Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Manuel Augusto Moreno)
Google has agreed to pay Canadian news businesses $100 million a year to comply with the country's Online News Act, despite previously saying it would remove Canadian news links from search rather than make the required payments.
Google and government officials agreed to a deal that lets Google negotiate with a single news collective and reduce its overall financial obligation. Facebook owner Meta is meanwhile holding firm in its opposition to payments.
"Google will contribute $100 million in financial support annually, indexed to inflation, for a wide range of news businesses across the country, including independent news businesses and those from Indigenous and official-language minority communities," Minister of Canadian Heritage Pascale St-Onge said in a statement today.
A chemical manufacturing facility in Wisconsin has drawn the ire of the Food and Drug Administration for making hand sanitizer with the same equipment it uses to make products with toxic industrial solvents and chemicals, such as automotive brake parts cleaner. The practice is a clear violation of manufacturing standards and could lead to harmful cross-contamination, the FDA said.
The agency sent a warning letter dated October 26 to the maker of the hand sanitizer, Brenntag Great Lakes, LLC, in Wisconsin. The letter, which redacted the name of the hand sanitizer, stated that the agency had found "significant violations" in an inspection in the spring and that the company's responses since then were "inadequate."
Toxic hand sanitizers became an alarming problem in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, when demand for the germ-fighting gels skyrocketed and manufacturers rushed products to market. Hundreds of products that flooded the market were found to contain methanol, a toxic alcohol that can cause harm via inhalation, ingestion, and skin absorption. Use of the products leads to poisoning, blindness, and even death, the FDA reported.
The US could be up to two decades away from maintaining its own domestic chips supply chain, Nvidia Corp.'s CEO, Jensen Huang, told an audience gathered in New York for the New York Times’s DealBook conference.
Nvidia is a giant in the semiconductor industry, and Huang said his company's success depends on "myriad components that come from different parts of the world," Bloomberg reported. "Not just Taiwan," Huang said, where Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing company makes the world's most advanced semiconductor technology.
“We are somewhere between a decade and two decades away from supply chain independence,” Huang said. “It’s not a really practical thing for a decade or two.”
Widely accepted wisdom has it that electric vehicles are easier to maintain than those with internal combustion powertrains. It seems intuitive—EVs have many fewer moving parts than cars that have to detonate small quantities of hydrocarbon fuel thousands of times a minute. But the data don't really bear out the idea. In fact, according to data collected by Consumer Reports, EVs are significantly less reliable than conventionally powered cars.
CR is known for buying cars for its own test fleet, but for its annual auto reliability survey, the organization cast a wider net. Specifically, it gathered data from 330,000 owners of vehicles from model year 2000 onwards, and it uses that survey data to generate reliability scores for each vehicle and model year.
The results are a little inconvenient for the EV evangelist. EVs had 79 percent more reliability problems than a gasoline- or diesel-powered vehicle, on average. Plug-in hybrids fared even worse; these had 146 percent more issues on average than the conventional alternative. But simpler not-plug-in hybrids bucked this trend, with 26 percent fewer reliability problems than conventionally powered vehicles.
Enlarge / Democratic Senators Joe Manchin (Left) and Debbie Stabenow (Right) don't exactly see eye to eye on the auto industry's transition to electric vehicles. (credit: Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)
The new and somewhat-complicated rules governing which cars do or don't qualify for the new clean vehicle tax credit look like they might get tweaked a little in the near future.
Before, the tax credit was linked to the battery-storage capacity of a plug-in hybrid or battery-electric vehicle. But the Inflation Reduction Act changed that—now a range of conditions must be met, including final assembly in North America and an annually increasing percentage of locally sourced minerals and components within that battery pack.
On the one hand, the domestic sourcing requirements are beneficial because they are stimulating the development of local battery mineral refining and manufacturing here in the United States, adding well-paying jobs in the process. But the new rules have also significantly reduced the number of EVs that qualify.
Enlarge / The Ekobot autonomous weeding robot roving around an onion field in Sweden. (credit: Ekobot AB)
Anybody who has pulled weeds in a garden knows that it's a tedious task. Scale it up to farm-sized jobs, and it becomes a nightmare. The most efficient industrial alternative, herbicides, have potentially devastating side effects for people, animals, and the environment. So a Swedish company named Ekobot AB has introduced a wheeled robot that can autonomously recognize and pluck weeds from the ground rapidly using metal fingers.
The four-wheeled Ekobot WEAI robot is battery-powered and can operate 10–12 hours a day on one charge. It weighs 600 kg (about 1,322 pounds) and has a top speed of 5 km/h (2.5 mph). It's tuned for weeding fields full of onions, beetroots, carrots, or similar vegetables, and it can cover about 10 hectares (about 24.7 acres) in a day. It navigates using GPS RTK and contains safety sensors and vision systems to prevent it from unintentionally bumping into objects or people.
To pinpoint plants it needs to pluck, the Ekobot uses an AI-powered machine vision system trained to identify weeds as it rolls above the farm field. Once the weeds are within its sights, the robot uses a series of metal fingers to quickly dig up and push weeds out of the dirt. Ekobot claims that in trials, its weed-plucking robot allowed farmers to grow onions with 70 percent fewer herbicides. The weed recognition system is key because it keeps the robot from accidentally digging up crops by mistake.
Sam Altman, the poster boy for AI, was ousted from his company OpenAI. | Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images
The alternative — a mass exodus of OpenAI’s top talent to Microsoft — would have been worse.
The seismic shake-up at OpenAI — involving the firing and, ultimately, the reinstatement of CEO Sam Altman — came as a shock to almost everyone. But the truth is, the company was probably always going to reach a breaking point. It was built on a fault line so deep and unstable that eventually, stability would give way to chaos.
That fault line was OpenAI’s dual mission: to build AI that’s smarter than humanity, while also making sure that AI would be safe and beneficial to humanity. There’s an inherent tension between those goals because advanced AI could harm humans in a variety of ways, from entrenching bias to enabling bioterrorism. Now, the tension in OpenAI’s mandate appears to have helped precipitate the tech industry’s biggest earthquake in decades.
On Friday, the board fired Altman over an alleged lack of transparency, and company president Greg Brockman then quit in protest. On Saturday, the pair tried to get the board to reinstate them, but negotiations didn’t go their way. By Sunday, both had accepted jobs with major OpenAI investor Microsoft, where they would continue their work on cutting-edge AI. By Monday, 95 percent of OpenAI employees were threatening to leave for Microsoft, too.
Late Tuesday night, OpenAI announced, “We have reached an agreement in principle for Sam Altman to return to OpenAI as CEO with a new initial board.”
As chaotic as all this was, the aftershocks for the AI ecosystem might have been scarier if the shake-up had ended with a mass exodus of OpenAI employees,as it appeared poised to do a few days ago. A flow of talent from OpenAI to Microsoft would have meant a flow from a company that had been founded on worries about AI safety to a company that can barely be bothered to pay lip service to the concept.
So at the end of the day, did OpenAI’s board make the right decision when it fired Altman? Or did it make the right decision when it rehired him?
The answer may well be “yes” to both.
OpenAI’s board did exactly what it was supposed to do: Protect the company’s integrity
OpenAI is not a typical tech company. It has a unique structure, and that structure is key to understanding the current shake-up.
The company was originally founded as a nonprofit focused on AI research in 2015. But in 2019, hungry for the resources it would need to create AGI — artificial general intelligence, a hypothetical system that can match or exceed human abilities — OpenAI created a for-profit entity. That allowed investors to pour money into OpenAI and potentially earn a return on it, though their profits would be capped, according to the rules of the new setup, and anything above the cap would revert to the nonprofit. Crucially, the nonprofit board retained the power to govern the for-profit entity. That included hiring and firing power.
The board’s job was to make sure OpenAI stuck to its mission, as expressed in its charter, which states clearly, “Our primary fiduciary duty is to humanity.” Not to investors. Not to employees. To humanity.
The charter also states, “We are concerned about late-stage AGI development becoming a competitive race without time for adequate safety precautions.” But it also paradoxically states, “To be effective at addressing AGI’s impact on society, OpenAI must be on the cutting edge of AI capabilities.”
This reads a lot like: We’re worried about a race where everyone’s pushing to be at the front of the pack. But we’ve got to be at the front of the pack.
Each of those two impulses found an avatar in one of OpenAI’s leaders. Ilya Sutskever, an OpenAI co-founder and top AI researcher, reportedly worried that the company was moving too fast, trying to make a splash and a profit at the expense of safety. Since July, he’s co-led OpenAI’s “Superalignment” team, which aims to figure out how to manage the risk of superintelligent AI.
Altman, meanwhile, was moving full steam ahead. Under his tenure, OpenAI did more than any other company to catalyze an arms race dynamic, most notably with the launch of ChatGPT last November. More recently, Altman was reportedly fundraisingwith autocratic regimes in the Middle East like Saudi Arabia so he could spin up a new AI chip-making company. That in itself could raise safety concerns, since such regimes might use AI to supercharge digital surveillance or human rights abuses.
We still don’t know exactly why the OpenAI board fired Altman. The board has said that he was “not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities.” Sutskever, who spearheaded Altman’s ouster, initially defended the move in similar terms: “This was the board doing its duty to the mission of the nonprofit, which is to make sure that OpenAI builds AGI that benefits all of humanity,” he told employees at an all-hands meeting hours after the firing. (Sutskever later flipped sides, however, and said he regretted participating in the ouster.)
“Sam Altman and Greg Brockman seem to be of the view that accelerating AI can achieve the most good for humanity. The plurality of the[old]board, however, appears to be of a different view that the pace of advancement is too fast and could compromise safety and trust,” said Sarah Kreps, director of the Tech Policy Institute at Cornell University.
“I think that the board made the only decision they felt like they could make” in firing Altman, AI expert Gary Marcus told me. “I think they saw something from Sam that they thought they could not live with and stay true to their mission. So in their eyes, they made the right choice.”
Before OpenAI agreed to reinstate Altman, Kreps worried that“the board may have won the battle but lost the war.”
In other words, if the board fired Altman in part over concerns that his accelerationist impulse was jeopardizing the safety part of OpenAI’s mission, it won the battle, in that it did what it could to keep the company true to the mission.
But had the saga ended with the coup pushing OpenAI’s top talent straight into the arms of Microsoft, the board would have lost the larger war — the effort to keep AI safe for humankind. Which brings us to …
The AI risk landscape would probably be worse if Altman had stayed fired
Altman’s firing caused an unbelievable amount of chaos. According to futurist Amy Webb, the CEO of the Future Today Institute, OpenAI’s board had failed to practice “strategic foresight” — to understand how its sudden dismissal of Altman might cause the company to implode and might reverberate across the larger AI ecosystem. “You have to think through the next-order implications of your actions,” she told me.
It’s certainly possible that Sutskever did not predict the threat of a mass exodus that could have ended OpenAI altogether. But another board member behind the ouster, Helen Toner — whom Altman had castigated over a paper she co-wrote that appeared to criticize OpenAI’s approach to safety — did understand that was a possibility. And it was a possibility she was prepared to stomach, if that was what would best safeguard humanity’s interests — which, remember, was the board’s job. She said that if the company was destroyed as a result of Altman’s firing, that could be consistent with its mission, the New York Times reported.
However, once Altman and Brockman announced they were joining Microsoft and the OpenAI staff threatened a mass exodus, too, that may have changed the board’s calculation: Keeping them in house was arguably better than this new alternative. Sending them straight into Microsoft’s arms would probably not bode well for AI safety.
After all, Microsoft laid off its entire AI ethics team earlier this year. When Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella teamed up with OpenAI to embed its GPT-4 into Bing search in February, he taunted competitor Google: “We made them dance.” And upon hiring Altman, Nadella tweeted that he was excited for the ousted leader to set “a new pace for innovation.”
Pushing out Altman and OpenAI’s top talent would have meant that “OpenAI can wash its hands of any responsibility for any possible future missteps on AI development but can’t stop it from happening,” Kreps said. “The developments show just how dynamic and high-stakes the AI space has become, and that it’s impossible either to stop or contain the progress.”
Impossible may be too strong a word. But containing the progress would require changing the underlying incentive structure in the AI industry, and that has proven extremely difficult in the context of hyper-capitalist, hyper-competitive, move-fast-and-break-things Silicon Valley. Being at the cutting edge of tech development is what earns profit and prestige, but that does not lend itself to slowing down, even when slowing down is strongly warranted.
Under Altman, OpenAI tried to square this circle by arguing that researchers need to play with advanced AI to figure out how to make advanced AI safe — so accelerating development is actually helpful. That was tenuous logic even a decade ago, but it doesn’t hold up today, when we’ve got AI systems so advanced and so opaque (think: GPT-4) that many experts say we need to figure out how they work before we build more black boxes that are even more unexplainable.
OpenAI had also run into a more prosaic problem that made it susceptible to taking a profit-seeking path: It needed money. To run large-scale AI experiments these days, you need a ton of computing power — more than 300,000 times what you needed a decade ago — and that’s incredibly expensive. So to stay at the cutting edge, it had to create a for-profit arm and partner with Microsoft. OpenAI wasn’t alone in this: The rival company Anthropic, which former OpenAI employees spun up because they wanted to focus more on safety, started out by arguing that we need to change the underlying incentive structure in the industry, but it ended up joining forces with Amazon.
Given all this, is it even possible to build an AI company that advances the state of the art while also truly prioritizing ethics and safety?
“It’s looking like maybe not,” Marcus said.
Webb was even more direct, saying, “I don’t think it’s possible.” Instead, she emphasized that the government needs to change the underlying incentive structure within which all these companies operate. That would include a mix of carrots and sticks: positive incentives, like tax breaks for companies that prove they’re upholding the highest safety standards; and negative incentives, like regulation.
In the meantime, the AI industry is a Wild West, where each company plays by its own rules. OpenAI lives to play another day.
Update, November 22, 11:30 am ET: This story was originally published on November 21 and has been updated to reflect Altman’s reinstatement at OpenAI.
Enlarge / Google is looking pretty dilapidated these days. (credit: Aurich Lawson)
Chrome's new adblock-limiting extension plan is still on. The company paused the rollout of the new "Manifest V3" extension format a year ago after an outcry over how much it would damage some of Chrome's most popular extensions. A year later, Google is restarting the phase-out schedule, and while it has changed some things, Chrome will eventually be home to inferior filtering extensions.
Google's blog post says the plan to kill Manifest V2, the current format for Chrome extensions, is back on starting June 2024. On that date (we'll be on "Chrome 127" by then), Google will turn off Manifest V2 for the pre-stable versions of Chrome—that's the Beta, Dev, and Canary channels. Google says, "Manifest V2 extensions [will be] automatically disabled in their browser and will no longer be able to install Manifest V2 extensions from the Chrome Web Store."
The timeline around a stable channel rollout is worded kind of strangely. The company says: "We expect it will take at least a month to observe and stabilize the changes in pre-stable before expanding the rollout to stable channel Chrome, where it will also gradually roll out over time. The exact timing may vary depending on the data collected, and during this time, we will keep you informed about our progress." It's unclear what "data" Google is concerned with. It's not the end of the world if an extension crashes—it turns off and stops working until the user reboots the extension. Maybe the company is concerned about how many people Google "Firefox" once their ad-blocker stops working.
Sam Altman is back at OpenAI. What happens to its safety mission?
So, OpenAI had a weird week. The hottest company in tech just saw the removal, replacement, and reinstatement of its superstar CEO, Sam Altman in the span of five days. It also saw, as a result of that Altman drama, the removal and replacement of most of its board of directors. In the middle of this, almost every OpenAI employee threatened to quit, the company cycled through two interim CEOs, Microsoft set up a new Altman-led AI arm of its own, and we all faced the very real possibility that the $80 billion company behind ChatGPT would completely implode.
And we still don’t really know why.
The chaos started on November 17, when the OpenAI board announced Altman’s termination, kicking off several days of negotiations to bring him back, as was the desire of the company’s employees and its main investor, Microsoft. On November 22, OpenAI announced that Altman would indeed be returning as CEO, and most of the board that voted to fire him was being replaced.
This is not, suffice to say, how CEO firings traditionally play out. But OpenAI isn’t a traditional company. It became a Silicon Valley success story in a time when the industry was seen as largely stagnant. In the past year, thousands have been laid off at tech companies that have only ever known growth. Then along came generative AI and ChatGPT, new technology that is cool and exciting to everyone from the average consumer to one of the most valuable companies in the world. One of them, Microsoft, eagerly hitched its wagon to OpenAI and to Altman, who became the poster boy of the billion-dollar AI revolution.
OpenAI, as the leading developer of the technology that could shape how (or if) we live in the future, was shaping up to be one of the most important companies in the world. For a few days there, it looked like we were witnessing the effective end of that company. Now, however, order seems to have been restored.
That still leaves some big questions unanswered. Again, we still don’t know why OpenAI’s previous board made the extreme decision to remove Altman — nor do we know if their concerns with Altman were alleviated before he came back. And now that there’s a new board in place, one that includes a former Meta executive and a former treasury secretary, it’s hard to predict exactly what OpenAI does next.
Why did Sam Altman get fired?
The short answer: It’s still unclear. Altman seems to have no idea what happened, and the board has said very little, publicly, about its reasoning beyond that it didn’t trust Altman anymore. It’s also, reportedly, refused to say much privately. It appears there were fundamental differences between the (now former) board’s vision for AI, which included carrying out that mission of safety and transparency, and Altman’s vision, which, apparently, was not that.
How did Altman come back when the board was so determined to get rid of him?
Well, that board no longer exists, for one. As part of the deal to bring Altman back, most of its members were replaced, presumably with people Altman wants to be there and who share his vision. Those new members are former Salesforce CEO Bret Taylor, who will serve as its chair, and economist Larry Summers. Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo will remain on, the only member of the previous board to stick around. As this was described by OpenAI as an ”initial” board, we will almost certainly get a few additions in time. Including, perhaps, Altman, who was on OpenAI’s original board, and someone from Microsoft.
Departing board members are Ilya Sutskever, who co-founded OpenAI and is it chief scientist, tech entrepreneur Tasha McCauley; and Helen Toner, Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology’s director of strategy and foundational research grants. Toner, reportedly, had an especially frosty relationship with Altman because she co-authored a research paper that he saw as critical of OpenAI. Toner’s public comment so far is that she’s looking forward to getting some sleep.
More than a fewpeoplehavenoted that, aside from Sutskever (who made his change of heart known and still works at OpenAI), the only board members who were removed happen to be women — and they’ve been replaced with two white men. The optics aren’t great here, but, again, we’ll likely get additional members soon who may well be people who aren’t white men.
Perhaps more importantly, as far as Altman and the investors who pushed for the board to be revamped are concerned, is that the board is now made up of people with tech board and business experience. D’Angelo and Taylor both were chief technology officers at Facebook, for one, and Taylor was the chair of Twitter’s board until Elon Musk took over. As for Summers, he’s currently the director of the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government at Harvard, where he’s previously served as its president, and has held prominent positions in the Clinton (secretary of the treasury) and Obama (director of the National Economic Council) administrations. He’s also seen as someone who is very tech-business-friendly and would never dream of putting safety before profit.
How did Sam Altman, the boy wonder of AI, become a controversial figure?
Before Altman headed up OpenAI, he was the CEO of the influential startup accelerator Y Combinator, so he was well known in certain Silicon Valley circles. Altman was also a co-founder of OpenAI, and as the company started to be seen as the leader of a new technological revolution, he put himself forward as its youthful, press-friendly ambassador. As CEO, he went on an AI world tour, rubbing elbows with and winning over world leaders and telling various governments, including Congress and the Biden administration, how best to regulate this transformative technology — in ways that were very much advantageous to OpenAI and therefore Altman.
Altman often says that his company’s products could contribute to the end of humanity itself. Not many CEOs (at least, of companies that don’t make weapons) humblebrag about how potentially dangerous their business’s products are. That could be seen as a CEO being refreshingly honest, even if it makes his company look bad. It could also be seen as a CEO saying that his company is one of the most important and powerful things in the world, and you should trust him to lead it because he cares that much about all of us.
If you see generative AI as an enormously beneficial tool for humanity, you’re probably a fan of Altman. If you’re concerned about how the world will change when generative AI starts to replace human jobs and presumably becomes more and more powerful, you may not like Altman very much.
Simply put, Altman has made himself the face of AI, and people have responded accordingly.
And how did OpenAI get to be such a big deal?
OpenAI was founded in 2015, but it’s never been your average Silicon Valley startup. For one, it had the backing of many prominent tech people, including Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman, and Elon Musk, who is also credited as being one of its co-founders. Second, OpenAI was founded as a nonprofit. Its mission was not to move as quickly as possible to make as much money as possible, but rather to research and develop a technology with enormous transformative potential that therefore needed to be done safely, responsibly, and transparently: AI with the ability to learn and think for itself, also known as artificial general intelligence, or AGI. In order to do so, the company would need to develop generative AI, or AI that can learn from massive amounts of data and generate content upon request.
A few years later, OpenAI needed money. Altman took over as CEO in 2019. Around that time, it established a “capped profit” arm, allowing investors to get up to 100 times a return on what they put into it. The rest of the profit — if there was any — would go back into OpenAI’s nonprofit. The company was still governed by a board of directors charged with carrying out that nonprofit mission, but the board was pretty much the only thing left of OpenAI’s nonprofit origins.
OpenAI released some of its generative AI products into the world in 2022, giving everyone a chance to experiment with them. People were impressed, and OpenAI was seen as the leader in a burgeoning industry. Thanks to $13 billion of investments from Microsoft, OpenAI has been able to develop and market its services, giving Microsoft access to the new technologies along the way. Microsoft pinned a large part of its future on AI, and with its investment in OpenAI, established a partnership with the most prominent and seemingly advanced company in the field. And OpenAI’s valuation grew by leaps and bounds.
Meanwhile, Altman emerged as the leader of the AI movement because he was the head of the leading AI company, a role he has embraced. He has extolled the virtues of AI (and OpenAI) to world leaders. He says regulation is important, lest his company become too powerful (only to balk when regulation actually happens). And along the way, he has become one of the most powerful people in tech, if not beyond. Which is part of why his abrupt termination as CEO of OpenAI was such a shock.
If Altman was otherwise so popular, what was the OpenAI board so upset about?
Removing Altman could have amounted to a huge, potentially company-destroying deal, so you’d think there’d be a very good reason the OpenAI board decided to do it. It has yet to tell us what that reason is.
The board has the authority to remove its CEO with a majority vote. Altman and OpenAI co-founder and president Greg Brockman were on that board — Brockman was its chair — but clearly not involved in the vote for their own ouster from it.
The board said in a statement that its decision was the result of a “deliberative review process by the board, which concluded that [Altman] was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities. The board no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI.”
So, yeah, that’s a little vague. For what it’s worth, Emmett Shear, who briefly served as OpenAI’s interim CEO during all of this, tweeted that “the board did *not* remove Sam over any specific disagreement on safety, their reasoning was completely different from that. I’m not crazy enough to take this job without board support for commercializing our awesome models.”
We do have some reporting that Altman and the board hadn’t gotten along for a while now, much of this due to the release and massive success of ChatGPT. OpenAI suddenly became one of the hottest tech companies and moved quickly to capitalize on that. That’s what a for-profit startup does — not a nonprofit, which, again, OpenAI supposedly was.
Altman hasn’t said anything publicly about why he was removed, and it’s beyond belief that he had no idea that there were tensions. Brockman, who resigned in solidarity with Altman, said that he and Altman were “shocked and saddened.” Presumably, more will come out in time about the board’s reasoning for firing Altman. According to the New York Times, there will be an “independent investigation” into Altman as part of the former board’s deal to bring him back.
Given OpenAI’s mission to develop safe and responsible AI, there are fears that Altman was driving the development of unsafe and irresponsible AI and that the board felt it had to put a stop to it. But, again, we don’t yet know if those fears are founded.
What happened after Altman got fired? OpenAI got a new CEO and everyone was happy?
During the five days when Altmas was not CEO, OpenAI actually got two interim CEOs and, it seems, almost no one was happy about any of it.
When the board announced Altman’s departure, it said that chief technology officer Mira Murati would be its interim CEO. In the next few days, many of OpenAI’s employees openly revolted, and the board was reported to be desperately trying to get Altman back, with Microsoft very much pressuring them to do so. But then Shear, who is Twitch’s co-founder and former CEO, announced that he was OpenAI’s CEO. Not Murati, and not Altman.
It didn’t seem like he’d have much to oversee, with most of OpenAI’s employees threatening to quit if Altman and Brockman weren’t reinstated and the current board didn’t leave. Murati was the first signee. Several prominent OpenAI employees also tweeted that “OpenAI is nothing without its people,” which Altman quote-tweeted with a single heart. Sutskever was also a signatory of the letter. He has since tweeted that “I deeply regret my participation in the board’s actions.” (Which earned him a three-heart quote tweet from Altman — no hard feelings!)
With Altman back at the helm, it appears that most of the order has been restored. Brockman is also back and tweeted a photo of himself with many OpenAI employees, all looking quite happy about everything.
How did the rest of Silicon Valley respond to the drama? Do people still think Altman should be running OpenAI?
Sam Altman is a very wealthy, very well-connected entrepreneur-turned-investor who was also running the most exciting tech startup in years. So it’s not surprising that once the news of his firing broke, the tech industry’s narrative quickly became one about the OpenAI board’s ineptitude, not any of his shortcomings.
But there is a world beyond the tech industry, and not everyone in it is behind Altman. You won’t hear many people defending the board out loud since it’s much safer to support Altman. But writer Eric Newcomer, in a post he published November 19, took a stab at it. He noted, for instance, that Altman has had fallouts with partners before — one of whom was Elon Musk — and reported that Altman was asked to leave his perch running Y Combinator.
“Altman had been given a lot of power, the cloak of a nonprofit, and a glowing public profile that exceeds his more mixed private reputation,” Newcomer wrote. “He lost the trust of his board. We should take that seriously.”
What was Microsoft’s response to all this? Did they really offer Altman a job?
Microsoft has poured billions of dollars into OpenAI, and a big part of its future direction is riding on OpenAI’s success. OpenAI’s complete implosion would be a very bad development for that future.
When it seemed that talks between Altman and OpenAI had broken down, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella tweeted that the company was still very confident in OpenAI and its new leadership, but that it was also starting a “new advanced AI research team” headed up by — you guessed it — Sam Altman. He added that Brockman and unnamed “colleagues” were also on board.
But Nadella also made it very clear, in multipleinterviews, that he was open to (and would prefer) Altman to return to running OpenAI — and that he wasn’t very happy with its board, which didn’t consult with nor give Microsoft a heads up about its plans, let alone tell its partner and main investor why it made that decision. And Altman tweeted that “satya and my top priority remains to ensure openai continues to thrive.”
With Altman back at OpenAI, it looks like Microsoft’s new AI research team won’t need to go forward. He tweeted that his return to OpenAI was done “w satya’s support.”
What does all this mean for AI safety?
That kind of depends on what OpenAI had in the works and Altman’s plans for it, doesn’t it? Maybe Altman and OpenAI figured out the artificial general intelligence puzzle and the board thought it was too powerful to release so they canned him. Maybe it had nothing to do with OpenAI’s tech at all and more to do with the unresolvable conflict between a nonprofit’s mission and an executive’s quest to build the most valuable company in the world — a conflict that got worse and worse as OpenAI and Altman got bigger and bigger. And which, in the end, Altman won.
If nothing else, this whole debacle serves as a reminder that the safety of products shouldn’t be left to the businesses that put them out into the world, which are generally only interested in safety when it makes them money or stops them from losing it. Housing that mission within a safety-focused nonprofit will only work as long as the nonprofit doesn’t stop the company from making money. And remember, OpenAI isn’t the only company working on this technology. Plenty of others that are very much not nonprofits, like Google and Meta, have their own generative AI models.
Governments around the world are trying to figure out how best to regulate AI. How safe this technology is will largely rely on if and how they do it. It won’t and shouldn’t depend on one man (read: Altman) who says he has the world’s best interests at heart and that we should trust him.
Update, November 22, 12:30 pm ET: This story was originally published on November 20 and has been updated to include news of Altman’s reinstatement and more details about his ouster and return.
Various forms of heat pumps—refrigerators, air conditioners, heaters—are estimated to consume about 30 percent of the world's electricity. And that number is almost certain to rise, as heat pumps play a very large role in efforts to electrify heating to reduce the use of fossil fuels.
Most existing versions of these systems rely on the compression of a class of chemicals called hydrofluorocarbons, gasses that were chosen because they have a far smaller impact on the ozone layer than earlier refrigerants. Unfortunately, they are also extremely potent greenhouse gasses, with a short-term impact several thousand times that of carbon dioxide.
Alternate technologies have been tested, but all of them have at least one major drawback in comparison to gas compression. In a paper released in today's issue of Science, however, researchers describe progress on a form of heat pump that is built around a capacitor that changes temperature as it's charged and discharged. Because the energy spent while charging it can be used on discharge, the system has the potential to be highly efficient.
One of the world’s most active ransomware groups has taken an unusual—if not unprecedented—tactic to pressure one of its victims to pay up: reporting the victim to the US Securities and Exchange Commission.
The pressure tactic came to light in a post published on Wednesday on the dark web site run by AlphV, a ransomware crime syndicate that’s been in operation for two years. After first claiming to have breached the network of the publicly traded digital lending company MeridianLink, AlphV officials posted a screenshot of a complaint it said it filed with the SEC through the agency’s website. Under a recently adopted rule that goes into effect next month, publicly traded companies must file an SEC disclosure within four days of learning of a security incident that had a “material” impact on their business.
“We want to bring to your attention a concerning issue regarding MeridianLink's compliance with the recently adopted cybersecurity incident disclosure rules,” AlphV officials wrote in the complaint. “It has come to our attention that MeridianLink, in light of a significant breach compromising customer data and operational information, has failed to file the requisite disclosure under item 1.05 of form 8-K within the stipulated four business days, as mandated by the new SEC rules.”
The Federal Communications Commission today approved rules that prohibit discrimination in access to broadband services, rejecting fervent opposition from Internet service providers and Republicans. The broadband industry is likely to sue the FCC in an attempt to block the rules.
The digital discrimination rules were approved in a 3-2 party-line vote. "Under these rules, the FCC can protect consumers by directly addressing companies' policies and practices if they differentially impact consumers' access to broadband Internet access service or are intended to do so, and by applying these protections to ensure communities see equitable broadband deployment, network upgrades, and maintenance," an FCC announcement today said.
The rules and a related complaint process will ensure that the FCC "can investigate possible instances of discrimination of broadband access, work with companies to solve problems, facilitate mediation, and, when necessary, penalize companies for violating the rules," the agency also said.
This week, some of the biggest tech companies found out that Section 230 immunity doesn't shield them from some of the biggest complaints alleging that social media platform designs are defective and harming children and teen users.
On Tuesday, US district judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers ruled that discovery can proceed in a lawsuit documenting individual cases involving hundreds of children and teens allegedly harmed by social media use across 30 states. Their complaint alleged that tech companies were guilty of negligently operating platforms with many design defects—including lack of parental controls, insufficient age verification, complicated account deletion processes, appearance-altering filters, and requirements forcing users to log in to report child sexual abuse materials (CSAM)—and failed to warn young users and their parents about those defects.
Defendants are companies operating "the world’s most used social media platforms: Meta’s Facebook and Instagram, Google’s YouTube, ByteDance’s TikTok, and Snapchat." All of these companies moved to dismiss the multi-district litigation entirely, hoping that the First Amendment and Section 230 immunity would effectively bar all the plaintiffs' claims—including, apparently, claims that companies ignored addressing when moving to dismiss.
Enlarge / Histological section of an artery suffering from atherosclerosis (credit: James Cavallini/Getty Images)
In a small initial test in people, researchers have shown that a single infusion of a novel gene-editing treatment can reduce cholesterol, the fatty substance that clogs and hardens arteries over time.
The experiment was carried out in 10 participants with an inherited condition that causes extremely high LDL, or “bad,” cholesterol levels, which can lead to heart attack at an early age. Despite being on cholesterol-lowering medications, the volunteers were already suffering from heart disease. They joined a trial in New Zealand and the United Kingdom run by Verve Therapeutics, a Cambridge, Massachusetts–based biotech company.
Google yesterday sued a group of people accused of weaponizing the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to get competitors' websites removed from search results. Over the past few years, the foreign defendants "created at least 65 Google accounts so they could submit thousands of fraudulent notices of copyright infringement against more than 117,000 third-party website URLs," said Google's lawsuit filed in US District Court for the Northern District of California.
Another 500,000 URLs were also targeted, according to Google. "To date, Defendants' scheme has forced Google to investigate and respond to fraudulent takedown requests targeting more than 117,000 third-party website URLs, as well as takedown requests targeting more than half a million additional third-party URLs that are likely fraudulent based on preliminary investigation," the lawsuit said.
Google filed the lawsuit against Nguyen Van Duc and Pham Van Thien, who are both said to live in Vietnam, and 20 defendants whose identities are unknown. Google alleged that the defendants "appear to be connected with websites selling printed t-shirts, and their unlawful conduct aims to remove competing third-party sellers from Google Search results."
Enlarge / A file photo of Tropical Storm Fiona as seen in a satellite image from 2022. (credit: Getty Images)
On Tuesday, the peer-reviewed journal Science published a study that shows how an AI meteorology model from Google DeepMind called GraphCast has significantly outperformed conventional weather forecasting methods in predicting global weather conditions up to 10 days in advance. The achievement suggests that future weather forecasting may become far more accurate, reports The Washington Post and Financial Times.
In the study, GraphCast demonstrated superior performance over the world's leading conventional system, operated by the European Centre for Medium-range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF). In a comprehensive evaluation, GraphCast outperformed ECMWF's system in 90 percent of 1,380 metrics, including temperature, pressure, wind speed and direction, and humidity at various atmospheric levels.
And GraphCast does all this quickly: "It predicts hundreds of weather variables, over 10 days at 0.25° resolution globally, in under one minute," write the authors in the paper "Learning skillful medium-range global weather forecasting."
Enlarge / Students decide between Lunchables and a walking taco during lunch at Pembroke Elementary School on Thursday September 7, 2023, in Pembroke, NC. (credit: Getty | Matt McClain)
Such warning or limits would mark the first time that Americans would be advised to consider not just the basic nutritional components of foods, but also how their foods are processed.
Ultra-processed foods have garnered considerable negative attention in recent years. Dozens of observational studies have linked the food category to weight gain, obesity, cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes, and other chronic diseases, the Post notes. A small but landmark randomized controlled study in 2019, led by the National Institutes of Health's nutrition expert, Kevin Hall, found that when inpatient trial participants received diets with ultra-processed foods, they ate roughly 500 extra calories a day compared to a control group of inpatient participants who were served a diet that was matched in macronutrients but did not include ultra-processed foods.
We just got done noting how pretty much all of the criticism of the Sprint T-Mobile merger by economists and consumer advocates wound up being true. The deal has resulted in more than 10,000+ eliminated jobs, steady price hikes, annoying new fees, a weaker T-Mobile brand, and a lower quality product overall. It also clearly distracted T-Mobile from competent network security.
But Verizon and AT&T customers are also pissed, and are part of a new lawsuit against T-Mobile arguing that the merger raised prices for everybody due to the reduction in overall wireless market competition. A federal judge in Chicago last week ruled that plaintiffs made some decent points and the lawsuit should be allowed to proceed:
“U.S. District Judge Thomas Durkin in a 41-page ruling on Thursday said the plaintiffs “plausibly” argued that higher prices “flowed directly” from the $26 billion merger.”
The important time to protect consumers is before these kinds of competition-eroding deals are approved, but that very clearly didn’t happen here. Trump regulators at the FCC didn’t even bother to read about the deal’s impact before approving it. Trump “antitrust enforcers” at the FTC actively helped T-Mobile avoid regulatory scrutiny on their personal time, you know, like antitrust enforcers do.
T-Mobile’s response to the lawsuit was expected: to deny everything and insist the U.S. wireless sector is secretly super competitive:
Attorneys for T-Mobile called the lawsuit “unprecedented,” and said the plaintiffs’ damages were “speculative.”
“If plaintiffs are unhappy with Verizon and AT&T, there is a remedy available in the highly competitive market that wireless consumers enjoy today — they should switch to T-Mobile, not sue it,” attorneys for T-Mobile told the court.
The harms of mindless consolidation are not theoretical. They’re clearly documented. Yet we’re dedicated to ignoring those harms because such consolidation is hugely profitable for a handful of over-compensated executives and a few key investors (sometimes). Rinse, wash, repeat, with nobody responsible for the end result getting within a thousand miles of introspection or accountability.
I’d not expect much from the suit in terms of reform. Any payout will be a tiny fraction of the financial harm caused. The real fix lies in more stringent merger review and well funded and staffed regulators; concepts defenders of a broken but profitable status quo have no real interest in.
Enlarge / We have no idea what's going to be in the movie, but likely this is the height of the romance. (credit: Nintendo)
Sony and Nintendo haven't collaborated on much of anything since the Nintendo PlayStation went awry. But Sony's film division is putting its money together with its console semi-rival to produce a live-action The Legend of Zelda film.
Details are scant beyond a Nintendo press release and Hollywood reporting by Deadline. The director is Wes Ball, director of the Maze Runner film trilogy, and the writer is Derek Connolly, who wrote the Jurassic World trilogy and was tagged to work on a putative Metal Gear film.
The film will be produced by Nintendo legend Shigeru Miyamoto and Avi Arad, the founder of Marvel's film arm, Marvel Studios, who later produced Marvel and other IP-based films for Sony, including Uncharted and the Spider-Man and X-Men films. Arad, Deadline reports, was "a lynchpin" to finalizing a film that has long been in the works. Arad is also reportedly involved in the gestating MetalGear film.
President Joe Biden, right, and Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear at a briefing at a local elementary school, on response efforts to flooding in Kentucky, in August 2022. | Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images
Democrats had a good night. So did abortion rights. Glenn Youngkin, not so much.
The 2023 general election on Tuesday, November 7, featured only a grab-bag group of contests, but there was one clear overall theme in the results: Democrats did well.
Gov. Andy Beshear (D) won reelection in deep-red Kentucky. Democrats held onto the Virginia state Senate and took over the Virginia state House, blocking Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s hopes of passing conservative policies (and perhaps his ambitions in national politics). Meanwhile, Ohio voters enshrined the protection of abortion rights in the state constitution and legalized recreational cannabis.
Strangely, all this happened while President Joe Biden has been getting some of his worst polling numbers yet. As in the 2022 midterms, though, national dissatisfaction with Biden did not lead to a red wave sweeping out Democrats across the country or to wins for conservative policy proposals in ballot initiatives.
If you’re looking for tea leaves about how 2024 will go, don’t get carried away. Many of these outcomes were driven by local personalities, issues, and circumstances. And they took place in so few states that the results hardly present a clear picture of where opinion in the country is, or where it will be next year. But wins are wins, and Democrats got some significant ones on Tuesday.
Winner: Democrats
Michael Swensen/Getty Images
Incumbent Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear speaks to the press and supporters on his last campaign stop before the election, on November 6, 2023, in Louisville, Kentucky.
Democrats had about as good a night on Tuesday as they could have reasonably expected.
Gov. Beshear’s reelection in Kentucky proves that Democrats can still win in Trump country, especially if they happen to be the son of a popular former governor. Though Republicans won the other statewide races on the ballot in Kentucky, Beshear beat back the candidacy of Daniel Cameron, who had been hyped as a Republican rising star, to win a second term.
The other governor’s race on the ballot was in Mississippi, where Brandon Presley (D) put forth a surprisingly strong challenge to Gov. Tate Reeves (R) in this red state but ultimately conceded the race late Tuesday night.
Then, in Virginia, Democrats swept into control of both sides of the state’s General Assembly, prevailing in an expensive contest against Gov. Youngkin and Virginia Republicans. Legislative races in the other states on the ballot this year — New Jersey, Louisiana, and Mississippi — appeared to show little change. A Democrat won in Pennsylvania’s state Supreme Court race as well, preserving the party’s 5-2 majority in a court that heard many election-related challenges in 2020.
This wasn’t a blue wave sweeping the nation, exactly. And the margins of key Virginia races looked more similar to 2021’s than 2020’s (when Biden won the state big). But considering how the incumbent president’s party usually suffers in off-year elections, and how bad Biden’s national numbers have been, Democrats should be pretty pleased with these outcomes.
Winner: Abortion rights
Megan Jelinger/AFP via Getty Images
Tuesday was an excellent night for supporters of abortion rights — again.
Their biggest victory was in the ballot referendum in Ohio, which both codified abortion access up to the point when a fetus is viable and made clear abortions would be permitted even after viability if a doctor deems it necessary to protect a patient’s health. Ohio Republicans had previously passed a law banning abortion after six weeks of pregnancy, but it had been blocked in court, with the state Supreme Court hearing arguments about it in September. Now that’s off the table.
But abortion rights were a major theme in Beshear’s reelection campaign in Kentucky and Youngkin’s attempt to flip the state legislature in Virginia, as well as in the Pennsylvania Supreme Court race. In election after election and referendum after referendum in the post-Dobbs era, voters have made clear — even in many red states — that they are not enthusiastic about major abortion restrictions.
Yet Republicans remain beholden to right-wing voters and activists demanding such restrictions — and it keeps backfiring on them in elections.
Loser: Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin
Nathan Howard/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Glenn Youngkin, governor of Virginia, speaks during a “Get Out the Vote” rally in Richmond, Virginia, on November 5, 2023.
Every so often this year, a story would pop up claiming that Youngkin was consideringchallengingDonald Trump in the GOP presidential primary. However, these stories usually claimed Youngkin would wait to make up his mind until after his state’s legislative elections, in which he was hoping to wrest control of the state Senate from Democrats. Big wins for Virginia Republicans, the theory went, would prove Youngkin was a political powerhouse who could win nationally too.
This never made a ton of sense, both because there are such things as ballot deadlines that would make the timing extremely difficult, and because national GOP voters have been quite loyal to Trump. More likely, Youngkin hoped that full control of Virginia’s government could let him pass laws like a ban on abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, making himself a champion of the right and positioning him well for the 2028 presidential race. He made no secret of his abortion policy — hoping that he could show Republicans how to run on the issue and win.
But he didn’t win. Republicans fell short of retaking the state Senate and they lost control of the House of Delegates, likely in part because Democrats campaigned on abortion. Those wins will prevent Youngkin from using the legislature to cozy up to the national right. And Youngkin won’t get another shot — Virginia governors can’t run for reelection. So while it may be too sweeping to say his presidential ambitions have been squashed, they’ve certainly taken a serious hit.
Winner: Joe Biden
Mark Makela/Getty Images
President Joe Biden speaks at Tioga Marine Terminal on October 13, 2023, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Biden was not on the ballot in any state this year, and it would be a mistake to think that Tuesday’s results have any real connection to how he’ll do in 2024.
But, as mentioned above, the president has been dogged by a series of brutal polls of late showing him trailing Donald Trump nationally and in most battleground states.
Democrats and political analysts have hotly debated what to make of these polls, with some arguing that they show Biden is a badly flawed candidate who might put Trump back into the White House if he persists in running again. Former Obama adviser David Axelrod tweeted this weekend that Biden needed to consider whether it would be “wise” for him to run again. Recent news reports spoke of some Democrats’ “worry,” “frustrations,” and “panic.”
But others have argued that these polls tell us little of value. After all, they’re being taken a year in advance of the election at a time when Biden’s likely opponent, Trump, has had a relatively minor (for him) role in the news cycle. Such a panic occurred before the 2022 midterms, they point out, and yet Democrats did better than expected there. Biden’s numbers will likely recover once the choice is clearly framed for voters as Biden or Trump, the argument goes.
Democrats’ wins Tuesday will likely ease some of the pressure on Biden, feeding a sense in the party that, regardless of what the polls say, Democrats’ strategy and coalition turn out to be solid when people actually vote.
Now, it’s not clear whether that inference would actually be correct. I said just a few paragraphs ago that it would be a mistake to connect these races to 2024, which will feature a very different electorate. (It’s possible that Democrats are now the party that is structurally advantaged in non-presidential-year elections, since they now do so well among college-educated voters, who are more likely to vote consistently.) And even if Biden’s party does well now, it’s still possible that he himself is a uniquely vulnerable candidate, either due to his age or his record in office.
Still, winning is better than losing. So regardless of what the future holds, Biden has good reason to be happy about Tuesday’s results.
Update, November 8, 9 am ET: This post has been updated to reflect the Virginia House of Delegates results.
Enlarge / The Waze crash history alerts look like this. (credit: Waze)
Traffic navigation app Waze is adding a new feature to its toolbox today. It's called crash history alerts, and it's meant to warn drivers about dangerous hotspots, based on a combination of historical data plus road and traffic data.
Originally an independent startup, in 2013 Google purchased the Israeli company for $1.15 billion, perhaps beating Apple to the punch. Even before the purchase, Waze was becoming an Ars reader favorite thanks to more advanced traffic rerouting than either Google Maps or Apple Maps.
It has not been entirely smooth sailingdriving; for a while the app was infamous for asking drivers to make difficult left turns across busy multi-lane roads and routing cars through once-quiet neighborhoods as shortcuts, aggravating the people who live in those neighborhoods.
Julia Child prepared scallops in her kitchen in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on October 16, 1975, on her Garland gas stovetop. The gas range became almost as iconic as the chef herself, featured in a Smithsonian exhibit today. | Ulrike Welsch/Boston Globe via Getty Images
Documents reveal the untold story of how the natural gas industry infiltrated American’s kitchens through the beloved chef.
For years on her popular cooking show, The French Chef, Julia Child used a crude, makeshift kitchen that she and her husband would haul to the set for each filming. When she returned to the screen for a new, 13-episode series later in her career, she had one condition: She needed a kitchen that was her own to film in, one “that we could just walk into and work in and leave.”
Child got her wish — thanks to a generous sponsorship from the American Gas Association (AGA), a powerful lobby for gas utilities, which paid for a new kitchen, complete with a four-burner commercial range and a gas oven rotisserie.
Her new show, Julia Child & Company, aired in 1978. “We have a new set, and a new theme song,” she said at the time. And each episode that theme music reached its crescendo, a slide noted a “special thanks to The American Gas Association.”
Child herself never endorsed products on her shows (regulations around public programming forbade it) and there’s no evidence to suggest that she was a willing shill of the AGA. But from the industry’s point of view, Child was potent product placement that could help establish the dominance of gas in the American home. “Millions of viewers week after week will be able to watch Julia Child as she stirs food simmering over a gas flame,” read an October 1978 article from the association’s monthly trade magazine.
This was a continuation of a larger campaign called “Operation Attack.” Launched by the AGA in the late 1960s, it employed at the time some of the same experts and public relations firms as the tobacco industry to fend off growing threats to gas. The nation was becoming more environmentally conscious; the fossil-fuel industry feared heightened scrutiny from the newly formed Environmental Protection Agency, and energy price shocks had begun to make alternative fuels more appealing. To make matters worse, new research raised questions about gas stove emissions and impacts on public health. Gas was losing ground to electric competition, but the industry had plans to fight back.
AGA Monthly, courtesy of Climate Investigations Center
An excerpt from an American Gas Association Monthly article that ran in 1978 showed Julia Child filmed Julia Child & Company in a “new all-gas kitchen” sponsored by the gas industry. Although she didn’t personally endorse products, the gas industry saw her as potent product placement.
Child’s role in this industry battle would be largely forgotten if not for documents unearthed by the climate watchdog group Climate Investigations Center, which shared them with Vox for review.
This history adds a new layer to the image of the late TV star, affectionately known as “Joooooolia” by her fans, who was dedicated to teaching. Julia Child was also a weapon wielded by the fossil fuel lobby.
Reached for comment, the Julia Child Foundation, a grantmaking organization that Child established when she was still alive, expressed concern over the legacy of Child, who died in 2004. “We were unaware of the AGA’s misappropriation of Julia’s legacy for their own agenda,” Todd Schulkin, the foundation’s executive director, wrote in an email. “Julia’s legacy was about learning to cook and appreciating what makes for good food, which extended to an embrace of new technology.”
How the gas lobby infiltrated Hollywood
Child had many stoves over her five-decade career, but she was famously devoted to one in particular: the Garland, a squat, six-burner gas range Child used in her home kitchen that cemented gas as her recommendation for professional and home chefs alike. The stove was so iconic that the Smithsonian has dedicated an exhibit to it. “It was a professional gas range, and as soon as I laid eyes on it I knew I must have one,” according to her posthumous memoir published in 2006. “I loved it so much I vowed to take it to my grave!”
Decades after Child’s glowing endorsement, gas appliances have come under scrutiny in light of new evidence that they produce pollution linked to asthma and cancer, especially when not vented properly. Climate activists have also put pressure on lawmakers to pass local and state-wide bans on expanding gas infrastructure, to curb harmful emissions driving climate change.
But in 2023, a mention doubting the safety of gas stoves made some politicians apoplectic. In January, the Consumer Product Safety Commission’s Richard Trumka Jr. set off a firestorm for raising the idea of a gas stove ban to which the Republican representative Ronny Jackson from Texas threatened “they can pry it from my cold dead hands.”
AGA Monthly, courtesy of Climate Investigations Center
Boston Gas Company’s President John J. Bacon visited Julia Child’s set of her show Julia Child & Company, according to American Gas Monthly’s October 1978 issue.
How did the gas stove become such a trigger point? Julia Child’s endearing affinity for gas stoves may have had some influence, but the industry was also reaching deep into Hollywood during the 1960s and ’70s.
As part of a larger campaign, the American Gas Association established a “Hollywood Bureau” staffed with agents whose job was “obtaining publicity favorable to the natural gas industry within the national media of television and motion pictures,” according to AGA Monthly, the trade publication read by tens of thousands of industry professionals.
“The fact that these shows make use of gas appliances is hardly an accident,” one of its trade magazine articles noted. The bureau took credit for gas appliances appearing regularly in 25 primetime television series, periodically in another 12, in eight television movies, and nine feature films.
Throughout the 1970s, AGA launched in-show product placements and paid appearances at conferences with celebrities — a kind of prototype of today’s social media influencer endorsements. The gas stove made appearances alongside stars Mary Tyler Moore and Doris Day. AGA brought football quarterbacks from the Dallas Cowboys and St. Louis Cardinals and famous French chef Jacques Pépin to homebuilders conferences to attract attention. Onlookers who stopped by Pepin’s cooking demonstrations received pamphlets from AGA.
The industry fought hard to win favor in American kitchens so that it could generate demand to ensure new homes were built equipped with gas. The industry took out advertising in magazines like Ladies’ Home Journal, House Beautiful, and Good Housekeeping specifically to target the American housewife.
“As a result of the Hollywood Bureau’s efforts ... four potential damaging and misleading portrayals of gas incidents never reached the air”
Of course, natural gas utilities weren’t the only companies pursuing celebrity endorsements; General Electric hired then-actor Ronald Reagan to appear in widely watched ads for the all-electric home. But the AGA kept an especially close watch on its image.
According to an article in its trade magazine, AGA’s influence went so far as to alter scripts that made gas look dangerous. “This ‘watchdog’ function is aided by friends in the industry who alert the bureau to scripts that call for a gas explosion or an asphyxiation,” the article read. “As a result of the Hollywood Bureau’s efforts last year, four potential damaging and misleading portrayals of gas incidents never reached the air.” The group also detailed efforts to land more pro-gas scripts, working with studios so “an environmentally conscious producer or director” might plug the “non-polluting” aspects of “natural” gas in scripts. “If such a screenplay eventually appears,” AGA Monthly claimed, “it will not be entirely an accident of fate.”
In 1977, American Gas Association’s president gave a sense of the scale of these campaigns, writing “an estimated eight out of 10 Americans saw AGA commercials on major network television in which we appeared as the sponsor of TV spectaculars, major documentaries or sports events.”
In the course of reporting this story, Vox reached AGA for comment. A spokesperson for the group declined to answer specific questions but provided a general statement.
“The natural gas industry has collaborated with subject matter experts and credible researchers to develop analysis and scientific studies to inform and educate regulators about the safety of gas cooking appliances and ways to help reduce cooking process emissions, regardless of heating source, from impacting indoor air quality,” AGA spokesperson Emily Carlin wrote in an email.
Today, approximately 40 million homes, or about 38 percent of households, cook with gas, and 61 percent of households rely on gas for some other use that includes cooking, water, and space heating, according to the Energy Information Administration.
How the gas lobby uses influencers now
Since at least 2018, gas interests including the AGA, which represents the vast share of the industry, and the American Public Gas Association have hired influencers — though not quite of Julia Child’s caliber — to promote gas stoves on social media like YouTube and Instagram. These ads have been filled with youthful women posing in their stylish kitchens, flaunting the sponsored hashtag #cookingwithgas.
One of those influencers is Kate Arends, writer of Wit & Delight, a style website for “designing a life well-lived.” In a sponsored blog post, Arends defended her new natural gas fireplace: “We knew it would be safe and ventilated properly—a MUST if using natural gas anywhere in your home.”
After I first reported on these campaigns in 2020, Sue Kristjansson, who is now president of Berkshire Gas, fretted in an internal company email: “If we wait to promote natural gas stoves until we have scientific data that they are not causing any air quality issues we’ll be done.”
AGA Monthly, courtesy of Energy and Policy Institute
An ad that appeared in a 1970 issue of AGA Monthly discussed two important audiences for the gas industry: homebuilders and women.
AGA’s efforts go beyond hiring influencers. Many of its campaigns aim to thwart environmental regulation. Last year, AGA hired a consulting firm, Gradient, which has a track record defending tobacco and chemical companies, to dispute research from scientists on gas stove emissions.
Gas utility ratepayers ultimately help pay the tab for these efforts. State utility commissions allow the gas industry to add a fee — usually just pennies to every consumer’s gas bill — so it can recoup its membership fees to the American Gas Association. Though small in scale, these fees add up to an expansive war chest in the tens of millions of dollars annually, according to the utility watchdog group Energy and Policy Institute. Environmental groupshave called on FERC, the agency that regulates interstate gas and electricity commerce, to close what they see as a loophole that holds ratepayers captive — using funds meant for consumer education, not “political activity that does not benefit them.” They are also pressuring AGA’s utility members to exit, asking seven CEOs to abandon AGA because it is undermining their companies’ stated climate goals.
In addition to hiring social media personalities and sympathetic scientists, AGA and gas utilities also seem to perpetuate disinformation. When the Department of Energy proposed new efficiency regulations for stoves, a process required by law, AGA suggested this spring it amounted to a de facto ban. In reality, a limited number of older, less efficient models would be phased out after 2027, with no effect on existing gas appliances.
Even so, this June, House Republicans passed a bill prohibiting the federal government from issuing any kind of regulations around gas stoves, which would interfere with the Department of Energy’s ability to set new efficiency standards.
The AGA submitted comments to the Department of Energy in response to a proposed regulation to strengthen stove efficiency standards, with a nod to Child: “Thankfully, Julia Child was able to cook her masterful creations and have her gas range displayed in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History before DOE had a chance to ban it.”
For months, it has seemed as though retailers are under siege, raided on a daily basis by organized groups of thugs who walk off with hundreds, if not thousands of dollars of merchandise.
This has been amplified by all forms of media. Clips from security cameras circulate social media with viral spread outpacing reality. This is further amplified by news media operations, which lead reporting with the same clips, offering up the same conclusory takes on isolated instances.
This has been a boon for law enforcement. Officials have used these incidents to ask for bigger budgets, despite being unable to offer any solutions to the problem other than throwing more money at it. That they’ve failed to deter this supposed wave of retail crime fails to register with local politicians who are just as likely as everyone else to assume whatever’s gone viral must be representative of the larger whole.
While it’s true there have some particularly daring robberies at retail outlets, those instances remain outliers. For the most part, the amount of retail theft hasn’t changed much. Most increases in “shrink” (the retail term for lost property via internal or external theft) can likely be chalked up to the off-loading of checkout duties to shoppers. Self-checkouts lend themselves to theft, something that is only now being addressed by retailers now that those losses have exceeded the labor savings that come from having customers ring up and bag their own purchases.
But the amount of shrink that can be attributed to self-checkout lanes (or, rather, the lack of best practices when deploying self-checkout options) isn’t enough to explain larger retail losses. So, the narrative has shifted to portraying the nation’s retailers as being victimized on a regular basis by organized smash-and-grab operations where thousands of dollars of merchandise is stolen in a single incident.
Meanwhile, cop shops get richer and politicians are once again talking about being tough on crime. But what’s being represented as a bold new wave of criminal activity is likely nothing more than retailers hoping to hide their losses behind the public’s skewed perception of the theft problem.
The analysts noted that overall shrink — merchandise losses due to external and internal theft, damaged products, inventory mismanagement and other errors — makes up just 1.5% to 2% of retailers’ sales. That percentage has remained steady for years, despite retailers sounding the alarm more than ever about theft.
The National Retail Federation said that retailers’ losses, known as shrink, increased 19% last year to $112 billion, based on a survey of 177 retailers. But shrink as a percentage of sales fell during the height of the pandemic as stores temporarily closed and grew in 2022 as stores re-opened.
This hit to profits is relatively small and fleeting — not reason enough alone to close stores according to the analysts. At nine major retailers that have increasingly cited the rising impact of theft, shrink as a percentage of sales increased just 0.4% in 2022, they found.
“We believe there is a disconnect…between the expected increase in shrink and the attention it has drawn,” the analysts said.
While the report does acknowledge there are areas of the country where organized theft is causing serious retail problems, it does go on to note that retailers affected by other issues are using these instances to hide preexisting problems, as well as to lobby lawmakers for favorable legislation.
While theft is likely elevated, companies a are also likely using the opportunity to draw attention away from margin headwinds in the form of higher promotions and weaker inventory management in recent quarters. We also believe some more recent permanent store closures enacted under the cover of shink relate to underperformance of these locations.
That’s just part of it. The analysts also suggest that retailers aren’t wise to jump on the hysteria train if they don’t need to. What’s being seen now is indicative of how things are going to go for the foreseeable future, given the relative ease of moving stolen property combined with the increase in the market for stolen products, given the pressure placed on the average American household by supply chain issues and increased inflation.
Combined with this bleaker macro outlook, the capacity to steal and move stolen goods has reached an inflection point. We do not see any of these trends reversing, in fact, we believe they will likely grow stronger in the coming years, particularly given online demand for secondhand goods amid an uncertain economic backdrop.
The upshot is most closed retail stores weren’t closed because they suffered too much theft. They were on their way out well before this due to their inability to maintain profitability even without increases in shrink.
So, when company spokespeople speak to journalists or issue widely reprinted press releases, it would serve viewers well to question what exactly is prompting the actions being taken. The analysts detail Target’s recent store closures as evidence of more widespread retail misdirection that attempts to blame (perhaps nonexistent) increases in theft for store closures, rather than mismanagement by either local management or Target Corporation as a whole.
Target has not quantified the dollar or basis-point impact of theft in the stores it is closing. And it would seem a relatively small and likely fleeting hit to profits could not be telling the whole story. Indeed, there is a more cynical theory as to why some retailers are choosing to close a store to address theft. One analysis by Popular Information found that the stores Target is closing in both New York and San Francisco actually had lower reported theft rates when compared to other nearby locations (though total dollar amounts were not reported and instances of violence are harder to parse out through reports alone).
More pointedly, we would note that after making a big push into smaller format, Target has not discussed the initiative since 2020. As such, we allow that Target could be using shrink to mask other issues, including poor inventory management, which came to a head in 2022 following supply chain disruption, and is now exiting underperforming stores to boost overall margins. Meanwhile, stores in downtown locations could also be seeing as much if not more of an impact from lower overall traffic patterns.
The rest of the report details statements from several retailers, most of which either say that shrink remains a manageable problem or that it has increased year-over-year, but only to meet the percentages seen pre-pandemic (2019). While there may be more cases of organized retail theft, retail theft overall simply isn’t what it seems to be when the most “reporting” is simply regurgitation of the last social media post to go viral.
A Tesla charging station in Skei, Norway. The country has the world’s highest rate of electric car adoption. | Sean Gallup/Getty Images
Electric cars are crucial, but not enough to solve climate change. We can’t let them crowd out car-free transit options.
OSLO, Norway — With motor vehicles generating nearly a 10th of global CO2 emissions, governments and environmentalists around the world are scrambling to mitigate the damage. In wealthy countries, strategies often revolve around electrifying cars — and for good reason, many are looking to Norway for inspiration.
Over the last decade, Norway has emerged as the world’s undisputed leader in electric vehicle adoption. With generous government incentives available, 87 percent of the country’s new car sales are now fully electric, a share that dwarfs that of the European Union (13 percent) and the United States (7 percent). Norway’s muscular EV push has garnered headlines in outlets like the New York Times and the Guardian while drawing praise from the Environmental Defense Fund, the World Economic Forum, and Tesla CEO Elon Musk. “I’d like to thank the people of Norway again for their incredible support of electric vehicles,” he tweeted last December. “Norway rocks!!”
I’ve been writing about transportation for the better part of a decade, so all that fawning international attention piqued my curiosity. Does Norway offer a climate strategy that other countries could copy chapter and verse? Or has the hype outpaced the reality?
So I flew across the Atlantic to see what the fuss was about. I discovered a Norwegian EV bonanza that has indeed reduced emissions — but at the expense of compromising vital societal goals. Eye-popping EV subsidies have flowed largely to the affluent, contributing to the gap between rich and poor in a country proud of its egalitarian social policies.
Worse, the EV boom has hobbled Norwegian cities’ efforts to untether themselves from the automobile and enable residents to instead travel by transit or bicycle, decisions that do more to reduce emissions, enhance road safety, and enliven urban life than swapping a gas-powered car for an electric one.
Despite the hosannas from abroad, Norway’s government has begun to unwind some of its electrification subsidies in order to mitigate the downsides of no-holds-barred EV promotion.
“Countries should introduce EV subsidies in a way that doesn’t widen inequality or stimulate car use at the expense of other transport modes,” Bjørne Grimsrud, director of the transportation research center TØI, told me over coffee in Oslo. “But that’s what ended up happening here in Norway.”
Ending the sales of gas-powered cars, as Norway is close to doing, is an essential step toward addressing climate change. But a 2020 studyfound that even the most optimistic forecasts for global EV adoption would not prevent a potentially catastrophic 2 degree Celsius rise in global temperatures. Reducing driving — not just gas-powered driving — is crucial.
As the world’s EV trendsetter, Norway’s experience offers a bevy of lessons for other nations seeking to decarbonize transportation. But some of those lessons are cautionary.
How Norway fell in love with the electric car
At first glance, Norway’s EV embrace might seem odd. The country lacks a domestic auto industry and its dominant export is, of all things, fossil fuels. Nevertheless, Norway’s unique geography and identity helped put it at the vanguard of car electrification.
Historically, Norway has been mostly rural; as recently as 1960, half the nation’s population resided in the countryside. But as the postwar economy boomed, Norwegians migrated to cities, and especially to their fast-growing, sprawling suburbs (much as Americans did at the time). They also fell hard for the automobile.
“The car was this genius idea for Norwegians,” Ulrik Eriksen, author of the book A Country on Four Wheels, told me over dinner in Oslo, after stashing his cargo e-bike. “Because there is plenty of land, cars opened up urban space for people to live in, letting more of them get sizable single-family homes.”
Norway embarked on a road-building binge, constructing bridges over fjords and boring tunnels through mountains to connect downtowns with new neighborhoods on the urban fringe. As Norwegian cities expanded, public transit took a back seat. Bergen, for instance, shuttered its extensive tramway service in the 1960s, dumping some of the trams into the North Sea.
Manuel Romano/NurPhoto via Getty Images
Reine, a village in the Lofoten, an archipelago in northern Norway connected to the country’s mainland through road bridges.
Those decisions cast a long shadow: Norway still has one of Europe’s lowest rates of public transportation usage and a higher car ownership rate than Denmark and Sweden, its Scandinavian neighbors. “Most Norwegian cities now have more of a car-centric, American approach toward transportation than a multi-modal, European one,” Eriksen said.
Norway’s city residents often own an automobile even though they seldom use it, Oslo-based urban planner Anine Hartmann told me. “Norwegians identify as coming from the place where their parents or grandparents come from,” she said. “Many people have a car to return to that place or simply to visit a cabin in the country.”
By the 1990s, the automobile was Norway’s indispensable vehicle. It was then that Norwegian entrepreneurs launched two early electric car startups, Buddy and Think. Though their models were clunky and inefficient by today’s standards, the companies spurred excitement that Norway could become a global hub of EV production. Seeking to give the carmakers a tailwind, the Norwegian government exempted EVs from the country’s steep taxes on car purchases, which today add an average of $27,000 to each sale. Even better, EV owners — who at the time were few and far between — would not pay for tolls, parking, or ferries (over all those fjords) anywhere in the country.
Norway’s dreams of becoming a global hub of EV manufacturing quickly fizzled when the companies ran into financial problems. (This summer, I spotted a tiny, aged Buddy squeezed into an Oslo parking spot, dwarfed by SUVs on either side.) But the incentives remained on the books; since few people were buying EVs, their cost was negligible.
David Zipper for Vox
An old Buddy car (right) parked in Oslo.
That changed as the global EV market improved in the mid-2010s, with carmakers like Tesla offering stylish, high-performance models that attracted more buyers. Norway’s EV policies were now championed as a centerpiece of the national effort to slow climate change in an economy whose electricity is already clean, produced largely from hydropower. “We want people to buy electric cars,” Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg said in 2019. “It is the most important thing you can do personally and privately to help reduce climate emissions.”
As EV models improved, Norwegians began to realize how valuable the cost savings from government incentives could be, particularly for urban commuters. After an already discounted EV purchase, owners’ ongoing expenses were minimal because Norwegian electricity is inexpensive (due to abundant hydropower), and EVs were exempt from tolls, parking, and ferries. EV owners were even invited to drive in bus-only lanes.
Hundreds of thousands of Norwegians responded to the government’s invitation to buy an EV, seemingly saving money and the planet in one fell swoop. But not every EV purchase replaced a gas guzzler; Grimsrud noted that the Norwegians owned 10 percent more cars per capita at the end of the 2010s than they did at the decade’s outset, in large part due to the EV incentives. “The families who could afford a second or third car ran off to the shop and bought one,” he said.
Norway’s incentives have unquestionably reshaped the country’s car market and reduced carbon emissions. EVs’ share of new vehicle sales surged from 1 percent in 2014 to 83 percent today. Around one in four cars on Norwegian roads is now electric, and the country’s surface transportation emissions fell 8.3 percent between 2014 and 2023.
The national government seems ready to declare victory. “When it comes to electrical vehicles, I’m quite proud,” Cecilie Knibe Kroglund, Norway’s state secretary for transportation, told me at the Oslo headquarters of the Ministry of Transport. “My main lesson is that incentives work. We have succeeded at a large scale.”
But not everyone shares her enthusiasm. Although the EV rush has reduced tailpipe emissions, it has also entrenched car dependence, which inflicts other kinds of damage. “Climate change gave Norway an opportunity to change how we travel,” said Eriksen. “I worry we had this once-in-a-generation chance to fix our transportation network, and we blew it.”
EV subsidies fueled car sales, but Norway’s cities want fewer cars
As electric car sales picked up throughout the 2010s, Norway placed few constraints on its EV incentives. Wealthy Norwegians could buy as many high-end EVs as they liked, receiving a full package of subsidies on each one. Luxury carmakers like Porsche advertised Norway’s promotions in their marketing materials.
Although the EV policies were fueling a car-buying frenzy for affluent residents, they offered little to those of limited means. Many low-income Norwegians do not own a car: In Bergen, for instance, 67 percent of households in the lowest income quartile go without one. One recent study found the likelihood that a Norwegian household would purchase an EV rose 26 percent with each 100,000 Norwegian Krones (around $11,000) in annual income, suggesting that electrification subsidies — which ballooned to $4 billion in 2022, equivalent to 2 percent of the national budget — have redistributed resources toward the rich.
Meanwhile, EV incentives have undermined the shift away from automobiles that Norwegian city officials, like their counterparts throughout Europe, are increasingly encouraging. “Everyone agrees that 100 percent of cars should be electric. That’s not the question,” Tiina Ruohonen, a climate advisor to the mayor of Oslo, told me. “The real question is whether you really need to own a car in Oslo.”
Over the last decade, Oslo has joined Bergen, Trondheim, and Stavanger (Norway’s four largest cities) in committing to meet all future trip growth through transit, biking, and walking — not cars. Seeking to reduce driving, Oslo has removed over 4,000 parking spots since 2016 while also building bike lanes, widening sidewalks, and adjusting traffic patterns to reduce through traffic. Those efforts helped the city achieve a remarkable milestone in 2019: For a full year, not a single pedestrian or cyclist was killed in a crash.
David Zipper for Vox
A street in Oslo’s city center.
Walking and biking through Oslo helped me understand how it became so safe. The few motor vehicles I encountered within the city center moved carefully through streets thronged with pedestrians (some blocks are entirely car-free). Traffic typically moved at the speed of my e-bike; my one moment of anxiety came when a passing streetcar startled me as I gazed at Oslo’s picturesque harbor.
Many local leaders recognize that reducing car dependence will enhance urban life. “I am certain that when people imagine their ideal city, it would not be a dream of polluted air, cars jammed in endless traffic, or streets filled up with parked cars,” Hanne Marcussen, Oslo’s former vice mayor of urban development, told Fast Company in 2019.
But there are inherent conflicts between cities’ efforts to limit driving and the Norwegian government’s promotion of EVs. Oslo’s elimination of street parking and creation of pedestrian-only streets, for instance, nudge Norwegians away from driving, but they also diminish EVs’ usefulness.
“The way to get people to buy EVs is to make them easy and cheap to use,” said Eriksen. “But cities don’t want driving cars to be easy and cheap.” A recent study of EV subsidies in Bergen underscores those tensions, finding that promoting EV adoption hampers cities’ ability to build dense neighborhoods that shorten trips and strengthen transit.
The effect of EV adoption on public transportation has been a particular concern for Norway’s cities because boosting transit ridership has been a linchpin of local mobility strategies. Bergen, for instance, opened its first light rail line in 2010, and Trondheim overhauled its bus fleet in 2019. But because generous EV incentives make driving cheaper, they make public transportation relatively less cost-competitive.
Worse, EV promotions have shrunk the funding available to invest in transit improvements because Norwegian public transportation budgets are partly funded through the road tolls that the national government exempted EV owners from paying. As more Norwegians purchased EVs, transit revenue fell, threatening major investments like a new metro line in Oslo. “One of my primary concerns is that because we are subsidizing EVs through the cheaper toll roads, we don’t have the money to pay for big transit infrastructure projects,” said Eivind Trædal, an Oslo city councilmember who until a few weeks ago led the city’s council’s environment and transportation committee.
National officials, for their part, have stuck to pro-EV messaging and refrained from discouraging driving. Despite its generous incentives for electric cars, the Norwegian government provides no discounts for those buying e-bikes or e-cargo bikes (Oslo and Bergen offer limited programs for residents). The country’s current 12-year National Transport Plan includes initiatives to catalyze the adoption of zero-emissions vehicles, but none to reduce car trips.
Trædal said that politics led the Norwegian government to downplay reducing transportation emissions through transit, biking, and walking — all of which produce significantly fewer emissions than driving an EV. “Nobody’s mad about getting a cheaper new car, right?” he shrugged. “It’s politically easier to just give them car subsidies.”
When I asked Kroglund, the country’s transportation state secretary, if Norway’s government seeks to reduce total kilometers driven, she said it does not. “We don’t have a specific goal [to reduce driving],” she told me. “Of course, we would like to get more people on public transportation and bikes. But that is more something that cities work on.”
But national policy decisions inevitably affect local transportation efforts — and sometimes undermine them. Last October, the Norwegian Public Roads Administration opened E39, a four-lane highway into Bergen that the city had opposed due to concerns that it would increase driving. Those fears proved justified. Lars Ove Kvalbein, a Bergen city adviser on sustainable mobility, told me that before E39 opened, 30 percent of those traveling into the city from the south had used a car, but after the highway opened that share jumped to 40 percent.
“E39 was part of a national plan that smashed all the positive local plans to pieces,” he said.
Other countries can avoid repeating Norway’s mistakes
“The argument is to make the tax system more fair,” said transportation state secretary Kroglund, “and not give benefits for things that are unnecessary for the transition to EVs.” As a result of the new policies, Norwegian sales of some high-end EVs, like the enormous Chinese Hongqi SUV, have collapsed.
Looking to the future, TØI’s Grimsrud hopes that Norway’s next 12-year National Transport Plan beginning in 2025 will include a goal of limiting total driving, which could restrain highway expansion plans and direct more investment toward transit. “If you start with a national goal for reducing transportation emissions, it will force you to focus more on public transportation and less on road construction,” he said.
For other countries, a clear Norwegian lesson is that a focus on reducing transportation emissions through electric car adoption can worsen inequality. Capping the price of eligible vehicles and limiting the number of EVs that a household can purchase tax-free are intuitive moves that Norway took only belatedly.
At the same time, Norway offers a warning about the dangers of promoting EVs at the expense of modes that are more beneficial to the environment as well as urban life. The national government’s decision to subsidize electric cars but not e-bikes makes no sense from a climate perspective, although the United States Congress made the same mistake when it passed the Inflation Reduction Act last year. At a minimum, countries should ensure that EV adoption does not deplete resources needed for public transportation investments, as has happened in Norway and could occur in the US, since EVs reduce gasoline tax revenues, a portion of which funds American transit.
With frequent bus and rail service, walkable city centers, and expanding networks of bike lanes (including, in Bergen, the longest purpose-built bike tunnel in the world), Norwegian cities are far ahead of American peers in providing viable alternatives to driving. Nevertheless, over the last decade, US cities have taken significant steps forward: Bike share programs are now a fixture, and new bus rapid transit lines have emerged in places like Madison, Richmond, and Washington, DC. New York City and San Francisco have even experimented with making major thoroughfares car-free. But if local initiatives aren’t matched with supportive federal policies, Norway’s experience suggests that an influx of electric vehicles can hinder efforts to escape the automobile’s urban stranglehold.
“The mistake is to think that EVs solve all your problems when it comes to transport,” said Ruohonen, the Oslo mayoral adviser. “They don’t.”
The reporting of this story was supported by the Heinrich Boll Foundation through a Transatlantic Media Fellowship. Lucas Peilert provided research assistance.
I have no idea how the current Google antitrust trial will turn out, and frankly, I’m not sure it much matters. I mean, I’m sure it matters for Google, but I don’t see how either outcome will change all that much for anyone else. I have noted, repeatedly, that I’m much more interested in a different Google antitrust trial, regarding how it handles ads. That one strikes me as more akin to a traditional antitrust case, in which it argues that Google used a dominant position in the ads market to be in a position to extract much greater rents from basically everyone.
That’s the kind of thing you normally see that should raise antitrust concerns: situations where a company leverages a position to extract more money than it would have been able to otherwise in a competitive market.
And this is why I’m… confused by a lot of people getting really excited about the revelation last week that Google had paid $26.3 billion in 2021 to be the default search engine on Apple Safari, Mozilla Firefox, and in a few other places as well.
The US v. Google antitrust trial is about many things, but more than anything, it’s about the power of defaults. Even if it’s easy to switch browsers or platforms or search engines, the one that appears when you turn it on matters a lot. Google obviously agrees and has paid a staggering amount to make sure it is the default: testimony in the trial revealed that Google spent a total of $26.3 billion in 2021 to be the default search engine in multiple browsers, phones, and platforms.
That number, the sum total of all of Google’s search distribution deals, came out during the Justice Department’s cross-examination of Google’s search head, Prabhakar Raghavan. It was made public after a debate earlier in the week between the two sides and Judge Amit Mehta over whether the figure should be redacted.
On social media, I saw a bunch of the usual crew of “big tech haters” acting as if this were the smoking gun that basically sealed the deal, proving that Google violated antitrust law with these deals.
But, I’m having difficulty following this argument. First of all, this isn’t a surprise. Long before all this was confirmed in court, journalists had reported that Google paid Apple between $15 billion and $20 billion to be the default search engine. All that really came out at trial is the actual number in 2021 was $18 billion (basically in the middle of the estimated range), and another $8 billion went to others.
More importantly, though, it strikes me that this massive payment would seem to… argue against the very crux of the trial, and not in favor of it? If Google were abusing its position as a dominant monopolist, then… shouldn’t it be squeezing more money out of the deal than it deserved, not paying many, many billions of dollars?
In other words, if Google actually had an unassailable monopolistic position, why would it need to pay so much to keep its search engine as the default? Wouldn’t it (as it has been credibly accused in the ads space) use that position to pay a lot less and keep a lot more of the money for itself?
The other part that remains unknown (at least publicly) is the nature of these deals. It seems like there’s a decent chance that they’re mostly revenue share deals: that is, whenever people do Google searches in Safari, if Google ads get clicked, then some of the ad revenue kicks to Apple. When put that way, it looks… kinda like a normal deal? It’s not just Google handing Apple a big bag full of cash and saying “keep us in the spotlight.” It’s Google saying “if you send us traffic, we’ll cut you in on some of the revenue we generate.”
It’s entirely possible that Google will lose this lawsuit, but I’m honestly perplexed by the idea that this payment revelation is a smoking gun against Google. It really seems like the opposite to me. It seems to show a big company paying for placement, which is… kinda a standard business practice?
I’ve made it clear I’d love to see more competition in the search space (I’m personally enjoying Kagl). But I’m left scratching my head as to how the arguments in this case make any sense at all.
When you score a reservation at a busy restaurant, it can feel like you just won a modest lottery. However, getting a reservation is not just randomness. You’re up against others vying for the same seats, and you have to work within the seating arrangements of the restaurant. You need a strategy.
Enlarge / GreenPower has given its class-D electric school bus a big battery bump. (credit: GreenPower)
On Tuesday morning, the West Virginia-based GreenPower Motor Company debuted its latest electric vehicle. It's the newest version of its Type D electric school bus, now fitted with a great big battery to give the big yellow bus the kind of range it needs for longer routes.
GreenPower has been building electric buses for almost a decade now, and in 2019 it delivered the first BEAST buses (it stands for Battery Electric Automotive School Transportation) to a school district in California. More recently, GreenPower has been testing its buses in real-world conditions, conducting a nine-month pilot program in West Virginia that split its time across 18 different school districts (for six weeks each), clocking up more than 32,000 miles (51,500 km) in the process.
"We found that in ideal conditions, so not a real cold morning or anything like that, but the bus was getting between 1.4 and 1.5 [miles] to 1 percent state of charge. So that means that your range on 100 percent state of charge is in that 140- to 150-mile range," explained Mark Nestlen, vice president of business development and strategy at GreenPower.
Enlarge / It's no trick; 3DS players are treating themselves to StreetPass tags this Halloween. (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)
When it comes to unique gimmicks, the Nintendo 3DS is mainly remembered for the wow factor of its glasses-free stereoscopic 3D effects (which Nintendo would eventually abandon with the introduction of the 2DS line). But today, more than 12 years after the launch of the 3DS, a group of dedicated players has been gathering to ensure that another unique 3DS feature still has a bright and active future after being abandoned by Nintendo.
We're talking about StreetPass, the proto-social-network that Nintendo devised to let 3DS owners instantly and silently exchange Mii avatars (and some basic information) when two consoles get close enough to communicate wirelessly. Those exchanged Miis can then be used as companions in simple minigames, like tiny board-game pieces crafted to look like 3DS-owning friends and strangers you pass on the street.
Even as most portable gamers have given up their 3DS consoles for the Switch or Steam Deck, thousands of 3DS fans have met at various events this year to trade StreetPass "tags" with their nostalgic brethren. The next such set of gatherings will take place on "StreetPass Halloween," when participants are encouraged to throw a system in their candy bag, leave one on and idle near a candy distribution door, or even just drive slowly around town with a 3DS in the front seat.
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