Despite being redesigned, the 2020 Chevrolet Corvette Stingray carries a base price of $59,995 — a relatively small increase over the outgoing model. Given the extent of the changes over the previous-generation Corvette, this price sounded too good to break true. It turns out it was — in a bad way: Motor Trend reports that General Motors will lose money on every base 2020 Corvette sold.
Category: News and Views
Twitter account deletions on ‘pause’ after outcry | BBC News
Twitter has said it will “pause” plans to disable inactive accounts following user backlash, a day after announcing plans for a huge cull of such accounts.
The social network said it now would not remove accounts until it had a process for “memorialising” dead users on the network.
It admitted not having a policy in place was a “miss on our part”.
The firm said it was taking action on inactive accounts due to regulatory concerns.
Etsy Did Nearly $20,000 in Sales Per Minute Last Cyber Monday. Here’s How Its Engineers Plan to Survive the Surge This Year | Inc.com
Cyber Monday is like the Super Bowl of shopping for e-commerce sites. As such, it’s usually not the day to roll out changes to website code. After all, a golden four-hour window during Cyber Monday could make or break or sales.
Etsy takes a different tack. For the 14-year-old marketplace, the biggest online shopping holiday of the year–when Etsy sees double the sales and search activity that it does on a normal day–is not off limits for code tweaks. Etsy continuously deploys code onto the site, sometimes as many as 30 times a day, says chief technical officer Mike Fisher. Continual deployment, he argues, helps keep the staff in the rhythm of making fixes quickly too. “I think that’s the best way to keep things stable.”
Daily Crunch: Twitter will delete dormant accounts | TechCrunch
1. Twitter will free up handles by deleting inactive accounts
“As part of our commitment to serve the public conversation, we’re working to clean up inactive accounts to present more accurate, credible information people can trust across Twitter,” the company said. Sounds like a smart move, with one big catch: If someone with a Twitter account died more than six months prior and no one else has their login, their account will be deleted. So hopefully, Twitter will come up with a way to memorialize these accounts.
I’m a Vegetarian—Will I Eat Lab-Grown Meat? | WIRED
Eschewing meat requires explanation, especially if you were raised an omnivore. Every forkful carries culture and identity in the memory and effort of its preparation. So, on days like Thanksgiving, when vegetarians turn down their family’s lovingly basted golden brown turkey in favor of a Gardein Holiday Roast, a savory loaf of soy protein isolate and vital wheat gluten that comes in a box, the people around them often feel rejected, even judged. Saying no to turkey becomes saying no to tradition, to family. No wonder people turn such baleful eyes on the bloodless lumps of beans and grain brought into their midst.
20 Thanksgiving horror stories to stress you out before the big day | Mashable
Thanksgiving dinner is high-stakes. It’s labor-intensive. And people have a lot of opinions about it. Basically, it’s a recipe for disaster.
As home cooks across the country prepare their fridges for this year’s feast, stories of Thanksgiving dinners gone wrong are also popping up on Twitter. Take them as funny anecdotes or serious warnings, but please take that Pyrex off the stove and don’t forget to defrost the turkey this year.
Target and TJ Maxx are killing department stores | CNN
Department stores like Macy’s have a big problem, and it’s not Amazon: Discount retailers Target and TJMaxx continue to take their customers.
Macy’s struggled during its latest quarter, adding to a string of poor results at department stores. This comes as lower-priced retailers grow sales and consumer spending in the United States remains strong. Americans are still shopping, but they are hunting for bargains elsewhere.
Macy’s posted a sales decline of 3.9% at stores open for at least a year, the company said Thursday.
New Yorkers can now recycle Nespresso pods | Fast Company
Brewing single-use coffee capsules can be a convenient way to start your morning, but they can be pretty inconvenient for the environment, quickly adding up to a lot of waste if you don’t recycle them properly. Now, New Yorkers can be confident their Nespresso pods will be recycled, thanks to an investment in the city’s sanitation programs funded by Nespresso itself.
Google Confirms Android Camera Security Threat: ‘Hundreds Of Millions’ Of Users Affected | Forbes
The security research team at Checkmarx has made something of a habit of uncovering alarming vulnerabilities, with past disclosures covering Amazon’s Alexa and Tinder. However, a discovery of vulnerabilities affecting Google and Samsung smartphones, with the potential to impact hundreds of millions of Android users, is the biggest to date. What did the researchers discover? Oh, only a way for an attacker to take control of smartphone camera apps and remotely take photos, record video, spy on your conversations by recording them as you lift the phone to your ear, identify your location, and more. All of this performed silently, in the background, with the user none the wiser.
Last Call: These Stores Are Closing Locations in 2020 | Investing Media Blog
If your local mall has more and more begun resembling a post-apocalyptic ghost town, then chances are you’re already well aware of the “retail apocalypse” underway. Last year, amidst crashing retail sales nationwide, more than 5,800 American stores shut down across the country, with many brands declaring bankruptcy altogether.
And while giants like Target and Walmart have managed to survive the ‘retailocalypse’ with their fleet (and sales) intact, others have been scrambling to adapt to customers’ growing demand for online shopping.
Dispatches From The Front 