Frame.io takes the frequently time consuming process of reviewing edits and footage, and makes it asynchronous and on the web, Google Workspace-style. Editors, clients, and whoever else can use the company’s cloud-based software to store and view footage, and leave feedback on edits, just by sharing a link. Frame.io also offers integrations with popular video editing software like Adobe’s...
A screenshot of Facebook’s new Workrooms virtual reality remote collaboration product. | Facebook
The company is rolling out a virtual reality videoconference app as part of its “metaverse” future.
With no end to the Covid-19 pandemic in sight, it looks like many of us may be working home for even longer than we initially imagined.
Facebook is capitalizing on that with the release of its new virtual reality office meeting software, Horizon Workrooms. The idea is that you can interact with your colleagues remotely in a simulated, 3D conference room, complete with cartoon avatars, “spatial sound,” and hand motion tracking. Think of it like Zoom on steroids. For now, the software is free to use, and anyone can join by dialing in to video call — but to get the full experience, you’ll need one of Facebook’s Oculus 2 headsets. Facebook says the Oculus-powered version of Workrooms has already been used widely within the company for the past six months.
“Workrooms is our flagship collaboration experience that lets people come together to work in the same virtual room, regardless of physical distance,” the company said in a press release announcing the launch.
The new product is another sign that Facebook is investing heavily in its VR- and AR-filled “metaverse,” which CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently described as an “embodied internet” where people communicate through digital representations of themselves. Facebook recently created an executive team to build out the metaverse, and as of last March, nearly a fifth of the company was working on AR or VR, according to the Information.
Zuckerberg — along with many other leaders in tech — views AR and VR as the next frontier in computing, akin to the mobile phone.
But so far, the technology has only really taken off among gamers. So it makes sense that the company is building a product that aims to make the technology more useful for a mainstream audience. A spokesperson for Facebook noted that Zuckerberg himself has hosted meetings using Workrooms.
Facebook isn’t the first company to come up with the idea of VR-powered office meetings. Spatial, which Recode’s Adam Clark Estes wrote about last year, offers a lot of the same features as Workrooms, raising familiar questions about whether Facebook is copying some of its smaller competitors. And while early adopters may love the idea of using cutting-edge technology to make virtual office meetings less dull, it could be years before the average person uses VR for entertainment, let alone for work.
Still, Workrooms is trying to leverage an interesting new technology at just the right time. Many office workers are burned out after a year and a half of working from home and for a return to a more normal office setting — or the next best thing.
How Workrooms works
When you’re in a Horizon Workrooms meeting, the idea is that it should feel almost like you’re actually in the same physical space as the other people in the room.
Recode hasn’t yet tried out the product, but based on what we know from Facebook’s demo videos and product descriptions, participants are supposed to experience a kind of “mixed reality,” which combines aspects of the virtual world with the real one — for example, you can still type on your actual computer keyboard and have that register in the simulated meeting room. Once you’re in the meeting room, you can do all the things you’d do in a regular videoconference, but with some enhancements. For example, you can collaborate on a virtual whiteboard, which you can write on using hand gestures (which the Oculus headset tracks) or an Oculus handheld controller.
Everything is supposed to feel much more like the real world than in a traditional videoconference. You can project your notes onto a board in the front of the virtual room, and using a technology called “spatial sound,” you can hear people better when you tilt your head toward them.
While there’s a lot of promise for Facebook’s workrooms app, there are also significant hurdles.
Facebook’s biggest hurdle with Workrooms is a simple logistical one: Most people don’t have an Oculus Quest 2 headset. The cost of the $300 hardware will undoubtedly be a barrier for many potential users to access the full experience.
Aside from that, there are also potentially major privacy concerns about people giving Facebook more data. Facebook has said that it will not use the conversations you have in Workrooms to inform ads on Facebook, and that the technology will only process images of your home environment locally. But given the company’s controversial track record on protecting user privacy, it may be hard to convince people to let Facebook into their lives more than they already have.
Facebook has also struggled so far to get people invested in metaverse-ready products. Spaces, the company’s previous attempt at a virtual environment, was geared toward social conversations, but it never took off and is now defunct. Facebook has, however, seen some success with its messaging app for work, Workplace Messenger. And virtual reality technology has become much more accessible since then, with the price of headsets dropping from a price point of a few thousand dollars to a few hundred.
Facebook’s Workrooms app is a foundational step in the company’s grand “metaverse” vision. And whether or not people actually want to participate in this new world, Facebook’s CEO is extremely excited about it.
Facebook has launched a virtual and mixed reality collaboration platform for business.
Horizon Workrooms is a virtual meeting space that can be joined by VR or video call, where colleagues can collaborate via virtual whiteboards.
The VR component of the app is available in countries where the Oculus Quest 2 VR headset is supported.
Facebook said in a blog post: “Workrooms is our flagship collaboration experience that lets people come together to work in the same virtual room, regardless of physical distance.
“It works across both virtual reality and the web and is designed to improve your team’s ability to collaborate, communicate, and connect remotely, through the power of VR—whether that’s getting together to brainstorm or whiteboard an idea, work on a document, hear updates from your team, hang out and socialise, or simply have better conversations that flow more naturally”
The mixed reality components of the platform let users see and use their keyboard while in virtual meetings. A list of compatible keyboards can be found here, with more set to be added soon.
The Oculus Remote Desktop companion app also lets users bring files from their computer into the collaboration space.
Participants using VR in Workrooms will appear in a room with each other as customisable avatars, while spatial audio means users will hear their peers’ voices from where they are situated in the virtual space.
Attendees not using a VR headset will appear in a video tile, similarly to how they’d be shown in a standard video meeting.
The Oculus handset can be used as a pen to write notes, either by writing across the physical desk in front of users or at a virtual whiteboard. Whiteboards, notes and files are stored in the room for as long as they are needed.
Facebook stressed that none of the data recorded in Workrooms will be used to personalise ads on the main Facebook platform. Facebook and third-party apps will also not have access to any images recorded by the Oculus headset, and participants are not able to see each other’s screens unless a user has chosen to share it.
Workrooms supports up to 16 people in VR conferences and up to 50 for video and dial-in calls. It is currently in open beta.
LONDON – – Vonage (Nasdaq: VG), a global leader in cloud communications helping businesses accelerate their digital transformation, today announced that Key Travel has delivered an enhanced omnichannel experience for humanitarian and academic travelers worldwide with Vonage Contact Center for Salesforce.
Key Travel is the world’s largest travel management company specialising in the humanitarian, faith and academic sectors. With offices in the U.S., Europe, and Africa, Key Travel books flights, hotels and transportation all over the world. Customers can also use the company’s digital tools to book cost-effective and eco-friendly travel, and access 24/7 customer service through its new Global Travel Hub — powered by Vonage Contact Center.
“We need to ensure that we’re delivering the highest quality customer experience possible, so the selection of Vonage was absolutely a core part of our strategy,” said Daniel Morris, group IT director for Key Travel. “If we didn’t get our selection of a reliable omnichannel communications provider right, the rest of our strategy would have been seriously flawed. Failing our customers means people who save lives cannot get to where they need to go. Implementing Vonage Contact Center not only enabled us to provide a great customer experience, but also made a difference for our customers and the people they serve.”
Vonage Contact Center is a reliable and flexible omnichannel communications solution integrated with Salesforce, which Key Travel relies on to connect agents with customers around the world via phone, video, chat, and SMS. Calls can also be automatically routed to agents with the right expertise and who speak the same language as the caller.
“The range of communications channels that you need as a humanitarian travel provider is vast,” adds Morris. “You need to have the full multichannel capabilities, and the ability to deliver an omnichannel customer experience. No matter how the customer reaches you, the experience must be seamless and personalised across channels.”
As a cloud solution, agents can access the Vonage Contact Center from anywhere and it can be easily scaled in line with the company’s needs. This provides the technology necessary to boost Key Travel’s response to an increase in demand. During COVID-19, the company was able to transition more than 600 contact centre agents worldwide into remote workers without missing a single customer call.
“Communication is key in any business, but it’s particularly important for a humanitarian travel agency like Key Travel,” said Rodolpho Cardenuto, President, Applications Group for Vonage, “Customers need to be able to connect with an agent quickly if something goes wrong or their plans change. Because Key Travel’s customers travel globally, and their agents and supervisors work globally, the organisation needed a contact centre solution that works from anywhere.”
Read the full case study to find out more about how Key Travel is using the Vonage Contact Center.
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.
Microsoft’s upcoming release of Windows 11 will make it even harder to switch default browsers and ignores browser defaults in new areas of the operating system. While Microsoft is making many positive changes to the Windows 11 UI, the default apps experience is a step back and browser competitors like Mozilla, Opera, and Vivaldi are concerned.
In Windows 11, Microsoft has changed the way you set default apps. Like Windows 10, there’s a prompt that appears when you install a new browser and open a web link for the first time. It’s the only opportunity to easily switch browsers, though. Unless you tick “always use this app,” the default will never be changed. It’s incredibly easy to forget to toggle the “always use this app” option, or...
No-code platforms have developed into a hot market, and Stacker, a London-based no-code platform, is attempting to bring the concept to a new level. Not only can you create a web application from a spreadsheet, you can pull data from a variety of sources to create a sophisticated business application automatically (although some tweaking may be required).
Today the company announced a $20 million Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from existing investors Initialized Capital, Y Combinator and Pentech. Today’s investment brings the total raised to $23 million, according to Crunchbase data.
Michael Skelly, CEO and co-founder at Stacker, says that the idea is to take key business data and turn it into a useful app to help someone do their job more efficiently. “[We enable] people in business to create apps to help them in their working life — so things like customer portals, internal tools and things that take the data they’re already using, often to run a process, and turn that into an app,” Skelly explained.
“We really think that in order to actually be useful for business, you need to be hooked into the data that a business cares about. And so we let people bring their spreadsheets, SQL databases, Salesforce data, bring all the data that they use to run their business, and automatically turn it into an app,” he said.
Once the company pulls that data in and creates an app, the user can begin to tweak how things look, but Stacker gives them a big head start toward creating something usable from the get-go, Skelly said.
Jennifer Li, a partner at lead investor Andreessen Horowitz, likes the startup’s approach to no-code. “We’ve been watching the no-code space for a while, and Stacker stands apart from the rest because of its thoughtful product approach, allowing business operators to instantly generate a functional app that perfectly fits existing business processes,” she said in a blog post announcing the funding round.
The company currently has 19 employees, with plans to put the new capital to work to reach 30-40 by the end of the year. Skelly sees building a diverse company as a key goal and is proactive and thoughtful about finding ways to achieve that. In fact, he has identified three ways to approach diversity.
“Firstly is just making sure that we get a diverse pipeline of people. I really think that the ratio of the people you talk to is probably going to be the biggest indicator of the people you hire. Secondly we try to find ways we can hire people who are maybe further down their career profile, but [looking] to grow,” he said.
Thirdly, and I think this is something that is not talked about enough, there are plenty of people who would like to get into programming roles, and who are underrepresented, and so we have members of our team who are converting from various non-technical roles to DevOps — and I think it’s just like a really great route to add to the overall pool [of diverse candidates],” he said.
The company is remote-first, with Skelly in London and his co-founder Sam Davyson based in Geneva, and they intend to stay that way. They founded the company in 2017 and originally created a different product that was much more complex and required a lot of hand holding before eventually concluding that making it simple was the way to go. They released the first version of the current product at the end of 2019.
The company has a big vision to be the software development tool for business units. “We really think that in the future just like everyone’s got email, a chat tool, a spreadsheet and a video conferencing tool nowadays, they will also have a software tool where they write and run the custom software that they run their business on,” he said.
A card with an EMV chip and contactless, but not magnetic stripe. | Image: Mastercard
Mastercard is phasing out the use of magnetic stripes on its credit and debit cards over the next decade, as the industry moves towards more secure or convenient alternatives like chips and contactless payments, the company has announced. It says it will be the first payments network to phase out the technology, which dates back to the 1960s.
Mastercard says the transition will start in 2024, when the stripe will no longer be required on new cards in regions like Europe where chip cards are already widely used. In the US, where the adoption of chip payments has been slower, the transition will start in 2027. From 2029, no new Mastercard debit or credit cards will come with a magnetic stripe, and they’ll be gone completely by 2033.
Roughly a third of large international companies have faced a ransomware attack or other data break in the last 12 months, according to a new survey by the International Data Corporation, a market intelligence company.
Analysts surveyed almost 800 companies and found that companies based in the U.S. experienced ransomware attacks at a much lower rate (7 percent) than international companies (37 percent) this past year. The survey focused on companies with more than 500 employees.
“Ransomware has become the enemy of the day,” IDC’s vice president of cybersecurity products Frank Dickson said in a press release. Dickson described this recent rise in attacks as the “dark side” of digital transformation.
Sensitive and confidential data was only exfiltrated from 18 percent of the companies surveyed. In most cases, hackers accessed data that was public or not considered valuable, the company found.
Of those surveyed by the IDC, only 13 percent reported not paying a ransom in order to restore their operations. The study also found that the average ransom payment was nearly $250,000, with some outliers reaching well over $1 million.
Paying the ransom doesn’t necessarily guarantee that a company’s systems won’t experience another attack. If anything, it might highlight key weaknesses in its operations to other attackers. Cybersecurity company Cybereason recently reported that 80 percent of ransomware victims who paid ransoms experienced another attack soon after. The IDC’s survey showed that some companies experienced as many as three to 10 attacks in the past 12 months.
Companies are often forced to shut down their operations following a ransomware attack, possibly costing them more than the ransom the hackers are requesting. A third of the companies said their business operations were disrupted for at least a week following an attack, but recent research from Coveware shows that following an attack, organizations' systems are down for an average of 21 days.
Tech companies are not the only ones suffering the brunt of these attacks. Hospitals, universities and local governments have also become recent victims. Just last year, the University of California at San Francisco paid attackers nearly $1.14 million in Bitcoin after hackers gained access to data that the school says was important to its academic research.
“As the greed of cyber miscreants has been fed, ransomware has evolved in sophistication, moving laterally, elevating privileges, actively evading detection,” Dickson said.
These attacks also have global implications. REvil’s attack on Kaseya this past year impacted only 50 of the company’s clients, but really affected the 800-1,500 businesses that their clients serviced around the world.
The study found that organizations that invested long term in cybersecurity and digital transformations were less likely to experience ransomware attacks. Ransomware attacks are only becoming more multifaceted and expensive for companies to deal with so cybersecurity needs to be more prioritized.
Mitel has named Daren Finney as its first-ever senior vice president of global channel sales. The company has also added new leaders in Cloud Operations, Channel Sales, Service Delivery and Market Intelligence.
One of the dominant reasons cited by bosses for workers to return to the office is the importance of "water cooler moments."
The narrative goes, that if workers, especially younger ones, are absent from the office they miss out on the chance for serendipitous, informal conversations with colleagues and therefore the opportunity to bond and learn from senior colleagues. Creativity and company culture also take a hit.
However, not only are water-cooler moments completely possible to recreate virtually, but interns who engage in them with managers "significantly" improve their chances of getting a full-time job at the end, according to the results of one recent study.
Harvard Business School academics Iavor Bojinov, Prithwiraj Choudhury, and Jacqueline Lane wanted to understand the impact that virtual informal interactions on an intern's career prospects.
They studied one cohort of 1,370 new summer interns starting at an unspecified global corporation of 30,000 staff.
The internship was adapted as a result of the pandemic to be virtual and shortened to five weeks. Interns were based across 16 different locations.
The researchers observed three types of interaction between interns and colleagues.
In one situation, interns regularly jumped into informal Zoom meetings with colleagues and managers - sometimes they proactively instigated these water cooler conversations on their own initiative.
Another situation consisted of asynchronous question-and-answer sessions where senior managers publicly answered written questions submitted by interns.
The final situation involved group project meetings between interns without managers present.
The main measure of performance outcomes was whether the interns received a job offer following the five-week course. The researchers also collected ratings from managers and self-reported performance reviews from colleagues.
The key finding? Interns who had more face-to-face Zoom time with managers were 4.7% to 7.3% more likely to receive a job offer at the end of the five-week internship.
"The survey measures suggest that the virtual water coolers may have facilitated information and advice sharing, which possibly enabled the interns to improve their job performance and career outcomes," wrote the researchers.
The working paper, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, offers weight to the idea that it's possible to bond with colleagues and create cohesive corporate cultures while working remotely, but there are some limitations.
The study gave no indication of how relations are impacted over a longer time period, only five weeks.
It also only focused on interactions within a context where everyone was remote.
Given a significant number of firms are planning to pursue a hybrid way of working in the future, how this would affect an intern's career path needs further understanding.
The findings also reveal some potentially problematic consequences about the nature of remote and hybrid work.
The study found interns were more likely to receive a job offer if they were demographically similar in terms of race and gender to the manager they were interacting with - by a variation of between 9% to 13%.
The researchers don't provide a breakdown of the demographics, but this could be problematic given women and Black and other minority backgrounds are often underrepresented at manager level.
In addition, parents or those with caring responsibilities - which statistically are more likely to be women - could also be at a disadvantage, as the evidence that the chances of receiving a job offer could be tipped in the favour of those who are able to be available spontaneously, or can dedicate more time to bonding with colleagues.
"I would definitely advocate proactive facilitation," Karin Reed, an executive coach and the author of "Suddenly Virtual" told Insider. "It does really require the leader of the meeting to be very conscious of who has spoken and who might have something to add."
In an interview with Bloomberg's Tracy Alloway and Joe Weisenthal, Rob Kaplan, the president of the Dallas Federal Reserve, broke down some of the factors that could be contributing to the current tightness in the labor market. And no, it's not just enhanced federal unemployment benefits.
"I've felt for some time, and I've said this publicly, that the unemployment benefits were only one piece of the larger puzzle," Kaplan told Bloomberg.
Indeed, preliminary research has found that cutting off benefits early didn't get people to rush back to work - and an analysis from Homebase suggested that employment was actually growing faster in states that kept the benefits.
So what are the other pieces of the "puzzle" keeping workers back? Kaplan laid out three points.
Retirement
Kaplan cites the number of workers retiring as one big factor in the current crunch. The Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City found that the number of people retiring rose by 3.6 million from February 2020 to June 2021 - a 1.3% increase, far higher than the prior decade's average annual increase of 0.3%.
Interestingly, the increase is driven by retirees who are not returning to the labor force, even though The Kansas City Fed says that many are still young enough to return to work. However, fears of the virus stand in the way. It could take over two years to "fully unwind" the increased number of retirees.
And Kaplan said that "this aging issue, which has been with us for years, is going to stay with us for the foreseeable future."
Caregiving
Caregiving has emerged as another reason workers aren't returning, as schools and childcare centers alike shuttered for in-person instruction. Kaplan said that approximately a million and a half caregivers have left the workforce; an analysis from the Federal Reserve Board of Governors found that labor force nonparticipation associated with caregiving went up by 0.7% from January and February 2020 to April and May 2021.
Experts are mixed on what the start of school will mean for the parents who dropped out, especially mothers. But Kaplan said that he's hopeful "expanded childcare, in-person school, that will help get a chunk of the caregivers back into the workforce."
But the Delta variant is already jeopardizing the start of the school year: As Insider's Connor Perrett reports, a whole Georgia school district had to shut down a little less than two weeks into the school year following an outbreak.
Fear of the virus
The school closures illustrate one important point: Workers are still very concerned about the ongoing - and more infectious - pandemic. The Delta variant has already made a dent on the economy, and how Americans perceive it.
When it comes to the variant, Kaplan said that "we will not see a step backward in the economy, but we might not see the progress we were hoping to see." He added: "I think it's going to delay the matching process between businesses who were trying to hire workers and workers stepping into the economy."
One thing that might get workers back quicker: Higher vaccination rates. The White House has said that job growth was up because of vaccination rates, not unemployment benefits - something that an analysis by economist Luke Pardue at payroll platform Gusto also found to be true.
Walmart is looking to hire a new senior director to develop new digital currency products, possibly including cryptocurrency payments, according to a listing on the company’s job site (via Bloomberg). The move mirrors a similar interest shown by Walmart’s sworn enemy Amazon, which wants to hire someone to head up cryptocurrency products.
The new Walmart senior director position will serve as the company’s “Cryptocurrency and Digital Currency Product Lead,” in charge of “developing the digital currency strategy and product roadmap.” Among other responsibilities, the listing says this new role will also be focused on “identify[ing] crypto related investment and partnerships,” suggesting Walmart might buy its way into preexisting...
Some workers use remote jobs to juggle multiple employers | Photo by Fabian Strauch/picture alliance via Getty Images
For journalists and others in creative and technical fields, having a side hustle or doing freelance work is extremely common. In addition to a day job an editor, for example, one may write paid-per-piece articles for other publications who aren’t competitors of her primary employer, and typically (ideally) with her employer’s explicit or tacit approval. Some people do so for the needed additional income, some like the work.
And according to a story in The Wall Street Journal, a new website provides tips for tech workers who want to earn two full-time paychecks while working remotely, giving half-assed effort to one (or both) and without letting either employer know about the other. The WSJ describes the scenario:
NEC Enterprise Solutions has made two new cloud-based UC packages available in the UK for customers who have deployed Microsoft Teams.
UNIVERGE BLUE “WITH” Microsoft Teams and UNIVERGE BLUE “FOR” Microsoft Teams allow customers to choose between integrating the UNIVERGE BLUE CONNECT UCaaS solution with the Teams application or using a Teams-specific version of CONNECT to work alongside Teams.
“These two packages come fully integrated with NEC’s recently introduced comprehensive, cloud-based unified communications solution, UNIVERGE BLUE CONNECT,” says NEC UK & Ireland Sales Director, Andrew Cooper.
“They combine the best of both solutions by enabling customers to use Microsoft Teams for collaboration and NEC UNIVERGE BLUE CONNECT for business-grade, cloud-based phone system features, such as contact centre, and advanced call routing”
UNIVERGE BLUE CONNECT “FOR” Microsoft Teams integrates PBX functionality into a Teams application and is most suited for customers who want to make all calls through Teams, without the need for features, such as call centre.
UNIVERGE BLUE CONNECT “WITH” Microsoft Teams adds all advanced features of an enterprise PBX, including contact centre, to a Teams environment, while still using the platform for collaboration, chat, meetings, and file management.
Ram Menghani, President of Product Development for NEC Enterprise Communications Technologies, stated:
“Microsoft Teams saw a tremendous uptick in user adoption in 2020 and succeeding months. Knowing that many of our customers use Microsoft Teams, developing a solution that complements Microsoft Teams was a natural next step for our UNIVERGE BLUE CONNECT platform”
“By combining the strengths of UNIVERGE BLUE and Microsoft Teams, our customers get the best of both products with industry-leading cloud-based collaboration, contact centre, and telephony capabilities.”
"If Bitcoin were to catch up to Ethereum's performance this year, the No. 1 crypto's price would approach $100,000," believes Mike McGlone, senior commodity str...
Here are the top 25 companies on this year’s Fast Growth 150 list, which ranks solution providers with gross annual sales of at least $1 million by their two-year growth rate.
If you recall, economists repeatedly warned the $26 billion Sprint/T-Mobile merger would kill jobs, harm competition, and ultimately raise prices for consumers. To "fix" the problem, the Trump DOJ and FCC concocted an elaborate and cumbersome plan to create a replacement fourth wireless carrier out of Dish Network, despite the company's lack of experience in the sector and history of empty promises. So far none of this is going particularly well, with 5,000 and counting lost jobs, Dish and T-Mobile clearly unable to get along, and Dish... the cornerstone of the entire plan... continuing to bleed both TV and wireless subscribers.
Of all the pay TV providers dealing with "cord cutting," Dish has indisputably been hit the hardest, losing another 67,000 pay TV subscribers last quarter. It technically added 65,000 Sling TV streaming video subscribers, but it wasn't enough to offset the 132,000 customers that cancelled Dish's traditional satellite TV service. With absolutely no plans to build new satellites and users shifting increasingly to streaming, Dish knows satellite TV is a dead end.
That's where the company's wireless business is supposed to come in.
As part of the DOJ/FCC deal, Dish obtained billions in spectrum and the Boost prepaid mobile brand from Sprint. The idea is that Dish is supposed to operate a Mobile Virtual Network Operator (MVNO) as it builds out its own, full 5G wireless network.
But, there too, things aren't going particularly well. Dish lost 201,000 Boost subscribers in the last quarter. And while it added 200,000 subscribers last March by buying a small wireless company named Republic Wireless, a research note by Wall Street analyst Craig Moffett indicates the overall trajectory isn't a great one:
"Their Q2 loss of 201K wireless subscribers (about 2.3% of their Q1-ending subscriber base, or almost exactly the size of Republic Wireless) means that they have now organically lost 9.7% of their subscribers in their first year of ownership."
The Trump DOJ and FCC "fix" for the Sprint T-Mobile merger was always a bit dodgy. It was hand-crafted by a DOJ "antitrust enforcer" in Makan Delrahim who was completely disinterested in data showing the deal should be blocked. Delrahim was far more interested in working as a glorified life coach for Sprint, T-Mobile, and Dish executives looking for regulatory approval. The deal itself always felt like flimsy theatrical cover to justify rubber stamping the Sprint T-Mobile deal, instead of a real fix for any genuine problems.
Now the whole mess is in the lap of the Biden DOJ, who this week sent a letter to Dish urging Dish and T-Mobile to start getting along. The DOJ is particularly concerned about the fact that T-Mobile's shutdown of its 3G CDMA network could leave millions of Boost mobile customers stranded January 1. Dish says the shutdown was earlier than promised, violating merger guidelines. T-Mobile says Dish is simply being too cheap to give Boost users discounted 4G or 5G phones. Either way, the DOJ isn't impressed:
"After careful consideration of the Parties’ submissions and arguments, the Division is left with grave concerns about the potential for a nationwide CDMA shutdown to leave a substantial proportion of Boost’s customers without service. While it cannot reach any conclusions today regarding events that have not yet transpired, the Division believes that the Final Judgment may be violated by one or both Parties if the network shutdown strands a substantial proportion of Boost customers, particularly if either or both Parties have not taken all appropriate steps to affirmatively alleviate any such harms in the leadup to implementing the network shutdown. If that situation manifests—and we sincerely hope that it does not—the Division may act pursuant to its authority under the Final Judgment or seek relief from the Court against one or both Defendants."
But again, the real problem is this deal was always a stupid, unworkable mess from the get go. Numerous experts noted so, and they were all ignored. Largely because the deal provided useful if flimsy cover for merger approval, which is all that really mattered.
To make any of this work Dish, a company with no real experience in the sector it's trying to disrupt, needs to remain financially viable as it attempts to meet guidelines attached to its deal with the DOJ and FCC (providing wireless to 70% of the country by 2025). But Dish is a company with a long history of empty promises in wireless (just ask T-Mobile circa 2018), run by a guy (Charlie Ergen) people traditionally say is hard to work both for and with, purportedly building a new wireless network whose details remain hard to come by.
l still tend to think it seems entirely possible Dish strings feckless U.S. regulators along for years then, once the six year restriction on selling its spectrum expires, cashes out, hoovers up billions of dollars, then throws a relative pittance at any remaining legal or regulatory penalties. The U.S. wireless sector gets even more consolidated, and all the folks who pushed this dodgy fix for a bad deal (that should have been rejected outright) simply forget any of this ever happened.
In July, catastrophic flash floods ripped through northwest Europe, leaving at least 199 dead. | Thomas Lohnes/Getty Images
“There’s no going back” — and there’s no room for wishful thinking, top climate scientists say.
How much has humanity already changed the climate? And how much worse will it get?
The answers now are sharper than ever, according to an international team of scientists. In a new report, they say that far more aggressive action is needed to limit catastrophic climate change, and that time is running out.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the United Nations’ climate science research group, concluded in a major report that it is “unequivocal” that humans have warmed the skies, waters, and lands, and that “widespread and rapid changes” have already occurred in every inhabited region across the globe. Many of these changes are irreversible within our lifetimes.
This is the first report of its kind in eight years, and a lot has changed. Scientists have backed away from many of the best-case scenarios. They’re more confident than ever that human-caused climate change is already worsening deadly weather events, from flooding to heat waves. And they’re investigating culprits of climate change that warm the planet even more than carbon dioxide.
The report warns that the world is likely to overshoot 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming compared to pre-industrial temperatures — one of the goalposts of the Paris climate agreement — within the next 20 or 30 years, even under scenarios where greenhouse gas emissions fall significantly. It’s a stark warning for the 195countries meeting later this year in Glasgow, Scotland, to come up with more ambitious goals for fighting climate change — although many of those countries are not on track to meet even their previous targets.
“This report tells us that recent changes in the climate are widespread, rapid, and intensifying, unprecedented in thousands of years,” Ko Barrett, vice chair of the IPCC and senior adviser for climate at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said in a press conference. Climate change “is already affecting every region on earth in multiple ways,” Barrett said. “There’s no going back from some changes in the climate system.”
This first installment of the latest report, known as the Sixth Assessment Report (AR6), goes over the physical sciences of climate change, examining what’s fueling planetary warming in the atmosphere, oceans, and on land. It covers the body of research that’s emerged over the eight years since the previous report. Subsequent chapters due out over the coming months will look at economic and environmental vulnerabilities to climate change, as well as the options for mitigating warming.
The goal of these reports is to compile the best available science and create a solid foundation for decision-makers to act, whether that’s to invest in clean energy, relocate people from high-risk areas, or help the most vulnerable places cope with unavoidable impacts. IPCC reports are considered to be the definitive assessments of the science behind climate change. Past IPCC reports have been cited in coastal construction plans, drought risk estimates, and even lawsuits.
While researchers have better answers now on some fronts, they are also blunt about the things they still don’t know, which could have huge effects on the livability of the planet. Certain tipping points, feedbacks, and currently unappreciated mechanisms could further tilt the climate out of balance in ways that are hard to predict.
Josh Edelson/AFP/Getty Images
The Dixie fire in northern California has burned more than 190,000 acres as of July 26.
Climate science has advanced rapidly, but climate action has not
With the AR6 report, the IPCC is building on assessments in recent years that tackled specific issues, such as the shrinking window in which the world could keep future warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius. The IPCC also studied climate change impacts on oceans and frozen regions and the strain on the world’s food and water supplies from rising temperatures.
These reports helped ignite a global movement, most notably among young people, demanding that world leaders do more to uphold their commitments under the Paris agreement before time runs out.
But in the eight years since the last comprehensive IPCC report and the six years since the Paris accords, humanity’s output of heat-trapping gases has only grown. Even with a dip in emissions stemming from the Covid-19 pandemic, carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere reached a record high this year, topping 419 parts per million, a level the planet has not seen for at least 2 million years.
This rise in emissions has given scientists unprecedented opportunities to study climate change in real time. Alongside improvements in computer simulations, measurement technology, laboratory experiments, and historical records, scientists have gained far more insight to, and confidence in, humanity’s role in cranking up the planet’s thermostat.
In general, IPCC reports don’t contain much in the way of new revelations, since they are compiled from existing research: AR6 is based on research published before January 31, 2021, and draws on 14,000 researcharticles. But paper by paper, these reports illustrate how confident scientists are in the mechanisms behind climate change and show how their understanding has changed.
Here are some of the most notable sections of the new report:
Scientists are even more confident that climate change worsens extreme weather
“What’s new in this report is that we can now attribute many more changes at the global and regional level to human influence and better project future changes we will see from different amounts of emissions,” said Barrett.
The world has already warmed 1.1 degrees Celsius since the dawn of the industrial revolution. It’s clear that humanity’s gargantuan output of greenhouse gases — currently about 2.6 million pounds of carbon dioxide per second — is the culprit. Without the combustion of fossil fuels, the planet would very likely be much cooler.
IPCC
The warming observed since the industrial revolution across the planet is unprecedented in its pace and scale, and would be almost impossible without human intervention.
This deceptively small shift in average temperatures increases the likelihood and severity of extreme events and is already worsening disasters around the world. Now scientists can tease out just how much human emissions of greenhouse gases is making them worse.
This is due to advances in an area of climate science called attribution that have led to a better understanding of the climate before industrialization, as well as models of a hypothetical world without human intervention. “Evidence of observed changes in extremes such as heatwaves, heavy precipitation, droughts, and tropical cyclones, and, in particular, their attribution to human influence, has strengthened since [the previous IPCC report],” according to the report.
With these methods, scientists can establish just how much burning fossil fuels has increased the likelihood of extreme events like heat waves. The report says it’s “virtually certain” that extreme heat events have increased in frequency and intensity because of humans. Researchers can also measure how much worse coastal flooding has become due to rising sea levels stemming from warming.
Climate change is global, but the effects are local
With improved measurements and modeling, scientists have been able to zoom in on parts of the planet and gain a better sense of how climate change will play out. While the world is warming on average, specific locations have been hit with especially stark changes. AR6 includes an interactive atlas showing some of these effects around the world.
For instance, some warming regions are projected to dry out, while others are poised to get wetter. In some instances, both can happen in the same place — the averages may not shift much, but the extremes may grow, leading to periods of drought followed by deluge. This weather whiplash wasn’t appreciated as much until recently and is yet another signal of how humans are changing the climate.
“This whiplash — this increase in both the extreme wet and dry events — are projected to increase over the 21st century,” said Kim Cobb, lead author of the first chapter of AR6 and director of the Global Change Program at Georgia Tech, during a press conference.
And as temperatures continue to rise, these extremes “will worsen within each increment of additional warming,” said Cobb. However, with more specific and local information about the impacts of climate change, IPCC authors hope that the report will be more useful for making decisions about planning for and mitigating warming.
Carbon dioxide is not the only villain
Scientists have long understood that carbon dioxide — the gas that spews from chimneys, tailpipes, and smokestacks — plays the biggest role in global warming and will continue to influence the climate for hundreds of years. But the report says that other greenhouse gases are a growing cause for concern.
Methane in particular can trap even more heat than carbon in the near term, over the span of 20 years, and countries that have focused on carbon emissions may be less prepared to control it. Scientists know methane pollution is at its highest level in 800,000 years because of human activities like agriculture and oil and gas production, and that other greenhouse gases like nitrogen dioxide are also rising.
The upside is that because these gases are so potent at trapping heat, reducing their emissions has outsized benefits for mitigating climate change.
There’s no more room for wishful thinking
There are two broad variables that shape climate forecasts: what humans will do, and what the planet will do in response.
As scientists resolve the physics of climate change, they can better project how the planet will respond to a given concentration of greenhouse gases. This response is known as equilibrium climate sensitivity, which estimates what would happen if carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere doubled compared to pre-industrial levels, reaching around 560 ppm.
This year’s AR6 report found that a doubling of CO2 concentrations would warm the planet by about 3°C, with a likely range between 2.5°C and 4°C. The last big IPCC report, in 2013, gave a range of 1.5 to 4.5°C of warming.
As for humanity’s actions, the IPCC has established five scenarios for human greenhouse gas emissions, known as shared socioeconomic pathways (SSPs). Even in the best-case scenario for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, IPCC authors expect that warming will continue until at least the middle of the century. Among the five scenarios, scientists expect the world to surpass the Paris agreement’s 1.5°C warming target in all of them, but in the “very low emissions” SSP, the planet’s temperature is expected to eventually fall below this threshold before the end of the century.
IPCC
Only two emissions scenarios will keep warming this century below 2 degrees Celsius, and only one stays below 1.5 degrees Celsius.
Some of the most dire forecasts of warming appear to be less likely in this recent report, but so do many of the more favorable outcomes. According to the report, it now seems impossible that the world will get lucky and warming will somehow stay within the Paris agreement targets without massive action to limit emissions, starting right away.
The new IPCC report raises several new mysteries of climate change
We know humans are dangerously warming the planet through human activities like burning fossil fuels and clearing lands for agriculture and urban development. The models have gotten more accurate in recent years, but there are still unanswered questions.
Where is all that methane coming from?
Methane is rising, but exactly what are the causes? Scientists generally know that methane comes from a mix of natural sources, like wetlands and melting permafrost, and human sources, like oil and gas, agriculture, and landfills. The report doesn’t name which of the human sources are the biggest culprit, and it doesn’t look very closely at feedback loops, which in a warming world will generate even more of this damaging gas. And the world still doesn’t monitor the oil and gas industry closely enough to identify and plug the leakiest oil and gas facilities.
Will clouds help heat up the planet or cool it off?
One of the largest sources of uncertainty in climate models is clouds, as Vox’s podcast Unexplainable has explored. These puffs of moisture in the atmosphere are complicated, difficult to predict, and can have wildly different impacts depending on specific conditions in a given spot in the sky. Clouds change the distribution of rainfall over the planet, but they can influence temperatures too. Low-altitude clouds tend to bounce sunlight back into space and have a net cooling effect, while clouds at high altitudes trap heat by absorbing and re-emitting infrared radiation. Exactly which clouds form and where they occur as temperatures rise will have huge implications for how climate change plays out on the ground.
Are there any tipping points?
One of the most worrisome potential consequences of climate science is crossing tipping points at which humans trigger irreversible, catastrophic impacts that accelerate the global changes. The report considers these events to have a low likelihood of happening this century, but they are frightening to consider.
For example, thawing permafrost could release huge quantities of carbon dioxide and methane, which further enhance warming without human intervention. Warming could also reach a point where critical ocean circulation patterns stall, leading to global changes in rainfall and sea levels. Changes in the climate could also cause critical ecosystems like tropical rainforests to enter a cycle of collapse.
If one of these potential thresholds is breached, then the damaging effects of warming will continue even if every country drastically curbs greenhouse gas emissions.
What will humans actually end up doing?
The biggest unanswered question about the future remains the same: What will humanity do to mitigate climate change? “The main issues are what are the people on our planet going to choose as future directions for energy, transportation, and land use, the primary drivers of the changing climate,” said Donald Wuebbles, a professor of atmospheric science at the University of Illinois and an author of the previous IPCC report, in an email.
David Paul Morris/Bloomberg/Getty Images
An abandoned pomegranate orchard seen in Firebaugh, California, on July 13. Drought and heat waves are straining the state’s power grid as officials ask residents to decrease their water and electricity consumption.
It all comes down to what people do with this information
The IPCC’s process for generating these reports is tedious, requiring every word to be approved by representatives from 195 countries. AR6 generated more than 70,000 comments. So the framing of the results tends to be limited by the consensus.
That the group has reached such stark conclusions shows that humanity has already done significant damage to the climate, and even more dire consequences are ahead without drastic, worldwide action. IPCC authors insist that this report is not meant to prescribe specific tactics or targets for dealing with climate change, but given the projections of disaster and dislocation, anyone who reads the report will be hard-pressed to come away with anything other than a sense of urgency.
“It does provide a very compelling case for more aggressive actions,” Jane Lubchenco, the White House’s deputy director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, said in an interview.
For leaders, the report could serve as an important justification for doing more to mitigate climate change. The next big test of this will be at the November 26 Conference of Parties (COP26) meeting, where the signatories to the Paris agreement are expected to raise their ambitions for mitigating climate change.
“The IPCC report underscores the overwhelming urgency of this moment,” said John Kerry, the US special envoy for climate, in a statement. “We can get to the low carbon economy we urgently need, but time is not on our side. This is the critical decade for action, and COP26 in Glasgow must be a turning point in this crisis.”
For climate activists, this report is a stark reminder that the world is doing nowhere near enough to meet its current climate goals — let alone stepping up to actually keep warming in check.
The upcoming chapters of AR6 will go into more practical questions of what tactics will actually be meaningful for limiting warming, but this first chapter focusing on the science leaves no room for wishful thinking. Avoiding the worst consequences of climate change demands far more drastic and urgent action to cut greenhouse gas emissions right away, according to Maisa Rojas Corradi, an IPCC author and director of the Center for Climate and Resilience Research at the University of Chile.
“Is it still possible to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees? The answer is yes, but unless there are immediate, rapid and large-scale reductions of all greenhouse gases, limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees will be beyond reach,” she said.
We've noted more times than I can count how in the modern era, you no longer really own the things you buy. Thanks to internet connectivity, hardware you own can be bricked or downgraded to the point where you lose essential features. Or, just as often, obnoxious DRM means you have to jump through all kinds of bizarre hoops to actually use the thing you thought you owned, whether that's Keurig using DRM to prevent you from using competing coffee pods, to printer manufacturers using DRM to keep you from buying cheaper cartridges.
Now Home Depot is experimenting further with DRM at the point of sale. The company has started embedding chips in many of the major tool brands it sells (DeWalt, Milwaukee). And unless the tool is enabled by a Bluetooth-based system at the register, it simply won't work when you take it home:
"Home Depot says their new anti-theft strategy is now being used in several stores nationwide to combat the thefts of their most popular power tools. A chip is inserted into power tools of major brands like DeWalt and Milwaukee brand tools, similar to how gift cards need to be scanned and paid for at a store to activate. Once the tools are paid for, the store will use Bluetooth technology to activate the tool."
Yes, what could possibly go wrong. What if the system is buggy and doesn't work? What if you then try to contact a manufacturer or retailer that no longer exists or supports the device and systems in question? Too bad.
The company tells Business Insider the program isn't focused on individual shoplifting, but wholesale efforts by organized crime to steal power tools in bulk. But given the sophistication of organized crime, and the overall vulnerability of Bluetooth tech, the risk here is not insubstantial that criminals find a way to circumnavigate this technology rendering it useless:
Just what nobody asked for: DRM but for power tools. I wonder how long it will take for someone to bypass it. pic.twitter.com/RpnxOzl3KY
Then you're simply left with an additional layer of cumbersome technical restrictions that potentially risk making tool purchase and ownership more of a hassle. People act as if they'd never read Cory Doctorow.
New trucks sit next to a race track at the Kentucky Speedway as Ford waits for more semiconductor shipments to arrive. | Jeffrey Scott Dean/Bloomberg via Getty Images
The semiconductor supply crunch came for cars and phones. Now consumers are facing higher prices.
Starting next week, General Motors is again halting the assembly lines of several pickup truck plants because the company doesn’t have enough computer chips. The plants had been back up and running for just a week following a shutdown in July, which was also caused by the chip shortage.
These production halts may not stop anytime soon. “I do think we’ll continue to see impact this year, and it will have a tail into next year,” warned CEO Mary Barra on Wednesday. And Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger similarly predicted last month that things won’t get back to normal for at least a year or two.
Now, the impact of the supply crunch is spreading to consumer tech. Apple CEO Tim Cook warned last week that a limited supply of semiconductors would hurt sales of iPhones. Microsoft is struggling to make enoughXbox consoles and Surface laptops. Elon Musk told a court last month that the chip shortage meant Tesla would only be able to manufacture about half as many Powerwall home batteries as it thinks it can sell. One San Francisco sex toy company even stockpiled microcontrollers to fend off future supply chain problems.
It’s clear that the global chip shortage shows no sign of abating anytime soon. In fact, it seems to be getting worse. While the White House is racing to expand chip manufacturing in the US to avoid future shortages, it could be years before that government investment actually pays off for consumers. So for now, the chip industry will continue to be hampered by the fallout from the Covid-19 pandemic, as products ship with missing features and higher prices — often after long delays.
“The administration is saying, ‘Well, this is temporary,’” Willy Shih, a management practice professor at Harvard Business School, told Recode. “People are spending a lot of money to expedite things, and somebody’s going to have to pay for it.”
In an effort to measure the scope of the chip shortage, Recode reached out to nearly 30 companies that use, design,andmake chips, including General Motors, Qualcomm, and Hewlett-Packard. All of the companies that responded said they were affected by the shortage.
The electronics maker Toshiba told Recode it’s stuck paying higher prices for components while Toyota said the company’s supply chain issues continue to affect production at its North American facilities. BSH, which makes Bosch appliances, said some products have lead times as long as six months.
While companies are adapting in their own ways, most didn’t anticipate a resolution anytime soon. Instead, companies see the chip shortage as an industry-wide problem that could go unresolved untilat leastnext year and quite possibly into 2023.
The chip shortage is still wreaking havoc on auto production
Almost every major automaker has been affected by the chip shortage. Last month, Ford Motors announced that its second-quarter profits had fallen by 50 percent, more than half a billion dollars, largely due to the lack of semiconductors. Stellantis, the Dutch automotive conglomerate, stalled production of its Jeep Gladiator pickup in July because the company couldn’t secure enough chips. And Subaru’s chief financial officer, Katsuyuki Mizuma, recently said that, thanks to the chip shortage, the company has just seven days worth of inventory on hand, compared to the 45-day supply of cars the automaker normally has.
These supply chain woes began in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, when lockdowns worldwide shuttered manufacturing plants, disrupting the supply of semiconductors while simultaneously driving a surge in demand for devices like laptops and gaming consoles. Sensing an economic slowdown, many car companies jumped off the line for chips. Semiconductors can take up to six months to make, so when automakers canceled their orders, consumer tech companies were able to swoop in and buy those chips. When car demand returned and automakers needed semiconductors again, there weren’t enough to go around.
Car buyers are now feeling the consequences of the difficult-to-predict pandemic in the form of vehicles missing features, higher prices, and a scarcity of options. GM has sold some of its newest pickups and SUVs without advanced gas management systems or wireless charging features. Renault stopped installing the large screens that sit behind the wheel of its Arkana SUV models, while Nissan left navigation systems out of thousands of cars.
Tesla even turned to rewriting its vehicles’ code so that the company could make use of the chips it did have at its disposal. But even that hasn’t completely spared the company from the shortage’s impact. CEO Elon Musk told investors in July that the company was finding it particularly difficult to secure chips needed for its airbags and seatbelts, essential features for a car.
All of these problems combined are affecting price tags, too. Some 13 percent of people buying a car in April paid above sticker price, compared to 8 percent in 2020, one analyst told The Verge. In fact, the chip shortage has now gotten so dire that it’s not just fueling high prices for new cars, but higher prices for older vehicles, too. This means consumers looking to buy a new car have three limited choices, Consumer Reports wrote in July: “Look at models you weren’t previously considering, hold off on buying, or fix your old car if it’s in rough shape.”
There’s no quick fix to the semiconductor shortage
Demand for chips is still incredibly high, and there’s no reason to expect a sudden surplus of semiconductors to arrive in the next few weeks. Right now, there are only a small number of chipmakers across the globe, and much of the world’s supply of semiconductors come from a single company based in Taiwan: TSMC.
Chipmakers are already producing chips at their maximum capacity, according to Falan Yinug of the Semiconductor Industry Association, a trade and lobbying group that represents the chip industry. “Chip production has, in fact, increased substantially, and more chips have shipped in recent months than ever before,” Yinung told Recode.
Again, making a single chip takes an incredibly long time. At the same time, building more chip manufacturing plants, sometimes called fabs, requires years of engineering and construction and billions of dollars.
The White House is still trying to offer some short-term relief. Biden administration officials have already brokered negotiations between semiconductor makers and car companies, helping push more chips back into the hands of automakers. That’s made the auto giants happy while frustrating others. Medical device makers, who use chips for everything from patient monitoring systems to assistive robots for surgery, urged Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo to avoid “prioritizing one industry over another.”
The Commerce Department recently concluded a 100-day review of the US semiconductor supply chain, which the White House said resulted in collaboration with the chip industry and a task force to identify potential disruptions in the supply chain. The agency is also pushing for a $52 billion program to incentivize more chip manufacturing in the US, a plan that will need congressional approval.
“It’s not like you can just build a plant in 30 days. It takes roughly about 2.5 years,” Patrick Penfield, a supply chain management professor at Syracuse University, told Recode. “We’ve got Intel. We’ve got a couple of smaller fab manufacturers, but it’s gonna take time — and I think there needs to be more of an investment.”
The shortage has come for consumer tech
Although they scooped up the chips that automakers abandoned earlier in the pandemic, consumer tech companies are now running out of semiconductors as well. This is causing the price of laptops and TVs to rise and delays in orders for smartphones and gaming consoles.
The market research firm Strategy Analytics estimated that, on average, the global wholesale price for phones grew 5 percent between April and June. Laptop, TV, and accessory prices have also spiked.One investment research firm told the Wall Street Journal that HP alone had raised the price of printers by more than 20 percent over the course of a year. At least one phone maker, China-based electronics company Xiaomi, delayed the shipment of a new device model in India. Sony also warned customers in May that there won’t be a large supply of the PlayStation 5 until at least 2022.
Though the latest devices often tout their highly advanced chips, they also need simple semiconductors, too. And right now, it’s these basic chips that are in the shortest supply. This category of components includes “commodity chips that do these mundane things like display drivers or timers or microcontrollers or power management chips,” Shih, the Harvard professor, told Recode.
In announcing how chip shortages would impact iPhones, Tim Cook told analysts that it was “legacy nodes” — simpler chips that can be manufactured using older techniques — that were hindering production.Whirlpool similarly struggled with the sparsity of microcontrollers, which are also relatively uncomplicated chips, in manufacturing its washing machines, microwaves, and refrigerators.
As the chip shortage has hit consumer tech, chip designers and makers have promised to boost supplies and manufacturing capacity. A spokesperson for Qualcomm, which makes chip processors for devices like smartphones, told Recode that the company is making a lot of adjustments and said that it ”continue[s] to see strong demand in every single business outpacing supply.”
Intel told Recode that the company boosted its central processing unit by double digits compared to last year, bolstered by the high demand for new electronics. It is also expanding its manufacturing capacity, and in March, the company announced that it would invest $20 billion to build two new chip-making fabs in Arizona. Still, Intel says the high demand for semiconductors is a challenge, and that the shortage could stretch into 2023.
As the chip shortage continues to rattle car and laptop makers, consumers are all but certain to feel the consequences, possibly in price hikes as high as 10 to 15 percent, Penfield, the supply chain expert at Syracuse, told Recode. So for now, whether you’re hoping to snag a pickup truck or a laptop for back-to-(virtual)-school shopping, it’s best to buy as early as possible. As Penfield warns: “It’s going to be a difficult holiday season.”
A scientist-led research cruise has found that the Gulf of Mexico’s “dead zone” is now measuring at 6,334 square miles, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced on Tuesday, which is roughly the size of Connecticut. This is approximately four million acres of habitat that is unusable for underwater species.
The “dead zone” describes an area of bottom water in the Louisiana coast that is hypoxic, or low-oxygen, which renders the area uninhabitable for wildlife. Hypoxia occurs there when excess nutrients from surrounding cities and areas drain into the Gulf and stimulate algae growth during the spring and summer. When the algae dies, it sinks to the bottom of the Gulf and is decayed by oxygen-consuming bacteria. This process results in low oxygen levels in the bottom water.
The investigation was led by researchers from the Louisiana State University and the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium, with support from NOAA. The scientists also found that surface waters in the area were low in salinity due to freshwater runoff from the Mississippi River. This, combined with warm surface waters, reduces the rate at which surface water oxygen can diffuse to the bottom layer. Winds from the south also maintained the surface water’s low salinity.
These conditions can alter the diets, reproduction and growth rates of fish. Researchers also warned that hypoxic waters can also affect the availability of harvestable shrimp which could impact local economies.
According to a press release from the researchers, wind speed and direction as well as hurricane conditions will continue to impact the area’s hypoxia.
“This year, we have seen again and again the profound effect that climate change has on our communities—from historic drought in the west to flooding events. Climate is directly linked to water, including the flow of nutrient pollution into the Gulf of Mexico,” Radhika Fox, assistant administrator for water at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, said in a press release from the NOAA. “As we work to address the Gulf of Mexico hypoxic zone, we must consider climate change and we must strengthen our collaboration and partnerships to make needed progress.”
Scientists have measured the area annually since 1985 on research cruises funded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Their annual measurements of the area help track progress towards their 2035 goal of 1,900 square miles or smaller. This year’s measurement is on the higher end of recent years’ findings.
Efforts are being made to alleviate these conditions in the Gulf by groups such as the Hypoxia Task Force, which works with federal partners, states, and farmers to reduce excess nutrients in the area. Other federal efforts such as the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Mississippi River Basin Healthy Watersheds Initiative will further support conservation investments by agricultural workers in the area.
“The efforts need to continue and intensify as we face many societal and environmental knowns and unknowns in both the watershed and in offshore waters,” the researchers’ press release reads. “We, as citizens of the watershed, need to lessen our consumption of nitrogen-based products and reduce other activities that contribute reactive-Nitrogen to the environment.”
A type of marine algae in Florida has killed hundreds of tons of fish this summer. Here, dead fish float in the Boca Ciega Bay in Madeira Beach, Florida. | Octavio Jones/Getty Images
A toxic “red tide” is killing fish, displacing sharks, and going viral on TikTok. Is it getting worse?
This story is part of Down to Earth, a Vox reporting initiative on the science, politics, and economics of the biodiversity crisis.
The scenes from western Florida are hard to stomach: fish carcasses dotting beaches for miles, a backhoe lifting a 400-pound goliath grouper out of the water, hundreds of sharks swimming through neighborhoods, and hordes of maggots wriggling along the shore.
In the past three weeks, more than 1,700 tons of dead fish and other marine organisms and debris have washed ashore along beaches near Tampa Bay. They were killed by an overgrowth of toxic algae, known as red tide, that came inland earlier this summer.
While algal blooms are a natural phenomenon in southwest Florida — and across much of the world — they’re typically not this severe. The algae have not only killed untoldthousands of fish and more than a dozen manatees but also sickened some beachgoers, who can experience respiratory issues when the toxins become airborne.
Now scientists are racing to determine what makes a year particularly bad for red tides — and whether they’re becoming more common. The last major red tide was just three years ago, when then-Gov. Rick Scott declared a state of emergency, as Vox’s Brian Resnick previously reported. The state’s current governor, Ron DeSantis, has rebuffed calls from environmental groups to declare a state of emergency for this year’s red tide.
Red tides in Florida result from a complicated set of variables, from ocean currents to weather patterns, researchers have learned. And while these events are not necessarily becoming more common, as you might expect, climate change is making them much harder to forecast — and Florida’s booming population is making them far more visible.
Octavio Jones/Getty Images
Thousands of dead fish killed by red tide in Boca Ciega Bay in Madeira Beach, Florida.
How a microscopic creature can kill so many fish
Dead fish, ruined vacations, and other consequences of Florida’s red tide can be tied to just one tiny species: Karenia brevis. It’s a type of marine algae, or phytoplankton, native to the Gulf of Mexico.
While they don’t always make national news, blooms of K. brevis typically occur every year. Starting in late summer, a deep-water current in the Gulf tends to move east toward Florida, causing an upwelling of nutrients like phosphorous and nitrogen that feed the algae and push them toward the coast, where they find other sources of nutrients.
Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission
Karenia brevis, a type of marine algae responsible for Florida red tides.
Normally, the blooms — which can be a rusty red in hue — last for only a few months and impact a relatively small area. But on occasion, they grow uncontrollably and start wreaking havoc on marine ecosystems. That’s because K. brevis produces brevetoxin, an odorless neurotoxin that can be fatal to fish and other marine animals.
While scientists aren’t sure why the algae make toxins, one interesting theory is that it’s to kill fish by design. Rotting fish essentially fertilize the water, which in turn creates more algae. “The toxins have to have a purpose, and it might be killing fish to get the nutrients,” said Cynthia Heil, director of the Red Tide Institute at Florida’s Mote Marine Laboratory & Aquarium. “This little one-cell plant may actually be farming.”
In large numbers, these microscopic organisms also pose a threat to human health. Waves can break open the algae cells and release the toxin into the air. Inhaling it can cause respiratory issues and feel like “you’re starting to get a cold,” Heil said. Studieshave linked severe red tides with a rise in hospital visits, especially among older adults.
Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission
Where red tide is found in Florida, as of late July. The red dots show areas with high concentrations of Karenia brevis, the algae that cause red tide.
Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission
The red tide bloom off the coast of northern Pinellas County, Florida.
Why this year’s red tide has been so bad
Although K. brevis is well-studied, it’s still not clear why it explodes in some years. Each major red tide event seems to have its own unique equation, experts say.
This year, southerly winds helped keep the bloom close to shore, where it could feed off pollution spilling into the water. Meanwhile, months of drought ahead of Hurricane Elsa likely made estuaries around Tampa Bay saltier, allowing the marine algae to move farther inshore. Plus, more than 200 million gallons of wastewater from an abandoned phosphate mine known as Piney Point was pumped into Tampa Bay last spring.
“There was this huge pulse of nutrients into the bay,” Heil said. While it didn’t outright cause the bloom, it may have made it worse, she added. “It’s been a very odd year.”
Ultimately, the red tide killed more than 1,700 tons of sea life in Pinellas County, which hugs Tampa Bay, and that number could continue to grow. The bloom is also implicated in the death of 17 manatees in June and July, according to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC).
Floridians also reported seeing hundreds of live sharks evading the red tide by swimming into human-made canals and waterways in the Tampa region. “You literally could have walked across the canal on the backs of sharks — that’s how many there were,” Janelle Branower, a resident of Longboat Key, told Allyson Henning, a reporter with a local NBC news channel.
The toxic bloom is now beginning to dissipate, and hundreds of government workers have been working to clean up mountains of dead fish. (In Pinellas County, dead fish can be burned along with other trash to produce electricity, a county official told Vox.) But it’s only a matter of time before the next severe bloom strikes, experts say.
Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission
Researchers measure a dead goliath grouper that washed ashore at St. Pete Beach, Florida.
Red tides aren’t becoming more common in Florida
A cursory glance at state data showing the number of red tides over time suggests that these events are becoming more common in Florida. That’s in line with a handful of media reports that indicate climate change is fueling harmful algal blooms.
But that frightening conclusion isn’tquite right, experts say. “I don’t think we’re in a position to say with any certainty that the frequency of the events has been increasing,” said Thomas Frazer, a professor in the college of marine science at the University of South Florida. A recently published review of the evidence came to the same conclusion for Florida’s red tides: “no significant trend over time is evident,” the review reads.
So why do harmful blooms appear to be increasing?
For one, scientists have ramped up sampling efforts over time, Frazer said. The more you sample, the more likely you’ll beableto detect a toxic algae bloom. Florida has also seen a massive influx of residents in the past decade, so there are simplymore people affected by red tides. “Each new bloom is undoubtedly the worst for many residents, regardless of trends,” Heil said. Plus, social media platforms like TikTok have brought a new level of attention to algal blooms. (Several top recent red tide videos on TikTok have tens of thousands of views.)
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A dumpster for sea life killed by the red tide in St. Petersburg, Florida.
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Dead fish killed by red tide piled up on beaches in the Tampa Bay region.
“You should not underestimate that there is a very strong human behavior factor involved,” said Gustaaf Hallegraeff, a professor emeritus at the University of Tasmania who’s been studying harmful algal blooms for decades. “The more people there are on the coast, the more blooms they see.”
Hallegraeff points out that records of red tides date back hundreds of years, and fish kills have been documented since at least the mid-1800s. The worst bloom in history — which spread from Sarasota down to the Florida Keys — was likely in 1947 and killed an estimated half a billion fish.
Climate change is making blooms unpredictable, but forecasts are improving
There’s some reassuring news in this history, Hallegraeff says. For one thing, “it’s not a new phenomenon. It’s always been there.” Other parts of the world are dealing with new outbreaks of harmful invasive species, he said, and thisisn’t one of those.
Still, red tides could get more severe or longer-lasting, he said, as coastal houses and factories contribute to algae-fueling pollution. (There’s not great data showing whether the severity or duration of blooms is increasing, and it’s still a matter of debate among scientists.)
“Red tides are naturally occurring, but we have the capacity to make them worse,” Frazer said. “Increased nutrient delivery is a global problem and arguably the largest problem affecting water quality around the globe.” Nutrient-rich runoff is also fueling a massive “dead zone” farther east in the Gulf of Mexico, which is also caused by algal growth.
Climate change is certain to have some effect, experts say. Rising temperatures can alter ocean currents, raise sea levels, heat the water, and increase the frequency and intensity of droughts and hurricanes. Meanwhile, carbon dioxide affects the acidity of water and the growth rate of photosynthetic organisms like algae. All these variables will likely impact red tide. “Climate change makes algal blooms less predictable,” Hallegraeff said. “That’s the real impact.”
It’s a good thing, then, that researchers are getting better at forecasting blooms. The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission can process hundreds of water samples a week, with the help of a sampling robot that measures levels of K. brevis and whether they’re growing.
“The more we know about the ecology of the organism, the better we are able to model it under different conditions,” said Kate Hubbard, director of the Center for Red Tide Research at FWC. Researchers are also experimenting with tools that can fight the blooms directly, from clay (which is used to fight blooms in China) to brewer’s spent grain (a common byproduct in making beer).
In the meantime, the National Centers for Coastal Ocean Science runs a respiratory forecast for red tide in beaches in western Florida, which is updated every three hours. “It’s really helpful to have these new forecasting tools and models that try to predict where it’s good to go, given that there’s an ongoing bloom,” Hubbard said. “It can change over the course of the day, or over the course of a few days — it’s a dynamic organism.”
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