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CEO Picks - The best that international journalism has to offer!  S14This Is What It Looks Like When AI Eats the World - The Atlantic (No paywall)  The pace of implementation is dizzying, even alarming—including to some of those who understand the technology best. Earlier this week, employees and former employees of OpenAI and Google published a letter declaring that “strong financial incentives” have led the industry to dodge meaningful oversight. Those same incentives have seemingly led companies to produce a lot of trash as well. Chatbot hardware products from companies such as Humane and Rabbit were touted as attempts to unseat the smartphone, but were shipped in a barely functional state. Google’s rush to launch AI Overviews—an attempt to compete with Microsoft, Perplexity, and OpenAI—resulted in comically flawed and potentially dangerous search results.Technology companies, in other words, are racing to capture money and market share before their competitors do and making unforced errors as a result. But though tech corporations may have built the hype train, others are happy to ride it. Leaders in all industries, terrified of missing out on the next big thing, are signing checks and inking deals, perhaps not knowing what precisely it is they’re getting into or if they are unwittingly helping the companies who will ultimately destroy them. The Washington Post’s chief technology officer, Vineet Khosla, has reportedly told staff that the company intends to “have A.I. everywhere” inside the newsroom, even if its value to journalism remains, in my eyes, unproven and ornamental. We are watching as the plane is haphazardly assembled in midair.
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S1Elon Musk's Starship makes a test flight without exploding - The Economist (No paywall) “ONE OF THE key questions is—does that seal work? We think it will work, but it may not work,” said Elon Musk, the boss of SpaceX, on June 5th, as his company’s Starship rocket was being prepared for its fourth test flight the following day. He was referring to one particular component of the rocket: the thermal protection around the steering flaps used during re-entry from orbit. Mr Musk was talking to Tim Dodd, a YouTuber known as Everyday Astronaut. In the event, the test flight went well: the launch went as planned and there was no “rapid unscheduled disassembly” (ie, catastrophic explosion). But the focus on the seal around those flaps proved to be strikingly prescient.Starship is the world’s largest rocket. It consists of two parts: the Super Heavy booster stage, a behemoth 71 metres tall with 33 engines, and the 50-metre Starship upper stage. On Starship’s first two test flights it failed to reach orbit; it managed on the third, in March, but then broke apart while re-entering the atmosphere. SpaceX’s primary goal, for the uncrewed test flight on June 6th, was successful atmospheric re-entry of the upper stage.
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S3Howard University Returning Sean 'Diddy' Combs' $1 Million Donation Amid Sexual Misconduct Allegations - Forbes (No paywall) Howard University announced Friday it will take back Sean 'Diddy' Combs' honorary degree and return a seven-figure donation to the school, citing a video of the rapper attacking his ex-girlfriendâas Combs faces multiple sexual misconduct allegations, all of which he's denied.Combs' scholarship was awarded to eligible undergraduate students who pursued a business degree and needed financial assistance, Billboard reported in 2016, also providing the students with a mentor from Combs Enterprises and a summer internship with Combs' record label Bad Boy Entertainment or his media company, Revolt, which the rapper recently sold his majority stake in.
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S4Nicotine patches, like Zyn, are used by 400,000 teens. Here's why some experts say 'it's reasonable to be concerned' - Fortune Well (No paywall) Today, he says, he goes through a can to a can and a half a day—about 25 pouches total—placing a pouch between his gum and his lip or cheek around every 15 minutes to deliver the maximum-available-in-the-U.S. 6 mg of tobacco-free nicotine (compared to a cigarette’s 10-12 mg) directly to his bloodstream through the lining of his mouth. His frequent posts—sponsored by Snus Town, an online UK-based shop that sends him 10 cans a week to sample—range from dreaming up new Zyn flavors to simply declaring his love for the little white pouches.Ratch is also not the only Zyn user to have started as a teen. According to the National Youth Tobacco Survey of 2023, an estimated 1.5% of high school and middle school students (more than half of them boys), representing 400,000 adolescents, use nicotine pouches—around the same percentage (1.6%) who smoke cigarettes, but much less than those who vape (7.7%).
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S5Nvidia hits $3 trillion, making CEO Jensen Huang richer than Michael Dell - Fortune (No paywall) Huang hit another milestone on Friday, passing personal computer pioneer Michael Dell to become the world’s 13th-richest person with a net worth of $106.1 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. His wealth has surged more than $62 billion this year as demand for Nvidia chips used to power artificial intelligence tasks remains insatiable.Huang, 61, is leading a new wave of tech billionaires as AI-fueled “Jensanity,” as one analyst termed it, takes over Silicon Valley. Other beneficiaries include Lisa Su, chief executive officer of Advanced Micro Devices Inc., as well as Super Micro Computer Inc.’s Charles Liang. Last month, Huang’s fortune surpassed each individual member of the Waltons, America’s richest family, following another blowout quarter from the chipmaker.
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S8Humane Founders' Toxic Positivity May Have Killed Its Ai Pin Device - Inc.com (No paywall) The idea of a small, chest-worn, screenless, AI "communicator" device sounded like a great idea, but in the wake of a disastrous launch, a new report suggests why the startup Humane produced such a terrible product with its Ai Pin. Its abject failure may have had less to do with engineering and more to do with a flawed management culture.Though the idea was appealing--surely everyone would want such a Star Trek-like gizmo--almost as soon reports about Humane's $700 Ai Pin device started to show up in the tech press last year, critics expressed everything from doubt to scorn. When Humane revealed a commercial for the Pin in late 2023 highlighting what it could (and, by implication, what it couldn't) do, doubts deepened. In April of this year, when it finally launched, reviews confirmed early industry reactions: The device was truly awful, lacking many expected features and sporting a limited battery life.
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S9Zombie Attack: More Companies Drowning in Debt May Not Survive - Inc.com (No paywall) Zombies are commonly defined as companies that have failed to make enough money from operations in the past three years to pay even the interest on their loans. AP's analysis found their ranks in raw numbers have jumped over the past decade by a third or more in Australia, Canada, Japan, South Korea, the United Kingdom and the U.S., including companies that run Carnival Cruise Line, JetBlue Airways, Wayfair, Peloton, Italy's Telecom Italia and British soccer giant Manchester United.For its part, Wall Street isn't panicking. Investors have been buying stock of some zombies and their "junk bonds," loans rating agencies deem most at risk of default. While that may help zombies raise cash in the short term, investors pouring money into these securities and pushing up their prices could eventually face heavy losses.
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S10Seasonal Businesses Can Stay Profitable in the Off-Season. Hereâs How. - Harvard Business Review (No paywall) A seasonal business primarily derives its income during specific peak periods, which can span from weeks to a few months. Industries facing this cyclicality are diverse, from snow removal services and ice cream shops to Halloween stores and Christmas tree farms. Then there are those driven by government or deadline-based needs, such as accounting services during tax season. Most seasonal companies are familiar with the basics of budgeting: reviewing your financials and tracking against them, keeping a close eye on headcount, and leaning into part-time or seasonal staff in the peak season. But smart budgeting alone can’t tackle all the obstacles of a seasonal business. Companies must use outside-of-the-box thinking, effective planning, and careful execution to ensure profitable company. This includes building relationships with key internal and external stakeholders, offering impeccable customer service, finding ways to pivot in the off-season, and adopting a cash preservation mindset.
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S11S12Microsoft Will Switch Off Recall by Default After Security Backlash - WIRED (No paywall) When Microsoft named its new Windows feature Recall, the company intended the word to refer to a kind of perfect, AI-enabled memory for your device. Today, the other, unintended definition of “recall”—a company's admission that a product is too dangerous or defective to be left on the market in its current form—seems more appropriate.On Friday, Microsoft announced that it would be making multiple dramatic changes to its rollout of its Recall feature, making it an opt-in feature in the Copilot+ compatible versions of Windows where it had previously been turned on by default, and introducing new security measures designed to better keep data encrypted and require authentication to access Recall's stored data.
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S13Each of the Past 12 Months Broke Temperature Records - WIRED (No paywall) June 2023 did not seem like an exceptional month at the time. It was the warmest June in the instrumental temperature record, but monthly records haven't exactly been unusual in a period where the top 10 warmest years on record all occurred in the past 15 years. And monthly records have often occurred in years that are otherwise unexceptional; at the time, the warmest July on record had occurred in 2019, a year that doesn't stand out much from the rest of the past decade.In the Copernicus data, a similar yearlong streak of records happened once before, in 2015/2016. NASA, which uses slightly different data and methods, doesn't show a similar streak in that earlier period. NASA hasn't released its results for May's temperatures yet—they're expected in the next few days—but it's very likely that the results will also show a yearlong streak of records.
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S15The Deepfake Crisis That Didnât Happen - The Atlantic (No paywall) Presidential elections in the United States are prolonged, chaotic, and torturous. (Please, not another election needle …) But they don’t come close to rivaling what happens in India. The country’s latest national election—which wrapped up this week with the reelection of Prime Minister Narendra Modi—was a logistical nightmare, as it always is. To set up polling booths in even the most rural of areas, Indian election officials hiked mountains, crossed rivers, and huddled into helicopters (or sometimes all three). More than 600 million voters cast ballots over the course of six weeks.To add to the chaos, this year voters were deluged with synthetic media. As Nilesh Christopher reported this week, “The country has endured voice clones, convincing fake videos of dead politicians endorsing candidates, automated phone calls addressing voters by name, and AI-generated songs and memes lionizing candidates and ridiculing opponents.” But while experts in India had fretted about an AI misinformation crisis made possible by cheap, easy-to-use AI tools, that didn’t exactly materialize. Lots of deepfakes were easily debunked, if they were convincing at all. “You might need only one truly believable deepfake to stir up violence or defame a political rival,” Christopher notes, “but ostensibly, none of the ones in India has seemed to have had that effect.”
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S16What Is the Opposite of Oil Drilling? - The New Yorker (No paywall) Monte Markley, a geologist who lives on a farm near Wichita, Kansas, describes his job as “putting things underground and keeping them there.” As an environmental consultant, he specializes in disposing of industrial waste in subterranean rock formations. “All through my career, I’ve helped industries deal with the things that come out of the back side of a plant that nobody wants to talk about,” he told me. In early 2020, he got a call from Shaun Kinetic, a co-founder of a Bay Area company called Charm Industrial. Kinetic, who has experience building robots, satellites, and rockets, wanted to know how to dispose of a particularly troubling kind of waste: the excess carbon that contributes to global warming.Markley had worked with companies that were trying to capture and store their own carbon emissions before they entered the atmosphere. But Charm was working with carbon that was already in circulation. The company was adapting a machine called a pyrolyzer, which heats plant material such as cornstalks in an oxygen-free environment, so that the plants turned into bio-oil, a carbon-rich liquid with the color and consistency of dark maple syrup. Kinetic wanted to know whether it was feasible to dispose of bio-oil underground. Markley said that it was—in fact, bio-oil would likely remain trapped there for centuries, if not longer. The process would resemble the drilling and burning of conventional oil, but in reverse.
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S17S18S19S20S21NIH will bring clinical research into primary care offices with $30 million pilot - STAT (No paywall) For many Americans, health care means going to a local primary care office. But the vast majority of clinical research is conducted inside the walls of large, specialized academic health centers. Millions of patients are left out of those studies, which often fail to capture the population in all its diversity.“A person is not a disease, and most of the NIH is organized around diseases,” said Harper. “This is the first time that NIH is recognizing that people are complex, and have many factors that pertain to their health care…that cannot be teased out and separated to be studied in a single, particular line.”
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S22FDA expands approval for GSKâs RSV vaccine to cover younger at-risk adults - STAT (No paywall) “Today’s approval reflects the importance of broadening the benefits of RSV immunization to adults aged 50-59 who are at increased risk,” GSK’s chief scientific officer, Tony Wood, said in a statement. “For those with underlying medical conditions, RSV can have serious consequences, so we are proud to be the first to help protect them.”“When it comes to the risks associated with RSV, age is just a number, an important number, but not the only factor to consider,” she said in a statement circulated by the company. “Many adults in this age group have underlying health conditions that place them at increased risk for serious illness with RSV infection compared with those without these conditions.”
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S23Biden Apologizes to Zelensky for Monthslong Ukraine Aid Delay - Foreign Policy (No paywall) U.S. President Joe Biden apologized to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in Paris on Friday for the monthslong congressional delay in approving the latest U.S. aid package. The meeting, on the sidelines of D-Day commemoration events, was their first face-to-face encounter since Zelensky visited Washington last December to request greater military support.U.S. Republicans—some who directly opposed sending additional aid to Ukraine and others who wanted the funding package, which also earmarked billions of dollars in aid for Israel, to include additional money for security at the U.S. southern border—had stalled the nearly $61 billion aid deal for months before passing the package in April. “I apologize for those weeks of not knowing what’s going to happen in terms of funding,” Biden told Zelensky, adding that “we’re still in. Completely. Thoroughly.”
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S24The End of American Exceptionalism in the High North - Foreign Policy (No paywall) KODIAK, Alaska—At Coast Guard Air Station Kodiak, the USCGC Stratton, a 418-foot national security cutter, was hemmed into port by a thin layer of ice that had formed overnight in the January cold. Named for the U.S. Coast Guard’s first female officer, Dorothy Stratton, the ship was not designed for ice; its home port is in Alameda, California. After serving missions in the Indo-Pacific, it was brought to Alaska because it was available.KODIAK, Alaska—At Coast Guard Air Station Kodiak, the USCGC Stratton, a 418-foot national security cutter, was hemmed into port by a thin layer of ice that had formed overnight in the January cold. Named for the U.S. Coast Guard’s first female officer, Dorothy Stratton, the ship was not designed for ice; its home port is in Alameda, California. After serving missions in the Indo-Pacific, it was brought to Alaska because it was available.
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S25Why Would Anyone Want to Run the World? Netflix viewers got an introduction, this spring, to a famous physics experiment: the three-body problem. A magnetized pendulum suspended above two fixed magnets will swing between them predictably. A third magnet, however, randomizes the motion, not because the laws of physics have been repealed, but because the forces involved are too intricate to measure. The only way to “model” them is to relate their history. That’s what Netflix did in dramatizing the Chinese writer Liu Cixin’s science-fiction classic, The Three-Body Problem: a planet light years from earth falls within the gravitational attraction of three suns. It’s no spoiler to say that the results, for earth, are not auspicious.Sergey Radchenko, a historian at Johns Hopkins University, comes from the East Asian island of Sakhalin, a good place from which to detect geopolitical gravitations. His first book bore the appropriate title Two Suns in the Heavens: The Sino-Soviet Struggle for Supremacy, 1962–1967. His second, Unwanted Visionaries: The Soviet Failure in Asia at the End of the Cold War, extended his analysis through the 1980s. Now, with To Run the World: The Kremlin’s Cold War Bid for Global Power, Radchenko seeks to refocus recent scholarship, which has sought to “decenter” the history of that conflict, back on the superpowers for which it was originally known.
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S26Is decaf really healthier than regular coffee? Hereâs how they compare. - National Geographic Premium (No paywall) Coffee may be one of the world’s most popular beverages but people are increasingly turning to decaf out of concern for their health. Surveys show that 26 million Americans report drinking decaf coffee on a regular basis, whether it’s due to concerns over high blood pressure, a desire to limit caffeine later in the day, to avoid sleep disruptions, or due to caffeine sensitivities. But regular coffee has health benefits in its own right—including a reduced risk of developing Type 2 diabetes, a reduced risk of developing neurological conditions, such as dementia, and a reduced risk of death. Meanwhile, there are rising health concerns about one particular method of removing caffeine from coffee beans, as it uses a harmful chemical called methylene chloride.
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S27Inside the rise of river surfing, the Midwestâs next big thing An urban whitewater park is expected to open next summer in Norfolk, Nebraska, and a surfing area is being planned for Cedar Falls, Iowa, as part of a wider river recreational project. Authorities in West Carrollton, Ohio, are poised to build a large development around a new whitewater river park on the Great Miami River, while a similar project is underway in Tulsa, Oklahoma.“We have had far and away our best year ever this year,” says Mike Harvey, its co-owner. “I’ve never seen this level of excitement from any other river-based activity I’ve been in.” The company has even named one of its boards’ Wave Farmer’ as an homage to the people who live and work the landscapes surrounding this emergent activity.
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S28Newly Named Tiny Ape Co-Existed With a Larger Hominid Relative - Discover Magazine (No paywall) Pulling the camera back a bit reveals another level of significance. It turns out that B. manfredschmidi had hominid company. The small plant-eating ape almost certainly shared an ecosystem with the omnivorous bipedal ape Danuvius guggenmosi, according to the report. To say that is highly unusual would be an understatement. The Hammerschmiede excavation site where the two species lived, about 20 miles north of the Alps, must have provided an ideal set of circumstances for both. The site offered plenty of fresh water, with a series of pools. A wide variety of plants must have afforded ample dining options to the two hominid species with the differing diets.
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S29As Earth Sizzles, CO2 in the Atmosphere Accelerates Faster Than Ever This short-term warming doesn’t mean we’ve breached that threshold — which concerns a longer-term span of years, not months. Nonetheless, ”we are way off track to meet the goals set in the Paris Agreement,” says Ko Barrett, deputy-secretary of the World Meteorological Organization. “We must urgently do more to cut greenhouse gas emissions, or we will pay an increasingly heavy price in terms of trillions of dollars in economic costs, millions of lives affected by more extreme weather and extensive damage to the environment and biodiversity.”“Not only is CO2 now at the highest level in millions of years, it is also rising faster than ever,” says Ralph Keeling, Director of the CO2 Program at Scripps, quoted in a release. “Each year achieves a higher maximum due to fossil-fuel burning, which releases pollution in the form of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Fossil fuel pollution just keeps building up, much like trash in a landfill.”
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S30S31S32Visualizing Raw Steel Production in 2023 The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) accounts for 74% of the world’s cobalt output. Although the metal is found on a large scale in other parts of the world, like Australia, Europe, and Asia, the African nation holds the biggest reserves by far. Of the 11,000,000 metric tons of worldwide reserves, it is estimated that 6,000,000 metric tons are located in the DRC.Since around 20% of the cobalt mined in the DRC originates from small-scale artisanal mines, often employing child labor, the extraction of the metal has been a point of intense debate. With a long history of conflict, political upheaval, and instability, the country is often listed among the poorest nations in the world.
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S33S34Ask Ethan: Why do matter and antimatter annihilate? The matter that we’re made out of here on planet Earth is composed of atoms: protons and neutrons in the nucleus, orbited by electrons, that bind together in countless possible ways to produce what we experience as the world around us. For every fundamental and composite particle of matter that exists, however, there’s also its antimatter counterpart: antiprotons for protons, antineutrons for neutrons, positrons for electrons, etc. When matter and antimatter collide and interact, they annihilate, producing pure energy and whatever particles are allowed by the quantum laws that govern nature as well as Einstein’s most famous equation, E = mc².But do matter and antimatter always annihilate away when they interact? Aren’t other types of interactions possible, and even likely? That’s what Brian Vant-Hull wants to know, writing in to ask:
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S35Yascha Mounk: The rise of the identity ideology--and why I think it spells trouble Yascha Mounk, a professor at Johns Hopkins University and host of “The Good Fight” podcast, explains how identity synthesis – an ideology based on treating people differently depending on their race, gender, or sexual orientation – can be quite harmful to society. He uses the example of racially segregated classrooms, claiming that it is human tendency to inherently side with someone in your “group” before you side with someone from another. Mounk argues that identity synthesis will only further divide us, as it goes directly against the ideologies of Black American thinkers like Fredrick Douglas and Martin Luther King Jr, who fought avidly for equality in the United States.
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S36Everyday Philosophy: Is praying fundamentally egotistical? Is it egotistical to think your prayers will be answered or that what you wish for will come true?It’s 1590, and two armies stand in the fields just outside Ivry in France. Both armies are a rag-tag shamble of children, old men, cripples, and foreign mercenaries. After 30 years of civil war, that’s all that’s left. In this latest, macabre chapter of the French Wars of Religion, priests walk up and down the lines. They tell everyone standing that “God blesses you,” “This is all for God,” and, most importantly of all, “Please God, give us victory this day.” Protestants and Catholics are praying to the same God to give them both victory. God will have to disappoint a lot of people.
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S37How psychedelics could help silence chronic pain What if symptoms of chronic pain were sometimes just echoes of a past injury, and your brain could “snap out of it” with the help of psychedelics? It’s a surprising theory that several labs around the world are beginning to investigate. While there have been few double-blind, placebo-controlled, randomized clinical trials evaluating the efficacy of psychedelics for treating chronic pain, preliminary evidence is beginning to emerge — with promising results.Chronic pain is defined as pain that persists beyond the usual recovery period or occurs with another condition. It may occur continuously or happen off and on. The most common manifestations of chronic pain are lower back pain, headache disorders, fibromyalgia, and neuropathic pain. People treated for chronic pain often undergo “pain management programs” that combine approaches from different fields to customize treatments.
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S38A philosopher's case against death The idea is intuitive: It is good to be alive; it is bad to die. Yet many, even most, resist this idea, and not just because they believe in an afterlife. Some of the resistance comes from the worries about what would happen to the world if we lived much longer: Overpopulation! Stagnation! Social security and pension crises! These are reasonable concerns: Something that appears to be good for the individual can have such bad effects for society that in the end it is good for no one. But more commonly, people simply appear to accept that death comes after a full life; they do not object to death, only untimely death.Writer David Ewing Duncan traveled the United States giving talks on biotechnology and life extension. At each venue, he asked the audience if they would want to live 80 years, 120 years, 150 years, or forever. People were allowed to imagine breakthroughs in antiaging medicine. Out of 30,000 people, around 60 percent responded by saying 80 years, 30 percent said 120 years, nearly 10 percent said 150 years, and less than 1 percent said forever. His results were similar to those of a 2013 survey conducted by the Pew Research Center about Americans’ opinions on death. When asked how long they would want to live, 69 percent gave a number between 78 and 100. The average ideal life span turned out to be about 90. Only 8 percent said that they would want to live beyond 100, and only 4 percent said they would want to live beyond 120.
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S39Shoppers Still Spending for On-Trend Purchases Recent quarterly results from retailers show shoppers are selectively buying non-essential, nice-to-have products--forgoing electronics, but not being shy about plunking down cash on those wide-legged jeans they've been coveting."Consumers are being choosier about where and when they spend. They are seemingly willing to splurge on items that are not inexpensive, be (it) a pair of Hokas or Birkenstocks," said research firm Emarketer analyst Zak Stambor. Â Â Â
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S40Trump Suggests Tariffs Against Illegal Immigrants' Home Countries, Including China Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump said on Thursday he may impose tariffs on countries, including China, that do not curb the flow of undocumented immigrants from their territory to the United States, if he wins the U.S. election in November.Trump made the remarks at an event in the border election battleground state of Arizona while responding to an audience question and did not specify the size of tariff he would impose in such a scenario.
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S41Walmart Will Replace Paper Shelf Labels With Digital Price Screens in 2,300 Stores Weekly updates to paper shelf labels typically took a store worker about two days. With digital labels, prices can be updated within two minutes after a few clicks through its mobile app for workers called Me@Walmart, the company said. The new labels are small square screens that look very much like the paper labels they will replace. They will also enable workers to pick products for online order fulfillment faster, the company said in a statement.
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S42Addiction-Treatment Startups Are Raking in VC Money--and Amassing Millions in Fines That's the subtext behind the latest funding stats. Medical and biotech--which involves everything from mental health services to antibody therapies to virtual methadone management--was the top category for VC funding in Q1, outpacing even the hype-driven avalanche of money to AI companies.For the past several years, the scourge of opioid abuse has left communities across the country grappling with crises of addiction and residual waves of violence and crime. In response, startups have emerged that develop addiction-tech platforms--tools and apps designed to help users more efficiently get off drugs and alcohol. The programs are often aided by licensed medical professionals, who provide telehealth services and counseling.
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S43This Billionaire Entrepreneur Just Canceled His SpaceX Moon Mission. Here's How He Made His Fortune Maezawa took to X, formerly known as Twitter, over the weekend to explain the cancellation of a high-profile trip to the moon that he booked with SpaceX in 2018. The trip, called the dearMoon project, was intended to take Maezawa and eight hand-picked artists from around the world on an orbital mission around the moon. Among the crew were DJ Steve Aoki and documentary filmmaker Brendan Hall. "I signed the contract in 2018 based on the assumption that dearMoon would launch by the end of 2023. It's a developmental project so it is what it is, but it is still uncertain as to when Starship can launch," he wrote on Saturday.Â
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S44Texas Startup Makes Fourth Try at Building First Big U.S. Oil Refinery Since 1977 Element Fuels Holdings, a Dallas-area startup proposing to build the first all-new U.S. oil refinery in nearly 50 years, on Thursday said it was relaunching efforts to build a large plant in South Texas. The Brownsville, Texas, project has been proposed by entrepreneur John Calce at least twice before by his ARX Energy, and JupiterMLP startups, with one leading to a bankruptcy filing. The project was originally owned by a holding company that also owned Centurion Terminals. Â
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S45Rep for Meta, Craigslist Sues to Block Law Requiring Data on High-Volume Sellers An internet trade group is suing the state of Georgia to block a law requiring online classified sites to gather data on high-volume sellers who advertise online but collect payment in cash or some other offline method.NetChoice, which represents companies including Facebook parent Meta and Craigslist, filed the lawsuit Thursday in federal court in Atlanta. The group argues that the Georgia law scheduled to take effect July 1 is blocked by an earlier federal law, violates the First Amendment rights of sellers, buyers and online services, and is unconstitutionally vague.
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S46GameStop Stock Plunges Despite Optimistic Outlook from Roaring Kitty But remarks from the man known on social media platforms as "Roaring Kitty," made during a live stream on YouTube that drew more than 600,000 views, didn't keep shares in the company from plunging about 40% -- a warning on the unpredictability of meme stocks.Keith Gill's live stream followed the release of GameStop's quarterly results, which showed the company managed to narrow its losses in the first quarter, though its revenue fell as sales weakened for hardware and accessories, software and collectibles. GameStop also filed paperwork with securities regulators to sell up to 75 million shares of stock.
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S47Recreational Marijuana is On Its Way in Ohio Friday was the deadline for making applications available, a provision in a 2023 initiated statute approved overwhelmingly by Ohio voters. Under the measure, Ohioans over 21 were immediately able to legally grow and possess adult-use marijuana at home, but there has yet to be anywhere in the state to legally buy it.State regulators won't say how long license approvals could take, but those who have helped put together rules for the program believe the first sales could come by mid-June. That's because obtaining a dual license will allow Ohio's network of about 132 medical pot dispensaries to begin selling those same products simply for fun.
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S4843 Years Ago, Pat Sajak of Wheel of Fortune Made a Brilliant Introduction. Here's Why (With Video) Most of you know by now that Chuck has decided to leave the show to concentrate on other areas. He's a very talented actor and singer and songwriter. So I want to take a minute, and I know everyone in the studio does, and all his fans around the country, to wish Chuck nothing but the best future success and happiness.(I cut one of these mentions after the first ellipsis because it's part of a joke that people would have understood in 1981, but that I'd have to take too much time away to explain to a 2024 audience. But, you can see it in the video.)
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S49How to Make Job Interviews More Accessible How can you make your job interviews fairer and more inclusive for disabled people and people with different learning styles? In this article, the author shares insights from two experts on how to set up an environment where all candidates have opportunities to demonstrate their strengths.
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S50Research: Smaller, More Precise Discounts Could Increase Your Sales Retailers might think that bigger discounts attract more customers. But new research suggests that’s not always true. Sometimes, a smaller discount that looks more precise — say 6.8% as compared to 7% — can make people think the deal won’t last long, and they’ll buy more. In a series of nine experimental studies involving around 2,000 individuals considering online or retail purchases of a variety of products, the authors found precise discount depths — the difference between the original and sale price — can increase purchase intentions by up to 21%.
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