Davemichels

Since 2013, AT&T has quietly bilked customers out of hundreds of millions of dollars with a bogus “administrative fee,” a fee it more than doubled to $1.99 a month in 2018. For a few years there, a California class-action lawsuit made it seem like AT&T might finally get taken to task. But in May, both sides told a judge they’d settle for just $14 million — meaning customers may get less than 10 percent of what they paid AT&T, while AT&T gets to keep on charging them.

In June, the judge tentatively approved that settlement — and today, July 29th, we’re hearing that AT&T is texting and emailing customers a link to a currently-blank website where the settlement claim form will live.

According to the settlement agreement in Vianu v. AT&T...

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As the needs of hybrid workforces continue to evolve, it’s essential that remote and mobile workers are provided with quality equipment, to do their jobs properly. However, employers have moved on from their initial enablement baseline, providing any old device for the sake of business continuity. Organisations now want to go a step further and are laser-focused on meeting equality to ensure remote workers get the same experience as their office-based colleagues.

Professional-grade equipment means workers can collaborate and communicate seamlessly; they get the work done more efficiently. But it’s not all about productivity, it also means employees can be seen and heard on an equal footing, by colleagues and customers alike. And that truly matters in today’s hybrid world of work.

The first step to delivering meeting equality is all about getting the basics right. This starts with the fundamentals of audio – if you can’t hear properly, you won’t be participating in a call effectively.  So, a first action point is to move beyond in-built laptop microphones and cameras and use purpose-designed devices.

Poly has added several new devices to its portfolio that are specifically engineered and designed to deliver top-class employee experiences, from any location. The Poly Sync 10 is an entry-level, plug-and-play USB speakerphone that upgrades the home office experience. Perfect for calls and music, its two-microphone steerable array reduces surrounding noise and delivers high-quality audio. It also connects to any device and easily detects active speaker voices in a room, keeping you focused on the conversation.

Whereas audio is an essential component for experiencing useful meetings, it’s by no means the only one. High quality video is also important for enabling immersive experiences that really help workers feel like they are sat in the same room as their colleagues. This is particularly important for fostering equality between teams calling in from fully equipped board rooms and home office workers or people in small, break-out rooms. By providing dedicated video equipment to each and every type of workspace, employers can truly and easily enhance the entire work experience for everyone.

Standard, inbuilt video and audio serves a purpose but why use basic tools when pro-grade solutions can now be deployed to users relatively simply? The Poly Studio R30, for example, is a plug and play video bar with board room quality for smaller conference spaces.  With a 120-degree FOV 4k camera, the newest addition to Poly’s vast video room solutions portfolio provides a dynamic camera experience.  Everyone is seen clearly, with pinpoint accurate automatic framing and tracking, making meetings easier and more inclusive than ever.

Both Poly Sync 10 and Poly Studio R30 have been awarded the Red Dot and iF Design awards, alongside other Poly products. The Poly Sync family also bagged the ISE Best of Show awards in both the AV Technology and Installation categories.

SAN RAMON, CA – May 11, 2022 – Five9, Inc. (NASDAQ: FIVN), a leading provider of the intelligent cloud contact center, today announced the general availability of two data centers located in Frankfurt and Amsterdam.

The data centers serve Five9 customers in the European Union (EU), Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, supporting the company’s international growth and the desire for European customers to maintain data residency.

“We are excited to see the growing demand for our cloud contact center solutions in Europe and the value our global data center footprint brings to Five9 customers,” said Panos Kozanian, Five9 EVP of Cloud Operations. “The Frankfurt and Amsterdam data centers will help Five9 continue delivering the latest contact center and customer experience innovations to both European customers and multinational companies with a presence in both the US and EMEA.”

Five9 leverages a modern deployment architecture including a mix of high availability public cloud offerings and containerized deployments alongside a world-class telephony private cloud, ideal for reliable and rapid deployments for data residency requests. This infrastructure helps enterprises ensure high availability in Europe and facilitates compliance with local regulatory requirements.

Five9 continues to make significant inroads in the European market and was recently recognized in the Frost Radar™: European Contact Centre as a Service Market, 2021 by industry analysts Frost & Sullivan.

Companies profiled in the Frost Radar™ have registered consistent growth with a strong focus on innovation and a prominent position in the market. Five9 achieved a leadership position on the Radar’s Innovation Index, and the report notes that Five9 leads in the application of AI in the contact center with extensive process analysis that empowers agents to produce concrete and measurable outcomes.

Five9 is also recognized for uptime capabilities that are “among the highest in the market,” a keen focus on partner enablement, and for providing easy and fast deployments. These investments are clearly paying off for Five9, with first quarter LTM revenue from non-U.S. companies growing 46% YoY.

The Frost Radar™ noted, “Five9’s promising product development roadmap should allow the company to become a formidable cloud leader in the European market over the next five years.”

Read a complimentary reprint of the Frost Radar™: European Contact Centre as a Service Market, 2021 and visit the Five9 trust site to learn more about the provider’s global reliability.

About Five9

Five9 is an industry-leading provider of cloud contact center solutions, bringing the power of cloud innovation to more than 2,500 customers worldwide and facilitating billions of call minutes annually. The Five9 Intelligent Cloud Contact Center provides digital engagement, analytics, workflow automation, workforce optimization, and practical AI to create more human customer experiences, to engage and empower agents, and deliver tangible business results. Designed to be reliable, secure, compliant, and scalable, the Five9 platform helps contact centers increase productivity, be agile, boost revenue, and create customer trust and loyalty.

For more information, visit www.five9.com.

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What makes South Asia’s recent severe temperatures so surprising.

Nearly one in eight people on Earth are enduring a relentless, lethal heat wave that is stretching into its third week.

Triple-digit temperatures are continuing to bake swaths of India and Pakistan, a region home to 1.5 billion people. Extreme heat has also scorched Bangladesh and Sri Lanka in recent weeks. For India, this past April was the hottest in 122 years and followed the hottest March on record. For Pakistan, it was the hottest April in 61 years. Jacobabad, Pakistan, already one of the hottest cities in the world, saw temperatures rise above 120 degrees Fahrenheit. Nighttime temperatures are staying in the 90s, granting little relief for the overheated. And more heat is in store for the coming days.

The sweltering weather has reportedly killed at least 25 people in India and 65 people in Pakistan, though the true number of casualties is likely much higher. Even birds are getting heat stroke.

The heat wave has had critical knock-on effects. Surging electricity demand and stress on the power grid triggered power outages for two-thirds of Indian households. Outages in Pakistan have lasted up to 12 hours, cutting off power when people need cooling the most. Without electricity, many households have lost access to water. The hot weather has also increased dust and ozone levels, leading to spikes in air pollution in major cities across the region. The heat melted mountain glaciers faster than normal, triggering flash floods in Pakistan. At the same time, ongoing political disruptions and the economic fallout from the Covid-19 pandemic are further hampering the response to the heat wave.

And South Asia’s heat wave is poised to radiate into other countries. The high temperatures are threatening wheat production, which could push already rising food prices even higher around the world.

India and Pakistan are no strangers to extreme temperatures, but the current heat wave stands out for its early-season timing, its rapid onset, its extent, and its severity. Researchers are now investigating how much human-caused climate change contributed to the severe heat across South Asia. But scientists have long warned that more frequent and more extreme heat waves are some of the most direct consequences of rising global average temperatures.

Climate change is already rendering parts of the world unlivable, and in South Asia, survival now depends on artificial cooling. That cooling demands power. Fans and air conditioners in India and Pakistan run on electricity from burning fossil fuels, which emit greenhouse gases that heat up the planet. About 75 percent of India’s energy comes from coal, oil, and natural gas, while Pakistan gets about 60 percent of its energy from the same mix. The ongoing heat wave has already increased demand for coal imports. Because of its immense scale, how South Asia cools off will shift international energy markets and shape the global climate.

It’s a difficult tension to resolve, trying to mitigate an immediate problem at the risk of worsening another one. It also shows how urgently India and Pakistan need to switch toward cleaner energy sources. But doing so requires political changes that can support the transition without leaving people out to broil.

What made India and Pakistan’s heat wave so surprising

Heat waves are a distinct meteorological phenomenon, in which temperatures rise above the 90th percentile of the average temperature in a given area and stay there for a prolonged period, usually a week or so. Since they’re defined based on a local average, what counts as a heat wave changes depending on the location. The threshold for a heat wave is much higher in India than it is in Canada, for example.

A heat wave begins when a high atmospheric pressure system settles over an area, sometimes triggered by disturbances halfway around the world. The high-pressure system compresses and heats up the air while squeezing out clouds. Without clouds above, sunlight hits the land below directly, stripping away moisture that would otherwise help cool the air. As the pressure builds up, the sun bakes the ground more, and over the course of days, heat accumulates.

South Asia’s heat wave is unusual because it’s happening much earlier in the season than normal, before summer weather typically sets in, so it caught people off guard. It also spread out over a much larger area, covering most of the landmass across Pakistan and India instead of concentrating in a few pockets.

“Ordinarily, there is a slow creeping up [of temperatures] into the summers,” said Suruchi Bhadwal, director for earth science and climate change at the Energy and Resources Institute, who is based in Delhi. “When the temperatures started rising and stayed consistently high, it wasn’t predicted.”

Jewel Samad/AFP via Getty Images

But with hindsight, researchers said that lower precipitation was one of the key factors in the heat wave. “We had clear weather which caused a lack of rain in March and April,” said Fahad Saeed, a climate scientist at Climate Analytics, based in Islamabad. “The rain was substantially lower than the normal, about 75 percent below normal.”

The recent weather also mirrors what happened in 2021, when temperatures spiked in the months of March and April. “It’s been two years where we are witnessing almost springless seasons,” Saeed said, though he added that it’s too soon to say whether this is a new trend.

A silver lining in the heat wave is that the dry weather has kept humidity low. “I would say the low level of humidity was the reason it was not as fatal as the 2015 heat wave,” Saeed said. During the June 2015 heat wave, which occurred during the monsoon season that brings heavy rains, at least 700 people died in Pakistan and at least 2,300 died in India.

High heat combined with high humidity is a dangerous formula. A key metric for this is wet-bulb temperature, which is the highest temperature under a given amount of humidity where water will not evaporate. It indicates how well a person can cool off by sweating. The maximum wet-bulb temperature an otherwise healthy person can tolerate is about 35 degrees Celsius, or 95 degrees Fahrenheit, for six hours. For people with underlying health conditions, the limit can be much lower.

But South Asia is poised to see more of these dangerous wet-bulb temperatures too. Some places have already reached this 35°C threshold, and the frequency of reaching this limit has doubled since 1979. “That’s one of my biggest concerns: If a high level of mercury [in a thermometer] coincides with a high level of humidity, it can be very fatal,” Saeed said. So far, the seasonal forecast holds that the monsoon season will be drier than normal, but Tropical Cyclone Asani is now barreling toward India’s east coast.

Economic pressures are putting people in harm’s way

The populations of India and Pakistan are especially vulnerable to extreme heat. About 60 percent of India’s workforce and about 40 percent of workers in Pakistan are in agriculture, where the bulk of labor is outdoors. Both countries are currently in their wheat harvest seasons, so millions of people are facing the difficult choice of working during dangerous weather or forgoing their livelihoods.

Anindito Mukherjee/Bloomberg via Getty Images

But urban areas suffer from extreme heat, too. Teeming metropolises like Mumbai (20 million residents), Delhi (19 million), Karachi (15 million), and Lahore (11 million) heat up faster than their surrounding areas as asphalt, concrete, glass, and steel absorb sunlight.

“The more concretized, high-rise buildings that you have in cities also disrupt open air circulation, the lack of green spaces, and lack of places where people can sit and relax in shade … [they] have their own set of impacts,” Bhadwal said. “That further intensifies the heat conditions in a particular location.”

The worst impacts of extreme heat fall on the most impoverished, in both urban and rural areas, who don’t have access to cooling, shelter, or adequate water. But even people who have fans or air conditioning have to manage their use with power outages and rising energy prices. Many households are only able to cool one or two rooms.

“The moment you move out of the air conditioned space into a space that is not air conditioned, you become highly unproductive. You do not feel like going out and doing anything in that space,” Bhadwal said.

So the full health and economic fallout from the current heat wave will likely take months to determine as researchers tally the number of excess deaths, lost wages, missed school days, and diminished working hours.

Political hurdles continue to thwart action

There are no quick or easy answers to the threat of heat waves. Climate change is a problem more than a century in the making. Restructuring cities and economies to better cope with rising average temperatures is a process that will take decades.

There are ways to protect people in South Asia from heat waves, but it will require leaders in Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, India, and Pakistan to take the problem far more seriously than they have so far. India has committed to zeroing out its contributions to climate change by 2070, a deadline that’s decades after much of the rest of the world. Pakistan has refused to commit to a net-zero target at all.

“Solutions are there, but climate change is not on anyone’s agenda,” said Aseem Prakash, founding director of the Center for Environmental Politics at the University of Washington. “I don’t think any political party is talking about climate change.”

Better urban planning, planting trees, green spaces, improved water infrastructure, pollution controls, and more robust weather forecasting could all help ensure that fewer people suffer as temperatures rise. Switching to cleaner energy sources would also help mitigate the problem over the long term. But leaders in South Asia are more focused on recovering from the Covid-19 pandemic, and some are facing political turmoil. Pakistan ousted its prime minister last month, and Sri Lanka’s prime minister resigned this week.

So at a national level, it’s difficult to get attention on the impacts of climate change and muster the resources needed to prevent it from getting worse. “I don’t think people are going to wake up, because political leaders are framing the issue to score political points,” Prakash said. Much of the action, then, has to happen at local levels, among mayors, governors, and local elected officials who can break down a global problem into its local stakes. “Political entrepreneurship is needed,” Prakash added.

Mitigating and adapting to rising temperatures across South Asia demands international action too. India is now the world’s third-largest greenhouse gas emitter, but the bulk of historical emissions came from wealthier countries like the US and those in Europe. So the countries that contributed most to climate change have an obligation to help those facing the consequences now, as Pakistan’s climate change minister pointed out on Twitter.

Those wealthy countries, however, have been loath to commit to paying their climate change tab.

Sacrificing climate change commitments for immediate economic or political demands is not unique to South Asia. The US has been pushing for more oil drilling in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, for example, despite its own net-zero emissions targets. But the heat wave across India and Pakistan presents a new scale of urgency that these countries face in confronting climate change. How more than 1.5 billion people cope with extreme heat will help determine how much more the planet will warm, and without immediate action to curb emissions and protect the vulnerable around the world, the threat from heat waves will only get worse.

“These incidences are going to increase by the years, and each one of us is going to be facing it in one form or the other,” Bhadwal said.

Indranil Aditya/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Google launched a new mode for Maps on Wednesday, designed to give users a more real-life look at the places they’re going before they even go. The new Immersive View is sort of a Street View in the sky: you can look over a location from above to get a sense of the neighborhood and then drop to street level to see the specific spots you might want to hit up. Maps overlays its live busyness and traffic info, so you get a quasi-augmented reality look at whatever park or street corner or beach spot you’re looking at.

The images behind Immersive View are all computer-generated, a combination of Google’s satellite captures and its Street View shots. As you move through them, it looks like playing a video game on medium graphics set in a...

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Google couldn’t let its I/O keynote pass without teasing its next flagship phones: the Pixel 7 and 7 Pro, arriving this fall. It’s a modest update of last year’s design that keeps the horizontal camera bar but tones it down a little with updated camera cutouts. The 7 and 7 Pro will include a next-gen Tensor chipset and ship with Android 13.

This year’s Pixel phones feature an updated version of the design introduced on the 6 and 6 Pro, hanging onto the prominent horizontal camera bump wrapping around the back. This time, the camera bar is made of aluminum that flows into the device’s side rails, rather than having a big black bar that cuts off at the edges like last year. The renders also suggest that Google will ditch the two-tone color...

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Google has wrapped up its two-hour-long I/O keynote, which was absolutely packed with news. We heard about AI, Android, and, of course, a plethora of Pixel hardware. Here are the biggest announcements we saw on Wednesday.

The Pixel 6A features Google’s flagship chip but not its best camera

Google announced its new mid-tier phone, the Pixel 6A, which will cost $449 when it’s available for preorder on July 21st. The company seems to be flipping its usual script for this phone — previous A models have featured a camera comparable to the one found on Google’s flagship Pixels but had weaker processors. The 6A, though, has the Pixel 6’s Tensor chip and...

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Google wrapped up its I/O presentation with one big surprise: a look at its latest AR glasses. The key feature Google showed off was the ability to see languages translated right in front of your eyes, which seems to me like a very practical application for AR glasses. While a big part of Silicon Valley is heavily invested in making AR glasses a reality thus far no has suggested a truly “killer” app for AR that would let you overlook the wide variety of privacy concerns inherent with the tech. Live translating the spoken word would definitely be a killer feature.

The company didn’t share any details on when they might be available, and only demonstrated them in a recorded video that didn’t actually show the display, or how you would...

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Big white bezels. Matte, looks-like-plastic back. Thick profile. 2023. Android.

That’s about all we know about Google’s forthcoming Pixel Tablet, which the company teased during its keynote presentation for the I/O 2022 developer conference this week. Rick Osterloh, Google’s senior vice president of devices and services and head of the Pixel program, confirmed to my colleague David Pierce that the tablet is coming to fill out the range of Pixel devices and provide a complete ecosystem in Google’s lineup.

But as I saw the image of the Pixel Tablet pop up in the livestream during the keynote, I couldn’t help but react with, “That? That’s Google’s big return to tablet hardware?” The device that Google showed off brings to mind the front of...

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Robotics engineering student Ken Pillonel has followed up his USB-C iPhone mod with a modified pair of AirPods with a USB-C port for charging — replacing Apple’s proprietary Lightning port. Although the result is simple (USB-C cable goes in, power goes up), it was an engineering challenge that Pillonel says consumed “pretty much all my weekends for a few months.” It comes around a month after he completed a project that brought a Lightning port to an Android phone.

Pillonel plans to release a full-length video explaining the project in the coming weeks, but for now, he’s put out a short clip showing his modded AirPods being charged with the same USB-C cable as a MacBook and his previously modded iPhone. He plans to open source the...

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Apple has announced that it’s discontinuing the iPod Touch, the last remaining model in its lineup of portable music players. In a news post on Tuesday, the company says that it will sell the current Touch “while supplies last.”

While Apple may be done with making dedicated music players, the company says that “the spirit of iPod lives on” in all of its devices that play music, such as the iPhone, iPad, and HomePod Mini.

The iPod Touch going away marks the end of an era. As Apple notes, it introduced the first iPod “over 20 years ago.” The original FireWire-equipped model acted as just a portable music player, and Apple made models that were pretty much exclusively for listening to audio up until 2017, when it discontinued the iPod Nano...

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At Opus Research, we talk a lot about Conversational Intelligence within single platform solutions and orchestrated across disparate systems. Business intelligence sourced at the right time, in the correct context, and made transparent to the right stakeholders, is fundamental to the health and success of an organization.

Zoho is an example of a company infusing intelligence and transparency into everything they do, from their AI assistant (Zia), to their Business Intelligence platform, and now with Marketing Plus, announced today. Marketing Plus focuses on marketing project and deployment orchestration, management, and measurement, providing stakeholders across the entire marketing organization with a unified view of collaboration details, campaign status, and performance. The solution integrates with existing Zoho apps as well as with third-party solutions across CRM (Salesforce, Microsoft, HubSpot), data and analytics (Google, Facebook, Survey Monkey), finance (QuickBooks, Xero, and Stripe), commerce (WooCommerce and Shopify), and advertising.

Zoho’s Prashanth Veeravalli Krishnaswami (Market Strategy, Thought Leadership, Research – CX) spoke with Opus Research about the challenges they faced in their own marketing organization and the problems they want to solve for themselves and other organizations.

Four key challenges to managing successful marketing projects:

1. Creating visibility across all projects: Regardless of the tools used by team members, progress can’t be stalled by lack of visibility or coordination between systems.
2. Ease of collaboration: Marketing Plus focuses on real-time project status, feedback, progress, and transparency in a common dashboard.
3. Maintaining a shared understanding of your customers: Marketing is on the hook for knowing the audience, if they have unreliable data, or if they don’t have shared tooling, it affects everyone downstream of the marketing team.
4. Tracking and measuring success: Marketing campaigns have a responsibility to revenue and growth and need to have measurable performance and outcomes.

In our ever changing multi-channel landscape, marketing teams are under additional pressure to differentiate campaigns per channel for maximum reach — and then measure resulting performance data from each of those channels. This level of coordination demands business intelligence and transparency within a compelling, collaborative platform that can “play nicely” with others, and that is the goal of Zoho’s Marketing Plus.

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Dish Network seems to be taking its unconventional approach to building a wireless network all the way to the blockchain. Executives hosting an analyst event in Las Vegas today gave a few hints at their vision of this country’s fourth wireless carrier, and it might involve a future where you can pay for a new iPhone in Bitcoin.

Stephen Stokols, CEO of Dish-owned Boost Mobile, showed off branding for a new postpaid wireless plan coming this fall called “Boost Infinite,” and, well, here’s what he said:

Imagine if there was a wireless carrier that embraced digital acceleration, the web 3.0 trends, to reshape the entire wireless experience. Or imagine if you could turn your unused data into a real digital currency.

Digital currency doesn’t...

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HENDERSON, NV – April 28, 2022 – 2600Hz, a leading provider of unified business communications, was named the winner of a Gold Stevie® Award in the Company of the Year – Telecommunications category in the 20^th Annual American Business Awards® today.

The American Business Awards are the U.S.A.’s premier business awards program. All organizations operating in the U.S.A. are eligible to submit nominations – public and private, for-profit and non-profit, large and small. More than 3,700 nominations from organizations of all sizes and in virtually every industry were submitted this year for consideration in a wide range of categories.

“We are very excited to have won the 2022 Gold Stevie Award for Telecom Company of the Year (Medium),” said 2600Hz Co-CEO and Co-Founder, Patrick Sullivan. “It is an honor to be recognized for our innovation and growth, and we look forward to continued success throughout the remainder of 2022 and beyond. This award is a true testament to the hard work and dedication our team has put into KAZOO, and I am very proud of them.”

More than 230 professionals worldwide participated in the judging process to select this year’s Stevie Award winners.

“We are so pleased that we will be able to stage our first ABA awards banquet since 2019 and to celebrate, in person, the achievements of such a diverse group of organizations and individuals,” said Maggie Miller, President of the Stevie Awards.

Details about The American Business Awards and the list of 2022 Stevie winners are available at www.StevieAwards.com/ABA.

About 2600Hz: 2600Hz’s cloud communications platform KAZOO modernizes how businesses provide communications services to their customers. With thoughtfully engineered tools built by leaders in the telecom industry, KAZOO offers feature-rich UCaaS, CPaaS, and CCaaS solutions. For developers building their own telephony apps, 2600Hz offers 300+ APIs and provides access to the building blocks of the platform. For more information, visit www.2600Hz.com.

About the Stevie Awards: Stevie Awards competitions receive more than 12,000 entries each year from organizations in more than 70 nations. Honoring organizations of all types and sizes and the people behind them, the Stevies recognize outstanding performances in the workplace worldwide. Learn more about the Stevie Awards at http://www.StevieAwards.com.

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Powered by Vonage, Headsets.com boasts a 98% success rate answering all calls within four rings

HOLMDEL, NJ – May 4, 2022 – Vonage (Nasdaq: VG), a global leader in cloud communications helping businesses accelerate their digital transformation, provides an integrated unified communications and contact center solution to Headsets.com, enabling seamless agent experience and peerless customer service.

The team behind Headsets.com has been America’s headsets specialists for 25 years, providing over 1.5 million businesses with high-quality, ergonomic wired or wireless headsets for office or remote work. As the leading headset supplier in North America, peerless customer service – what the team calls “customer love” – is the bedrock of the company’s culture. From start to finish, at every touchpoint, the Headsets.com customer experience is paramount.

To meet these high standards of customer experience, Headsets.com, the prime retailer of Leitner headsets, relies on Vonage Business Communications (VBC) for a flexible, unified communications experience for their on-site and hybrid work employees, integrated with Vonage’s contact center solution for increased productivity and personalized, intelligent customer connections. With Vonage, the Headsets.com team has strategically built both internal and external communications workflows that power exceptional experiences for both customers and employees.

“At Headsets.com, customer love drives every decision we make as a company,” said Rick Mills, CFO at Headsets.com. “We have an amazing team that truly wants to help and support our customers however they can and give them the best experience possible, every time. To make this possible, we need to provide our team members with communications technology that is reliable, fast, simple, and integrated – and Vonage does that.”

Headsets.com sets an exceptional standard for its customer support team – answer every call live within just four rings. And powered by Vonage, the team has a 98% success rate. The Headsets.com customer journey is marked by real-time interactions, intelligent routing (no phone trees here), and advanced data reporting, all working together to create the smoothest, most positive experience for every customer, every time.

“We are seeing increased demand for unified communications integrated with contact center capabilities, CRM and business apps to create more engaging customer experiences,” said Jay Bellissimo, Chief Operating Officer at Vonage. “Vonage is proud to provide the applications and solutions that enable Headsets.com to offer unparalleled customer support and seamless employee communications.”

Read the full case study to find out more about how Headsets.com is using Vonage’s fully integrated unified communications and contact center solutions to deliver more flexible, intelligent, and personal connections for its customers and agents.

To find out more about Vonage, visit www.vonage.com.

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In Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, superheroes are great at saving the world but rotten at saving each other

This post contains light spoilers about Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, but nothing more than what we’ve seen in trailers and nine episodes of WandaVision.

The most intriguing thing about the Avengers is also the reason I’ve never really warmed to them: They’re just a group of extraordinarily gifted coworkers. For Earth’s Mightiest Heroes, being super is a job.

The first Avengers movie grafted the idea of conflicting office egos onto a hyperbolic, alien invasion allegory. The team began as an extra-governmental initiative contracted together by Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson). Their split in Civil War was largely about who they worked for. And Marvel’s television series The Falcon and The Winter Soldier included an entire plot built upon the fact that the Avengers weren’t paid, even in spite of Tony Stark’s (Robert Downey Jr.) astronomic wealth. How these heroes aren’t on the phone with Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow) demanding medical insurance and overtime reimbursement is beyond me.

The Avengers are coworkers first and friends by chance.

Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness’s spin on that idea is the most riveting thing about the flashy but ultimately uneven movie. Directed by horror comedy savant Sam Raimi and written by Michael Waldron, Multiverse of Madness suggests that despite saving the world multiple times, and enduring all kinds of triumphs and trauma together, these people don’t really care about each other outside of those world-ending events.

Individually, they have their own lives. They don’t think about each other. They don’t call or text or check-in. They aren’t family. And nothing makes that more abundantly clear than when one of them loses their way.

From its first beat, Multiverse of Madness requires its audience to know everything that happened to Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen) in WandaVision — including everything she did.

In that nine-episode Disney+ show, Wanda, in response to the grief of losing her android soulmate, Vision (Paul Bettany), altered the fabric of reality and gave herself a pair of twin sons while mentally enslaving an entire town of people. Think: “gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss,” but with telekinesis and chaos magic.

Eventually, thanks to a fight with an ancient witch named Agatha Harkness (Kathryn Hahn) coupled with her memories of Vision, and because she is a genuinely good person at heart, Wanda realizes that mind-controlling New Jersey townies is not morally great and undoes her hex.

But even as she came to that epiphany, Wanda also found the ultimate temptation in an ancient evil book called the Darkhold (in the show’s post-credits scene).

In Marvel mythos, the Darkhold gives its owner cataclysmic magical power, but is tethered to a Faustian deal: the book corrupts its possessor’s soul, rotting them from the inside out. Unable to resist, Wanda becomes consumed with an immolating desire to be with her conjured children. (You can tell she’s getting more evil because she gets intricate headgear, like she sports in the comic books.)

Marvel Studios

Anyone who’s familiar with X-Men comics or the horrendous end of every X-Men cinematic trilogy will roll their eyes as Multiverse of Madness plops Wanda into the shopworn comic book trope of a red-headed woman feeling immense feelings that put the entire world at risk. The pleas for sanity, the gut-wrenching point of no return, the way culpability and justice are inevitable — there’s nothing fresh here.

In the present day Marvel universe, a mysterious and evil force is chasing an extra-dimensional being named America Chavez (Xochitl Gomez) through the multiverse and, luckily, into the path of Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch). Chavez explains that she’s the only being who has the power to travel through the multiverse, which also explains why big evil is obsessed with her.

Strange consults Wanda, and it becomes clear that the evil chasing America and Wanda are one and the same. It’s a surprise to Strange, but not to anyone who has seen WandaVision.

One might assume that the second-most powerful sorcerer in the world, whose duty is to protect the universe from magical threats, would check on a teammate who mentally enslaved an entire town, magicked two babies out of thin air, and got a power upgrade via Marvel’s version of the Necronomicon. But that assumption would be a mistake.

The lack of interaction between Strange and Wanda could be seen as a weakness in the script or another Marvel plot hole. Lots of cataclysmic stuff happens in the MCU, like the celestial birth in Eternals or the soul-sucking, face-hugging demons in Shang-Chi, but there always seems to be a coincidental and alarming lack of Avengers present whenever these bad things happen. Yet, it’s more provocative if you consider their lack of connection deliberate — that despite saving humanity over and over, Strange fails to see the humanity in his teammate.

Since her first appearance in Age of Ultron, Wanda has always looked to the Avengers as a chosen family — mainly because she has lost everyone close to her by the time she joins the group.

She took up residence at the Avengers HQ. She forged a father-daughter bond with Hawkeye when Ultron attacked, and he helped her escape from house arrest in Civil War. Wanda also found love with Vision, whom she tragically had to kill as part of a futile plan to stop Thanos in Infinity War. When the Avengers defeated Thanos in Endgame, Vision and Natasha Romanoff (Scarlett Johansson) are the only two Avengers who aren’t resurrected.

Speaking of Natasha, it’s striking too how she and Wanda are two Avengers who really see the team as their friends and family. This happens occasionally with some characters throughout Marvel storytelling, like Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) and Tony Stark or the Guardians of the Galaxy, but rarely do we see individual characters think of the entire Avengers team as a family unit. (Both Wanda and Natasha are also women who have red hair, have issues with having children, and in a bit of clumsy, insensitive writing, juxtapose their maternal status with the word “monster.”)

It was also Natasha who kept some semblance of the Avengers up and running after Thanos’s snap, and kept searching for any clue that would bring her friends back. Natasha sacrificed herself for the Soul Stone to bring back her Avengers teammates and their loved ones, only to have many of those same teammates mourn her death by wondering out loud how little they knew about her.

After Thanos was finally vanquished, the Avengers (sans Natasha) disbanded and so did Wanda’s makeshift family. No one — not Hawkeye; not Okoye or Shuri, who Wanda briefly befriended in Wakanda; not Falcon or Bucky, with whom she fought alongside in Civil War; not any of the female Avengers with whom she teamed up with in that “she’s got help” Endgame moment — checked in with her.

It’s hard to distinguish whether this dynamic is an indictment of Wanda for expecting too much from her teammates, or of her teammates for not caring enough about her. Maybe the indecision is the point, and how deeply you feel (or don’t feel) for Wanda is reflective of your own ideas about what being part of a team means, and friendship factors into that equation. The same goes for Strange’s behavior toward his teammate.

Courtesy of Marvel Studios

While Strange is there to protect the multiverse, he’s absent when Wanda needs his help the most. He also isn’t particularly invested in researching any solutions that involve saving Wanda’s soul from the Darkhold. And throughout the movie he, for some inexplicable reason, constantly reminds Wanda that she’s technically not a mom. The strategy of berating a woman who’s grieving her lost children and whose soul is being devoured by an ancient evil with a comically insensitive combination of words seems like a particularly cruel one.

Strange’s lack of tact isn’t out of character. His comic book history and his first movie are punctuated with moments of arrogance, coldness, and unintentionally mean and paternalistic relationships with women. He will do anything to get the job done and defeating Wanda at all costs, in Strange’s eyes, has become the job.

Multiverse of Madness becomes an exhibit of how Doctor Strange and his Avengers teammates are very good at saving the world, but rotten at saving each other. Heroes can do good things without kindness. This is how the Avengers function and have always functioned. And maybe the tragedy, then, isn’t that no one was there to help Wanda, but rather that Wanda expected anything more from a group of world-saving coworkers.

WhatsApp is now rolling out the ability to react to a message with emoji, as well as share files that are up to 2GB in size, a massive jump from the previous 100MB limit. Meta, the company behind WhatsApp, said last month that these features would be coming “soon,” and it seems like today’s the day. The company also announced on Thursday that it’ll be doubling the maximum size of group chats.

When reactions were first announced, Meta said that you’d only be able to use a select few to start out with but that support for “all emojis and skin-tones” would be added in the future.

The reactions are a useful feature, which is why other apps like Slack and Telegram...

Continue reading…

“We’re making these nurdles and basically spilling oil, just in a different form.”

NEW ORLEANS — On an overcast day in April, on the edge of Chalmette Battlefield, a few miles outside the city, Liz Marchio examined a pile of broken twigs and tree branches on the bank of the Mississippi River. “Usually I try to look — oh, there’s one,” said Marchio, a research associate for the Vertebrate Museum at Southeastern Louisiana University. She bent down to pick up something with a pinch of her thumb and forefinger and placed it in her palm for me to see.

The object in Marchio’s hand was small, round, and yellowish-white, about the size of a lentil. It looked like an egg, as if a fish or salamander or tadpole could come wriggling out of it. Marchio handed it to me and turned to flip over a tree branch floating in the water, where dozens more lay waiting underneath. She made a sound of disgust. We had come hunting, and we had quickly found our quarry: nurdles.

A nurdle is a bead of pure plastic. It is the basic building block of almost all plastic products, like some sort of synthetic ore; their creators call them “pre-production plastic pellets” or “resins.” Every year, trillions of nurdles are produced from natural gas or oil, shipped to factories around the world, and then melted and poured into molds that churn out water bottles and sewage pipes and steering wheels and the millions of other plastic products we use every day. You are almost certainly reading this story on a device that is part nurdle.

That is the ideal journey for a nurdle, but not all of them make their way safely to the end of a production line. As Marchio and I continued to make our way upriver toward New Orleans’ French Quarter, she began collecting nurdles in ziplock bags, marking in red Sharpie the date, location, number of beads collected, and the time taken to collect them.

Neel Dhanesha/Vox

Neel Dhanesha/Vox

At one point, on the side of a levee outside the Lower Ninth Ward, she collected 113 nurdles in five minutes. This is not uncommon: An estimated 200,000 metric tons of nurdles make their way into oceans annually. The beads are extremely light, around 20 milligrams each. That means, under current conditions, approximately 10 trillion nurdles are projected to infiltrate marine ecosystems around the world each year.

Hundreds of fish species — including some eaten by humans — and at least 80 kinds of seabirds eat plastics. Researchers are concerned that animals that eat nurdles risk blocking their digestive tracts and starving to death. Just as concerning is what happens to the beads in the long term: Like most plastics, they do not biodegrade, but they do deteriorate over time, forming the second-largest source of ocean microplastics after tire dust. (A nurdle, being less than 5 millimeters around, is a microplastic from the moment of its creation, something also known as a primary microplastic.)

There’s much we still don’t know about how plastics can harm the bodies of humans and animals alike, but recent research has shown that microplastics can be found in the blood of as much as 80 percent of all adult humans, where they can potentially harm our cells. We may not eat the plastic beads ourselves, but nurdles seem to have a way of finding their way back to us.

In most of the United States, the federal and local government respond to nurdle spills big and small in the same way: by doing practically nothing. Nurdles are not classified as pollutants or hazardous materials, so the Coast Guard, which usually handles cleanups of oil or other toxic substances that enter waterways, bears no responsibility for them.

Likewise, most state governments have no rules in place around monitoring, preventing, or cleaning up nurdle spills; a spill is often an occasion of great confusion as local and state environmental agencies try to figure out who might be responsible for managing it. In the eyes of the federal government and every state except California, which began regulating marine plastics in 2007, nurdles are essentially invisible. For all official purposes, a nurdle that has escaped into the wild may as well have entered a black hole.

“Here in Louisiana, we’re making these nurdles and basically spilling oil, just in a different form,” said Mark Benfield, an oceanographer at Louisiana State University who studies microplastics, “And no one notices it, and no one seems to do anything about it.”

A nurdle often escapes from the plastic production process in mundane ways, slipping into drains at factories or spilling out of cargo containers while being transported by trains and ships. When nurdles are being loaded into trains, for example, they are often blown into rail cars using large hoses. The beads can leak around the edges of hoses at factories and out the sides of rail cars as they travel to distribution centers; Benfield and Marchio have both found nurdles lining the sides of tracks used by nurdle-carrying trains.

Sometimes, however, a large spill — often during transportation — will send millions or even billions of nurdles out into the world all at once, coating shorelines with deposits so thick they could be mistaken for banks of snow.

In May 2021, a container ship off the coast of Sri Lanka caught fire and sank, releasing an estimated 1,680 metric tons of nurdles in an incident the United Nations called “the single largest plastic spill on record.” About a year earlier, in August 2020, a storm hit a ship docked at the port of New Orleans, knocking a container filled with bags of nurdles into the Mississippi River. Hundreds of millions of beads escaped from their bags, coating local beaches in white plastic and floating down toward the Gulf of Mexico. They would remain long after the spill; Marchio pointed to a small dimple on the side of the first nurdle we found that identified it as a likely remnant of that spill.

“Big spills, like by ship containers and barge … that’s probably about once a year,” said Jace Tunnell, director of the University of Texas’ Mission-Aransas National Estuarine Research Reserve and founder of the Nurdle Patrol citizen science project, which asks contributors to count nurdles on their local beaches and uses the data to create a map of the pollution.

The map could easily be mistaken for a map of plastic production sites: The vast majority of red and purple dots, which correspond to particularly high levels of nurdles, appear in the petrochemical hubs of Texas and Louisiana. “What happens every single day — it’s a chronic problem — is the loss of pellets during on-loading and off-loading and during transportation,” Tunnell said.

Most plastic does not biodegrade, and a spilled nurdle does not simply disappear. Many wash up on shorelines, like the ones Marchio and I saw, where they easily blend in with the sand, shells, and assorted debris; if undisturbed, they will likely remain there for hundreds if not thousands of years.

A nurdle in the wild is a sneaky thing. Even before it starts breaking down, it is difficult to spot from afar, unlike the plastic bags or bottles we often associate with plastic pollution. It does not give off a heat signature or emit fumes, or create a sheen on the surface of water the way an oil spill might. What it does do is attract toxic pollutants. A nurdle floating down, say, the Mississippi River will absorb the pollutants riding alongside it while sloughing off the water, Benfield told me. It also provides a convenient home for phytoplankton, which will go on to attract zooplankton, which eat the phytoplankton and emit dimethyl sulfide — better known as the smell of the sea.

For many marine animals, the smell of the sea is the smell of food. Seabirds like albatrosses and petrels track dimethyl sulfide to locate patches of plankton from afar, swooping down to pluck their plankton-eating prey out of the water. A nurdle is the size and shape of a fish egg; its camouflage is nearly perfect after some time in the water, looking and smelling like easy pickings to fish, birds, turtles, and crustaceans alike.

Once eaten, nurdles can tangle a creature’s intestines or make it feel as if it is full, said Benfield. A 1992 EPA report found that at least 80 species of seabirds ate nurdles; Benfield said that number has since more than doubled. Plastics provide no nutrients to animals, but an animal that fills up on the beads will eat less food as a result, meaning it could starve to death without even knowing it was starving — especially if its digestive tract is too small to pass the nurdle. Photographs from the aftermath of the spill in Sri Lanka showed fish filled with the pellets, white plastic lining their insides.

Saman Abesiriwardana/Pacific Press/Shutterstock

Eranga Jayawardena/AP

Plastics are endocrine disruptors, meaning they can stunt an animal’s development, and researchers are studying whether toxic pollutants can pass from a nurdle into an animal’s tissue and subsequently up the food chain. But measuring the full impact is difficult, in part because it’s difficult to know exactly what causes a marine animal to die in a world that is increasingly hostile to marine animals.

Preventing nurdle spills, say Tunnell and Benfield, would involve a number of deceptively simple changes. Companies can place containers in loading areas to catch any nurdles that fall during their loading and unloading from rail cars, install screens on storm drains to catch beads that wash away, or make the bags they’re packed into before being shipped out of a sturdier material so they’re less likely to split open. Workers can double-check valves on rail cars to make sure they’re fully tightened and vacuum up nurdles that spill onto factory floors.

Cleaning nurdles up after they’ve spread through an ecosystem is much harder, and no one wants to be responsible for it. The most promising solutions so far involve machines that are essentially vacuums with sieves that filter out sand while sucking up the nurdles. But they have yet to be widely tested, let alone adopted, and they’d be of little use cleaning up beads in the water.

Nurdles have a significant impact on the environment long before they are formed, as well. The vast majority of the plastics plants in the United States are located alongside communities of color, which are disproportionately impacted by industrial pollution. Those plants emit a toxic mixture of pollutants including ethylene oxide, styrene, and benzene; there are so many petrochemical plants located between Baton Rouge and New Orleans that the area has become known as “cancer alley.”

The tide may slowly be turning: Last year, residents of Louisiana’s majority-Black St. James Parish managed to delay the construction of a massive new plastics plant in their community, arguing that they’d suffer undue environmental harm, but the plants that are already in the area will continue to pump out both nurdles and the pollutants that come from making them.

As the world moves toward renewable energy and demand for fossil fuels is expected to peak in the near future, the oil and gas industry is increasingly shifting its business focus to plastic production. Plastic production is expected to triple by 2050 thanks to a fracking boom in the United States that makes natural gas extremely cheap to produce. That will lead to a rise in nurdle production. The question on researchers’ minds is where these beads will end up.

Mark Benfield scrunched up his face as he bent at the waist to examine the sand below him, placing his hands on his knees for support and looking a bit like a human-sized question mark. “This is hard on your back,” said Benfield. “A few decades from now we’ll all have nurdle-related back issues. Nurdle-osis, like scoliosis,” he joked.

We were standing on the beach at Elmer’s Island Wildlife Refuge, on the Gulf of Mexico a couple of hours’ drive south of New Orleans. The beach was empty aside from Benfield, myself, a couple of LSU students, and the occasional crab or seagull. This was the place where, in 2021, Benfield had found hundreds of nurdles nestled in the dunes, indicating a spill somewhere offshore. At first, Benfield thought they may have been the remnants of the 2020 spill in New Orleans. “But when we started to look at the shape and the weights, they were different,” Benfield said, “so there was some big spill of nurdles that we didn’t even know happened.”

Neel Dhanesha/Vox

Neel Dhanesha/Vox

By the time Benfield and I went to Elmer’s Island, most of those nurdles had disappeared. Storms had eaten away at the dunes, and the wind likely pushed the beads inland to the marsh just north of where we were standing, where they would quickly settle into the mud and become unrecoverable. Within a few minutes of arriving, however, Benfield found one hidden amid a pile of sticks that had washed up on the sand. “This must be pretty recent,” he said; it had probably washed in with the tide a day or two ago, though there was no way to tell when it had spilled or where it had come from. Benfield produced a ziplock from a pocket of his cargo pants and dropped the nurdle inside.

The sound of shells crunching underneath our shoes accompanied us as we made our way up the beach; occasionally, Benfield would drop to his hands and knees to check whether he was looking at a nurdle or a shell. “I used to come to the beach to look for shark teeth,” Benfield said. “Now I’m looking for nurdles.”

That changed for Benfield after the 2020 spill in New Orleans. While he had been studying microplastics in the Gulf of Mexico since 2015 and found nurdles in the Mississippi River during previous research trips, he’d only ever pulled a handful out of the river at most; that August, they blanketed the banks. Benfield recruited Marchio, who worked for the Jean Lafitte National Historic Park at the time, to help document the spill, and together they spent days traveling to points along the Mississippi River, laying down square frames and counting tens of thousands of beads in the space of a single square foot.

As the local community learned about the spill through local news outlets and word of mouth, concerned residents organized cleanup efforts. Word got out that Benfield was interested in the nurdles, and people began sending him samples. At one point, Marchio found an entire bag of nurdles, practically intact, underneath a wharf in New Orleans. The name of the manufacturer, Dow Chemical, was still clearly stamped on the bag, along with a warning: “DO NOT DUMP INTO ANY SEWERS, ON THE GROUND, OR INTO ANY BODY OF WATER.”

Neel Dhanesha/Vox

While Benfield, Marchio, and the volunteers busied themselves with trying to document and clean up the spill, state and federal agencies spent weeks trying to decide who, if anyone, ought to be responsible for oversight of the spill and any potential cleanup.

While the Coast Guard usually takes responsibility for cleanups of oil and toxic substances that spill into waterways, it has no responsibility for nontoxic spills. Because nurdles aren’t deemed hazardous to human health under federal or Louisiana state law, a court had to decide which agency, if any, was responsible for cleaning up the spill, said Gregory Langley, a spokesperson for the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ). “The problem with court action is it’s not instantaneous,” Langley said.

The Mississippi River, of course, was not beholden to the courts; while the agencies waited and debated whose job it was to clean up the nurdles, the current carried them downriver. “If you lose something in the river,” said Langley, “it’s gone.”

About three weeks after the spill, the ship’s operator paid for a small crew of men with booms, leaf blowers, and butterfly nets to clean up a small section of the river. The voluntary cleanup, the DEQ reasoned, rendered waiting for the court a moot point; no determination was made about which agency, if any, would have been responsible for the spill.

That cleanup crew was mostly for show, Benfield told me, and most of the nurdles had already disappeared, carried downriver by the current and blown away by the wind. The DEQ still doesn’t know who would be responsible for cleaning up such a spill in the future. “All of that is subject to court action,” Langley told me. So the DEQ would still have to wait for a court decision in the event of a future spill.

Benfield and Marchio have since become the de facto Louisiana outpost of a countrywide effort to document, map, and, eventually (they hope) stop nurdle spills. In the aftermath of the 2020 spill, Benfield turned his lab in LSU’s Baton Rouge campus into a sort of evidence room. When I visited, jars of nurdles lined the countertop by a sink; dozens more were packed into boxes, ready to be shipped to Jace Tunnell in Texas so he could include them in teaching kits he sends to schools around the country. The bag of nurdles Marchio found underneath the wharf in New Orleans sat in one corner, next to a bucket filled with a mixture of sand, twigs, and nurdles brought in by a well-meaning local who helped with the cleanup in 2020.

When Benfield finds new nurdles, he analyzes them under a spectrometer to see what they are made of; he hopes to eventually build a database of nurdles so that they can be traced back to their origin. In an ideal world, he’d receive samples of nurdles from plastics manufacturers that could make that sort of tracing easier, but he doubts they would be open to the idea; there’s no business case for accountability, he reasons.

Neel Dhanesha/Vox

“It’s ridiculous. If I went to the river and tossed in hundreds of plastic bags, I’d be in trouble,” Benfield said. Under Louisiana law, he would likely be fined somewhere between $500 and $1,000 for littering, at the least, and have to serve a few hours in a litter abatement program. “But because (the nurdles) are so small,” he continued, “the companies get away with it.”

Being the documenter of plastic pellets is thankless work. There’s little funding for researching them, and Benfield, Marchio, and Tunnell often speak with the air of people resigned to the seemingly quixotic quest of tilting at nurdles. “Nurdles infiltrate your brain,” Marchio said to me once. “I have to remember that my role is monitoring, not cleaning. If I try to clean, I’ll just get frustrated.”

So what does doing something about nurdles look like?

The plastics industry’s stance on plastic pollution at large has long been that recycling needs to be improved. More responsible consumer behavior and waste-management practices, the industry line goes, will bring post-consumer plastics back to manufacturers that can reuse them. But a nurdle almost never reaches a consumer’s hands in its base form, and asking consumers to solve the nurdle problem through recycling would be akin to asking drivers to clean up an oil spill by conserving the fuel in their cars. Unlike a finished plastic product, the solution to nurdle spills, like nurdles themselves, will have to be found somewhere in the plastic production process.

For a brief moment a few years ago, it seemed as though the answer could come from the courts. In 2019, a federal judge in Texas approved a $50 million settlement in a case brought by Diane Wilson, a retired shrimper, which alleged that a plant run by the Taiwanese plastics giant Formosa Plastics had violated its permits by illegally discharging nurdles into the water in and around Lavaca Bay, on the Gulf Coast in Calhoun County, Texas.

The settlement, which was the largest of its kind in American history to result from a civil environmental lawsuit, included a consent decree that committed Formosa to “zero discharge” standards. In other words, the company’s plant at Lavaca Bay’s Point Comfort had to stop releasing pellets into the water or risk fines of up to $10,000 for each violation in the first year, increasing annually to a maximum of $54,000 per violation.

Formosa isn’t quite keeping its end of the bargain. Since it began operations in June 2021, said Wilson, a wastewater monitoring facility set up to keep tabs on Formosa’s pellet discharge has logged at least 239 violations, for fines totaling $5.3 million and counting. “The implementing of this consent decree is the hardest thing we have ever done,” said Wilson, who at 73 years old has been an environmental activist for more than 30 years. “You’ve got to be on them all the time. Most of my life is almost full-time Formosa.”

For Formosa, which is the sixth-largest chemical company in the world with sales of $27.7 billion in 2020, a $5.3 million fine is “almost like the cost of doing business,” Tunnell said. At least for now, it seems it’s cheaper to simply keep racking up those small fines over time than to make any potential large investments that would be needed to stop the nurdles from spilling in the first place.

In the meantime, Wilson told me, fishers in Lavaca Bay continue to pull up fish with nurdles in their guts; oyster fishers have found the beads nestled in their catch like pearls. The area is home to a mercury superfund site — an EPA designation for contaminated industrial areas that receive funding for cleanup efforts — that was closed to fishing for decades due to the threat of mercury poisoning. Mercury has already devastated local marine life; now, Wilson says researchers and activists are concerned the nurdles may absorb the mercury and become vectors that can carry the mercury beyond Lavaca Bay. “People just ignore it,” Wilson said.

Mark Felix/AFP via Getty Images

Mark Felix/AFP via Getty Images

While Wilson’s lawsuit was a remarkable victory, it was also an indicator of the difficulty of addressing nurdle pollution piecemeal. Wilson and her collaborators spent years collecting thousands of beads from around the area — including one discharge site in the middle of the water, which Wilson had to kayak out to — and it was only through amassing a mountain of evidence that she was able to convince a judge that Formosa’s Point Comfort plant was responsible for the beads that were washing up in the area. Attributing nurdles to a particular source is difficult, and repeating the feat would require a similar effort for every nurdle production plant in the country.

“I think the best place to start is to take a small step backward and recognize we have laws on the books already that are meant to regulate pollution and emissions from manufacturing and production facilities,” said Anja Brandon, US plastics policy analyst at the Ocean Conservancy, a nonprofit that works to protect oceans and marine life. “Namely in this instance, the Clean Water Act, kind of our bedrock environmental law.”

The Clean Water Act passed in 1972 after the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland, Ohio, caught fire in 1969, drawing national attention to the country’s polluted waterways. Today, the act regulates the discharge of various pollutants into waters around the country; it’s a major reason why many of the nation’s rivers are cleaner now than they were 50 years ago.

“These laws haven’t been updated to meet the needs of the moment,” said Brandon. In most of the country, she explained, “plastic nurdles have essentially gotten off scot free because they have yet to be classified or specifically labeled as a pollutant.” The rare exception is California, which in 2007 became the first and so far only state to pass a law classifying nurdles as pollutants to be regulated under the Clean Water Act, citing their contribution to litter on beaches and the possibility that they could be mistaken for food by marine animals.

Lawmakers in Texas and South Carolina have introduced similar legislation, though both bills seem stuck. The Texas bill, introduced in the House by representative Todd Hunter last year, never moved forward, while the South Carolina bill passed the state senate in 2021 but was recently shelved in the House.

Closing the nurdle loophole, says Brandon, would require classifying nurdles as a pollutant under the Clean Water Act at the federal level. Lawmakers have shown some support for this approach: In 2020, then-Sen. Tom Udall (D-NM) introduced the Break Free From Plastics Pollution Act, which would have put in place wide-ranging regulations on plastics and recycling.

Identical bills were reintroduced in the House by Alan Lowenthal (D-CA) and in the Senate by Jeff Merkley (D-OR) in March 2021, but neither bill has moved beyond committee. In April 2021, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) introduced the much shorter and more tightly focused Plastic Pellet Free Waters Act, which would give the EPA regulatory control over nurdles through the Clean Water Act; that bill has also been stalled.

The plastics industry is opposed to both bills. “We do not think that plastics belong in the environment. They belong in the economy,” said Joshua Baca, vice president of the plastics division at the American Chemistry Council, a major plastics industry trade group. That said, he continued, “The Break Free From Plastics Pollution Act is really a bad piece of legislation. It has a very nice title. But it can be very misleading to the average person.”

Legislation like the Break Free From Plastics Pollution Act or the Plastic Pellet Free Waters Act, Baca argued, are disguised attempts to simply shut down plastic manufacturing in the US more broadly. “We generally think that the best approach here is to think about this holistically in a way that looks at loss across the entire value chain and puts in place best practices to avoid the loss within the environment,” he continued.

Baca pointed to Operation Clean Sweep, or OCS, a voluntary program run by the American Chemistry Council and the Plastics Industry Association that’s meant to curb nurdle leaks and spills but maintains no oversight mechanism and imposes no penalty for failure to comply.

“Many of our companies are inserting state-of-the-art technology within their facilities ... to ensure that they limit the loss of pellets going on,” Baca said. When I asked Baca for more information, he demurred, citing the possible use of proprietary technology.

Formosa Plastics, the subject of Diane Wilson’s lawsuit, is not only a participant in Operation Clean Sweep but also a member of OCS blue, a “data-driven VIP member offering” of Operation Clean Sweep that “enhances the commitment to management, measurement, and reporting of unrecovered plastic releases into the environment from resin handling facilities.” Members receive plaques commemorating their enrollment.

Neel Dhanesha/Vox

“I think they have a lot of good practices that ought to be mandatory, but they’re voluntary,” said Tunnell. “That obviously does not work. There needs to be accountability.” One way to create that accountability, Tunnell told me, would be to classify plastic pellets as hazardous substances outright, which would not only bring much tighter scrutiny to the production process but also give the Coast Guard the authority to coordinate and perform cleanups whenever a spill occurs. This is something like the nuclear option for nurdles, and would no doubt be the subject of stiff opposition from the plastics industry if it ever becomes a matter of debate.

For Tunnell, the stakes are existential. A failure to stop nurdles from spilling would be like giving up on the future of our world. “At the end of the day, it comes down to the next generation,” Tunnell said. “These plastic pellets will be around for hundreds of years. It’s not like they dissolve. They’re just accumulating and accumulating, and even if you’re in high school right now, your great-grandkids will see the same pellets on the beach. So I think we owe it to my great-grandkids and their great-grandkids to do something about this now.”

We’d already noted how telecom and media giants are engaged in a last ditch attempt over the next few weeks to derail Biden’s nomination to the FCC, Gigi Sohn. Sohn is widely admired by folks on both sides of the aisle, and is eminently qualified on stuff like expanding access to affordable broadband, media consolidation, consumer protection, privacy, and media diversity.

The broad consensus is that Sohn is hugely qualified and fair. But she’s also a real reformer, an anti-monopolist, and a staunch opponent of mindless media consolidation. That’s something AT&T, Verizon, Charter, and Comcast, which were coddled throughout the Trump era, would very much like to avoid.

Since they can’t attack her actual record, telecom and media giants have been engaged in an absolutely grotesque smear campaign involving getting various groups to falsely accuse Sohn of disliking minorities, hating rural America, or trying to censor conservatives. With the entire GOP in loyal lockstep (as is usually the case), telecom’s now focused on flipping the votes of Senators Mark Kelly of Arizona, Catherine Cortez Mastro of Nevada, and Joe Manchin of West Virginia to kill Sohn’s nomination dead.

Joining that campaign is the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP). For the last six months, FOP has been spewing all manner of gibberish complaints about Sohn, including the idea that her nomination should be opposed because she (gasp) supports encryption. I’d wager much of this being coordinated by AT&T, which has a long history with precisely this kind of greasy shit and has an existing partnership with FOP.

Now the FOP has come out with a push poll, whose function is to accuse Sohn of hating the police. Basically, the FOP’s not-at-all-scientific poll found that if you tell people who had no idea who Sohn is that she is “anti-police,” they’ll be less likely to support Sohn:

Of course Sohn isn’t “anti-police” and doesn’t actually support “defunding the police.” Like many, she has supported police reform (itself not at all a radical or unpopular position), such as offloading some more sensitive social and mental health outreach to social workers. The FOP’s “research” into what tweets Sohn liked on this front is about as flimsy and performative as it comes.

Granted it didn’t take long for the bunk claim that Sohn is “anti-police” to be circulated by right wing gibberish merchants like Phil Kerpen (he played a role in those fake comments supporting the telecom industry attack on net neutrality), who thought the FOP’s completely unscientific findings were “interesting”:

Again, telecom and media giants don’t oppose Sohn because she likes tweets advocating for police reform (which itself isn’t disqualifying anyway). They oppose Sohn because she actively wants to tackle the vast harms created by things like telecom monopolization, limited broadband competition, privacy abuses, mindless media consolidation, and other issues in the telecom space.

Sohn’s genuinely popular across both sides of the aisle and her record is stellar. Since they can’t attack her on the merits, telecom is using proxy organizations to spread harmful gibberish in a bid to either flip or provide flimsy justification for the votes of Senators Kelly, Cortez Mastro, or Manchin.

It’s a grotesque campaign, but it’s how DC works. And when the press can be bothered to stop talking about Elon Musk long enough to cover the story, they cover it with headlines like this one, that amplify the false claims, and at no point make it clear this is all manufactured controversy:

I’ve been watching these kinds of bad faith “astroturf” campaigns from telecom (which of course are common in most other industries) for decades, and the press, public, and policymakers never seem to get any more savvy at identifying or combating them.

The Biden team isn’t faultless here either. It took the Biden administration nine months to even nominate Sohn, giving the telecom industry (frightened by the rush promotion of Lina Khan at the FTC) ample time to galvanize opposition. Team Biden also hasn’t done anything to defend Sohn publicly, or apply any meaningful pressure on the Senate confirmation voting process. Nor have Sohn’s future FCC colleagues voiced any public support, despite the shamelessness of the attacks.

Which, in turn, is fairly reflective of how the federal government doesn’t really take stuff like telecom monopolization and telecom consolidation seriously, especially in an era where “big tech” has sucked all the oxygen out of the DC policy room. And again, this is all occurring in an era when DC pretends to be interested in “bipartisan antitrust reform,” revealing the hollowness of the gambit.

Starlink’s internet-from-SpaceX service has gone mobile with a new Portability feature. For an additional monthly fee, Starlink subscribers can now take their “dishy” anywhere on their home continent that provides active internet coverage. That opens up connectivity to remote places that will likely never be covered by 5G — a potential boon to the increasing numbers of work-from-anywhere types spawned by the COVID 19 pandemic.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk responded to one happy Starlink camper saying, “Starlink is awesome for RV’s, camping or any activity away from cities.”

Starlink doesn’t support use while driving yet, but the company...

Continue reading…

If your employer loves you, they should give you money, not a granola bar.

A while back, I worked at a Company That Shall Not Be Named. When I started, they had really nice (probably too nice) snacks. Then, they scrapped the snacks and got a vending machine you had to pay for. You were still allowed free fruit — but were limited to two pieces per week. Then, the mass layoffs came.

Why, I started to think, had Company That Shall Not Be Named been wasting money on snacks in the first place, especially if the budget really was so tight? Sure, pretzels at work are nice, but what is even nicer is a paycheck. Obviously, a smaller snack budget wasn’t going to save jobs, but the whole situation seemed silly.

A lot of corporate rewards are kind of bullshit.

Office snacks aren’t necessarily a scam, but they do feel scam-adjacent. If they were to go away entirely, that would probably be fine. And that might be just what’s happening anyway, thanks to the rise of remote work and a diminishing tax break for employers who provide them.

For years, many companies — especially those with fat wallets — have been engaged in a sort of arms race of office perks in order to compete for workers and keep them on board. Some of those perks and benefits are really meaningful, such as generous parental leave and solid health coverage. Others fall more on the nice-to-have list, such as on-site gyms, yoga workshops, and dry cleaning. Also on the latter list: snacks.

The pandemic has thrown some of the snack situation out of whack because more office workers have been doing their jobs from home. Now, companies are trying to lure people back to their desks with perks, including free food and snacks. Among other things, it’s a tell on what companies are trying to do, in part, with snacks in the first place: get you to work a little harder and a little longer and feel a little better about it because food, psychologically, can make people feel better. And companies get a tax deduction on what they spend on snacks to boot.

“For some offices, office snacks are considered motivation or a perk. Whenever we feel like we have some extra perks, we tend to work harder,” said Susan Albers, a psychologist at Cleveland Clinic and author of multiple books on mindful eating. “Food can really change, shape, and adapt behavior.”

A pile of granola bars, bananas, and pretzels at the office isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it does play a role in keeping people in the office and working when maybe they would be better off going outside, or would rather just go home. Companies can also use snacks as a potential recruitment tool, a way to say, “Look what a cool, kind place we are to work” — and it’s cheaper for a company to provide snacks than to pay employees more. Snacks are not a stand-in for more tangible, impactful benefits or higher pay. A free candy bar does not a sufficient retirement fund make.

“Snacks should be thought of as a small tool to elevate employee experience, but it’s not a substitute for the fundamentals of creating a healthy work environment,” said Steven Rogelberg, a professor at UNC Charlotte and an expert in organizational science and management. “If an organization is fundamentally flawed and leaders are fundamentally not good leaders, snacks aren’t going to do much. Snacks can’t mask these fundamental problems.”

Or maybe the days of office snacks should just be over.

The rise of office snacks

Snacks were not always so big of a thing in the United States, in culture in general or at work. But over the latter half of the 20th century, that changed. Manufacturers were producing and sending out prepackaged snacks to the masses, and consumers were literally eating them up. From 1977 to 2002, the percentage of Americans eating at least three snacks a day rose from 11 percent to 42 percent. Snack culture spilled over to the workplace, as Jamie Lauren Keiles laid out in 2019 for the New York Times, in wheeled carts and vending machines for employees to buy from. During and after the dot-com boom, it became employers who were buying and providing snacks. You probably know the familiar startup trope: the pingpong table, the video games, beer on tap, and, of course, an array of foods that no one would call a full meal.

People like snacks, at least according to the snack industry and, also, logic. A study from snack maker Mondelez found that 59 percent of adults around the world prefer snacking to eating meals. A 2015 survey from grocery delivery company Peapod found that 67 percent of workers who had access to free food said they were “extremely” or “very” happy with their jobs compared to 56 percent of workers overall.

Rogelberg said his research shows that one of the best predictors of satisfaction with a meeting at work is having snacks, though he clarified it’s not really about the snacks in and of themselves. “It’s more the fact that the leader is taking the time to try to do something nice for people, and that they are signaling some intentionality,” he said.

I’m not going to lie, getting a doughnut will probably make me feel better about a meeting. That doesn’t mean said meeting maybe couldn’t have been an email, or that I couldn’t have done without the doughnut.

Office snacks are tax deductible for employers. Prior to the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, they were 100 percent deductible; now, that’s been cut down to 50 percent. Snacks are considered what’s called a de minimis fringe benefit, and there are fewer limits around tax deductions for them compared to other employer-provided meals.

“What they’re spending on the purchase of snacks, the employer right now is allowed to deduct 50 percent of the cost of the snack unless the snack is coming from a restaurant,” said Kathryn Bjornstad Amin, partner at Groom Law Group. “Employers were not happy about that, the 50 percent cut.”

Still, it’s better than nothing. Bjornstad Amin added that the tax deductibility for snacks for companies will be eliminated entirely in 2026. “They might not want to purchase the snacks for employees if they can’t deduct it,” she said. “It might still be worth it to provide snacks to employees for other reasons, that’s worth more than the deduction to them.”

Snacks make it easier to be in the office but maybe it’s not awesome to be so much in the office

Most of the experts I spoke to for this story agreed on one thing regarding snacks: Part of the point is to get workers to stick around in the office. “It lends itself to staying in the office longer and more of a face-time kind of culture,” said Kyra Sutton, an assistant professor of human resource management at Rutgers. “The goal would be to make work as comfortable and as convenient as possible, kind of creating a home setting in the workplace so that you have less to worry about and you have readily available snacks.”

If there’s food available, really whatever it is, it lets people stay in the office instead of going out to get something, and maybe they even turn the snacks into lunch. At the end of the day, if they’re hungry, a snack might get people to stick around a little longer. Employer-provided snacks can be a nice money-saver for workers who don’t want to spend on food while on the job. Of course, companies could pay them more as well.

There is some evidence that snacks can improve performance and productivity at work, though as Monica Torres outlined in HuffPost in 2019, the evidence is more mixed than you’d think. Not all snacks are created equal. A 2011 study found that snack foods such as chocolate and cookies were associated with higher stress and more cognitive failures at work. A 2014 study found that people snacking on fruits experienced lower anxiety, depression, and stress compared to those snacking on chips and chocolate. If you have ever worked in an office, I probably do not need to tell you that a lot or even most of the snack options are not exactly ones you’d find at the health food store.

Stress, including at work, can cause people to overeat; not a good thing. One study found that when layoffs were coming at one New York manufacturing company, workers were draining the vending machines of high-calorie and high-sugar snacks. Albers said she always encourages people to eat “mindfully” and to try to make sure “they’re not using those snacks for stress reduction.” But if you’re in a high-stress work environment, mindful eating can be easier said than done.

“Often, office snacks are high-sugar and don’t create a lot of nutrients. Often, they’re also placed in a location where people have to get up and walk to. That can be a good thing, or it can also produce some mindless eating and weight gain and promote some procrastination as well,” Albers said. “Food tends to make people happy. It hits the dopamine in the brain — but there are a lot of other non-food perks that businesses can incorporate.”

As companies look to get workers back into the office, snacks and food are part of the playbook. It’s not a terrible idea, but it’s also not necessarily what workers value most from employers. One survey from Envoy of workers who have gone back to the office found that office perks like free food ranked low on a list of advantages of returning. What ranked higher: separating home life from work life, collaborating in person, seeing work friends and managers, and better wifi.

I’m not saying office snacks are the devil. (And maybe I’m just the office snack grinch!) Of the ways companies try to get employees to work longer and harder and feel better about their jobs without having to do much, snacks are just a small factor. Some firms pay for dinner, but only if you stay until a certain time. Or they’ll put gyms and massages and dry cleaning services on the premises, which again, sure, fine, but maybe everyone would be fine just working out without their coworkers around, and leaving the premises to do so. And all of these perks shouldn’t overshadow what really makes a workplace good: good pay, reliable benefits, a safe environment. A couple of years ago, I talked to a Family Dollar worker who said corporate had sent her store cookies at the outset of the pandemic while the workers waited for sneeze guards. I think about it a lot.

If work-from-home and a dying tax deduction are the death of office snacks, it won’t be the end of the world. They were never that great in the first place.

We live in a world that’s constantly trying to sucker us and trick us, where we’re always surrounded by scams big and small. It can feel impossible to navigate. Every two weeks, join Emily Stewart to look at all the little ways our economic systems control and manipulate the average person. Welcome to The Big Squeeze.

Have ideas for a future column? Other work “perks” you don’t feel are great? Email emily.stewart@vox.com.

Bird flu currently poses little threat to humans, but it’s hell for the birds.

The final month of Minnesota Timberwolves basketball was livelier than ever this season, and not just because they nearly upset the Memphis Grizzlies in their first-round playoff series.

During one game in mid-April, a woman glued her hand to the court. A few days later, another woman chained herself to the goal post. The following week, a third woman, dressed as a referee, stormed the court before removing her jacket, exposing a shirt underneath that read “Glen Taylor roasts animals alive.”

The protests, coordinated by the animal rights group Direct Action Everywhere, were aimed at the Timberwolves’ majority owner Glen Taylor. Taylor also owns Rembrandt Enterprises, a large Iowa egg producer that has culled — meaning deliberately killed — 5.3 million of its hens in response to a widespread bird flu outbreak (and then laid off nearly all of its staff).

Carlos Gonzalez/Star Tribune via Getty Images

The virus, known as the Eurasian H5N1 avian influenza, began tearing through Europe, Asia, and Africa in late 2021 and is still raging, with Europe experiencing its worst bird flu outbreak on record. It was first detected in the US in January and has since spread to at least 32 states, resulting in the death of more than 36 million chickens and turkeys and triggering a spike in egg prices.

While the virus has a near 100 percent mortality rate among infected poultry — and can spread rapidly among birds, especially in packed industrial farming conditions — it’s currently believed to pose little threat to human beings. It only rarely spills over to people, and only to those who come into close contact with infected birds. Even when there are human infections, “the viruses are unable to efficiently transmit between humans,” notes Michelle Wille, a virus ecologist at the University of Sydney.

But when certain strains of avian flu do manage to infect humans, it can be deadly. From 2003 to 2021, a little more than half of the 863 people who contracted an earlier strain of H5N1 died. The H5N1 strain currently spreading appears to be less transmissible and less severe to humans than those that infected people in the past, and only two people have tested positive for the strain — a man in the United Kingdom last December, and a man in Colorado last week.

The Colorado man — a prison inmate who had come in direct contact with presumably infected birds while working at a culling operation as part of a pre-release work program — experienced a few days of fatigue and recovered after being treated with an antiviral drug. Around 10 people who came into contact with him are under close observation.

Beyond the occasional one-off case in close human contacts, the bigger worry is that an unchecked flu that spreads among birds has plenty of opportunities to mutate in a way that allows it to transmit efficiently from person to person, thereby kicking off a new influenza pandemic. A widespread bird flu outbreak in 2005 raised alarm bells and prompted the US Senate to allocate $4 billion to prepare for a possible influenza pandemic — though when a new flu pandemic did break out in 2009, the origin was ultimately found in a swine virus.

So far, the bird flu has mostly been a problem for birds. It’s not the disease that’s killing most of them, however — it’s their owners.

When chicken, turkey, and egg companies detect one infected bird, they kill the whole flock in an effort to slow the spread of the virus. And they’re doing so using a variety of excruciating methods, including spraying birds with a suffocating water-based foam or closing off barn vents to raise temperatures so the birds die by heat stroke, a practice called ventilation shutdown, which can take 1.5 to 3.75 hours to kill them.

USDA APHIS

“It’s horrendous,” says Craig Watts, a former large-scale chicken farmer and currently a director of field operations for the Socially Responsible Agriculture Project, a nonprofit that advocates against industrial livestock operations. “I’ve been in those houses when the power went out and the generator didn’t kick on. In just a few minutes [the heat] is unbearable. … I can’t imagine that going on for hours and hours.”

According to the Storm Lake Times, a newspaper based near Rembrandt’s operation, the company used ventilation shutdown plus, or VSD+, meaning they also pumped heat into their barns to kill the birds faster, a practice being employed in several states. Rembrandt Enterprises did not respond to a request for comment.

The situation is horrific, but given the industrialized nature of the US poultry industry and its response to past bird flu outbreaks, animal advocates say it’s unsurprising. Nearly all birds raised for meat and eggs in the US are raised on factory farms, where producers raise hundreds of thousands to millions of animals per year. And most of these animals are genetically identical, which could make them more vulnerable to bird flu. Some experts say the intensification of animal farming — raising more animals closer together — could also be increasing the virulence and transmission rate of bird flu strains.

Dena Jones of the Animal Welfare Institute says the 2014-2015 bird flu outbreak in the US, which led to the culling of more than 50 million animals — the largest cull in US history — didn’t prompt any real change in the industry. Instead, mega operations that raise millions of birds per year are continuing to be built across the country, from Oregon to Wisconsin and West Virginia to North Carolina as US chicken and egg consumption rises.

“We’re doubling down on this same system by raising more animals with less genetic diversity and higher density in larger operations, and all of that contributes to making it difficult to humanely kill an animal during an emergency,” Jones said.

There are culling methods that kill the birds much quicker than ventilation shutdown, such as spraying them with nitrogen-filled foam or gassing them in small enclosures, a method some producers are using to address this outbreak. There’s also a race to create an effective bird flu vaccine that could be used to slow the spread of future outbreaks, a race the USDA is partially funding.

Considering the speed at which bird flu spreads among commercial poultry flocks, and how painful it is for infected birds, the industry has no choice but to mass cull. But the USDA’s approval of ventilation shutdown in 2015 and the rise of its use in recent years, combined with the slow pace of vaccine approval and adoption, mean that for the time being, the birds themselves will continue to receive little consideration in the fight against bird flu. The ongoing expansion and intensification of US animal agriculture, along with a rise in animal disease outbreaks, might also mean that we need to learn how to live with the bird flu and the looming threat it poses.

Bird flu spread, explained

Migratory waterfowl, like ducks, geese, and terns, are the natural hosts of highly pathogenic avian influenza strains, but can largely — though not always — carry and spread the virus without showing symptoms.

Wild birds rarely come into direct contact with farmed chickens and turkeys, most of which are raised in large indoor barns — especially in more developed economies — but instead spread the virus when their fecal droppings, saliva, or nasal secretions contaminate animal feed or land on surfaces like farmworkers’ clothing or farm equipment. Researchers say the global poultry trade also contributes to the worldwide spread of the bird flu through the import and export of infected poultry.

Once any birds test positive for the virus, the whole flock is culled, as the flu can quickly spread to the tens of thousands of other hens, chickens, or turkeys in a single farm. And the flu itself is agonizing for infected poultry. Chickens have trouble breathing and suffer from extreme diarrhea, and sometimes develop swelling around their head, neck, or eyes. Turkeys’ wings can become paralyzed and they might experience tremors.

Daniel Acker/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Bird flu outbreaks have been recorded in commercial poultry flocks since at least the 19th century, but the frequency accelerated — and became a bigger issue in the poultry industry — starting in 1997, when an outbreak of H5N1 in Hong Kong chicken farms led to 18 infections in people, six of whom died. Officials responded by culling all 1.3 million chickens in Hong Kong in the winter of 1997-98. Since then, outbreaks have occurred around the world every few years.

And not much beyond mass culling can be done to slow the spread once it starts. Adel Talaat, a professor of microbiology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, says we should improve disease surveillance and farm biosecurity to help prevent new outbreaks and slow the spread, but a vaccine that could reliably reduce transmission would go a long way.

At the moment, there aren’t any highly effective vaccines on the market, but Talaat is working to develop one using a database of thousands of avian influenza antigens to create a “composite” vaccine that he hopes will protect against current and future virus strains. “Our job is to try to stop this cycle of transmission,” Talaat says. “Because if you stop the cycle of transmission you will be able to basically stop the mutation and stop the replication of the virus.”

Jeff Miller/UW-Madison

He estimates it could take up to five years until he completes his work and hopefully receives USDA approval, and says a mass vaccination program in the early phase of a bird flu outbreak could be effective at slowing the spread of the virus.

“In a big country [like the US], once we start seeing any one case, we know it’s going to go throughout the states — state by state — so we really should start an aggressive campaign for vaccination right away,” Talaat says.

Aside from the ineffectiveness of currently available bird flu vaccines, they’re also made in such a way that it’s impossible to distinguish vaccinated, non-infected birds from infected birds. And because no country wants to import meat from potentially infected birds, the vaccines have been a non-starter. Talaat hopes his vaccine will solve this long-standing problem.

A spokesperson with the National Turkey Federation told Vox over email that the trade group “supports vaccine development and believes it can be done relatively quickly. However, World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE) rules impose severe trade penalties for vaccine use, and we are encouraging USDA to work aggressively for a change in those rules.”

“Decisions on vaccinations require many data and we’re investigating an avian influenza vaccine that could distinguish from the wild-type virus,” Rick Coker, a USDA spokesperson, said over email. “We do not have a time frame on any potential vaccine or how it would be used.”

There are also efforts underway to create a gene-edited chicken breed immune to bird flu. But for now, the primary way to prevent the flu from killing poultry is by killing poultry.

Toward less cruel culling methods

During the 2014-2015 bird flu outbreak, the most common culling method in the US entailed spraying turkeys with suffocating water-based foam; with this method, it takes seven to 15 minutes for the birds to die, and it causes significant pain. The second-most common method was gassing hens with carbon dioxide in small enclosures, which can render birds unconscious within 30 seconds.

But according to the USDA, deploying these methods was sometimes too slow to meet the need of depopulating infected flocks within 24 hours. So, at the end of 2015, fearing another wave of outbreaks, the USDA approved ventilation shutdown — closing off air vents so the temperature rises, which can take hours for the birds to die by heat stroke. The USDA now says ventilation shutdown alone, without added heat or CO2, should only be used as a last-resort measure.

Over email, Coker with the USDA told Vox that ventilation shutdown plus should only be used under “constrained circumstances,” like when depopulation by water-based foam or CO2 gassing is not possible. Various factors, like epidemiological information and housing and environmental conditions are weighed by USDA personnel, farm operators, and state officials when deciding whether or not to use VSD+. “Should VSD+ be authorized on-site, responders will carry it out quickly and as humanely as possible,” he said.

Despite the policy to only use it under constrained circumstances, VSD+ has already been employed in at least six states and on millions of birds during this current outbreak.

Will Lowrey, an attorney with the animal rights group Animal Outlook who has submitted public records requests on VSD+, found that in addition to being used on the 5.3 million Rembrandt hens, it has also been used on commercial poultry farms in Kentucky, Delaware, Minnesota (Jennie-O/Hormel), Missouri (Tyson Foods), and Wisconsin.

Producers do have some incentive to use VSD+ over other culling options. To receive reimbursement for costs incurred during depopulation and disposal, they have to use a culling method permitted by the American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA), a nongovernmental trade group, and VSD+ generally requires less labor and supplies than most other methods. But it’s an inhumane practice.

In the AVMA’s culling guidelines for VSD+, the organization cites research conducted at North Carolina State University in 2016 meant to replicate and study ventilation shutdown. Researchers placed one chicken at a time in a small enclosure and pumped in heat, carbon dioxide, or both. Animal Outlook obtained footage from that experiment via a Freedom of Information Act request and shared it with Marina Bolotnikova for the Intercept. You can view the experiment below (warning: it’s graphic).

In the video, a bird appears to be gasping for air, unable to stand, and according to a veterinarian interviewed by the Intercept, showing signs of attempting to vocalize (the video has no audio). It took around 91 minutes for the birds to die of just ventilation shutdown, 53 minutes when heat was added, 11.5 minutes when carbon dioxide was added, and nine minutes when both heat and carbon dioxide were added. Other research has found that times are much longer for hens in stacked cage systems, as opposed to turkeys and chickens raised for meat who live on barn floors.

A coalition of more than 1,500 veterinarians, appropriately called Veterinarians Against Ventilation Shutdown, say the process is inhumane and are calling on the American Veterinary Medical Association to classify it as “not recommended” for culling. An investigator with Direct Action Everywhere — the group that’s been disrupting Minnesota Timberwolves games — says they entered a Rembrandt facility after depopulation and allegedly found some birds who had survived ventilation shutdown plus.

“On the floor and in the cages we found … upwards of 100 chickens [still alive],” the investigator, who spoke with me on the condition of anonymity, said. “If you [extrapolate that for] the parts of the facility we didn’t go into, maybe several hundred chickens were still stuck in cages or running around loose.”

Jones says more humane methods need to be prioritized, like nitrogen-filled foam and small-enclosure gassing, which knock animals unconscious before they die.

Despite the challenges that come with these methods — increased costs and labor, among others — Watts, the ex-chicken farmer, says change would be a matter of the industry prioritizing animal welfare.

“I hear the industry argument about everything costing too much,” he said. “If they’re serious about animal welfare, you and I [wouldn’t be] having this discussion on what could be done better — they would already be doing it.” He wants to see the industrialized model that dominates US agriculture today — the model he once raised birds in — replaced by farms with smaller flock sizes, and where birds are given outdoor access and more space.

Factory-farming animals is an inherently risky business. And when a system that crams tens of thousands of birds together is faced with a highly-transmissible, lethal virus, that system is largely defenseless. At best, industry can work to minimize harm, but only if it’s willing to pay increased costs. But the conditions on today’s meat and egg farms — and the approval and adoption of ventilation shutdown — demonstrate a drive toward efficiency, not welfare.

“In the short term, it would be my preference to see something more painless and quick” used to cull the birds, says Watts. “In the long term, what we’re looking at is a very flawed system — it’s time to just basically push it off a ledge and reboot and start over.”

Spencer got his vasectomy in December. He and his wife had been discussing it for a year, and they decided together that it was time to take the big snip.

“Her IUD was coming up on its expiration date, and she really didn’t want to get another one put in, which was traumatic and very painful, or go back onto birth control,” he told me. They live in Arizona, one of the most hostile states toward abortion rights, and they don’t want to have children in the future. His getting a vasectomy—the outpatient procedure that severs the tubes that carry sperm from the balls to the urethra—was “the simple solution to all of the issues,” he said.

On Monday, a leaked draft majority opinion indicated that the Supreme Court has voted to overturn Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that’s protected the right to legal abortions at the federal level. The outcry from abortion rights supporters has been tremendous, as people grieve a foundational right to bodily autonomy coming another step closer to being stripped away in the U.S.

In what they see as both acts of solidarity and public service announcements, it’s prompted many people who’ve gotten their sperm-tubes snipped to talk openly about their balls—and their own roles in the demand for abortion access—online.

“It’s one thing to read a meme, but it's a whole other thing when you can connect with somebody.”

Spencer talked about it publicly for the first time in his Instagram Stories this week. “I’ve been holding off on posting a bit because I haven’t told my family yet, but I think it’s important for men to talk to other men about the procedure,” he said. “Everyone has heard horror stories, but few have heard the success stories. After seeing how much pain my wife had to go through getting her IUD installed and removed and how relatively painless my vasectomy was, I can’t let people continue to put the pressure on women to bear the weight of birth control.”

Several of the men I spoke to cited having directly benefited from abortion as a reason to take more control of their own part in the baby-making process.

“I've gotten people pregnant when I was in my early 20s and I felt so guilty putting my partner through all that stress—stress which was compounded by repressive reproductive laws making it harder to get care,” Timothy Faust, who got his vasectomy in 2020 and currently works at an abortion clinic, told me. “So I figured I'd nut up, so to speak, and do my part to prevent it in the future.”

Dave, who got a vasectomy about four years ago, said that his partner’s sensitivity to contraception prompted them to make the decision together. “If we can take the worry out of her mind, why not, right?” he said. He’s never wanted kids, so the choice seemed obvious. After the Roe news this week, he posted about his experience on social media. “It’s one thing to read a meme, but it's a whole other thing when you can connect with somebody, connect with their experience, and for them to be like, ‘I have never thought about any of this.’”

Chas Christiansen, a professional cyclist who also got his vasectomy four years ago, told me that watching his current partner go through the process of getting an abortion was the decision-making moment for him. “It's like, what can I do to take responsibility for this and it's something that I had been thinking about for a long time… I think ultimately, for me, it was the fact that I have never wanted to have kids, and that I've been a beneficiary of a number of abortions that have allowed me to continue to live the life that I live without having to take responsibility for raising a child.” Christiansen said he’s been vocal about the decision ever since, online and off. Every time he brings it up, he gets direct messages with questions about his experience, or finds more people who’ve also had their tubes snipped and want to talk about it.

The bar for reproductive justice set incredibly low for cisgender men, Faust said. “It's incredibly easy to get someone pregnant and then go ‘whoops’ and bounce, and society accommodates that. Contraception is ultimately made the problem of the person who can get pregnant; if they don't have an IUD or if both partners decide not to use a condom or Plan B or whatever, it's pretty clear who has to deal with it,” he said. “Which isn't to say that both partners should get a say on whether the pregnancy is terminated, but that the consequences of sex are borne almost exclusively by women (and nonbinary people, trans men, etc.). And that sucks! That's super unfair.”

Getting a vasectomy as an act of allyship or solidarity for one’s partner isn’t a new phenomenon, just as abortion rights have been under attack by Republicans, conservatives, and the religious right for years. In 2021, Pennsylvania state Rep. Chris Rabb introduced “parody” legislation that would require men to get vasectomies after their third child or once they turn 40. “As long as state legislatures continue to restrict the reproductive rights of cis women, trans men and nonbinary people, there should be laws that address the responsibility of men who impregnate them,” Rabb wrote in a memo, according to the Keystone. “Thus, my bill will also codify ‘wrongful conception’ to include when a person has demonstrated negligence toward preventing conception during intercourse.”

There’s already an endless supply of “Don’t like abortion? Get a vasectomy!” merch floating around for sale on the internet. For “World Vasectomy Day” in 2021 (held on November 19, for those who celebrate), a doctor toured New York in a mobile clinic to spread the good word.

Some insurance plans cover the cost of vasectomies, but out of pocket, the procedure plus follow-ups can cost between a couple hundred to a thousand dollars. (For comparison, birth control for people who can get pregnant—such as pills, vaginal rings and IUDs—can cost hundreds of dollars or more a year without insurance, and many, many hours of doctors’ visits, copays, and complications, even with insurance. Getting a tubal ligation is much more invasive and often inaccessible, financially or because doctors frequently deny them for patients of childbearing age.)

“Vasectomy is typically done in the office setting and takes about 30 minutes under local anesthesia,” Tony Chen, MD, clinical assistant professor at the Stanford School of Medicine urology department, told me. “The physician will feel for the vas deferens, numb the area, make a tiny hole/incision where they can lift each vas deferens out, and then seal the vas deferens off through various means.” If you’re having a hard time visualizing all this cutting and lifting, here’s a demonstration on CGI nuts:

Everyone I talked to had a relatively easy experience, and reported a mostly-painless procedure and recovery. Christiansen was nervous about getting back to cycling, but was on the bike again within weeks; the weirdest part of the process, he said, was “smelling barbecue, because that was my own nuts burning as they cauterized everything.” But ultimately, he said it wasn’t any worse than going to the dentist.

Afterwards, patients need to take it “really easy” in the first 24 to 48 hours, Chen said, and might be able to go back to work within that time frame, depending on what they do. Heavy lifting, sports, exercise and sexual activity are out for a week, to avoid pain or bleeding. And you’re not sterile immediately after leaving the doctor’s office—it takes a few weeks to months. “It takes something like two dozen ejaculations to clear you out of sperm, so I appreciated that I was medically required to masturbate,” Faust said.

Spencer’s vasectomy was performed by a doctor he calls the “Kobe Bryant of Vasectomies.” “I was awake the whole time and my doctor just chatted about vintage video games with me,” he said. This particularly prolific doc had performed 114 vasectomies in the month he got his.

“This guy was a fucking pro, and probably why my recovery was so smooth. He had a very minimally invasive process that was just so simple to heal,” Spencer said. “I kept waiting for the really terrible pain to come, but it didn’t. Around the third day it felt like someone had given me a swift tap to the balls, but that was it.” He was out riding his bike again within a week.

Many of the people posting about vasectomies this week are emphasizing the reversibility of the procedure as a good reason to dive in—but Chen cautions that people should think of it as a form of permanent contraception, since reversibility isn’t always 100 percent successful. There are options, however; you can “freeze your guys” before getting snipped, as one vasectomy patient put it, or sperm can be retrieved directly from the testicles to be used in combination with IVF treatments if they want to have kids in the future.

“I have not regretted a minute of being sterile nor has being unable to have children had negative consequences for my dating life or long-term relationships,” Eric, whose own vasectomy was almost 10 years ago, told me. “If anything, having a vasectomy has improved this area of my life as I find many women are attracted to a man responsible enough to undergo the procedure,” he said. His current partner matched with him on Tinder because he mentioned having a vasectomy in his profile.

“Upon learning the news of the possible Supreme Court decision on Monday evening I made plans to make a post about my vasectomy the next morning,” Eric said. “I wanted to clear up any misconceptions about the procedure and encourage other men to ask questions and rethink their role in this mess.” He told any vasectomy-curious followers to reach out. “I have received so many responses and it is encouraging to see how much that initial post was shared and discussed.”

“If sympathetic men collectively sit back and watch the reproductive movement pass them by, it is hideous that other men will be the ones who unravel or repress it.”

Everyone, regardless of gender, “should consider a rolling back of established precedent on the right to privacy and reproductive choice a dangerous direction that needs to be pushed back on,” Chen said. “Men should not idly assume that the type of justifications for attacking female reproductive choice couldn't also be conceivably used to take away their rights as well, such as their ability to obtain a vasectomy. These deeply personal and medical decisions should be left to a patient and their doctors.”

If you don’t plan to procreate, “get a fucking vasectomy,” Spencer said. “A vasectomy doesn’t affect my being at all. Once again it's truly the simplest and most effective solution, and it's time more men took the control into their hands to change the status quo.”

“It's critical that the movement which guarantees abortion on demand, no questions asked, includes men,” said Faust. “If sympathetic men collectively sit back and watch the reproductive movement pass them by, it is hideous that other men will be the ones who unravel or repress it. We have a responsibility to clean up our own mess instead of expecting our girlfriends, mothers, wives, and friends to pick up after us, so to speak.”

Volkswagen’s CEO, Herbert Diess, says that the company is “basically sold out on electric vehicles in Europe and in the United States” for the year, according to a report from the Financial Times. This means that anyone hoping to get an EV from VW, Audi, or any of the group’s other brands may have to wait until 2023, as the company tries to navigate the chip shortage and production issues from COVID shutdowns in China.

According to the report, VW expects its backlog of orders to keep growing. It currently has plenty of people on the list waiting to get an EV and expects to add more throughout the year. But supply chain issues will make those difficult to fill. Almost every automaker has had to halt or slow down production thanks to a...

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Sonos is preparing to introduce its own voice assistant service within the next few weeks, according to people familiar with the company’s plans. The voice functionality will let customers play and control music on Sonos’ whole-home audio platform.

It will be part of a forthcoming software update set to arrive first to customers in the US on June 1st, with an international rollout to follow. Sonos Voice will serve as an alternative to Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant, which Sonos already supports on its smart speakers and voice-enabled soundbars. All Sonos products that run the company’s S2 software will support Sonos Voice Control.

Sonos has recently posted job openings related to the “Sonos Voice Experience,” with the company saying...

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If you are in an older home and want to upgrade to smart switches, I have good news. This week, lighting control company Leviton released two smart switches that don’t require a neutral wire. The Decora Smart No-Neutral Dimmer ($49.99) and Switch ($44.99) both work with the plug-in Decora Smart Wi-Fi Bridge ($19.99). Both are compatible with Apple HomeKit, Google Home, and Amazon Alexa for smart home and voice control, as is Leviton's entire Decora Smart Wi-Fi line.

Most smart light switches require a neutral wire to work. As this wiring wasn’t standard in homes until the mid-1980s many houses have limited options for upgrading to smart switches. While there are choices — the popular one being Lutron Caseta — the selection is limited in...

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Crawley, United Kingdom – May 4, 2022 – Leading call reporting and analytics company, Akixi, has announced that Alastair Hay has joined the company as Chief Financial Officer (CFO).

Following the company’s investment and leadership announcement in February 2022, Alastair is the latest appointment to the Akixi executive team, where he will work with CEO Craig Decker, and the Axiom Equity and True North Advisory teams to execute the company’s growth strategy and international expansion plans.

Alastair, previously Chief Financial Officer and Chief Corporate Development Officer, was a member of the founding team at Pharmanovia. Scaling the business from a single product in a single market, to 25 products in 140 markets, generating over €300m in sales. Prior to this, he was a Managing Director in FTI Consulting’s Corporate Finance practice. 

Alastair comments: “I am hugely excited by this market opportunity, and I look forward to being a part of the team which grows the business to become a truly global, best-in-class SaaS business.”

Craig Decker, CEO of Akixi, also comments: “I am thrilled to welcome Alastair to the Akixi team. Alastair brings an incredible background in managing and enabling business growth, he will no doubt be instrumental as we drive forward with our global growth strategy.”

Jonathan Organ of Axiom Equity adds, “We are delighted to have such a high-calibre individual join the Akixi senior management team. Alastair brings a wealth of experience supporting scaling businesses, which will prove invaluable to Craig and Akixi as the business continues to grow.”

About Akixi

Established in 2008 and with its head office in the UK, Akixi provides a cloud-based data analytics and reporting platform which gives customers clear insights into business behaviours including the real-time value of lost calls, queued calls, and workforce optimisation – ultimately, helping businesses increase productivity, maximise revenue and improve customer experience.

Akixi has built trusted partnerships with over 600 of the world’s leading B2B telecoms and IT providers who have delivered Akixi services to over 7,000 customer sites worldwide. End users come from all industry sectors and business sizes.

More information about Akixi can be found at www.akixi.com.

About Axiom Equity

Axiom Equity is a B2B SaaS investor, focusing on businesses generating £5m-£15m ARR and looking to scale.

Investing as either a majority or minority investor, Axiom Equity employs a long-term approach, utilising its strategic resources to help management teams build lasting value in quality growth companies.

More information about Axiom Equity can be found at www.axiomequity.com.

About True North Advisory

True North Advisory is a premier trusted advisor to enterprise B2B companies, focused on the customer experience and collaboration industries, providing bespoke high-impact advice combined with tailored senior-level access. True North’s five partners – Mike Tessler, Scott Hoffpauir, Andy Miller, Dino Di Palma, and Jim Tholen – provide experience and insight from roles across the industry, working together at BroadSoft as founders and CxOs to CxO leadership roles at Acme Packet, Tandberg, Polycom and elsewhere.

More information about True North Advisory can be found at www.truenorthadvisory.us.

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