Greg Wasson is suing his former employer for $200 million in a contract dispute related to his startup. Greg Wasson worked for Walgreens for more than three decades, starting as an intern and serving as chief executive officer of the pharmacy giant from 2009 to 2014. Now, Wasson is suing his former employer in a contract dispute with a technology startup he helped found in 2017. He claims current Walgreens CEO Roz Brewer reneged on an agreement to replace glass doors on store refrigerator displays with high-tech digital screens that would flash product information and advertisements at consumers while they were shopping for cold beverages. Brewer’s decision to end a roll-out of the “Smart Doors” that Wasson and his partners at Cooler Screens had committed to installing at 2,500 Walgreens Boots Alliance Inc. stores across the US cost their business more than $200 million, according to the complaint filed Wednesday in state court in Chicago. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] More from TIME [video id=UUoxwYSx autostart="viewable"] Walgreens called the allegations “baseless and unfounded” in a statement. Cooler Screens had sold the Deerfield, Illinois-based pharmacy chain on a pilot project with the innovative doors in 2018 before winning a nationwide contract, only to have Brewer change direction after she started as CEO in 2021, according to the complaint. “After visiting stores in which Smart Doors had been installed, Brewer decided that she did not like the way they looked, purportedly comparing the screens to ‘Vegas’ in a derogatory way,” lawyers for Wasson and his partners wrote. They alleged that Walgreens fabricated reasons to terminate the contract, including by citing safety defects with the Smart Doors that didn’t really exist. Cooler Screens said it spent $45 million making and installing doors in the first 700 stores, $88 million on doors that haven’t been installed, and more than $100 million on third-party vendors. “We are disappointed that Cooler Screens is falsely claiming that anything other than their failure to perform was the basis for the termination of our contractual relationship,” Walgreens said in its statement. Walgreens customers gave the doors mixed reviews, according to media accounts. Cooler Screens said in a statement that “third-party consumer surveys taken earlier this year show that 79% of respondents reported that in-store digital advertising positively impacted their shopping experience, while only 6% said it had a negative effect.” In 2014, Wasson announced his retirement from Walgreens as CEO and president amid a management shakeup as the company was merging with European retailer Alliance Boots GmbH. The case is Cooler Screens Inc. v. Walgreens Co., 2023CH05474, Illinois Circuit Court, Cook County (Chicago). (Updates with Walgreens statement.).....»»

Zeynep Ton explores how high turnover rates can ruin companies. There’s a lot more to a good job than making money. But for more than 50 million Americans who work in low-wage jobs, pay matters a lot—more than those of us who make higher wages may think. Low and inconsistent pay wreak havoc on workers’ lives, leaving no margin for emergencies or unexpected expenses. Juggling multiple jobs and not being able to meet obligations increases stress, undermining mental and physical health and cognitive functioning, which leads to more errors and less reliable attendance. As a result, they find themselves stuck in a vicious cycle: low pay hurts their performance, which keeps them stuck in low paying jobs. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] In my research and work with more than two dozen companies at the nonprofit Good Jobs Institute, I’ve seen that companies, too, pay a steep price for low pay. Low pay drives high employee turnover, including for K-12 teachers. In low-wage settings including senior living, call centers, warehouses, retail stores, and restaurants, we have seen some companies replacing their entire frontline workforce annually, with more than 100% employee turnover. Many executives I’ve met didn’t think costs of turnover were high enough to justify higher pay—but they had never even quantified the full costs of turnover to begin with. At most companies with which Good Jobs Institute has worked, employers are pouring the equivalent of 10 to 25% of their labor budget on replacement costs—the costs to recruit, train, and reach baseline productivity, only to start all over again when employees leave. We worked with one company whose replacement costs were 45% of payroll because employees had to be licensed. But those costs pale in comparison to costs from the inevitable poor operational execution that takes place when there is high turnover: lower sales from mistakes, slow service, and customer dissatisfaction; high product costs from more errors, overtime costs, and reduced labor productivity. Not to mention the lost sales from shutting down stores—recall the signs that went viral during the pandemic asserting, “we’re closed because we all quit.” Read More: Return-to-Office Full Time Is Losing. Hybrid Work Is On the Rise When pay is low, companies end up in their own vicious cycle: High turnover hurts company performance, ensuring that pay stays low and turnover stays high. Furthermore, when companies are in this cycle, they end up making many interrelated decisions that weaken their system. Managers are always fighting fires, never having enough time to hire and train well. Inevitably, these companies don’t trust their frontliners to do a good job and design the jobs for interchangeable pairs of hands rather than humans with brains, wasting so much talent and potential along the way. Understaffing is common, which causes even more problems and creates anxiety for employees and their managers. Overworked managers then leave or ask to be demoted. Expectations become dismally low. For instance, high turnover at a convenience store chain we worked with forced managers to make what they called, “desperation hires”: when someone walked in to apply for a job, they were hired immediately, with no interview or background check, and put on the floor without training. That already told employees that this was not a high expectations environment, and in turn, the stores struggled with absenteeism and poor service. Because store managers couldn’t trust this revolving door of new employees, they spent most of their time re-checking counts of the cash drawer and lottery tickets—not on driving better service. So, to get customers in, executives spent resources on rewards programs and marketing, only to lose them quickly due to long lines and dirty bathrooms. The chain had to halt plans to start offering high-margin fresh food, because errors were leading to spoilage and food safety issues. High turnover is not just expensive. It’s ruinous. It’s uncompetitive. It’s inhumane. And a system based on low pay and high turnover is a weak match for what’s coming. With more retirements, people having fewer kids, it’s not going to get any easier to hire and retain frontline workers. A leaked Amazon memo from 2022 revealed that they had to change their expansion plans because, given its high turnover rate, it would simply run out of people within a few years. With frontline employees in high demand, and new minimum wage regulations, continuously rising wages are inevitable. If companies don’t change their system that treats employees like a pair of hands, they will face increasing costs for the same output—after all the job is the same. But there’s a better way. Rather than seeing employees as a cost to be minimized, companies like Costco and H-E-B view them as human beings who can drive profitability and growth, paying them significantly more than market. In 2022, average hourly wage for a Costco worker in the US was $26, almost $10 more per hour than a typical retail worker. H-E-B’s pay strategy is to pay as high as they can, not as low as they can. But these companies don’t just pay more—they design a system that increases productivity and sets up employees to succeed. They eliminate wasteful activities (such as constant changes to displays), stagger new product introductions to smooth workload, cross-train employees, empower them to make decisions, and give them enough time to serve the customer well and engage in improvement. Unlike the vulnerable high turnover system, both companies have a system of excellence where workers are treated with dignity and respect, customers enjoy lower prices and better service, and shareholders are rewarded with strong returns. Consider the example of QuikTrip, a convenience store chain with gas stations. Far from “desperation hires,” getting a job at QuikTrip is quite competitive. Training is evaluative—if you can’t deliver the fast and friendly QuikTrip experience then you don’t start working. Employees are accountable to high standards to keep shelves stocked, bathrooms clean, and customers in and out quickly. Store managers constantly give employees feedback to improve performance. With just quarter of the turnover of the industry average, QuikTrip can spend more on each employee and trust them to use good judgment, which gives employees more agency to drive higher sales and customer satisfaction. The good news: companies can change. Walmart’s Sam’s Club, call centers at Quest Diagnostics, and pet store chain Mud Bay improved pay, schedules, and redesigned their system to improve productivity and service. In 2019, Sam’s Club increased pay $5-$7 an hour for several key roles and, from 2020-2022, further increased hourly pay for all employees by 18%. In 2016, Quest Diagnostics raised starting pay for its call center workers from $13 to $14 and implemented tenure-based increases. Mud Bay, a chain with 2% profit margins, increased hourly pay 24% over 3 years. By 2022, it was able to pay all its employees a living wage, based on the MIT living wage calculator for different locations. These companies didn’t just raise pay, they made employees’ work more valuable, making the pay investment worthy. What were the results? Within two years, Sam’s Club reduced hourly workers’ turnover by 25%. Manager turnover dropped even more. Within eighteen months, Quest Diagnostics reduced hourly turnover by more than 50%, and absenteeism dropped. Within three years, Mud Bay reduced turnover by 35%. In addition to lower turnover costs, all these companies saw higher sales, lower costs, and improved productivity. At Sam’s Club, productivity increased 16%, customer loyalty increased 7%, and sales grew nearly 15% without opening any new stores. At Quest, overall costs decreased $2 million, $1.3 million of which came from ideas from the reps. Customers received better service, with fewer transfers and faster answer rates. At Mud Bay, employees were able to generate 12% higher sales per labor hour and 25% higher sales per square (compared to 9% industry average at the time). We’ve seen similar results in small restaurants and bakeries. Leaders at these companies realized that to win with their customers and grow, they couldn’t afford high employee turnover. Instead of asking, “how much will it cost to increase pay?” they asked the enlightened question of, “what will be the cost to my competitors if we get this right, and they don’t?” Throughout the pandemic, we called these frontline workers essential because they are essential to the functioning of our economy. They deserve living wages and companies can profitably offer those wages, if they choose to adopt a different system. If more companies chose good jobs, we could rebuild a strong middle class and better businesses......»»

Greg Wasson is suing his former employer for $200 million in a contract dispute related to his startup. Greg Wasson worked for Walgreens for more than three decades, starting as an intern and serving as chief executive officer of the pharmacy giant from 2009 to 2014. Now Wasson is suing his former employer in a contract dispute. He claims that current CEO Roz Brewer reneged on the company’s agreement with him to replace glass doors on store refrigerator displays with high-tech digital screens that would flash product information and advertisements at consumers while they were shopping for cold beverages. Brewer’s decision to end a rollout of the “Smart Doors” that Wasson and his partners had committed to installing at 2,500 Walgreens Boots Alliance Inc. stores across the U.S. cost their startup more than $200 million, according to the complaint filed Wednesday in state court in Chicago. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] More from TIME [video id=UUoxwYSx autostart="viewable"] Cooler Screens had sold the Deerfield, Illinois-based pharmacy chain on a pilot project with the innovative doors in 2018 before winning a nationwide contract, only to have Brewer change direction after she started as CEO in 2021, according to the complaint. “After visiting stores in which Smart Doors had been installed, Brewer decided that she did not like the way they looked, purportedly comparing the screens to ‘Vegas’ in a derogatory way,” lawyers for Wasson and his partners wrote. They alleged that Walgreens fabricated reasons to terminate the contract, including by citing safety defects with the Smart Doors that didn’t really exist. Cooler Screens said it spent $45 million making and installing doors in the first 700 stores, $88 million on doors that haven’t been installed, and more than $100 million on third-party vendors. Walgreens customers gave the doors mixed reviews, according to media accounts. The company declined to comment on the suit, citing “pending litigation.” In 2014, Wasson announced his retirement from Walgreens as CEO and president amid a management shakeup as the company was merging with European retailer Alliance Boots GmbH. The case is Cooler Screens Inc. v. Walgreens Co., 2023CH05474, Illinois Circuit Court, Cook County (Chicago)......»»

The religious broadcaster helped make religion central to GOP politics in America through his Christian Coalition VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. — Pat Robertson, a religious broadcaster who turned a tiny Virginia station into the global Christian Broadcasting Network, tried a run for president and helped make religion central to Republican Party politics in America through his Christian Coalition, has died. He was 93. Robertson’s death Thursday was announced by his broadcasting network. No cause was given. Robertson’s enterprises also included Regent University, an evangelical Christian school in Virginia Beach; the American Center for Law and Justice, which defends the First Amendment rights of religious people; and Operation Blessing, an international humanitarian organization. But for more than a half-century, Robertson was a familiar presence in American living rooms, known for his “700 Club” television show, and in later years, his televised pronouncements of God’s judgment on America for everything from homosexuality to the teaching of evolution. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] More from TIME [video id=OKBbLLJa autostart="viewable"] The money poured in as he solicited donations, his influence soared, and when he moved directly into politics by seeking the GOP presidential nomination in 1988, he brought a huge following with him. Robertson pioneered a now-common strategy of courting Iowa’s network of evangelical Christian churches, and finished in second place in the Iowa caucuses, ahead of Vice President George H.W. Bush. At the time, Jeffrey K. Hadden, a University of Virginia sociologist and a Robertson biographer, said Robertson’s masterstroke was insisting that three million followers across the U.S. sign petitions before he would decide to run. The tactic gave him an army. ″He asked people to pledge that they’d work for him, pray for him and give him money,” Hadden told The Associated Press in 1988. ″Political historians may view it as one of the most ingenious things a candidate ever did.″ Robertson later endorsed Bush, who won the presidency. Pursuit of Iowa’s evangelicals is now a ritual for Republican hopefuls, including those currently seeking the White House in 2024. Robertson started the Christian Coalition in Chesapeake in 1989, saying it would further his campaign’s ideals. The coalition became a major force in Republican politics in the 1990s, mobilizing conservative voters through grass-roots activities. By the time of his resignation as the coalition’s president in 2001 — Robertson said he wanted to concentrate on ministerial work — his impact on both religion and politics in the U.S. was “enormous,” according to John C. Green, an emeritus political science professor at The University of Akron. Many followed the path Robertson cut in religious broadcasting, Green told the AP in 2021. In American politics, Robertson helped “cement the alliance between conservative Christians and the Republican Party.” Marion Gordon “Pat” Robertson was born March 22, 1930, in Lexington, Virginia, to Absalom Willis Robertson and Gladys Churchill Robertson. His father served for 36 years as a U.S. Representative and U.S. Senator from Virginia. After graduating from Washington and Lee University, he served as assistant adjutant of the 1st Marine Division in Korea. He received a law degree from Yale University Law School, but failed the bar exam and chose not to pursue a law career. Robertson met his wife, Adelia “Dede” Elmer, at Yale in 1952. He was a Southern Baptist, she was a Catholic, earning a master’s in nursing. Eighteen months later, they ran off to be married by a justice of the peace, knowing neither family would approve. Robertson was interested in politics until he found religion, Dede Robertson told the AP in 1987. He stunned her by pouring out their liquor, tearing a nude print off the wall and declaring he had found the Lord. They moved into a commune in New York City’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood because Robertson said God told him to sell all his possessions and minister to the poor. She was tempted to return home to Ohio, “but I realized that was not what the Lord would have me do … I had promised to stay, so I did,” she told the AP. Robertson received a master’s in divinity from New York Theological Seminary in 1959, then drove south with his family to buy a bankrupt UHF television station in Portsmouth, Va. He said he had just $70 in his pocket, but soon found investors, and CBN went on the air on Oct. 1, 1961. Established as a tax-exempt religious nonprofit, CBN brought in hundreds of millions, disclosing $321 million in “ministry support” in 2022 alone. One of Robertson’s innovations was to use the secular talk-show format on the network’s flagship show, the “700 Club,” which grew out of a telethon when Robertson asked 700 viewers for monthly $10 contributions. It was more suited to television than traditional revival meetings or church services, and gained a huge audience. “Here’s a well-educated person having sophisticated conversations with a wide variety of guests on a wide variety of topics,” said Green, the University of Akron political science professor. “It was with a religious inflection to be sure. But it was an approach that took up everyday concerns.” His guests eventually included several U.S. presidents — Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump. At times, his on-air pronouncements drew criticism. He claimed that the terrorist attacks that killed thousands of Americans on Sept. 11, 2001 were caused by God, angered by the federal courts, pornography, abortion rights and church-state separation. Talking again about 9-11 on his TV show a year later, Robertson described Islam as a violent religion that wants to “dominate” and “destroy,” prompting President George W. Bush to distance himself and say Islam is a peaceful and respectful religion. He called for the assassination of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez in 2005. Later that year, he warned residents of a rural Pennsylvania town not to be surprised if disaster struck them because they voted out school board members who favored teaching “intelligent design” over evolution. And in 1998, he said Orlando, Florida, should beware of hurricanes after allowing the annual Gay Days event. In 2014, he angered Kenyans when he warned that towels in Kenya could transmit AIDS. CBN issued a correction, saying Robertson “misspoke about the possibility of getting AIDS through towels.” Robertson also could be unpredictable: In 2010, he called for ending mandatory prison sentences for marijuana possession convictions. Two years later, he said on the “700 Club” that marijuana should be legalized and treated like alcohol because the government’s war on drugs had failed. Robertson condemned Democrats caught up in sex scandals, saying for example that President Bill Clinton turned the White House into a playpen for sexual freedom. But he helped solidify evangelical support for Donald Trump, dismissing the candidate’s sexually predatory comments about women as an attempt “to look like he’s macho.” After Trump took office, Robertson interviewed the president at the White House. And CBN welcomed Trump advisers, such as Kellyanne Conway, as guests. But after President Trump lost to Joe Biden in 2020, Robertson said Trump was living in an “alternate reality” and should “move on,” news outlets reported. Robertson’s son, Gordon, succeeded him in December 2007 as chief executive of CBN, which is now based in Virginia Beach. Robertson remained chairman of the network and continued to appear on the “700 Club.” Robertson stepped down as host of the show after half a century in 2021, with his son Gordon taking over the weekday show. Robertson also was founder and chairman of International Family Entertainment Inc., parent of The Family Channel basic cable TV network. Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. bought IFE in 1997. Regent University, where classes began in Virginia Beach in 1978, now has more than 30,000 alumni, CBN said in a statement. Robertson wrote 15 books, including “The Turning Tide” and “The New World Order.” His wife Dede, who was a founding board member of CBN, died last year at the age of 94. The couple had four children, 14 grandchildren and 24 great-grandchildren, CBN said in a statement. —Former Associated Press reporter Don Schanche contributed to this story......»»

Major luxury brand LVMH has made a wave of climate commitments to rethink how it does business, its head of environment tells TIME. (To get this story in your inbox, subscribe to the TIME CO2 Leadership Report newsletter here.) Earlier this year, luxury goods company LVMH made headlines when it became the first European company to top a $500 billion market cap, helping make its founder Bernard Arnault the wealthiest person in the world. At the same time, and less noticed by the global media, the company has made a wave of climate commitments to rethink how it does business. These caught my eye both because of the fashion industry’s enormous and growing environmental footprint and because of LVMH’s pole position as perhaps the industry’s most recognizable company. So with those factors in mind, a few weeks ago in Paris I sat down with Hélène Valade, who oversees environmental work across all of LVMH’s 75 brands. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] At the core of LVMH’s climate efforts is a new program called LIFE360 that lays out a range of climate and biodiversity targets for the company. The goals are extensive: no virgin plastics used in packaging by 2026, a 50% cut in energy-related emissions by 2026 from 2019 levels, and zero deforestation from products in its supply chain by 2025. The company’s regulatory filings lists a range of achievements along those lines, from successful implementation of policies that uncover where they’re sourcing materials to measures that have slashed energy use in stores. “All our products come from nature—no champagne without grapes, no perfumes without forests, no ready-to-wear without cotton,” Valade told me. “It was very important to have an ambitious environmental strategy in mind.” That strategy cuts to the core of the LVMH business model. The company is evaluating where it sources raw materials, not only to protect biodiversity but also to ensure that its supply chains aren’t vulnerable to rapidly changing climate conditions like desertification. The company is working to grow its repair business to extend the lifespan of its products, and is rolling out traceability tools so customers can understand the source and environmental impact of what they buy. Later this year, customers should be able to scan a QR on products at Sephora, for example, and see the details of its sourcing. One challenge for diversified firms like LVMH is implementing ambitious company-wide goals across widely varied divisions and departments. LVMH has 75 brands, each of which has a lot of operational independence. Valade said the company is laying out a “common set of goals” around everything from biodiversity to energy consumption with LIFE360 and then giving the brands the tools to implement. I was most struck by the commitment to give all employees across the globe environmental training. Buyers now need to be concerned with carbon footprints, sales people need to be able to answer environmental questions from customers, and employees that handle logistics need to understand emissions from different modes of transport, says Valade. “The change has to make sense to each employee,” says Valade. “We have to give them the keys to implement the change.” To that end, the company is opening a training center just outside Paris where European employees will come through to get up to speed on how climate impacts their jobs. The company is looking to conduct similar programs in other locations across the globe. It can be easy to look at corporate commitments skeptically, but Valade makes the business case convincingly. LVMH needs to attract young talent, and sustainability is a key concern for Gen Z. Customers increasingly care about the issue. (The company’s sustainability focused products—for example, Louis Vuitton’s line of upcycled sneakers—have been some of its best sellers). And, perhaps most importantly, the company’s supply chains are vulnerable to climate change. Valade discussed this point with me, but it’s also evident from a look at the company’s regulatory filings, which devote significant space to the financial risks of climate change. In recent years, the fashion industry accounted for 4% of global emissions, according to data from McKinsey. And that percentage is poised to grow both as other sectors decarbonize and the global population continues to grow and buy more clothing. In theory, LVMH, with its size and iconic brands, can play a leading role in changing the industry. “We have an important capacity to influence and drive society,” Valade says. “And this influence has to be put in the service of sustainability.” To get there will require all the firms focused on selling cheap products quickly, not just the luxury brands of LVMH, to think a little differently......»»

From managing under Elon Musk to bringing back advertisers, here are some of the challenges Linda Yaccarino faces Twitter’s new CEO Linda Yaccarino took over the helm at the company from owner Elon Musk this week. The media executive inherits a slew of challenges as she begins leading the company. In the roughly seven months since Elon Musk bought and began running the social media company, it has faced various challenges—including figuring out how to monetize its blue-check offering, and an exodus of advertisers amid concerns about hate speech on the site—all while Musk slashed staff numbers. “It’s been a cascading set of events that have really put her behind the eight ball in terms of favorable conditions,” says Brian Uzzi, a professor of leadership at Northwestern University. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] Yaccarino, who has spent nearly 12 years as an advertising executive at NBCUniversal, is faced with the task of rehabilitating Twitter in more ways than one—most notably repairing the company’s reputation with advertisers and bringing it to profitability. Here are some of the biggest challenges Yaccarino faces as Twitter’s new CEO. Managing under Musk Musk has said that he will transition into the role of executive chairman and chief technology officer, which experts say could lead to problems for Yaccarino, given his unpredictable nature. “I think handling Elon Musk is going to be her biggest hurdle,” says Jasmine Enberg, principal analyst at Insider Intelligence. Publicly, the two have a good relationship—Yaccarino interviewed Musk at an advertising conference in April and implored advertisers to “give the guy a minute,” when they began retreating after his October takeover of the company. But that doesn’t guarantee their relationship will be smooth sailing, Enberg says. “He is mercurial, he is unpredictable, and there’s no way that they aren’t going to clash to some degree.” Yaccarino will have to build back the company’s reputation, to lure back skittish advertisers, which may be challenging with an owner who could at any moment use the platform to pick fights publicly with anyone from journalists to ex-employees. It’s a process that can’t be rushed, Uzzi says, but will have to be balanced with the quick wins Musk might expect to see. “Once you’ve tarnished the reputation of a company, you’ve got to do an awful lot to bring it back,” he says. “Will Musk give her the time?” Getting the company to profit Long before Musk took the helm, Twitter struggled to emulate the levels of profitability achieved by its peers like Meta and TikTok. The company last reported a profit in 2019, and saw a loss of $344 million in the last quarterly earnings report the company released publicly before Musk’s $44 billion acquisition. In April, Musk said he hoped to get the company to a valuation of $250 billion by the end of the first quarter, a number that rivals big banks. This could be tough, as social media company valuations have come under pressure, says Dan Salmon, internet researcher at New Street Research. “As the market has shown, other social media companies have declined in terms of their relative valuation since [Musk acquired Twitter], so we can presume that if it were to be valued publicly again, it would still be a far ways off of that target for him,” says Salmon. “But Rome wasn’t built in a day.” Musk told The Wall Street Journal last month that Twitter was not profitable but could become cash-flow positive in June. Bringing back advertisers About 90% of Twitter’s revenue comes from advertising, but the company has struggled to bring in ad revenues compared to its rivals. “Twitter lags its peers in digital advertising,” says Salmon. “That was the number one priority for the company before Elon bought it, [and] it’s likely still the number one priority insofar as generating more revenue goes.” The problem only worsened under Musk, when advertisers flocked in the wake of Musk’s acquisition, unwilling to associate themselves with a brand that was making headlines for the wrong reasons. A rise in hate speech and pornography on the platform has also reportedly sparked concerns. From September to October of last year, Twitter’s top 10 advertisers dropped spending 89% from $71 million to $7.6 million, according to estimates from research firm Sensor Tower. Twitter’s ad revenue from April 1 to the first week of May was down 59% from the year before, the New York Times reported. “Ultimately, the goal [is] trying to convince the CMOs [chief marketing officers] that it’s worthy to have Twitter within their mix and that they won’t be stuck waking up to a negative headline the next day,” Salmon says. Enberg predicts Musk will stand back and let Yaccarino leverage the contacts she has from decades in the industry. “That is one area where I don’t think Musk is going to stand as much in Yaccarino’s way because by appointing her CEO, he is acknowledging without actually saying the words that Twitter’s ad business is in a dismal state and he is just not the right person to fix it.” Balancing free speech To placate advertisers, experts say that Yaccarino will likely have to strike a balance between Musk’s vision for free speech and the internal regulation that advertisers would hope to see. Musk, who once referred to himself as a “free speech absolutist” has made decisions that have prompted questions about his commitment to free speech, such as complying with requests from authoritarian ruling parties in Turkey and India to censor posts Salmon says Yaccarino will have to “think about finding a balance between what Musk sees as the opportunity to create a more open type of platform with what we know large marketers care about, which is things like brand safety.” Yaccarino has spent the past decade arguing to advertisers that social media’s unpredictable nature is far more risky than network television. Just last year, she called network TV, “the only place that consumers can actually completely trust” according to Semafor. “Yaccarino has been really vocal about the dangers of social media and now she’s faced with trying to convince advertisers that her concerns were overblown,” says Enberg. “She is going to have to really not only backtrack on what she’s said before, but also give real evidence that Twitter is a safe platform.” “One of the things that makes brands worried about being on Twitter is being associated with what they see as offensive content,” Uzzi says. One way of tackling this is to use technology that filters content to ensure ads are placed next to appropriate content, Salmon says. Staffing and morale In April, Musk told the BBC that the company went from a staff of almost 8,000 last October down to just 1,500 employees. Business Insider reported last month that the numbers were even more dismal than Musk has said publicly, and that Twitter is operating with only 10% of the staff it had before his October takeover. Musk previously said that workers would need to be “extremely hardcore,” logging “long hours at high intensity” and that the cuts, which spanned teams ranging from content moderation to engineering, resulted in “some of the people who were let go probably shouldn’t have been” he told CNBC in May. Musk said that he and Yaccarino would be looking to grow the company again. “We absolutely need to hire people,” Musk told CNBC. “And if they’re not too mad at us probably rehire some of the people that were let go.” Whether Yaccarino will be able to staff up again remains uncertain, especially given that the company is not yet breaking even. “Twitter as an organization is not positioned to hire new people. What you read in the media is that it can’t even pay the bills it has now. How is it going to hire new people?” says Uzzi. The competitive landscape Experts say that, as Twitter deals with its growing pains, competing services might try to move in while the company is struggling. A range of competitors, from Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey’s Bluesky to Instagram’s text-based app expected to launch this summer, are looking to populate the market. “Rival companies smell blood in the water,” Uzzi says. “They’re going to be pushing hard to try to gain success while Twitter’s been weakened.” Twitter has also become less relevant, Enberg says. “Even before Musk, Twitter’s cultural relevance was declining. Its user base is already tiny compared to Facebook, Instagram and TikTok and smaller now that Musk has taken over,” Enberg adds. Media ambitions In recent months, Enberg says that Musk has made decisions that suggest he might be angling Twitter towards a new life as a broader media company. Hiring Yaccarino, who has a background in streaming and TV could help him to achieve this. But some moves Musk has made with Twitter, such as hosting Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s presidential candidacy announcement on Twitter Spaces, and allowing Tucker Carlson to launch a show on the platform following his ouster from Fox News, are could cause problems for Yaccarino. “Musk is clearly amplifying far-right voices as well as controversial content,” says Enberg. “It’s going to impact Twitter’s ability to be able to generate ad revenues in the future. Enberg adds that Yaccarino and Musk might be most successful if they both focus on their respective strengths. “In this partnership, if [Musk] can now focus on what he does best, which is product development… and empower Yaccarino to handle the business side of things, I do think this could be a really fruitful relationship and a win for Twitter, which is something that it hasn’t had in a long time.”.....»»

The business leader spoke to TIME about recycling, revenues, and what ChatGPT doesn't know about assembling a bookcase. (To receive weekly emails of conversations with the world’s top CEOs and decisionmakers, click here.) The number of globally known brands to which consumers feel personally connected are surprisingly few. But say the word Ikea to someone almost anywhere in the world, and chances are good they’ll have their own Ikea story, whether it’s furnishing a first post-college apartment, kids playing in the in-store ball pit or a near-divorce while assembling a cabinet. For me, it’s the day my then-fiancé and I did so many rounds around the winding floors of the Newark, N.J., location that we spent all of breakfast, lunch and Swedish-meatballs dinner in the Ikea cafeteria. (We’re still married two decades, an Expedit toy cubby, Ektorp sectional and many Billy bookcases later, no doubt partly because TaskRabbit can now be hired to assemble.) [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] Under Jesper Brodin, the CEO of Ingka Group, the company behind the 80-year-old brand—known for furniture that is cost-efficient and aesthetically pleasing but not exactly meant to be handed down as heirlooms—has put sustainability front and center while seeing record revenues. TIME included Ikea on the inaugural TIME100 companies list in 2021, citing the strides it has taken toward its goal of being climate-positive—reducing more greenhouse gases than it produces—by 2030. One of Brodin’s latest moves is, literally, going to the mattresses, via a new business that recycles them rather than having them pile up for incineration or worse. (Related trivia: The New Yorker and the New York Times have both cited the claim that 10% of Europe’s babies are conceived on Ikea beds.) Brodin and I caught up recently to discuss all of this and more. This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity. TIME: We like to say everybody has a TIME story. I think everybody has an Ikea story. The brand intersects with so many life events—people’s first apartments, a first child, a desk when a kid gets to high school, furniture when a kid goes to college. How do you think about your relationship with customers throughout that life cycle? And how connected is it with price? BRODIN: It gets to the heart of who we are. Ingvar Kamprad [the I.K. in Ikea] was 17 years old when he founded the company. He actually had to bring his father to the registry to sign up to start the company. Ingvar [was] coming from a quite frugal part of Sweden; low pricing was part of his childhood. Still today, we are very loyal to the democratic design principles of Ikea. Some of our external board members tell us that in other companies, they celebrate when they raise the prices. We cry when we have to raise prices. Inviting customers to do part of the job [e.g., carrying out and assembling] is how we save money together. What has been your biggest surprise since becoming CEO in 2017? Nobody briefed me about pandemics, economic chaos, supply-chain disruption, and geopolitical tensions and wars. It’s been an incredibly humbling and very stressful period of course, which goes without saying for any of us out there today. How do you navigate through these times? We have been able to be quite entrepreneurial…. Early in the [pandemic], we were in the red in our forecasts. We never went in the red. We actually managed to navigate through [that period] with not-phenomenal bottom line results but surviving. Read more: How American Shoppers Broke the Supply Chain What would you do differently now with hindsight? We were victim to the supply chain disruption for a while, only to realize that this is a new reality. We have to retain our agility. We also learned along the way that we were probably a bit too rigid in the way we were set up. How are you thinking about AI in your business? It’s really the trend topic right now. Maybe we should ask generative AI the same question and see if it answers differently than what I’m going to do now. We have developed different ways of steering our business where we basically ask machines to help us to make commercial choices, help us steer towards optimization of [what we] stock and so forth. When it comes to the latest generation of AI, we are currently doing a fast-tracking, a review of both the opportunities and the risks. I think we need a little bit more time to figure out both the plus and the minus account. What types of risks do you see? [One is] if the data is misused in any way. Where do we see people are adding value? Where would we not agree on a machine adding value? Where would we say this is absolutely fine for a machine to help us to do? It becomes almost philosophical. We’re still in the early stages of understanding this in society. I think it’s a collective responsibility. I’m going to ask ChatGPT how to put a Billy bookcase together and see what happens. [Response: “Putting together a Billy bookcase from IKEA can seem overwhelming at first, but by following these simple steps, you should be able to assemble it with ease.”] Maybe you’ve done that. It’s incredibly accurate. I still believe that the manuals with the pictures are helpful. What AI didn’t know is that we are now replacing the fittings with click solutions. Which is one of the other real revolutions in Ikea. We are standardizing and setting up another way of constructing furniture, which also by the way has an immense impact from a sustainability point of view with less use of material. Instead of screwing your furniture together, you will actually click it together with super smart fittings, which is less material and less work. The most beautiful execution of that is when we use wood and click fittings, where basically you don’t have any glue or any metals. And the more you sit on the chair, it will make the compound stronger. To be honest, in the old days, if you would move some of our furniture, move with it four or five times, the compound itself will start to get a little bit loose and in the end, deteriorate. So it’s a great opportunity to prolong the life length for furniture. For a lot of us over the years, we go to Ikea for relatively temporary needs. You’ve got an infant, for example, and don’t want to invest a ton of money in gear that you’re not going to hand down to the grandchildren. The furniture is disposable in a sense. And now, we’re in this world where that is a dangerous concept, disposable. Culturally, how do you get a company that’s been focused in a sense on low price and disposability to think about what is in a way the opposite, sustainability? It’s a fascinating question, and one of the most important questions on the planet right now. I think we have all underestimated the Anthropocene age and the impact we humans have. Obviously the consumption model and the economic model of the 1900s will not serve humanity in the future. So we need to change. Today, we are trained to assume that things like sustainability that are good would actually add to the cost. In Ikea, from the start, we were taught that wasting resources was a sin. So if you look at our tradition and history, long before anybody could spell sustainability, it was about reducing air in the packages, filling up the containers, making a flatpack. Read more: Depop Made Sustainable Shopping Cool for Gen Z. What Happens When Parents Crash the Party? The only way Ikea can be successful in the future is to be in a hurry to get sustainable. We need to get smarter on how we use energy and materials across the whole value chain. And that’s the only way we will be able to be affordable. So we are—from an ethical point of view, from a brand point of view, from a cost point of view—in a hurry. I would also [note] that Ikea is normally a big market share in secondhand. Our furniture tends to rotate. If you go to any eBay in the world, you would probably see Ikea on the top of the list of items [that] have been circulated. You’ve made a particular effort around mattresses. It serves as the best example of circularity for us. Most people sleep on a mattress. On average, they last for about 10 years. In the Netherlands, which is a country of 17 million people, what means is that you have 1.7 million mattresses per year that go to waste. Imagine the tower of annual waste for something that is quite big, has a big carbon footprint. The solution came together with an entrepreneur in the Netherlands and the Dutch government. The government imposed legislation that mattresses had to be taken back. They couldn’t be incinerated anymore. As a consumer, you need to bring your mattress to a collection point. And that made it then logistically possible for us to collect mattresses and bring them back to, if you like, a reverse factory, where we break it up into three or four categories of material and we sell it back in the chain. We did not stop at Ikea’s market share. Today, we have a capacity to take back every mattress in the Netherlands. And the beauty is it’s a quite okay business. It’s not a gold mine, but it’s a plus. We are actually in expansion to many markets now to take that concept not only for Ikea but for others. It’s the new business model that will actually become profitable at the same time as you take care of a huge problem. How do you scale it? The barriers are that we need markets where the government does what the Netherlands did. We will look into the opportunity to apply this on sofas as well. And if you take sofas and mattresses in Ikea, you probably come up to some 15% to 20% of our total carbon footprint. So that would be immense for us. You also got rid of the catalogue. There were years when more of those were printed than the Bible. We are reconstructing the digital foundation of Ikea by adding everything from the basic shopping experience to virtual reality and augmented reality. Some of us feel still—a bit of the statement of the catalogue and maybe the look of it that, we miss it. But there was a lot of paper and a lot of transport paper for very little use at the end of the day. Read more: Watch This Prominent German Literary Critic Scrutinize Ikea’s Catalogue You’ve got an aggressive goal, right? To be climate positive by 2030. That’s correct. We were one of the first companies to set up a climate plan back in 2016, alongside with the Paris Agreement. At that time, we set out the goal to be minus 15% in carbon by 2030. That’s absolute, so we have to factor in our growth. The very good news is that we are already at minus 13.6%. That is actually a 2022 number, which is actually fact-based proof that it’s a good idea for growth to decarbonize. [The company says it grew 24% during this same period.] I would say production and transport is moving in the right direction. But on top of that, we need the circularity. Small- and medium-size enterprises are also part of our value chain. Most Ikea suppliers are actually quite big companies today, which is a benefit from a climate perspective, because they are fewer contacts and a capability to scale many of these things we are talking about. But we have more than 1 million customers who use Ikea and are typically smaller companies who use us for furnishing their office, cafe, or shop. So we have [together with We Mean Business] started to now actually invite our customers to be part of the journey. We have just started to pilot it in two countries. We encourage them to do a climate plan, because it’s the right thing to do ethically, but also because it will help them to strengthen their competitiveness. We have a platform [SME Climate Hub] with a lot of self-help tools for how you actually can do your own assessment and make your own, so to say, draft climate plan. This is a bit new, but it’s something that we’re going to stay with......»»

The move marks a swift downfall for Licht, whose departure is immediate as the company looks for a replacement. CNN Chief Executive Officer Chris Licht has stepped down from the cable news channel after a brief and tumultuous tenure at the company. The move marks a swift downfall for Licht, a longtime television executive who in 2022 replaced CNN’s well-liked leader, Jeff Zucker, who had failed to disclose a consensual relationship with a longtime co-worker. Licht’s departure is immediate and the company will look for a replacement, CNN’s parent company Warner Bros. Discovery Inc. said in a statement. “I have great respect for Chris, personally and professionally,” said David Zaslav, president and CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery, in the statement. “The job of leading CNN was never going to be easy, especially at a time of huge disruption and transformation, and he has poured his heart and soul into it.” [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] Licht, a former executive producer of CBS This Morning and The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, arrived at CNN with the goal of creating a less divisive network. CNN had taken a combative stance during Donald Trump’s presidency, and Licht wanted the network to be less opinionated. But Licht struggled in his first year. One of his first moves was shutting down the CNN+ streaming service just a few weeks after its launch. With Warner Bros. cutting costs, Licht oversaw layoffs of hundreds of CNN employees that left remaining staff demoralized. Read More: Alison Roman’s CNN Show Isn’t Happening Anymore In May, Licht faced a backlash after hosting a town-hall event with Trump. The event was widely criticized, including by CNN anchor Christiane Amanpour, for a format that allowed the former president to spread misinformation and talk over the moderator, Kaitlan Collins. A few weeks later, the Atlantic published an embarrassing profile of him in which he criticized the network’s pandemic coverage and appeared aloof to his staff. Following the article, Licht apologized to CNN employees for becoming a distraction and said he’d “fight like hell” to win back their trust. In early June, David Leavy, a longtime lieutenant of Zaslav, was named CNN’s chief operating officer. While Leavy would run the business side of the network, Licht could focus on CNN’s programming, which had not been going as planned. Most notably, Licht’s new morning show was thrown into turmoil after he fired one of the co-hosts, the controversial longtime CNN anchor Don Lemon. Meanwhile, CNN’s ratings continued to decline. The network has fallen to third place in the cable news ratings, behind both Fox News and MSNBC. Read More: Column: What America Could Look Like Without Fox News In a memo to staff, Zaslav said the company will be conducting “a wide search, internally and externally, for a new leader.” In the meantime, the company has established an interim leadership team, comprising Amy Entelis, executive vice president of talent and content development, Virginia Moseley, executive vice president of editorial, and Eric Sherling, executive vice president of US programming and David Leavy, chief operating officer. Read More: The 30 Most Anticipated Movies of Summer 2023 —With assistance from Divya Balji......»»

Home insurance needs to evolve to meet the climate challenge. Last year, I attended a town hall meeting in Colorado’s Boulder County for local residents displaced by the Marshall Fire. The blaze had swept through the community a few months prior destroying more than 1,000 buildings and causing more than $2 billion in damage. For the displaced residents, insurance dominated the conversation. They described how insurance companies calculated payouts and the challenges of itemizing their lost property. “We’re going to soon have a PhD in fire insurance policies,” one resident quipped. But despite the understandable frustration, the residents had no doubt that insurance was essential. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] I was reminded of this story as news broke last week of the decision by two large firms—State Farm and Allstate—to stop writing new property insurance policies in California due to increasing climate-related risk. The move makes pretty obvious financial sense: the increased risk of wildfires in the state threatens the bottom line of insurance companies. But it’s not just California that has to worry about this. Hurricanes are forcing firms in Florida and Texas to rethink where they do business. And as Canadian wildfire smoke wafts across the border it’s surely top of East Coasters’ minds too. Read more: The Climate Real Estate Bubble: Is the U.S. on the Verge of Another Financial Crisis? Given the essential role insurance plays—both on the ground for victims of climate-linked disasters and for the broader global economy—insurance companies, regulators, and elected officials need to find new ways of doing business that protect property owners without threatening bottom lines. Indeed, the costs of wildfire damage in California have grown dramatically in recent years, and reports have estimated truly astonishing numbers for potential property at risk. Nearly $630 billion worth of property in the state is at high wildfire risk, according to data from real estate company Redfin. Regulators in the state have taken notice and pursued a range of fixes to forestall the loss of coverage for residents. Last year, the state implemented a new policy that requires insurers to incorporate risk reduction measures like installation of a fire-resistant roof or vents into their policy pricing. In theory, the move should both keep homeowners safer and help protect insurers from losses. Because insurance is truly essential, governments will step in to try to fill the gap left by insurers. In California, the state has operated the “FAIR” program since the 1960s to offer insurance to homeowners who can’t get it on the private market. And regulators sought to bolster the program as recently as last year, doubling the the coverage limit among other fixes. But programs like FAIR are intended as backstops. Read more: Climate-Proof Towns Are Popping Up Across the U.S. But Not Everyone Can Afford To Live There Many who watch the issue closely say there are changes that stakeholders are already starting to pursue to reinvent the insurance market in vulnerable places—but that those changes need to happen faster and and at a much greater scale than they are now. A 2020 report from McKinsey suggests that insurers act as “climate-risk experts in the private sector and partners in the public sector.” That means using their knowledge about climate risk to help customers adapt. For example, an insurance company can offer rebates to customers who implement climate-smart housing. In the public sector, companies can work with regulators to help craft guidelines that take climate risk into account. These sorts of initiatives would turn the industry into a key, constructive player helping to advance climate adaption. Indeed, as climate risks expand across the globe, the McKinsey report warns that failing to think innovatively about these challenges poses a risk to insurers: “A lack of responsiveness can damage the industry’s reputation and its credibility as a global economic citizen.” A version of this story also appears in the Climate is Everything newsletter. To sign up, click here......»»

The business leader spoke to TIME about recycling, revenues, and what ChatGPT doesn't know about assembling a bookcase. (To receive weekly emails of conversations with the world’s top CEOs and decisionmakers, click here.) The number of globally known brands to which consumers feel personally connected are surprisingly few. But say the word Ikea to someone almost anywhere in the world, and chances are good they’ll have their own Ikea story, whether it’s furnishing a first post-college apartment, kids playing in the in-store ball pit or a near-divorce while assembling a cabinet. For me, it’s the day my then-fiancé and I did so many rounds around the winding floors of the Newark, N.J., location that we spent all of breakfast, lunch and Swedish-meatballs dinner in the Ikea cafeteria. (We’re still married two decades, an Expedit toy cubby, Ektorp sectional and many Billy bookcases later, no doubt partly because TaskRabbit can now be hired to assemble.) [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] Under Jesper Brodin, the CEO of Ingka Group, the company behind the 80-year-old brand—known for furniture that is cost-efficient and aesthetically pleasing but not exactly meant to be handed down as heirlooms—has put sustainability front and center while seeing record revenues. TIME included Ikea on the inaugural TIME100 companies list in 2021, citing the strides it has taken toward its goal of being climate-positive—reducing more greenhouse gases than it produces—by 2030. One of Brodin’s latest moves is, literally, going to the mattresses, via a new business that recycles them rather than having them pile up for incineration or worse. (Related trivia: The New Yorker and the New York Times have both cited the claim that 10% of Europe’s babies are conceived on Ikea beds.) Brodin and I caught up recently to discuss all of this and more. This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity. TIME: We like to say everybody has a TIME story. I think everybody has an Ikea story. The brand intersects with so many life events—people’s first apartments, a first child, a desk when a kid gets to high school, furniture when a kid goes to college. How do you think about your relationship with customers throughout that life cycle? And how connected is it with price? BRODIN: It gets to the heart of who we are. Ingvar Kamprad [the I.K. in Ikea] was 17 years old when he founded the company. He actually had to bring his father to the registry to sign up to start the company. Ingvar [was] coming from a quite frugal part of Sweden; low pricing was part of his childhood. Still today, we are very loyal to the democratic design principles of Ikea. Some of our external board members tell us that in other companies, they celebrate when they raise the prices. We cry when we have to raise prices. Inviting customers to do part of the job [e.g., carrying out and assembling] is how we save money together. What has been your biggest surprise since becoming CEO in 2017? Nobody briefed me about pandemics, economic chaos, supply-chain disruption, and geopolitical tensions and wars. It’s been an incredibly humbling and very stressful period of course, which goes without saying for any of us out there today. How do you navigate through these times? We have been able to be quite entrepreneurial…. Early in the [pandemic], we were in the red in our forecasts. We never went in the red. We actually managed to navigate through [that period] with not-phenomenal bottom line results but surviving. Read more: How American Shoppers Broke the Supply Chain What would you do differently now with hindsight? We were victim to the supply chain disruption for a while, only to realize that this is a new reality. We have to retain our agility. We also learned along the way that we were probably a bit too rigid in the way we were set up. How are you thinking about AI in your business? It’s really the trend topic right now. Maybe we should ask generative AI the same question and see if it answers differently than what I’m going to do now. We have developed different ways of steering our business where we basically ask machines to help us to make commercial choices, help us steer towards optimization of [what we] stock and so forth. When it comes to the latest generation of AI, we are currently doing a fast-tracking, a review of both the opportunities and the risks. I think we need a little bit more time to figure out both the plus and the minus account. What types of risks do you see? [One is] if the data is misused in any way. Where do we see people are adding value? Where would we not agree on a machine adding value? Where would we say this is absolutely fine for a machine to help us to do? It becomes almost philosophical. We’re still in the early stages of understanding this in society. I think it’s a collective responsibility. I’m going to ask ChatGPT how to put a Billy bookcase together and see what happens. [Response: “Putting together a Billy bookcase from IKEA can seem overwhelming at first, but by following these simple steps, you should be able to assemble it with ease.”] Maybe you’ve done that. It’s incredibly accurate. I still believe that the manuals with the pictures are helpful. What AI didn’t know is that we are now replacing the fittings with click solutions. Which is one of the other real revolutions in Ikea. We are standardizing and setting up another way of constructing furniture, which also by the way has an immense impact from a sustainability point of view with less use of material. Instead of screwing your furniture together, you will actually click it together with super smart fittings, which is less material and less work. The most beautiful execution of that is when we use wood and click fittings, where basically you don’t have any glue or any metals. And the more you sit on the chair, it will make the compound stronger. To be honest, in the old days, if you would move some of our furniture, move with it four or five times, the compound itself will start to get a little bit loose and in the end, deteriorate. So it’s a great opportunity to prolong the life length for furniture. For a lot of us over the years, we go to Ikea for relatively temporary needs. You’ve got an infant, for example, and don’t want to invest a ton of money in gear that you’re not going to hand down to the grandchildren. The furniture is disposable in a sense. And now, we’re in this world where that is a dangerous concept, disposable. Culturally, how do you get a company that’s been focused in a sense on low price and disposability to think about what is in a way the opposite, sustainability? It’s a fascinating question, and one of the most important questions on the planet right now. I think we have all underestimated the Anthropocene age and the impact we humans have. Obviously the consumption model and the economic model of the 1900s will not serve humanity in the future. So we need to change. Today, we are trained to assume that things like sustainability that are good would actually add to the cost. In Ikea, from the start, we were taught that wasting resources was a sin. So if you look at our tradition and history, long before anybody could spell sustainability, it was about reducing air in the packages, filling up the containers, making a flatpack. Read more: Depop Made Sustainable Shopping Cool for Gen Z. What Happens When Parents Crash the Party? The only way Ikea can be successful in the future is to be in a hurry to get sustainable. We need to get smarter on how we use energy and materials across the whole value chain. And that’s the only way we will be able to be affordable. So we are—from an ethical point of view, from a brand point of view, from a cost point of view—in a hurry. I would also [note] that Ikea is normally a big market share in secondhand. Our furniture tends to rotate. If you go to any eBay in the world, you would probably see Ikea on the top of the list of items [that] have been circulated. You’ve made a particular effort around mattresses. It serves as the best example of circularity for us. Most people sleep on a mattress. On average, they last for about 10 years. In the Netherlands, which is a country of 17 million people, what means is that you have 1.7 million mattresses per year that go to waste. Imagine the tower of annual waste for something that is quite big, has a big carbon footprint. The solution came together with an entrepreneur in the Netherlands and the Dutch government. The government imposed legislation that mattresses had to be taken back. They couldn’t be incinerated anymore. As a consumer, you need to bring your mattress to a collection point. And that made it then logistically possible for us to collect mattresses and bring them back to, if you like, a reverse factory, where we break it up into three or four categories of material and we sell it back in the chain. We did not stop at Ikea’s market share. Today, we have a capacity to take back every mattress in the Netherlands. And the beauty is it’s a quite okay business. It’s not a gold mine, but it’s a plus. We are actually in expansion to many markets now to take that concept not only for Ikea but for others. It’s the new business model that will actually become profitable at the same time as you take care of a huge problem. How do you scale it? The barriers are that we need markets where the government does what the Netherlands did. We will look into the opportunity to apply this on sofas as well. And if you take sofas and mattresses in Ikea, you probably come up to some 15% to 20% of our total carbon footprint. So that would be immense for us. You also got rid of the catalogue. There were years when more of those were printed than the Bible. We are reconstructing the digital foundation of Ikea by adding everything from the basic shopping experience to virtual reality and augmented reality. Some of us feel still—a bit of the statement of the catalogue and maybe the look of it that, we miss it. But there was a lot of paper and a lot of transport paper for very little use at the end of the day. Read more: Watch This Prominent German Literary Critic Scrutinize Ikea’s Catalogue You’ve got an aggressive goal, right? To be climate positive by 2030. That’s correct. We were one of the first companies to set up a climate plan back in 2016, alongside with the Paris Agreement. At that time, we set out the goal to be minus 15% in carbon by 2030. That’s absolute, so we have to factor in our growth. The very good news is that we are already at minus 13.6%. That is actually a 2022 number, which is actually fact-based proof that it’s a good idea for growth to decarbonize. [The company says it grew 24% during this same period.] I would say production and transport is moving in the right direction. But on top of that, we need the circularity. Small- and medium-size enterprises are also part of our value chain. Most Ikea suppliers are actually quite big companies today, which is a benefit from a climate perspective, because they are fewer contacts and a capability to scale many of these things we are talking about. But we have more than 1 million customers who use Ikea and are typically smaller companies who use us for furnishing their office, cafe, or shop. So we have [together with We Mean Business] started to now actually invite our customers to be part of the journey. We have just started to pilot it in two countries. We encourage them to do a climate plan, because it’s the right thing to do ethically, but also because it will help them to strengthen their competitiveness. We have a platform [SME Climate Hub] with a lot of self-help tools for how you actually can do your own assessment and make your own, so to say, draft climate plan. This is a bit new, but it’s something that we’re going to stay with......»»

Ella Irwin, Twitter's head of trust and safety, confirmed her resignation in a pair of tweets late Friday. SAN FRANCISCO — A top Twitter executive responsible for safety and content moderation has left the company, her departure coming soon after owner Elon Musk publicly complained about the platform’s handling of posts about transgender topics. The departure pointed to a fresh wave of turmoil among key officials at Twitter since Musk took over last year. Ella Irwin, Twitter’s head of trust and safety, confirmed her resignation in a pair of tweets late Friday. She did not say in the message why she was leaving, but her departure came shortly after Musk criticized Twitter’s handling of tweets about a conservative media company’s documentary that questions transgender medical treatment for children and teens. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] Musk was responding to complaints by Jeremy Boreing, co-CEO of the media company, the Daily Wire. Boreing said in tweets and retweets of conservative commentators Thursday that Twitter was suppressing the movie by flagging posts about it as hate speech and keeping the movie off lists of trending topics. Boreing tweeted that Twitter canceled a deal to premiere “What is a Woman?” for free on the platform “because of two instances of ‘misgendering.’” Twitter rules prohibit intentionally referring to transgender individuals with the wrong gender or name. “This was a mistake by many people at Twitter. It is definitely allowed,” Musk tweeted back. “Whether or not you agree with using someone’s preferred pronouns, not doing so is at most rude and certainly breaks no laws.” Irwin tweeted Friday that “one or two people noticed” she left the company the day before, and she noted speculation about whether she was fired or quit. She teased that she would post 24 tweets to explain her departure. Then she posted that she was just kidding about the long narrative. “In all seriousness, I did resign but this has been a once in a lifetime experience and I’m so thankful to have worked with this amazing team of passionate, creative and hardworking people. Will be cheering you all and Twitter as you go!” Next to Musk, Irwin had been the most prominent voice of the company’s ever-changing content policies in recent months. Twitter has struggled to bring back advertisers turned off by Musk’s drastic changes and loosening of rules against hate speech since he bought Twitter for $44 billion in October. Twitter also has an incoming CEO, Linda Yaccarino, known for decades of media and advertising industry experience, but she hasn’t started yet. Irwin and Twitter didn’t respond to requests from The Associated Press for comment. Twitter has been in turmoil including mass layoffs and voluntary departures since the billionaire Tesla owner bought the San Francisco company and took it private. The company’s head of trust and safety left shortly after the takeover, and turnover in the top ranks has continued. Last month, Twitter fired two more top managers......»»

Tracy Chou's Block Party has closed its doors, a victim of soaring new bills imposed by new owner Elon Musk. Tracy Chou launched the Twitter app Block Party in 2021 to help users escape targeted harassment campaigns that she—as an Asian American woman—knew from personal experience could ostracize vulnerable voices from the public conversation. But on Wednesday Block Party closed its doors, becoming the latest victim of soaring new bills imposed by a struggling Twitter under new owner Elon Musk. Under Twitter’s former ownership, Chou struck a deal with the company for free access to data—a win-win arrangement that would allow Block Party to grow and provide Twitter with a valuable anti-harassment tool to which it didn’t have to devote expensive engineering time. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] But Chou tells TIME that following the recent expiration of that contract, Twitter wanted Block Party to pay $42,000 per month for access to enough data to keep the app running. There was no way Block Party could afford the figure, she says. “We’re heartbroken that we won’t be able to help protect you from harassers and spammers on the platform, at least for now,” Block Party said in a blog post on its site. More from TIME [video id=EwUFJE7x autostart="viewable"] Read More: Social Media Platforms Failed to Tackle Abuse. So Tracy Chou Stepped In Block Party is just the latest victim of Musk’s drive to monetize Twitter’s API, or application programming interface, a service that lets third-party developers and researchers access Twitter data. The move, some have speculated, is part of efforts to stop the company hemorrhaging money. The company is not profitable, and its revenue has reportedly dropped more than two thirds since Musk took over in October 2022, mainly driven by advertisers deserting the platform. The value of the company has similarly fallen by more than two thirds since Musk’s $44 billion takeover, according to one asset manager. Musk’s move to monetize access to Twitter’s data may also be a reaction to large language models—artificial intelligence (AI) programs that have boomed in popularity this year. To build models like ChatGPT, companies like its creator OpenAI need large quantities of data, which is often scraped from the internet, including sites like Twitter and Reddit. Musk has sparred with Microsoft, OpenAI’s chief funder, over what he suggested was Microsoft’s “illegal” use of Twitter data for AI training purposes. “I’m open to ideas, but ripping off the Twitter database, demonetizing it (removing ads) and then selling our data to others isn’t a winning solution,” Musk said in a follow-up tweet. “People want lots of data to train things, and they [Twitter] thought there was an opportunity to monetize better there,” says Block Party’s Chou. “Unfortunately for us, the data volume that we need in order to provide safety services to people is on the larger side. And so when the pricing model is potentially more geared around extracting money from people who want to do [AI] training on large datasets, it also impacts companies like us.” Twitter isn’t the only company jacking up its API prices. Reddit, which has struggled to turn a profit, said in April that it would change its rules around how third parties could use its data, including introducing new pricing tiers, in reaction to the rise of large language models. “The Reddit corpus of data is really valuable,” Steve Huffman, the Reddit CEO, told the New York Times in April. “But we don’t need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free.” Like with Twitter and Block Party, the victims of those price changes included independent developers who had built free apps popular with users. Reddit reportedly told developers last month that it planned to increase its API charges to $12,000 per 50 million requests, a figure the developer of Apollo, Reddit’s most popular third-party app, said this week was “far more than I ever could have imagined.” The increase would mean Apollo would need to pay Reddit $20 million per year to maintain its features. “I don’t see how this pricing is anything based in reality or remotely reasonable,” Christian Selig, Apollo’s developer, wrote on the Apollo subreddit. “I hope it goes without saying that I don’t have that kind of money or would even know how to charge it to a credit card.” “It’s a bummer,” says Chou, the Block Party founder, of the changes to Twitter’s API. “My guess is that it’s a business play to try to extract as much money as possible in the short term. But it’s short sighted because it cuts out a lot of value in the ecosystem that might not be cash value. But it is still value.”.....»»

The pandemic made workers reevaluate their priorities; the strong labor market gives them the power to ask for better schedules. At first, getting laid off from her job at a marketing tech firm in June of 2022 was shocking and depressing for Sam Popp, 33, who had also been furloughed from a different company briefly in 2020. But then she looked around and realized she was in okay shape. She’d saved money during the pandemic. She’d been running a side photography business on weekends that she wanted to spend more time on. And best of all, if she worked for herself, she wouldn’t have to worry about being laid off again. “What gives me comfort right now is that my well-being doesn’t depend on anyone else but myself,” says Popp, a Manhattan resident who launched a career as a freelance photographer and marketing consultant shortly after getting laid off and says she doesn’t want to go back to the old ways. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] Despite the downsides of foregoing a traditional 40-hour-a-week job, more Americans are embracing part-time and freelance work as they emerge from the pandemic era seeking more flexibility in a job market where workers still have the upper hand. The number of people who say they’re working part-time for non-economic reasons—in other words, by choice—reached 21.8 million in May, according to government data released June 2, which is up 5% from a year ago and 15% from a decade ago. The number of people working part-time for economic reasons—3.7 million—has declined over the past year. The ratio of people working part-time voluntarily to those who want more work is nearly six to one, the highest it’s been in two decades, a sign of a strong labor market that is enabling workers to set more flexible hours. U.S. employers added 339,000 jobs to the overall labor market in May, more than analysts had expected. Some of the rise in part-time workers is driven by Baby Boomers who are still doing some work but are mostly retired. Older workers don’t account for the entirety of the trend, though. “There’s this reevaluation of how people are spending their time,” says Lonnie Golden, an economist at Penn State Abington who studies the part-time workforce. “People are more happy when they choose how to allocate their time, and the things that drive their happiness are recreation and time with friends and family.” Some weeks, Popp says she works 50 hours and others, she works 20. But it’s the option of setting their own schedules and not working the traditional 9-to-5 job that appeals to Popp, and to so many other people, Golden says. Some workers eschewing traditional jobs because they took on caregiving duties for children or aging parents during the pandemic and don’t want to give up that time, Golden says. In 2021, the amount of time Americans spent caring for household children and adults per day rose 9% and 14%, respectively, from 2019, according to the American Time Use Survey. Sam PoppSam Popp takes a photo of former New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio as part of her freelance work. The extremely tight labor market has also helped independent workers demand the working conditions and hours they want; there were 10.1 million job openings in April, the Labor Department said on May 31, which means there are nearly two openings for every worker seeking a job. Rafael Espinal, the executive director of the Freelancers’ Union, says that many people who were laid off during the pandemic, like Popp, took time to reflect on their careers and decided to explore freelance work. Many have found that they can earn more than they did at their traditional jobs, and women and people of color find that they can make greater wage gains because they aren’t going through a boss or HR department to ask for a raise; they can make more money by finding more clients who are willing to pay. Read more: Return-to-Office Full Time Is Losing. Hybrid Work Is On the Rise Eric Dai’re, 49, is one person who has found he will be able to get ahead in his career if he’s not a permanent employee. Dai’re uses Instawork, an app that connects business to hourly workers, to find odd jobs as a line cook, a site captain, and a general laborer. His favorite Instawork jobs are at stadiums; he’s taken a road trip from Texas to work at Dodger Stadium and explore Los Angeles, for example and has had gigs at NRG Stadium, home to the Houston Texans. Dai’re is now an Instawork supervisor, and says that employers sometimes ask him to come on full-time after they see how effective he is while running cleanup or setup for events. He’s thinking about taking one of them up on the offer—but so far, no one can match the $60,000 a year or the independent life he has as an Instaworker. There were 6.7 million “independent professionals” in the U.S. in 2022, up 2.2% from 2021, according to a report from the Freelancers’ Union and Fiverr, a global marketplace for freelancers, which found that a growing share of women are switching from traditional full-time jobs to independent work. About 73% of these independent workers are “highly satisfied” with their work-life balance, according to a survey of 815 skilled workers conducted for the report. The growth of the flexible workforce even during a time of high inflation suggests that this could be a long-term, permanent shift, says Golden. Workers can choose between finding a more stable job or staying a part of the flexible workforce and cutting back on some expenses. Right now, he says, they appear to be adjusting to higher prices by giving up on spending more, not by giving up their free time. Of course, there are some notable downsides to being an independent or part-time worker, especially since health insurance and retirement accounts are commonly tied to employment in the U.S. And the quality of part-time jobs can vary tremendously based on a worker’s education level. Some part-time workers are employed by staffing firms and temp agencies in warehouses, construction, and factories, where they make less than full-time employees, are less likely to receive health insurance, and have little guarantee of stability, according to Sally Dworak-Fisher, senior staff attorney of the National Employment Law Project. For these workers, who have less education than the professional freelancers, the decline of full-time jobs is a dangerous proposition that has led to instability for some. And that doesn’t even take into account the gig workers who make money through apps such as Uber, DoorDash, and Lyft who have long tried to survive off gig work alone and found it a difficult proposition. But the era of worker power is helping these workers too; both New Jersey and Illinois passed laws in 2023 that make it easier for temporary workers to get hired permanently and that otherwise allow them to complain about dangerous working conditions, after more than a decade of worker advocacy. Read more: Companies Are Finally Designing Offices for the New Work Reality Educated workers looking for part-time and freelance work have also seen a few developments that makes the lifestyle a little easier, says Espinosa. The passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2010 created a marketplace where people could buy health insurance. And the Freelancers’ Union, which grew 300% during the pandemic to 500,000 members, has helped pass laws in New York City, Seattle, Minneapolis, and Los Angeles that allow freelancers to reach out to their municipality if they’re not getting paid for their work in a timely fashion. Of course, flexible work may become less appealing in an economic downturn, and as workers age and have children, they may not be able to resist the appeal of a full-time job with health benefits and paid time off. But many workers are discovering that the flexible workforce allows them to do jobs that wouldn’t exist otherwise. Marnie Kunz, for example, ran her own fitness business until the pandemic shut it down. She panicked and applied for 200 jobs, and didn’t find anything, so went on Fiverr and other sites to work as a freelance writer, helping sites with search engine optimization (SEO) and blogs. She says she makes the same amount of money as she did before the pandemic, but has a lot more flexibility in her hours. She’s also launched a fitness blog, and can apply her search engine optimization strategies to promote that blog, where she also earns ad revenue. She knows that the role of fitness blogger and SEO consultant isn’t likely one that existed before she made it up out of necessity. Now, she says, she can’t imagine doing anything else......»»

"Oil and gas companies need to make some commitments in order to be taken seriously," says Fatih Birol. (To get this story in your inbox, subscribe to the TIME CO2 Leadership Report newsletter here.) Fatih Birol has spent much of the last few years as head of the International Energy Agency (IEA) laying out a path for the world to decarbonize its energy use. The IEA’s recent reports have called for a dramatic scale up in financing for renewable energy and warned that the world cannot afford investment in new fossil fuel supplies. In a May 25 interview at his office in Paris, Birol told me he is “disappointed” in the energy industry’s lackluster response to climate change. “When they talk, they recognize the importance of climate change,” he said. “But when you look at the numbers there is a major gap.” [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] To address that gap, Birol tells TIME that the IEA is spearheading a push to get the companies to commit to data-driven targets ahead of the upcoming U.N. climate conference known as COP28 to be held in Dubai this November. “Oil and gas companies need to make some commitments in order to be taken seriously,” he says. Birol is an economist and he explains his analysis of this situation with a simple look at the numbers. Last year, the companies made $4 trillion in revenue, an enormous increase from pre-COVID numbers. That money could have been used to power the energy transition, but instead companies largely channeled it into dividends, share buybacks, and debt repayment. To that end, Birol has identified two concrete goals that energy companies should take to align with the net zero ambition. First, oil and gas companies need to commit to cutting emissions from their operations and supply chains—so-called Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions—by 60% by 2030. An analysis from the IEA found that nearly 15% of global emissions come from the business of getting oil and gas out of the ground and transporting it to consumers. Second, Birol says fossil fuel companies need to commit to ramping up their investment in clean energy technologies. Last year, oil and gas companies devoted about 5% of their spending to areas outside of their traditional fossil fuel supply business, according to an IEA analysis. That low percentage not only means less capital is flowing into clean technologies but also that the companies aren’t fully utilizing their expertise in a way that could benefit the transition. “They have huge engineering experience, they know how to run major, complex projects,” says Birol. “If we can get them on board, they can really help us to reach our targets.” Birol says the IEA is currently pushing “very strongly” for oil and gas companies to make those commitments in time for COP28. “There are people who say oil and gas companies have no seat on the table in the COP meeting,” he says. “I think we need to build a grand coalition of governments, energy industry, civil society, and investors who sincerely believe in the fight against climate change.” But Birol isn’t relying on the urgency of climate alone to make the case to energy companies. He says he points to investment trends to suggest to energy companies that if they move too slowly they risk being left behind. On the morning of our interview, the IEA released a report projecting that more than $1.7 trillion will be invested in clean energy technologies this year, a nearly 25% increase over the last two years. “If I have to give one advice to the companies or investors,” he told me, “they better give a close look at the clean energy investment trends.”.....»»

Hundreds of Amazon employees staged a walkout to decry the company's lack of climate progress and inequitable return-to-office mandate. (SEATTLE) — Telling executives to “strive harder,” hundreds of corporate Amazon workers protested what they decried as the company’s lack of progress on climate goals and an inequitable return-to-office mandate during a lunchtime demonstration at its Seattle headquarters Wednesday. The protest came a week after Amazon’s annual shareholder meeting and a month after a policy took effect returning workers to the office three days per week. Previously, team leaders were allowed to determine how their charges worked. The employees chanted their disappointment with the pace of the company’s efforts to reduce its carbon footprint — “Emissions climbing, time to act” — and urged Amazon to return authority to team leaders when it comes to work location. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] Wearing a black pirate hat and red coat, Church Hindley, a quality assurance engineer, said working from home allowed him to live a better, healthier life. “I’m out here because I refuse to just sit idly by while mandates are dictated from above down that don’t make sense and hurt the planet, hurt families and individual lives,” Hindley said. “And just to get us into a seat at the office for their tax incentives.” In a statement, Amazon said it supported workers expressing opinions. As of Wednesday morning, organizers estimated more than 1,900 employees pledged to walk out around the world, with about 900 in Seattle. Many participated remotely, but hundreds gathered at the Amazon Spheres — a four-story structure in downtown Seattle that from the outside looks like three connected glass orbs. “Today looks like it might be the start of a new chapter in Amazon’s history, when tech workers coming out of the pandemic stood up and said, ‘We still want a say in this company and the direction of this company,’” said Eliza Pan, a former Amazon corporate employee and a co-founder of Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, a climate change advocacy group founded by Amazon workers. Amazon, which relies on fossil fuels to power the planes, trucks and vans that ship packages all over the world, has an enormous carbon footprint. Amazon workers have been vocal in criticizing some of the company’s practices. In an annual statement to investors, Amazon said it aims to deploy 100,000 electric delivery vehicles by 2030 and reach net-zero carbon by 2040. But activists say the company must do more and commit to zero emissions by 2030. “While we all would like to get there tomorrow, for companies like ours who consume a lot of power, and have very substantial transportation, packaging, and physical building assets, it’ll take time to accomplish,” Brad Glasser, an Amazon spokesperson, said in a statement. Since more employees returned to the office, Glasser said, there has also been a good energy on the company’s South Lake Union campus and at its other urban centers. More than 20,000 workers, however, signed a petition urging Amazon to reconsider the return-to-office mandate. In a February memo, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said the company made its decision to return corporate employees to the office at least three days a week after observing what worked during the pandemic. Among other things, he said senior leadership watched how staff performed and talked to leaders at other companies. He said they concluded employees tended to be more engaged in person and collaborate more easily. In a note asking Amazon employees to pledge their participation in the walkout, organizers said the company “must return autonomy to its teams, who know their employees and customers best, to make the best decision on remote, in-person, or hybrid work, and to its employees to choose a team which enables them to work the way they work best.” Pamela Hayter, a project manager at Amazon, started an internal Slack channel called “Remote Advocacy” after the company announced its return-to-office policy. Its 33,000 members share stories about how the return-to-office policy impacted their lives. “I cannot believe that a company in this day and age, a company that claims to be an innovative leader in its space, would do that to one of its most precious resources — its employees,” Hayter said during the protest in Seattle, drawing applause from the crowd. The walkout follows widespread cost-cutting at Amazon, where layoffs have affected workers in advertising, human resources, gaming, stores, devices and Amazon Web Services, the company’s cloud computing division. Like other tech companies, including Facebook parent Meta and Google parent Alphabet, Amazon ramped up hiring during the pandemic to meet the demand from homebound Americans who were increasingly shopping online to keep themselves safe from the virus. Amazon’s workforce, in warehouses and offices, doubled to more than 1.6 million in about two years. But demand slowed as the worst of the pandemic eased. The company last year began pausing or canceling warehouse expansion plans and has cut 27,000 jobs since November......»»

Yellen embraces an alternative method for measuring the sustainability of the nation’s debt. Whether they favor debt-limit brinkmanship or not, most Americans are alarmed by the level of U.S. government borrowing. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen isn’t one of them. Outstanding debt held by the public stood at $23.9 trillion as of the end of 2022. That’s 97% of gross domestic product, using the measure most popular among economists—roughly triple what it was 20 years earlier, and forecast to keep climbing. It’s a figure at the heart of the debt-ceiling fight now inching toward resolution. “We have the highest debt than we ever had before,” House Speaker Kevin McCarthy—who negotiated a deal with the Biden administration to trim outlays, and must steer it through Congress this week to avert a default – said on May 24. “I just don’t think that’s right.” Plenty of others, including Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, have warned that the U.S. debt trajectory is “unsustainable.” [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] Don’t count Yellen among the alarmists, though. That’s partly because she’s using a different debt yardstick. The former Fed chair, regarded by many as the country’s most experienced economic policymaker, shows little concern when reflecting on government spending. “That is not something to feel we’re in a catastrophic situation,” she told Bloomberg News in a May 13 interview. ‘Charged It Up’ One reason she’s sanguine is that Yellen is among a number of prominent economists to embrace an alternative method for measuring the sustainability of the nation’s debt. Instead of looking at the pile of outstanding bonds as a share of the economy’s output, she prefers the ratio of interest payments—crucially, after adjustment for inflation—to GDP. In other words, take the amount of money the government spends on interest payments in a given year, divide by the size of the economy, then subtract inflation. The lower the outcome, the better. With all the caveats that public finances and household budgets are fundamentally different things, the logic is similar to assessing the affordability of a mortgage. What matters most isn’t necessarily the amount borrowed, but how much a homeowner has to pay each month or year compared with their income over the same period. McCarthy prefers the analogy of a credit card. He likened Democrats to a family that “charged it up, and year after year they just kept raising the limit, until they owed more money on the credit card than they make in an entire year.” Using Yellen’s preferred measure, the larger public debt load hasn’t imposed much of an interest burden, at least so far. The government’s interest bill has fallen in recent decades as a share of the economy, thanks to lower borrowing costs over the period. Net interest as a percentage of GDP, without adjusting for inflation, has averaged about 1.5%, though it climbed to 1.9% in 2022 after the pandemic borrowing surge. Factor in inflation, and interest-to-GDP has frequently been negative, even before the burst of post-COVID price increases. Looking ahead, the White House Office of Management and Budget expects Yellen’s measure to rise back above zero in 2024, as inflation ebbs, and then to top out at 1.1% in 2032-33. That’s a level the Treasury secretary says is “quite reasonable.” ‘Inflated Away’ Jason Furman, a professor at Harvard University and former economic adviser to President Barack Obama, agrees. In a 2020 paper, he and former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers argued that policymakers should aim to keep real net interest from rising above 2% of GDP. The metric favored by Yellen is the right one to use, Furman says, because it’s important to factor in the opposite effects that interest costs and inflation have on the debt burden. When rates and prices are both going up, Furman says that “in one sense, next year’s debt is even bigger than this year’s debt, because it goes up with interest. But in another sense, next year’s debt is smaller, because part of it is inflated away and so you don’t need to pay back as much.” Still, Furman concedes the 2% threshold he and Summers arrived at for real net-interest-to-GDP is “arbitrary. It’s based on looking at the experience in other countries, the historical experience in the United States, our gut instinct, et cetera. I’m not positive it’s right.” His co-author Summers, who is a paid contributor to Bloomberg Television, warned earlier this year that a rising debt burden could end up pushing interest rates higher, which adds pressure on the budget deficit and could turn into a “vicious cycle.” ‘Risk Management’ More than any precise level, it’s the trajectory of debt that can prove critical. One big threat for those who are watching Yellen’s metric is a scenario in which interest rates stay high even after inflation subsides. That would see debt-service costs add to the burden without being offset by rising prices, like they are now. That, Yellen has acknowledged, would introduce considerable problems. But she doesn’t expect it to happen because she’s in the camp of economists who anticipate the low-inflation, low-rate regime that dominated the last two decades to return once the pandemic price surge is beaten down by the Fed. Wendy Edelberg, a former chief economist at the Congressional Budget Office, says better budgeting will be needed in the long run, because “you can’t have the federal government taking action over time that perpetually reduces the amount of savings in the economy and perpetually crowds out ever more private investment.” In the meantime, she advocates keeping an eye on a range of debt measures to figure out where danger may be lurking. “Part of this is just risk management,” she says......»»

Amazon is alleged to have violated a child privacy law and deceived parents by retaining kids' voice and location data. WASHINGTON — Amazon agreed Wednesday to pay a $25 million civil penalty to settle Federal Trade Commission allegations it violated a child privacy law and deceived parents by keeping for years kids’ voice and location data recorded by its popular Alexa voice assistant. Separately, the company agreed to pay $5.8 million in customer refunds for alleged privacy violations involving its doorbell camera Ring. The Alexa-related action orders Amazon to overhaul its data deletion practices and impose stricter, more transparent privacy measures. It also obliges the tech giant to delete certain data collected by its internet-connected digital assistant, which people use for everything from checking the weather to playing games and queueing up music. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] “Amazon’s history of misleading parents, keeping children’s recordings indefinitely, and flouting parents’ deletion requests violated COPPA (the Child Online Privacy Protection Act) and sacrificed privacy for profits,” Samuel Levine, the FCT consumer protection chief, said in a statement. The 1998 law is designed to shield children from online harms. FTC Commissioner Alvaro Bedoya said in a statement that “when parents asked Amazon to delete their kids’ Alexa voice data, the company did not delete all of it.” The agency ordered the company to delete inactive child accounts as well as certain voice and geolocation data. Amazon kept the kids’ data to refine its voice recognition algorithm, the artificial intelligence behind Alexa, which powers Echo and other smart speakers, Bedoya said. The FTC complaint sends a message to all tech companies who are “sprinting to do the same” amid fierce competition in developing AI datasets, he added. “Nothing is more visceral to a parent than the sound of their child’s voice,” tweeted Bedoya, father of two small children. Amazon said last month that it has sold more than a half-billion Alexa-enabled devices globally and that use of the service increased 35% last year. Jessica Hill—AP PhotoA Ring doorbell camera. In the Ring case, the FTC says Amazon’s home security camera subsidiary let employees and contractors access consumers’ private videos and providing lax security practices that enabled hackers to take control of some accounts. Amazon bought California-based Ring in 2018, and many of the violations alleged by the FTC predate the acquisition. Under the FTC’s order, Ring is required to pay $5.8 million that would be used for consumer refunds. Read More: Andy Jassy on Figuring Out What’s Next for Amazon Amazon said it disagreed with the FTC’s claims on both Alexa and Ring and denied violating the law. But it said the settlements “put these matters behind us.” “Our devices and services are built to protect customers’ privacy, and to provide customers with control over their experience,” the Seattle-based company said. In addition to the fine in the Alexa case, the proposed order prohibits Amazon from using deleted geolocation and voice information to create or improve any data product. The order also requires Amazon to create a privacy program for its use of geolocation information. The proposed orders must be approved by federal judges. FTC commissioners had unanimously voted to file the charges against Amazon in both cases......»»

Grab was once known as the Uber of Southeast Asia. Now it's a super-app that helps the financially underserved The lunchtime rush is just bubbling at Kedai Kopi hawker center in Singapore’s Clementi neighborhood when Anthony Tan strolls in. The co-founder and CEO of the ride-hailing firm Grab orders himself a Horlicks malt drink, sits at a Formica table, and takes a sweep of the bustling vendors. One catches his eye: a stall selling nasi lemak, the signature Malay dish of fragrant rice cooked in coconut milk and pandan leaf. Back in 2012, Tan used to offer it to taxi drivers gassing up in his hometown of Kuala Lumpur, pitching his upstart service while they ate. “But because we couldn’t afford to do a deal with the petrol station, they chased us out,” Tan, 40, recalls. He decamped to a nearby sidewalk by fetid monsoon drains. “It was so smelly,” he says. “But it was close enough to shout over, ‘Hey uncle, do you want free nasi lemak?’” [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] In the years since, Grab has transformed from a “street fighting” startup, as Tan puts it—scoring Southeast Asia’s biggest Nasdaq IPO in 2021, valued at around $40 billion. But that hasn’t kept Tan sequestered in his office. Opposite the nasi lemak stall is another for fiery Peranakan seafood, where Tan pulled a four-hour shift during the pandemic. With lockdowns decimating Grab’s ride-hailing business, it pivoted to food delivery, and Tan wanted to better understand vendors’ needs. He ended up “cleaning live crabs and absolutely covered in bits of shell and crab juice,” he laughs. “But I saw that when the orders came out in -English, the Chinese-speaking chefs couldn’t understand them. After that we made the tickets in both languages.” Tan’s anecdotes help to explain why Grab, with a market cap of $12 billion, is one of Southeast Asia’s most valuable firms. Its green-attired delivery drivers are ubiquitous in over 500 cities across eight nations. Often compared to Uber, Grab is much more, fast becoming a fully fledged super-app, offering insurance, travel bookings, financial services, and more. Tan envisages making Grab a “triple bottom line” company, measuring success not only by its balance sheet but also by its social and environmental impact, particularly through the financial services it now offers. Southeast Asia may be the world’s fastest-growing region economically, but those gains are uneven and 70% of the population is “underbanked,” not relying primarily on traditional banks. Tan’s pitch is that by bringing more small businesses into the digital economy, he can boost Grab’s earnings while fostering equality. “There are many ways you can build social impact and create financial impact—they’re not mutually exclusive,” he says. “If you don’t build a society that’s stable, and you don’t uplift the bottom, it becomes all of our problem.” Mobility is in Tan’s genes. His great-grandfather was a taxi driver and his grandfather an automotive tycoon. After attending Harvard Business School, Tan decided not to join the family business, Tan Chong Motor, which his father runs, but to go it alone. Inspired by classmate and Grab co-founder Tan Hooi Ling’s horrific experiences with Kuala Lumpur taxis—by some rankings the world’s worst—Tan asked his dad to back their ride-hailing venture but was told “your head is in the clouds,” he says. So he went to his mom, who thought the same but still agreed to back him. “Moms are amazing, right?” Still, for a young man born “with a silver spoon,” Tan admits, the move was scary. “My dad basically disowned me,” he says. “I thought, I’m not going to grovel. I’m going to fight and make sure we win. That was a pivotal moment.” Whereas Uber took a cookie-cutter approach to global expansion, Grab’s growth was rooted in being hyper-local. In Cambodia, it offers tuk-tuks; in Indonesia, users ride pillion on motor-cycle taxis. While Uber launched delivery ice cream, which often arrived in a slushy mess in the unforgiving tropics, Grab rolled out Southeast Asia’s “king of fruits,” durian, which remains a huge money spinner. But like any disrupter, Grab has faced pushback. In Thailand, where it operated illegally until rule changes in 2021, local taxi competitors held protests against Grab, brandishing placards of Tan in a coffin: “This job is not for the fainthearted.” Meanwhile, Grab’s shares now trade at less than a quarter of their IPO price. Tan puts this down to “timing,” given the drying-up of cheap money. These setbacks haven’t deterred Tan. Last August, Grab launched one of Singapore’s first digital banks, in partnership with telecom firm Singtel, and is rolling out more across the region. Interest is paid daily instead of monthly, and small loans can be approved in minutes. For Tan, the need was made plain by a conversation at church. A fellow parishioner confessed to spending a stint in Singapore’s Changi prison for being a loan shark’s goon, who would splash pig’s blood on debtors’ homes to intimidate them. “He said there were thousands of people like him in Singapore,” says Tan. “It’s fundamentally wrong to charge somebody 20% a day interest, because you’re putting them in a real poverty trap.” The pandemic served as another inflection point. While ride hailing ground to a halt, lockdowns also meant that small businesses had no choice but to embrace digitization. Buoyed by government stimulus packages for small businesses, in just one year Grab added over 600,000 merchants across the region, offering everything from dog bowls to apple strudel. “The COVID crisis became an opportunity for us,” says Tan. It was also a lifeline for people like Suparno, 52, who like many Indonesians uses one name. The father of three owns a tiny fruit stall in Bali’s Taman Sari Market, which overflows with lush mangosteen, papaya, and watermelon. When Indonesia shut its borders during the pandemic, tourism-reliant Bali suffered more than most, and Suparno’s trade fell 70%, he says. Struggling to feed his family, he became the first vendor in Taman Sari to join GrabMart. By selling his fruit via the app, and using its data-crunching service to bundle in-demand items together, trade quickly recovered to pre-pandemic levels. Today, practically every business in Taman Sari displays a green GrabMart logo, and Suparno plans to open a third stall. But the leap to digital revealed other benefits. Suparno’s business was previously cash-based, which meant carrying around large wads—a risky proposition—or braving long 9 a.m. queues at the bank before heading to the wholesalers, by which time the best fruit had often been snapped up. Now, any GrabMart sales Suparno makes before midnight appear in his GrabPay account by 4 a.m., meaning he can restock before the bank has even opened. “It helps a lot because mornings are my busiest time,” he says. It demonstrates how better access to digital financial services helps small businesses compete, which Tan hopes will translate into higher revenue for his firm. Grab’s financial-services revenue grew 233% year over year in the first quarter of 2023, with loan disbursements up 45%. In 2022, small merchants on Grab saw a 26% increase in average monthly earnings after a year on the platform. Still, despite boasting over 32 million monthly users and expecting revenue of $2.2 billion in 2022, Grab has yet to turn a profit, with Tan expecting to finally break even by year’s end. “Grab’s success is also their problem,” says Jeffrey Towson, an investor and consultant on digital strategy in Asia. “They’re dominating the market, with high-frequency services, lots of engagement, which means lots of data. But they’re still struggling to get profitability, because that’s just the nature of the business they’re in.” Supplementing the low-margin ride-hailing sector with higher-margin add-ons is a main driver behind Tan’s super-app vision. He says it also helps merchants to boost their income through secondary services. Drivers can earn from deliveries but also by hosting advertising brokered via the app, or wearing a helmet camera funneling data to Grab’s own maps offering, which it sells to third parties like Amazon Web Services. Last year, 72% of Grab’s drivers earned from more than one of its services, while over a million took part in one of its 2,500 training and upskilling courses. “When we create more inclusion, society benefits,” says Tan. “What’s good for society is good for business.”.....»»

A broad increase in passenger weights could affect anything from the size of seats to how far a full aircraft can fly. Long lines, lost baggage and lengthy delays — common features of air travel these days. Now passengers in some places are being asked to step on the scales before boarding to help airlines calibrate their weight loads. It’s to do with safety. Air New Zealand is the latest to ask travelers to be weighed before flying, carrying out a survey in Auckland through June. The carrier plans to ask more than 10,000 customers boarding international flights to take part, saying the data will help it calculate the “weight and balance of the loaded aircraft.” “Civil aviation rules are all about keeping passengers and aviation operators safe, and determining the weight of everything that goes on an aeroplane is an essential step to ensuring it reaches its destination safely,” New Zealand aviation authority spokesperson Aly Thompson said. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] Air New Zealand did the same thing for domestic flights in 2021. Pandemic Bloat? The US Federal Aviation Administration and the European Union Aviation Safety Agency also require airlines under their jurisdiction to conduct periodic weight surveys, along with assessing hand baggage and checked luggage. As part of an EASA survey published in 2022, Lufthansa Consulting collected the weight of more than 4,000 passengers to update aircraft mass and balance calculations. EASA said it would repeat the process in 2026 to see how recent factors such as the shift to remote working, war in Ukraine and potential long-term effects of Covid-19 have impacted people’s weight. Read More: More Than Half of the World Will Be Obese By 2035, Report Says A global rise in obesity doesn’t appear to be slowing down. The World Obesity Atlas 2023 reported in March that over half of people over the age of 5 will be obese or overweight by 2035, an increase from 38% in 2020. For airlines, a broad increase in passenger weights could affect anything from the size of seats to how far a full aircraft can fly. Inaccurate weight data has led to some airlines grounding aircraft and can even prompt aviation agencies to fine carriers over faulty results. The FAA allows airlines to either weigh passengers on scales before boarding or ask a person their weight and add at least 10 pounds for clothing, according to a 2019 advisory circular from the agency. Air New Zealand has pledged that passengers who take part in its survey will remain anonymous. The carrier weighs everything loaded onto the plane, from meals to luggage, so pilots can prepare for flight......»»

AI chips have suddenly taken center stage in what is considered an AI revolution that could reshape the technology sector, and the world. SAN FRANCISCO — The hottest thing in technology is an unprepossessing sliver of silicon closely related to the chips that power video game graphics. It’s an artificial intelligence chip, designed specifically to make building AI systems such as ChatGPT faster and cheaper. Such chips have suddenly taken center stage in what some experts consider an AI revolution that could reshape the technology sector — and possibly the world along with it. Shares of Nvidia, the leading designer of AI chips, rocketed up almost 25% last Thursday after the company forecast a huge jump in revenue that analysts said indicated soaring sales of its products. The company was briefly worth more than $1 trillion on Tuesday. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] So, what are AI chips, anyway? That isn’t an easy question to answer. “There really isn’t a completely agreed upon definition of AI chips,” said Hannah Dohmen, a research analyst with the Center for Security and Emerging Technology. In general, though, the term encompasses computing hardware that’s specialized to handle AI workloads — for instance, by “training” AI systems to tackle difficult problems that can choke conventional computers. Video game origins Three entrepreneurs founded Nvidia in 1993 to push the boundaries of computational graphics. Within a few years, the company developed a new chip called a graphics processing unit, or GPU, which dramatically sped up both development and play of video games by performing multiple complex graphics calculations at once. Read More: To Stay Ahead of China in AI, the U.S. Needs to Work with China That technique, known formally as parallel processing, would prove key to the development of both games and AI. Two graduate students at the University of Toronto used a GPU-based neural network to win a prestigious 2012 AI competition called ImageNet by identifying photo images at much lower error rates than competitors. The win kick-started interest in AI-related parallel processing, opening a new business opportunity for Nvidia and its rivals while providing researchers powerful tools for exploring the frontiers of AI development. Modern AI chips Eleven years later, Nvidia is the dominant supplier of chips for building and updating AI systems. One of its recent products, the H100 GPU, packs in 80 billion transistors — about 13 million more than Apple’s latest high-end processor for its MacBook Pro laptop. Unsurprisingly, this technology isn’t cheap; at one online retailer, the H100 lists for $30,000. Read More: The Metaverse Is Coming. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang on the Fusion of Virtual and Physical Worlds Nvidia doesn’t fabricate these complex GPU chips itself, a task that would require enormous investments in new factories. Instead it relies on Asian chip foundries such as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing and Korea’s Samsung Electronics. Some of the biggest customers for AI chips are cloud-computing services such as those run by Amazon and Microsoft. By renting out their AI computing power, those services make it possible for smaller companies and groups that couldn’t afford to build their own AI systems from scratch to use cloud-based tools to help with tasks that can range from drug discovery to customer management. Other uses Parallel processing has many uses outside of AI. A few years ago, for instance, Nvidia graphics cards were in short supply because cryptocurrency miners, who set up banks of computers to solve thorny mathematical problems for bitcoin rewards, had snapped up most of them. That problem faded as the cryptocurrency market collapsed in early 2022. Read More: How the World Must Respond to the AI Revolution Analysts say Nvidia will inevitably face tougher competition. One potential rival is Advanced Micro Devices, which already faces off with Nvidia in the market for computer graphics chips. AMD has recently taken steps to bolster its own lineup of AI chips. Nvidia is based in Santa Clara, California. Co-founder Jensen Huang remains the company’s president and chief executive......»»