Throughout my career as a founder and CEO, I’ve always prioritized mentoring and advising young professionals, providing them with the tools they need to break into a new industry successfully. Whether they are looking for their next role or are entry-level employees, my conversations with them are typically centered on the desire to find new ways to unlock their potential while at the same time navigating challenges like imposter syndrome that can be discouraging.
Finding your own potential and career path and recognizing that managing it is your responsibility and yours alone is crucial. So how do you unlock your potential when you’re just starting out? Below are some ways to help in your journey.
Work is work
The most important thing to remember is that work is work. It’s not camp or a time to slack off. Your coworkers are not your friends or family. They are business associates. Never disclose too much about your personal life to strangers who you really don’t know.
Work is nothing like the environment you’ve grown up with. You weren’t hired to be babysat, coddled, or even micromanaged. Workers expecting this type of treatment never have successful futures.
Too many people don’t take ownership of their story throughout their careers and don’t realize they can make the necessary changes to achieve their potential or better their situation. So when your boss gives you feedback on how to improve, don’t get defensive.
Feedback is an investment in your potential, it’s not meant to hurt your feelings. They’re giving it to you because they’re your boss, and it’s their job to tell you if you need to pivot or adjust. Stop assuming the worst about everyone and their intentions at work. The “woe is me” attitude is not going to work here. Take a deep breath, hold your head high, and know this is all about growing you into the next part of your career. Trust me, if you do things well they will also commend you.
You need to dress like you’re going to work—not the club, not brunch with your friends, not the gym. You should always dress for the job you want, not the job you have. People often forget that we are judged by our exterior as much as our interior. You represent the company, your boss, and your role. When you dress for the job you want you will be seen as a leader, someone to be counted on to represent the business. And when an unexpected client shows up you will be asked to join the meeting.
Show up for yourself
You need to show up every day when you’re at work, and I don’t just mean literally. You need to give 110% and not waste time and energy on nonsense. For example, if you’re new in your career and assigned a task with a specific deadline, you should never be late turning it in. Deadlines are in place for many reasons and the first rule of thumb—especially during an internship—is not to miss them. Your manager is counting on you to deliver work promptly, and it’s also a test to see how reliable you really are.
Another example: If your company’s office hours begin at 9:30 a.m., be there at 9 a.m. And you should never be the first person out the door—unless you have a prior commitment. You can use this extra time to work on assigned tasks or things that you hope to be doing more of but aren’t just yet.
This is when you start to discover where your passions and potential lie. Show that you are eager and ambitious to prove yourself to your colleagues, who are ultimately responsible for giving you more advanced titles, more responsibility, and more money.
Besides just showing up, you have to be dependable and indispensable. This is how you get people on your side. I know there is a small group of people I can call within my organization and say “I need this” and know it will get done at a level that I would expect, or the way I would do it myself. Those are the people who are dependable and indispensable.
Ask yourself every single day:
How do I show up?
How do I present myself best?
How do I help out and become indispensable?
This will help you get in the mindset of taking control and responsibility. Always be thinking ahead. Sure, your role right now is just this, but consider your boss’s role and what you can do to alleviate their workload.
Every organization needs passengers. You need a lot of people doing things, but few drivers control the business. So don’t be afraid to speak up. The employees who say, “What if?” or “Maybe we could . . .” are the people who leapfrog ahead in their careers. They are innovative and excel at critical tasks. They want to take things to the next level.
Be persistent in offering help to your superiors. When I was starting out I was adamant about joining every meeting with my boss and sitting in the back and taking copious notes of everything. Within those notes, you can start to make recommendations and offer suggestions. When you do this you become more important in an organization.
Fail (and stop comparing yourself to others)
We’re all going to have professional and personal failures. If you’re afraid to fail or make a mistake at work, you will never grow and reach your full potential. Before you know it, years will go by and you’ll probably be in the same place.
Work is the place to develop and absorb new skills. Always fail forward. Trying something new for the first time and taking risks will help you learn the most and become more successful and resilient. You can only do this if you did something wrong and now know how to improve the next time.
It’s important to identify weaknesses at work. You can always work to strengthen those areas. Wake up every day and understand it is a new day and you get another chance.
When I was junior in my career, I kept a notebook and wrote down all the missed opportunities at work. I would study this to be sure I would be ready for the next time.
This type of initiative takes time, humility, and a willingness to confront weaknesses, fears, and blind spots we would rather ignore. But I never cease to be impressed by the capacity of people to change and improve once they recognize their shortcomings as well as their strengths.
When you enter the workforce you must never compare yourself to others. Just don’t. You can admire them, but recognizing every person is unique and has a different perspective that sets them apart is what you should home in on.
I made this mistake early in my career by comparing myself to someone just because we were at the same level. I failed to realize we had different thought processes, pluses, and minuses. Move away from taking on the views of your peers at work as this can lead you in a direction you don’t want to go. Focus on being yourself and you’ll go far.
I’ve seen many people come and go in the workplace: those who have made names for themselves, and those who never met their potential because they played it too safe. You have the opportunity to take the wheel in your career. It starts with believing that you can. It’s often difficult to spot your potential in the beginning, but with time and effort, it’ll be clear as day.
Sometimes the thought of Avi Loeb being an extremely advanced AI has crossed my mind. It’s the only way I can explain that a man so prolific in his research, so busy with teaching, trips, and conferences, replies so swiftly to email.
Whether early in the morning, when the sun is barely out—after jogging in the forests by his home near the Harvard University campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts—or from the middle of the Pacific Ocean, after a long day searching for evidence of the first known interstellar meteor on the coast of Papua New Guinea, Loeb always answers my emails, seemingly within seconds of me sending them. But his replies, always kind, warm, and illuminating, can’t come from any of our current AIs.
Loeb—who is the Frank B. Baird Jr. Professor of Science at Harvard, director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and bestselling author of Extraterrestrial and Interstellar—does have a lot of thoughts about artificial intelligence.
He has been thinking about the current approach to training AI, and how we can correct the path so that the technology can harness the best of humanity. Loeb believes that AI could ultimately become humanity’s eternal spirit, traveling the universe in the same way that ancient alien civilizations may have already done, sending AI probes across the immensity of the Milky Way.
I spoke with Loeb about all of this via video conference, and came out of the conversation full of both hope and despair. Loeb is a scientist who is never afraid to ask questions that others ignore. He has built a reputation as a (sometimes controversial) maverick in the scientific community by challenging the dominant orthodoxy anchored in the eternal fight for research money and the fear of ridicule in academia.
He genuinely believes that science would have progressed faster if the adults practicing it were guided by their childhood curiosity. “Instead, experts often worry about their public image and pretend that they can explain all new evidence based on their past knowledge,” he says.
[Source Photo: choness/Getty Images]
Teach AI as our own children
Loeb believes AI is being developed too rapidly. Today, most systems are trained on vast amounts of data pulled from across the internet. This approach carries significant risks, Loeb tells me, as it could embed the worst aspects of humanity into the algorithms that will shape our future.
He compares the process of training AI to how we raise children, emphasizing the importance of being just as cautious with AI as we are with young minds. “The way I understand it is that AI is being trained on all texts that are available on the internet. This is equivalent to taking a teenager or a young kid and exposing them to everything that you find in magazines, newspapers, everywhere,” he says.
In very broad terms, this forced feeding is a product of companies’ insatiable need to continue training their large language models with as much information as possible in order for them to, in essence, become more complex and “smart.” The more information the models can eat, the more able they will be to respond to queries by predicting the most likely bit of language.
While this has provided some immediate satisfaction to corporations and consumers, the strategy will inevitably lead to long-term harm to AI’s “brain”—and ultimately to everyone who uses AI. “It’s like saying, ‘Okay, we have some kids that we want to grow, and we have to feed them, so we will feed them with junk food so that they grow very fast,’” Loeb says. “You might say, ‘Okay, well, that may be a solution for one generation.’ But I don’t want to give authority to these kids that are eating junk food because they would be unhealthy in their mentality.”
To extend the metaphor, we know that too much junk food can lead to unhealthy outcomes; eventually, a bad diet can lead to disease and death. This is not so different from AI. As companies run out of material, the quality of the text keeps decreasing until, eventually, it feeds on its own production scattered around the web causing models to collapse.
Low-quality training data can lead to systems that reflect and even amplify negative human behaviors, from racism to gender discrimination. Loeb equates it to raising a child in an environment filled with harmful influences. It’s a parent’s job to curate information that will help them raise their children to be responsible adults. In school, kids follow a structured curriculum for a reason. Shouldn’t we be equally careful in selecting the data we use to train AI?
“Some of this material has negative content that is not constructive to society,” Loeb says. “Some people are not constructive to society,” he says. “Instead [we should] imagine a society that is far better than what we humans were able to produce in the past.”
Better curation of training data is a moral obligation for future generations, Loeb says. He imagines a future where AI helps build a society that is collaborative, respectful, and focused on solving the major challenges facing humanity.
But this approach requires a fundamental shift in how we think about AI training. If we want AI to become a force for good in the world, let’s feed AI only the right data instead of feeding AI more of any data. “Right now, they have a hunger for data because these models work on how many parameters you can get in,” Loeb notes. “But if we slow down and focus on the quality of the data rather than the quantity, we could end up with AI systems that are far more beneficial to society.”
[Source Photo: U.S. Navy]
Fast path vs. slow path
Loeb says one way to ease the current market forces around AI could be a two-path development system for the technology: one approach for closed labs and another for public consumption. This bifurcation in training would allow AI scientists to research new engines faster in a controlled environment. Meanwhile, regular people will have access only to the versions of the AI that, while less capable than the ones in the lab, will only help us in positive ways.
Loeb envisions a scenario in which research labs could experiment in a controlled environment, unbound by the protections that society requires. “You can develop it in the laboratory as long as you don’t apply it to society,” he says. He compares it to the way scientists approach drug and vaccine development. The laboratory can be a place of experimentation, but any proposed solution must go through several phases of testing to ensure it’s safe and will have an overall positive effect on people’s lives.
Innovation is essential to advancing civilization, but it must be guided by ethical considerations and a clear understanding of the potential consequences. Another way of thinking about this is how nuclear energy evolved, says Loeb. Experimentation was necessary for scientific progress, but there was also a clear acknowledgment for caution and control.
“Let’s think about that,” Loeb says. “In order to develop nuclear physics, you had to do experiments in the laboratory. That was completely legitimate. . . . But once you understand how to make an atomic bomb, you want to have some limitation on the use of the atomic bomb.”
Loeb says the risks posed by unregulated AI development are obvious. Without proper oversight and regulation, AI could become a powerful and potentially dangerous tool in the wrong hands. The stakes are incredibly high, and Loeb believes that the decisions we make now will have long-lasting consequences for the future of humanity.
One of Loeb’s primary concerns is that the rapid pace of AI development, driven by commercial interests, could lead to a situation where the technology outpaces our ability to control or understand it. He’s also concerned about AI falling into the hands of individuals or groups with malicious intent. In an increasingly interconnected world, even a single AI system with harmful programming could have far-reaching consequences. “This is a very open, very easy-to-use technology,” he says. “Like, any teenager in the house can actually be kind of an actor. They can become terrorists. They can introduce these systems on the internet and do bad things.”
[Source Photo: fhm/Getty Images]
Design AI with human values
Loeb doesn’t believe stopping is the answer. “Some people say, ‘Let’s ban development for six months, have a moratorium.’ But we need to think about what would be a better approach,” he says. “And I’m suggesting the training set is the key—making sure the training set incorporates the values we want to have for the future.”
Current AI design processes overlook the importance of embedding ethical considerations into AI, despite what OpenAI or Google are telling us. And without a deliberate effort to instill values, Loeb argues, AI will evolve in ways that are misaligned with the best interests of humanity: “What is missing right now is how to introduce values to those intelligence systems.”
Loeb says this would require a proactive effort to consciously design the content that AI systems are trained on, ensuring that it embodies the values we want to see reflected in the technology. This could involve training AI on texts that emphasize collaboration, empathy, and ethical decision-making, rather than on content that reflects conflict, competition, and self-interest. “Imagine that the future would be generous, where people share ideas, where people support each other, where society works together to solve the major problems that face us,” he says.
And yes, this will be a Herculean effort. It will cost a lot of money. It will not be the easy, cheap approach that OpenAI, Google, and other tech companies are currently taking by scraping the internet for everything (including copyright material and trashy Twitter posts). But Loeb believes that taking the time to carefully design and produce the content we use to train AI could lead to a significant payoff in the long run. While Loeb didn’t get into specifics, it’s clear to me that if companies like OpenAI, Meta, and Google really had the betterment of humanity in mind rather than their bottom line, they could eliminate access to the current models and retrain new ones guided by the responsibility principles Loeb outlines.
[Source Image: Westend61/Getty Images]
The legal framework
Loeb believes none of this matters without the necessary legal and regulatory frameworks for AI’s development. He says there needs to be a robust legal structure to hold developers accountable for the systems they create. This includes clear guidelines on who is responsible when AI systems cause harm, as well as mechanisms for ensuring that AI systems can be retrained or decommissioned if they act in ways that are contrary to societal values.
“The issue is who to punish if something wrong happens,” he says. “As long as the system is under the training phase, it’s obviously the developer’s responsibility. Also, as long as it’s not developed well beyond what the manufacturer or the distributor is doing—you know, there will be distributors of these systems—they [the manufacturers] should be held responsible. Just like if a self-driving car causes accidents, it’s the manufacturer that is held liable for that.”
Things get more complicated once AI reaches a point where it can no longer be controlled directly by its creators. Legal frameworks must be designed to address new challenges posed by AI systems that operate independently of human oversight. “There would be systems that evolve well beyond what the manufacturer or the training set was about, and that would be equivalent to kids leaving home and becoming autonomous,” Loeb says. “They become independent of the educational phase, and therefore their parents should not be held responsible.”
It’s hard to comprehend now, he says, but AI systems that have become autonomous and commit harmful actions should face legal consequences, similar to how humans are treated under the law. Minor infractions could result in retraining, he points out, while more serious offenses could lead to the AI being permanently decommissioned.
To do all this, however, we are going to need strong leadership; especially from the United States, but the rest of the world, too. The European Union seems to be ahead in these efforts. Meanwhile, during a meeting last year at the White House—where President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris invited CEOs from Big Tech companies to discuss “responsible artificial intelligence innovation”—there was neither substance nor seriousness on this extremely delicate problem. Loeb argues that most meetings end up being little more than performative gestures without real follow-through. To me, asking corporations to weigh in on responsible AI is like asking the wolves weigh in on strategies to safeguard sheep.
Loeb believes the U.S. should take the lead in establishing a comprehensive regulatory framework for AI. However, he acknowledges the challenges in achieving this, especially given the differing perspectives and interests of various nations. “I think the United States has to decide about what is the appropriate path, reach out to the Chinese, and say, ‘Look, this is an issue of humanity. It’s nothing to do with competition,’” he says.
Despite these issues, Loeb still sees a future where AI systems, trained responsibly and equipped with the right values, could become humanity’s emissaries to the stars. According to Loeb, these autonomous AI systems could play a critical role in the long-term survival and expansion of humanity.
As an astronomer, he is acutely aware of the existential threats that lie ahead, such as climate change and the eventual expansion of the sun, which will render Earth uninhabitable in the distant future. In this context, AI represents not just a technological challenge but also a potential solution to these existential risks.
“When I think about the next phase in humanity, it’s actually going to space because Earth itself will not be hospitable to life. I am an astronomer, so I know that within a billion years, the sun will boil off all the oceans on Earth, so Earth will become just like Mars,” he says. “There will be no liquid water on the surface. It will be a desert.”
To ensure the survival of human civilization, he believes we must look beyond Earth and explore the possibilities of living on other planets, or even in space stations that are not tied to any single celestial body. However, Loeb recognizes the immense challenges involved in such endeavors, particularly the difficulties of long-duration space travel.
Loeb says AI could become humanity’s best hope for exploring and colonizing distant worlds. He suggests that autonomous, completely synthetic AI brains with cognitive abilities equal to or better than ours could be designed to withstand the harsh conditions of space and undertake the long and dangerous journeys between stars. These are missions that would be difficult, if not impossible, for humans to endure.
“If you want to leave the solar system, it’s really difficult for humans and any biological creatures because the trip takes millions of years,” he says. “We are just not designed to survive such a long trip, and also there are cosmic rays that can harm our bodies. We are protected under the womb of the Earth’s atmosphere and magnetic field. If we go to space, we will not be protected.”
These AI explorers, however, would be hardened against the rigors of space travel, and capable of surviving for millions of years in an interstellar environment. They could serve as the pioneers of human civilization, charting new worlds and possibly even creating life on other planets using advanced technologies like 3D printing.
“If they have 3D printers next to them, they might, for example, create life on other planets far away, you know, millions of years from now, billions of years from now,” Loeb says. “That’s the way I see the future of humanity. It is like sending seeds from a dandelion.”
In Loeb’s long-term vision, AI is not just a tool for solving immediate problems but a critical component of humanity’s future in the cosmos. He believes that by developing AI systems with the right values and capabilities, we can extend the reach of human civilization far beyond Earth, ensuring its survival and flourishing in the distant future.
The way we train and develop AI will determine whether these systems can serve as the vanguard of humanity in the universe or whether they will simply replicate the flaws of our past on a larger scale, possibly leading to our complete extinction from the cosmic record. That’s why it is imperative for nations to come together and establish common principles for AI development that prioritize the well-being of humanity as a whole.
As of right now, it all seems rather unlikely. “This is a reality that we’ve never witnessed before,” Loeb says. Today, AI is a fast-racing car toward the cliff. “Nobody’s doing anything about it, also because the United States has the fear that China would be way ahead.”
Realizing AI’s potential for good requires us to act with foresight, responsibility, and a commitment to the values that we want to see reflected in our future. “We need to agree for the future, for the benefit of humanity. What we do now, right now,not next year, not in five years, will be crucial to get to the best possible outcome,” Loeb says. The future of AI—and indeed the future of humanity—is in our hands. It’s up to us to ensure that the technology we create serves to uplift and unite us. And take us to the stars.
iOS 18 has introduced many awesome new software features for the iPhone, particularly when it comes to productivity and privacy. Yet the best new software feature Apple has released this year isn’t for the iPhone. It’s for the Mac, and it’s called iPhone Mirroring. Here’s why it’s so extraordinary. Plus, some tips on putting it to use.
Whatis iPhone Mirroring?
iPhone Mirroring is a new feature in macOS Sequoia that allows you to use your iPhone on your Mac. When you launch the new iPhone Mirroring app on your Mac, your Mac will automatically connect to your iPhone and display a digital twin version of it on your desktop.
You can interact with this digital twin of your iPhone using your Mac’s keyboard, mouse, and trackpad. In other words, you can fully interact with your iPhone without even taking it out of your pocket.
[Photo: Apple]
What can I do with iPhone Mirroring?
Once your iPhone’s digital twin is displayed on your Mac’s desktop, you can do virtually anything with it that you can do on the iPhone itself. You can swipe through the iPhone’s home screens, launch any app on your iPhone, and then use that iPhone app right on your Mac’s desktop. This digital twin looks exactly like your real iPhone—down to the arrangement of its apps, widgets, and wallpaper background.
iPhone Mirroring feels like magic. It is fluid and responsive and now gives you a way to use apps that are exclusive to the iPhone right on your Mac. For example, if you have a favorite messenger app that doesn’t have a Mac counterpart, you can launch the iPhone Mirroring app on your Mac, open the messaging app in your iPhone’s digital twin, and then use your Mac’s keyboard to type out a reply to the last message you received.
But iPhone Mirroring goes even further. When you get a notification on your iPhone, that notification will appear in the Notification Center on your Mac. This means that if you are working at your desk, you no longer need to check your iPhone to see your notifications—they’ll appear instantly on your computer.
But why would I want to use it?
There are several situations in which iPhone Mirroring can come in handy. The first is when you are working at home and want to quickly use an app on your iPhone but you don’t have it nearby. Instead of hunting down your iPhone (perhaps it’s in your bedroom, charging) you can just launch iPhone Mirroring and do what you need to do.
Another great use case is when you are working in a public space like a coffee shop. Thieves love coffee shops because people often have their laptops and phones on the tabletop. It’s relatively easy for an experienced thief to snatch our iPhone, especially when we are distracted by whatever we are working on on our MacBook. But now, you can now just leave your iPhone securely stored in your pocket the whole time, and if you do need to access information on it, you can simply launch its digital twin on your Mac.
And yet another great use case is coming later this year. In a future software update, iPhone Mirroring will allow you to drag and drop files like documents, movies, and photos between your Mac and iPhone. For example, say you want to save a PDF copy of your boarding pass to your iPhone. Now you can just launch iPhone Mirroring on your Mac and drag the PDF from your Mac’s desktop onto the digital twin of your iPhone and the file will instantly be added to your real iPhone. No more needing to email files to yourself.
iPhone Mirroring is one of those rare software features that makes you sit up and say “wow” when you use it for the first time—and it’s a feature that every Mac user should take advantage of.
iPhone Mirroring requires an Apple Silicon Mac or an Intel-based Mac with a T2 security chip running macOS Sequoia, as well as an iPhone running iOS 18.
It turns out that when Crichton agreed to develop the ER series, he kept the right to approve—or not approve—of any sequels. That right didn’t die with him.
Now that Warner is developing a new medical drama series, The Pitt, Crichton’s estate is claiming that the new show is simply a reboot of ER. Although the new show has some similarities, including some of the same actors, Warner denies the allegations.
The dispute is the most recent in a series of high-profile legal cases brought to protect the legacy of a now-dead creative artist. And yes, even after death artists can retain some control over their work.
As lawprofessors who teach about trusts and estates, we’re following these cases so we can teach our students how authors, artists, and other creative people can preserve their legacies.
We’re particularly interested in three situations featuring celebrities, because they show how complicated it is to protect artists—especially in the age of artificial intelligence.
Contracts offer lasting control
When a creator sells a film or TV project, the buyer usually seeks to acquire rights to produce sequels, remakes, and spin-offs associated with the original intellectual property. Selling so-called derivative rights can allow the creator to maximize the sale price and the buyer to exploit the creative idea to the fullest extent.
Crichton, however, had so much industry clout that he was able to negotiate more favorable contracts for some of his most famous projects. In 1994, for example, Crichton signed a contract with Warner Bros. that led to the production of the NBC medical drama ER, which enjoyed a 331-episode run while generating more than $3.5 billion in revenue.
Because of Crichton’s stature, he won a rarely granted frozen rights provision requiring his consent for Warner Bros. to produce any “sequels, remakes, spin-offs, and/or other derivative works.”
That frozen rights contract survived his death, as do contractual rights generally. So, on August 27, 2024, following Warner Bros.’s recently announced production of a new medical drama starring ER’s original lead, Noah Wyle, Crichton’s widow filed a lawsuit that invoked the frozen rights clause to challenge The Pitt as an unauthorized reboot.
Copyright protection endures after death
A copyright grants exclusive rights to the creator of a work authorship for the life of the author plus 70 more years. After the author dies, the copyright may be enforced by their estate.
Recently, for instance, the estate of Isaac Hayes objected to the use of the late songwriter’s “Hold On, I’m Comin’” by Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. According to a federal lawsuit filed on August 21, the Trump campaign has “unlawfully performed” the song at least 133 times since 2020, including at the 2024 Republican National Convention.
The Hayes estate demanded that Trump stop using the song and is seeking $3 million in royalties for prior performances. On September 4, the judge sided with the estate in a preliminary ruling. The Hayes dispute shows the importance of copyright protections—and also the significance of music in the 2024 presidential race, since Hayes’s estate wasn’t alone in objecting to Trump’s use of its music.
Another recent case involved Vultures 1, a new studio recording album collaboration between Ye (formerly known as Kanye West) and Ty Dolla Sign. According to the estate of Donna Summer, Vultures 1 contained an “unauthorized interpolation” of Summer’s 1977 hit song “I Feel Love.” Summer died in 2012.
In a lawsuit filed in February 2024, Summer’s estate explained that it rejected a request to license the song because it “wanted no association with West’s controversial history.”
Despite that refusal, West and Dolla Sign “rerecorded almost verbatim the key, memorable portions of Summer’s iconic song, used it as the hook for their own song, and released it to the public knowing they had tried and failed to secure legal permission from its rightful owners and had no legal right to do so,” according to the complaint.
When the parties settled in June, the lawyer for Summer’s estate stated publicly that the agreement didn’t include permission to license the song.
Publicity rights can protect an artist’s legacy
Publicity rights allow people to prevent the commercial use of their identity, including their name and likeness, without that person’s consent. About 20 states protect that right after death. Tennessee just extended its protections to prevent unauthorized use of an individual’s voice and AI applications with the Ensuring Likeness Voice and Image Security, or ELVIS, Act. It is the first state to do so.
Carlin has been dead for more than 15 years. Social media marketing teased a deepfake image of Carlin to promote an hourlong video titled George Carlin: I’m Glad I’m Dead (2024). According to the complaint, the video “used an AI-generated sound-alike of George Carlin to read out and perform an AI-generated script written in Carlin’s style of humor.”
The estate reached a settlement in April 2024 that called for the podcasters to “permanently remove” the video from the internet and discontinue use of Carlin’s identity without the estate’s consent.
Another recent case shows how estate planning can play a crucial role in how beneficiaries use publicity rights after the celebrity’s death. When legendary recording artist Little Richard died in 2020, his will gave valuable intellectual property rights to nine people in a special provision that encouraged them to “cooperate among themselves . . . to reach an agreement” regarding his postmortem publicity rights. Once they had created a plan, any beneficiary who interfered with the plan would “forfeit” their right to any money from the plan.
Little Richard’s brother Peyton Penniman wrote a letter to the buyer who had agreed to purchase Little Richard’s publicity rights in which Peyton implied that the estate was “being robbed.” The next day, the buyer, who had tentatively agreed to a purchase price, backed out of the deal. Earlier this month, a Tennessee court held that Peyton’s actions harmed the estate and, consequently, forfeited his rights.
Little Richard performing at the University of Texas Forty Acres Festival in 2007 [Photo: Anna Bleker/Wikipedia]
Who holds copyright after death or who can profit from images of a dead celebrity has implications for the celebrity’s legacy, but it also means that, even from the grave, they may be able to control what the rest of us see and hear.
As AI allows each of us to create content, there are powerful lessons for what we can—and cannot—do in cultivating our own legacies.
Most CubeSats weigh less than a bowling ball, and some are small enough to hold in your hand. But the impact these instruments are having on space exploration is gigantic. CubeSats—miniature, agile and cheap satellites—are revolutionizing how scientists study the cosmos.
A standard-size CubeSat is tiny, about 4 pounds. Some are larger, maybe four times the standard size, but others are no more than a pound.
Rather than carry many instruments with a vast array of purposes, these Lilliputian-size satellites typically focus on a single, specific scientific goal—whether discovering exoplanets or measuring the size of an asteroid. They are affordable throughout the space community, even to small startups, private companies, and university laboratories.
Tiny satellites, big advantages
CubeSats’ advantages over larger satellites are significant. CubeSats are cheaper to develop and test. The savings of time and money means more frequent and diverse missions along with less risk. That alone increases the pace of discovery and space exploration.
CubeSats don’t travel under their own power. Instead, they hitch a ride; they become part of the payload of a larger spacecraft. Stuffed into containers, they’re ejected into space by a spring mechanism attached to their dispensers. Once in space, they power on. CubeSats usually conclude their missions by burning up as they enter the atmosphere after their orbits slowly decay.
That is now changing. Satellites large and small are rapidly becoming the backbone of space research. These spacecrafts can now travel long distances to study planets and stars, places where human explorations or robot landings are costly, risky, or simply impossible with the current technology.
But the cost of building and launching traditional satellites is considerable. NASA’s lunar reconnaissance orbiter, launched in 2009, is roughly the size of a minivan and cost close to $600 million. The Mars reconnaissance orbiter, with a wingspan the length of a school bus, cost more than $700 million. The European Space Agency’s solar orbiter, a 4,000-pound probe designed to study the sun, cost $1.5 billion. And the Europa Clipper—the length of a basketball court and scheduled to launch in October 2024 to the Jupiter moon Europa—will ultimately cost $5 billion.
These satellites, relatively large and stunningly complex, are vulnerable to potential failures, a not uncommon occurrence. In the blink of an eye, years of work and hundreds of millions of dollars could be lost in space.
Exploring the Moon, Mars, and the Milky Way
Because they are so small, CubeSats can be released in large numbers in a single launch, further reducing costs. Deploying them in batches, known as constellations, means multiple devices can make observations of the same phenomena.
For example, as part of the Artemis I mission in November 2022, NASA launched 10 CubeSats. The satellites are now trying to detect and map water on the moon. These findings are crucial, not only for the upcoming Artemis missions but also to the quest to sustain a permanent human presence on the lunar surface. The CubeSats cost $13 million.
The MarCO CubeSats—two of them—accompanied NASA’s Insight lander to Mars in 2018. They served as a real-time communications relay back to Earth during Insight’s entry, descent, and landing on the Martian surface. As a bonus, they captured pictures of the planet with wide-angle cameras. They cost about $20 million.
CubeSats have also studied nearby stars and exoplanets, which are worlds outside the solar system. In 2017, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory deployed ASTERIA, a CubeSat that observed 55 Cancri e, also known as Janssen, an exoplanet eight times larger than Earth, orbiting a star 41 light years away from us. In reconfirming the existence of that faraway world, ASTERIA became the smallest space instrument ever to detect an exoplanet.
Two more notable CubeSat space missions are on the way: HERA, scheduled to launch in October 2024, will deploy the European Space Agency’s first deep-space CubeSats to visit the Didymos asteroid system, which orbits between Mars and Jupiter in the asteroid belt.
And the M-Argo satellite, with a launch planned for 2025, will study the shape, mass, and surface minerals of a soon-to-be-named asteroid. The size of a suitcase, M-Argo will be the smallest CubeSat to perform its own independent mission in interplanetary space.
The swift progress and substantial investments already made in CubeSat missions could help make humans a multiplanetary species. But that journey will be a long one—and depends on the next generation of scientists to develop this dream.
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When assessing home price momentum, ResiClub believes it’s important to monitor active listings and months of supply. If active listings start to rapidly increase or get very high as homes remain on the market for longer periods, it may indicate pricing weakness. Conversely, a rapid decline in active listings could suggest a market that is heating up.
In August 2024, there were 26% fewer U.S. homes for sale as compared to August 2019. Given there is not an excessive amount of unsold inventory on the national market, it makes sense that spiked mortgage rates and strained affordability, so far, hasn’t coincided in more regional price corrections.
That said, national active inventory for sale is on the rise (up 36% between August 2023 and August 2024), suggesting that many regional housing markets have softened as buyers aren’t purchasing homes as quickly as they are being listed. Simply put, buyers have gained some leverage in most resale markets over the past year, with some markets even becoming buyer’s markets.
The metro map above—which is sized by total active listing count—removes some of the noise from the county map and shows that the biggest inventory jumps over the past year are concentrated across the Sun Belt.
Many of those Sun Belt markets have a greater concentration of new construction. Homebuilders, who have greater margins to make affordability adjustments, could be attracting buyers who might otherwise look in the resale market. This cooling, with the help of strained affordability, is helping to increase days on market, months of supply, and active listing counts.
How far does inventory need to rise before buyers actually gain the edge?
Most of the Midwest, Northeast, and Southern California remain below pre-pandemic inventory levels. In contrast, many parts of the Gulf Coast—including Tampa, Florida, and New Orleans—and the Mountain West have ticked back above pre-pandemic inventory levels.
Some of the metro areas where homebuyers have the edge right now and active inventory is above pre-pandemic levels include the aforementioned Tampa and New Orleans, plus Austin; Memphis; Nashville; Dallas; Denver; San Antonio, Texas; and Jacksonville, Florida.
It’s perhaps a gross understatement to assert that multihyphenate Lin-Manuel Miranda knows a thing or two about leadership. This is the man who got people on board with his crazy idea to create a hip-hop musical about lesser-known founding father Alexander Hamilton.
The risk paid off big-time, as Hamilton is both a commercial and innovative success, expanding storytelling in the process.
Miranda appeared last week at the Fast Company Innovation Festival in New York and was asked about his leadership style, how he keeps track of his ideas, and which ones he chooses to develop. Here are some of his most compelling insights:
Ideas love company
Inspiration can be found around us, but Miranda’s ideas lead to even more thoughts and directives. “I find more often than not that the right ideas don’t leave me alone. They come with friends,” he mused. “Hamilton is not one idea.”
It started that way but soon expanded. “Hamilton was a couple of insights when I was reading Ron Chernow’s book, but then in my research, learning all this and this and this and that contributes to the larger idea,” Miranda said.
The same principle can be applied to Miranda’s latest project, a musical adaptation of Sol Yurick’s 1965 novel The Warriors. He has long loved the book and the 1979 Walter Hill film it inspired.
“If it’s just one idea, it will probably die in the impulse phase. If the idea opens avenues and you see many more roads, that’s worth pursuing. It doesn’t leave you alone,” Miranda said.
Never go it alone
Warriors also presented the opportunity for Miranda to work with Eisa Davis. The two are cowriting the concept album together. Vocalists Marc Anthony, Luis Figueroa, Flaco Navaja, and Chris Rivers are hitting all the right notes.
Write it down—when you can
When inspiration hits Miranda, he jots it down. The biggest lie creators tell themselves is they will remember it.
“I have hundreds of little notepads everywhere, and it will be frustrating for future archivists because some of them have tons of stuff, and some of them have four notes,” he joked. “They just live in my car. I also use the Notes app on my phone.”
Inspiration isn’t always on a schedule. “I am like most people—the best idea comes when I’m in the shower or walking the dog or when I cannot write something down or driving,” he said. How inconvenient.
Create what you want to see in the world (when the time is right)
Miranda isn’t afraid to put ideas on the back burner until they are ready to be explored further. He was first presented with the idea of Warriors in 2009 but didn’t start working on it until 2017. He didn’t think it would work at first.
He also is a firm believer in “cultivating your own taste.” You should consume whatever product you are trying to create. He sees lots of theater. When you see an opening or absence in the market, that’s your in.
“You want to write the kind of things you would want to see,” he advised. “You want to make the thing that you think is missing or you haven’t seen out there in the world yet, and so it’s really about not turning your brain off when you . . . see something you don’t like.”
Never stop being curious
Don’t turn away from a product, book, or play that isn’t your cup of tea. Instead, get curious.
“When I see theater and I see something I don’t like, I don’t turn my brain off. I go, Why isn’t this working?” he explained. “In doing that and keeping your critical eye open at all times [you] are informing the kind of stuff you’re going to make because you’re going to think, Well, I’m not going to do that, but I would like to do something like this. All of it’s grist for the mill, and as long as you stay open to all of it and you figure out who you are amidst everything you’re consuming, you’re going to make stuff that really excites you.”
Menopause impacts 47 million women a year, resulting in $150 billion in lost productivity. Yet menopause continues to be shrouded in silence and shame, with few employers providing support to employees.
Telehealth company Maven Clinic surveyed 1,050 millennials and Gen Xers with perimenopause and menopausal symptoms to better understand their experience. Here are the key findings:
Menopause can impact performance: A third of millennials and a quarter of Gen Xers who have experienced menopause say their work has been impacted. Nearly one in six millennials whose work has been impacted by menopause symptoms have switched to less-demanding careers, nearly 30% have avoided taking on new projects, and nearly 20% have not been able to do in-person work.
People are not getting help: Some 60% of millennials and 35% of Gen Xers say they have not talked about their symptoms with a healthcare provider. About 30% of millennials say this is because they can’t take time away from work.
Employers can make a difference: Around 30% of millennials and Gen Xers say they don’t feel like they have support at work around managing symptoms. More than three-quarters of millennials say that receiving menopause benefits would impact their desire to keep working for their current employer.
“Though millennials are relatively new to menopause, their problems are not,” said Dr. Neel Shah, chief medical officer of Maven Clinic. “They join Gen X in discovering how poorly equipped both the modern workplace and doctor’s office are to ease this life transition.”
As your parents age, it can often feel like you have swapped roles. Now you’re the one taking care of everything, from scheduling Mom and Dad’s doctor’s appointments to driving them where they need to go. But even if your aging parents welcome some aspects of this role reversal—you did give them anxiety-induced heartburn all through your teen years, and turnabout is fair play—they may struggle to accept it when you start taking responsibility for their finances.
It can feel nearly impossible to balance your parents’ need for independence with your need to protect them, especially when it comes to an issue as fraught as financial decisions. But ignoring the real financial dangers facing your elderly parents could hurt you all.
Here’s what you need to know about assuming responsibility for Mom and Dad’s finances as they age.
Know when to start
When it comes to making choices regarding aging parents’ finances, many of us assume we can cross that bridge when we get to it. Rather than broach the subject before it’s needed (and get an angry “I’m not that old!” from the old man), it’s easier to wait until there is a problem.
Unfortunately, a lot can go wrong before you’re aware of a problem. In fact, an early sign of cognitive difficulties is a decline in financial capabilities. According to research published in JAMA Internal Medicine, seniors with Alzheimer’s disease or dementia were more likely to miss bill payments six years before receiving an official diagnosis.
Additionally, all seniors, no matter their cognitive abilities, are more vulnerable to scams than other age demographics. The FBI reports that more than 101,000 Americans over age 60 reported being the victim of elder fraud in 2023, losing an average of $33,915 per victim. Considering how underreported financial scams tend to be, the approximately $3.4 billion in reported losses to elder fraud in 2023 is most likely an underestimate.
Waiting until you know your aging parents are struggling with their finances can cost them. So as uncomfortable as the subject may be, it’s wise to bring it up before you think it’s necessary.
Create an inventory of accounts
Tracking down the information for various accounts when the primary account holder is unavailable can be both logistically and emotionally overwhelming. That’s why it’s a good idea to start with an account inventory. You can couch this as an activity you do together, since it’s important for everyone, no matter their age, to make the information available in case of an emergency.
Specifically, you will want to create a list of all your parents’ (and your own) financial accounts, loans, and regular bills, including login credentials. If your parents are uncomfortable sharing login information, you can consider sharing a password manager. These programs allow you to share passwords and appoint digital legacy managers (i.e., individuals who have access after you become incapacitated).
Get legal permission
When it comes to taking care of your aging parents’ finances, having access to your parents’ accounts does not mean you have the legal right to pay bills or make decisions on their behalf. To do that, you will need to take on one of the following roles:
Joint account holder: Getting added to your parents’ account as a joint account holder allows you to access the account, make deposits and withdrawals, write checks, and pay bills. This option is relatively easy to implement, but it can potentially affect your parents’ eligibility for Medicaid or your child’s eligibility for college financial aid.
Trustee: As the trustee of your parents’ living trust, you will have the ability to manage any accounts, funds, or property within the trust. However, anything outside of the trust (such as utility payments) must still be handled by the account holder. Setting up a living trust can also be more onerous than adding you as a joint account holder.
Power of attorney: While your parents are compos mentis, they can name you as their agent under power of attorney. This allows you to access their financial accounts and make legal and financial decisions on their behalf. General durable power of attorney goes into effect immediately and stays in effect if your parents become incapacitated.
Court-appointed conservator or guardian: If your parents are no longer able to make decisions on their own behalf, you will need to petition the court to be named as conservator or guardian. This process can take time and will cost money, so it’s better to get Mom and Dad’s buy-in before this is needed.
Mom, Dad, and Money
Taking over the financial tasks and decisions for your aging parents will probably feel uncomfortable for everyone involved. But your parents will likely need your help with managing their money—and they may not know how to ask.
Start the conversation early, before you think Mom and Dad need any help. Beginning with an inventory of accounts—both yours and theirs—can prepare the entire family for potential emergencies. From there, you can discuss what legal permissions you might need in the future. You and your parents will be glad you did.
The county also happens to be sitting on enough lithium to produce nearly 400 million batteries, sufficient to completely revamp the American auto fleet to electric propulsion. Even better, that lithium could be extracted in a way consistent with broader goals to reduce pollution.
The traditional ways to extract lithium involve either hard rock mining, which generates lots of waste, or large evaporation ponds, which waste a lot of water. In Imperial Valley, companies are pioneering a third method. They are extracting the mineral from the underground briny water brought up during geothermal energy production and then injecting that briny water back into the ground in a closed loop. It promises to yield the cleanest, greenest lithium on the planet.
The hope of a clean energy future has excited investors and public officials so much that the area is being rechristened as “Lithium Valley.”
In a region desperate for jobs and income, the prospect of a “white gold rush” is appealing. Public officials have been working to roll out the red carpet for big investors, including trying to create a clear plan for infrastructure and a quicker permitting process. To get community groups’ support, they are playing up the potential for jobs, including company commitments to hire local workers.
But Imperial Valley residents who have been on the butt end of get-rich schemes around water and real estate in the past are worried that their political leaders may be giving away the store. As we explore in our new book, Charging Forward: Lithium Valley, Electric Vehicles and a Just Future, the U.S. has an opportunity to ensure that these residents directly benefit from the lithium extraction boom, which is an important part of the global shift to clean energy.
Possibilities and perils in “Lithium Valley”
Imperial Valley is emblematic of the potential and the risks that have long faced impoverished communities in resource-rich regions.
To understand the possibilities and perils in Imperial Valley, it’s useful to remember that the world is not just moving away from fossil fuel extraction but toward more mineral extraction. Today’s battery technology—necessary for electric vehicles and energy storage—relies on minerals including cobalt, magnesium, nickel, and graphite. And mineral extraction is often accompanied by obscured environmental risks.
In Imperial Valley, environmental and community organizations are worried about lithium extraction’s water use, waste, and air pollution as production steps up and truck traffic increases. When your region’s childhood asthma rate is already more than twice the national average, and dust from the drying lake is toxic, kicking up a “little extra dust” is a big deal.
Comite Civico del Valle, a long-established environmental justice organization in Imperial Valley, has sued to slow down a streamlined permitting process for Controlled Thermal Resources, a company planning lithium extraction there. The group’s concern is that inadequate environmental reviews could result in harm to residents’ health. Both the company and public officials are warning that the lawsuit could stop the lithium boom before it begins.
Behind these policies and financial incentives have been public will and taxpayer money.
Young advocates with the Imperial Valley Equity & Justice Coalition have been spreading their concerns through the community. [Photo: Chris Benner]
We believe that local residents, not just companies, deserve a return. Rather than promising to just pay for community “benefits,” such as environmental mitigation, contributions to municipal coffers, or jobs, the companies could pay “dividends” directly to local residents and communities.
There are models of this dividend approach. For example, the Alaska Permanent Fund gives an annual amount to all residents of that state from revenues obtained from the oil beneath the ground.
In Imperial Valley, the actual ownership of the lithium is complex, involving a mix of privately owned subsurface rights, public lease rights obtained by companies, and public rights held by the regional water district to whom companies will pay royalties.
Given the ownership complexities and the desire to benefit as development takes place, local authorities and community organizations persuaded the state in 2022 to pass a per-metric-ton lithium tax to address local needs.
That “flat tax” was bitterly resisted by some in the emerging industry on the grounds that it could make Imperial Valley’s less-polluting extraction method too costly to compete with environmentally damaging imports; after the vote, CTR’s CEO called the legislators “clowns.” Meanwhile, CTR has also agreed to hire union workers in the construction phase. Everyone—companies, communities and government officials—is struggling to balance economic viability with accountability.
Lessons for a just transition
The hesitance of low-income Imperial Valley residents to immediately buy into the lithium vision is deeply rooted in history.
Decades of racial exclusion, patronizing practices, and broken promises have led to deep distrust of outsiders who assert that things will be better this time.
You can still find old billboards promising a resort life on the Salton Sea, which today is one of the state’s most polluted lakes. Wind kicks up toxic dust when the water is low. [Photo: Manuel Pastor]
Building the supply chain here, too
In recent years, some people have pinned their hopes on lithium. The main site so far in Imperial Valley has been CTR’s Hell’s Kitchen. It’s a fitting moniker on summer days when temperatures regularly exceed 110 degrees.
Ensuring that the surrounding communities benefit from this new lithium boom will require thinking about how to attract not just companies extracting the lithium but also those that will use it. So far, Imperial County has had limited success in attracting related industries. In 2023, a company named Statevolt said it would build a “gigafactory” there to assemble batteries. However, the company’s previous efforts—Britishvolt in the United Kingdom and Italvot in Italy—have stalled without any volts being produced. Imperial County will need serious suitors to make a go of it.
A potentially promising future for modern transportation and energy storage may be brewing in Imperial Valley. But getting to a brighter future for everyone will require remembering a lesson from the past: that community investments tend to be hard-won. We believe that ensuring everyone benefits long term is essential for achieving a more inclusive and sustainable future.
Three days after the debate, Bruce Zuchowski, an Ohio sheriff, posted on his Facebook account that Harris was a “laughing hyena.” Zuchowski was subsequently barred from providing election security during in-person voting.
This is not surprising, given that Harris’s laughter was on full display during much of the nationally televised U.S. presidential debate earlier this month—and, worse, Trump was clearly the object of her unrelenting derision.
Much has been written already about the sexism and racism behind Trump’s contempt for Harris’s laugh.
Ellison’s essay, published in a 1986 collection Going to the Territory, still offers useful historical racial context for explaining Trump’s animus toward Harris. Among the stories Ellison tells: Black people once had to put their heads in a barrel to laugh because their laughter unnerved white Southerners.
The dangers of Black laughter
Best known for his 1952 novel Invisible Man, Ellison was one of America’s foremost social critics who confronted racism and white supremacy by telling the stories of alienation among everyday Black people searching for identity in a nation that deemed them inferior.
In “An Extravagance of Laughter,” Ellison began with an anecdote about attending a theater adaptation of Erskine Caldwell’s novel Tobacco Road in New York City in 1936. The popular play detailed the lives of destitute white sharecroppers during the Great Depression. The sharecroppers feared, among other things, losing their social status by dropping below the lower rung reserved for Black people in America.
While laughing uncontrollably at a comical scene in the play involving the antics of poor white Georgia farmers, Ellison became aware of the stir he was causing among the predominantly white audience.
For many white Americans, Black laughter was “a peculiar form of insanity suffered exclusively by Negroes, who in light of their social status and past condition of servitude were regarded as having absolutely nothing in their daily experience which could possibly inspire rational laughter,” Ellison explained.
As Ellison saw it, his laugh during the play was being construed as an affirmation of the Black buffoon stereotype.
As he described it, the white spectators were “catching fire and beginning to howl and cheer the disgraceful loss of control being exhibited” by a Black man.
Later in the essay, Ellison lampoons the use of “laughing barrels” in Southern towns, which he described as “huge whitewashed barrels labeled FOR COLORED, and into which any Negro who felt a laugh coming on was forced . . . to thrust his boisterous head.”
The intent of suppressing Black laughter, Ellison explained, was pro bono publico, or for the public good.
While the idea of the barrels may seem utterly ridiculous, Ellison understood them as an absurd strategy of containment for a not-so-absurd fear in post-Reconstruction and Jim Crow white America, when racial segregation was legal.
Black folks who laugh “turned the world upside down and inside out,” he explained.
And in so doing, Ellison wrote, Black laughter “in-verted (and thus sub-verted) tradition and thus the preordained and cherished scheme of Southern racial relationships was blasted asunder.”
In a 1983 letter celebrating Caldwell’s birthday, Ellison thanked the writer: “By giving artistic sanction to a source of comedy which in the interest of self-protection I had been forced to deny myself you had released me from three turbulent years of self-restraint.”
Flipping the script on who gets to laugh
The first time Trump found himself the object of Black laughter was during the 2011 White House correspondents’ dinner, where he was publicly and mercilessly roasted by a gleeful President Barack Obama. The experience appeared to humiliate and infuriate Trump and is widely seen by political pundits as the catalyst for Trump’s entrance into the 2016 presidential race.
It is not surprising, then, to see his campaign resurrect the rhetoric that many deem to be racist to erode public confidence in Harris’s fitness for the office.
These hearken to the long and shameful history of racist characterizations of Black Americans as menaces to society. They include depictions of unruly, newly emancipated Black men holding public office in D.W. Griffith’s 1915 The Birth of a Nation to Trump’s public call for the death penalty for the Black and Hispanic teens known as the Central Park Five in a full-page New York Times ad in 1989.
In that case, the teen boys were falsely accused of the brutal assault of a white New York jogger. They served years in prison before being exonerated by DNA and the confession of a convicted rapist and murderer.
America’s new racial and gender norms
Trump’s mockery of Harris’s laughter has not been successful in neutralizing her popularity.
Harris is widely regarded by political commentators as the winner of the debate, and the lasting impression is that of a glowering Trump repeatedly failing to put a stop to Harris’s mirthful expressions of incredulity.
Almost a century has passed since Ellison’s disruptive laugh occurred in a New York theater in 1936. In that time, both Obama and Harris have reordered traditional gender and racial norms by using Black laughter in the very public theater of U.S. presidential politics.
How would you describe these statements? As sincere expressions of modesty, humility, or stoicism?
Possibly so. Experience proves that we often lose more than we gain by pursuing the gifts, pleasures, and indulgences that come our way. A gracious demurral honors the offer while allowing us to practice moderation and self-restraint, both of which make for a more disciplined life filled with more enduring rewards.
Unless, of course, the gentle protestation is followed by, “Well, if you insist.”
False humility might be the ugliest kind of arrogance, compounding egocentricity with a caricature of magnanimity. In contrast, authentic graciousness can be achieved with a simple thank you or other expression of gratitude, accepting the offer with a smile, a nod, a warm handshake, or a touch on the shoulder.
A pro forma refusal followed by an immediate reversal fools no one. And yet, it’s common enough that we have a word for it, which is the current entry into the Ethical Lexicon:
Accismus (ac·cis·mus/ uhk-siz-muhs) noun
An ironic rhetorical device, in which one feigns indifference or makes a pretense of refusing something one desires
It’s a phenomenon that seems to have infiltrated our culture. Social dynamics coaches and even etiquette mavens likely include accismus in their toolbox, advising us to turn every interaction and opportunity into a mind game:
Don’t seem too eager for the job.
Don’t answer the phone; let them call back.
Wait a day before responding to that email.
Tell them you need to think it over.
Make them ask for a second date.
But what if we dropped the pretense? What’s wrong with simply saying what we mean and meaning what we say? Instead of trying relentlessly to gain the upper hand or squeeze another ounce of blood from the stone, we might content ourselves with the goodwill we earn by being up-front, honest, and sincere:
“I think I’d be a wonderful fit for the position.”
“Thanks for calling back so quickly.”
“I saw your email and wanted to respond right away.”
“Sounds perfect to me.”
“I’d really like to see you again.”
As we ponder why there seems to be so little trust left in our culture, we might ask ourselves if we share the blame by perpetuating the problem. When each of us is play-acting casual indifference and waiting for the other person to make the next move, aren’t we all spending way too much time waiting and wondering? And if we are, isn’t the most effective way of making a strong, positive impression to break the cycle of calculated nonchalance and show genuine enthusiasm?
Ah, but you might ask: Am I not taking too big a risk by being first to buck the trend? What if my openness will be interpreted as overeagerness, or my frankness as desperation? Then, not only will my sincerity fail to be appreciated, but it will actually work against me.
That is a real concern. And it seems to leave us with the loathsome choice between joining the race to the bottom or getting left behind.
If you’re worried that being straightforward will come across as brash or impolitic, you can hedge just a little without seeming coy or playing hard to get:
“I’d love to continue the conversation to see if we’re really a good fit for each other.”
“I had a free moment, so the timing was perfect for me to return your call.”
“I wanted to reply right away so your email doesn’t get lost in my inbox.”
“Your proposal sounds good, and I’d hate to waste time dithering if it’s worth pursuing.”
“I hope you had as good a time as I did.”
George Burns famously said: The secret to success is sincerity. Once you can fake that you’ve got it made. Sadly, in a world that gives lip service to authenticity while embracing superficiality, his words sound more like prophecy than irony. But they do remind us that in a world of fakery and pretense, being genuine may be the best way to stand out from the crowd.
Direct communication that doesn’t come across as blunt, as well as diplomacy that doesn’t feel like equivocation, are skills that take thought and practice. Our brains are lazy. It’s why we naturally default to one extreme or the other. We’re afraid of being either too bold or too reticent.
However, as insincerity becomes the norm and accismus becomes our anticipated default, navigating a course between feigned disinterest and embarrassing zeal might be just the way to earn a reputation for honesty, integrity, and trustworthiness.
And that is the best branding anyone can ever hope for.
After Ethan Olkovikas lost his marketing communications job in the third round of company layoffs earlier this year, he faced a common decision: To post or not to post about it on LinkedIn.
“As a marketing communications professional, I knew how important it would be to control the narrative around my experience,” he says. In addition, he says he has always liked to help others by sharing his experiences and being a resource. So, he decided to go public.
By the end of the week, he posted the news about his layoff. But, then Olkovikas took things one step further: He posted a series of updates that included personal stories, strategies for professional headshots, and insights from his own experiences. Ultimately, the posts lead to a freelance art directing gig and a wave of support. The final post in the series announced his new role, which he landed in May. Altogether, His posts earned more than 30,000 impressions.
“I didn’t feel that the layoff reflected on my performance,” he says. “It felt like posting on LinkedIn and being very open and honest and transparent about my experience from the start would kind of allow me to control the narrative around my story.”
While deciding whether to make layoff news public or not is a personal decision, getting there is a process that requires thought and, perhaps, some preparation.
To share or keep quiet?
While Olkovikas had a positive experience announcing his layoff on LinkedIn, recruiter Jacob Binke isn’t as enthusiastic about sharing. The managing partner of The Birmingham Group, a Berkley, Michigan recruitment firm specializing in the construction industry. Binke says he has a more challenging time placing people who announce that they’re unemployed. “The perception, at least in my industry, is that if you get laid off, there’s a reason why you get laid off,” he says. He says prospective employers may offer lower salaries because they think the laid-off candidate is desperate for work.
Human-first leadership advocate Paul Wolfe, a former chief human resources officer (CHRO) and human resources executive for Indeed, Match.com, and Condé Nast says that type of feeling may be industry-specific. He believes the “stigma” of going through a layoff or job loss is fading. “I’m a big believer, both as a CHRO and as an individual, in transparency,” he says. Wolfe believes it’s easier to be transparent about a layoff—especially if a company has announced a big layoff—than trying to pretend it didn’t happen.
Catherine Fisher, LinkedIn career expert, agrees. LinkedIn research found that 85% of users who post that they’re open to work get support from their networks.
Put your best foot forward
If you do decide that you’re going to post, there are a few matters to consider. The most important, says Wolfe, is to be sure you’re in the right state of mind. A layoff can be emotional—and you don’t want to let those emotions get the best of you.
“It’s kind of like the grieving process you go through,” he says. “Don’t post anything while you’re pissed as hell.”
Then, make sure your LinkedIn profile is “complete, accurate, and active,” Olkovikas advises. Fisher adds it’s also a good time to review the skills you want to showcase and make sure your LinkedIn profile is reflecting them. Ensure that any skills or experience you’ve acquired in your last job are properly highlighted. And, before you decide to go public, you can also signal to recruiters only that you’re open to work.
Make your post work for you
When you post about your layoff on LinkedIn, “be bright, be brief, be gone,” Wolfe says. In other words, keep your post positive and short. Fisher adds that it’s important to be thoughtful about what you’re asking of your network.
“What’s really important is to say what you’re looking for, what skills that you have that make you right for what you’re looking for, and then how your network can help,” she says. Are you looking for introductions? Are you looking for advice about how to approach the job search? Being specific about what you need will help ensure that you get it.
Some folks have strong opinions about the green badge, unveiled during pandemic-era layoffs, as Fast Company has previously reported. Some believe the badge seems “desperate” and may even lead to employment scams. Others say it’s just one more tool to get the word out. Fisher says people who signal that they’re open to work in some way get roughly 40% more Inmail messages than those who don’t. The green badge is just a visible way to do so.
If you do decide to go public on LinkedIn with your layoff, Wolfe says handling it in a polished, professional manner is the way to go. He says he is often called on by friends to look at a post before they put it out into the world. “More than one set of eyes is always good on something you’re going to post publicly,” he says.
We’re just off a solid week of the annual Fast Company Innovation Festival and one of the things that stands out to me every year (along with the stellar programming, of course) is the certainty of attendees asking me: “What should I absolutely see and do?” Understandable. When you’re spoiled for choice, it’s tough to make a decision and the default can be just to ask someone you trust.
That got me thinking about the process of decision-making and the paralysis of analysis that can come when you have too much information and time to overthink.
In a fireside chat, one of Fast Company’s 10 Most Innovative leaders Ryan Reynolds summed it up nicely: “If you have too much time . . . I can pretty much promise you, you’re going to murder creativity.” Reynolds, actor, cofounder of Maximum Effort, and chief creative officer of MNTN was speaking about spending eight or nine months making an ad (“You’ve already overthought it,” he flatly declared) while extolling the virtues of just doing something that maybe sucks and making something better later.
This is a great lesson on decision-making. But don’t just take Reynolds’s word for it. The brain science behind making better decisions faster is pretty compelling too. Here are some ways to train your brain to level up your decision-making.
Understand your brain’s framework
A recent study published in the JAMA explored and explained our brains’ two decision-making strategies: exploitation or exploration, particularly during times of uncertainty. “Exploitation involves choosing options that are familiar and provide a higher certainty of reward, while exploration involves testing out unfamiliar choices,” according to a recent Fast Company article. When making a decision, “It would be best to exploit the more rewarding choice early on, but then engage in exploration once you’ve noticed a shift in how often points are offered,” said one of the researchers.
Your brain also works in 90-minute cycles. Poland-based researchers suggested that you need to take breaks every hour and a half or so “to protect the mind from information overload and give it a chance, at regular intervals, to wander and process what it has imbibed.”
Try a few weird tricks
Organizational psychologist Amantha Imber took that a step further and outlined some of the strange but potentially effective ways to improve your decision-making that are backed by science. These include:
Dim the lights. Human emotion tends to heighten under bright lights, so if you want to be less driven by those impulses, flip the switch.
Watch something move in a clockwise direction. “Clockwise movement may induce a mental state of future orientation, whereas counterclockwise movement is likelier to orient us toward the past,” so watch an analog clock to mitigate the bias of familiar things.
Wait until you have to pee. This counterintuitively may enhance your ability to restrain yourself and make a better long-term choice.
Let go of the ‘absolute best’
Good may be said to be the enemy of great, but science shows that in decision-making there is no ideal choice. That’s because the bigger enemy inside your brain causes regret (there will always be something better out there somewhere) and envy (you start comparing yourself to others who made different choices). To add another maxim: “Comparison is the thief of joy,” so bonus happy points if you can train your brain to accept good enough in some cases.
Comparisons do have their place, according to cognitive scientist Art Markman. “For really important decisions, you should spend some time focusing on each option individually and imagining the context in which you’re going to live with that option,” he explained. “So, if you’re choosing among projects to pursue, consider the elements of those projects that make them particularly worth supporting (or not).”
Know the strengths and weaknesses of a decision. This is valuable according to the authors of Decisions Over Decimals, Christopher Frank, Paul Magnone, Oded Netzer, because an extreme outcome may never come to pass, but examining the possibilities can help expose flaws in the decision.
Finally, the authors discourage letting too many others weigh in. Instead, they recommend seeking consent to ensure major obstacles are addressed. “Satisfying all inputs leads to unnecessary compromise,” they wrote.
This story originally appeared in The Technology Letter and is republished here with permission.
Oh, the Metaverse!
Remember that bit of nonsense, from three years ago? Deep in the pandemic lockdowns, it seemed we all would be living in a digital cave for the rest of eternity. The Metaverse was the signature of Facebook’s transformation into Meta Platforms.
The Metaverse stuff is now very dated, and has been replaced with some other ambitions.
On Thursday, the company, at its developer conference showed off a cheaper version of its virtual reality headset, the “Quest 3S,” which is $300 versus the original Quest 3, introduced earlier this year, at $500.
And, the show-steeler, a prototype of a pair of glasses, code-named “Orion,” that project holograms onto one’s field of view, so that you can see your email floating in front of your surroundings. A picture of Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang demonstrating the glasses (up top) struck me as hilarious in a sublime way.
“On the negative side, the new glasses appear to be several years (and $10s of billions) away from general release (size, tech, and cost improvements),” writes Merrill Lynch’s Justin Post in his recap of the event. “Also, the event did not include any Metaverse related user metrics, suggesting limited traction for the VR ecosystem.” I’m not surprised.
An expensive demo, an unfulfilled Metaverse—Meta has become the Queen of Vaporware. But it’s okay, because Post is bullish on the shares nonetheless. He raised his price target to $630 from $563. That is a mere 11% gain from Thursday’s $567.84, but he rates the stock a Buy.
Meta stock trades for twenty-three times next year’s earnings per share currently, and Post thinks it can inch up to twenty-five times based on its artificial intelligence potential. “The company appears to be successfully innovating around new AI capabilities, driving usage growth which can offset terminal value concerns, and we see Meta as the top AI pick in consumer Internet.”
It is true that Meta has lead the move to AI technology that is “open-source.” Its Llama version of “generative” AI is all the rage, even as OpenAI continues to lose top talent.
So, Meta is very relevant technologically, just not in the fluffy way that Mark Zuckerberg had presented three years ago. The thing that’s been best for this company is driving the advertising engine, laying off staff, boosting operating profit margins, and buying back a ton of stock—the plain old stuff that doesn’t require a Metaverse.
A MORE INTERNATIONAL REDDIT
Meanwhile, the newer darling of social media, Reddit, gets a vote of confidence on Thursday from Benjamin Black of Deutsche Bank, who notes that the company is deploying localized versions of the property in Spanish, Portuguese, German, Italian, Filipino and dozens of other languages. When this happened with French-language support earlier this year, notes Black, it lead to a surge of activity among users in France of Reddit.
“This follows the initial launch of French translation earlier this year, which propelled France to be one of the fastest growing countries for Reddit, outpacing the US, which grew users 59% y/y and revenue 39% y/y in 2Q24,” he notes. “In our view, this could fast-track both content consumption, as well as content creation across the globe to the benefit of all users,” writes Black, “which should fuel the flywheel of more content attracting more users, which in turn should generate more content, attracting more users.” That is important because Reddit has only half its users coming from outside the U.S., whereas Meta, for example, gets 91% of people from outside the country. If Reddit can close that gap, muses Black, its number of users—as measured by “daily average users,” or, DAUs, the thing the Street cares about—could be 50 to 150% higher than current estimates come 2026.
I’m fairly confident that by 2026, no one will remember what they thought the DAU numbers were supposed to be for Reddit. Nor will they even remember it by the end of this year. Stuff such as DAUs, user counts, engagement, etc., all get sweated over quarter by quarter. So, while Black could be right, I doubt it will mean much for the shares on the way to 2026. Reddit has doubled since its March 21st IPO.
ROBO-TAXIS ARE THE FUTURE?
You may recall that Tesla is expected on October 10th to unveil its “robo-taxi,” an event eagerly anticipated since the company’s disappointing second-quarter report in July. The shares are up almost 30% since that report as investors have become a little more comfortable with Tesla’s pace of sales, and as they anticipate the taxi unveiling.
But just how viable is the robo-taxi thing? A big believer is Bernstein’s Nikhil Devnani, who on Thursday relates his personal trip in a Waymo self-driving taxi in San Francisco. This is by now a somewhat familiar story—Waymo, backed by Alphabet’s Google, is serving 50,000 paid rides per week in California, according to Devnani. But the “unit economics” are still rough even when not paying a driver. The Waymo car, a Jaguar I-Pace, costing $75,000, must be outfitted with as much as a $100,000 worth of LiDAR and other sensors, notes Devnani.
In a previous report—this is the third in a series Devnani has written—he had noted that “there are real challenges to scaling,” getting enough of these expensive cars on the road to have a fleet that’s economical. In the latest note, after enjoying some Waymo rides in San Francisco, Devnani concludes, “It’s early days, but recent developments and continued investment across the space leave me increasingly convinced that AVs are the future, not just for robotaxi supply but also with respect to personal car ownership in the long-run, which I think is the bigger picture end-game here.”
Perhaps, but one thing needs to be reiterated again and again. Waymo, and all other operations, such as General Motors’s Cruise business, have very, very limited deployments in areas such as San Francisco that have been extensively mapped by multiple companies. As critics of self-driving tech, such as Meta’s head of AI, Yann LeCun, have repeatedly noted, this technology does not yet understand how to drive on any road in any city in any country. For that reason, I suspect that no matter what comes from Elon Musk on the 10th of October, we are farther from the promise of self-driving than Waymo and others will admit.
This story originally appeared in The Technology Letter and is republished here with permission.
U.S. trade officials this week may impose new tariffs on solar panels from four Southeast Asian nations that American manufacturers have complained employ unfair subsidies that make U.S. products uncompetitive.
The announcement, due on Tuesday, is the first of two preliminary decisions the Commerce Department will make this year in a trade case brought by Korea’s Hanwha Qcells, Arizona-based First Solar and several smaller companies seeking to protect billions of dollars in investments in U.S. solar manufacturing.
The domestic producers argue that competition from cheap imports by Chinese companies operating in Malaysia, Vietnam, Thailand and Cambodia threatens U.S. President Joe Biden’s goal to boost domestic manufacturing of clean energy technologies needed to combat climate change.
“They are hopeful that these cases will help to level the playing field,” Tim Brightbill, the group’s attorney, said in an interview last month.
Commerce’s decision will for the first time consider the impact of cross-border subsidies, for instance the Chinese government subsidizing a manufacturer in Vietnam or elsewhere. Such countervailing duties had previously been banned but this year the department finalized a rule that allowed them.
In its April petition, the Hanwha-led American Alliance for Solar Manufacturing Trade Committee alleged that Chinese manufacturers operating in the four Southeast Asian countries received generous subsidies from those governments in the form of cheap financing, electricity and land, tax exemptions and more. The group also alleged the companies receive subsidies from China like cut-rate raw materials and components as well as other support via its Belt and Road Initiative, a decade-old infrastructure program to link China with Asia, the Middle East and Europe.
A companion anti-dumping case is expected to receive a preliminary decision in November. Countervailing duties tend to be lower than anti-dumping duties, a form of tariff meant to keep overseas producers from selling at below market prices.
The U.S. already collects an array of duties on solar imports.
Not all U.S. solar manufacturers want Commerce to impose new tariffs on solar imports.
Companies setting up panel factories, for instance, rely on low-cost solar cells from Southeast Asia to assemble into panels in the U.S. Many U.S. panel plants are owned by large China-based manufacturers.
Solar project developers also worry that tariffs will hurt their business by driving up the cost of panels, which are already more expensive in the U.S. than anywhere else in the world.
“Imposing tariffs on solar cell imports — when there’s currently no solar cell manufacturing in the U.S. — will only enhance the profits of incumbent manufacturers, and will stifle America’s ability to onshore the solar supply chain and meet the fast-growing demand for clean, affordable and reliable power supply” said Jim Murphy, president of Invenergy, a Chicago-based project developer that is also the joint owner, with China’s Longi, of Ohio solar panel maker Illuminate USA.
My iPhone 13 Pro Max was working just fine when I decided to upgrade to the latest model.
The 13 Pro Max still feels fast, takes excellent photos, and easily lasts all day on a full charge even at 88% battery health. The usual improvements you expect from a new iPhone—faster processor, better cameras, longer battery life—would be lost on me in day-to-day use.
But over the past few years, Apple’s also been piling on new features that flat out don’t work on older phones. For me, at least, upgrading to the iPhone 16 Pro Max wasn’t just about incremental performance improvements, but about gaining access to specific capabilities that my older phone doesn’t support.
If, like me, you’re also upgrading for the first time in a few years or more, here’s all the lost ground you need to cover:
[Photo: Jared Newman]
New buttons
Unless you bought an iPhone 15 Pro last year, your new iPhone now has two extra buttons that weren’t there before, and they both take some getting used to.
The Camera Control button appears on all iPhone 16 models and will open the Camera with a single click, or a double-click if your phone’s screen is off. Sliding your finger across the button will adjust the zoom range by default, while a light double-click will let you switch from zoom control to other settings such as exposure and depth of field.
Heading to Settings > Camera > Camera Control gives you some extra options, such as always requiring a double-click or mapping the button to Apple’s Magnifier mode instead. Apple says it’ll add more features to Camera Control over time.
The Action Button, which debuted on the iPhone 15 Pro last year, activates with a long-press and replaces the mute switch on older iPhones by default. If you head to Settings > Action Button, you can map it to other functions such as the flashlight, specific camera modes, or Shazam music recognition.
The possibilities really open up if you connect the Action Button to the iOS Shortcuts app. That way, you can launch a favorite app, trigger custom actions, or open a Shortcuts folder with different menu options. You can even use a Shortcut that assigns the button to two separate actions.
[Photo: Jared Newman]
Dynamic Island
“Dynamic Island” is Apple’s term for the space around the front camera cutout on the iPhone 14 Pro and all iPhones from the 15 series onward. While you might initially dismiss it as a cosmetic flourish, it actually serves as a helpful multitasking tool.
If you’re navigating in Apple Maps or Google Maps, for instance, you can open a different app, then tap the island to quickly go back to the directions. Same goes if you’re listening to music, playing a podcast, or making a phone call.
Some apps also provide quick controls when you long-press the Dynamic Island instead of tapping on it. Long-press while playing music, for instance, and you can pause, skip tracks, or choose an AirPlay speaker directly from the pop-up menu.
[Photo: Jared Newman]
Always-On Display and StandBy
Pro-model iPhones from the iPhone 14 Pro onward include an Always-On Display mode, which dims the screen instead of turning it all the way off when you hit the power button. In this setting, you’ll still see the lock screen wallpaper, the current time, and incoming notifications. If any of this seems too distracting, head to Settings > Display & Brightness > Always-On Display, where you’ll find options to turn off wallpapers, hide notifications, or disable the feature entirely.
The Always-On Display is also a key component of StandBy, a special display mode that kicks in when you place the phone on its side and connect it to a charger. In StandBy mode, you’ll see a pair of customizable widgets, similar to those on the home screen, and can swipe over to a photo gallery and a clock. If audio is playing, you can also tap the “….” icon at the top to bring up playback controls.
While StandBy mode also works with standard iPhones, the screen will stay off until you tap on it, which kind of defeats the purpose. Combining a Pro-model iPhone with StandBy—and perhaps a MagSafe charging dock—is the closest you’ll get to an Apple smart display until the company finally gets around to shipping one.
[Photo: Jared Newman]
Emergency SOS
All iPhones 14 and onward include emergency satellite messaging, which can contact emergency services even when Wi-Fi and cellular service are unavailable. Apple initially said the service would be free for two years, but it’s yet to announce a price and has already extended the offer to three years for iPhone 14 owners.
Arguably the biggest new iPhone feature that’s bound to recent hardware is also one that’s not quite here yet. That’d be Apple Intelligence, which requires an iPhone 15 Pro or any iPhone 16 model.
Apple Intelligence refers to a suite of features that use generative AI in some capacity. The first wave of features, arriving in iOS 18.1, will include system-wide writing tools, an unwanted object eraser for photos, notification summaries, email summaries in Apple’s Mail app, and adaptive Focus modes that try to filter out unimportant interruptions. An overhauled version of Siri is also coming, bringing much deeper integration with third-party apps.
Will any of that have a bigger impact on my day-to-day iPhone use than, say, a faster processor and better cameras? It’s unclear, but at least I’ve got some new buttons and screen modes to play with in the meantime.
Britain’s last coal-fired power plant is closing on Monday, ending 142 years of coal-generated electricity in the nation that sparked the Industrial Revolution.
The Ratcliffe-on-Soar station in central England is finishing its final shift at midnight after more than half a century of turning coal into power. The U.K. government hailed the closure as a milestone in efforts to generate all of Britain’s energy from renewable sources by 2030.
Plant manager Peter O’Grady said it was “an emotional day.”
“When I started my career 36 years ago, none of us imaged a future without coal generation in our lifetimes,” he said.
The shutdown makes Britain the first country from the Group of Seven major economies to phase out coal — though some other European nations, including Sweden and Belgium, got there sooner.
Owner Uniper says many of the 170 remaining employees will stay on during a two-year decommissioning process.
Energy Minister Michael Shanks said the plant’s closure “marks the end of an era and coal workers can be rightly proud of their work powering our country for over 140 years. We owe generations a debt of gratitude as a country.”
“The era of coal might be ending, but a new age of good energy jobs for our country is just beginning,” he said.
The world’s first coal-fired electricity plant, Thomas Edison’s Edison Electric Light Station, opened in London in 1882.
Ratcliffe-on-Soar, which opened in 1967, is a landmark whose eight concrete cooling towers and 199-meter (650-foot) chimney are seen by millions of people a year as they drive past on the M1 highway or speed by on trains.
In 1990 coal provided about 80% of Britain’s electricity. By 2012 it had fallen to 39%, and by 2023 it stood at just 1%, according to figures from the National Grid. More than half of Britain’s electricity now comes from renewable sources such as wind and solar power, and the rest from natural gas and nuclear energy.
“Ten years ago, coal was the leading source of this country’s power — generating a third of our electricity,” said Dhara Vyas, deputy chief executive of trade body Energy U.K.
“So, to get to this point just a decade later, with coal’s contribution replaced by clean and low carbon sources, is an incredible achievement,” Vyas said. “As we aim for further ambitious targets in the energy transition, it’s worth remembering that few back then thought such a change at such a pace was possible.”
Coal has fueled civil strife as well as powering the country. Tens of thousands of miners walked out in 1984 over plans by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government to close more than 20 coal pits. The strike lasted a year, divided communities and saw widespread violence as police clashed with pickets. The miners’ eventual defeat helped break the power of Britain’s trade unions and hasten the end of the mining industry and the communities that relied on it.
Coal remains a combustible issue. Plans to open Britain’s first new coal mine in 30 years in northwest England divided residents, with some welcoming the promise of well-paid jobs and others opposing the pollution and carbon emissions it would bring. On Sept. 13 the High Court struck down planning permission for the mine that had been granted by the previous Conservative government in 2022.
Another chapter in Britain’s carbon-burning industrial heritage ends Monday with the closure of the last blast furnace at one of the world’s biggest steelworks, in Port Talbot, Wales.
Almost 2,000 jobs are being lost with the shutdown at the plant, owned by India’s Tata Steel. Tata plans to replace the blast furnace, which runs on the coal derivative coke, with a cleaner electric furnace that will emit less carbon and require fewer workers.
At its 1960s peak, more than 18,000 people were employed at the Port Talbot steelworks, before cheaper offerings from China and other countries hit production.
Roy Rickhuss, general secretary of the Community union, said the closure “marks the end of an era, but this is not the end for Port Talbot.”
“We will never stop fighting for our steel industry and our communities in South Wales,” he said.
The two astronauts stuck at the International Space Station since June welcomed their new ride home with Sunday’s arrival of a SpaceX capsule.
SpaceX launched the rescue mission on Saturday with a downsized crew of two astronauts and two empty seats reserved for Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, who will return next year. The Dragon capsule docked in darkness as the two craft soared 265 miles (426 kilometers) above Botswana.
NASA switched Wilmore and Williams to SpaceX following concerns over the safety of their Boeing Starliner capsule. It was the first Starliner test flight with a crew, and NASA decided the thruster failures and helium leaks that cropped up after liftoff were too serious and poorly understood to risk the test pilots’ return. So Starliner returned to Earth empty earlier this month.
The Dragon carrying NASA’s Nick Hague and the Russian Space Agency’s Alexander Gorbunov will remain at the space station until February, turning what should have been a weeklong trip for Wilmore and Williams into a mission lasting more than eight months.
Two NASA astronauts were pulled from the mission to make room for Wilmore and Williams on the return leg.
“I just want to say welcome to our new compadres,” Williams, the space station commander, said once Hague and Gorbunov floated inside and were embraced by the nine astronauts awaiting them.
Hague said it was a smooth flight up. “Coming through the hatch and seeing all the smiles, and as much as I’ve laughed and cried in the last 10 minutes, I know it’s going to be an amazing expedition,” he said.
NASA likes to replace its station crews every six months or so. SpaceX has provided the taxi service since the company’s first astronaut flight in 2020. NASA also hired Boeing for ferry flights after the space shuttles were retired, but flawed software and other Starliner issues led to years of delays and more than $1 billion in repairs.
Starliner inspections are underway at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, with post-flight reviews of data set to begin this week.
“We’re a long way from saying, ‘Hey, we’re writing off Boeing,'” NASA’s associate administrator Jim Free said at a pre-launch briefing.
The arrival of two fresh astronauts means the four who have been up there since March can now return to Earth in their own SpaceX capsule in just over a week, bringing the station’s crew size back down to the normal seven. Their stay was extended a month because of the Starliner turmoil.
Although Saturday’s liftoff went well, SpaceX said the rocket’s spent upper stage ended up outside its targeted impact zone in the Pacific because of a bad engine firing. The company has halted all Falcon launches until it figures out what went wrong.was extended a month because of the Starliner turmoil.
The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
As the joke goes, sometimes you need a vacation to recover from your vacation. Traditionally, vacations conjure up images of packed itineraries, rushing from one landmark to the next, only to return home completely exhausted.
However, according to the latest Hilton Annual Trends Report, those vacations may be a relic of the past as we enter an era of slow travel. This is where tourists prioritize rest, along with “immersing oneself into a destination for an extended time as a local to fully experience the culture,” as Hilton explains it.
The hospitality giant surveyed 13,000 adults over the age of 18 who plan to travel within the next year from 13 different countries across the globe. Here are the key findings:
Travelers are leaning into relaxation: 20% are indulging in “Hurkle-Durkling,” a Scottish phrase for lounging in bed all day, and over a quarter have booked spa or wellness treatments. A quarter are looking to disconnect from social media, and 20% are traveling for self-discovery or for their mental health.
The call of the wild still beckons: 70% of travelers say they still enjoy being active, and 20% are planning an outdoor adventure.
In good company: 64% of solo travelers say their favorite companion is a good book and 25% travel with pets (compared to 19% of non-solo travelers). Meanwhile, 30% say they are traveling with “frolleagues”—colleague friends.
So what are some top destinations for slow travelers? According to Hilton, “secondary” locations are all the rage, including places like Sardinia and the Turkish port city of Bodrum.
“Travelers don’t just want to choose their own adventure—they want to maximize every moment of their time away,” Chris Nassetta, president and chief executive officer of Hilton, said in a statement.
