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Internal evidence shared by former Facebook product manager Frances Haugen shows Facebook has known — but ignored — the harm it causes.

On Sunday evening, a former Facebook employee who has previously revealed damning internal documents about the company came forward on 60 Minutes to reveal her identity.

Frances Haugen, a former product manager on Facebook’s civic integrity team, shared documents that were the basis of an explosive series of articles in the Wall Street Journal. The reports revealed that the company knew its products can cause meaningful harm — including negatively impacting the mental health of teens — but it still has not made major changes to fix such problems.

“There were conflicts of interest between what was good for the public and what was good for Facebook. And Facebook, over and over again, chose to optimize for its own interests, like making more money,” said Haugen in the 60 Minutes interview on Sunday.

She also shared new allegations — not previously covered in the WSJ’s extensive reporting — about Facebook allegedly relaxing its standards on misinformation after the 2020 presidential elections, shortly ahead of the January 6 riots at the US Capitol.

In an internal staff memo obtained and published on Friday by the New York Times, Facebook’s vice president of global affairs, Nick Clegg, wrote that the responsibility for January 6 “rests squarely with the perpetrators of the violence, and those in politics and elsewhere who actively encouraged them.” Clegg also wrote that Facebook is not a “primary cause of polarization.”

Facebook has been mired in PR and political crises for the past five years. But this is a staggering moment for the company and the billions of people who use its products. Already, in response to documents revealed by Haugen, the whistleblower, the company has paused development of its Instagram for Kids product, brought two executives before Congress to testify, and launched a PR offensive dismissing the Wall Street Journal’s reporting as “cherry picking.”

Haugen has also shared internal Facebook documents with lawmakers and is expected to testify before members of Congress on Tuesday. The fact that she is coordinating with lawmakers reflects how politicians on both sides of the aisle are viewing social media companies like Facebook with more concern — and that they’re becoming more adept at scrutinizing them.

“This is the first time I can remember anything this dramatic, with an anonymous whistleblower, this many documents, and a big reveal,” said Katie Harbath, a former director of public policy at Facebook who is now a fellow at the Bipartisan Policy Center and the Atlantic Council.

While plenty of Facebook employees have spoken out against the company anonymously or internally, only a handful — particularly at a high-ranking level — have ever spoken out on the record against Facebook. And never before have they revealed such detailed evidence that the company seemingly understands but ignores systematic harms it causes.

Nor has a Facebook defector had this kind of press rollout: first, a series of investigative reports with a major publication, then an unveiling on primetime television, and soon testimony before Congress — all within the span of just a few weeks.

The extent to which Facebook seemingly knew about the harmful effects of its products and withheld that knowledge from the public has caused lawmakers such as Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) to compare the company’s tactics to those of Big Tobacco.

Facebook has already responded to the allegations with defense from a familiar playbook, similar to its response to President Joe Biden’s criticism that the platform was “killing people” because of the spread of Covid-19 misinformation on the platform. The company and its leaders are arguing that the allegations are sensationalized and untrue, that information is being taken out of context, and that Facebook isn’t the only one to blame for the world’s problems.

And just like it did during the recent Biden and Facebook Covid-19 misinformation debate, Facebook has questioned the credibility of outside research on how its platforms function.

This time, the company went so far as to discredit some of its internal researchers’ findings about Instagram’s negative effects on teenagers’ mental health. Last week, it distributed an annotated version of the original research that was first published in the Journal. In its annotated slides, Facebook said that its researchers’ slide titles “may be sensationalizing” findings that Instagram can negatively contribute to teenage girls’ body image issues. The company also said the size of the study was limited.

The fact that the company is disputing the top-line findings of its staff’s research shows just how damaging the reporting coming out of the whistleblower’s documents are, and how urgently the company is moving to change the narrative.

“It is a big moment,” said Yaël Eisenstat, Facebook’s former global head of elections integrity operations. She has been a vocal critic of the company since she left in November 2018. “For years, we’ve known many of these issues — via journalists and researchers — but Facebook has been able to claim that they have an ax to grind and so we shouldn’t trust what they say. This time, the documents speak for themselves,” she told Recode.

A key reason why this latest scandal feels more significant is that politicians on both sides of the aisle feel deceived by Facebook, because they have previously asked CEO Mark Zuckerberg about Instagram’s mental health effects on children and teenagers, and the company wasn’t forthcoming.

In March, Zuckerberg told Congress that he didn’t believe the research was conclusive, and that “overall, the research that we have seen is that using social apps to connect with other people can have positive mental health benefits.” But he did not disclose the negative findings in the research cited in the Wall Street Journal reporting, including that 13 percent of British teenage users and 6 percent of American teenage users studied who had suicidal thoughts traced the desire to kill themselves to Instagram.

The company also didn’t share the research in response to two separate inquiries by Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA), and Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) when they asked for Facebook’s internal research on the matter after the March congressional hearing.

More of Facebook’s current and former employees — instead of being quieted by the company’s reported tightening of communication among its staff — are starting to openly discuss the company’s issues on Twitter, and within internal settings like company message boards, according to reporting from the New York Times.

Some researchers working at the company feel “embarrassed” that Facebook dismissed the quality of its own staff’s work, according to the Times. Facebook, like other major tech companies, prides itself on hiring world-class researchers and engineering talent. If the company further taints its own image in the engineering and academic communities, that could limit the caliber of employees it’s able to recruit.

“I think Facebook is miscalculating what a watershed moment this is, not just because the public now has eyes on these documents but because employees are starting to get angry,” Eisenstat told Recode.

In the coming days, the attention around Haugen will likely shift to include her personal story: her background, what she worked on at Facebook, whether she has any incentive to share this information other than the public good, and how she might face legal challenges or even retaliation for her actions (Facebook executives have testified under oath that they will not retaliate against her for addressing Congress).

But Haugen coming forward is about much more than one individual. In revealing thousands of documents involving the work of many people at the company — which was subsequently largely ignored by top executives — this whistleblower has reignited longstanding debates inside and outside the company about Facebook’s flaws.

“[Haugen] has provided an unvarnished and unprecedented look at the extent to which Facebook executives have knowingly disregarded the life-and-death consequences of their own products and decisions,” Jesse Lehrich, co-founder of the policy nonprofit Accountable Tech, told Recode. “And she’s paved the way for others to speak out.”

The whistleblower, who revealed her identity on 60 Minutes, has a troubling story to tell and documents to back it up.

Google announced a suite of new features that it says will help people who use their platforms make more sustainable choices. The new services focus on reducing planet-heating greenhouse gas emissions and are primarily found on Search, Maps, Travel, and Nest.

But before we get into the details of how their new tools work, a quick note of context; some environmental advocates have called out companies for shifting responsibility for the climate crisis onto individual consumers. Holding big corporate polluters accountable for their emissions far outweighs any one consumers’ individual impact. And Wednesday’s announcements from Google aren’t really designed to reduce the company’s own carbon footprint.

Continue reading…

Vonage has launched an artificial intelligence-powered assistant for its unified communications as a service (UCaaS) offering.

The firm said its assistant is designed for businesses that use its UCaaS offering but do not have a fully-fledged contact centre.

The assistant uses AI and machine learning to create conversational experiences for customers in natural language.

Savinay Berry, EVP of Product and Engineering for Vonage, said: “In addition to reducing and optimizing IT costs and resources, enterprises are enhancing the customer experience with the use of AI as a part of their communications strategy.

“In today’s modern workplace, consumers expect to get the information they want, when they want it and they expect it to be easy to do business with a brand”

“As one of the first providers to offer this kind of solution for unified communications, Vonage is enabling businesses to leverage AI to improve their business processes.

“By automating responses and addressing simple tasks through AI, we are transforming the way businesses across all industries connect with their customers.”

• Watch UC Today’s interview with the Vonage CEO

Vonage said that the assistant can be set up using its Vonage AI Studio, which is a no-code interface ,for simpler implementation of solutions such as self-service options.

It added that waiting times for customers with simple queries can be reduced because the assistant can handle simple queries.

The assistant will also present insights through verbal cues given by customers for their interest, questions or issues about products and services, then taking appropriate actions to maintain customer lifetime value.

 

 

 

Demand for books is way up this year. Supplies are way, way down.

If there’s a particular book you’ve got your eye on for the holidays, it’s best to order it now. The problems with the supply chain are coming for books, too.

“Think of the inputs that go into a book,” says Matt Baehr, executive director of the Book Manufacturers’ Institute. “There’s paper, there’s ink, and there’s getting the book from point A to point B. All of those things are affected.”

The ongoing Covid-19 pandemic has been exacerbating existing problems in the global supply chain for nearly two years now. Add to that pressure a global labor shortage, a paper shortage, the consolidation of the American printing industry, and an increased demand for books from bored stay-at-homers across the US, and you’re faced with what Baehr says is a “perfect storm” of factors to create what some observers are calling a book shortage.

However, that doesn’t mean holiday book shoppers will be faced with empty shelves at their local bookstore come December, cautions Barnes & Noble CEO James Daunt. “There is no book shortage as such at the moment because the nature of the publishing cycle is that these books are planned many months ahead,” Daunt says.

Most of this fall’s major releases have already been printed or have their printing runs scheduled, and any delays to those scheduled print runs are expected to be minimal. Still, some titles have seen their publication dates bumped by weeks or even months. Of those, some now won’t reach shelves until next year.

The place where readers are most likely to find themselves in a crunch, though, is with surprise bestsellers. Every year, there are books that do much better than either publishers or booksellers expected them to and sell out their initial print runs. Normally when that happens, booksellers immediately order more books, and publishers are able to print those books and ship them out rapidly. In 2021, that’s going to be a lot more difficult. If a publisher unexpectedly sells out of a book early, it may not be able to send new copies to bookstores until well into 2022.

So if there’s a book you’ve got your heart set on reading in print this fall, now is the time to preorder. Otherwise, you might find your heart broken in December.

Here are the major issues leading up to the great book shortage (or, if we are being as pedantic as James Daunt would like, the surprise bestseller shortage) of 2021.

More people are reading books

According to industry tracker NPD Bookscan, printed book sales have increased 13.2 percent from 2020 to 2021, and 21 percent from 2019 to 2021.

“Usually a good year means going up maybe 3 or 4 percent,” says NPD books analyst Kristen McLean. “The growth that we saw last year and this year is pretty unprecedented.”

McLean says it’s clear that the pandemic is what’s driving the growth in book sales, in part because of what kind of books are selling well and which aren’t. As global lockdowns began in March of 2020, sales of traditionally high-performing categories like self-help books and business books plummeted, while sales of educational books for home-bound kids and first aid books for emergency preppers took off.

Since then, McClean says, book sales have tracked closely to the trends of the quarantine era: a lot of bread books early on, a lot of books on social justice and race in the summer of 2020 during the George Floyd protests, and books on politics during the presidential election season. Then, after the election, sales of adult fiction began to really take off — a trend McLean pointed to as telling.

“That’s one of the things I look at really closely,” McLean says. “When someone buys a nonfiction book, that could be because it’s a reference book, or because they want to understand something that they’ve heard. But when someone buys an adult fiction book, generally that’s for pleasure reading. So that is a good leading indicator that people are really engaging with books.”

Reading is one of the hobbies that people have started to pick up over the course of the pandemic. And overwhelmingly, they’re reading printed books, not ebooks.

“Ebook sales did go up last summer,” McLean allows, noting that many of the social justice titles of the summer, such as Ibram Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist, rapidly sold out in print, driving readers to ebooks for their immediacy. Generally, however, ebooks are holding steady at just 20 percent of the US market.

“There’s just more people who want to read and prefer reading print,” McLean says.

Most years, the news that more people are reading books would be treated as an unalloyed positive. This year, the increased demand for books is colliding head-on with some major problems throughout the rest of the publishing industry.

It’s getting more complicated (and expensive) to physically make books

Paper, ink, and printing presses are all at a premium right now. There’s not enough of any of them, and what we do have costs a lot.

The paper shortage begins with the wood pulp shortage. According to a report from the printing company Sheridan, the price of wood pulp rose from $700–$750 per metric ton in 2020 to almost $1,200 per metric ton in 2021. Sheridan cites an environmental initiative in China that shut down 279 pulp and paper mills as one of the major drivers behind the spike in pricing, as well as a global backlash against plastic and the rush to replace plastic products with paper alternatives.

Meanwhile, with shoppers increasingly ordering products online, the price of cardboard in which to ship goods has gone up with demand. So paper factories have begun to invest more in producing cardboard, shifting their resources away from making book-grade paper in the process.

“You have a combination of both fewer mills producing book paper and greater demand for wood pulp elsewhere, so that there is both a price and availability issue,” explains Brian O’Leary, executive director of the Book Industry Study Group.

A shortage of raw materials is also wreaking havoc in the inks market. According to a report by the Business Research Company, the same Chinese environmental initiative that led to a shortage of wood pulp has also led to decreased availability of resins, monomers, photo initiators, oligomers, and additives. Moreover, ink manufacturers are rapidly consolidating. All of these issues combined means ink prices are steadily rising.

Printing presses, meanwhile, are scrambling. The cause dates back more than a decade. In 2008, presses faced what appeared to be an existential crisis: the Great Recession on the one hand and the advent of the Amazon Kindle ebook reader on the other. Many in the industry predicted that printed books would soon be obsolete, and companies began to de-invest in printing books.

Instead, demand for print books has steadily climbed after a drop in 2008, and printers have not kept up.

Most book printing happens in the US. Books with heavy color printing, like picture books, are sent to China, but in order to keep the cost of shipping low, most publishers do the rest of their printing domestically. That’s getting more and more difficult to manage.

Until 2018, there were three major printing presses in the US. Then one of them, the 125-year-old company Edwards Brothers Malloy, closed. The remaining big two, Quad and LSC, attempted to merge in 2020, but then the Justice Department filed an antitrust lawsuit. Quad responded by getting out of the book business entirely; LSC filed for bankruptcy and sold off a number of its presses. Smaller printers have continued to operate, but the infrastructure to keep up with the demand for printed books in North America is in shambles.

So if demand is up, why are so many printers shutting down?

Part of the issue is that printers find themselves squeezed by Amazon in both directions. As a major book buyer, Amazon has a lot of leverage to negotiate on price, allowing it to purchase its books from publishers at very low cost. Publishers pass the resulting losses along to their printing presses. Following the rules of capitalism, printing presses would like to pass the loss along to their workers in turn — but in the rural distribution regions where most of these presses operate, the other major employer is Amazon warehouses. And Amazon has set the floor for wages at $15 per hour.

“I don’t necessarily think this is a bad thing,” O’Leary says. “But you’re competing for labor.”

The labor shortage also means that even when printers raise their wages, they don’t have anyone to hire. The industry is chronically understaffed. “Printers, binders, the true book manufacturers, they could all hire an additional 10 to 20 percent of their current workforce without even batting an eye,” says Baehr.

Meanwhile, very few new players are entering the game. Part of the reason is that it costs a lot of money upfront to enter the industry. “It’s a capital-intensive business, printing,” says O’Leary. “You have to spend from several million to more than $10 million on a printing press, and you generally amortize that over a long period of time.”

So right now, publishers and printing companies have to pay more for the paper that makes up any given book, more for the ink that prints the words in the book, more for the time at a printing company to get the book printed, and more for the labor to staff the press to get the book produced.

Then come the problems with shipping.

It’s getting harder to ship books

Right now, distribution networks across the world are massively congested.

“Los Angeles — which is a major port of entry for the United States — New York, and New Jersey are all pretty full up,” says O’Leary. “We’re hearing reports of delays of weeks for getting things cleared.”

“Containers are not moving out of ports and onto trains quickly enough,” explains Chris Tang, a UCLA business professor specializing in global supply chain management. “And on top of that, all of the warehouses in the Midwest are full. So everything is stuck.”

An increase in online shipping in part of what’s driving the congestion. Meanwhile, the complications of Brexit and the internet’s beloved container ship Ever Given — both of which dramatically disrupted global supply chains — certainly aren’t helping ports empty themselves out faster.

Even more pressing, however, is a shortage of truck drivers. There just aren’t enough trucks on the road to pick up as much stuff as we’re currently shipping around the world. “We’re talking tens of thousands fewer truck drivers than we need,” says O’Leary.

And as stuff sits in warehouses, waiting to be picked up by increasingly scarce truck drivers, the price of storage goes up, adding to overall shipping costs. “It used to be around $3,000 per container,” Tang says. “Now the price is closer to $20,000.” The skyrocketing costs mean that companies selling luxury goods will take more warehouse slots, since they can afford them, while lower-priced goods, like books, compete for what’s left.

Barnes & Noble CEO Daunt notes that books do have one big advantage over other goods when it comes to shipping: They’re durable. “The reality is that books are fantastic because they don’t really perish, so you’re able to print lots of them in advance,” he says. “They’re incredibly robust, so you can send them through the most basic of supply chain routes. They’re not strawberries or peaches or delicate things.”

But right now, even the most basic of supply chain routes are finding themselves overwhelmed.

Underlying all these issues is the increasingly dire labor shortage

One of the big underlying problems when it comes to printing and shipping books is the same labor shortage that’s currently roiling the rest of the country. There aren’t enough press operators to get books printed, and then there aren’t enough truck drivers to get them to bookstores. Wages have gone up, but there still aren’t enough people working.

“In the whole national workforce, you’ve got 8.4 million unemployed but 10.9 million open jobs,” says Baehr. “That’s a two and a half million-person shortage, period, and that’s across all buckets. The book industry is getting hit with that just as much as the paper industry is getting hit with that just as much as the transportation industry is getting hit with that. It all just compounds on itself. It’s just a rough spot right now for the book business.”

“Simply put, the working-age population in the US has stopped growing,” says Gad Levanon, founder of the Labor Market Institute. “And the working-age population without a BA is shrinking quite rapidly.” That’s a major issue for the industries we’re discussing here because in general, people with college degrees prefer not to work in warehouses, as truck drivers, or in printing presses.

The pandemic has only exacerbated this issue. As Covid-19 spread, many people preferred not to work in the close quarters of a factory or warehouse, or in a job that required as much in-person interaction as making deliveries. They were also likely to want to stay home to care for their now home-bound children. For a while, enhanced unemployment benefits meant that it was even financially possible for people to do so. Some older workers simply retired early.

Levanon expects the labor force to increase slightly this fall as enhanced unemployment benefits expire and children return to in-person school. But he says that in the long term, the US labor force will continue to shrink for the next decade.

Where do we go from here?

So should we all be worried about the long-term destruction of our book-producing ecosystem?

Yes and no.

Chris Tang projects that shipping congestion will ease in early 2022, after Chinese New Year. “Demand will come back down after the holiday season,” he says. “In Asia they do a big push to produce everything before the Chinese New Year because that’s when all the factories will close for one month. So in that case, after that they will clear the old backlog.”

In the long term, it’s likely that as current agreements between printers and publishers expire, the printers will begin to charge publishers more for their services to better manage the rising costs of paper, ink, and labor. At that point, book prices will likely go up. No one is entirely certain what that increase will do to the book retail market, but it’s unlikely that demand will keep scaling up indefinitely.

“I think it would be very hard for 2022 to match what we’ve done this year and last year, just because it’s so unusually high,” says Kristen McLean. “But these days you can never be sure, right? It’s been such a roller coaster for us that the market could surprise me again.”

Levanon argues that to end its labor shortage, the US will need to do more than raise wages. “Before the pandemic, when there was also a shortage, we saw a large increase in the labor force participation of demographic groups that are less connected to the labor market,” he says. “The best example was Latina women. Their labor force participation increased dramatically. So attracting more people from groups that are less connected to the labor market and increasing immigration would help.”

Increased automation is another possible way to ease the labor crunch, and some tech groups are hopeful that automation could solve the truck driver shortage on its own. But automation comes with its own problems. “Putting 40 thousand pounds worth of books on an automated truck and hoping they get to New York without killing somebody?” says O’Leary. “Not a big fan.”

“If it was easier to automate the job,” Levanon agrees, “they probably would have done it already.”

This holiday season, bookstores will be able to mostly fill their orders. However, O’Leary warns, “you might see that there’s a hair cut across the top.” Publishers may only be able to print, say, 70 percent of the copies they’d like to print of any given book, and in that case they’d only sell booksellers 70 percent of their ideal order.

“If you really want a book, order it early or buy it early if you can,” says O’Leary. “Because if it gets hot, it’s going to be hard to replace.”

Daunt suggests not getting too attached to any particular title, noting that on the whole, there are still more than enough books to go around. “The thing for bookshops is, we’re amped for books,” he says. “So if we don’t have one book for you, we’ve definitely got plenty of other alternatives to suggest.”

Here‘s how some of the leading UC, collaboration, and CCaaS providers are addressing the hybrid work trend with new solutions and capabilities.

LONDON – October 6, 2021 – Vonage (Nasdaq: VG), a global leader in cloud communications helping businesses accelerate their digital transformation, announced that it has been named a recipient of the Salesforce Partner Innovation Award for Customer Success, showcasing leadership within the Salesforce ecosystem.

For this innovative work, Salesforce has recognised that Vonage has demonstrated excellence in customer success in the Trailblazer award category. The Vonage Contact Center for Salesforce solution integrates all communications channels without expensive, disruptive hardware changes and plugs straight into an organisation’s Salesforce instance. This enables Vonage customers using Salesforce, such as Homeless Link, Hotelbeds, and Key Travel, to perform better, connect easier and enhance engagement to help them serve their stakeholders better.

“We are delighted to have won this prestigious award from Salesforce,” said Breanna Kuhl, Senior Vice President, Strategic Alliances for Vonage. “This is testament to our integration with Salesforce and commitment to enabling communications that are more flexible, intelligent, and personal, helping businesses create richer engagement with their customers.”

“Salesforce Partner Innovation Award winners such as Vonage work relentlessly to enable their customers’ success,” said Tyler Prince, Executive Vice President, Alliances & Channels, Salesforce. “Vonage’s initiative and ability to deliver results illustrate how Salesforce partners are integral to creating value and enabling digital transformation in our new work-from-anywhere world.”

Salesforce partners such as Vonage are part of the growing Salesforce economy, which according to a new study by IDC *, is projected to produce more than 9 million new jobs and $1.6 trillion in new business revenue by 2026. The study finds that Salesforce is driving massive gains for its partner ecosystem, which will see $6.19 in gains for every $1 Salesforce makes by 2026.

Salesforce, and others are among the trademarks of salesforce.com, inc.

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

**​​IDC White Paper, sponsored by Salesforce, “The Salesforce Economic Impact,” doc #US48214821, September 20, 2021

About Vonage

Vonage (Nasdaq: VG), a global cloud communications leader, helps businesses accelerate their digital transformation. Vonage’s Communications Platform is fully programmable and allows for the integration of Video, Voice, Chat, Messaging and Verification into existing products, workflows and systems. Vonage’s fully programmable unified communications and contact center applications are built from the Vonage platform and enable companies to transform how they communicate and operate from the office or anywhere, providing enormous flexibility and ensuring business continuity.

The post Vonage Demonstrates Excellence within Salesforce Ecosystem with Partner Innovation Award appeared first on Cloud Communications Alliance.

Mint the Coin and the debt ceiling, explained

The debt ceiling standoff is getting very real, very quickly. On Friday, the Congressional Budget Office warned that the federal government could run out of cash within the first two weeks of June. While the Treasury Department has been using extraordinary measures since January to keep paying US debt, officials there have said those measures could be exhausted by June 1, potentially setting up the US for a catastrophic default later this summer.

The most straightforward way to avoid disaster would be for Congress to vote for a clean debt ceiling increase, as it has repeatedly done in past years, but the Republican-led House has said it won’t raise the ceiling without deep spending cuts and a rollback of President Joe Biden’s clean energy agenda, all of which the president has said is off the table.

Negotiations are still underway, but barring a deal, the only way to avoid a default might be for Biden to use executive action to render the ceiling moot. Those options range from issuing a novel kind of debt that could be used to fund the government, to invoking the 14th Amendment to argue the debt ceiling is unconstitutional, to claiming that previously passed congressional tax and spending legislation allows the president to simply ignore the debt ceiling.

But no option would be funnier — in a way that matches the absurdity of the situation Washington finds itself in — than this one: minting a platinum coin worth $1 trillion to pay for the government expenses.

If you are not familiar with the platinum coin idea, or the hashtag #MintTheCoin, or the small army of Coinistas who have become a vocal part of economics and finance circles since the early 2010s, you may be asking: What the hell are you talking about?

The (sorta) short answer is that a 1997 law intended to help the Mint make money off of coin collectors gives the Treasury secretary the power to mint platinum coins of any denomination, for any reason. When commentators discovered this law during the 2011 and 2013 debt ceiling battles, they realized that this power could offer a way to sidestep the legal cap Congress places on the federal government’s borrowing.

Instead of issuing new debt and running afoul of the debt ceiling, the Treasury secretary could simply fund the government by minting platinum coins. In 2013, even former US Mint director Philip Diehl agreed it would work, and over the years, influential voices like financial journalist Joe Weisenthal and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman have also promoted the idea.

But all these people did not simply stumble upon this law. It was brought to their attention by Beowulf, a blog commenter and “reply guy” better known as Atlanta-area attorney Carlos Mucha. Mucha conceived of the idea in a short comment on financier Warren Mosler’s blog posted on May 24, 2010, at 8:29 pm:

Curiously enough Congress has already delegated to Tsy [Treasury] all the seignorage power authority it needs to mint a $1 trillion coin (even numismatic coins are legal tender at their face value and must be accepted by the Federal Reserve)– the catch is, its gotta be made of platinum (ditto the balls of any President who tried this). So for a 1 oz. coin, Tsy would net only $999.998 Billion :o)

From this modest post, a trillion-dollar idea sprouted, one that has come to influence fiscal policy discussions in the US at the highest levels.

I reached out in October 2021 to Carlos Mucha on his natural sparring grounds, Twitter, and we talked a bit via direct message about how he started the #MintTheCoin craze, how it got the attention of policymakers, and how to get out of the current debt ceiling crisis. Our DM conversation, edited for length and clarity, follows.

Dylan Matthews

Tell me the basic story of the trillion-dollar coin idea. How did it go from you posting in a blog comment thread to being something the president and his advisers talk about?

Carlos Mucha

The idea developed on the forum of Warren Mosler’s website in 2010. Warren is [a] founder of Modern Monetary Theory, which is quite popular among progressives these days. [Modern Monetary Theory, or MMT, is a heterodox school of economics that argues that concerns about the national debt are often overblown.] Anyway, the crowd was brainstorming on how to avoid a default if Congress didn’t lift the debt ceiling and I came across the platinum coin subsection (k) of the Coinage Act.

I blogged about it a bit back then and it was picked up by other bloggers and then journalists and just snowballed from there.

Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine book describes how conservatives in this country and abroad use a crisis — natural disasters and other unexpected calamities — to push through policies that would never win legislative support. What happened was, in the Obama administration, his Republican adversaries realized they could actually plan a crisis by refusing to increase the debt ceiling and then use the shock doctrine to push through their desired policy (spending cuts and, if they can get away with it, tax cuts too).

Here’s the thing. Republicans know that by and large Dick Cheney was right: Deficits don’t matter; Reagan taught us that. It’s possible that Reagan didn’t teach Cheney that but rather [Cheney’s] best friend in the DC power circle, Don Rumsfeld.

And where did Rumsfeld learn this? Warren Mosler. [Mosler has said he devised MMT after a discussion with Rumsfeld in the steam room of the Racquet Club in Chicago.]

So Republicans know deficit and debt fears are overblown, but Democrats do not. So we see Carter, Clinton, and Obama clean up the balance sheet and enable Reagan, Bush, and Trump to come in and cut taxes. Progressives have [now] caught on to the game, which is why the trillion-dollar coin (and big spending plans of Bernie Sanders and AOC) resonate with the Democratic base. Anyway, that’s what I think is going on.

Dylan Matthews

How did you get interested in Warren Mosler and his forum? What made that a preferred place for you to post?

Carlos Mucha

I don’t even remember how I landed at Warren’s site, but he’s a genuinely cool guy and is always ready to engage with readers on his board.

It helped that he was simpatico with two economists that I was already a fan of: William Vickrey (who had introduced Warren to the other post-Keynesian economists, Bill Mitchell and Randy Wray, that helped develop MMT), and Jamie Galbraith, who wrote the foreword to one of Warren’s books and who’d later quietly plug the trillion-dollar coin idea to other economists. I suspect Jamie is the proximate cause of Paul Krugman endorsing it.

Dylan Matthews

And from there it was a pretty short walk to people like Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY) promoting it and the White House having to formally comment. It’s a mainstream idea now. What was it like to watch the idea take off like this? Bewildering? Embarrassing? Entirely positive?

Carlos Mucha

Entirely positive. I have had clients seek me out and hire me because of it, so it’s been nice being able to, well, monetize the idea. The best part was getting an email from Phil Diehl, the former Mint director who actually drafted the platinum coin law that Congress enacted in 1997. When he said, “Yes, this will actually work,” I suddenly felt like Rodney Dangerfield in Back to School. He has a Kurt Vonnegut paper due, so naturally he hires Kurt Vonnegut to write it.

It’s hilarious, it was basically an intellectual exercise — like a website where people hash out who the greatest third basemen of all time was or whatever — and it just took off.

Dylan Matthews

Have you had any politicians or Treasury/Fed officials reach out to ask you about the coin?

Carlos Mucha

Sure, sometimes someone in the admin, Congress, or the Fed will drop me a line asking for my take on some problem or another. If you had asked me yesterday, I would have said that was because of the trillion-dollar coin story, but after receiving this text yesterday ...

... I’m not so sure anymore. Maybe public officials secretly canvass all the Twitter reply guys for policy advice. Who knows.

Dylan Matthews

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen recently seemed to close the door on the coin, telling CNBC, “I’m opposed to it and I don’t think we should consider it seriously. It’s really a gimmick. … It compromises the independence of the Fed, conflating monetary and fiscal policy.” She also argued it would fail to reassure markets, thereby creating some risks akin to those of a debt ceiling breach. What do you make of her comments?

Carlos Mucha

She is, by and large, very good at her job and is by all accounts a nice person, but on this she’s wrong, not just on the law but on policy.

Dylan Matthews

There are a few other options for the executive to get around the debt ceiling — I wrote about a couple here, like declaring that continuing to pay the government’s bills is the “least unconstitutional option” compared to failing to spend what Congress authorized.

What do you make of these? Is it coin or bust for you, or are there non-coin ways out?

Carlos Mucha

At the same time as I started noodling around on platinum coinage, I found and wrote about two other loopholes too:

1. Treasury can issue perpetual consols [debts that never mature and continue paying interest forever until the government buys them back]. Since there’s no guarantee to repay the principal, it doesn’t add to public debt (which measures amount of guaranteed principal).
2. The Fed can just donate the Treasury securities it holds back to Treasury.

Of the three [the above two and the coin], issuing consols is probably the least disruptive. Treasury can announce it is issuing T-bonds “payable at the pleasure of the United States” instead of a fixed term and can hold an auction later the same day. So that’s what I’d expect to see if Treasury runs out of money.

Update, May 12, 2023, 2:20 pm: This story, originally published on October 7, 2021, has been updated to reflect the news that the Congressional Budget Office projects the US will run out of cash to pay its debts in the first two weeks of June 2023.

BTC is up almost 50% this year overall, brushing aside corrections and increasingly decoupling from the macro environment in Q4.

The USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF) — the group that maintains the USB standard across its many varied incarnations — has introduced new, official logos for companies to use to brand their USB-C cables and packaging to go with its USB4 and 240W power standards. The goal is a noble one, aiming to help ease the confusion about the different types of USB-C cables (which can differ widely in things like charging and data transfer speeds) when you’re buying one.

Naturally, the USB-IF, in its... unique wisdom, has chosen to simplify things the only way it knows how: a slew of new logos that will soon adorn packaging for cables and chargers to help indicate to customers what charging and data speeds their devices support. Because nothing says...

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Clubhouse is getting a bunch of new features next month, including one many people have wanted: in-app recording. Starting in October, app users will be able to record a room, save it to their profile and club, or download it. Clubhouse is calling the feature “replays.” Creators and moderators are the ones who can record, and they can toggle that option on or off. Rooms must be public to be recorded.

Along with full recordings, users will be able to create 30-second shareable clips in rooms that allow it. The app is also gaining a search feature so people can type a keyword or name and receive the rooms, people, clubs, and bios that match. Finally, spatial audio is also now coming to Android devices after rolling out to iOS devices in...

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By Ryan Daily
Teams can use BlueJeans Spaces to collaborate in a virtual workspace with tools like digital whiteboarding and video meetings.

After acquiring Boost Mobile as part of the Sprint and T-Mobile merger in 2020 and snapping up Republic Wireless for its 5G network earlier this year, Dish is finally ready to turn Boost Mobile into the fourth wireless carrier that the FCC envisioned.

Its opening salvo? The satellite television provider is introducing an exclusive budget 5G phone for Boost Mobile’s prepaid customers.

The Celero5G is a “custom-built phone” for Boost Mobile, according to its spokesperson. Just like T-Mobile’s Revvl or AT&T’s Radiant, it has unique branding that you won’t find anywhere else. For a carrier that is trying to expand its user base, this is certainly an unusual way to get there. After all, most other carriers try to dangle the latest flagship...

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On Wednesday, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced the extinction of 23 wildlife species.

Novice and professional birders alike can attest to the excitement they feel when tracking an elusive bird. There’s the rush of adrenaline at the blur of a red-tipped wing and the dogged concentration that pushes them through brush with held breath. But for conservationists tracking endangered birds and fish, this cautious optimism can be replaced with dread as species go years and decades without sightings. Now, those fears have been confirmed.

Among the losses is the ivory-billed woodpecker, whose striking coloring and size earned it the name “Lord God Bird” in reference to the exclamations made by those who saw it. Native to the American southeast, the last confirmed sighting of the ivory-billed woodpecker was in the 1940s, according to a statement from U.S. Fish and Wildlife.

These 23 species join what scientists already estimate is a loss of 3 billion individual birds since the 1970s. Together, these losses are sombering evidence of the damage that climate change and habitat loss are causing the natural world, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Secretary Deb Haaland said in a statement.

“With climate change and natural area loss pushing more and more species to the brink, now is the time to lift up proactive, collaborative, and innovative efforts to save America's wildlife,” Haaland said.

In addition to the ivory-bill, the new extinctions include 10 other bird species, eight freshwater mussels, two fish, a bat, and one plant. 11 of these species were lost from Hawaii and Guam alone.

The extinction of these 23 species will  take them off the U.S. Fish and Wildlife endangered species list created as part of the Endangered Species Act of 1973. While 99 percent of species on this list manage to avoid extinction or are delisted due to species recovery, scientists say that these conservation efforts came too late for many of the species removed from the list on Wednesday.

The ivory-billed woodpecker, for example, has been battling extinction since the 1800s when they became a common target of collectors and hat makers. Likewise, many of the bird species lost in Hawaii have been suffering from an onslaught of avian malaria carried by mosquitoes that came to the island aboard colonial ships.

As climate change continues to worsen and humans extract more resources from these natural areas, conservation and protection of wildlife is more important than ever, scientists say. This is something that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife department hopes that the Biden-Harris Administration’s “America the Beautiful” initiative can help rectify. This initiative pledges to “conserve, connect, and restore” 30 percent of the country's land and water by 2030. This plan is similar, albeit distinct, from a global initiative called 30x30, which pledges to globally protect the same percentage of land and water.

Through these efforts, Haaland says the U.S. Fish and Wildlife department plans to continue its work to ensure more species leave the list through species recovery and not extinction.

As for the 23 species declared lost, there is still a sliver of hope that they might be saved. The extinction proposal is now in a 60-day comment period—ending on December 29th—for scientists and the public to come forward with proof that these extinction claims may be incorrect.

A reversal is unlikely, as many of these species have been seen in many decades, but director emeritus of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, John Fitzpatrick, told The Washington Post that he’s still not giving up just yet.

“I’m not ready to call it extinct,” he said. “It’s looking bad, but it’s been looking bad for 60 years.”

Google says search is still far from solved

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Yesterday, Amazon announced its “home robot” — a wheeled device named Astro that has a display, an array of sensors, and a camera that periscopes out the top of its body like a mast. In advertisements for Astro, Amazon presents the device as an engineering breakthrough and the realization of a long-held sci-fi dream: to build a robot that can help around the house.

This is rubbish, of course. What Astro is — for better or worse — is a camera on wheels.

The physical limitations of Astro are obvious. It has no arms or manipulators; no way to interact with the world other than bumping into objects at shin height. It can’t navigate steps, and, according to employees who worked on the robot and spoke...

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‘What I cannot get is why customers still do not protect their AD FS keys in an HSM - if they still use AD FS. This was a key vector during the SolarWinds attack and the actor behind it is still chasing these keys,’ Microsoft’s Roger Halbheer writes on LinkedIn.

Ring revealed its latest ambitious security product today: real-life people watching over your home. Taking the concept of monitored security to the next level, Ring’s Virtual Security Guard is a new subscription service that lets agents at a professional monitoring center respond to specific motion alerts on any outdoor Ring camera and take action for you.

Virtual Security Guard requires a Ring Alarm home security system to work (Gen 1, 2, or Pro) and costs $99 per month on top of a $20 monthly Ring Protect Plus subscription for professional monitoring. It works with any of Ring’s wired, outdoor cameras (including all the wired doorbells, the Spotlight Cam, Stick-up Cam and the floodlight cameras). You choose which are monitored through...

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It’s difficult to remember now, but in August 2020 there was a deeply surreal episode wherein Microsoft proposed acquiring some portion of TikTok in a complicated deal as the Trump administration was threatening to come down hard on the platform. Ultimately, TikTok turned Microsoft down just a day before Oracle came in with an entirely different kind of deal and the whole thing dissipated.

Speaking today at the Code Conference, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said the whole ordeal was the “strangest thing I’ve ever sort of worked on.”

In terms of the value of such a deal for Microsoft, Nadella said he “was kind of intrigued by it,” before trying to move right along with a laugh, deadpanning after a pause “and then I guess the rest is...

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A hamster on a treadmill is doing a decent job of playing the cryptocurrency market. His name is Mr. Goxx, and his adorable day trading antics are live-streamed to the world on his Twitch channel.

Mr. Goxx, who is named for the infamous Mt. Gox cryptocurrency exchange that imploded in 2014, lives in Germany, where a currently anonymous human business partner keeps up maintenance of his office. Inside is a treadmill, a tunnel to scurry down for “buy” and a tunnel for “sell”, two cameras, a Tesla emblem, a desk with miniature computers, and a killer view of a cityscape.

It’s time to trade when Mr. Goxx wanders into the office. A run in his treadmill will select one of 30 different cryptocurrencies. Once he dismounts and wanders through a tunnel, an automated system buys or sells depending on which one he ran through.

Mr. Goxx began his day trading hamster life with a portfolio of €326 ($381). He buys and sells in €20 increments and is locked out of using the tunnels for 20 seconds after he’s run through them. This prevents the temperamental hamster from immediately selling what he’s just bought.

The tiny crypto trader started working the markets in June. According to his first performance review in July, he was down about 7 percent. He’s since rebounded and as of close of business on Friday, was up about 20 percent, or €63, according to Mr. Goxx’s official Twitter account.

The tokens that Mr. Goxx buys and sells run the gamut. He’s got positions in Bitcoin, Doge, Ethereum, and Polkadot, among others. He’s up right now, but he’s usually running at a loss. Still, he’s had success: On Monday, the Mr. Goxx Twitter account said that the hamster was up 19.41 percent, outperforming the S&P 500 for the past three months.

Press attention has poured in recently, as the curious tune in to see how this hamster on a treadmill will do at playing the notoriously volatile cryptocurrency markets. Even Brian Sullivan of CNBC has gotten in on the action, although he seemed a bit baffled.

“I don’t know how much he reads, or she reads, research reports,” Sullivan remarked, while watching the hamster scamper down a tunnel to make a trade. “Look at that: Mr. Goxx is going to get some corn or whatever.”

“I don’t know where you go with any of these stories,” Sullivan said after watching the hamster make a €20 sale of the cryptocurrency Ripple. 

Despite how well Mr. Goxx is currently doing, please don’t take financial advice from a hamster.

By Zeus Kerravala
8x8 moves on its XCaaS vision with a tool that aims to bring receptionists into the future of hybrid work.

The pandemic has led to a collection of unusual digital experiences, from Google Forms escape rooms to whole virtual, two-dimensional comedy shows. But the interactive digital play / upstate barn wedding I attended last Friday, Future Wife: Party in a Spreadsheet, takes things to a strange new level. The show, co-created by playwright ruth tang and director Sarah Blush, and put on by a cast of game collaborators and theater company New Georges, manages to be playful, confounding, and surprisingly, a little touching. Basically all the things Google Sheets never are.

It’s difficult to describe Party in a Spreadsheet in a way that makes sense. There are communist goats, alien activists, several themed islands, and an anonymous audience...

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‘Our plan is to double our revenue to $50 billion in the next four years,’ Salesforce channel chief Tyler Prince said during Dreamforce 2021. ‘As we scale to meet demand, the ecosystem should grow even faster. We‘ll need more consulting firms, digital agencies, experts, resellers and ISV solutions in the marketplace.’

The risks of massive wildfires are growing, but we have tools to curb them.

It has been yet another breathtaking year for disasters. While Hurricane Ida drenched a path from New Orleans to New York, leaving flooding and power outages in its wake, wildfires forced thousands to evacuate and sent choking smoke across the US.

Such disasters are a fact of life in many parts of the country, and the risks are only growing as human activity continues to warm the planet. For those living in the West within reach of devastating blazes, that raises a difficult question: Should I stay or should I go?

Retreat from dangerous areas may seem like the obvious solution to people watching from afar. Why stay in the crosshairs of deadly fires?

The reality is a lot more complicated, because pulling back from high-risk areas brings its own problems. “Managed retreat, relocation, that’s one of the tools in the tool-kit, and it’s a tool that has a lot of potential social costs,” said Aaron Clark-Ginsberg, a social scientist at the RAND Corporation who studies disasters.

If people do decide to pull up stakes, they will have a hard time finding refuge: Just about every part of the US is going to face impacts from climate change, be it extreme rainfall, storm surges, or life-threatening heat.

“There is no place that has zero exposure to natural disasters,” said Crystal Kolden, an assistant professor studying wildfires at the University of California Merced.

A growing number of experts want people to rethink what it means to prepare for the worst, focusing on the ways that wildfires in the West can be managed and controlled over time, rather than simply extinguishing them as fast as possible. Ancient tactics like prescribed burns and new methods such as fire-resistant materials have already proven effective at reducing risks, but they remain woefully underused over the vast swaths of the country that risk going up in flames.

Neither retreating nor holding one’s ground against climate disasters is an easy option. However, as more individuals face this difficult decision, Americans should be ready to share the burden. Many disasters worsened by climate change are unavoidable, but local, state, and national leaders can begin taking steps to reduce harms and prevent natural phenomena like wildfires from turning into calamities.

Wildfire risks are massive and growing, but we know how to manage them

There are at least 4.5 million properties in the United States at “high to extreme risk” from wildfire, according a 2019 analysis by Verisk, a risk-assessment firm. More than 2 million are in California alone.

The gargantuan Dixie Fire burning north of Lake Tahoe and closing in on 1 million acres in size has destroyed more than 1,300 structures so far. The 216,000-acre Caldor Fire has already burned more than 990 structures. In 2020’s record-setting US fire season, almost 10,500 structures went up in flames.

Many more people are at risk. In California, more than 11 million residents — about a quarter of the state’s population — live in high-risk fire zones. More people are settling in fire-prone areas even as the specter of more devastating wildfires looms, thanks in part to decades of poor land management, encroachment on wildlands, and climate change. Fires are not only more common along the wildland-urban interface, they’re also more damaging to people and property.

At its core, the problem of massive wildfires stems, paradoxically, from not enough regular fires. Many ecosystems across the United States, but particularly in the West, evolved to cope with fires at regular intervals. Without fires, landscapes can become overgrown with shrubs, grasses, and trees, providing an overwhelming amount of fuel for when hot, dry weather settles in. When a blaze inevitably ignites, the resulting fires burn faster, hotter, and over a wider area than periodic fires, posing a greater hazard.

Yet Indigenous people for millennia not only lived alongside fire, they also harnessed it for cultural practices such as maintaining trails, growing food crops, and harvesting materials. That means there is a precedent for thriving in fire-prone areas. Many of these practices were halted and natural fires suppressed for generations, but bringing back cultural fire mediation methods and conducting prescribed burns can help reduce the danger.

Other tactics include forest thinning, where small-diameter trees that tend to burn more readily are cut down from an area, leaving behind larger, more fire-resistant trees. In communities, building a defensible perimeter around structures by removing flammable vegetation can also limit blazes.

As for buildings, codes that mandate fire-resistant materials and design can help ensure homes don’t go up in flames when embers land on rooftops.

Together, these measures don’t just reduce the risk of the blazes, they also change the nature of the fires themselves. These tactics remove many ingredients of devastating wildfires, as well as making fires that do occur less intense, burning through grasses and shrubs in the understory rather than tearing through forest canopies. Lower-intensity fires also tend to produce less smoke, mitigating one of the most dangerous health effects of major blazes.

Over the long term, decisions about where to build new structures should account for where regular fires are needed. And slowing climate change can help prevent many contributors to wildfires from continually getting worse.

What would it take — and cost — to put these tactics into action?

While many fire-mitigation tactics are effective, they’re not cheap. It takes a lot of manual labor to thin forests, conduct burns, and cut fire breaks, and they must be applied over a massive area that crosses federal, state, and private jurisdictions. The US Forest Service estimates that it costs about $1,000 per acre to lessen fire risk. The agency reports that 80 million acres of federal land are overdue for fire-mitigation work. That’s greater than the acreage of Arizona.

Some regions have decided to invest in wildfire risk reduction on their own. Many towns around Lake Tahoe have implemented a fuel-reduction strategy for years as a step toward becoming a fire-adapted community. The plan has included measures such as prescribed burning and removing certain trees, as well as a public messaging campaign to teach homeowners about building a fire-resistant perimeter around their homes and how to properly evacuate should a fire pose a threat.

When the Caldor Fire approached, defensive measures around communities like South Lake Tahoe bought time for people to evacuate. “South Lake Tahoe had done an enormous amount of work on all sides over the last 10 to 15 years, and that has really made a difference,” said Kolden, the wildfire expert at UC Merced. “It actually modified the fire behavior to the point where the firefighters have been able to keep it out of the community and protect the homes.” Many residents were allowed to return home a few days later, when the evacuation orders were downgraded to warnings.

Not every community at risk of wildfires can afford to mitigate them on their own. There have been efforts to build the costs of these risks into property insurance rates, but local governments don’t have much appetite for mandating fire insurance or covering some of the costs of risk reduction in areas that face frequent blazes. A 2019 poll of Californians found just 36 percent of respondents supported requiring wildfire insurance.

To close this gap, wildfire risk management should be a public endeavor, Kolden said, akin to the investments made to prevent damage from earthquakes. States like California have invested millions of dollars over decades to make structures more resilient to tremors, even though major earthquakes are rare events. “We need to have that same level of public investment in mitigation for wildfires,” Kolden said. “When wildfires burn communities, we all bear the cost.”

The idea is that if taxpayers collectively cover the up-front costs of preventing the worst fires by building perimeters and fireproofing, they can avoid the much larger costs of devastating, uncontrolled blazes that displace thousands and turn the sky red. By one 2010 estimate, every dollar invested in mitigating wildfire risk yields $35 in benefits.

Earlier this year, California announced more than $500 million for wildfire prevention efforts. The state also reached an agreement with the US Forest Service to conduct fire-mitigation treatment across 1 million acres in the state per year. But statewide, wildfire fuel reduction has actually declined, and California is falling short of its goals. A tangle of legal red tape and unclear authority over these plans has added more hurdles. So risk-reduction plans can lose steam even with money and targets in place.

Retreat may still be necessary in some cases, but it’s not a simple or easy solution

As climate change escalates, it may become too costly or dangerous to live in certain areas, even with some of the most aggressive interventions. That may be the case not only for areas contending with sea-level rise and coastal flooding, but also some fire-prone regions.

To deal with this, some experts are calling for more investment to deliberately move people away from danger. This strategy is called managed retreat, and in some cases it means leaving behind homes, businesses, and infrastructure. Retreat, much like building resilience, depends on collective actions that can make the choice easier and less expensive.

“It’s important to keep in mind that spontaneous, unplanned retreat is already taking place all over the world, as people make individual decisions to move away from threatened areas,” researchers Katharine J. Mach from the University of Miami and A.R. Siders from the University of Delaware wrote in the New York Times. “The question is not whether we want retreat to happen. It’s whether we want it to happen in this ad hoc fashion, which can lead to neighborhoods in decline, homes abandoned and infrastructure degrading.”

But when it comes to retreat, there’s more at stake than property. Many people living in vulnerable areas have strong social and historical ties to their communities. Moving can become an unbearable strain on mental health and financial stability, so it requires buy-in from the people most directly affected.

“The ultimate factor [in] whether we should be pursuing managed retreat is: Do those households and communities want to go?” said Clark-Ginsberg, the social scientist. “If they are reticent, if communities don’t want to move, the literature on relocation shows it causes more harm than good.”

Distancing people from high-risk areas is only one part of the equation. When disasters do strike, it’s equally crucial to help communities recover and aid individuals in resuming their lives.

In a global crisis, no one can escape from every risk or avoid every harm. Rather than trying to eliminate all potential problems, we should prepare to live with them as best we can. “We’ve been stuck in this mindset that we need to separate ourselves from risk,” Clark-Ginsberg said. “In reality, we’re products of the natural world. We’re products of the human world. These worlds contain risk, and we need to figure out how to navigate that.”

PHOENIX, AZ – September 21, 2021 – Crexendo, Inc. (NASDAQ:CXDO) an award-winning premier provider of Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS), Call Center as a Service (CCaaS), communication platform software solutions, and collaboration services designed to provide enterprise-class cloud communication solutions to any size business through our business partners, agents, and direct channels today announced that its solutions now support over two million end users globally.

The Crexendo NetSapiens division is an award-winning, patented cloud-native communications platform delivered via a high availability, multi-tenant solution that can be consumed however the service providers prefer, in their cloud or the NetSapiens cloud, on a subscription or a purchase model. NetSapiens maintains a portfolio of cloud-native solutions, including its flagship SNAPsolution platform and its award winning SnapHD video collaboration solution. NetSapiens was recently spotlighted in Frost & Sullivan’s UCaaS (Unified Communications as a Service) report as the third-party platform vendor with the fastest growth rate in the North American market and the #4 ranked provider of UCaaS seats in North America.

Steven G. Mihaylo, Chief Executive Officer commented “This is a major milestone for Crexendo. When we acquired NetSapiens we did so because we were convinced that it was the best communication platform that was available anywhere. The continued acceptance of the platform by end users confirms our belief. The steady growth is a testament to the hard work done every day by our team and the commitment of our community. We are continuing to make investments and improvement in the platform that will benefit both the NetSapiens community and Crexendo telecom customers. One of the primary advantages of joining with NetSapiens team was to allow Crexendo to offer the VIP platform which is an all-in-one cloud business communications solution with a 100% uptime guarantee offering Video Collaboration, Interactions, and Business Phone communications for customers of all sizes. We provide world class collaboration tools at a price that is better than our competitors. In addition, the VIP Platform features advanced customer experience and call center capabilities to help companies deliver an excellent customer experience. Our combined efforts will continue to make a better company, provide better products and services and to increase shareholder value.”

Anand Buch, Chief Strategy Officer stated “This is a very exciting milestone for the entire team. We worked hard as an independent company to be the fastest growing UCaaS platform in the business and continue now as part of Crexendo to make sure that we provide the best UCaaS platform in the business. When NetSapiens merged with the Crexendo we did so knowing we were joining a team that demanded excellence and would settle for nothing less. We strive every day for continuous improvement and are growing a great company for our community of partners, our employees, our vendors, and our shareholders. This is just the start of many more major milestones.”

About Crexendo
Crexendo, Inc. is an award-winning premier provider of Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS), Call Center as a Service (CCaaS), communication platform software solutions, and collaboration services designed to provide enterprise-class cloud communication solutions to any size business through our business partners, agents, and direct channels. Our solutions currently support over 2 Million end users globally and was recently recognized as the fastest growing UCaaS platform in the United States.

Safe Harbor Statement
This press release contains forward-looking statements. The Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 provides a “safe harbor” for such forward-looking statements. The words “believe,” “expect,” “anticipate,” “estimate,” “will” and other similar statements of expectation identify forward-looking statements including but not limited to Crexendo (i) believing that this is a major milestone; (ii) being that NetSapiens has and had the best communication platform that was available anywhere; (iii) believing that the continued acceptance of the NetSapiens platform by end users confirms the belief of the Company; (iv) believing the steady growth is a testament to the hard work done every day by its team and the commitment of its community; (v) continuing to make investments and improvement in the platform which will benefit both the NetSapiens community and telecom customers; (vi) believing one of the primary advantages of joining with NetSapiens team was to allow the Company to offer the VIP platform and that the Company offers class collaboration tools at a price that is better than our competitors; (vii) believing the combined efforts will continue to make a better company, provide better products and services and to increase shareholder value; (viii) believing the Company will make sure to provide the best UCaaS platform in the business; (ix) believing the team demands excellence and would settle for nothing less; (x) believing the Company strives every day for continuous improvement and is growing a great company for its community of partners, employees, vendors, and our shareholders and (xi) believing this is just the start of many more major milestones.

For a more detailed discussion of risk factors that may affect Crexendo’s operations and results, please refer to the company’s Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2020, quarterly Form 10-Qs as filed with the SEC. These forward-looking statements speak only as of the date on which such statements are made, and the company undertakes no obligation to update such forward-looking statements, except as required by law.

The post Crexendo Reaches Two Million End Users Utilizing Their Award-Winning Platform appeared first on Cloud Communications Alliance.

Companies are struggling to manage security as the work-from-home model moves from an emergency stopgap to a more permanent environment. 

The European Union announced on Thursday that it will force manufacturers to adopt a universal phone charger, meaning the iPhone will have to use USB-C or whatever standardized charger regulators decide to use and will no longer be able to use Apple’s proprietary Lightning Charger. According to the AFP, the European Commission released an 18 page directive that outlined the new legislation it said was aimed at reducing waste and saving EU consumers millions of dollars a year.

The European Union has been threatening to make this change, which Apple has strongly fought against, for years. The move is designed to make things easier for consumers and to prevent people from owning all sorts of different chargers, which creates more trash. The directive also applies to “other small electronic portable devices.”

“In the past, mobile telephones were only compatible with specific mobile telephone chargers. An estimated 500 million mobile phones were in use in 2009 in all EU countries,” EC research about the directive says. “The chargers used often varied according to the manufacturer and model, and more than 30 different types of chargers were on the market. Apart from causing inconvenience to the consumer, this created unnecessary electronic waste.”

The law would prevent Apple and Android from swapping chargers between phone generations. There would be no more adapters and power bricks for multiple devices. Apple was upset at the legislative move.“We remain concerned that strict regulation mandating just one type of connector stifles innovation rather than encouraging it, which in turn will harm consumers in Europe and around the world,” Apple said in a statement.

Apple famously uses Lightning Chargers on iPhones, but recently switched to USB-C chargers for iPads. Presumably, Apple will simply switch to USB-C chargers on the iPhone, which has been a move long rumored by Apple watchers anyway, and is a charging standard that many people really like.

"European consumers have been frustrated long enough about incompatible chargers piling up in their drawers," EU executive vice president Margrethe Vestager said in a statement. "We gave industry plenty of time to come up with their own solutions, now time is ripe for legislative action for a common charger.”

This is a problem that affects more than just phones. In Europe, electric vehicles have two charging networks—Tesla and everyone else. The lack of common charging stations across the EU has made it difficult to build out EV infrastructure and convert the population to electric cars.

The charging regulation has been coming for some time. The European Parliament embraced the right to repair in 2020. Europeans have been protesting manufacturers and asking them to make it easier to fix stuff for years.

Much like the company's dedication to women, AT&T's dedication to not funding people eager to overthrow democracy appears to be somewhere between inconsistent and nonexistent. Shortly after January 6 a number of companies, including telecom giants like AT&T, publicly crowed about how they'd be ceasing all funding to politicians that supported the attack on the Capitol and the overturning of, you know, fucking democracy. Of course that promise was never worth all that much, given the the umbrella lobbying orgs companies like AT&T used never really stopped financing terrible people.

Initially, AT&T made a big stink about how it had suspended funding to all 147 Republicans who voted to overturn the 2020 election. But not only did AT&T not actually suspend funding via its numerous policy and lobbying tendrils, it didn't even really ever stop funding insurrectionists directly:

"In February, however, AT&T donated $5,000 to the House Conservatives Fund. The chair of the House Conservatives Fund is Jim Banks (R-IN), who objected to the certification of the Electoral College in January. Banks also signed an amicus brief submitted to the Supreme Court supporting Texas' efforts to throw out the election results in several states."

Back in March, when news outlets like the Dallas News pressed AT&T on why it was still funding insurrectionists, the company offered up some convoluted gibberish about how it was more ethically policing its PAC spending:

"We have been assured that none of the employee PAC’s contributions will go toward the reelection of any of those members of Congress,” Balmoris said. “Any future contributions to multi-candidate PACs will require such consistency with the policy suspending individual contributions."

Six months later, when a reporter tries to press AT&T on the fact it continues to fund insurrectionists, it just goes radio silent:

"Six months later, AT&T is charting a very different path. In August, new FEC disclosures reveal, AT&T donated $15,000 each to the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) and National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC). These donations will support the reelection of every Republican objector running for reelection. Popular Information contacted AT&T and asked whether, as it had pledged in March, it had secured a commitment that none of the funds it donated to the NRCC or NRSC would support Republican objectors. This time, the company did not respond."

In short, AT&T funded a bunch of politicians who filled the public's head with propaganda and bullshit, resulting in a violent if clumsy attempt to steal an election. Now AT&T doesn't want to talk about it, and hopes that if it stays quiet about it, the storm will pass. And they're probably right, given the broader press' ongoing tendency to normalize what happened earlier this year (largely because they don't want to offend leak sources and advertisers). Which, of course, all but guarantees that, sooner or later, the same bullshit is going to play out all over again, potentially with more calamitous results.

Twitter is turning on the ability to ask for tips in Bitcoin through its app, making it the first major social network to encourage use of the cryptocurrency as a method of payment. The company also plans to let users connect their crypto wallets and authenticate the ownership of NFTs they tweet with a special badge.

Twitter has been testing tipping for a few months now, but the company hasn’t made tips widely available until Thursday, when the feature is rolling out globally on iOS with Android to follow. Besides Bitcoin, Twitter will let users connect nine traditional payment providers, including Venmo and Cash App, to their profiles to accept tips. Twitter isn’t processing the payments itself.

The Bitcoin tips are facilitated by...

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Google is adding a new button to Google Calendar events on mobile and the web that will immediately open a chat with meeting attendees. Google launched its rebranded version of Hangouts Chat to customers earlier this year and has slowly added more features to the main Gmail landing page, including its Zoom-like Google Meet video chat.

The new Chat button appears next to the attendee list in a Calendar event. Previously, Google only offered the ability to email attendees about a meeting, but since the company has closely integrated Chats and Gmail — seemingly to popularize Chats — this new addition makes sense. You can start a chat before, during, or after the meeting with attendees, and the feature will be toggled on by default.

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