Davemichels

We’re radically underestimating the true cost of our carbon footprint.

The Supreme Court decided on May 26 to allow President Joe Biden’s administration to continue using a key metric in the fight against climate change.

The court’s order, in refusing to put back an order from a federal judge in Louisiana that had blocked the administration, is just one line long. But it represents a big setback for the Republican-led states that have been suing the president over the metric, known as the social cost of carbon: a measure, in dollars, of how much damage results from emitting 1 ton of carbon dioxide.

Being able to discuss the damage in terms of a precise dollar amount is important because it allows policymakers to show when the benefits of preventing global warming are greater than the costs. At some point it just becomes cheaper to switch to sustainable systems instead of coping with all the wildfires, floods, droughts, and heat waves that result from unsustainable systems.

In 2021, Biden signed an executive order that tasked a working group with determining the social cost of carbon (SCC). The working group decided to go with an interim figure of $51 per ton — the same SCC the Obama administration used — until it could study the matter in depth and release a final determination that’s updated to the latest science.

But under the Trump administration, the SCC was as low as $1, in part because of a decision to factor in only domestic, not global, impacts of emissions. Compared to $1, the $51 price tag the Biden administration reverted to is high — and the Republican states suing Biden, led by Louisiana, are not happy with it.

Knowing that the SCC is used in regulating carbon-emitting projects, like oil and gas drilling, the red states had argued that the price tag is a “power grab” designed to “manipulate America’s entire federal regulatory apparatus through speculative costs and benefits.”

But according to some top environmental economists, we have good reason to believe the true cost of emitting carbon is actually a lot higher than even a $51 price tag suggests.

There are a couple of reasons for that. First, until recently, the economists who calculated the SCC had barely factored in one of the biggest harms that climate change can cause: human mortality. Second, the way the SCC had been calculated rested on a problematic premise: that damage in the future counts for significantly less than damage in the present.

Let’s look at each of these issues in turn to understand why some experts now say the true cost of carbon per ton should really be much, much higher than we’d thought. In addition to having major policy implications, this discussion has major moral implications: It goes to the heart of our ethical responsibility to care for future generations.

The cost of our carbon footprint — in human lives

Record-shattering temperatures, which have led to recent heat waves like the one in India and Pakistan, make it painfully obvious that climate change isn’t a far-off threat — it’s already killing people.

So you might think that the SCC would also include a decent estimate as to the number of climate-related deaths per ton. But due to a lack of reliable data, it didn’t. There was no centralized data source enabling scientists to access daily temperature-related mortality figures for each country, so deaths barely factored into the calculation.

In 2021, the economist Danny Bressler published a study in the journal Nature Communications that attempts to rectify that shortcoming. His paper updates the SCC based on findings that have emerged in the last few years about heat-related deaths.

When Bressler factored in the projected deaths — what he calls “the mortality cost of carbon” — the SCC jumped to a whopping $258 per ton.

To break that down a bit: Bressler found that adding 4,434 metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere would result in one heat-related death this century. That’s equivalent to the lifetime emissions of 3.5 Americans.

People in other nations emit much less. For example, it would take the combined lifetime emissions of 146.2 Nigerians to kill one person.

This highlights one of the injustices of climate change. On a per-capita basis, people in richer, cooler countries produce far more emissions than people in poorer, hotter countries who suffer most of the damage.

It’s important to emphasize that Bressler’s estimate is only taking into account temperature-related mortality. (That means the net effect of having more hot days and fewer cold days.) But we know there are a lot of other climate-related events that can lead to death, including flooding, crop failures, disease transmission, and wars. Bressler told me he couldn’t factor them in due to a lack of rigorous data.

“But if you add in those other pathways,” Bressler said, “yeah, that would probably make the number go up.”

At this point, you might be wondering where, exactly, these sorts of numbers come from.

In the early ’90s, American economist William Nordhaus first figured out how to attach a price tag to the damage caused by 1 ton of carbon dioxide, a contribution deemed so valuable that he won a Nobel Prize for it. His model was dubbed the “Dynamic Integrated Climate-Economy,” or DICE (to emphasize that we’re playing dice with the planet’s future).

Bressler used Nordhaus’s original DICE model to calculate the SCC. He left all the parameters the same but added in the mortality costs of carbon, which the original model didn’t properly incorporate. That’s what made the SCC jump to $258.

Some experts say that number might be too high. But even if it’s somewhere in the right ballpark, that means it’s extremely worthwhile — not only morally but also in purely economic terms — to reduce emissions fast. More specifically, the main policy implication of the revamped model is that we should commit to full decarbonization by 2050. Note that while your choices as an individual factor into this, we can make a much greater impact by focusing on what governments and businesses do. “If you want to make as large-scale change as possible, do things at the level of policy or the level of business,” Bressler said.

If we fully decarbonize by 2050 rather than letting emissions grow in line with Nordhaus’s baseline scenario (which sees our emissions plateau close to the end of the century), we could bring down the expected number of heat-related deaths this century from 83 million to 9 million, according to Bressler. In other words, we could save 74 million lives. That’s roughly the number of people who died in World War II, the deadliest conflict in history.

The rate at which we’re “discounting” the future is too high

Unless you’ve studied economics, you may have never heard about discount rates. But it’s a key idea to wrap your head around, so let’s go ahead and unpack it.

The basic idea behind discount rates is that future damages or benefits are worth less than those in the present. That might sound unintuitive, but we all use discounting, whether we realize it or not.

For example, think about the value of getting $100 today versus the value of getting $100 next year. It’s common sense that if I give you $100 today, that’s better for you because you can invest it and potentially earn a nice return by next year.

If instead I gave you $100 next year, the relative value of that gift would be “discounted.” But by how much? That depends on market realities like interest rates. Let’s say the market dictates that there’s a discount rate of 3 percent per year. That means what I give you a year from now is worth only 97 percent of what I give you this year. And the picture gets worse and worse with each passing year, since any earnings would have compounded over time if you’d been able to invest earlier.

When environmental economists talk about discounting, they’re typically operating with the underlying assumption that society is likely to be richer in the future, as that’s the pattern we’ve seen over the past couple of centuries. So a benefit worth $100 is going to be worth less to us in the future than today. Likewise, $100 worth of damage from climate change will matter less to us.

But how much less? Economists disagree vehemently on the answer.

Nordhaus, the Nobel winner who created the DICE model, was a proponent of using a 3 percent discount rate. British economist Nicholas Stern argued in his famed 2006 Stern Review for using a lower discount rate of 1.4 percent, which would lead to a higher SCC.

To understand their disagreement, consider that there are two main reasons to discount the future. The first is the reason we just covered: An extra dollar is worth less to a wealthy person than to a poorer person, and the assumption is that future people will be wealthier. Nordhaus and Stern wouldn’t disagree about that.

But the second reason for discounting is more contentious. It has to do with the fact that people tend to value the future less than the present. In wonky terms, this is called the “rate of pure time preference.”

As Bressler explained, “Nordhaus would say people are naturally myopic — they naturally discount the future relative to today — and it’s not up to us as economists to tell people what to think. Whereas Stern would say, ‘Well, we need to consider all the generations in our economic analysis, not just the present one, and we shouldn’t discount the future just because it’s in the future.’”

This argument gets at a core problem of climate advocacy: It’s hard enough to get people to invest in their own future, and persuading them to highly value future generations who can’t advocate for themselves is even harder. But because Stern thought it wrong to implicitly discriminate against the future generations who will bear the brunt of our emissions, he put less value on the rate of pure time preference, and as a result came up with a lower discount rate.

Interestingly, what Bressler’s study shows is that even when we assume Nordhaus’s higher discount rate and just add in the mortality impacts, we still get a big increase in the social cost of carbon.

And what happens to the SCC if we try using Stern’s lower discount rate?

“Oh, it goes way up,” Bressler told me. “Way, way up. It goes into the thousands of dollars.”

Laurie Johnson, former chief economist of the Natural Resources Defense Council and now executive director at the Climate Cost Project, didn’t bat an eye at the idea of a social cost of carbon in the thousands. She told me that’s a reasonable number per ton.

“People are suffering and dying, and more people will be suffering and dying,” she said, emphasizing that Bressler’s mortality estimates account for only a small fraction of the deaths we’ll see.

Other experts likewise believe the US has been using an overly high discount rate and thus underestimating the SCC. Economists Tamma Carleton and Michael Greenstone, for example, argued in a paper that the discount rate should be no higher than 2 percent. When they plugged in that rate, it resulted in a SCC of $125.

Carleton said the need for a lower discount rate is justifiable on purely economic grounds. “As you might have noticed if you’ve tried to buy a house recently (among lots of other things), interest rates look very different. Capital markets have changed, and interest rates are lower,” she told me.

But there are also very strong ethical reasons to think the discount rate used to date is much too high.

The discount rate is not objective — it’s a subjective moral judgment

People do tend to value the present more than the future. You may grab that chocolate chip cookie today, for instance, even though you know it means you’ll have to lean into the diet extra hard tomorrow. But that doesn’t necessarily mean our climate models should follow suit. In fact, some philosophers think baking in people’s rate of pure time preference is a terrible idea.

“We’re basically just measuring a form of human impatience and irrationality, then trying to add it into political decision-making,” Toby Ord, a senior research fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University, argued on the 80,000 Hours podcast in 2017. “It doesn’t seem to be the kind of thing that one should be respecting at all. It’s just like finding a cognitive bias that we have, and then adding it back into your economic analysis in order to make your analysis biased in the same way.”

One classic reason individuals undervalue future events is because there’s a chance they’ll no longer be alive when those events happen, so they won’t be affected. That might make sense when it comes to individual choices, like eating a bunch of chocolate chip cookies. But in the case of climate change, respecting that bias means accepting that future generations will face centuries of climate disaster because of the choices we’ve made (and continue to make).

There’s an implicit intergenerational trade-off here. And although there’s no philosophical consensus about the right way to handle such trade-offs, many philosophers think we have a moral responsibility to care for future generations.

Frank Partnoy, now a Berkeley Law professor, argued this point in a 2012 interview with the New York Times. “A human life is often estimated to be worth around $10 million,” he said. “But if you apply a 3 percent discount rate to this, that means that a human life 500 years from now is only worth $3.81 today.”

Most people would agree that seems ridiculous. Philosopher Derek Parfit and economist Tyler Cowen underscored the absurdity of a social discount rate in a 1992 paper, writing: “Why should costs and benefits receive less weight, simply because they are further in the future? When the future comes, these benefits and costs will be no less real. Imagine finding out that you, having just reached your twenty-first birthday, must soon die of cancer because one evening Cleopatra wanted an extra helping of dessert. How could this be justified?”

Now, that’s not to say the pure rate of time preference should be absolutely zero. As Carleton and Greenstone wrote, “Perhaps the most compelling explanation for a nonzero pure rate of time preference is the possibility of a disaster (e.g., asteroids or nuclear war) that wipes out the population at some point in the future, thus removing the value of any events that happen afterwards.” Ord has made the same argument, suggesting we should discount the future by the extinction risk to humanity, and no more.

Whatever you think about discounting, intellectual honesty requires us to admit that how we choose to answer the question of what we owe to future generations gets baked into the discount rate and thus into the SCC. And any answer to that question will be a subjective moral judgment, not some objective mathematical truth.

“Ultimately, we can’t rely on only numbers — we have to make really hard value judgments,” Partnoy told the New York Times. “We should stop pretending this is a science and admit it is an art and talk about this in terms of ethics and fairness, not what we can observe in the markets.”

The Climate Cost Project’s Johnson agrees. “Some economists like to do a lot of smoke and mirrors and pretend that everything is objective and not based on values,” she said. “But it is based on values.”

She pointed out that even the first purely economic reason to discount the future (society will be wealthier in the future, and damages matter less the wealthier you are) is not some objective truth. She doesn’t take it for granted that economic growth will continue, since climate change could hamper or even reverse it. But many economists, she said, have an “irrational love affair” with the idea of ongoing economic growth.

“There’s a blind spot there among some economists — they really think growth can just continue like this,” Johnson said. “But it’s a delusion.”

Because Johnson thinks the first and second reasons to discount the future are deeply flawed, she does not think it makes sense to continue talking in terms of a social cost of carbon. Instead, she said we should simply set an emissions target and then determine the most cost-effective ways of reaching it.

She’s not alone. Even Stern, one of the main economists to shape the idea of the SCC, advocated for the same shift in a 2021 report he co-authored with Nobel laureate and Columbia professor Joseph Stiglitz.

Realistically, though, the Biden administration will likely set a new social cost of carbon, as it’s promised to do. The experts I spoke with expect the new SCC to factor in the latest empirical data. That includes what we now know about the mortality cost of carbon as well as data on what the market is doing; as Carleton noted, interest rates have dropped, and it wouldn’t be surprising to see that reflected in a lower discount rate — and thus a higher SCC.

The Biden administration may well follow the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s general guidance on how to determine the SCC. One important aspect of those recommendations is that they “put uncertainty center stage,” Carleton said, meaning they “price in the uncertainty we face about future economic growth — and hence future discount rates.”

This careful treatment of uncertainty would go some way toward accounting for Johnson’s objection that economic growth may not continue in the era of climate change. However, “I think the discussion still needs to be honest about what the real ethics are,” Johnson said. “You can’t reduce this problem to a mathematical equation.”

Update, May 27, 2022: This story has been updated to reflect the news that the Supreme Court declined to uphold the Republican-led states’ effort to block the Biden administration’s social cost of carbon policy.

Home Depot has launched a smart home app meant to be an all-in-one for smart appliances and accessories the big box store sells, but it’s debatable why anyone would need it when Google Home and Amazon’s Alexa already exist.

Called Hubspace, the free app is available in Android and iOS app stores, and “enables light bulbs, smart plugs and ceiling fans to be controlled from anywhere,” according to a press release from Home Depot. It’s compatible with Google Home and Amazon Alexa devices, and works with a short list of products that Home Depot sells, from its proprietary brands such as Hampton Bay and EcoSmart. “There’s no need for a hub or extra equipment, and the platform already works with more than 20 products,” the press release...

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Vine creator Dom Hofmann’s new project, explained

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Campaign to educate B2B customers on how Vonage accelerates the world’s ability to connect – continuing to shift brand perception

HOLMDEL, NJ – September 1, 2021 – Vonage (Nasdaq: VG), a global leader in cloud communications helping businesses accelerate their digital transformation, this week launched a new brand campaign platform, “Vonage Does That,” to help business buyers understand who Vonage is today and how Vonage powers connections that deepen customer engagement and brand loyalty. The campaign takes an engaging storytelling, use-case approach to drive a perception shift of the Vonage brand, focusing on real-world applications for Vonage solutions.

At a time when employee connectivity and customer engagement around the world is more important than ever, the campaign illustrates how Vonage’s technologies power many of the apps, software and business communications tools people use every day through the Company’s API, Unified Communications, and Contact Center offerings.

“The strategy is really twofold,” said Joy Corso, Chief Marketing Officer of Vonage. “First is to help businesses understand, very simply, how Vonage powers organizations to connect employees and engage customers in tangible and meaningful ways. There is no question these are areas that are top of mind for businesses around the world as the need for hybrid work accelerates, and the demand to build solutions to engage with customers in new ways grows.”

Corso continued, “The second is a continued brand perception shift. Vonage is a well-known and respected brand, but it is also a brand that has gone through significant transformation from a residential telco provider to a leading B2B communications cloud provider. This campaign approach really accomplishes both missions beautifully.”

Targeting business decision makers and developers, the campaign’s approach was inspired by the insight that customers speak and think in use cases. The work takes the storytelling principles of consumer advertising to bring those use cases to life in meaningful ways for a B2B audience. Digital and video executions are built on short engaging stories that customers can relate to, both personally and as a business buyer.

Whether it’s receiving medical attention from anywhere through telehealth, tracking a package or a food delivery in real time, booking a rideshare service while maintaining privacy, providing fraud protection, connecting with the right customer support agent for your individual need, or enabling video and voice communications across thousands of office locations, Vonage Does That and this new campaign shows it.

The campaign concept was developed by Doremus featuring slice-of-life scenarios where Vonage plays a key role, all delivered as catchy, conversational :10s spots. A live-action shoot allowed Vonage to create differentiation in a category that relies heavily on stock and animation.

“Vonage is a great brand with a great story to tell. We deliberately steered clear of “tech speak” to reach audiences in a more human and memorable way. We know that done right, well-produced videos can not only educate and entertain, but drive business too,” added Paul Hirsch, President & Chief Creative Officer of Doremus.

The campaign will run nationally on Facebook, Reddit, YouTube and OTT/CTV.

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. More at https://ir.vonage.com/.

About Doremus & Co.
Doremus & Co. is Omnicom’s B2B specialist, a global, integrated agency with offices in New York, San Francisco, London, Frankfurt, Beijing, Hong Kong, and Shanghai. Doremus provides unparalleled understanding into the complex challenges facing clients in the B2B space and partners with some of the world’s leading B2B brands, including Akamai, Carrier, FIS, FM Global, LEGO Education, NI, Shell, and Vonage, to create award-winning work with ideas that connect. For more information, visit www.doremus.com.

The post Vonage Launches New Brand Campaign To Show Just How ‘Vonage Does That’ By Powering Everyday Interactions appeared first on Cloud Communications Alliance.

You can get a great 1080p webcam for under $75. If you want to spend more, you can get 4K recording, AI head tracking, and even a real gimbal.

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Twitter is planning new features to give people more privacy options, according to Bloomberg. The social network’s plans reportedly include the option to archive old tweets so they’re not visible to other users after a given period of time (like 30, 60, or 90 days or a full year). They also include possible options to limit who can see which tweets you’ve liked, to let people remove themselves from a conversation on Twitter, and to let people remove followers without outright blocking them.

Bloomberg describes the new features as a suite of “social privacy” changes that are aimed at making people more comfortable engaging on Twitter. Internal research at Twitter apparently found that many users don’t even understand whether their...

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General Motors, parent company of Chevrolet, GMC, Cadillac, and Buick, said it was temporarily halting production at six of its North American factories as a result of the global chip shortage. It’s the latest major automaker to be affected by the tight supply of essential computer chips.

Four of GM’s US-based plants will be affected: Fort Wayne, Indiana; Wentzville, Missouri; Spring Hill, Tennessee; and Lansing, Michigan. Four other factories in Mexico and Canada will also go dark for several weeks as GM works to shore up its supply of chips. The halt in production will affect GM’s most profitable vehicles, including pickup trucks and SUVs.

“During the downtime, we will repair and ship...

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Google’s custom chips could expand past the Pixel 6 to Chromebook laptops and tablets as early as 2023, according to a new report from Nikkei Asia on the company’s expanding emphasis on designing its own processors.

The company is already preparing to release its first major custom chip this fall, with the Pixel 6’s upcoming Tensor SoC. The report also lines up with rumors from 2020 that Google was planning in-house Chromebook chips after it debuted the concept on Pixel phones — something we now know is happening in a few weeks.

But the Nikkei Asia report does note a few additional details, including the aforementioned 2023 timing; a confirmation that, like the Tensor chip, the Chromebook CPUs will be based on Arm; and that Google is...

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Google is adding a new “Time insights” panel to Calendar on the web, showing users how much of their working week is spent in meetings. According to Google’s blog post, the feature is rolling out gradually over the next month on select plans. It was first announced back in March as part of a raft of new features coming to Google Workspace.

Time Insights arrives a couple of years after both Google and Apple added similar breakdowns into Android and iOS respectively to show the amount of time spent using different apps. But while these OS features included the ability to set per-app time limits, Google Calendar won’t let you set similar boundaries on meetings. Instead, it provides you with the information you need to hopefully curb any...

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UC Today’s Marian McHugh hosts Rory Read, CEO of Vonage.

In this session we discuss the following:

• Vonage’s growth success
• Its channel strategy
• The UCaaS and CCaaS opportunity going forward

If you’re looking for more information on this topic visit Vonage.

Thanks for watching, if you’d like more like this, don’t forget to SUBSCRIBE to our YouTube channel.

You can also join in the conversation on our Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook pages.

COVID-19 has shifted work-life balance in quite a literal way, but not all agree on how that will look moving forward.

Zoom’s impending entrance to the contact centre space is probably not a shock to many, although the size of its arrival – through the impending acquisition of Five9 – may well be.

The announcement caused such a stir that a number of senior execs in unified comms and customer experience competitors were asked to give their views when reporting their company’s quarterly earnings.

Earning’s call participants are often reluctant to discuss competitors but, on the whole, that was not the case this time.

We’ve pulled together the highlights of the responses from senior execs in the UC and CC space.

Anand Eswaran, COO, RingCentral

“Zoom and Five9 have been partners for two-plus years and we are actually pretty thrilled about our win rates against them over the last two and a half years.

“The other thing that I would probably offer up is, if you just look at our strategy, we’ve been working with NICE inContact for six-plus years. We saw this UC+CC trend long

Anand Eswaran

before it has become fashionable, as it is right now.

“We have a deep integration with inContact. And in fact, what you see is no other Gartner Magic Quadrant-leading, deeply integrated UCaaS and CCaaS solution outside of RingCentral contact centre, and that is what is making a difference.

“We just extended our partnership for a long time to come with NICE inContact and we’re seeing great pipe.”

Jim Chirico, CEO, Avaya

“I think one thing we need to keep in mind is how one determines and classifies enterprise versus non-enterprise. If you take a look… within contact centre, I would suggest that we play in a completely different zone than Five9.

Jim Chirico

“I think that’s a clear differentiation because it has to do [with] complexity expertise and so on.

“If you look at the acquisition, I don’t think it’s a surprise to anybody that there is a need for consolidation in this industry and I think Zoom and Five9 obviously took advantage of that. but if you contrast that to Avaya, we launched the Avaya OneCloud portfolio over a year ago – probably close to 18 months ago. In fact, we’ve had an integrated platform strategy as being the leader in UC and CC for years”

“This transaction to me is just proof that Avaya’s in a great position. Welcome to the neighbourhood. — rising tide lifts all boats, so we’re excited about it.”

Dave Sipes, CEO, 8×8

“Those are two platforms we compete with today, so fundamentally the landscape doesn’t change. I do believe it’s a validation that other people are coming to the vision that we have of XCaaS, which is bringing UC and CC together and it’s really being driven by the customer demand for that solution.

Dave Sipes

“I do think you can draw a few conclusions from that. One is the era of build your own contact centre is over.

“The other is, I think, less obvious, but the era of partnering is ending. While this was fine when there weren’t other solutions for customers to be partnered between UC and CC solutions, I think customers want more. They want more integration; they want more manageability long term with integration frameworks that work well; and they want single-vendor reliability across that.

“So, I do think we’re entering the era of the owned and integrated UC and CC product, and that’s an area where we continue to be farthest along on an integrated solution in our XCaaS and message.”

Barak Eilam, CEO, Nice

“There aren’t too many players in this market and, actually, Five9 were not a leader and the Gartner MQ and them being taken out by a video collaboration or video collaboration player is actually good news for us.

“We believe that in order to win the customer engagement market, the direction and the need from customers is to offer full digital CX offering that includes CCaaS, workforce engagement, analytics and AI digital and self-service. That’s what we were building in the last 18 months and this is where we see the success today.

“In this particular transaction, I don’t think Zoom is given size in any of those assets. I don’t see how it solves their problem”

“So quite frankly we’re happy with the upcoming disruption to them and we believe we have a very solid position both with our offering as well as many other partners that we have. And we do great business together.”

Doug Gaylor, COO, Crexendo

Zoom is a player in our field now, obviously leveraging their positioning with the video collaboration and trying to get into UCaaS.

“The acquisition of Five-9  puts them into the high-end call centre application space. We feel like we have got a great call centre application for the SMB market.

“Zoom and Five9, that’s a big acquisition. I was talking to somebody the other day and they say that putting two unicorns when you put two unicorns together, then you got to figure out what you got. I know that with what we’ve got with NetSapiens, we have got a tremendous UCaaS offering with a great contact centre application.

“So for the market that we are going after, I see Zoom as a competitor, but not a serious competitor because we have got our mission and I don’t worry about Zoom getting into our lunch.”

Rory Read, CEO, Vonage

“I think that acquisition kind of validates what we’re trying to do with the Vonage Communications Platform. We’ve been on this strategy for five, six years; we put the right assets together for where the market is going and I think that acquisition, in particular, kind of validates this idea that we’re on.

“I think we have been a first mover in the space to put these together in a platform that allows our customers to get these broad-based of an API-first engagement platform and then to build purpose-built applications in contact centre and then unified communications on top of that API flow.

“The next three to five, seven years, it’s the culmination of Internet, cloud and mobility all coming together to create this kind of perfect storm for communications embedded in all those activities.

“It’s a huge market. I don’t care what all the competition does. We’re going to focus on our customers. This is a customer first-based culture but we understand our customers and give them the best care nobody else can”

“Sure, there’ll be competitors, and there’ll be this one this quarter and the next one next year. It doesn’t matter; this market is huge.”

Shabtai Adlersberg, CEO, AudioCodes

Context: AudioCodes reported a strong lift in its business with Zoom when reporting its last quarter, particularly around Zoom Phone in the enterprise market. Adlersberg was asked if he expects Audiocodes to benefit from the Zoom-Five9 acquisition

“On the first glance, [I’m] not sure, however, should Zoom be successful in integrating with Five9 in terms of their customer base, with Five9 [being] a strong mid-market player, that may help Zoom to win those mid-market players.

“Now, if that happens the answer is ‘yes’, meaning that if Zoom is successful in acquiring more mid-market customers of Five9, that would be good for us.”

David Morken, CEO, Bandwidth

“For us, it doesn’t [change the competitive dynamics of the industry].

“They’re both terrific customers of Bandwidth. We love seeing our customers work well together and, in some cases, join forces. We believe that that combination will serve many global end-users really well.

For us, we celebrate great, innovative teams that we serve and support. In this case, they got together and have a view of the world that’s exciting and we’re going to do our best to keep up with them.”

Hundreds of wildfires have already scorched the rainforest this year, and the worst is likely yet to come.

In the summer of 2019, the Amazon captured the world’s attention when large chunks of the iconic rainforest went up in flames and smoke darkened the afternoon sky above São Paulo, Brazil’s largest city. The following year proved to be even worse.

And this year?

It’s not looking good so far: More than 1,000 large fires have burned across the rainforest since January. Experts say this year is on track to be as bad as 2020, when fires razed more than 19 million acres of the world’s largest tropical forest.

Conservation advocates aren’t counting on help from the government of Brazil, which is home to some 60 percent of the Amazon. While President Jair Bolsonaro banned unauthorized outdoor fires and deployed troops to the Amazon earlier this year, experts say these efforts haven’t worked in the past — and question the president’s commitment to ending rampant forest loss. A populist and ally of former President Donald Trump, Bolsonaro has dismantled a number of environmental protections since taking office in 2019.

Christian Braga/Greenpeace

Courtesy of Amazon Conservation Association/Planet Labs

The situation today is especially dire given that new research reveals that parts of the Amazon are already so damaged that they now emit more carbon than they absorb. Meanwhile, the landmark United Nations climate report published earlier this summer shows that the rainforest — which stores 123 billion tons of carbon and is a haven of biodiversity — is heating up and drying out at a much faster clip than other parts of the world. Drier forests, naturally, are more likely to burn.

For some, this may seem like a distant problem. But the Amazon is one of the world’s best defenses against climate change, so its fate affects us all.

Surging deforestation meets the worst drought in nearly a century

Almost all wildfires in the Amazon are deliberately ignited by people, who typically burn trees after cutting them down or, less commonly, when they want to clear a swath of forest, said Ane Alencar, science director at the Amazon Environmental Research Institute in Brazil. So where you find forest loss, you tend to also find forest fires.

There’s certainly been a lot of recent forest loss. Over the past 12 months, the Brazilian Amazon lost more than 2.5 million acres, by some estimates — the highest level of deforestation since 2012, according to Imazon, a nonprofit research institute in Brazil. That’s sparked concern among experts like Alencar that fires will be especially bad this year.

“There’s lots of fuel material on the ground right now, waiting to be burned,” Alencar said. “This means we’re going to have lots of fire.”

Joshua Stevens/NASA Earth Observatory

Making matters worse, much of the Amazon is now extremely dry. Central and southern Brazil are experiencing the worst drought in more than 90 years, due in part to the weather phenomenon known as La Niña, prompting several Brazilian states to warn of water shortages. That means that when someone lights a fire, it’s more likely to escape and spread, Alencar said. Research shows that fires in the Amazon are more common in years of drought and during La Niña events.

Hundreds of fires have scorched the Amazon, and the worst may be yet to come

More than 1,000 major fires have burned in the Brazilian Amazon this year, according to Monitoring of the Andean Amazon Project (MAAP), a forest monitoring project affiliated with the nonprofit Amazon Conservation Association. Many of those fires are illegal and burned in areas that were previously deforested, the group said. MAAP data also shows fires in the Bolivian Amazon. Thousands of acres of forest have burned this year in Bolivia, some of which were in the Amazon, Reuters reports.

Other data sources paint a similarly bleak picture: Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research estimates that fires in the Brazilian Amazon scorched about 2 million acres through July. The institute, known as INPE, also reports that there have been more than 50,000 fire “outbreaks,” or hot spots detected by satellites, from January through late August, in the Brazilian Amazon. (Large fires or fires that burn for many days may be represented by multiple “outbreaks,” so a single outbreak doesn’t necessarily correspond to one fire.)

Christina Animashaun/Vox; Monitoring of the Andean Amazon Project

Is that worse than last year? It depends on the source of data.

According to MAAP, there have been nearly double the number of major fires in the Brazilian Amazon through late August compared to the same period last year. “So far this year has way more major fires through the same date,” said Matt Finer, a senior research specialist at Amazon Conservation Association who leads the MAAP project. “This year could be worse than last year, which ironically was actually way worse than the infamous 2019 year.”

Brazil’s INPE, meanwhile, estimates that there were slightly more fire outbreaks through late August in 2019 and 2020 in the Amazon, and much more acreage burned, compared to this year. MAAP and INPE use different monitoring tools, which is why they report different figures, according to Mikaela Weisse, a forest monitoring expert at the DC-based think tank World Resources Institute.

The worst may be yet to come, Alencar said. The southern Amazon was hit with a few cold fronts earlier this year, she said, which delayed the start of the fire season. Now it’s picking up.

Why a burning Amazon is so frightening for everyone

Rampant wildfires in the Amazon are never a good thing, but the consequences of three years of severe fires are increasingly troubling and far-reaching.

We count on forests to suck up loads of carbon dioxide that humans, companies, and countries emit through the burning of fossil fuels. The Amazon has always performed this essential function.

But as scientists are now learning, wildfires are putting that function at risk. A groundbreaking study published in July found that parts of the Amazon are now emitting more carbon than they absorb, due to climate change, deforestation, and wildfires. These regions, which are largely concentrated in the southeast, have warmed by as much as 4.5 degrees Fahrenheit over the past four decades in the dry season, the authors found. That means we’re undercutting one of our greatest bulwarks against climate change.

Christian Braga/Greenpeace

Courtesy of Amazon Conservation Association/Planet Labs

Worse, wildfires are pushing the Amazon toward a dangerous tipping point that, some scientists say, could turn large swaths of the forest into a dry savanna. Hundreds of billions of trees in the forest pull water out of the ground and release it through their leaves, producing what some have called a “giant river in the sky” that keeps the forest wet. As the Amazon shrinks, so does this airborne river — further drying out the biome, and further increasing the risk of fires.

That tipping point may already be here, suggesting the window to restore the Amazon is extremely narrow, according to authors of a 2019 essay in the journal Science Advances that popularized the idea of a rainforest tipping point. “The precious Amazon is teetering on the edge of functional destruction,” they wrote. “And, with it, so are we.”

Slap bang in the middle of a Venn diagram with two circles labelled “sincere tech startups” and “dystopian satires that are a little on the nose” you will find SquarEat: a company that you would swear is a joke if you weren’t already familiar with how the simulation we’re all living in likes to collide fact and fiction.

SquarEat was apparently born of a simple idea: what if you could eat squares? But boy oh boy does it deliver on that premise.

The company claims to have “created a new concept of food” (squares) which it makes by blitzing ingredients and compressing them into “ready-to-eat” 50 gram packages (squares). You can buy your squares in packs of four or six and have...

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GREENVILLE, SC – August 24, 2021 – ScanSource, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCSC), a leading global provider of technology products and solutions, today announced the upcoming retirement of long-time director John P. (“Jack”) Reilly from its Board of Directors. Mr. Reilly, who has served as a director of ScanSource since 2001, is retiring from the Board when his current term of office expires effective at ScanSource’s Annual Meeting of Shareholders to be held on January 27, 2022. The Company also announced the appointment of Charles A. (“Charlie”) Mathis to its Board of Directors, effective August 19, 2021. Mr. Mathis’ appointment expands the Board to 10 members.

Mr. Mathis brings decades of experience in finance, strategic M&A, and capital markets to the Board, including 13 years as Chief Financial Officer for multiple publicly traded companies. Mr. Mathis also has in-depth knowledge of ScanSource and the IT industry. He previously served as ScanSource’s Chief Financial Officer from 2012 to 2016 and was instrumental in the 2016 acquisition of Intelisys. Most recently, Mr. Mathis served as Chief Financial Officer for Science Applications International Corporation, a Fortune 500 company and U.S. government IT services provider, from 2016 until his retirement in January 2021. He previously served as Chief Financial Officer for Force Protection Inc., a global defense company, and EFW, Inc., the U.S.-based subsidiary of the Israeli defense contractor, Elbit Systems. He started his career in investment banking.

“Charlie is an outstanding fit for our Board, and I am thrilled to welcome him back to ScanSource,” said Mike Baur, Chairman and CEO, ScanSource, Inc. “Charlie’s deep knowledge of our business and markets, financial acumen, and experience creating shareholder value will serve ScanSource extremely well.”

Mr. Reilly joined the ScanSource Board in 2001. During his tenure, Mr. Reilly has served on all committees of the Board, most recently as Chair of Nominating Committee.

Mr. Baur commented, “Working alongside Jack is a privilege. His extensive corporate finance and banking knowledge helped guide our strategy and growth. On behalf of the Board, I want to thank Jack for his 20 years of insightful guidance and exceptional service to the ScanSource Board.”

Following Mr. Reilly’s retirement and Mr. Mathis’ appointment, ScanSource’s Board is expected to consist of nine directors.

About ScanSource, Inc.

ScanSource, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCSC) is at the center of the technology solution delivery channel, connecting businesses and providing solutions for their complex needs. ScanSource sells through multiple, specialized routes-to-market with digital, physical and services offerings from the world’s leading suppliers of point-of-sale (POS), payments, barcode, physical security, unified communications and collaboration, telecom and cloud services. ScanSource enables its sales partners to create, deliver and manage solutions for end-customers across almost every vertical market. Founded in 1992 and headquartered in Greenville, South Carolina, ScanSource was named one of the 2021 Best Places to Work in South Carolina and on FORTUNE magazine’s 2021 List of World’s Most Admired Companies. ScanSource ranks #655 on the Fortune 1000. For more information, visit www.scansource.com.

The post ScanSource Announces Retirement of Jack Reilly and Appointment of Charlie Mathis to the Board of Directors appeared first on Cloud Communications Alliance.

Panasonic knows that gamers want to be blown away. But maybe not quite this literally?

That looks a little painful. So does this:

But what do you expect from a product called the SoundSlayer? It had better slay or my money back.

And because gamers like acronyms, you should know that the SoundSlayer WIGSS (Wearable Immersive Gaming Speaker System) will come with True MAGESS (Majestic Augmented Gaming Environment Sound System) when it arrives this October for $199.99. Wigs and mages? Not quite, because Panasonic snuck in that extra “S”!

Panasonic promises its four full-range speakers will create a...

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Otter.ai is one of our favorite transcription tools thanks to the accuracy of its machine learning-generated notes. If you’re a paying user, you can also use its Otter Assistant feature to plug into your calendar and automatically join and transcribe meetings even if you’re not there. Previously, Otter Assistant only worked with Zoom meetings, but today the company is expanding it to integrate with Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, and Cisco Webex meetings.

It’s a handy feature, depending on the platform (or platforms) on which you tend to have meetings. Zoom already offers third-party transcription features, for example, while Teams has its own built-in free transcription tool. If you’re already using one of these services, then the...

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Wing, the drone delivery company operated by Google-parent Alphabet, is about to rack up 100,000 deliveries. The company says it will pass the threshold in the next few days, a significant milestone for a technology that has nevertheless yet to prove its utility at scale.

Drone deliveries began to catch the public imagination in the early 2010s as consumer quadcopters fell in price and AI control systems became more reliable. Then, in 2013, Amazon made wild promises about making drones a standard part of its delivery empire. But so far the technology has mainly found success at a much smaller scale: delivering high-value but physically small items like vaccines and blood in remote locations.

Wing’s success, though, hints that one future...

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Expansion of high-precision face recognition use for FinTech, Digital ID and more

TOKYO – August 24, 2021 – NEC Corporation (NEC; TSE: 6701) today announced that its face recognition technology ranked first in the world in the most recent face recognition technology benchmarking test (FRVT Ongoing, 1) conducted by the globally authoritative U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). In particular, in the large-scale “1:N Identification”, which is largely used for FinTech and requires higher precision for applications that include cashless payments, public transportation and digital ID, the system was evaluated with an accuracy rate of 99.78% for still images among 12 million people (2).

In NIST benchmark testing, NEC also ranked first following the face recognition benchmark in 2018 (FRVT2018, 3).

NEC was one of the first companies in the world to develop and commercialize a face recognition engine that achieves high accuracy even when masks are worn in response to the spread of COVID-19. In this way, NEC works to further improve the performance of its core face recognition algorithm in order to quickly respond to emerging social needs. In addition, based on the NEC Group AI and Human Rights Principles (4), NEC will continue to give top priority to privacy considerations and respect for human rights when using data such as AI and biometric information.

Going forward, NEC will capitalize on its portfolio of biometric identification solutions, ‘Bio-IDiom’ (5), which includes face recognition technologies, and ‘NEC the WISE’ (6), a leading-edge group of AI technologies, including video analytics, in order to expand their use among applications that require a high degree of reliability, including cashless payment solutions for FinTech, public transportation, and digital ID for large-scale facilities and functions, such as airports and sports events.

Expanding use of high-precision face recognition technology

(1) Face Recognition Vendor Test Ongoing, supported by and in collaboration with the US Department of Homeland Security and others, assessed the accuracy of authentication for tens of millions of people using face recognition technologies from top vendors from throughout the world. “Results shown from NIST do not constitute an endorsement of any particular system, product, service, or company by NIST.”
new windowhttps://www.nist.gov/programs-projects/face-recognition-vendor-test-frvt-ongoing
(2) As of August 5, 2021. The rate at which biometric subjects are correctly identified at 0.3% of False Positive Identification Rate (FPIR) against the law enforcement images (Mugshot) of 12 million registered persons. In addition, the company has been ranked No. 1 in terms of accuracy in testing (database Border 10+YRS for border control) where images that have been taken more than 10 years ago and the current image are matched. Source: Face Recognition Vendor Test (FRVT) Part 2: Identification (NISTIR 8271 DRAFT SUPPLEMENT, 08/05/2021.
(3) NEC Face Recognition Technology Ranks First in NIST Accuracy Testing
https://www.nec.com/en/press/201910/global_20191003_01.html
(4) NEC Unveils “NEC Group AI and Human Rights Principles”
https://www.nec.com/en/press/201904/global_20190402_01.html
(5) Bio-IDiom
https://www.nec.com/en/global/solutions/biometrics/index.html
(6) NEC the WISE
https://www.nec.com/en/global/solutions/ai/

About NEC Corporation

NEC Corporation has established itself as a leader in the integration of IT and network technologies while promoting the brand statement of “Orchestrating a brighter world.” NEC enables businesses and communities to adapt to rapid changes taking place in both society and the market as it provides for the social values of safety, security, fairness and efficiency to promote a more sustainable world where everyone has the chance to reach their full potential. For more information, visit NEC at https://www.nec.com.

The post NEC Face Recognition Technology Ranks First in NIST Accuracy Testing appeared first on Cloud Communications Alliance.

President Joe Biden plans to host a meeting on Wednesday to discuss how companies are improving cybersecurity after the waves of recent security breaches and ransomware attacks, and Apple CEO Tim Cook, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, and Amazon CEO Andy Jassy will be attending, according to Bloomberg. Google, IBM, JPMorgan Chase, and the energy firm Southern Company have also been invited, and Southern Company CEO Tom Fanning is also set to attend, Bloomberg reports.

While it’s not clear exactly what the president and any attendees plan to discuss, there will surely be a lot to talk about given incidents like the massive Solarwinds hack, the Kaseya ransomware attack, or the Colonial Pipeline shutdown resulting from a cyberattack.

Apple,...

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The pandemic brought rampant growth for local food distribution platforms

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Late Thursday night, Tesla CEO Elon Musk added a new moonshot project to his ever-growing list: a humanoid robot, with a prototype by next year.

Announced at a presentation at Tesla's Fremont, California factory, Musk failed to offer a working robot or even a substantive presentation explaining how it would get there. Instead, a human dressed in a vaguely machine-like bodysuit appeared. They pantomimed a machine's movements before breaking into dance on stage. The not-a-robot danced like a 1920s flapper to Skrillex before Elon cut the music. 

In other words, it was a shitpost. 

"It's intended to be friendly, of course, and navigate through a world of humans, and eliminate dangerous, repetitive and boring tasks," Musk told attendees of the planned robot. The CEO also warned that the prototype “probably won’t work.”  Judging by Musk's previous promises and predictions, it might not exist at all.

In 2019, Musk promised we would have one million autonomous "robotaxis" driving around sometime in 2020. In 2016, Elon Musk promised that by 2018 you'd be able to summon an autonomous car "anywhere connected by land & not blocked by borders" such as summon an NYC car to LA. Obviously, none of that happened. 

There's Cybertruck, of course, which Musk promised could tow 14,000 pounds, was bulletproof, and would start being delivered in 2021. It hasn't yet been sold to the public and had its window shattered during a demonstration of its bulletproof glass. We can also look at the Boring Company, which made headlines by selling flamethrowers in the name of solving gridlock but has yet to produce more than colorfully-lit tunnels for cars to slowly drive through in single file. 

All of this raises the question of why we continue taking Musk's trollish pronouncements seriously, even as they get more and more far-fetched. Whatever the reason, be it his cult of personality or simply his immense wealth, Musk knows what he's doing. During proceedings in a court case defending Tesla's acquisition of SolarCity, Musk admitted that he pulls stunts like proclaiming himself "Technoking" of Tesla because memes are marketing.

“If we are entertaining, then people will write stories about us, and then we don’t have to spend money on advertising that would increase the price of our products,” Musk said. 

It's possible that a Tesla robot will one day exist in some form. After all, delivery robots that ferry around groceries and the like already exist, they just don't look like the humanoid sci-fi fever dream that Musk put on display and admitted might not work. 

A Poly study outlines how to identify and respond to personality types within your organisation to maximise productivity

LONDON, UK – August 18, 2021 – Poly (NYSE: POLY) has revealed six distinct personas, and the associated trends to baseline the workplace technology needs that businesses must be aware of and adapt to in the world getting fine-tuned by a continuum of regional nuances, the pandemic, and the new ways of work.

The six personas, which together make up 92% of a typical enterprise have distinct character traits. Through identifying the attributes, pain points, and communication intensity associated with each persona, businesses are better equipped to match workstyles and employee behaviours to devices and technologies, in turn increasing organisational productivity and meeting equality for workers collaborating from several different locations.

The six baseline personas, along with the product that would be most suited to each group based on their work style, needs, and behaviours, are:

OFFICE COLLABORATOR

Making up the largest proportion of the workforce at 27%, these workers have a traditional office-based work style that is highly collaborative in nature, and open to new technology. However, this brings with it background noise, and constant disruptions, and a need to seamlessly manage their communication across devices. The findings further predict a stark decline in this type of workplace persona in the future underpinned by the uptick in their desire to work more flexibly in the future.

Office Collaborators would best suit the Poly Savi 8200 Office wireless DECTTM headset, and Poly Studio P5 professional webcam.

FLEX WORKER

Splitting time between the corporate office, a home office and travel, 20% of the workforce is now a flexible worker who is always innovating, and adapting their communications channels due to their frequent remote and on-the-go work. They risk having difficulty collaborating with colleagues, and missing important information in the office so they need to be “always-on,” and communicate across several devices to minimise this risk. The size of this persona group will likely grow as Office Collaborators who want to work more flexibly adapt to work at home, in the office and elsewhere.

The Poly Voyager 6200 UC Bluetooth® neckband headset, and Poly Studio P5 professional webcam is going to help minimise the collaboration difficulties for those that are embracing this new era of flexible working.

REMOTE COLLABORATOR

With fewer opportunities for in-person meetings, the 15% of the workforce who are Remote Collaborators face challenges including successful and productive collaboration. They need multiple devices, unified communications, and technologies to bridge the gaps between them and their colleagues, co-workers and clients. This persona will grow, likely from Office Collaborators who choose to work remotely following the recent, worldwide test-and-experience phase of remote working driven primarily by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Utilising the Poly Voyager Focus UC stereo Bluetooth® headset, and Poly Studio P15 personal video bar will help them to retain effective communication channels with their colleagues in different locations.

OFFICE COMMUNICATOR

Office Communicators are most comfortable with familiar systems and devices such as a desk phone. They make up 13% of the workforce and it is important to acknowledge their challenges such as being diverted by interruptions, background noise and lack of privacy on calls. More traditional workstyles went through a change during the pandemic, and this persona group will be stable in the short term as this is a group anxious to return to the office.

The Poly Blackwire 8225 headset is the ideal solution for overcoming these challenges.

CONNECTED EXECUTIVE

These tech-savvy business drivers make up 12% of the typical workforce. They go wherever needed to make decisions and solve problems. Versatile in their work style, they use more communication tools than any other persona. Their pain points include diversions, interruptions and unpredictable background noise as they need to stay connected across all devices. Executives’ need to connect will continue to be persistent due to which there will be a negligible effect on this persona type in the future.

The Poly Voyager Focus UC stereo Bluetooth® headset, and Poly Studio P15 personal video bar is best suited to their needs.

ROAD WARRIOR

Accounting for 5% of the workforce, Road Warriors are always on the move working outside of the office more than 50% of the time. They need highly portable and easy to use solutions that eliminate noise and reduce the chance of unreliable connections. Some people will still need to travel at times to complete the business tasks that require in-person contributions. This group size will remain stable as those who were prevented from travelling during COVID-19 get back out to see customers and colleagues.

Their go-to product should be the Poly Voyager 5200 UC headset.

The remaining 8% of employees not covered by the six personas fall under the Office Independent type. This includes people operating in self-directed roles with limited communication and collaboration technology needs.

Jennifer Adams, senior sales experience and enablement director at Poly, explains: “We have been studying workplace personas for almost a decade, but never has it been as crucial as it is now to truly understand the personality types within your business and how to get the best out of them. Whilst this study was conducted during COVID-19, we believe that the behaviour shifts observed in the workplace will remain long-term. Identifying these and ensuring that everyone has the correct tools and devices to maximise efficiency and productivity is the key to a successful and efficient workforce both now and for years to come.”

Read more information on Poly Global Persona Research, by FactWorks 2021, here.

About Poly

Poly (NYSE: POLY) creates premium audio and video products so you can have your best meeting — anywhere, anytime, every time. Our headsets, video and audio-conferencing products, desk phones, analytics software and services are beautifully designed and engineered to connect people with incredible clarity. They’re pro-grade, easy to use and work seamlessly with all the best video and audio conferencing services. With Poly (Plantronics, Inc. – formerly Plantronics and Polycom), you’ll do more than just show up, you’ll stand out. For more information visit www.Poly.com.

The post Poly Baselines Six Workplace Personas And The Emerging Trends appeared first on Cloud Communications Alliance.

Google is adding an option to its Calendar service to let you show where you’re working on any given day of the week, the company has announced. The feature will start rolling out from August 30th for users on select Google Workspace plans, and will be accessible via Calendar’s settings menu alongside its existing working hours options, as well as on the weekly calendar view below where it shows each day’s dates. Available work locations include “Office,” “Home,” “Unspecified,” or “Somewhere else.”

According to Google, the option is being added so it’s “easier to plan in-person collaboration or set expectations in a hybrid workplace.” It follows a surge in the popularity of home and hybrid working due to the pandemic. This has meant...

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To be clear, wireless carrier app stores have always kind of sucked. Verizon's efforts to create its own app store were shut down in 2012, after underwhelming consumers for years. At the time, the narrative was that Verizon just didn't find it worth the trouble in the face of Google domination and innovation. And while that's still largely true (wireless carriers are utterly unfamiliar with competition and therefore historically suck at innovation and adaptation), it turns out there was another reason.

Namely, that Google was paying Verizon and other major wireless companies a big chunk of money to not compete with the Android marketplace. And they were paying smartphone manufacturers to ship devices without competing app stores installed. Both nuggets were buried in a freshly unredacted copy of Epic's antitrust complaint (pdf) against Google, first spotted by Jeremy Owens:

This agreement to start paying wireless carriers 20-25% of app sales was occurring right around the time that Google brass was visibly starting to wimp out on consumer-centric issues like net neutrality. That involved working closely with Verizon to push the FCC toward flimsy, loophole-filled, "compromise" 2010 net neutrality rules that excluded wireless entirely. Verizon proceeded to then successfully sue the FCC to have those repealed anyway, leading to better rules in 2015 that were also dismantled a few years, later, albeit thanks to lobbying, not the courtroom.

Google's shift from hugely innovative disruptor to entrenched, elbow-swinging turf protector has been a fairly ugly and historically unsurprising transition. You can clearly see the line in the sand somewhere around 2010 to throw away many of the guiding principles that made them successful and popular. There was another executive leadership pivot sometime around 2016 that brought with it increased timidity at the company (see: the company's abrupt decision to largely give up on expanding Google Fiber and many other exciting moonshot projects). Then, more recently there's the whole AI ethics scandals, which speaks for itself.

To be clear Google still does a lot of interesting and popular stuff, but it's pretty damn clear that the ethics and bravery that guided the company originally were obliterated some time back.

I have to think that revelations Google was paying wireless carriers and smartphone manufacturers to not compete with it will likely fuel several different antitrust inquiries and court cases. Maybe wireless carriers would have always failed to develop compelling app stores of their own thanks to innate incompetence, but it's harder than ever for that to happen when Google is paying you billions of dollars to not even try. And then, should those competing app stores succeed, paying handset makers not to carry them anyway, even if they happen to become popular.

As a little side note, the fact Google has been paying wireless carriers billions of dollars to do nothing kind of puts an additional dent in FCC Commissioner's ongoing, dumb claim that "big tech" gets a "free ride" on telecom networks. Getting paid to do nothing is the exact kind of thing AT&T has been pushing for since 2003 or so. It's the kind of stupid demand that started the net neutrality debate. Whether the payoffs violated the law is for antitrust lawyers to decide, but the fact Google repeatedly thought nothing about ignoring its original founding principles continues to speak pretty loudly either way.

Rain fell on the highest point of Greenland’s Ice Sheet, known as the Summit, for the first time in recorded history on Saturday. It was the latest anomaly in a series of heatwaves and melting events in the territory this summer that are linked to human-driven climate change.

Precipitation is not unusual at Greenland’s Summit, but it has taken the form of snow, not rain, since record-keeping began in 1950. But on August 14, it rained for several hours at the ice sheet’s zenith, which is located about 3,216 meters (10,551 feet) above sea level, according to the National Snow & Ice Data Center (NSIDC), a polar research center managed by the University of Colorado Boulder.

"There is no previous report of rainfall at this location,” according to the NSIDC. 

In addition to the unprecedented rainfall, air temperatures at the Summit remained above freezing for roughly nine hours last weekend, marking the latest recorded date in the year that conditions rose above the melting point. In addition to the rain that briefly fell at the Summit, clouds dropped an estimated seven billion tons of water precipitation across the ice sheet from August 14 to 16.

The warmer temperatures and rainfall triggered ice loss across the sheet, sparking a melting event that is seven times more voluminous than average at this point in August. This new period of ice loss comes just a few weeks after another major melting event in late July, that led to the loss of more than eight billion tons of meltwater in a single day—enough to cover the entire state of Florida with two inches of water.

Both anomalous melts were precipitated by heatwaves driven by low pressure centers over Baffin Island that pushed warm air and moisture north into Greenland, according to the NSIDC.

The Arctic is warming at least twice as fast as the rest of the world due to the climate crisis, which is caused by greenhouse gas emissions from the consumption of fossil fuels. Greenland is one of the most vulnerable and important regions affected by these anthropogenic changes. 

The Greenland Ice Sheet is melting faster than at any point over the past 12,000 years, which is both disrupting its local natural landscape and contributing to rising sea levels around the world. This accelerated ice loss from Greenland has already added about 0.4 inches to sea level rise since the 1990s, and could add anywhere from 3.1 to 10.6 inches more by 2100.