"Stay-at-home" stocks including Zoom and Peloton tumbled on Monday after Moderna revealed its COVID-19 vaccine was almost 95% effective in a late-stage trial.
Fastly, Chegg, and other stocks that have at least partly benefited from the pandemic also retreated.
In contrast, airlines, cruise lines, manufacturers, and other "real economy" stocks jumped as investors wagered the vaccine would allow economies to reopen in a matter of months.
Zoom, Peloton, and other "stay-at-home" stocks slumped on Monday as positive vaccine news dampened their growth prospects.
Moderna's announcement that its COVID-19 vaccine proved 94.5% effective in a late-stage trial helped to drive Zoom shares down as much as 7%, and Peloton down as much as 5%.
Netflix, Pinterest, Fastly, Chegg, and other companies that have benefited from people spending more time at home during the pandemic also retreated.
Many of those stocks tumbled last week after Pfizer announced its vaccine was more than 90% effective. Now, the prospect of two or more working vaccines promises to accelerate their distribution around the world and speed up a full reopening of the global economy.
As a result, cruise lines, airlines, and other companies that rely on people leaving their homes saw their shares jump in pre-market trading.
The "big four" US airline stocks rose more than 3%. Cruise operators Carnival, Norwegian, and Royal Caribbean gained at least 7%. Boeing, Ford, General Electric, and other "real economy" stocks also climbed.
We've long mentioned how incumbent ISPs like AT&T and Comcast have spent millions of dollars quite literally buying shitty, protectionist laws in around twenty states that either ban or heavily hamstring towns and cities from building their own broadband networks. In some cases these laws ban municipalities from even engaging in public/private partnerships. It's a scenario where ISPs get to have their cake and eat it too; they often refuse to upgrade their networks in under-served areas (particularly true among telcos offering DSL), but also get to write shitty laws preventing these under-served towns from doing anything about it.
This dance of dysfunction has been particularly interesting in Colorado, however. While lobbyists for Comcast and CenturyLink managed to convince state leaders to pass such a law (SB 152) in 2005, the legislation contains a provision that lets individual Colorado towns and cities ignore the measure with a simple referendum. With frustration mounting over sub-standard broadband and awful customer service, more than 100 towns and cities have done so thus far. And that was before a pandemic highlighted the urgent importance of broadband for public safety.
The trend continued this month, when the vast majority of Colorado voters (82%) voted to opt out of the state law restricting community broadband. According to the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, several other communities voted along the same lines, and more than 140 Colorado communities have done the same in the fifteen years since the Colorado law was passed:
"Two other Colorado communities – Berthoud and Englewood – also voted in favor of similar ballot questions, asking voters if they want to opt out of SB 152. In Berthoud, 77.3% of voters cast ballots in support of the question. In Englewood, the opt-out question passed with 79.4% of voters in favor, which will allow the city to provide Wi-Fi service in city facilities.
In the 15 years since SB 152 was passed 140 Colorado communities have opted out with resultant networks like Longmont’s NextLight as an example of a municipal Fiber-to-the-Home (FTTH) success story."
While incumbent ISPs (and the regulators and lawmakers paid to love them) routinely claim community broadband is some kind of inevitable taxpayer boondoggle or nefarious affront to free speech, that's simply never been true. Such efforts are an organic response to market failure and the lack of competition in countless markets across the United States. And data has repeatedly indicated that such projects tend to offer faster speeds and better customer service at lower, more transparent prices than incumbent cable and phone giants.
Such networks aren't some kind of magic panacea, but they can often drive apathetic monopolies toward actually giving a damn, resulting in upgrades that wouldn't materialize otherwise. And despite many nonsensical political narratives about community broadband being "socialism run amok," such networks have broad bipartisan public support, and are most frequently built in Conservative areas.
Despite a lot of whining among entrenched incumbents and their army of policy voices, there's a pretty easy way to thwart such projects: start offering better, faster, cheaper broadband service. But because that's not profitable enough, quickly enough for Wall Street, the sector instead spends its time buying lawmakers and anti-competitive laws. In Colorado's case, Centurylink and other backers of SB 152 likely rue the day they included an opt-out clause.
Google is adding a new option to let users opt out of having their Gmail, Chat, and Meet data used to offer smart features like Smart Compose and Smart Reply, the company announced today. Although you’ve previously been able to toggle these individual features on and off, the new toggle disables the background data processing that makes them possible. Google says the new option will roll out “in the coming weeks.”
According to images posted on Google’s blog, Gmail users will be shown two dialog boxes showing the data processing. The first concerns smart features offered within Gmail, including automatic email filtering / categorizations, Smart Compose, summary cards shown above emails, and extracting event details to create calendar...
A man wearing a mask crosses a road with the US flag behind him in New York City on May 29, 2020. | Alexi Rosenfeld/Getty Images
The US is losing the fight against Covid-19. The only way to win quickly is closing down.
The past few six months have been an American experiment with Covid-19: Can the country keep bars, restaurants, gyms, and other businesses open while fighting the virus with milder measures, including some social distancing and widespread masking?
Six months after spring shutdowns ended, the answer is clear: The milder approach isn’t working.
The US surpassed 100,000 daily new coronavirus cases on November 4, and it’s gone on to regularly break new records for coronavirus cases since then — with the most recent high exceeding 180,000 on Friday. Hospitalizations have skyrocketed to their highest level of the pandemic, leaving a growing number of hospitals around the US, from Arizona and Texas to Ohio and Tennessee, nearing or at capacity. And deaths are climbing: now above 1,000 a day once again, with a growing likelihood that the country will surpass 2,000 or even 3,000 a day in the coming weeks and months — on top of the more than 246,000 Covid-19 deaths that America has seen so far.
Unlike the spring outbreak, the current disaster isn’t isolated to the New York City area and a few other states. It’s truly national: Every state now has more than 4 daily new coronavirus cases per 100,000 people, the standard for having Covid-19 under control. And some states now breach 100 daily new cases per 100,000 — which was unthinkable months ago. That’ll make it much harder to respond to outbreaks, as states dealing with their own crises won’t be able to, as they did in the spring and summer, send reinforcements of doctors and nurses to support other places.
“This is the worst we’ve seen it,” Saskia Popescu, an infectious disease epidemiologist, told me.
The coronavirus’s explosive growth has occurred before Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s are set to bring friends and family together in large gatherings that could turn into super-spreading events. It’s also largely before colder weather in most of the US pushes people into poorly ventilated indoor spaces where the virus has an easier time spreading. The country is hitting records before experts believe Covid-19 cases stand to shoot up even further.
With the milder measures failing us, it’s clear what needs to happen: To avert possibly hundreds of thousands of deaths in the months before a vaccine becomes widely available, the US needs to close down once again. That means temporarily shuttering in-person, indoor services at nonessential businesses, particularly bars and restaurants; restricting larger gatherings, including in private homes; and encouraging, or outright mandating, people to stay home as much as possible — only going out for food, work, exercise, health care, and other basics needs — and limit their social interactions to their own households.
Some places are already taking steps in this direction, like New Mexico, Oregon, Chicago, and El Paso, Texas. But for this to work, it has to be much more widespread — so it becomes more likely the entire country can stop the spread.
This doesn’t mean locking down in the same way many places did in the spring. Since then, we’ve learned a lot about what works and doesn’t, and can apply those lessons accordingly — keeping outdoor spaces like parks open, for example.
It also shouldn’t mean simply abandoning individuals and businesses hurt by closing down. In the spring, Congress passed economic aid for workers and businesses to ease the suffering that a lockdown involved. Experts widely agree that, if closing down is necessary again, Congress should make similar moves — from boosting unemployment insurance to offering financial aid, even a bailout, to the businesses most affected. This wouldn’t just ease people’s economic suffering, but make closing down more bearable and, as a result, more sustainable.
No one wants this to be true. I don’t want this to be true. The experts I spoke to were divided on whether such aggressive restrictions are necessary. Jen Kates, director of global health and HIV policy at the Kaiser Family Foundation, echoed others who argued the US could still do a much better job with testing, tracing, and masking. “I think there are other ways to accomplish this without having to go [to a lockdown],” Kates said.
But we’ve now seen again and again what happens when countries try to keep indoor businesses in particular open as cases remain elevated or go up. Unlike many countries in Europe, Asia, and Oceania, the US never truly suppressed cases, outside of a handful of states, largely because it moved to reopen so quickly. That’s left the country in a vulnerable position as we barrel to what may be the worst Covid-19 outbreak the country will ever see.
Time is running out. With the coronavirus, the infections that are happening right now take weeks to show up in hospitals or morgues. That means that the horrifying numbers we see right now are actually signals from the past, like data that took time to reach our eyes. The present reality is likely much worse, and we’ll see it in record hospitalizations and deaths in the coming weeks. That makes the problem all the more urgent, forcing us to race to avert an even worse future than we might have expected.
The flipside is the finish line for this pandemic has never been clearer. This month, we saw reports that we really might have a highly effective vaccine coming soon. Mass distribution is still likely months away — possibly until the spring of 2021 or later — but, finally, we have some idea of how and when this all might end.
First, though, the US has to get through a fall and winter that could be the worst of Covid-19. Closing down again increasingly seems like the best way to ensure more of us make it through that finish line.
Closing down can stop the spread
In March through May, much of America, under federal guidance to do so, locked down. That led both cities and states to impose variations of stay-at-home orders, which closed down public locations and businesses — except those deemed “essential,” such as grocery stores and pharmacies. People were advised or mandated to stay home, not socialize with people in other households, and avoid large gatherings.
It worked. A Health Affairsstudy found government-imposed social distancing measures reduced the growth rate of coronavirus cases, particularly the longer measures remained in place. A study in The Lancet produced similar results. A study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention of Delaware found its lockdown, paired with contact tracing and a mask mandate, contributed to 80-plus percent drops in coronavirus cases, hospitalizations, and deaths by the summer.
A more pessimistic working paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that, while lockdowns reduced Covid-19 cases, their effect might have been limited because people were already voluntarily staying home at the time. But that still means the concept of people social distancing and limiting their interactions is still effective. (That differs from the situation today, where increasingly fewer people are voluntarily distancing.)
Lockdowns have also clearly worked in places that have seen resurgences of Covid-19. In September, Israel suffered what was the worst Covid-19 outbreak in the world at the time. The country first tried milder, more targeted measures — and after they failed, imposed a lockdown. And despite some public opposition, it worked to massively reduce cases from October to this month.
Notably, more European countries, including France, Germany, and the UK, have also closed down again in recent weeks after trying milder measures, which failed to stop massive spikes in cases over the past couple of months. The European efforts have already seen some success, with cases starting to drop or at least grow more slowly with the new restrictions in place.
There’s a historical example that applies to the US, too: During the 1918 flu pandemic, many places shut down certain indoor venues and large gatherings to constrain the disease. Deaths plummeted. When the measures were lifted, deaths increased again, and only came down once the measures were reimposed.
Take the experience of St. Louis: In this chart, the dotted lines represent excess flu deaths and the black and gray bars show when social distancing measures were in place. The peak came after the measures were lifted, and the death rate fell only after they were reinstated.
America, right now, is essentially in that in-between space. The vast majority of states have reopened, at least partially, or are reopening right now, even as cases continue to increase. Most states, even those hit very hard in the spring like New York, now let people gather in indoor spaces, such as restaurants, bars, and places of worship, in which the coronavirus can spread easily due to poor ventilation and close contact with others.
As states have reopened, officials across the country have argued other measures, like physical distancing, masking, and aggressive testing and tracing, can keep coronavirus cases down.
It’s true all these measures work to reduce coronavirus cases, based on a growing body of research and real-world evidence. But these approaches don’t seem to be working as well as many hoped.
Part of it is an adherence problem, in which people simply aren’t social distancing and masking. In some states, an increase in larger gatherings, such as house parties, has led to more Covid-19 cases. Rates of masking in public can drop below 75 or even 70 percent in some states, and the real rates are likely lower since people may not be honest with survey takers about their mask use. Fifteen states still don’t have mask mandates at all.
There’s also some natural tension between reopening and measures like social distancing and masking. People who work in retail and other service industries, for example, may not always be able to social distance from people, or avoid interacting with people who aren’t wearing masks — issues that these workers may have little control over if they want to keep their jobs. In some settings, masking and social distancing are in practice impossible, like in restaurants and bars where people are often cramped for hours and have to take off masks to eat or drink.
The other problem is the milder approaches don’t seem to work well enough when cases are already high or rising. Consider contact tracing: The idea is “disease detectives” can contact people who are positive for the coronavirus to get them to isolate, find out their close contacts, and get those close contacts to quarantine. But that is simply much harder when there are more than 100,000 new cases a day — it requires much more staff, time, and resources. Even the best teams may not be able to keep up with exponential spread.
Crystal Watson, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, estimated that contact tracing becomes difficult at 10 daily new cases per 100,000 people. The US is now at more than four times that, and some states are past 10 or even 15 times that threshold.
New York has a lot of testing, a contact tracing program, a mask mandate, and strongly recommends social distancing. But it’s still seen its cases spiral as it’s reopened more and more. Since the state allowed indoor dining to reopen in New York City in September, with parts of the state reopening before that, cases have spiked from a weekly average of 800 a day to more than 4,400. Indoor dining doesn’t explain the whole increase, but it’s reflective of a wider reopening that measures like masking simply haven’t been able to keep up with.
All of that suggests that social distancing, masking, testing, and tracing can keep cases low, at least for a time. But to get Covid-19 cases down, the country simply needs to close down.
We need to do more than close down
Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, recalled a recent conversation with a Democratic governor about controlling the coronavirus. When Jha suggested closing down indoor dining, the governor immediately responded: “What else do you have?” The recommendation wasn’t even worth considering.
“This is where states are,” Jha said. “I just don’t see any political appetite for a lockdown.”
If anything, the country is by and large moving in the opposite direction. Many people are preparing to celebrate Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s with family and friends — after celebrating other holidays, like Labor Day and Halloween, in large gatherings. There are reports of people refusing to get tested so they don’t have to call off work if they test positive. States are, again, continuing to reopen or letting places stay open, including risky indoor spaces like bars and restaurants. The federal government has even allowed cruise ships to start up again, after they became big hotspots for the coronavirus in the spring.
Adherence to existing mandates and guidelines, meanwhile, is spotty. Some experts argued: If we can’t get people to mask up, can we really get them to close down? “I could describe it as a fantasy,” Kumi Smith, an epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota, told me. “I don’t know what political and cultural stars would have to align for, really, Americans everywhere to appreciate the gravity of the situation and make a lot of personal sacrifices.”
But this could also be flipped into an argument for another stay-at-home order: If people aren’t going to voluntarily social distance and make sacrifices, the government could try to force their hand.
The effects of the lockdown were also unequal. While wealthier people in office jobs could largely transition to working from home, lower-income workers either lost their jobs as their employers shut down or were effectively forced to work in “essential” workplaces. A Naturestudy, looking at cellphone data, found that mobility during the spring lockdown dropped significantly more in higher-income communities than in their lower-income counterparts.
“It just doesn’t feel equitable to me,” Stefan Baral, a physician epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University, told me. “There’s a tremendous number of interventions we could be doing to break transmission chains and to support people and empower them” — without, he argued, closing down and all the negative consequences that could produce.
But many of these problems could be mitigated with more action by Congress. Just like the CARES Act made the spring lockdown more bearable for many, more economic aid could in the coming months, too.
Experts have many ideas for how this could work. Some of that could simply mean a repeat or extension of the CARES Act, like the unemployment benefits that have expired or are set to expire at the end of the year. Another round of stimulus, including paychecks to Americans, could make potentially losing sources of income more tolerable. Businesses that are forced to close, such as bars and restaurants, and their employees could be made whole with a bailout or another form of financial aid. If people lose health insurance as they lose jobs, Congress could boost support for safety net programs like Medicaid or COBRA.
Many of these programs could help or even explicitly target lower-income communities to ease economic disparities, too.
This is not only important for the economy and people’s financial well-being, but for slowing the spread of the coronavirus as well. People are more likely to follow orders or guidance to stay home and not reopen businesses if they can actually afford it — and the country needs people adhering to rules and recommendations for any of this to work.
And closing down again doesn’t have to mean a full-on lockdown like many countries did in the spring. Since then, we’ve learned some places, particularly the outdoors, are fairly safe. Keeping as many of those venues as possible open could, at least in warmer climates, help ease people’s pain as other places close. Admittedly, this will be less helpful in the northern parts of the country, though the option of a park in the cold weather is better than nothing at all.
A key mistake made during the spring lockdown is that the US didn’t use the time it bought productively. Instead of building a national testing and tracing system, President Donald Trump’s administration punted the issue down to the states. Congress and state officials should take steps to ensure things go differently this time around — building up testing and tracing regimes, and full cooperation between states’ systems, to keep the US safe as cases are, hopefully, suppressed closer to zero.
In addition, all levels of government could use the time to prepare for widespread vaccine distribution. With some data showing we might get a highly effective vaccine soon, now is the time more than ever to make sure that hundreds of millions of Americans can and will get vaccinated. That means setting up distribution networks, including dealing with likely transportation hurdles if vaccines require extremely cold temperatures to store. It means making sure that Americans are persuaded to get a vaccine, given polling showing half of US adults, or more, are currently skeptical of getting one.
Crucially, the bulk of this work must come from Congress and the White House. A big reason that states aren’t closing down right now is because they simply don’t have the resources or reach, especially as they deal with an economic downturn, to offer enough financial support to individuals and businesses hurt by new restrictions. The federal government does.
The good news: If the country does this right, it could come out of widespread closures later in the winter or spring with a visible finish line to the pandemic. If coronavirus cases are successfully suppressed, a test-and-trace system keeps new cases low, and vaccine distribution is ready to go, we could be looking at a much better, more normal spring than we saw in 2020.
To put it another way: As painful as closing down again might be, it may only have to last a few months at most — to carry as many Americans as possible through the finish line, and end this pandemic with more lives saved.
The alternative, at the current rates of spread, is we go through the winter and into the spring with a widespread scourge that kills possibly hundreds of thousands of Americans and, ironically, impedes our ability to reopen more of the economy as much of the public remains terrified of going out while cases are high and it takes months to roll out a vaccine. (There’s historical evidence for this: A preliminary study of the 1918 flu pandemic found the US cities that took stronger measures against outbreaks saw quicker economic recoveries.)
Everyone wants to go back to normal. As unpopular as closing down may be right now, it’s how we can do it sooner rather than later.
Microsoft is introducing the ability to integrate popular workplace apps like Asana into meetings on its Teams collaboration platform. Teams meetings were previously limited to chats and channel communications, but now users can integrate 20 new apps into their meetings. For instance, you can discuss and modify a project built in Asana with others directly within a Teams meeting.
The new apps for meetings join the more than 700 already available in the Teams App Store, Microsoft said.
Image: Microsoft
The company is also making its Power Platform — which provides low-code tools to build and deploy apps, chatbots, and workflows — available right within Teams. The Power Apps app for Teams is a maker studio where...
Former US President Barack Obama speaks at a Biden-Harris drive-in rally in Orlando, Florida on October 27, 2020.
RICARDO ARDUENGO/AFP via Getty Images
Former President Barack Obama said there should be government regulations for social media firms since they make "editorial choices, whether they've buried them in algorithms or not," he told The Atlantic in an interview.
Tech companies like Facebook and Twitter are protected by an internet law called Section 230 which shields them from being liable for content that people post on their platforms.
Republicans and Democrats alike have called for the law to be revised and for protections to be stripped for tech companies, which would majorly impact their businesses.
Tech companies have long argued that they shouldn't be treated as publishers and that Section 230 is what protects free speech on the internet and without it, online communication would change as we know it.
Former President Barack Obama said social media companies should be regulated in some capacity as tech firms continue to argue that they shouldn't be treated as publishers.
In an interview with The Atlantic, the former president said tech companies are still "making editorial choices" despite insisting they do not operate as newspapers and other news outlets do, whether those editorial decisions are made with algorithms or otherwise.
"The First Amendment doesn't require private companies to provide a platform for any view that is out there," Obama told The Atlantic. "At the end of the day, we're going to have to find a combination of government regulations and corporate practices that address this, because it's going to get worse."
He also alluded to the danger of deepfake videos, which use artificial intelligence to change someone's face in a video to another's, effectively showing something that didn't happen. The former President himself has appeared in one such video in 2018 when he appeared to call President Donald Trump a "dips---."
Facebook and its tech peers are protected by an internet law called Section 230, which prevents them from being liable for content that people post on their platforms. Introducing revisions to the law has largely been a bipartisan issue, with Republican and Democratic lawmakers alike agreeing that tech firms should no longer be shielded by Section 230. However, they differ slightly in their motivations: Democrats wish for changes to limit the spread of misinformation and hate speech, and Republicans are pushing for changes to curb alleged discrimination against conservative content, a theory backed by scant evidence that the right has been peddling.
President Trump has fueled the crusade to revise Section 230 since Twitter started fact-checking his posts in May. Multiple branches of the US government are now zeroing in on changing the internet law, as Business Insider's Aaron Holmes explains.
President-elect Joe Biden has said that he wants to revoke Section 230. When Biden was vice president under Obama, the administration was largely hands-off when it came to the tech industry.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has long said that he doesn't wish for the company to be the "arbiters of truth." He and the leaders of other tech firms maintain that Section 230 protects free speech on the open internet.
The CEOs of Facebook, Twitter, and Google appeared in a virtual Senate hearing in late October to discuss Section 230 protections. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey warned lawmakers that stripping back Section 230 could "collapse how we communicate on the Internet" and Zuckerberg said that "without Section 230, platforms could potentially be held liable for everything people say" and could "face liability for doing even basic moderation, such as removing hate speech and harassment that impacts the safety and security of their communities."
The tech giant says that over the past several quarters its business has shifted to better meet the needs of customers in the wake of the pandemic. Cisco also announces that tech veteran R. Scott Herren will be coming in December as the company’s new CFO.
The contact centre as we know it is evolving, now more than ever. Frustrating self-service interactions and exhausting waiting times are becoming a thing of the past. Today’s consumers expect better, and if they can’t get the right experience from you, they’ll go elsewhere.
This is a trend that’s becoming increasingly obvious in 2020. Now that consumers can’t necessarily interact with brands face-to-face, they expect the digital connections they have to be better than ever. The contact centre is officially going to be the most essential part of the brand/consumer interaction going forward, and no business can afford to cut corners.
To learn more about how the contact centre is changing, I spoke with the Director of Strategic Communications for Contact Center Solutions at Cisco, Zack Taylor. Here’s what he had to say.
How Has the Contact Centre and CX Changed?
Zack Taylor
Zack told me that the contact centre is going through a major shift, driven by a range of factors. He noted that shopping malls are now almost empty, and most organisations are emphasizing digital vs. face-to-face interactions.
The massive shift to working from home has made a difference to the way that we operate in contact centres too, agents are evolving in this new remote landscape. On top of that, Zack believes that the contact centre is even more of a crucial component in today’s business landscape. It’s the place where customers go when they can’t solve their own problem with self-service solutions.
“This year, we saw a rapid acceleration towards the contact centre that we were eventually going to get anyway – one that’s digital and connected. From a customer experience perspective, expectations have changed drastically. Customers expect an unparalleled quality of service from every company.”
Your clients aren’t just comparing experiences that they have with your brand with interactions they had in the past. They’re comparing you to category leaders in any industry – the likes of Tesla, Apple, and other CX leaders.
The result is countless businesses jumping into action. “Companies are taking the contact centre more seriously. It’s the last thing between your business and a lost opportunity. In a world where customers want more, companies are delivering easier, more optimized experiences.”
What is the Hype Cycle and Super-Agents?
In a recent blog post, Zack Taylor described the impending arrival of the “hype cycle” and “super-agents”. I asked him to explain those concepts a little further.
He told me that in the past, most companies were obsessed with the idea of reducing costs in the contact centre and cutting expenses wherever possible. For example, businesses would move agents to overseas locations to reduce costs – but this wouldn’t improve service. Now, we’re seeing that customer experience is the only sustainable differentiator. Companies need to deliver excellent experiences to create hype.
The “super-agent,” according to Cisco, is the idea that we can use technology and innovations to move every agent in the contact centre up a notch, “so the rest of them, become like the best of them.” Part of this process involves automating things that would otherwise take up valuable employee time that could be used to focus on the customer, and giving agents support from more advanced features.
“We can improve efficiency by automating note-taking and other repetitive tasks and get rid of the need to waste time searching for information. He noted that a typical contact centre agent spends upward of 20% of their time searching for information. Virtual agents can help answer questions for a human agent automatically, which means they reduce the time they spend on the phone, but still offer customers a better level of service. It’s not an either/or equation anymore, you can have better efficiency and better results.”
How Will the Agent Continue to Evolve?
I asked Zack how he believes the role of the agent is going to continue evolving going forward. First, he noted that where the agents are located has dramatically changed. Most of the agents that today’s contact centres have are at home, and there’s no guarantee that they’ll return to the office. The role that these agents are playing in the workspace is different too.
He told me that going forward, the contact centre agent is going to be a crucial ambassador for the business. The customers that come into the contact centre in the years to come are going to be the people who can’t solve problems on their own. They’re going to be the exceptions and outliers for situations that can’t be automated.
“Contact centre agents are going to need higher emotional equity going forward. They’ll need to be more informed, more skilled, and more capable of solving problems. Your agents will need to use more positive language and be less scripted too”
Zack noted that the contact centre agents of tomorrow will need to be more conversational – similar to the bots and IVRs of the future. They’ll have fewer scripts, and more genuine conversations where they can connect to customers on a deeper level. This human creativity will be able to shine through because we won’t be as focused on time-based metrics as we are today.
“We’ll be less concentrated on things like how much time an agent spends on a call, and more interested in whether the problem is resolved first-time around.”
Where’s the Opportunity for Cisco Customers Right Now?
Zack told me that there’s a lot of opportunity ahead for the contact centre, as the super-agent and the hype cycle become more critical. Cisco is investing in various cloud capabilities to help companies in driving newer, better customer experiences, where everyone has a better conversation.
“We’re going through a contact centre renaissance right now, and it’s a very exciting time. Every executive in the world right now is focusing on experience as their only true long-term differentiator. In the past, the contact centre focused heavily on cost and time. Now, the real focus is customer experience.”
The experience revolution, according to Zack, and the lack of a brick-and-mortar option or customer interactions is changing the nature of the contact centre. Customers want more, and the contact centre can deliver it with new technology and opportunities. “The things we’ve been musing about for years are actually happening. The future has arrived, and we’re already there.”
With the Biden victory, FCC boss Ajit Pai is being urged to pause all controversial rulemaking, including the agency's absurd and now likely doomed attempt to regulate social media and undermine Section 230 via the FCC. With a Biden win, Pai's guaranteed to lose his spot as top commissioner, and is likely to exit the agency altogether.
Energy and Commerce Committee heads Frank Pallone and Mike Doyle this week wrote to Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Ajit Pai and Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Chairman Joseph Simons, urging them to, as is tradition, pause any controversial rulemaking in preparation for the incoming Biden administration:
"With the results of the 2020 presidential election now apparent, leadership of the FCC will undoubtedly be changing. As a traditional part of the peaceful transfer of power — and as part of our oversight responsibilities — we strongly urge the agency to only pursue consensus and administrative matters for the remainder of your tenure."
The message to adhere to civility and norms was also mirrored by Jessica Rosenworcel, who'll likely be the next FCC boss (at least on an interim basis):
"I welcome the letter from Chairman Pallone and Chairman Doyle. Historically, the FCC has honored the transfer of power from one Administration to the next by pausing any controversial activity. I urge FCC Chairman Ajit Pai to follow this past practice in order to ensure an orderly transition of agency affairs. I look forward to continuing to work on the routine and consensus matters currently before the agency."
As such, any idea that the FCC intends to adhere to norms here as they simultaneously deny obvious and clear election results is likely wishful thinking. Even though Pai himself made such a request shortly after Trump won. Still, former FCC staffers like Wheeler advisor Gigi Sohn urged the agency to at least try to consistently adhere to norms:
From the sound of things, it seems unlikely that the FCC's bumbling attempt to regulate social media at Trump's request has a long shelf life either way.
You'll recall that Trump fired Republican FCC Commissioner Mike O'Rielly for very politely pointing out the FCC lacks the authority to regulate social media and that undermining 230 would likely create more censorship, not less. As his replacement, Trump nominated the NTIA's Nathan Simington, the very guy that wrote Trump's ridiculous EO demanding the FCC "reinterpret" Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.
Simington's appointment to the FCC is going through all the usual processes, including a hearing this week designed to provide media sound bytes supporting the completely bogus claim that social media unfairly censors Conservatives (data and reality often indicate the exact opposite). But everything I'm hearing is that Simington isn't likely to obtain an actual vote, in part because the GOP realizes Trump's 230 gambit is likely doomed, and they're more interested in others getting the FCC seat (Crystal Tully, Deputy Staff Director at the United States Senate Committee on Commerce, Science & Transportation is a name that keeps coming up in my conversations this week).
It's one of several indications that while the GOP publicly is pretending the election is contested (to fundraise, avoid angering Trump's adoring fans, and keep supporters engaged for the Georgia runoffs), they're privately positioning and strategizing with the full knowledge the Biden Presidency is a done deal. Either way, there's every indication that the dumb FCC attempt to regulate social media (and the rank hypocrisy required to embrace such a move after bitching about net neutrality as "government overreach" for four years), is likely dead as a doornail.
In the 1950s, few things seemed more futuristic and utopian than harnessing nuclear energy to power your home. Towering nuclear reactors popped up across the U.S. with the promise of harvesting energy from smashed atoms of Uranium to power everything from lights in an office to an oven cooking a pot roast. With clean and efficient nuclear power, anything seemed possible.
But as the years went on, doubt about the safety of these reactors began to poison the bright future they’d once promised. Stories of nuclear waste polluting waterways downstream of power plants began to stir alarm, and in the 1980s the Chernobyl nuclear power plant explosion sent radiation billowing across Europe and into the tissues of an estimated 4,000 Ukrainians who died from radiation poisoning. Even as recently as 2011, Japan’s Fukushima nuclear power plant faced catastrophe when a tsunami knocked out its power supply and led all three of its nuclear reactors to melt down.
All in all, it’s been a tough few decades for nuclear energy’s public image. But nuclear scientists say that now, more than ever, is the time to reinvest in nuclear innovation. Governments agree: In the U.K. Rolls-Royce plans to roll out 16 mini-nuclear plants over the next five years and China, an emerging nuclear super power, has pledged to ramp up its nuclear use to meet emissions goals.
“Nuclear energy has always been an emissions-free source of electricity,” Rita Baranwal, Assistant Secretary for the U.S. Office of Nuclear Energy, told Motherboard. “Countries around the world that have [emissions] targets and goals to really assess how they get to those targets. And what they're finding time and time again, is that nuclear has to be part of that energy portfolio.”
Renewable energy sources like solar and wind are too intermittent to carry the brunt of our emissions goals alone, says Baranwal. When done safely, nuclear energy can create emissions free energy for electricity and heat. It can even be used to help develop other green solutions, like synthetic fuel, which will also be crucial in crushing emissions levels.
“To achieve deep decarbonization, we need to decarbonize not just electricity, but also transportation (including shipping) and industrial processes,” Ashley Finan, director of the Idaho National Laboratory’s National Reactor Innovation Center, told Motherboard in an email.
Nuclear reactors have come a long way from the power plants of our parents and grandparents, and nuclear scientists say that innovation in material design, machine learning and even the design of the plants themselves has positioned this industry as an essential player in the quest for clean energy.
Nuclear energy has been quietly smashing its benchmarks for years now, says Baranwal, and now is the time to brag about it.
What is nuclear energy?
Nuclear energy may seem futuristic and complex in its approach to power, but at its core, the process is really not that different from power created with coal or oil. Essentially, something is heated up (in this case, the nuclear core) which creates steam to turn turbines and generate electricity.
The big difference for nuclear power is that these plants create their initial heat by smashing together Uranium atoms in a process called fission. Like a cue ball being shot across a pool table, a tiny neutron is sent careening towards an atom of Uranium—splitting it open upon contact. This splitting of the atom creates energy in the form of heat and radiation, and also sends out more neutrons that break apart other Uranium atoms in a domino effect.
Carefully controlling this creation of power is the name of the game at nuclear power plants, and traditionally pressurized water has been used to cool down these Uranium cores. But in next generation nuclear reactors, this might look a little different.
Goodbye water, hello helium and molten salt
When it comes to the future of nuclear energy, the U.S.’s Department of Energy has its eyes (and wallet) focused on two projects in particular: TerraPower’s Natrium reactor and an Xe-100 reactor from X-Energy. These two reactors are the first to participate in the DOE’s Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program, an initiative to reinvest in nuclear innovation, and have each already received $80 million toward the development of their designs, with up to $4 billion available over the next five to seven years.
A key innovation of both of these reactors, Baranwal told Motherboard, is that neither will use pressurized water to cool their uranium cores. TerraPower, which is chaired by founder Bill Gates, will instead use molten salt, while X-Energy’s reactor will use pressurized helium.
For TerraPower, this change to the reactor’s traditional coolant allows the plant to reduce both complexity and cost, while simultaneously increasing the reactor’s safety. Because molten salt has a higher boiling point than water, this material does not have to be pressurized when used as a coolant. Using molten salt would also allow nuclear engineers to finely tune the amount of energy coming out of the plant, making it an excellent companion to more intermittent sources of clean energy like solar and wind. A cloudy day? Crank up the nuclear plant.
TerraPower’s reactor is expected to be a little smaller than traditional reactors, but will still have a relatively large footprint, says Baranwal. X-Energy’s reactor, on the other hand, will be a much smaller type of new reactor called a small modular reactor, or SMR.
What are small modular reactors?
Traditionally, nuclear reactors have been housed in towering nuclear plants that take up more than a mile square footage of land per 1000 MW of energy production. This works well in communities with plenty of open space, but can be difficult to squeeze into more densely packed areas. As a solution, enter the SMR.
With some hovering just over 23 meters tall, a single torpedo-shaped SMR will take up only about 1 percent the square footage of a traditional power plant. And, unlike large reactors that can take many years and a lot of money to build, SMRs can be built much cheaper and quicker using factory manufacturing. Each reactor can only produce a maximum of 300 MWe, but as many as twelve reactors can be grouped together like big cans of soda to match a larger power plant’s output.
When combined together, these reactors could be used to power midsize cities, or separately, to power smaller towns.
X-Energy’s design, which the DOE has its eyes on, is one such reactor and plans to use pressurized helium as well as slow release pebbles of fuel to achieve its efficient design. Another U.S. based company, NuScale, is also turning its sights to SMR and was the first in the U.S. to have its water coolant based design approved by the Nuclear Regulatory Commision.
“NuScale’s smarter and simplified advanced design eliminates the need for two-thirds of the safety systems and components found in today’s large reactors,” representatives from the company told Motherboard over email. “This results in reduced maintenance cost, reduced capital costs, and a level of safety that is magnitudes better than current gigawatt sized nuclear plants.”
And the U.S. isn’t alone in its interest in these miniature reactors, dozens are in development around the world. At the end of 2019, Russia floated an SMR out to sea to trial a future fleet of floating power plants and Japan’s Toshiba electronics company has been working for years on its Super Safe, Small Simple (4S) modular reactors.
But nuclear energy is good for more than just providing bulk electricity and heat, Jacopo Buongiorno, the director of MIT’s Nuclear Reactor Laboratory, told Motherboard.
“[People] tend to think of nuclear as just electricity,” says Buongiorno. “But it’s also much more.”
What are microreactors?
If you thought SMRs were tiny, then microreactors are absolutely miniscule. Also called nuclear batteries, Buongiorno said, these reactors are on scale with jet engines and can be easily and quickly manufactured on assembly lines and set up within a few days of arriving in a community.
Because of their small size, these reactors don’t necessarily supply a lot of bang for their buck—they can only generate between 1 and 20 MW of energy—but Buongiorno says that this isn’t necessarily a problem because nuclear solutions don’t require one-size-fits-all reactors. Especially when it comes to finding a solution to climate change.
“I would say it's one of the truly critical questions as we move forward for solutions for climate change—what is the optimal mix?” said Buongiorno. “And not surprisingly, it's not one size fits all. It's a combination… It's a well balanced mix of different technologies that will give you the path of least resistance.”
Instead, microreactors could be used to power remote communities, desalinate local water and even produce an emissions free source of hydrogen to fuel other industries. Buongiorno says that microreactors are even under consideration for space applications with NASA.
A nuclear future
Nuclear energy is not a perfect solution to our energy problems, and there are still critics who are wary of the industry’s safety and cost, but nuclear scientists say the industry is ready for its time in the spotlight.
With international partners around the world, nuclear energy has the potential to be a powerful ally to solar and wind production to help not only lower energy emissions but to provide energy independence to remote communities.
“I have the sense that when the public looks at nuclear energy they think of people and companies that don’t care about others,” Finan said. “[But] the truth is that many people are entering the nuclear energy field… in order to tackle huge environmental challenges [and] energy poverty… I think that as the public gets to know todays’ advanced nuclear energy companies, they will meet people with passion and purpose that they can identify with and respect.”
Many of these nuclear solutions are already here, and nuclear scientists are excited to see what the next decade of innovation will bring.
The world needs clean heat, and geothermal energy has it.
The heat stored in the Earth’s crust, known as geothermal energy, is carbon-free and effectively inexhaustible. There’s enough of it to run all of civilization for generations, if it could be cost-effectively tapped.
Tapping it turns out to be no small feat, but efforts have ramped up recently due to new urgency by the climate crisis and the search for low-carbon alternatives to fossil fuels.
The cutting edge technological developments in the field (including, yes, lasers) are devoted to drilling deeper and deeper, into hotter and hotter rock. Heat anywhere from 302°F (150°C) up to 703°F (373°C), where water enters its “supercritical” phase and above, can be used to profitably generate electricity.
But electricity is only half of the geothermal story. Well before humans generated electricity with it, they used geothermal heat directly, to bathe, cook, and heat buildings, among other things. Geothermal direct heat is still used today in industry, agriculture, and for buildings, but only a tiny fraction of its potential has been unlocked.
When it comes to direct use of heat, geothermal resources don’t need to be quite so hot. It doesn’t require 300°F to heat the air in your home to 68°F. Just about anything 50°F or above (which is available just 10 feet down or so) can be used for something, whether drying grain, running a greenhouse, melting ice on airport runways, or heating commercial buildings.
Geothermal heat is accessible almost everywhere and useful in a wide range of applications. The US Department of Energy has a research program devoted to these “low-temperature and co-produced resources.”
But the most important application, in my mind, is the use of low-temperature geothermal resources for large-scale heating and cooling of buildings.
Heating and cooling buildings isn’t as sexy as electricity in the energy world these days, but it is important, representing just over 12 percent of US greenhouse gas emissions and a larger proportion of emissions in cities, many of which have aggressive decarbonization goals. To achieve those goals, they need to figure out carbon-free heating, and geothermal is one of the best (out of very few) options.
In this post, we’ll dive into the other half of geothermal: heat. First we’ll take a look at the market and the need for low-carbon heat. Then we’ll look at the technologies and companies involved, and wrap up by considering how government might help accelerate the development of geothermal solutions.
It’s hot, or at least warm, stuff!
Decarbonization means an improved competitive landscape for geothermal heat
Cities across the world are setting aggressive decarbonization goals, pledging to zero out their direct carbon emissions by 2050. The first three challenges facing a decarbonizing city are electricity supply, transportation, and heating and cooling of buildings. The pathways to decarbonization of electricity and transportation, while extremely challenging, are at least fairly well understood: renewable energy, electric vehicles, and good urban design that minimizes the need for cars.
For most cities, though, heat is a big unanswered question.
Oil and natural gas furnaces will need to be phased out, which means cities will need an extraordinary amount of low-carbon heat to compensate. And low-carbon options are much more limited in heat than in electricity.
Some furnaces can run on biomethane, other biofuels, hydrogen, or hydrogen-derived fuels, but in a mostly electrified world, low-carbon liquid fuels are likely to be used for high-value applications in industry and transportation — not heating your living room.
That leaves geothermal district heating or, at an individual building level, electrical options like electric resistance heating or heat pumps. In heat pumps, it’s either air-source (exchanging heat with the outside air) or ground-source (exchanging heat with the earth). The latter is far more efficient. And geothermal district heating is the most efficient of all.
In a decarbonizing world, it is these — the other low-carbon heating options — that will eventually comprise the competitors in the heating and cooling space. It’s a competition some decarbonizing cities, like Boston, are already grappling with. Boston will have trouble building lots of new electrical infrastructure to heat buildings with electricity, so it is leaning toward geothermal.
So what exactly are the technologies that can provide heat from the Earth? There are two basic categories. Let’s start by looking at the smaller side.
Ground-source heat pumps are the most efficient source of individual building heat
It’s a bit of a fudge to include ground-source heat pumps (GSHPs) here, because technically they do not make use of geothermal energy. They make use of stored solar energy, from sunlight striking the Earth’s surface. It’s only when you get much deeper, or in active volcanic areas, where you get into heat from the planet’s core. If you want to be precise, GSHPs harvest solar heat stored in the shallow earth.
I don’t think this terminological issue matters all that much though — it’s heat in the earth!
Anywhere from 10 to 1,000 feet beneath the surface, the temperature is a steady 54°F, year-round, everywhere in the country. GSHPs take advantage of that fact to heat and cool buildings. When the air is colder than 54°F, they draw heat from the earth; when it’s hotter than 54°F, they dump heat into the earth.
A GSHP consists of two parts. The first is the “ground loop” pipe buried beneath the ground with water circulating through it. Via conduction, the water draws heat from (or returns heat to) the earth, so the more pipe surface area there is, the more efficient the system. That’s why there are often several loops of pipe in the overall ground loop. The rule of thumb is one loop equals one ton of capacity, which equals about 12,000 BTU per hour. An average US home will need 2 to 3 tons of capacity, thus two to three loops (or one very deep one).
The second part is the heat pump itself, which sits inside, connected to the ground loop, exchanging heat with the water via a vapor compression refrigerant cycle (not unlike the way your refrigerator exchanges heat with the surrounding air). In the winter, it takes heat out of the circulating water and puts it into the air, thus warming the building; in the summer, it takes heat out of the air and puts it into the water, thus cooling the building.
You can think of a GSHP as two linked heat transfers. Via the ground loop, the water exchanges heat with the earth; via the heat pump, the water exchanges heat with the indoor air.
Because ground temperature is basically the same 10 or 1,000 feet below the ground, somewhat counterintuitively, the depth of the ground loop doesn’t matter much. What matters is the square footage of pipe exposed to earth. Installers use either long horizontal loops or deep vertical loops depending on the project. (Most projects these days are “closed loop,” meaning no fluids are exchanged with the ground, but in the right circumstances, an “open loop” system that works directly with water heated by the earth can work.)
A GSHP is not generating heat, like an oil or gas furnace, but harvesting heat from the ground. The water does not circulate itself, of course; it requires electricity to run a GSHP. But in terms of units of heat out per units of energy in — what they call, in the business, Coefficient of Performance (COP) — it is the single most efficient way to heat a building.
An oil or gas furnace has a COP less than 1; one unit of energy input produces about 0.7 to 0.9 units of heat. Electric resistance heating (baseboard heaters, wall heaters, space heaters) have a COP of 1. Air source heat pumps (ASHPs), which draw heat from the outside air rather than the earth, vary somewhat with the temperature of the air, but generally can reach a COP of 3. GSHPs, depending on the climate, can get to 4, or as high as 6. (They work better in extreme climates, with a high temperature differential between air and earth, than in temperate climates.)
In the best circumstances, GSHPs are 600 percent efficient. Nothing else, except a district heating system serving multiple buildings, can match that efficiency.
GSHPs are an old technology — they first popped up in the US around 1940 — with well known benefits and drawbacks. On the benefits side, the system runs quietly, operating costs are low, maintenance costs are low, there are no indoor pollutant emissions or GHGs, and it lasts a long time. (Heat pumps inside can last 25 years; ground loops can last 50 years or longer.) It is a nice thing indeed to already have a GSHP installed.
Unfortunately, it has also been expensive as hell to install one. They typically run from $20,000 up to $50,000 in upfront costs (quite a bit more than your $1,000 natural gas furnace) and installing them has typically involved extensive drilling and excavation that can last for weeks (quite a bit more than the 1-2 day turnaround for a gas furnace or ASHP). These limitations have made them impractical for most homeowners.
At least at the moment, when it comes to a remodel, it’s a real question whether GSHPs are worth the additional cost over and above ASHPs, which have improved enough to work in almost any climate. If an ASHP isn’t enough for a given building, it’s generally cheaper to reduce heating needs through insulation and efficiency than it is to buy a bigger system.
For new builds, though, “geothermal is a no brainer,” says Adam Santry, the president of Allied Well Drilling. “You don’t need any [tax] credits. Rolling [a GSHP] into your mortgage, you are cash flow positive that first month.” The savings on heat are greater than the loan payment on the GSHP, right off the jump.
“Yes, there’s an upfront cost,” says Alan Skouby, a 40-year veteran of the industry now with GeoPro, Inc. “But it will pay for itself in relatively short order, and once it’s paid for, it’s a money printer.”
GSHPs face a problem that all sorts of clean-energy technologies early in their cost and development curves have encountered: Though they pay off in the long run, the substantial upfront investment often deters customers. The two key strategies for growth, then, are reducing those upfront costs and spreading them out over time through clever financing.
One new company is currently attempting to do both, focusing on the residential market.
Dandelion is trying to make ground-source heat pumps easy
The secretive X Lab at Alphabet (Google’s parent company) has been working away on clean energy problems, spinning off companies as it goes. One of them, formed in 2018, is called Dandelion, and it is directly attacking the problems that have held GSHPs back.
Dandelion’s team “didn’t grow up in this industry, they grew up in the solar industry,” says Skouby. “They’re coming to all of this with a fresh perspective.”
Typically an HVAC contractor can install a furnace or an ASHP themselves, harvesting all the profits and tax credits. For a GSHP job, they have to find a drilling subcontractor and split the profits — more hassle for less money. They also frequently have furnaces in stock that they need to move, and might need to special order a GSHP. The incentives don’t line up.
One of Dandelion’s key moves has been to vertically integrate, to pull all those links in the supply chain into one organization. The people who find customers, assess properties, drill ground loops, and install heat pumps all work for Dandelion, so they can coordinate efficiently.
Vertical integration also means Dandelion can order custom-built, high-quality equipment. “Because they’ve got a game plan to reach much bigger scale,” Skouby says, “they can leverage that and buy down cost. Nobody else has been willing to do that.”
For instance, the company designed its own heat pump. “We looked at what was taking installers a lot of time,” says Kathy Hannun, Dandelion’s founder and president, “and every time, there was an opportunity to take those things and just build them into the heat pump.” There’s less on-site assembly required and it has a smaller form factor than comparable heat pumps. It is also covered in sensors, which provide real-time information on how it performs in the field, something the industry has lacked. It’s also cheaper than its competitors.
The company has ordered purpose-built drills, smaller than typical geothermal drills and able to fit into tighter spaces. Similarly, they have optimized piping, grouting, and other components. The strategy is more like a solar startup’s: Invest big early on to drive down costs and begin scaling up; trust that scale will pay back the investment.
Drilling vertical ground loops — 4 to 6-inch holes around 500 feet deep — Dandelion has substantially cut down on the time and disruption of installation, from weeks or months to one week. The company has got the upfront, delivered cost of a system down to $18,000 from $25,000.
Just as importantly, it has devised a financing model to overcome the upfront cost barrier. It loans the cost of the system to customers, who pay nothing upfront. Instead, they repay the loan at a fixed monthly rate that is lower than their previous heating and cooling costs. They save money from day one.
“They’re targeting the type of customer our industry needs,” says Santry, “medium- to lower-income people that this was not available to.”
The loans are still attached to the homeowner, though. What the industry needs, says Hannun, is a model like rooftop solar’s, with “third-party ownership models where, if you’re a homeowner and you don’t plan on living in your house forever, you can put no money down — just buy solar power, essentially, instead of buying normal electricity.” This kind of “solar as a service” model could work just as well with “heat as a service.”
Dandelion is taking off in New York, where some localities like Westchester County have banned gas in new buildings, and there are millions of people heating with expensive propane and fuel oil furnaces (against which a GSHP will pay itself off in five years). “When they see that they can get renewable energy for less than they’re paying for fuel oil,” says Hannun, “it’s very compelling.” The company recently expanded to Connecticut.
“I think they’re going to be successful, because the scope they’re projecting is attracting a lot of utility types that have the financial wherewithal to help drive what they’re doing,” says Skouby, “or get behind them on an exclusivity arrangement, which they wouldn’t be willing to do with a local contractor.”
New York also has substantial incentives for low-carbon heat, which will likely be needed anywhere GSHPs must compete with natural gas. But the company is learning as it goes and sees plenty of room to bring down costs “across the board,” says Hannun. And of course, in a carbon-constrained world, natural gas will be fazed out.
So that’s the smaller geothermal heat technology. Now let’s look at the bigger stuff.
Low-temperature geothermal can heat multiple buildings for cheap
In my previous post on geothermal, I described how a traditional geothermal system works. One well, the production well, taps into hot water trapped in underground aquifers; the water comes up, the heat is extracted, and the water is cooled and returned to the earth via a second well, the injection well.
To access the high heats needed to generate electricity, such systems typically must be sited in specialized (and relatively rare) areas near volcanic activity, where there is extremely hot water trapped in porous rock underground.
But saline aquifers containing warm water — not hot enough for electricity, but plenty hot enough for direct heat — are practically ubiquitous, in the US and elsewhere.
Geothermal systems that tap into warm (sub-300°F) water can be used as a source of heat for a district heating system, i.e., a single connected system of hot water loops that heats multiple buildings.
District heating found one of its very first expressions in the US — Boise, Idaho, has used geothermal to heat buildings since 1890 and heats its downtown with it to this day — but it is far more popular and advanced in Europe, especially Iceland (though China is, in this as in all things, scaling up quickly). Paris, Munich, and Reykjavik are all known for their extensive district heating systems.
GeoDHAn example of a geothermal district heating system.
Once the upfront capital costs are paid off, geothermal district heat is dirt cheap, for decades or even centuries. (The world’s oldest working geothermal district heating system, in Chaudes-Aigues, France, has been going since the 14th century.) But the upfront costs remain daunting.
There are some new technological developments in the space. The Department of Energy is studying deep direct use (DDU) geothermal systems, which go deeper to find suitably warm temperatures in almost any geography and use them as large-scale heating sources for campuses, military installations, hospital complexes, or residential developments. “Large-scale, fully integrated DDU geothermal systems have not been realized in the United States,” the DOE writes, “although efforts of this type are increasingly popular in Europe and elsewhere.”
Some of these DDU efforts are using “closed loop” systems (not unlike GSHPs) that don’t exchange fluids with the earth at all, thus eliminating any possibility of groundwater pollution. The Canadian company Eavor (covered in my previous post) is working on closed-loop systems that can, in addition to going deep for electricity-level heat, be used for lower-temperature systems that harvest heat for buildings.
Some DDU systems, if they tap high enough heat, can “co-produce” electricity and heat, thus blurring the line with geothermal power systems.
The fact is, though, when it comes to shallow saline aquifers, the oil and gas industry already knows its way around. “The low hanging fruit [for geothermal heat] is our sedimentary basins, between two and three kilometers depth,” says Marit Brommer, who runs the International Geothermal Association but started out her career as an oil and gas engineer, “and they have been mapped extensively because of our oil and gas runs. We know their temperatures extremely well — and we found more water than oil in those reservoirs, by the way.”
“We have a lot better tools now [than in previous decades] — better drilling technology, much better geophysical logging capability, better seismic reflection imaging,” says Jeff Tester, a professor of sustainable energy systems and principal scientist for Cornell University’s Earth Source Heat project. “We know so much more about how to find permeability and fluids in the rock.” Drilling at that depth, avoiding pollution or seismic disruption, is something oil and gas has been working on for decades.
Geothermal district heating is a no-brainer for anyone building new housing developments, campuses, or industrial clusters. It represents low, stable heating costs (rather than the fluctuating costs of oil and gas) for generations.
Forward-thinking cities like Munich (which is seeking to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 50 percent by 2030) have begun to think of geothermal loops as part of city infrastructure, to be installed and maintained alongside water and sewer lines, so that any new building or development can simply connect to the main line through a utility, like other basic services.
The larger such a system grows, the more its unit costs fall. And it’s a local resource that generates local jobs; it is not dependent on imports or global markets. It gives cities some measure of independence.
Again, the barrier is the upfront costs. A decent-sized geothermal district heating can run $25 million, says Brommer, and though, “on average, it takes you about a quarter of your life cycle in order to get rid of your [debt] burdens,” the capital costs are often enough to scare off developers and municipalities.
Costs will come down with scale and knowledge-sharing. “What we need is multiple companies who work in multiple countries in similar subservice settings, that understand the drilling requirements and the service needs,” Brommer says, “meaning that the lessons learned in country one can be applied to reduce costs in countries two, three, and four.”
But that kind of learning requires growth. Just as with GSHPs, the trick is finding tools to bring down upfront costs and spread them out over time.
Geothermal costs more upfront, but less overall. Government could help with that.
Accelerating the development of geothermal electricity is mostly about technology research and demonstration, but when it comes to geothermal heat — both GSHPs and larger solutions like DDU — the primary need is for the kind of public policy pull that draws demonstrated technologies into a broader market.
That means incentives like grants, tax credits, or feed-in tariffs (heating tariffs, in this case) to bring down the upfront costs. At the city or county level, it means regulatory reform to reduce the costs of permitting, siting, and constructing systems. But perhaps most importantly, it involves financing mechanisms.
Remember, a geothermal district heating system or a GSHP is already a better value than their competitors over the lifetime of the system. They just face the awkward problem that almost all of the costs are stacked upfront, while the benefits accrue over time. It is the timing of the costs and benefits that poses the challenge.
That is the kind of problem financing mechanisms, which move costs and benefits around in time, can solve. The 30-year fixed rate mortgage was invented in the 1930s to spread the large upfront costs of a house out over decades, thus opening home ownership to millions of Americans. Dandelion’s fledgling financing model, which requires no upfront money from the customer, could do the same thing for GSHPs if it can be scaled (and attached to the property rather than the owner).
The government can help by offering low-interest, long-term loans for low-carbon heating systems, or backing such loans if banks or other private institutions offer them. Those loans can help soften the substantial front-end risks of exploring for new resources.
“Iceland addressed this risk in the 1960s with the establishment of a National Energy Fund, which offers loans to fund the initial cost of drilling and exploration,” says Tester. “If the initial drilling stage is unsuccessful, the loan defaults to the state; if the drilling is successful, the loan will be paid as planned.” It is the single most powerful policy tool for expanding geothermal in Iceland, he says.
Shutterstock
A geothermal-heated greenhouse in Iceland.
Along with financing, new models of ownership and service delivery are needed. “The challenge for the energy transition is that oil and gas companies are unlikely to be operating heat,” says Brommer. “There is a need for smaller intermediary operating companies that understand what it takes to mine heat and can sell it as a service to utility companies. That’s the way forward.” Such intermediaries could even be owned by local communities, along the lines of the popular “community solar” model.
There is plenty of room for innovation around geothermal heat — in technology, but especially in policy and financing. But the US will need to get serious about the investments, policies, and regulations necessary to scale it up to the necessary size.
A large investment of time, money, and policy attention in geothermal heat could help create jobs in almost every US zip code. The DOE’s comprehensive 2019 Geovisions study found that “technology improvements could enable more than 17,500 geothermal district-heating installations nationwide, and 28 million U.S. households could realize cost-effective heating and cooling solutions through the use of geothermal heat pumps.” That number of geothermal systems would require over 50 times the number of wells dug by the entire US oil and gas industry — a bonanza of skilled trade jobs.
Geothermal heat could help towns and cities achieve a measure of energy independence, giving them a reliable source of heating and cooling that never changes price and requires no imports. It could help put retired, laid-off, or just bored oil and gas engineers to work; Dandelion recently hired Jeremy Smith, a 20-year oil and gas veteran, as their new VP of drilling.
But most of all, it could help solve the riddle of how to rapidly decarbonize the heating and cooling of buildings, a problem that has not gotten nearly enough attention and is not exactly awash in solutions. Geothermal is such a solution, right beneath our feet. We just need to get digging.
Audiences get an inside glimpse into teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg’s life in I Am Greta. | Hulu
In the new Hulu film, climate activist Greta Thunberg argues that her Aspberger’s is an asset.
Greta Thunberg managed, at the age of 15, to do something few teenage girls have ever done: make grown men around the world incredibly mad at her.
The youthful activist — and subject of the new Hulu documentary I Am Greta — sparked a global movement when, in 2018, she went on strike from school in her native Sweden to protest humanity’s collective failure to appropriately confront climate change. Her actions were noticed, and by the next year young people around the world were holding their own Friday climate strikes and demanding their countries’ leaders take action.
In I Am Greta, director Nathan Grossman follows Thunberg (and, often, her father) through this remarkable two-year stretch, in which Thunberg went from sitting outside her school on the sidewalk with her backpack and a hand-lettered sign to addressing formidable bodies of world leaders at venues including the United Nations and the World Economic Forum.
Thunberg has made a habit of delivering searing speeches that refuse to pull punches, accusing the powerful of essentially using her and other young activists as a prop to make it seem like they’re acting on climate while actually doing very little. As a result, her public image feels, at times, preternaturally mature. And it’s been easy for pundits and politicians to attack her — which they have done, vigorously, cruelly, and with very limited success — as a “mentally ill” puppet of her attention-hungry parents.
But I Am Greta makes it clear how laughably far from the truth that characterization is, just by letting Thunberg talk. She is vulnerable. We see her cry, erupt into peals of laughter reading hateful Facebook comments, and argue with her father when he tells her to stop revising a speech and please, please eat her lunch.
Grossman’s fly-on-the-wall approach is a perfect match for his subject. Thunberg is not unselfconscious, but she has very little to prove, and so her single-minded passion for her activism comes through in every word she says. The camera even accompanies her on a boat trip across the Atlantic to New York to address the UN. (Thunberg avoids air travel, less because she thinks she can personally save the planet by doing so and more to show, as she explains, how difficult it is to live a sustainable life today. A small, light boat, as you might guess, is not an easy or comfortable way to cross an ocean.)
But what might be best about I Am Greta is a related theme woven throughout the film. She speaks to the camera frequently, frankly, and without embarrassment about her experience of having Asperger syndrome, a neurodevelopmental disorder she refreshingly sees as a positive rather than a negative. Public discourse about the autism spectrum still tends to pathologize the syndrome, seeing it as something that people “suffer” from.
Thunberg is an Asperger’s apologist. When one interviewer uses the word “suffer,” she gently corrects him and says that it’s something she “has,” more like a gift. It is Asperger’s, she says, that lets her stay so focused on and passionate about her work, without the distraction that other teens might face. At the end of the film, she suggests that the world might be a better place if everyone had a little bit of Asperger’s. And by then, having seen Thunberg in action, it’s easy to agree.
When minks are bred for their pelts — which are used to make fur coats and accessories — they are confined in small cages for their entire lives. They cannot engage in natural behaviors like roaming territories, digging, or swimming. | Getty Images
From Denmark to the US, outbreaks on mink farms raise concerns that a virus mutation could make our vaccines ineffective.
Denmark’s fur farms are home to 17 million minks, and last week, the government announced it would kill all of them.
This week, however, the government rolled that back a bit. Now, the government merely recommends killing all farmed minks in the country. It will only requirethe killing of minks —weasel-like animals prized for their fur —on farms where Covid-19 has been detected.
Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen initially said all 17 million minks would be culled because the virus that causes Covid-19 had moved from humans to minks and back to humans. The country’s public health officials reported that while in the mink, the virus had mutated, raising the risk of a new strain circulating among us that our vaccines would be ineffective against — a finding that, to be clear, is preliminary and has not been confirmed in peer-reviewed research. In a worst-case scenario, that could set back the clock on our pandemic recovery.
This fear isn’t limited to Denmark. There have also been Covid-19 outbreaks on mink fur farms in the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, Italy — and the US. At least a million minks have already been culled by gassing in the Netherlands and Spain, though the US has so far avoided culling. On farms in Utah, Wisconsin,and Michigan, thousands of minks have died of the disease, but mink-to-human transmission has not yet been detected.
The threat to public healthseems to raise an ethical dilemma: Should farms kill all their minks in order to prevent a mutated form of the virus from spreading among all human beings? Is causing that much animal suffering justifiable if it prevents a lot of human suffering, which could result if our future vaccines are ineffective against the new strain?
Denmark, at first, thought the answer was yes. But it was forced to backtrack after experts pointed out that the government couldn’t legally mandate a mass cull without passing new legislation, and after infectious disease experts questioned the scientific basis for the cull.
Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at Columbia University, was among those pushing back. She pointed out that there is no data available to support the claim that the mink variant risks jeopardizing our future vaccines. Denmark’s public health authority suggested that might be the case based on its findings, but those findings were not peer-reviewed, and no specific data on the mutation was released to the scientific community — yet another instance of “science by press release” during the pandemic. What’s more, viruses mutate all the time; that’s normal and expected, so the mink variant is not necessarily cause for panic.
So there's no reason to be extra concerned about these mink variants without evidence otherwise. We should review the data objectively when available and we should continue and expand genomic surveillance.
If it turns out to be true that the mink variant would jeopardize our vaccines and that there’s a strong chance that thousands or evenmillions of people will therefore die if we don’t cull the minks, you could make the case that a cull is the lesser of two evils. But we just don’t have enough data right now to know whether that’s true.
We do, however, know one thing with certainty. The fact that we are being forced to choose between two reasonable impulses — wanting to prevent animal suffering and wanting to prevent human suffering — is the result of another decision made: to farm thousands and thousands of animals in close quarters and unsanitary conditions.
Large-scale animal farming amplifies the threat of pandemics
Mink fur farms have a reputation for cruelty. The animals spend their entire lives confined in small cages, where they grow so distressed that they sometimes resort to self-mutilation and even cannibalism.
In both environments, animals live in cages under harsh conditions that compromise their immune systems. They’re tightly crowded together, often coming into contact with each other’s secretions and excrement. To make matters worse, selection for specific genes makes the animals almost genetically identical. That means that a virus can easily spread from animal to animal without encountering any genetic variants that might stop it in its tracks. As it rips through a herd, the virus can mutate and grow more virulent.
That’s why Michael Greger, an expert on zoonotic viruses, previously told me, “If you actually want to create global pandemics, then build factory farms.”
Both with fur farms (which contain thousands of animals) and with larger factory farms (which contain tens or hundreds of thousands of animals), we have created perfect-storm environments for the emergence and spread of disease. As the Humane Society Veterinary Medical Association recently wrote, “Fur farms often lack naturally mitigating factors — such as abundant sunlight, genetic variability, and healthy distance between animals. For these reasons, fur farms provide potential channels for diseases to propagate.”
The sheer number of animals we keep on these farms makes it likely for disease to spread. It’s also what makes it hard for us to think of a way to stamp out the problem other than by killing all the animals.
Jeff Sebo, a professor of environmental studies, bioethics, and philosophy at New York University, said the moral of the story is obvious: “As a general rule, if you have so many animals in your care that you are unable to care for them during crises, then that is too many, and you should not be allowed to own or keep that many animals in the first place.”
Culling animals en masse is not as rare as we might like to think. This spring, millions of animals were euthanized on American factory farms because there were no meat plants to send them to for slaughter; many plants had been shuttered after workers contracted Covid-19. And right now, hundreds of birds in the UK are being culled because an outbreak of the H5N2 avian influenza has been detected.
The way we’ve designed our animal farming system forces us to make tragic choices. “It basically makes us have to get into some contorted ethical reasoning,” Sebo said.
For example, if you’re trying to decide whether it’s justifiable to kill 17 million minks in order to save thousands or millions of people, you might find yourself in the bizarre situation of having to ask: Is one mink life worth 1/50th of a human life? Or 1/100th? Or 1/1000th? The mere act of running this calculation in your mind may feel morally demeaning because of how it treats living beings as commodities.
In this regard, it's good that the Dutch mink industry is shutting down entirely by 2021. Hopefully other countries will follow suit. Mink farming is also unnecessary and cruel, so there's little upside for continuing the practice if it's also a spillback risk.
The mink situation has forced even some animal advocates to support a cull, for fear that leaving minks alive with untreated Covid-19 will cause them severe respiratory distress. “If mink on a farm are infected, suffering respiratory problems, and are not being culled, their welfare will also be seriously compromised,” said Joanna Swabe, a policy adviser for Humane Society International. Animal Protection Denmark CEO Britta Riis likewise said it was a “necessary decision” to cull, expressing concern about the welfare of the minks before they die.
And of course there are the potential public health risks for humans, which require more research but are not farfetched. The bottom line:“We have placed ourselves in this situation where we’re forced to make a choice that we never should have had to make,” Sebo said.
If we decide to keep raising thousands of animals on high-density farms, it’s clear we will keep finding ourselves in terrible and unnecessary moral binds where we have to choose between animal welfare and human welfare. We need to ask ourselves whether the benefit — a fur coat, a cheap cut of meat — is really worth the cost.
Sign up for the Future Perfect newsletter. Twice a week, you’ll get a roundup of ideas and solutions for tackling our biggest challenges: improving public health, decreasing human and animal suffering, easing catastrophic risks, and — to put it simply — getting better at doing good.
On November 3, four American states voted to legalize marijuana: Arizona, New Jersey, Montana, and South Dakota. Combined with the other states that have done so in recent years, one in three Americans now lives in a state where access to marijuana has been legalized. It shows that Americans are souring on the harsh drug policies that have put millions of people in prison.
But America’s national drug policy is a different story. Under federal law, marijuana is still classified as a Schedule 1 drug, meaning it’s considered to have little medical value and a high risk of abuse, along with drugs like LSD, heroin, ecstasy, and psilocybin (the chemical compound in so-called magic mushrooms).
In states where marijuana has been legalized, that conflict with federal law creates numerous problems for legal marijuana sellers and users. Few national politicians talk about legalizing marijuana throughout the country, but advocates are hoping that by introducing new state laws one by one, Americans who are ready to move on from the country’s decades-long war on drugs will eventually force the federal government’s hand.
Yesterday we noted that TikTok had made a filing with the government asking what the fuck was going on with the supposed ban on their application that was supposed to go into effect this week. While a court had issued an injunction saying the Commerce Department couldn't put the ban into effect, the Trump administration basically hadn't said anything since then, and the ban was set to go into effect yesterday.
Late yesterday, the Commerce Department put out a notice basically saying that it's complying with the injunction issued by the court, and therefore not implementing the executive order and the ban:
However, on October 30, 2020, the District Court issued an Order granting the Plaintiffs'
renewed motion for a preliminary injunction. This Order enjoined the Department from
enforcing the Identification and the prohibition on transactions identified in Paragraphs 1-6
above.
The Department is complying with the terms of this Order. Accordingly, this serves as NOTICE
that the Secretary’s prohibition of identified transactions pursuant to Executive Order 13942,
related to TikTok, HAS BEEN ENJOINED, and WILL NOT GO INTO EFFECT, pending
further legal developments
Of course, the Commerce Department saying it won't enforce the order doesn't answer the larger question of whether or not the US government is still demanding that it sell off all of its US assets -- or even whether or not the grifty non-sale to Oracle will suffice.
Basically, highlighting how much of a joke this whole thing was, it seems that the supposed "national security" rationale behind all of this was complete garbage, and since Trump has his hands full trying to pretend he won the election he very clearly lost, everyone's just going to let this slide until the Biden administration comes in and likely drops the executive order altogether. But kudos to Larry Ellison for getting a lucrative hosting deal.
It can be difficult to escape remote work when socially distanced gatherings, exercise, and outdoor dining are closed for the winter.
Justin Lewis/Getty Images
The first pandemic winter might feel especially challenging for those working from home, but building habits now can fend off loneliness and keep up motivation.
With limited interactions throughout the day, microsteps like starting a group chat or scheduling a virtual hangout with friends can significantly improve your mood and help you stay connected.
Other habits like switching up your video calls, mapping out your day, or performing time audits can help you prioritize and stay motivated.
Above all, remember to make a conscious effort to take care of yourself. Set aside time for passion projects, pinpoint and avoid stressors, and do activities that spark joy throughout your day.
In a world reshaped by the pandemic, we've all learned to make adjustments and create new routines to take care of ourselves and be productive. But things are about to get a little harder.
As we slide into our first pandemic winter, many of the outlets we've turned to for relief, connection, and joy will become less accessible. Socially distanced meetups, outdoor exercise, open-air dining — it's all a little more complicated when the temperature drops.
Mental health experts warn that winter during the coronavirus pandemic will pose some unique challenges. Seasonal affective disorder, a form of depression that occurs in the winter months, affects an average of at least 5% of American adults even before you take COVID-19 into account. With the ongoing global health crisis, experts predict even more people will struggle.
But by getting creative, you can take care of yourself and also stay inspired, connected, and productive. At Thrive Global, where I'm head of content development, we recommend microsteps: small, science-backed actions you can start taking immediately to build habits that significantly improve your life. We'll be sharing hundreds of them in our forthcoming book, "Your Time to Thrive: End Burnout, Increase Well-Being, and Unlock Your Full Potential With the New Science of Microsteps," which will be published by Hachette Go in March 2021.
The challenges are interconnected, and so are the solutions. When you take microsteps that support your well-being in your personal life, you're also making an investment in yourself that helps you stay motivated and be more successful at work. (If you're stressed out of your mind, you're not going to be as productive!)
Here are nine microsteps you can take to help you fend off loneliness, find motivation, and prioritize your well-being despite the wintry challenges ahead.
Stay connected
Loneliness, isolation, and the attendant mental health challenges have been major byproducts of the pandemic. For the 35.7 million Americans who live alone, the prospect of a lonely winter may seem particularly bleak. Social connectedness is tied to both our physical and mental health; when we interact and engage with others we experience less stress, more happiness, a stronger immune system, higher motivation to take care of ourselves, and even improved memory and cognitive skills.
It takes a little creativity, but we can start taking small steps to maintain and strengthen our relationships — with both personal and professional benefits.
Microstep 1: Start a group text with friends
Science shows there's power in consistent kinship, even if it's a simple daily "thinking of you" message. Send that silly photo you took of your dog to your college friends or reach out to your old trivia crew when you come across something that reminds you of those geography rounds that always seemed to be your team's downfall. Remind your friends you care, and they'll remind you back.
Microstep 2: Schedule a virtual coffee break with a friend
Social isolation can have powerful negative effects on your health, but spending time with others — even virtually — helps you stay connected. So when you're feeling lonely, put a remote coffee date or catch-up session on the calendar. Or do it preemptively, before you start feeling isolated.
Microstep 3: Ask someone what they're doing to take care of themselves and stay connected to loved ones
Social distancing can make us feel further apart, not just physically but emotionally. Bridge the distance with this simple question — you might learn something, or find you have something in common.
Establish habits that keep you motivated and productive
Those of us who thought working from home would lift us to new heights of productivity, focus, and accomplishment — well, we know how that turned out. Sure, working from home has its perks (goodbye, stressful commute!). But without the guardrails of going into the office and coming home, we've found ourselves in a world of boundaryless permawork — with longer days and more meetings — and are dealing with the burnout that comes with it. Our days are filled with back-to-back Zoom calls, little or no in-person interaction with coworkers, and more distractions at home from partners, kids, pets, and that pile of clothes we absolutely must sort before turning to our next work task.
Even though we're doing more, it can feel like we're getting less done. The endless distractions, coupled with the stress and uncertainty around the pandemic, make it really hard to stay motivated and productive. And it's not some kind of personal failure, it's because of the way our brains are wired. The brain's prefrontal cortex — responsible for critical thinking, decision making, and focus — actually shuts down during times of stress and uncertainty, and the more impulsive, reactive parts take over. According to Amy Arnsten, a neuroscience and psychology professor at Yale, the ongoing danger of the virus can cause a cycle of stress responses that make it hard to concentrate and find motivation, which isn't exactly a boon for our productivity.
Whether we're working from home or going to an office this winter, these microsteps are great for making the most of our time and doing our best work. (And you can read more here about working from home without working all the time.)
Microstep 4: Every morning, write down the top three things you want to accomplish that day
Relentless prioritization is more critical than ever. Give yourself structure and clarity by focusing on three objectives every day — and when they're done, you can declare an end to your work day, knowing you'll come back tomorrow recharged.
Microstep 5: Switch one video meeting to a phone call each day
Research has found that the sustained concentration required in video meetings means back-to-back Zoom calls will quickly tire you out and add stress to your day. Swapping one out for a phone call will give your eyes a break, and you can even pair the screen-free chat with a short walk around the neighborhood (or just around your room) to introduce movement into your day. (Looking for some other alternatives to video meetings? You can find several more here.)
Microstep 6: Do a time audit
At the end of the day, take two minutes to reflect on how you spent your time on work, family, household, and yourself. This exercise is an eye-opening way to look at your use of time and how you might make small improvements.
When I did my own time audit, I realized that my habit of starting each morning by looking at my phone right when I woke up was taking a serious toll. I never liked the feeling I got when I did this, but when the pandemic hit, I realized I was experiencing a palpable spike of anxiety each morning—a shortness of breath that took hours to go away. I was starting the day focused on what was important to others or going down a rabbit hole of stressful news, rather than focusing on what I wanted out of my day.
So I vowed to not check my phone for at least one minute after waking (see...micro!). Instead I decided I would take a few deep breaths and set my intentions for the day, and maybe even wait until I'd taken a shower to unlock my phone. Those quiet moments have become a calm respite for me (no more daily anxiety spike), allowing some creative work ideas to bubble to the surface. And the benefits carry over into the rest of my day in the way I interact with colleagues and what I choose to prioritize.
Make sure you're not forsaking self-care — and fun!
We can't do our best work if we don't take care of ourselves. This might sound obvious, until you consider how our collective definition of success is pretty much synonymous with sacrificing our well-being, celebrating hustle culture and burnout, and generally running ourselves into the ground. But this approach to success wasn't working before the pandemic, and it definitely isn't working now.
So by all means, work hard, chase your ambitions, and be grateful for your opportunities. And know that when you prioritize self-care, you're not stepping away from your goals — you're fueling yourself so you can get where you want to go.
Microstep 7: Set time on your calendar to focus on small passions each week
Make some time in your schedule to do something you love, even if it's just for a few minutes. And stick to it. You wouldn't miss an important meeting or doctor's appointment, so treat this time with the same respect. You'll begin to build the muscle of prioritizing the things that bring you joy.
Play an instrument, paint, write poetry, pull out your favorite video game, try a new recipe, look at the stars — whatever it is that fills you with joy, or purpose, or both. You might feel at first like you're being bad — taking a few minutes for yourself, the horror! But in fact, studies show that pursuing passions outside your work can have benefits for your personal life and your career. (Read more about finding a hobby you love here.)
Microstep 8: Identify one source of negative stress in your day
Before you can solve a problem, you have to name it. Pinpoint just one experience or scenario in your daily life that routinely creates negative stress. Interactions with a certain person? A moment in your day that always seems to be rushed and unpleasant? Once you recognize a pattern, you can begin to take steps to prevent stress from becoming cumulative and unmanageable — like taking a few breaths to reset, clarifying expectations with your colleague whose meetings tend to stress you out, or rearranging your schedule to smooth stressful transitions.
Microstep 9: Do one small thing each morning that brings you joy
How you begin your day can set the tone for the rest of it — so make a conscious effort to do something that will start you off right. It might be meditating, walking, reading while you drink your coffee, making a breakfast you love, or trading stories about weird dreams with your kids. From this foundation, you'll build up strength and resilience for the rest of your day — and the rest of this unusual winter.
Joe Biden has previously said he wants to revoke Section 230, the part of US law that grants tech companies sweeping protections. Trump has also targeted it in the past year.
Both Republicans and Democrats have shown support for reforming Section 230, but for very different reasons.
This could make it extremely difficult for Biden to pass any legislation on Section 230 – unless the Democratic party wins control of the Senate in the Georgia runoffs.
Business Insider spoke to four legal experts about what the future holds for Section 230.
Joe Biden's takeover from President Trump is going to mostly consist of rolling back broad swathes of Trump's agenda, but in one area Biden is weirdly taking up the torch from Trump – repealing the laws that protect Big Tech.
Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act is a part of US law that provides tech companies with two important protections. Firstly, it gives them broad authority to decide how to moderate content on their platforms. Secondly, it shields them from liability for what users post. It has been incredibly influential in giving the Big Tech companies the power they wield today, and has been referred to as "the 26 words that created the internet."
Biden has also voiced support for repealing Section 230, although his focus is on harmful content rather than censorship. In an interview with the New York Times in January, Biden said the law should be "revoked, immediately" and highlighted the way misinformation can spread unchecked on platforms such as Facebook. This week a senior Biden staffer signaled regulating harmful disinformation on Facebook could be a priority for the administration.
If Section 230 is changed at all, it could alter the landscape of the internet as we know it, but Biden will have to untangle the various motivations for reform and repeal, if he is to push through any changes.
Business Insider spoke to four legal experts about what a Biden administration means for the future of Section 230.
It will come down to who controls the Senate
All four experts highlighted that a major hurdle for Biden could be bipartisan division on how exactly to deal with Section 230. Scott Shackelford, associate professor of business law and ethics at Indiana University, said whether Biden will be able to fully unravel Trump's projects and pursue his own agenda depends on the outcome of the Georgia runoffs in January.
"If the Democrats are able to gain control of the upper chamber, then they will be able to use the Congressional Review Act to roll back any new rules passed in the waning months of the Trump administration," he said.
More generally, if the GOP retains control of the Senate, it could make policymaking on Section 230 extremely difficult.
Eric Goldman, a professor at Santa Clara University School of Law, said: "The Democrats and the Republicans disagree deeply about why Section 230 is a problem and how to fix it, and that partisan disagreement makes it hard to predict what reforms can get through."
He added that if the chambers are under the control of different parties, "then only bipartisan proposals have a chance of succeeding, and those will be hard to navigate given the diversity of views about Section 230."
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey appearing on-screen at an October 28 congressional hearing on Section 230.
Greg Nash/Pool via REUTERS TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY
This division was clear to see in the most recent hearing on Section 230, which took place on October 28. CEOs from Facebook, Google, and Twitter all testified before Congress. While Republican lawmakers grilled them on specific instances of perceived anti-conservative bias, Democratic representatives decried the hearing itself and used their time to criticize the GOP.
The issue of harmful content could also be particularly rankling to GOP lawmakers. Shackelford said: "It may be politically challenging to address in a divided government, given the extent to which removing Section 230 would encourage the likes of Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter to err on the side of taking down controversial content, disinformation, and hate speech that is often though certainly not always spread by right-wing groups."
Don't expect anything til January at the earliest
All four experts agreed we won't see any movement on Section 230 until after Biden is inaugurated on January 20, even if Trump decides to double down.
"Even in the most optimistic scenario any final rule will be challenged immediately in court and be put on hold. Plus, any executive action in this context cannot fundamentally change Section 230, not without Congressional action," said Shackelford.
After his inauguration, it's likely that Biden will roll back Trump's May executive order, as it is focused on allegations of anti-conservative censorship rather than harmful content.
Goldman said rescinding the executive order would provide Biden with the most direct route for pursuing his legislative agenda.
June DeHart, an attorney specializing in policymaking proceedings at Manatt law firm, added: "President Biden will issue Executive Orders, as well as work with Congress on legislation and utilize the full toolbox US Presidents have. He very well could roll back the Trump order since he has voiced concern that social media isn't doing enough to stop the spread of misinformation rather than censorship."
Trump may have given Biden something to work with
Richard Lawson, a partner at Gardner Brewer Martinez-Monfort law firm, said Trump's crusade against Section 230 won't be entirely useless to Biden. He believes the groundwork already done by the DOJ could end up being of use to the new administration – specifically a series of recommendations published in June.
"These proposals were carefully developed after extensive review and input from many different perspectives – government, technology, and consumers. This will provide a great starting point even for a Democratic administration to pick up the issue and develop it," Lawson said.
Specifically, he thinks the DOJ's proposals mean reforms to Section 230 could be folded into broader antitrust regulation actions.
"[The DOJ] call for Section 230 to be applicable in federal civil enforcement efforts. This could be viewed to include antitrust efforts from DOJ, as well as consumer protection efforts from the FTC. If that proposal has any legs, you can expect to see efforts to include state attorney general enforcement as well. While a subtle change, this could have massive consequences, so I think you can expect a tremendous amount of opposition from industry on this issue," he said.
Goldman said Biden is also likely to take on Big Tech in a more holistic way than Trump. "Unlike Trump, I don't expect Biden to punitively target individual companies in fits of vindictiveness," he said.
According to DeHart, the one thing we can also expect to see is the Big Tech CEOs being hauled in to answer more questions from Congress.
"I fully expect more hearings on these issues, as opposed to fast action. Section 230 is controversial and Democrats and Republicans come to the issue from different perspectives," she said, pointing to a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing scheduled for November 17 entitled "Breaking the News: Censorship, Suppression, and the 2020 Election."
Organizations need to closely manage multicloud environments so they operate toward a shared mission. Here are five ways to make a multicloud environment more effective.
by ydzhanova@businessinsider.com (Yelena Dzhanova)
A traveler walks past screeners testing a system of thermal imaging cameras which check body temperatures at Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) amid the COVID-19 pandemic on June 24, 2020 in Los Angeles, California.
Several states are tightening restrictions in an attempt to curtail the spread of the coronavirus as millions of Americans are expected to travel and gather for Thanksgiving.
Public-health experts like Dr. Anthony Fauci have said indoor gatherings like the ones that occur during Thanksgiving are likely to easily spread the coronavirus.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation's top infectious disease specialist, said late last month these gatherings are likely to easily spread the coronavirus.
"If you have people like elderly or individuals who are compromised because of underlying conditions, you want to take a couple of steps back and say, is it worth it for this year to bring those people together when you don't know what the status of everybody in that pod that you've created is?" Fauci said in conversation with peer-reviewed journal JAMA.
Guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention encourage people to modify their holiday plans to limit the spread of the coronavirus. The agency has stressed these recommendations are meant to supplement local and state restrictions.
Here are the states that have enacted tighter restrictions in response to surging cases that can affect holiday plans.
Alaska
Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy.
AP Photo/Mark Thiessen
Gov. Mike Dunleavy urged Alaskans to practice social distancing and wear masks ahead of the upcoming holiday.
The state has been reporting high infection rates, particularly among its first responders and front-line workers.
"For the next three weeks, I am asking you as the governor of Alaska, that we do everything possible to reduce these cases and bend this trend downward," he said in a video to Alaskans, according to the Anchorage Daily News.
California
California Gov. Gavin Newsom.
AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli
California Gov. Gavin Newsom issued on November 13 a travel advisory and urged people to avoid non-essential out-of-state travel.
"California just surpassed a sobering threshold — one million COVID-19 cases — with no signs of the virus slowing down," Newsom said in a statement announcing the restriction. "Increased cases are adding pressure on our hospital systems and threatening the lives of seniors, essential workers, and vulnerable Californians. Travel increases the risk of spreading COVID-19, and we must all collectively increase our efforts at this time to keep the virus at bay and save lives."
The advisory also asks those who do travel to quarantine for two weeks upon their return.
Coronavirus cases have been rapidly spiking in California, with hospitalizations increasing at a rate of 30% in recent weeks.
Colorado
Colorado Gov. Jared Polis.
Helen H. Richardson/MediaNews Group/The Denver Post via Getty Images
Colorado Gov. Jared Polis asked residents to limit social interactions beyond their households and continue to wear masks for the next few weeks.
"As hospitalizations increase everyone needs to do better by socializing only with those who you live with, wearing a mask and staying 6 feet apart, so we can get our numbers under control," Polis said in a statement.
Illinois
Illinois Gov. Jay Pritzker.
REUTERS/Kamil Krzaczynski
Illinois Gov. Jay Pritzker urged people to quarantine ahead of the Thanksgiving holiday if they plan to hold a gathering.
"If you're choosing to travel, it is even more important that you take extra caution in the coming weeks," he said on November 12. "If you do choose to have a small in-person Thanksgiving, have every single person more or less quarantine for two weeks prior, which would be today."
The state saw record highs in early November in the number of confirmed coronavirus cases and hospitalizations.
New York
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo.
Scott Heins/Getty Images
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo earlier this week enacted several measures to limit the spread of the coronavirus in the state.
Cuomo said on November 11 that there can no longer be indoor gatherings in private residences with more than 10 people. He also said businesses holding a liquor license and gyms must close by 10 p.m.
"COVID is getting worse by the day," Cuomo tweeted. "All around the country. The fall surge is here. We are taking action but we need New Yorkers to do their part. Wear a mask. Get tested. Follow all health guidelines. Take this seriously."
New Mexico
New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham.
AP Photo/Morgan Lee
New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham said on November 13 that there will be a statewide lockdown in response to surging coronavirus cases.
"New Mexico is at the breaking point," she said in a tweet. "We face a life-or-death situation, & we must & will act to preserve the lives of New Mexicans."
Beginning November 16, residents are instructed to shelter in place and essential businesses can run only at limited capacity.
"We've had every opportunity to preempt this by taking precautions to slow the spread," she tweeted. "But cases and deaths have continued to rise and hospitalizations are at record highs. These steps are difficult but necessary to blunt the spike of serious COVID-19 infections statewide."
North Dakota
North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum.
Stephen Yang/Getty Images
North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum enacted on November 13 a statewide mask mandate and urged residents to limit gatherings ahead of the holidays.
Burgum said masks are required anywhere indoors, as well as outdoors where social distancing is not an option. Bars and restaurants are also limited to working at 50% capacity.
"We believe in North Dakotans," Burgum said. "We believe in the power of individual responsibility. And we need individual responsibility now more than ever to slow the spread of COVID-19."
Oregon Gov. Kate Brown, along with officials in California and Washington, announced a travel advisory to limit the spread of the disease.
The travel advisory discourages out-of-state travel and asks those who do the leave to quarantine for 14 days when they come back.
"If you do not need to travel, you shouldn't," Brown said in a statement. "This will be hard, especially with Thanksgiving around the corner. But the best way to keep your family safe is to stay close to home."
Brown on November 13 announced a "two-week freeze" until December 2, shuttering several indoor facilities and businesses and limiting restaurant service to takeout only.
Vermont
Vermont Gov. Phil Scott.
AP Photo/Wilson Ring
Vermont Gov. Phil Scott said on November 10 that visitors to the state will be required to quarantine and cautioned residents against unnecessary travel.
"If it's just a want, let's hold off on that for a while," Scott said during a press conference.
Individuals who choose to travel to Vermont will have to either quarantine for 14 days or quarantine for seven days and produce negative coronavirus test results.
Washington
Washington Gov. Jay Inslee.
AP Photo/Rachel La Corte
Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, along with the governors of California and Oregon, issued a joint travel advisory in an attempt to drive down cases of the coronavirus in the states.
There have been spikes in the number of confirmed cases in the state for weeks.
"COVID cases have doubled in Washington over the past two weeks. This puts our state in as dangerous a position today as we were in March," Inslee said on November 13. "Limiting and reducing travel is one way to reduce the further spread of the disease. I am happy to partner with California and Oregon in this effort to help protect lives up and down the West Coast."
On November 12, Inslee also encouraged people to avoid gathering in large groups.
by rludacer@businessinsider.com (Rob Ludacer,Jessica Orwig)
Just how deep does the ocean go? Way further than you think.
This animation puts the actual distance into perspective, showing a vast distance between the waves we see and the mysterious point we call Challenger Deep.
An Amazon support member trying to help a subscriber on Twitter was apparently not fully up to speed on world geography when they suggested to the user that Northern Ireland wasn’t part of the United Kingdom.
Chris Jones was tweeting to the AmazonHelp account on Saturday, asking why he wasn’t able to view the Autumn Nations Cup, an international rugby tournament being live-streamed on Amazon Prime. After troubleshooting some possible technical issues, the helper believed they had found the problem: The match was only available to Prime Members in the UK.
Cholula and home tools maker Simplehuman have teamed up to unveil a touch-free Cholula dispenser.
A limited number of dispensers with half-gallon jugs of Cholula will be available to the public for $130 starting December 1, and all proceeds from this flash sale will go to the Independent Restaurant Coalition.
"When restaurant operators began removing Cholula bottles from tabletops amid the pandemic, we needed to develop a solution that could adapt to their new environment," CEO of The Cholula Food Company Maura Mottolese said in a statement.
Hot sauce maker Cholula has partnered with home tools maker Simplehuman to unveil what they call the "world's first" touch-free hot sauce dispenser.
The touchless Cholula dispenser comes at a time in which more fields, especially the restaurant industry, have been exploring alternatives to commonly used and touched items as the coronavirus pandemic continues to rage on in the US.
A limited number of these Cholula dispensers will be available to the public for $130 starting December 1, and all proceeds from this flash sale will go to the Independent Restaurant Coalition.
This flash sale price also includes a half-gallon jug of Cholula that can be used to refill the dispenser.
Cholula and simplehuman's touch-free dispenser.
The dispenser is battery-powered and weighs less than five pounds, which means it can be moved around freely.
Cholula and simplehuman's touch-free dispenser.
The sensor faces up instead of down, like most handsfree soap dispensers do, to make the unit more "intuitive," according to a statement from Simplehuman CEO Frank Yang.
Cholula and simplehuman's touch-free dispenser.
Our survey found that relationships were more likely to get better during the pandemic than worse.
Uwe Krejci/Getty Images
When the pandemic hit, many predicted that economic stress and forced quarantine would break a lot of relationships and marriages.
A recent study by the couples app Paired and The Open University revealed that relationships were more likely to get better than worse during the pandemic.
Hard times can lead us to draw closer to one another.
Kevin Shanahan is the CEO of couples app, Paired.
This is an opinion column. The thoughts expressed are those of the author.
When the pandemic hit, many couples and families were thrust into forced lockdown with one another. Some people foretold the demise of relationships and romance: would pandemic-induced financial stress and emotional turmoil lead to increased bickering, distance, and a divorce boom?
It's an interesting reflex to think that more time together might cause us more relationship problems. Certainly, being together 24 hours a day and absent our outside social support networks has led some couples to break stale or toxic relationships. In Washington, DC, some divorce law firms saw a 70% increase in the volume of calls. Other families are in the process of "restructuring" — not necessarily because the pandemic caused the demise of their relationship, but because it gave them the time and space to make changes that were a long time coming.
While some relationships will certainly end during the pandemic, the reality for most couples might be far less dramatic than we think.
Time spent together might have been just what some people needed.
According to a recent survey conducted by my couples app company Paired, in collaboration with The Open University, many couples are seeing their relationships improve instead of deteriorate. We surveyed approximately 2,800 adults in a relationship in the US and the UK, and found that relationships were more likely to get better during the pandemic than worse in both countries.
Respondents said that they spent more quality time together than usual, gave each other more emotional support, engaged in hobbies together, and split household duties more equally than they had in the past.
In the face of apocalyptic situations, or what we perceive to be "end times", humans want to find someone to brave the storm with. As Galit Atlas, a psychotherapist and professor at New York University, points out, "there is a lot of anxiety about the future right now, about the second wave of Covid…[p]eople talking about civil war and conspiracy theories and fear about the future. I do think that makes people not want to be alone."
Newer relationships were either strengthened or fell apart, while older relationships stayed steady.
Our data showed the pandemic had a polarizing effect on couples depending on the age of the partners and the length of the relationship. In other words, younger couples or those with shorter relationship lifespans were more likely to either strengthen or worsen their relationship during the pandemic, while older couples or those who had been together for a longer period of time were more likely to have a steady relationship quality.
One interpretation of this is that the challenges of the pandemic were more likely to 'make-or-break' newer relationships. For example, moving in together in an haphazard way or not being able to spend time together can either worsen a relationship or prompt people to make extra effort to make things work. Longer and more committed relationships may be more stable in the face of changes.
Even if relationships overall were more likely to improve, this doesn't mean that arguments and uncomfortable conversations haven't happened for couples. With unstable economic conditions, a contagious disease running rampant, and uncertainty over when this will all end, tensions can run high. But along with these strong feelings, other strong emotions can be accessed, too.
A big piece of growing closer together is unearthing feelings that have been suppressed, or discussing the taboo topics we generally skirt around. Dr. Terri Orbuch, professor at Oakland University and research scientist who wrote "5 Simple Steps to Take Your Marriage From Good to Great," found in her ongoing study of 373 couples for over 30 years that, "When couples shared their anxieties, concerns and fears with each other in a constructive manner, rather than let them fester and grow, they were happier in their relationship over time."
We will always remember this era of our lives and will no doubt be changed for it. But that change can also be something that shifts the way we look at those we love and our lives together. Whether that means we stay together —or not — might be the one thing we can thank the pandemic for.
Zoom said earlier this week it would lift its standard 40-minute limit on free video chats for Thanksgiving Day to make it easier to spend time with friends and family virtually on the US holiday. Given spikes in COVID-19 cases nationwide and various new and existing restrictions on interstate travel, this year’s Thanksgiving will be an unprecedented affair likely involving a mix of in-person and virtual hangouts using videoconferencing software like Zoom.
The 40-minute limit has been one of the key restrictions of Zoom’s Basic plan throughout the pandemic, often forcing groups to restart a chat after the time limit is up and causing a fair amount of friction in keeping a conversation or virtual gathering going. Many of Zoom’s...
She's your confidante, rock, mentor, and built-in best friend. She's been there through it all, and now she deserves something special. But coming up with gift ideas for Mom can be one of the hardest tasks. After all, what do you give someone who literally gave you life?
The good news is that the perfect gift for mom is out there, and, best of all, it doesn't have to break the bank to be special. When it comes to Christmas gifts for mom, whether you want to go with something big or small, thoughtfulness is key. That's why we scoured the web and collected unique gifts that show your mom you care, all for under $50.
Pick a gift that embraces nostalgia, mom's favorite hobbies, or some quality time with you - whatever you give, Mom will love it.
Keep reading for 51 Christmas gifts for Mom under $50:
A sip from this adorable floral print teapot is as enjoyable as it is soothing. The stackable teapot lets you savor each taste for longer with the teapot included with a teacup.
There's no better sleepwear to relax in than this plush, velvet robe for the breezy evenings or mornings. This cozy polyester robe brings extreme comfort and warmth whether you're layering or covering up.
A personalized video message from her favorite celebrity
When trying to think of a unique gift for Mom, one that might not immediately come to mind is Cameo. The online service has tons of famous people she might want a personalized video message from. Whether it's for her birthday, Mother's Day, or a different milestone, there's something for everyone on Cameo, with prices as low as $1. You can get Jay Jackson from "Parks and Recreation" or James Cosmo from "Game of Thrones," each for $50 or less.
Though dining out at restaurants is harder right now due to COVID-19, you can still treat mom to her favorite restaurant foods delivered right to her door. From lobster rolls to bagels, Goldbelly ships food gifts from famous eateries nationwide.
This 1,000-piece puzzle has an aesthetically pleasing gradient pattern that's nice to look at, but hard to put together. If mom loves a challenge, she'll enjoy trying to get this one right.
We love this super hydrating, skin-smoothing body lotion. It's filled with nourishing, clean ingredients that will keep dry skin at bay. The sleek packaging and skin-soothing formula are sure to upgrade her post-shower routine.
A streaming stick to up mom's binge-watching experience
Upgrade mom's next Netflix marathon without needing to splurge on a new TV. The Roku Streaming Stick + features 4K, HD, and HDR streaming in a small but mighty package.
These gentle and fluffy towels were made to help her wash off the day's makeup with ease, and the dark navy color hides stains. Choose from three different embroidery options, all of which are adorable.
She may not be able to travel the world, but a Bokksu Box can give Mom a fun cultural experience from the comfort of her own kitchen. The classic gift box is filled with a selection of 20-25 unique Japanese snacks, sourced directly from family-run businesses in Japan, so she can get a little more adventurous at snack time.
For many of us, achieving a salon-quality manicure at home feels impossible. Olive & June is trying to change that. The Poppy is an innovative bottle handle that makes it easy to apply your polish smoothly and evenly. This set has everything Mom needs for an easy, at-home mani: The Poppy, a top coat, and a bottle of Olive & June polish in a sheer shade.
When there's no time for a trip to the spa, this facial steam will upgrade her typical skincare routine. All she has to do is boil some water, steep the dried leaves, and hold her face over the steaming herbs — it'll enhance blood flow and open her pores, so her skin will easily absorb whatever product she puts on next.
A book subscription service for an exciting new read every month
If she's always asking you for new book recommendations, she's going to love this service that curates great books and sends them to subscribers once a month. Each monthly delivery will be an exciting surprise as she discovers a new read she might not have found otherwise. Our editor tried the service herself and loved it.
A bottle of high-quality olive oil is the perfect gift for any mom who enjoys cooking, or just eating great food. Alive from Brightland adds a vibrant, zesty flavor to any dish, and she'll appreciate the beautiful bottle.
Give Mom unlimited access to movies and shows from Disney, Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars, National Geographic, and 20th Century Fox. She'll have more than enough great content for movie marathons at home.
Mom will love these flavor-infused cubes that turn any glass of champagne into an elevated mimosa or bellini. To take it to the next level, add a bottle of bubbly to your gift.
A bag that multitasks as well as she does makes for a great gift. This pouch will keep her little things organized in her purse during the day but can pull double-duty as a clutch come nighttime.
This gift for mom lets her enjoy a good cuppa while also showing her some extra love. Each set contains five English Breakfast, five Earl Grey, and five White Berry teabags.
A smart speaker mom will get a kick out of talking to
Give mom a shirt she can feel good about wearing. When you buy a tee from this collection, Everlane will make a donation to the ACLU — an organization promoting equal rights for all.
Bring some life to their space with this adorable heart-shaped succulent. With little attention needed, it's a great gift for amateur plant parents and experienced ones alike.
A silk eye mask for when mom really needs some sleep
Some things just breed nostalgia. Grafomap will make a custom map of a location of your choice — you can even add personalized labels. Choose the place she grew up, a place where you have fond memories together, or a family favorite vacation spot. It's a great piece of home decor that means something to her, too.
Textured planters that mom can fill with her favorite plants
After all those years taking care of you, caring for her plants is nothing. These planters, which can stay indoors or outdoors, are a pretty and practical way to hold some greenery.
A set of soaps that smell like a bouquet of fresh flowers
There's something so wonderful about the smell of fresh flowers. That mood-lifting smell, combined with all-natural, soothing ingredients, make these soaps a unique and welcomed addition to her bathroom.
Nothing can compare to a gift that she can keep hung up forever as a reminder of the great memories you've shared together — that's what makes this framed photo so special.
Take her back to her favorite place with these nostalgia-inducing candles. Whether it's the scents of spring in New York City like flowers, concrete, and fine department store fragrances, or the salty seaweed, morning coffee, and ocean air of the beach cottage she frequented as a child — these Homesick candles are sure to bring back fond memories.
Ina Garten, the icon of home cooks everywhere, just released a new cookbook — and you know your mom will want to add this one to her shelf. With new recipes and techniques, you might even get to benefit from what she learns with a delicious meal.
These mason jar make growing fresh herbs easy. All she has to do is plant the seeds, add water, place the jars in a sunny spot, and let the herbs grow. It takes little effort on her part, but having fresh herbs will make all the difference in adding flavor to her favorite dishes.
Mom's guac game just got a lot stronger with this molcajete. The mortar and pestle are made of volcanic stone to grind out everything to the perfect texture — so she can claim the title of best dip on the table.
A pair of plush slippers she can wear in and out of the house
Chances are, she was the one telling you to eat your vegetables growing up — but that doesn't mean you can't share the same sentiment for her with this spiralizer, which can grate, slice, spiralize, and shred her favorite vegetables for all different kinds of uses.
Whether she wants to show her rings off or make sure she doesn't lose them, these little animals do the trick. They look super cute as a piece of decor, but are undoubtedly practical. You could even pair these with a cute ring to start.
A bath caddy with room for everything she might need
The only thing that could make a bath more relaxing than some luxurious bubbles is this bathtub caddy. It can hold everything she needs — a device so she can watch her favorite show, a glass full of her favorite drink, and even a candle she can light for ambiance.
A fitting diffuser for the tastemaker of your house
With a variety of shapes and sizes, S'well vacuum insulated water bottles do a great job of keeping all kinds of beverages hot (for 12 hours) or cold (for 24 hours). They come in a bunch of fun colors and patterns, which makes using a reusable water bottle a lot more fun.
There's a reason flowers are a classic — bursting with color and lovely scents, they bring life to every space. The Bouqs is one of our favorite places to order flowers online for their wide variety of vibrant, fresh arrangements to choose from.
This cozy throw is something she'll want to snuggle up with all winter long, and then some. It's not too heavy, so it's great for all times of year, but this super plush faux fur is just what she needs for your family movie marathons over the holidays.
Pretty and practical — what could be better? Mom will love keeping her favorite books sandwiched between these sturdy concrete vases which she can fill with her favorite flowers.
A fun game that your whole family will crack up playing
Amazon
What Do You Meme?, $29.99, available at Target and Walmart
She might not even know what a meme is, but there's no doubt she'll be laughing for hours creating funny memes with this card game. It's perfect for a family game night, but if you family members who err on the much younger side, go for something a little more PG.
She insists on keeping the corks from some of her favorite wines, so give her somewhere to actually show them off. This state-shaped display board turns her keepsake wine corks into a piece of art worthy of being seen.
Whether it's her own initials, you and your siblings' first names, or any other combinations of letters that matter to her — this necklace is a little but thoughtful way to keep those important to her close.
From a grocery bag to a work bag, this canvas tote can do it all. It can fit a 15-inch laptop and has adjustable straps so she'll be comfortable carrying it around all day.
A subscription that lets her discover new beauty products
Birchbox is a subscription service that sends a box full of five makeup and skincare samples for her to use each month. It's easy to buy full-size versions on the site, in case she falls in love with any one product and wants more. Plus, it'll be exciting for her to receive the beauty surprises each month.
A convenient charging port for her most-used devices
She has an iPad, Air Pods, and Apple Watch — it might seem like there's nothing else you could get your Apple-loving mom. This is a great gift for loyal Apple fans — it's a three-in-one charging hub that looks much nicer than an average extension cord, and it'll fit all of her devices perfectly.
A custom phone case made with a collage of family photos
There's nothing she loves more than family, so let her show it off every day with a personalized phone case. Upload some of your favorite family photos to put on this super cute case — there are plenty of options for different layouts and cases for all kinds of smartphones.
Work Mom's brain with this sentimental and interactive gift. Pick a special date (birthday, anniversary, etc.), and it'll be turned into a puzzle made of the actual front page of The New York Times from that day.
This chic mug will instantly transport Mom to her favorite cafe, sipping on a cappuccino while trying to figure out how to rotate her camera as she's FaceTiming you. Choose the first letter of her name, or better yet, choose yours.
The United Parcel Service (UPS) has overturned its longstanding facial hair ban for public-facing workers.
From now on, staff are allowed to wear beards and mustaches. Hairstyles such as Afros and braids are also allowed — previously, male employees had to keep their hair short.
UPS has also removed gender-specific appearance policies.
UPS revised the policy following staff feedback as part of a drive to "celebrate diversity" within the company.
For years, the United Parcel Service (UPS) has banned beards and prohibited male employees from having long hair as part of its strict appearance policies.
Now, the delivery company has relaxed some of its harshest rules as part of its efforts to recognize staff diversity.
UPS has lifted its ban on facial hair for public-facing roles such as delivery drivers, and is explicitly allowing hairstyles "such as afros, braids, curls, coils, locs, twists and knots," The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday after accessing an internal website announcement.
Previously, male staff had to keep their hair short.
UPS confirmed the accuracy of the report to Business Insider.
The company, which has 500,000 employees globally, has also removed all its gender-specific appearance rules, it said.
But rules on piercings — which must be small and look "businesslike" — and a ban on visible tattoos still apply.
The new rules are part of a wider drive at the company to "celebrate diversity rather than corporate restrictions," it said.
Facial hair such as beards and mustaches are now allowed "as long as they are worn in a business-like manner and don't create a safety concern", the documents said.
"These changes reflect our values and desire to have all UPS employees feel comfortable, genuine and authentic while providing service to our customers and interacting with the general public," UPS told Business Insider.
Previously, public-facing UPS workers were only allowed to have a beard for medical or religious reasons, known as "shaver waivers."
UPS revised policies come shortly after it hired its first female chief executive, Carol Tomé, in May.
She acted on feedback from employees that they would be more likely to recommend UPS as an employer if it relaxed its strict appearance policy, the company told Business Insider.
Apple has released the first of its new Macs with the company’s custom-designed M1 Arm processor. But you’d never know it by looking at the new MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, or Mac mini, which all look virtually identical to their Intel-based predecessors.
And that decision feels like a deliberate one. Apple made some big internal changes here, including a new logic board and a fully integrated system-on-a-chip (SoC) that replaces most of the discrete components within these new Macs. It would have been relatively easy to introduce more substantial external changes along with it.
The new Macs are still, well, Macs
The fact that Apple didn’t make changes speaks to the way Apple wants you to perceive these computers. The hardware may be new,...
McDonald's is testing new drive-thru concepts and streamlining designs, the fast-food giant said on a recent investor call.
McDonald's will test different drive-thru concepts that let customers order through the new MyMcDonald's app, skip lines, park in special pickup spaces, and some restaurants will be delivery and takeout only. The company says that the concepts could be tested in as many as 10,000 stores in the coming year.
Drive-thru orders have grown across the fast-food industry since the pandemic closed many dining rooms, and McDonald's has been quietly working to shorten wait times since March. During COVID, McDonald's says that 70% of sales in top markets are drive-thru orders. By October, wait times had dropped 20 seconds over the quarter. McDonald's is already a drive-thru heavy hitter, with 25,000 worldwide, with plans for "increasing the speed of service … making it more personal… making it more convenient" McDonald's head of digital customer engagement Lucy Brady said on the call.
Along with increasing drive-thru efficiency and simplifying the menu, McDonald's introduced new packaging that will rollout to every restaurant in the next two years, for what it says will be a consistent look, "so no matter where you are in the world, you can spot the same bag," the company said in a press release.
Take a look at the new packaging and drive-thru concepts here.
McDonald's introduced a packaging "refresh" across the chain.
McDonald's packaging.
McDonald's
The new packaging is "modern, fresh and fun" according to McDonald's in bright colors with simple patterns that nod to what's inside the containers.
McDonald's packaging.
McDonald's
For example the Filet-O-Fish will come in the typical sandwich container, but decorated with blue waves.
McDonald's packaging.
McDonald's
"Simple, bold graphics that nod to our world famous menu items are combined with a playful wink to whatever tasty item is inside. Think melting cheese drips on a Quarter Pounder with Cheese box" McDonald's said in a statement.
McDonald's packaging.
McDonald's
Bubbles on cups for cold drinks have the same effect.
McDonald's packaging.
McDonald's
The new packaging is planned to roll out across all McDonald's over the next two years.
McDonald's packaging.
McDonald's
McDonald's restaurant will see some changes, too with drive thru concept tests.
McDonald's.
McDonald's
On-the-go restaurants will be focused on takeout and delivery orders, with little or no seating and smaller footprints than regular restaurants.
McDonald's drive thru concept.
McDonald's
Express drive thrus will add extra lanes for customers who ordered food through the app.
McDonald's drive thru concept.
McDonald's
McDonald's says the food may even come to the car via a conveyer belt.
McDonald's drive thru concept.
McDonald's
Dedicated parking spaces for fast pickup orders will also be tested.
McDonald's drive thru concept.
Image: Google
A man wearing a mask crosses a road with the US flag behind him in New York City on May 29, 2020. | Alexi Rosenfeld/Getty Images
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Audiences get an inside glimpse into teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg’s life in I Am Greta. | Hulu
When minks are bred for their pelts — which are used to make fur coats and accessories — they are confined in small cages for their entire lives. They cannot engage in natural behaviors like roaming territories, digging, or swimming. | Getty Images
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
