Tag: Facebook

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Supplier Report: 3/22/2019

The technology industry saw multiple outages last week. Apple, Facebook, and Google all suffered from seemingly unrelated issues bringing services down. Facebook experienced their biggest outage in years.  The combination of these events highlight that the internet and online services are still fragile.

Apple suffered additional bad news with a ruling that the company infringed on Qualcomm’s intellectual property and will owe Qualcomm $31M.

On the topic of owing money… the EU is looking to shove their hands in Google’s pockets one more time.

Acquisitions

  • Nvidia to Acquire Mellanox, Its Biggest Deal Ever at Roughly $7 Billion

    With Mellanox, Nvidia is buying a maker of Ethernet switches and adapters that connect computers to each other, wiring together networks where users can rapidly exchange information. The company is a major supplier of equipment that conforms to the so-called InfiniBand networking standard widely used in supercomputers.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/nvidia-to-acquire-mellanox-for-about-7-billion-11552304615?ns=prod/accounts-wsj

  • Apple Acquires Machine Learning Startup in Boost for AI Group

    Laserlike was active for four years and concentrated on an “interest search engine” that could fetch news, video, and general Web content relative to each user. A key assumption was that people may want to know about things that don’t necessarily pop up in their usual sources, such as a car recall or an upcoming music festival. The app for the engine is no longer available.

    The Laserlike crew has reportedly joined Apple’s AI division, led by John Giannandrea, who was hired away from Google in 2018. His unit oversees the strategy for AI and Machine Learning across all Apple products, as well as the development of Core ML and Siri.

    https://appleinsider.com/articles/19/03/13/apple-confirms-buyout-of-machine-learning-startup-laserlike

Artificial Intelligence

  • DeepMind and Google: the battle to control artificial intelligence

    Google’s financial heft was attractive, yet, like many founders, Hassabis was reluctant to hand over the company he had nurtured. As part of the deal, DeepMind created an arrangement that would prevent Google from unilaterally taking control of the company’s intellectual property. In the year leading up to acquisition, according to a person familiar with the transaction, both parties signed a contract called the Ethics and Safety Review Agreement. The agreement, previously unreported, was drawn up by senior barristers in London.

    The Review Agreement puts control of DeepMind’s core AGI technology, whenever it may be created, in the hands of a governing panel known as the Ethics Board. Far from being a cosmetic concession from Google, the Ethics Board gives DeepMind solid legal backing to keep control of its most valuable and potentially most dangerous technology, according to the same source.

    https://www.1843magazine.com/features/deepmind-and-google-the-battle-to-control-artificial-intelligence

Cloud

  • Oracle’s Revenue Declines as It Struggles to Catch Up in Cloud Services

    Oracle has been slower than some of its rivals to develop cloud-computing technology—services customers rent on demand over the web. That has put competitors in a better position to win business as customers shift away from managing their own computing operations.

    The company expects to post revenue that is flat to down 2% in the current quarter, co-Chief Executive Safra Catz said during a conference call with analysts. Oracle shares, which fell a penny to $53.05 during regular trading Thursday, slid 3.9% after hours.

    Brad Reback, an analyst at Stifel Nicolaus & Co., said the current spending environment for information technology is the most robust in two decades. “The world is passing Oracle by,” he said.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/oracles-revenue-declines-1-11552595788

Software/SaaS

  • Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp are still down for some users around the world

    According to DownDetector, it looks like the outages are mainly in New England; Texas; Seattle, Washington; parts of Latin America, including Peru; the UK; India; and the Philippines. Users have written in from Canada, Las Vegas, and Turkey to note outages there as well. We’ve reached out to Facebook and Instagram to learn more.

    Also

    It wasn’t until over 24 hours later that Facebook finally gave the all clear, attributing the downtime to a “server configuration change.” “We’ve now resolved the issues and our systems are recovering. We’re very sorry for the inconvenience and appreciate everyone’s patience,” the company said via Twitter.

    https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/13/18264092/facebook-instagram-down-partially-post-messages-profile-loading

  • Apple’s iCloud recovers after a four-hour outage

    The company’s system status dashboard was blanketed in yellow warning notes for more than four hours Thursday, indicating mass outages of its iCloud service.

    The page didn’t offer much in terms of detail as to why the services experienced problems, only saying that “some users are affected” and “users may be unable to access this service.” Apple didn’t say what caused the outage once iCloud recovered.

    https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/14/apples-icloud-is-having-an-outage-too/

  • And Google had an outage too…

    At Google, some services, including Gmail, were slowed or outright inaccessible from Tuesday evening into early Wednesday on the East Coast. Google blamed a “cascading failure” that began after its engineers made tweaks to an internal storage service.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-and-instagram-suffer-lengthy-outages-11552539752

  • After the “adult content” ban, Tumblr users have ditched the platform as promised

    Tumblr’s global traffic in December clocked in at 521 million, but it had dropped to 370 million by February, web analytics firm SimilarWeb tells The Verge. Statista reports a similar trend in the number of unique visitors. By January 2019, only over 437 million visited Tumblr, compared to a high of 642 million visitors in July 2018.

    https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/14/18266013/tumblr-porn-ban-lost-users-down-traffic
    This is an example of a company putting a goal or objective over profit. They had to know that was going to happen.

  • Apple Music launches on Amazon Fire TV

    This change of pace from Apple’s standard walled-garden approach to services was most prevalent at CES 2019 where Apple said that iTunes will soon be available on Samsung smart TVs. In what was eventually dubbed a bug, Apple Music also appeared briefly on Google Home units but was never active before it was pulled offline.

    https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/13/apple-music-for-amazon-fire-tv.html

Other

  • A Better Way to Break Up Big Tech

    The problem with applying a one-size-fits-four model to tech, as the industry analyst Ben Thompson has written, is that the large tech companies have different business models that pose different anti-competitive risks. The stranglehold that Google and Facebook have on the digital advertising market is different from the way Amazon muscles out e-commerce brands, which is different from the way Apple uses its App Store to force burdensome terms on developers.

    The possibility of unintended consequences means that tailoring regulations to address each of these problems is important. A law that banned Amazon from competing with third-party sellers on its platform could also cripple Chromebook laptops, or prevent iPhone users from getting access to their iTunes libraries.

    Rather than one giant package that crams everything together, a set of effective tech regulations would treat each problem discretely, and address each with surgical precision.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/13/technology/elizabeth-warren-tech-companies.html

  • Facebook’s Data Deals Are Under Criminal Investigation

    It is not clear when the grand jury inquiry, overseen by prosecutors with the United States attorney’s office for the Eastern District of New York, began or exactly what it is focusing on. Facebook was already facing scrutiny by the Federal Trade Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission. And the Justice Department’s securities fraud unit began investigating it after reports that Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting firm, had improperly obtained the Facebook data of 87 million people and used it to build tools that helped President Trump’s election campaign.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/13/technology/facebook-data-deals-investigation.html

  • Apple dealt legal blow as jury awards Qualcomm $31 million

    The $31 million in damages — or $1.41 per infringing iPhone — is a drop in the bucket for Apple, a company that briefly became a $1 trillion company last year. But it marks an important victory for Qualcomm, burnishing its reputation as a mobile components innovator. The win also lends credibility to the notion that much of the company’s innovation is reflected in iPhones.

    https://www.cnet.com/news/apple-qualcomm-patent-infringement-verdict/

  • Google faces third EU antitrust fine next week: source

    Alphabet unit Google is likely to be hit with a third EU antitrust fine next week related to its AdSense advertising service, a person familiar with the matter said on Friday, with the sanction expected to be much smaller than previous fines.

    The AdSense case may not be end of Google’s EU antitrust woes.

    EU antitrust enforcers have asked Google’s rivals if it unfairly demotes local search competitors, according to a questionnaire seen by Reuters, a move which could lead to a fourth case.

    https://www.reuters.com/article/us-eu-google-antitrust-idUSKCN1QW1X0

Photo by Jeremy Bishop on Unsplash

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News You Can Use: 3/20/2019

  • The Software That Shapes Workers’ Lives

    Despite such labor-saving shortcuts, using sap is not easy. As the class proceeded, I felt as though I, too, were falling behind on an assembly line. Every task was more complicated than I’d imagined, with a seemingly endless variety of settings to configure; I struggled to keep the various interlocking systems arranged in my head. (It didn’t help that I sometimes clicked through sap with one hand while participating in my daughter’s craft projects with the other.) Over time, though, I started to understand the dynamics of the system as a whole. Log in to PeopleSoft, or a similar human-resource management system, and you only have access to certain modules—the ones relevant to your particular job. The same is true in sap. Most of the time, the work of supply-chain management is divided up, with handoffs where one specialist passes a package of data to another. No individual is liable to possess a detailed picture of the whole supply chain. Instead, each S.C.M. specialist knows only what her neighbors need.

    https://www.newyorker.com/science/elements/the-software-that-shapes-workers-lives

  • Facebook backtracks after removing Warren ads calling for Facebook breakup

    A Facebook spokesperson confirmed the ads had been taken down but said the company is in the process of restoring them.

    “We removed the ads because they violated our policies against use of our corporate logo,” the spokesperson said. “In the interest of allowing robust debate, we are restoring the ads.”

    Warren swiped at Facebook over the removal, citing it as evidence the company has grown too powerful.

    “Curious why I think FB has too much power? Let’s start with their ability to shut down a debate over whether FB has too much power,” she tweeted. “Thanks for restoring my posts. But I want a social media marketplace that isn’t dominated by a single censor.”

    https://www.politico.com/story/2019/03/11/facebook-removes-elizabeth-warren-ads-1216757

  • Is facial recognition technology too powerful?
  • ‘Captain Marvel’ Shows How the Culture War Is Making User Reviews Useless

    Culture war review bombing is nothing new. We saw it happen with the Red Hen restaurant after the owner asked President Trump’s press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders to leave, and people used Yelp as a battleground to try to defend or destroy the establishment. Yelp has guidelines in place that require users to “describe a firsthand consumer experience, not what someone read in the news,” a spokesperson told me at the time of the Red Hen review bombing—but it takes days or a week to review and clean up a Yelp page that’s been review-bombed.

    Steam, despite absolutely fumbling on what should be obvious content moderation issues and ignoring the presence of hate groups on its platform, was an early platform to seriously attempt to address the problem of review-bombing. Players have to purchase and play a game for at least 20 minutes before they can review it, reviews show how long a player spent with a game, and Steam shows users if there’s a spike in negative reviews, which helps them spot bad faith review brigades. These are helpful features, but even with these measures in place, Steam is not immune to review bombing.

    https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/qvymxq/captain-marvel-rotten-tomatoes-user-review-bombing

Photo by Dalelan Anderson on Unsplash

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Supplier Report: 3/15/2019

Elizabeth Warren is going after large IT companies like Google, Facebook, and Amazon and stating her desire to break them up if elected President.

As IT establishes itself as one of the primary drivers of the US economy (and THE major competitive advantage over foreign countries), can a 70-year-old politician really understand what these proposed “monopoly busters” would do to the US innovation engine?

Meanwhile, Facebook is handing politicians like Warren a narrative to break up the company with their inability to get privacy under control (while continuing to make a profit) and as Amazon grows (unchecked) in almost every major market.

Acquisitions

Cloud

  • Microsoft Azure Is Catching Up to Amazon AWS

    Brad Zelnick referred to the RightScale 2019 State of the Cloud Report from Flexera, which is based on a survey of 786 technical professionals in a note to investors.

    The report said that overall Azure adoption grew from 45% to 52% to narrow the gap with AWS. As a result, the report said, Azure adoption has now reached 85% of AWS adoption, up from 70% last year.

    “Azure continues to catch up with AWS overall especially among enterprises, where Azure adoption increases slightly from 58% to 60%, while AWS adoption in this group is relatively flat at 67%. This puts Azure with 89% of the AWS adoption based on the overall number of respondents using each cloud,” the Cloud Report said, noting that Google maintains its third-place position, increasing slightly from 18% to 19% adoption.

    https://www.thestreet.com/investing/stocks/azure-closing-the-gap-with-aws-14885053

  • Democrats to push to reinstate repealed ‘net neutrality’ rules

    Democrats in the U.S. Congress plan to unveil legislation on Wednesday to reinstate “net neutrality” rules that were repealed by the Trump administration in December 2017, House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi said.

    Pelosi told lawmakers in a letter that House Democrats, who won control of the chamber in the November 2018 elections, would work with their colleagues in the U.S. Senate to pass the “Save The Internet Act.”

    https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-internet-idUSKCN1QL1W0

  • SAP’s restructuring – Hunger Games, Game of Thrones or both?

    It seems that SAP has determined that it cannot realistically compete with AWS, Google and Microsoft for cloud platform offerings and is, therefore, scaling those back. That’s one easy way to unload staff and should be of no surprise to anyone in particular. Even though SAP touts a cloud platform, it never figures in any of the surveys of runners and riders. And despite the obvious allure as evidenced by AWS numbers (and Microsoft’s recent rocketing performance) SAP isn’t going to fight battles it can’t win. However, that still leaves the problem of engineering for each of those choices. That’s BIG engineering work that requires a considerable resource for very little obvious payback other than protecting existing application investments.

    Also

    From what I can gather, SAP started its program in Germany, including at its Walldorf HQ, offering early retirement to some of the ABAP ‘greybeards.’ In addition, employees are being offered the opportunity to apply for one of the 3,000 openings elsewhere. This is where I get my Hunger Games metaphor. 4.5 down with 3 up is a competitive environment.

    https://diginomica.com/saps-restructuring-hunger-games-game-of-thrones-or-both/

    Looks like SAP is letting go of several Hana and development subject matter experts…not good.

Security

  • Do You Trust Your VPN? Are You Sure?

    The CEO of one top VPN company, Silicon Valley–based AnchorFree, told me in a phone interview that he suspects one of his top rivals is secretly based in China—which would raise a red flag for many privacy advocates because of the Chinese government’s aggressive surveillance regime. An executive for that rival, ExpressVPN, insisted that isn’t true, though he wouldn’t disclose where the owners are actually based or even who they are. (The company is incorporated in the British Virgin Islands.) He argued the secrecy is actually a virtue because governments can’t apply pressure to ExpressVPN’s principals to give up user data if they don’t know who, or even where, those principals are. Indeed, many VPN users consider offshore providers preferable to U.S.-based firms.

    Also…

    How about the VPN that gets the best reviews? Ah, but there are dozens of review sites, their findings often conflict, and their criteria aren’t always transparent. Two of the more reputable tech sites that review VPNs, PCMag and CNET, both give Panama-based NordVPN the top spot, citing its speed, ease of use, and privacy features. But two others, Wirecutter and Tom’s Guide, found NordVPN slow and buggy. And, like ExpressVPN, NordVPN goes to great lengths to obscure its ownership. As Tom’s Guide notes, it’s a subsidiary of a Panama-based holding company called Tefincom S.A., which appears to be a shell company. (As with ExpressVPN, there are potential justifications for that anonymity.)

    https://slate.com/technology/2019/02/best-vpn-companies-trust-privacy.html

  • Facebook only cares about privacy because it has to

    Zuckerberg also talks about how ephemeral content (posts that don’t last forever) are key to Facebook’s evolution. That should come as no surprise given the rise of Instagram Stories, which now has over 500 million daily active users. That’s more than double of Snapchat — you know, the app Facebook essentially ripped off to create Stories. Zuckerberg says this doesn’t mean the News Feed is going away anytime soon, but it does raise the question: How does Facebook plan to turn its privacy-focused strategy into cash? Again, that’s a question that Zuckerberg doesn’t seem to have an answer for at the moment. Presumably, Facebook will still need to make money. And you have to wonder, if you’re not giving up your privacy, what will you have to give up for the company to turn a profit?

    https://www.engadget.com/2019/03/07/mark-zuckerberg-facebook-privacy-focused-strategy/
    Why Facebook’s pivot to privacy could backfire

    My view is that if you accept that Facebook’s News Feed and other feed-based products will eventually fade away, as they have already begun to do in North America, Facebook will need to transform its business completely. Rallying around privacy, encryption, and ephemeral messages — while buying time to build out new businesses around commerce and payments — seems to be as good an idea as any.

    Zuckerberg nods weakly to a belief in the continuing importance of the News Feed in his post. But over the past year, he also moved top News Feed talent to parts of the company that he needs to grow faster: Adam Mosseri to Instagram; designer Geoff Teehan to the blockchain division, and so on. These moves, coupled with the decline of original sharing in the News Feed in North America, lead me to believe that Zuckerberg — ever paranoid about the company’s long-term survival — feels pressure to start building lifeboats.

    https://www.theverge.com/interface/2019/3/8/18255480/facebook-pivot-privacy-mark-zuckerberg-pr-stunt

Software/SaaS

  • Elizabeth Warren Proposes Breaking Up Tech Giants Like Amazon and Facebook

    The proposal — which comes on the same day Ms. Warren will hold a rally in Long Island City, the Queens neighborhood that was to be home to a major new Amazon campus — calls for the appointment of regulators who would “unwind tech mergers that illegally undermine competition,” as well as legislation that would prohibit platforms from both offering a marketplace for commerce and participating in that marketplace.

    Ms. Warren’s plan would also force the rollback of some acquisitions by technological giants, the campaign said, including Facebook’s deals for WhatsApp and Instagram, Amazon’s addition of Whole Foods, and Google’s purchase of Waze. Companies would be barred from transferring or sharing users’ data with third parties. Dual entities, such as Amazon Marketplace and AmazonBasics, would be split apart.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/08/us/politics/elizabeth-warren-amazon.html
    Elizabeth Warren Wants To Break Up Amazon, Google And Facebook; But Does Her Plan Make Any Sense?

    But I fear that nearly all of these plans to “break up” big tech actually make that harder. It doesn’t open up new opportunities for a protocol-based approach, and simply assumes that the world will always be managed by giant platform companies — just slightly smaller, and highly regulated, ones. And that might actually lead us to a much worse future, one that is still controlled by more centralized systems, rather than more decentralized, distributed protocols where the users have power.

    The internet is a constant challenge with lots of new upstarts hoping to disrupt the big guys. And sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t. We should be wary of companies with too much power abusing that position to block competition. And I’m certainly open to looking at specific situations where it’s alleged that these companies are blocking competitors, but a general position that says breaking up the internet giants seems more opportunistic and headline-grabbing than realistic.

    https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20190308/10591041767/elizabeth-warren-wants-to-break-up-amazon-google-facebook-does-her-plan-make-any-sense.shtml

Other

  • Amazon’s joint healthcare organization is called ‘Haven’

    Haven, the website says, is a nonprofit that aims to make primary care easier to access, make prescription drugs more affordable and insurance benefits easier to understand. When the partners first announced the endeavor, they said they want to accomplish those goals with the help of technology. That hasn’t changed: they explained that they’re looking at new ways to use data and technology to better the healthcare system.

    The organization will start with addressing the healthcare needs of 1.2 million Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan Chase workers in the US. Ultimately, the partners intend to use whatever they learn from that initial period and the solutions they come up with to improve the system for everyone.

    https://www.engadget.com/2019/03/07/amazon-joint-healthcare-organization-haven/

  • Amazon to close all of its 87 pop-up stores in the US beginning in April

    “Across our Amazon network, we regularly evaluate our businesses to ensure we’re making thoughtful decisions around how we can best serve our customers,” an Amazon spokesperson told CNBC. “After much review, we came to the decision to discontinue our pop-up kiosk program, and are instead expanding Amazon Books and Amazon 4-star, where we provide a more comprehensive customer experience and broader selection.”

    https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/06/amazon-to-close-all-of-its-pop-up-stores-in-the-us.html

  • Amazon’s HQ2 deal isn’t looking great for Arlington County

    The contract doesn’t require Amazon to provide construction workers with a living wage, what would typically be called a project labor agreement, and it doesn’t ask Amazon to contribute to Arlington’s affordable housing trust fund. Housing fund requests are typically made after a company comes back to Arlington with more specific development plans.

    All Amazon needs to do in Arlington is hit office space requirements. It must occupy 64,000 square feet of office space by the end of July 2020, 252,800 square feet by 2021, and 5.576 million by 2034. As Amazon hits its office space goals, it will receive partial payment of the $23 million.

    https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/5/18252093/amazons-hq2-deal-arlington-county-living-wage-affordable-housing

Photo by Toby Yang on Unsplash

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News You Can Use: 2/27/2019

  • A digital gangster destroying democracy: the damning verdict on Facebook (UK)

    The scale of the report – it drew from 170 written submissions and evidence from 73 witnesses who were asked more than 4,350 questions – is without precedent. And it’s what contributes to making its conclusions so damning: that the government must now act. That Facebook must be regulated. That Britain’s electoral laws must be re-written from the bottom up; the report is unequivocal, they are not “fit for purpose”. And that the government must now open an independent investigation into foreign interference in all British elections since 2014.

    Cambridge Analytica was already on the committee’s radar when the scandal broke in March last year. But, over the ensuing weeks and months, it interviewed an extraordinary cast of characters to drill down into the underlying machinery of the new political power structures. And the result – a doorstopper of a report covering multiple interconnected issues – damns Facebook not just once or twice but time and time again.

    https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/feb/18/a-digital-gangster-destroying-democracy-the-damning-verdict-on-facebook

    I am no fan of Facebook, but this feels like scape-goating

  • It Started With a Jolt: How New York Became a Tech Town

    Skilled tech workers now flock to New York from everywhere. But the homegrown talent engine that city officials sought to jump-start a decade ago is also revving up. The new Cornell Tech graduate school campus on Roosevelt Island, a product of the city’s development plan, has 300 students, with expansion plans for a student population of 2,000 over the next two decades. And new courses, buildings and research institutes are underway at Columbia, New York University and the City University of New York.

    The Cornell Tech proposal fully embraced the Bloomberg administration’s priority of blending science and industry. Graduate students’ projects at local companies are a mainstay of the curriculum.

    “In New York, people are driven by real-world problems that can be solved with technology,” said Daniel Huttenlocher, the dean of Cornell Tech, who has also worked in Silicon Valley and is an Amazon board member. “In Silicon Valley, the heritage is much more to build cool technology and then figure out how it can make money.”

    https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/22/technology/nyc-tech-startups.html

  • How health care quietly powers the U.S. economy
  • ‘You need a thick skin’: Ad agencies grapple with workplace bullying

    A Society of Human Resource Management study found that 51 percent of organizations report incidents of bullying last year, with 62 percent reporting gossip or lies and 50 percent reporting threats. Another survey, sponsored by the Workplace Bullying Institute in 2010, found that 35 percent of U.S. workers have experienced or witnessed bullying. The survey also found that men bully other men more, while women bully other women.

    Workplace bullying and verbal harassment, although related, are a little bit different. Bullying is not illegal — mostly because no laws really exist to protect people from being bullied. Unlike race-based, gender-based or other forms of discrimination, those who are bullied aren’t considered a protected class unless that bullying spills over into harassment that is targeted because of race, gender, sexual orientation or another reason.

    https://digiday.com/marketing/need-thick-skin-ad-agencies-grapple-workplace-bullying/

Photo by Glen Carrie on Unsplash

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News You Can Use: 1/23/2019

  • We Are Living in the Begging Economy

    In this new paradigm, workers still have to work, but they don’t get paid at all. Instead, they beg for money on social media. It’s like replying to your viral Tweet with a link to your Soundcloud, only if you don’t go viral you have to ration your insulin (one third of GoFundMe’s campaigns are already for medical costs). This has been the case for many government employees for the entire duration of the shutdown, including the TSA employees who are supposedly there to prevent the next 9/11. It’ll be the case for the thousands more starting soon, so the Interior Department can continue to sell oil and gas drilling leases in the Gulf of Mexico.

    https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/a3m59p/we-are-living-in-the-begging-economy

  • Microsoft pledges $500M to create affordable housing around Seattle

    The money will be used in three ways: $225 million will be loaned at below-market interest rates to developers building units for households making between $62,000 to $124,000 a year; $250 million will be used for market-rate loans to support the construction of affordable housing for people making up to 60 percent of the local median income, or about $48,150 for a two-person household; and the rest of the money, $25 million, will be donated to services for low-income and homeless people. Loans will be made over a period of three years and any profit will be put back in the fund.

    https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/16/microsoft-pledges-500m-to-create-affordable-housing-around-seattle/

  • How tax brackets actually work
  • Sorry I Forgot Your Birthday, I’ve Stopped Checking Facebook

    Michael Haber had been at his cousin Jasmine’s house for nearly two hours—chatting, playing with her children—when she brought out a fluffy chocolate sponge cake with a whipped-cream filling. “What is this for?” asked Mr. Haber, 26, a web designer in Beirut, Lebanon.

    Jasmine explained that it was for her. It was her birthday.

    “It was pretty awkward. But how would I have known?” said Mr. Haber. “I quit Facebook . ”

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/you-quit-facebook-now-you-dont-know-anyones-birthday-11547652709

  • Receipts are secretly really bad–why are we still using them?

    “We started looking into this idea of receipts and whether we should move people towards electronic receipts,” says Phil Ting, a California assembly member from San Francisco. His staff calculated the amount of paper and water wasted to create receipts that often end up in the trash seconds later, and then learned about the health issues that receipts also pose. “As we did more research, we found out the receipts aren’t just printed with regular inkjet ink, which is recyclable. It’s [coated] with BPA which is not recyclable, and actually toxic.”

    https://www.fastcompany.com/90292886/receipts-are-secretly-really-bad-why-are-we-still-using-them

Photo by Kat Yukawa on Unsplash