There was nothing funny about the way Jeff Lawson left Twilio, the startup he cofounded in 2008 and built into a multibillion-dollar public company enabling businesses to communicate with customers via text messages and phone calls. Activist investors had been pushing for management changes and even a sell-off, and Lawson resigned from his CEO post … Read more
By Clare Duffy | CNN New York — Dozens of former Google workers filed a complaint with the US National Labor Relations Board on Tuesday after they were fired or placed on administrative leave last month for protesting the company’s cloud-computing contract with Israel’s government. The complaint accuses Google of retaliating against the workers for … Read more
More US workers will soon be free to leave their employers to work for rivals, thanks to a new federal rule that will block the long-standing practice of locking in workers with noncompete agreements. The US Federal Trade Commission on Tuesday issued a final rule that bans most noncompetes nationwide. The agency estimated that by … Read more
Solano County has the lowest wages and highest unemployment of any Bay Area county, according to a new study released by California Forever and authored by Michael Genest, former California Director of Finance. The report outlines Solano County’s economic paucity compared to the other eight counties of the Bay Area across multiple metrics, including household … Read more
Forget artificial intelligence breaking free of human control and taking over the world. A far more pressing concern is how today’s generative AI tools will transform the labor market. Some experts envisage a world of increased productivity and job satisfaction; others, a landscape of mass unemployment and social upheaval. Someone with a bird’s-eye view of … Read more
It’s easy to imagine the speculation and conspiracy theories swirling around this odd bit of royal news: King Charles III is set to honor Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos with a prestigious U.K. award. This news should certainly raise some eyebrows. After all, Sarandos runs the streaming giant that famously produced “The Crown” and paid Prince … Read more
Ever since the rollout of ChatGPT in November 2022, many people in science, business, and media have been obsessed with AI. A cursory look at my own published work during that period fingers me as among the guilty. My defense is that I share with those other obsessives a belief that large language models are … Read more
Sometimes donors expect that they can save a life for much less than $5,000, and they’re surprised to encounter our estimate. But most come to share my belief that $5,000 to save a life is a bargain. We aim to be fully transparent about what goes into our cost-effectiveness estimates—including the counterarguments, caveats, assumptions, best … Read more
The idea of Singer that excited me was that each of us should give a lot of money to help poor people abroad. His “shallow pond” thought experiment shows why. If you saw a child drowning in a shallow pond, you’d feel obliged to rescue her even if that meant ruining your new shoes. But … Read more
By Brian Fung, Hannah Rabinowitz and Evan Perez | CNN Washington (CNN) — The US Justice Department and more than a dozen states filed a blockbuster antitrust lawsuit against Apple on Thursday. It’s the latest – but largest – in a recent string of Big Tech companies to face monopoly accusations from the US government, … Read more
