extremes

Ambient temperatures are so foundational to our well-being that it’s easy to overlook their importance and the threat they pose. Extreme heat has been the deadliest weather phenomenon in the United States over the past 30 years, according to the National Weather Service.

That’s because heat has so many ways of hurting people. High temperatures make it harder for humans to shed excess heat. When air reaches temperatures higher than body temperatures, more heat flows into the human body than flows out. That can cause hyperthermia, heat stroke, and death. Some medications can become less effective with heat, while others can make people more susceptible to high temperatures.

During warmer weather, pollutants like ozone form faster, which can lead to breathing problems. In addition, the stress from heat is cumulative. High temperatures at night are particularly worrying because it means people have little relief from the heat during the day. Because of climate change, nights are actually warming faster than daylight hours.

And when extreme heat combines with humidity, the weather can turn lethal. To measure the risk from these conditions, scientists track the wet-bulb temperature, the temperature and humidity conditions where water will not evaporate. Higher wet-bulb temperatures mean it’s harder for a person to cool off by sweating. A healthy person can withstand a wet-bulb temperature of 35°C, or 95°F, for six hours. Older adults, young children, and people with underlying health conditions start to suffer at much lower thresholds.

But high temperatures can cause harm well before they reach the tip of the thermometer. For people who work on farms, on construction sites, in kitchens, or in factories, hotter temperatures lead to more injuries. Avoiding these risks has costs, too, as workers weigh lost wages against the potential for harm at work. Even in cooler workplaces like offices, studies have found that high temperatures reduce productivity and performance.

“The knock-on effects of heat are extraordinary,” said Rachel Kyte, dean of the Fletcher School at Tufts University, who coauthored a 2018 report titled “Chilling Prospects: Providing Sustainable Cooling for All.”

That adds up to a huge economic toll. By one estimate, heat costs the US economy $100 billion per year, a number poised to rise to $200 billion by 2030 and $500 billion by 2050 if nothing is done to mitigate climate change or the resulting harm.

There’s some debate among researchers about whether extreme heat poses a greater public health burden than extreme cold, but rising average temperatures mean that record-breaking cold events are becoming much less common, while heat records will continue to inch higher.

High temperatures with little relief could also pose political challenges. “If you can’t get cool, and you have lots of young people living in cities, that is a recipe for social disruption,” Kyte said. “Nothing will radicalize you more than no job, nowhere to get cool, and nowhere to get healthy or safe food.”

Yet in much of the world, air conditioning isn’t treated as essential. In the US, few states have mandates for cooling in housing, whereas most states and municipalities have a minimum heating requirement for landlords. The federal government does offer low-income households money to help pay for energy bills, including cooling and heating, but those households have to have cooling in the first place. AC is not required in federal public housing.

Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

So a huge part of the challenge in preventing harm from heat is getting people and policymakers to recognize the threat and treat cooling as a lifesaving tool.

The climate paradox of air conditioning

Cooling technologies, particularly air conditioning, have been reshaping societies around the world since Willis Carrier invented a device to prevent humidity from messing with ink at a Brooklyn printing plant in 1902.

These changes have had far-reaching and unexpected effects. In his 2014 book How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World, author Steven Johnson connected the dots between the spread of air conditioning and the election of Ronald Reagan: ACs made the southwestern US more hospitable, and the growing population of the region became an important base of support for Reagan.

Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s first prime minister, said air conditioning was the sine qua non of his country’s formation.

There are now roughly 2 billion air conditioners in use around the world today, with half of those units in the US and China alone. Cooling systems like ACs, fans, and ventilation account for about 20 percent of energy use in buildings globally, according to the International Energy Agency. That adds up to two-and-a-half times as much electricity consumed globally for cooling as the entire continent of Africa uses.

Cooling is not just for people. Refrigeration and freezing are essential for producing, storing, and transporting food, medicine, electronics, and, as Carrier found, books. By 2050, AC energy use is poised to triple on its current course, according to the IEA — which is roughly equivalent to the amount of electricity China uses today.

Within the current crop of air conditioners, there is wide variation in efficiency and the power sources they use. The spaces they cool aren’t all insulated the same ways, either.

There is also a huge gap in access. The IEA notes that for the nearly 3 billion people living in the hottest parts of the world, only 8 percent of them have ACs. And within countries, ACs are not distributed evenly. Access varies by income, but also by location. Last summer’s massive heat wave across the Pacific Northwest was especially worrying because so few people in the region have air conditioners due to the ordinarily mild climate. Seattle has the lowest percentage of households with air conditioning of any major metro area in the US. That likely contributed to hundreds of excess deaths.

Disparities in access to air conditioning also fall along racial lines. Black residents in New York City account for half of heat-related fatalities despite being 22 percent of the population; access to air conditioning is a key factor. Another is that neighborhoods with predominantly racial minority residents have fewer green spaces, foliage, and tree cover. Instead, their neighborhoods often have more concrete and asphalt. That worsens the heat island effect and makes temperatures in these areas rise higher than their surroundings.

It’s also a law of nature that you can’t cool a space without heating up another. In cities, the heat from running ACs at night can raise ambient temperatures by 1°C, or 1.8°F.

Air conditioners pose another direct problem for the climate. Many of them use refrigerants that are also powerful heat-trapping gases. Chemicals like hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) can be upward of 12,000 times more potent at trapping heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide. Small coolant leaks multiplied by billions of AC units could be devastating for the climate.

Wang Biao/VCG via Getty Images

The good news is, there is a lot that can be done. And some of that work is underway now.

Cooling in the climate change era requires a multi-pronged strategy

In current heat waves around the world, the priority must be saving as many lives as possible, even if the only options draw on fossil fuels.

“You can’t not give people power because the only power you can give them is power with too much coal in the energy mix,” Kyte said.

However, taking the temperature down has to remain an urgent priority, even after the weather cools off.

There are many ways to curb the climate impacts of ACs. “The answer lies first and foremost in improving the efficiency of air conditioners, which can quickly slow down the growth in cooling-related electricity demand,” wrote Fatih Birol, executive director of the IEA, in a 2018 report. With greater energy efficiency, air conditioners do more with less. Also, homes and businesses need better insulation and sealing to prevent waste.

Another method is to manufacture more air conditioners that don’t use HFCs or other heat-trapping gases. Many countries, including the US, are phasing out HFCs. The US Senate will soon vote to ratify the Kigali Amendment to the Montreal Protocol, an international treaty that commits to cutting HFCs 85 percent by 2050.

At the same time, there is going to be a massive market for sustainable cooling technologies. “There are billions of people that aspire to be wealthy, and as your income starts going up, you’re going to want to have access to cooling,” Kyte said.

The electricity that powers air conditioners needs to come from sources that don’t emit greenhouse gases, so dialing down coal, oil, and natural gas power on the grid and ramping up wind, solar, and nuclear energy is crucial.

Technology alone is not enough. ACs are only useful for people who work indoors, but millions still labor outside. Reducing outdoor air temperatures requires careful planning to ensure adequate shade and measures like cool roofs. For some jobs, workers will have to take on schedules that keep them out of the sun during the hottest times of day. In some places, the only tolerable times to work outdoors are at night.

Cooling may also require a more collective approach. Rather than installing ACs on every individual home, some areas can use district cooling systems. And in emergencies, people will need public cooling centers.

Regulators need to step in, too. The US currently doesn’t have a national workplace standard for heat exposure, but the Occupational Safety and Health Administration is now in the process of developing a rule to protect workers from high temperatures. Governments also need to enforce tougher standards for energy efficiency in cooling.

The fixes for extreme heat don’t stop at the border. The countries that have historically burned the most fossil fuels now have the wealth to cope with rising temperatures, while those who contributed least to the problem are facing the most dangerous heat with the fewest resources. Ergo, rich countries are obligated to help places facing dangerous heat deploy cooling, and to help pay for it.

“I think that the economic case and the global security case for investing in these countries’ ability to deploy hyper-efficient, nonpolluting technologies is pretty damn clear,” Kyte said. “We’re all living on the same planet.”

So while billions of people are facing more devastating and extreme heat, protecting them and avoiding as much warming as possible benefits everyone on Earth. Air conditioning is now an unfortunate necessity, but it’s also an opportunity to address some of the underlying injustices of climate change.

I’ve reviewed quite a few Chromebooks in the past few years, but the one that has consistently topped the competition is the Acer Chromebook Spin 713. Not only is it fast with good battery life but it also sports one of the best screens and port selections you can find in the Chromebook category. But there is one complaint I’ve had about multiple Spin 713 models: they’re just kind of ugly.

The Spin 714, the company’s newest premium Chromebook certified through the Intel Evo platform, looks like a similar package to the 713 in many ways. It has up to a top-notch Core i7-1260P, 16GB of RAM, and 512GB of storage. There’s an option for a high-resolution 2560 x 1600 display covering a claimed 100 percent of the sRGB color gamut.

But Acer...

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So does Elon Musk want to buy Twitter or not? This morning, the company’s prospective new owner insisted (in a tweet, of course) that the $44 billion deal he’d agreed to “cannot move forward” until he sees the proof he’s looking for about its active user numbers.

With needling current Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal and texting former CEO Jack Dorsey having failed to hit the spot, Musk — seemingly jokingly — pulled in another recurring character from his 24 / 7 revolving circus by tweeting to the US Securities and Exchange Commission, asking them to investigate.

Image: Twitter

In case you’ve forgotten, the folks at the SEC are the “bastards” that Musk has previously accused of infringing upon his rights to free speech,...

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A case brought by Ted Cruz is a huge boon to rich candidates and moneyed lobbyists.

The Supreme Court’s conservative majority has been at war with campaign finance laws for more than a dozen years, stretching at least as far back as its decision in Citizens United v. FEC (2010). On Monday, the Court’s six Republican appointees escalated this war.

The Court’s decision in FEC v. Ted Cruz for Senate is a boon to wealthy candidates. It strikes down an anti-bribery law that limited the amount of money candidates could raise after an election in order to repay loans they made to their own campaign.

Federal law permits candidates to loan money to their campaigns. In 2001, however, Congress prohibited campaigns from repaying more than $250,000 of these loans using funds raised after the election. They can repay as much as they want from campaign donations received before the election (although a federal regulation required them to do so “within 20 days of the election”).

The idea is that, if already-elected officials can solicit donations to repay what is effectively their own personal debt, lobbyists and others seeking to influence lawmakers can put money directly into the elected official’s pocket — and campaign donations that personally enrich a lawmaker are particularly likely to lead to corrupt bargains. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) manufactured a case to try to overturn that $250,000 limit, and now, the Court has sided with him.

Indeed, now that this limit on loan repayments has been struck down, lawmakers with sufficiently creative accountants may be able to use such loans to give themselves a steady income stream from campaign donors.

According to the Los Angeles Times, for example, Rep. Grace Napolitano (D-CA) made a $150,000 loan to her campaign at 18 percent interest in 1998 — before the 2001 law was enacted. Though Napolitano did eventually reduce the interest rate on this loan to 10 percent, the high-interest loan allowed her to make a considerable profit from donors.

As of 2009, Napolitano reportedly raised $221,780 to repay that loan — $158,000 of which was classified as “interest.” Because the 6-3 decision in Ted Cruz neutralizes the 2001 law, lawmakers may now potentially use a similar scheme in order to funnel legal bribes into their personal bank accounts.

Other lawmakers might not be quite as brazen in seeking to line their own pockets. But they still may be inclined to reward donors who help them recoup the cost of personal loans. As Justice Elena Kagan writes in dissent, a candidate who receives money that goes directly into their own pocket is likely to be “more grateful than for ordinary campaign contributions (which do not increase his personal wealth).”

The case builds upon past campaign finance decisions, but also expands upon them

The thrust of Chief Justice John Roberts’s majority opinion in Ted Cruz is that protecting the right of candidates to get out their campaign message — and to spend as much as they want to get out that message — is of such superlative importance that it trumps society’s interest in preventing corruption or in making sure that elections are not dominated by the wealthy. As Roberts writes, “the First Amendment ‘has its fullest and most urgent application precisely to the conduct of campaigns for political office.’”

To be clear, candidates were allowed to spend as much as they want to influence their election under the now-overturned law — they could loan their campaigns any amount they like, and could use donors’ money to repay all of it, as long as they got those donations before the election and repaid their personal loans within 20 days.

But that didn’t go far enough for the Court’s current conservative majority.

Roberts’s Ted Cruz opinion fully embraces the value system implicit in past decisions like Citizens United, which allowed corporations to spend unlimited sums of money to influence elections so long as they did not donate directly to candidates.

The First Amendment, Roberts writes, “safeguards the ability of a candidate to use personal funds to finance campaign speech,” a rule that “reflects our profound national commitment to the principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide-open.”

Of course, this “profound national commitment” only favors uninhibited, robust, and wide-open debate by certain privileged individuals. It should go without saying that most Americans cannot afford to drop $250,000 or more on a political campaign, even if they expect that money to be repaid at some point in the future.

But Roberts brushes off any concerns that the rule announced in Ted Cruz unfairly favors rich people who want to run for office. Quoting from the Court’s decision in Davis v. FEC (2008), Roberts writes that “level[ing] electoral opportunities for candidates of different personal wealth” is an “impermissible goal.”

Similarly, Roberts’s opinion places a great deal of weight on a distinction between different forms of corruption that also played a starring role in Citizens United. Though the Court’s decisions ostensibly permit Congress to ban “quid pro quo” corruption — that is, an explicit deal where a lawmaker agrees to cast a certain vote or take some other official action in return for a campaign donation — decisions like Citizens United do not permit campaign finance laws that try to prevent donors from buying access to lawmakers.

Much like Citizens United, Roberts’s Ted Cruz opinion frames this sort of influence-seeking as an affirmative good. “Influence and access ‘embody a central feature of democracy,’” Roberts writes, “that constituents support candidates who share their beliefs and interests, and candidates who are elected can be expected to be responsive to those concerns.”

In other words, the Ted Cruz opinion suggests that it is good for democracy if a Texas oil executive can write checks to candidates who will look out for the oil industry’s interests. And, if that candidate rewards this executive by meeting with him to hear his particular concerns, that’s a “central feature of democracy” as well.

Yet, while the outcome of Ted Cruz won’t surprise anyone familiar with the conservative justices’ previous statements about campaign finance laws, it is an escalation from prior decisions. As Justice Kagan writes in dissent, the Court’s previous decisions drew a distinction between laws “restricting expenditures” and those “restricting contributions.”

That is, the government’s power to limit what campaigns can do with the money they’ve lawfully raised is rather circumscribed. But, as the Court held in Buckley v. Valeo (1976), “a limitation upon the amount that any one person or group may contribute to a candidate or political committee entails only a marginal restriction upon the contributor’s ability to engage in free communication.”

This is why, for example, the Court has thus far left untouched a federal law limiting the amount that each individual may donate to a particular federal campaign to $2,900.

But the decision in Ted Cruz strikes down a limit on how much money campaigns can raise from donors, and not a restriction on how campaigns can spend their money. Before Ted Cruz, campaigns could only raise $250,000 in post-election funds to repay a loan from the candidate. Now they can raise as much as they want.

That’s an escalation in the Court’s approach to campaign finance. While decisions like Citizens United permit unlimited donations to political organizations independent from a political campaign — such as a super PAC — the Court has historically recognized that donations directly to a candidate or their campaign are different because they are more likely to lead to corrupt behavior.

Under the theory articulated by cases like Citizens United, a lawmaker is less likely to be corrupted by a large donation to an “independent” organization that supports their reelection, than they are to be corrupted by a similarly large donation to their campaign, so long as the independent group’s activities are “not coordinated” with the candidate.

In fairness, Roberts’s opinion does contain some language suggesting that the Court will leave the $2,900 cap on individual donations to campaigns intact. Indeed, Roberts argues that the anti-bribery protections offered by the cap on loan repayments is unnecessary because lobbyists and other donors may only give up to $2,900 per election cycle to an elected official — even if that money is going directly into the official’s pocket.

Apparently a bribe isn’t a big deal, so long as it is less than $2,900 (and so long as that bribe isn’t made to a super PAC or another group that is nominally independent from the candidate.)

In any event, the Court’s campaign finance decisions have been a steady march toward deregulation. So there’s no guarantee that any attempt to make elections less corrupt will remain safe.

The Poly Studio Series, Poly Sync Family, and Poly Lens deliver exceptional employee experiences so you can be seen and heard from anywhere

SANTA CRUZ, CA – May 10, 2022 – Poly (NYSE: POLY) today introduced its latest pro-grade solutions to solve the evolving needs of today’s distributed workforce. Additions to Poly’s portfolio of smart devices include the Poly Studio R30 video bar, Poly Sync 10 speakerphone, and enhancements to the Poly Lens platform to help deliver exceptional experiences from wherever you work. These solutions, combined with developments to Poly DirectorAI smart camera technology, help employees look and sound their best, while employers can maintain focus on delivering meeting equity for hybrid and office workers alike.

“The ability to deliver a seamless and equitable experience for today’s modern workforce is not only critical for driving business success, but also happier and more productive employees,” said Beau Wilder, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Video Collaboration, Poly. “Although organizations have started to announce return-to-office plans, relying on solutions that were successful pre-pandemic will no longer cut it. At Poly, we’re dedicated to investing in pro-grade tools that make sure all employees have equal opportunity and experience – whether in the office, at home or on-the-go.”

Outfitting the Modern Day Workplace

The Poly Studio Series pro-grade video conferencing devices deliver a purpose-built experience for meeting rooms of all sizes, including Poly Studio Kits for Microsoft Teams Rooms on Windows. Poly’s lineup of video conferencing devices bring equity and ease to upgrade every meeting with Poly DirectorAI technology which uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to deliver real-time automatic transitions, group framing and speaker tracking, presenter and conversation mode, while NoiseBlockAI and Acoustic Fence technologies block-out unwanted background noise.

The newest addition to the Poly Studio Series is the Poly Studio R30 smart USB video bar, designed for small meeting rooms. This plug-and-play device comes equipped with Poly DirectorAI technology to ensure everyone is seen clearly with pinpoint-accurate group and speaker framing. Poly is expanding its lineup of devices for Microsoft Teams Rooms on Windows to include the Poly Studio R30 Small Room Kit, optimized for smaller meeting rooms. The Poly Studio R30 works with the cloud-based video provider of your choice, is certified by Zoom, and will be Microsoft Teams certified by June 2022.

Poly Studio R30 video bar features include:

• 4K camera with 120-degree field of view so meeting participants are seen clearly, even those sitting closest to the camera
• Poly DirectorAI smart camera technology that can perfectly frame everyone in the room, an individual speaker, or even track a presenter in real time.
• Advanced audio with NoiseBlock AI and Acoustic Fence to block-out unwanted background noise
• WiFi device capabilities for remote IT management, reducing the need for additional management software in the room
• End-users have the option to personalize settings for their workspace

For larger meeting rooms, the Poly Studio E70 camera and Studio X70 video bar are adding a new Poly DirectorAI mode called people framing. People framing mode provides close-ups for each meeting participant in the room, which are displayed in gallery mode. People framing mode will be available on Studio E70 and Studio X70 starting in June 2022.

Delivering Flexibility in Microsoft Teams Rooms

In addition to the Poly Studio Small Room Kit for Microsoft Teams, Poly is delivering added flexibility for its entire lineup of Teams Rooms on Windows:

• A USB extender and Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) options for more flexible room deployments and seamless connections to user’s laptops for any video app
• A Camera Control App so users can easily adjust the camera experience or change Poly DirectorAI modes

Pro-grade Gear for Hybrid Workers

Poly Sync speakerphones feature USB and Bluetooth^® connectivity with intelligent microphones that track the talker, not the noise. The Sync family lineup is sleek, sophisticated, smart, and designed to deliver crisp audio quality for both work and entertainment.

The Poly Sync 10, the newest member of the Sync family, is a plug-and-play USB speakerphone designed to upgrade the home office experience, converting any space into your own personal conference room. Perfect for calls and music, its two-microphone steerable array reduces surrounding noise and delivers high-quality audio. The Poly Sync 10 is certified by Microsoft and Zoom and works seamlessly with the cloud-based meeting platform of your choosing.

Poly Sync 10 speakerphone features include:

• Reliable, enterprise-grade hi-fi audio and power amplifier for calls and music
• Easy-to-spot call status, with clear, bright status lightbar
• USB-A cable, with a USB-C adapter included
• Dust-and water-resistant IP64
• Supported by Poly Lens

Vital Device Insights and Management

Poly Lens provides a holistic platform with device control for all Poly gear, including the Studio R30 video bar and Sync 10 speakerphone, to enhance workspace and user experience. The cloud-based solution delivers vital management tools for provisioning, monitoring, and troubleshooting Poly devices.

No matter where users work, or which device they choose, the Poly Lens App gives them the ability to personalize their experience, stay up to date with the latest software, get helpful usage tips, support, and more. The latest enhancements will feature Lens App for mobile devices supporting Poly Bluetooth devices while on-the-go. Poly Lens App for mobile will be available soon.

Poly Lens and the Poly Lens App features include:

• Vital management for the Poly voice, video, and headsets for both the IT manager and individual user
• Device personalization for both the user desktop and mobile
• “Find MyDevice” for mobile users, so you never misplace your favorite device

Availability & Pricing

• The Poly Studio R30 video bar is available now at Poly.com, and select resellers worldwide, starting at $799 USD.
• The Poly Studio R30 Small Room Kit for Microsoft Teams Rooms is now available for purchase on Poly.com, and with select resellers worldwide, starting at $2,099 USD (PC not included).
• The Poly Sync 10 speakerphone is available now at Poly.com, Amazon, and select retailers worldwide, starting at $99.99 USD.
• Poly Lens and the Poly Lens App for desktop are currently available worldwide at no extra cost. Poly Lens App for mobile will be available soon.

To learn more about the Poly solutions delivering workplace equity for hybrid and office workers, please visit poly.com/work-wherever.

About Poly

Poly (NYSE: POLY) creates premium audio and video products so you can have your best meeting — anywhere, anytime, every time. Our headsets, video and audio-conferencing products, desk phones, analytics software and services are beautifully designed and engineered to connect people with incredible clarity. They’re pro-grade, easy to use and work seamlessly with all the best video and audio-conferencing services. Poly MeetingAI delivers a broadcast quality video conferencing experience with Poly DirectorAI technology which uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to deliver real-time automatic transitions, framing and tracking, while NoiseBlockAI and Acoustic Fence technologies block-out unwanted background noise. With Poly (Plantronics, Inc. – formerly Plantronics and Polycom), you’ll do more than just show up, you’ll stand out. For more information visit www.Poly.com.

The post Poly’s Pro-Grade Devices and Remote Management Tools Deliver Total Equity Wherever You Work appeared first on Cloud Communications Alliance.

These efforts are sure to help get many Terra projects back on their feet following last week's devastating events.

Turkey dropped its opposition after striking a deal with the Nordic countries at the NATO summit, paving the way for the alliance to officially expand.

Finland and Sweden are now on an unencumbered path to joining the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, a major expansion of the Western alliance as war continues in Europe.

Finland and Sweden applied for NATO membership in May, a historic shift for two traditionally non-aligned countries. But what many expected to be a rapid and relatively smooth succession process got sidetracked after Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan objected to their bids because of what he saw as the countries’ support for Kurdish groups that Erdogan regards as terrorist organizations, and because of the countries’ arms embargoes on Turkey. All 30 NATO countries must approve any new members, so Erdogan’s objection was an effective veto.

On Tuesday, Turkey ended its opposition, signing a memorandum with the two Nordic countries at the start of the NATO summit in Madrid, adding to the symbolism of a conference that seeks to showcase Western unity.

“NATO’s open door policy has been an historic success,” said NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg, in a press conference announcing the deal. “Welcoming Finland and Sweden into the alliance will make them safer, NATO stronger, and the Euro-Atlantic area more secure.”

This memorandum, which agrees to lift the arms embargo and cooperate with Turkey on terrorism, will allow Sweden and Finland to proceed with NATO membership — which is itself a dramatic turn for the two countries. Both had defined their geopolitical identities around nonalignment — Finland, for decades, and Sweden for two centuries. After resisting NATO membership for so long, Russia’s invasion forced Finland and Sweden to reconsider their security interests, and see ascension as a deterrent to future Russian aggression.

“This is pretty monumental,” said Katherine Kjellström Elgin, a fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. “It’s a fundamental change to the European alliance structure.”

Finland and Sweden already closely cooperate with NATO but had eschewed formal membership, a stance that worked both politically and strategically. Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine changed everything.

“Popular opinion, and the way Finnish political decision-makers see this, turned around very rapidly after Russia attacked Ukraine in February,” said Janne Kuusela, director of defense policy at the Finland Ministry of Defense. “It changed dramatically the security situation in Europe, and the way most Finns see how we best take care of our own defense and security, and how we contribute to the overall stability in northeastern Europe.”

That swing in public opinion — there is now majority support for joining NATO in both Finland and Sweden — reflected a broader awakening that the status quo with Russia would not hold. Finland felt the shock most abruptly because of its geography (it shares an 800-mile border with Russia) and its history. Joonas Könttä, a member of parliament from Finland’s Center Party who serves on the defense committee, said the common memory of the Soviet Union’s attack on Finland in 1939 led to a logical answer: “Finns realized that it could happen to us.”

Finland’s resolve is, in some ways, pulling Sweden along with it, which was a bit more politically divided on the issue, and reckoned more deeply with its longstanding tradition of nonalignment. “We will never have this sense of urgency, in the same way as Finland because of its history, its proximity to Russia,” said Anna Wieslander, the Stockholm-based director for Northern Europe at the Atlantic Council.

But Sweden and Finland’s close partnership means they will likely move quickly through the ascension process, at least now that Turkey’s opposition has lifted. There is also a sense of urgency. Finland and Sweden are not formally protected by NATO’s mutual defense guarantees until they are actually in the pact.

Russia, of course, is not thrilled. Moscow had repeatedly warned against NATO membership for these countries, but also seemed to concede it had limited recourse. Putin in May said there is “no immediate threat to Russia from an expansion [of NATO] to include these countries.” And Russia’s war in Ukraine, among other factors, makes any sort of military threat against Finland or Sweden unlikely, though experts and officials believe other types of hybrid warfare are possible, like disinformation campaigns or cyberattacks.

But Finland and Sweden’s prospective NATO membership is ultimately a defeat for Putin. The war in Ukraine is about more than NATO expansion, but if Putin sought to curtail the alliance’s influence in Europe, he has only managed to broaden and deepen it. Or as Finnish President Sauli Niinistö said in May, when asked how Putin might respond to his country’s NATO decision: “You caused this — look at the mirror.”

When two nonaligned countries stop being polite and start getting real(ly into NATO)

Sweden and Finland joined the European Union in the post-Cold War 1990s, but continued to embrace a policy of military nonalignment. That is, no official NATO membership.

Sweden has practiced a version of nonalignment since the 19th century. Finland’s story is a bit more complicated. The then-Soviet Union invaded Finland in 1939, and while the Finns fended off a full-on takeover in the Winter War, the threat from their neighbor persisted. That forced Finland to adopt a stance of nonalignment during the Cold War, although with quite a lot of Soviet meddling and domestic political influence.

Finland has since maintained nonalignment out of pragmatism. It shares an 800-mile border with Russia, and the two governments maintained neighborly relationships, even as Finland invested very seriously in its defense, including maintaining a conscription army.

Especially in recent years, Finland and Sweden have become strong partners with NATO — they are basically as close as a country can get to the alliance without formally being in it. They do military exercises together and share some intelligence; both Sweden and Finland supported NATO’s mission in Afghanistan. And NATO’s open door remained, well, open to Sweden and Finland, but was not something either had to pursue unless the security situation in Europe drastically shifted. Which is exactly what happened when Russia began threatening Ukraine.

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Last December, as Russia built up troops along Ukraine’s border, Moscow issued ultimatums that sought to remake the European security architecture — demands like no NATO enlargement, and a Russian sphere of influence. That rattled Sweden, but it really shook Finland. Wieslander, of the Atlantic Council, said for Finland’s leaders, it was a reminder of the very limited space Finland had to operate during the Cold War, both internationally and domestically. Moscow’s demands created this “feeling that Finland’s road to be part of the West could not be jeopardized, and that the informal position that Finland could have in relation to NATO was not strong enough.”

That kicked off the soul-searching in Helsinki; Russia’s Ukraine invasion delivered the shock. In Finland, support for NATO typically hovered in the 20 or so percent range. In January 2022, less than 30 percent of the Finnish public was in favor of NATO membership. After Russia’s invasion, it rose 53 percent, to an incredible 76 percent in May.

As extraordinary as the swings in public opinion were, Finland’s already close ties with the West and NATO helped make the possibility of membership more palatable. “It’s still much more an evolution rather than revolution, in a way, the attitude towards NATO,” said Sinikukka Saari, a leading researcher on Russia at the Finnish Institute of International Affairs.

Finland and Sweden, as EU members, joined the strong sanctions against Russia, and both sent military equipment to Ukraine. They were united with the West, except for actually being part of NATO, and after Russia’s invasion, it exposed a vulnerability, especially for Finland.

In Sweden, experts said, the calculus was a bit more complicated. Support for joining NATO jumped by double digits since January to about 57 percent, according to April polls. But the backing was not as dramatic as in Finland. Sweden holds tightly to a perception of itself as a neutral country, an identity it has preserved throughout major conflicts in Europe, including two World Wars and the Cold War. “The decision not to join NATO for Sweden, more so than Finland, was rooted in the neutral, nonaligned identity,” Elgin said.

The Social Democrats, who run Sweden’s minority government, have traditionally been opposed to NATO membership; it’s a position they reiterated in November. In March, Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson rejected the opposition’s calls to join NATO, saying it would destabilize Europe even more. She only proposed reviewing the security situation in April, leading up to an about-face a month later. The Green and Left parties were opposed. Sweden’s right-leaning opposition parties have tended to be more supportive of NATO membership, and are backing the current bid. Adding to the tensions were national elections in September. “The question about NATO membership has been deeply polarized between the parties,” Wieslander said, adding that has slowed the debate, even if Sweden ultimately ended up in the same place as Finland.

Finland and Sweden’s strong bilateral partnership almost guarantees neither would make a move if they thought the other would balk. “I would stress that we are doing this together,“ said Erkki Tuomioja, a Social Democrat in the Finnish Parliament, who previously served as a foreign affairs minister.

Finland’s push for NATO membership was also a process. Könttä, who is on the defense committee, said that when he ran for Parliament he stated Finland had no need to join the alliance. In December, he began privately reassessing his views. In March, he announced his change of position.

Tuomioja, meanwhile, said in May that he would support Finland’s NATO path, but was still somewhat skeptical. He said he would have liked to consider other options, but in the public, and in parliament, NATO is seen as the strongest security guarantee.

“Whether or not you think this is the best idea to join NATO,” he said, “it’s always better that Sweden and Finland do things together.”

What does this mean for NATO? And everyone else?

There’s another benefit of Finland and Sweden going in together: It reduces some of the risk of announcing you’re going to be in NATO.

The risks lie largely in how Russia reacts. Moscow has already threatened Sweden and Finland over NATO membership. In May, the Kremlin’s press service said Putin had told Niinistö, the Finnish president, that abandoning its nonalignment would be an “an error since there are no threats to Finland’s security.” But days later, Putin seemed to accept the inevitable by saying Russia had no problems with Finland and Sweden. Still, Putin warned that the expansion of military infrastructure there “would certainly provoke our response,” according to Reuters.

Putin has blamed the West for the war in Ukraine, and NATO’s likely expansion — along those 800 miles at Russia’s border — certainly plays into that narrative. “If Finland and Sweden actually also joined NATO, then that will just be a detail that somehow proves that the Russians were right,” said Martin Hurt, a research fellow at the International Centre for Defense and Security and a former Estonian defense official. “But the rest will still be made up of lies and disinformation.”

Even so, Finland’s or Sweden’s NATO membership likely would not resonate for Putin the same way as, say, an ascension of a former Soviet republic. Finland may sting a bit more, but as an EU member and NATO partner, Moscow likely already sees them as tied to the West. “Russia will see Finland’s NATO membership as some sort of defeat and betrayal, but it is or should be much easier to accept than what was, for example, the membership of the Baltic states in the alliance,” Tuomas Forsberg, an international relations expert and the director of the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, wrote in an email.

It seems like if you’re going to join a military alliance the Kremlin sees as an existential threat, you should do it while Russia’s military is bogged down in a protracted war in Ukraine. Still, there is no doubt that Finland and Sweden are at their most vulnerable right after they have announced their NATO intentions but lack its formal protections. “There is a general feeling that this kind of gray period should be kept as short as possible,” Saari said.

NATO also wanted to keep that window as short as possible, but Turkey initially foiled those plans. Turkey objected to what it saw as both countries’, but especially Sweden’s, support for the Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK, and other groups that Turkey has deemed terrorist organizations. Of course, it’s a bit more complicated than that; while the PKK has staged terrorist attacks in Turkey (it is designated as a terrorist organization by the US), Erdogan has cracked down on Kurdish groups and other opposition members of civil society, all under this rather shaky definition of terrorism. Erdogan also objected to the countries’ arms embargoes on Turkey, which were put in place after Turkey invaded Syria in 2019.

Erdogan also wanted some other concessions, including getting the United States to let Turkey back into its F-35 program, so it could either buy new F-16 fighter jets or upgrade its old fleet, something Turkey was kicked out of after buying a weapons system from Moscow, of all places. (The White House told Vox that is not part of this latest deal.) All of this, though, largely amounted to grandstanding more than actual opposition, as Erdogan, facing a cratering economy, was keen to do any and everything to play to a domestic audience.

The memorandum, at least on paper, does address many of Turkey’s concerns, with Sweden and Finland lifting their arms blockades, and agreeing to a series of steps to cooperate with Turkey on terrorism-related issues, the full scope of which are still a little unclear. “Our joint memorandum underscores the commitment of Finland, Sweden and Türkiye to extend their full support against threats to each other’s security,” Niinistö said in a statement, referring to Turkey by its Turkish-language name, something Erdogan has formally requested.

Barring any other objections from NATO members, both Finland and Sweden meet the political criteria to join NATO, as strong, established democracies, and the close cooperation with NATO means they already have a high level of interoperability — military speak for their systems and tactics being in sync. “In that sense, there’s very little of a delta that they have to step up to achieve,” said Steven Horrell, a nonresident senior fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis. Finland already spends close to the 2 percent on its military that NATO targets for its members, and Sweden already planned to increase its military spending over the next decade.

NATO members, even before Russia’s war, made it pretty clear that if Finland and Sweden wanted in, NATO would eagerly have them. Even when Turkey was making a fuss, US and NATO officials had indicated that all members were ultimately expected to back their ascension

In the meantime, NATO and its members are offering some assurances during the application period. A White House spokesperson told Vox in May the US is “confident that we could find ways to address any concerns either country may have about the period of time between a NATO membership application and their formal accession to the Alliance.” The United Kingdom offered more formalized security guarantees in May.

Finland and Sweden’s ascension to NATO will also likely reshape the alliance, even in subtle ways. Inclusion of Finland and Sweden will transform how it does its military planning in the Nordic, Arctic, and Baltic regions. NATO will expand its boundary with Russia, accessing a new front from which to pressure Russia, but also one it is now obligated to protect.

NATO still faces some very real strategic challenges, with or without new members. But Finnish and Swedish membership is politically symbolic for the alliance. “Putin talked before this third invasion of Ukraine about redrawing the global security architecture,” Horrell said. “And, well, that’s one thing he’s achieved, but I think not quite the way he wanted to.”

Update, June 28, 5:40 pm: This story has been updated with developments from the NATO summit, including Turkey withdrawing its opposition to Finland and Sweden’s accession.