General Motors deal clears the way for an end to US car strike | BBC News

October 31, 2023October 30, 2023 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

General Motors has struck a deal with the United Auto Workers (UAW) union to end a six-week strike in the US.

The tentative agreement follows similar deals at Ford and Chrysler-maker Stellantis, the other two carmakers affected by walkouts.

Nearly 50,000 workers and dozens of sites were involved in the action, the first in union’s history to target all three firms at once.

US President Joe Biden welcomed the deal hailing the deal as “great.”

The president added: “These record agreements reward auto workers who gave up much to keep the industry working and going during the financial crisis more than a decade ago.”

A look at how one fintech CEO’s PR decision backfired | TechCrunch

October 30, 2023October 29, 2023 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

This past week, Carta CEO Henry Ward took it upon himself to send a letter to customers addressing the company’s recent negative press. The move had many scratching their heads, including many customers and at least one investor.

I first learned about it when I saw one of those customers, Winnie co-founder and CEO Sara Mauskopf, post something on X. In her post, she noted that prior to receiving the email from Ward, she “didn’t actually read any negative press about Carta recently.”

She wasn’t alone.

So essentially what Ward did was notify all of Carta’s customers that the company was the target of lawsuits around allegations of sexual abuse on the part of executives and has been accused of having a toxic “boy’s club culture,” among other things. He did so by pointing them to a Medium post/missive he had shared with Carta employees a few days earlier.

More than a year later, the $20B Adobe-Figma deal is still stuck in regulatory limbo | TechCrunch

October 30, 2023October 29, 2023 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

In September 2022, Adobe dropped the bombshell news that it intended to buy Figma for $20 billion. It was a huge chunk of money for a startup that had recently been valued at half that amount, and it was a deal that would make investors and some Figma employees wealthy beyond their wildest dreams. But first it had to pass regulatory muster — and that has proven stubbornly difficult.

In fact, more than 13 months after the deal was announced, the two companies remain separate entities. A year is a long time in the tech world. Figma hasn’t been idly waiting for its corporate suitor and has continued to work on the platform, hiring 500 new people since the deal was announced for a total of 1,300 employees today.

Rolls Royce: Aircraft engine maker plans up to 2,500 job cuts worldwide | CNN Business

October 23, 2023October 22, 2023 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

Aircraft engine maker Rolls-Royce will slash up to 2,500 jobs worldwide in a bid to streamline its operations and tackle years of underperformance.

Britain’s flagship engineering firm, which makes engines for Boeing (BA) and Airbus planes, said Tuesday that the cuts were part of a broader strategic overhaul to “remove duplication and deliver cost efficiencies.”

The restructure will lead to between 2,000 and 2,500 job losses from a global workforce of 42,000, a cut of around 6%. (Rolls-Royce is a separate company from Rolls-Royce Motor Cars, a wholly owned subsidiary of BMW. The two businesses bearing the Rolls-Royce name were part of the same firm until the 1970s.)

Is overhype dooming the cultivated meat industry? | Fast Company

October 17, 2023October 16, 2023 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

As the founder of the Reducetarian Foundation, a nonprofit organization focused on reducing societal consumption of meat, I’m of the belief that we’re never going to convince everyone to give up animal products altogether, so we need to come up with ways to fill that demand without destroying the planet. Cell-cultivated meat—meat grown from animal cells rather than slaughtered animals—could be one of those history-changing innovations, allowing us to feed the world without the dirty business of torturing animals.

So you can imagine my disappointment when Wired reported last month that all was not as it seemed at Upside Foods, a leading cultivated meat company in the U.S. Since the company launched in 2015, journalists have gushed about their promise to make cell-cultivated meat a reality. The prospect seemed practically inevitable, and even the world’s biggest meat-producing companies were vying for a stake.

How to watch the annular solar eclipse in person or online | Digital Trends

October 11, 2023October 10, 2023 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

Skywatchers across the U.S. will have the chance this week to see a special event: an annular solar eclipse, also known as a “ring of fire” eclipse. The main date to look out for is Thursday, October 14, when people in various locations across the globe will be able to see the event at different times.

If you’d like to watch the eclipse in person, we’ve got advice on how to do that safely. But if you’re after an easier option or you’re located outside of the viewing regions, there’s also a live stream available that will let you watch the event online. More details are below.

A lot of workers are out on strike right now. Here’s how that looks in the jobs report | CNN Business

October 9, 2023October 8, 2023 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

From actors to autoworkers, more than 450,000 workers have participated in 312 strikes in the United States this year, according to Cornell University’s Labor Action Tracker.

Are all of these workers missing from the US government’s monthly jobs reports?

The report produced by the Bureau of Labor Statistics is a product of two different surveys.

One asks a sample group of employers to report how many workers they employed, based on their payroll records for the pay period that includes the 12th of the month. Data from that survey is used to determine how many people were hired or laid off in a given month.

The Archies: Why an American comic book evokes nostalgia in Indians | BBC News

September 25, 2023September 24, 2023 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

“Yoohoo, Archiekins!”

If this catchphrase sounds familiar, you’ve probably read the long-established American comic, Archie Comics, which was also hugely popular in India.

The comic is back in the news, with Netflix set to launch The Archies, a musical adapted from the comic, later this year. The coming-of-age film is based in 1960s India and explores teenage themes of love, heartbreak and rebellion through the lens of the Anglo-Indian community. The trailer has already been viewed over 800,000 times on YouTube.

The news of the film has sparked a lot of conversation among fans of the comic.

Osiris-Rex: Nasa confirms return of asteroid Bennu samples | BBC News

September 25, 2023September 24, 2023 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

Dusty samples from the “most dangerous known rock in the Solar System” have been brought to Earth.

The American space agency NASA landed the materials in a capsule that came down in the West Desert of Utah state.

The samples had been scooped up from the surface of asteroid Bennu in 2020 by the Osiris-Rex spacecraft.

NASA wants to learn more about the mountainous object, not least because it has an outside chance of hitting our planet in the next 300 years.

But more than this, the samples are likely to provide fresh insights into the formation of the Solar System 4.6 billion years ago and possibly even how life got started on our world.

Meredith Whittaker reaffirms that Signal would leave UK if forced by privacy bill | TechCrunch

September 22, 2023September 21, 2023 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

Onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2023, Meredith Whittaker, the president of the Signal Foundation, which maintains the nonprofit Signal messaging app, reaffirmed that Signal would leave the U.K. if the country’s recently passed Online Safety Bill forced Signal to build “backdoors” into its end-to-end encryption.

“We would leave the U.K. or any jurisdiction if it came down to the choice between backdooring our encryption and betraying the people who count on us for privacy, or leaving,” Whittaker said. “And that’s never not true.”

The Online Safety Bill, which was passed into law in September, includes a clause — clause 122 — that, depending on how it’s interpreted, could allow the U.K.’s communications regulator, Ofcom, to break the encryption of apps and services under the guise of making sure illegal material such as child sexual exploitation and abuse content is removed.