Good morning.
Amazon is coming to NYC anyway. Critics of Amazon's HQ2 are rubbing it in after a report that the company is opening a large new Manhattan office without any tax incentives. Still, the 1,500 jobs coming to the city are far fewer than the 25,000-position proposal that Amazon withdrew in February.
Electric cars make their mark
2019 was the year electric vehicles grew up. From budget Kias to fleets of e-trucks, this was the biggest year for vehicular electrification yet—but several blockbuster launches belie a hard road ahead as automakers are forced to reinvent themselves.
Tesla flexed its muscle in the market even as overall EV sales softened. Global automakers have committed $225 billion toward electrification -- well past the point of no return despite 2019's worrying dip in EV sales (at least for cars not built by Tesla). Overall, it was the year things got serious
Tesla flexed its muscle in the market even as overall EV sales softened. Global automakers have committed $225 billion toward electrification -- well past the point of no return despite 2019's worrying dip in EV sales (at least for cars not built by Tesla). Overall, it was the year things got serious for EVs.Tesla has done the yeoman's work of proving you can sell a million or so electric cars to the masses. Its Model 3 accounted for 1 out of every 6 EVs sold worldwide. Now VW, GM, Ford, and others have painted a giant target on Tesla's back. Let the race begin.
Two new electric cars help ease India's "range anxiety." Public charging infrastructure does not exist in India, so the short-range electric cars produced by domestic manufacturers have failed to make a dent in the market. But a pair of EVs by MG Motors could flip that script, if buyers ignore the price tag.
Record low unemployment
Americans locked up abroad
Canopy branches out
The future of finance
Trendy direct stock listings get dealt a blow by the SEC. A New York Stock Exchange proposal to give companies the freedom to raise capital during a direct listing was rejected by the Securities and Exchange Commission, CNBC reports.
For SoftBank’s Vision Fund, size doesn’t seem to matter. With nearly $100 billion in capital, it's the largest tech investing fund in the world. But it's not clear that SoftBank’s massive investments are paying off as its highly-valued unicorns transition to the public market. Learn more in this Quartz presentation for members. ✦
Solving the climate crisis
TED wants to become the global hub for the climate change crisis. The conference series hopes to crowdsource ideas businesses, experts and concerned citizens for an upcoming summit in 2020.
The way we colonize Mars says a lot about how we address climate change. Is repeating our mistakes on another planet the answer to our existential crises?
The most important sentence in this article for me is: “Imagine all the things we could do on Earth if we allocated an extra $22.6 billion to addressing climate change on our own planet?”.
Space exploration has undoubtedly kickstarted a raft of technological innovations we’ve all benefited from (insulin
The most important sentence in this article for me is: “Imagine all the things we could do on Earth if we allocated an extra $22.6 billion to addressing climate change on our own planet?”.
Space exploration has undoubtedly kickstarted a raft of technological innovations we’ve all benefited from (insulin pumps, solar cells, artificial limbs to name a few). So in my mind, it’s only worth spending all this money on getting to and living on Mars, if in doing so, we develop technology that also helps us solve all our very real problems here on Earth.
Get smart about parenting
Finland’s communal grandparents, known as "kylämummi," forge relationships across the generational divide. For more than a decade, Finland’s largest organization dedicated to child and family welfare has run a program that encourages older people to volunteer to give time and attention to toddlers. But are these programs successful?
Raising a child is hard. But the “parenting is hard” trope, which feeds memes and dinner conversations, can be dangerous. It frames the problem as the individual failure of a single parent rather than as a social issue.
I always say we have to raise our girls to be brave, not perfect. But it's not enough for parents to try to do this work alone, we have to change as a society because our kids are getting messages from everywhere - media, school, classmates - so it's on all of us together.
How Gen Z is changing Tinder
Disrupting dementia
What are the chances of getting dementia? The Quartz calculator can indicate your risk of developing dementia, based on your age, gender, and country of residence. ✦
Next-generation dementia care could learn from cancer care. Palliative care helps patients in their final months, and is often used for people suffering from end-stage cancer. But it can actually help anyone who has a long-term, chronic illness, and it could be especially effective for people living with dementia. ✦
In the 1950s, a single British physician named Cicely Saunders championed a new kind of care for terminally-ill cancer patients. She found that relieving pain and suffering made them happier—and ironically, live longer, even if drugs couldn't actually treat their condition.
That was the birth of hospice
In the 1950s, a single British physician named Cicely Saunders championed a new kind of care for terminally-ill cancer patients. She found that relieving pain and suffering made them happier—and ironically, live longer, even if drugs couldn't actually treat their condition.
That was the birth of hospice, which is a form of palliative care for the last six months of a person's life. Hospice, however, is a form of palliative care, which in general just means person-centered care. Sometimes, this means using life-saving interventions, like antibiotics for an infection. Other times, it means just making sue the person is comfortable. It depends on what the person and their caregivers want.
Palliative care could save dementia care, which is the more expensive in the last five years of life than cancer and heart disease. It could also save health care in general; it's cheaper than the current care systems in place. The trouble is, because it was historically used for cancer treatment, that's how most doctors think of it. Luckily, a few hospitals are testing out palliative care. If their results are good, it could expand nation-wide.
The rising price of immigration
US immigration suffers from death by a thousand fees. The Trump administration is trying to make it too expensive for poor immigrants to stay in the US with the application fee for naturalization set to increase from $640 to $1170.
The sole airline willing to deport high-risk immigrants is price-gouging ICE. There is only one carrier willing to take on US deportation flights and they're charging the US government nearly double the normal price, making flights as expensive as $33,500 per hour in November.
A basic lesson in supply and demand, as seen through the lens of ICE Air ops in an unredacted ICE document we obtained. ICE can only obtain the Boeing 767s required for its so-called SHRC (special high-risk charter) flights from one company in the entire country, because it's the only firm willing to
A basic lesson in supply and demand, as seen through the lens of ICE Air ops in an unredacted ICE document we obtained. ICE can only obtain the Boeing 767s required for its so-called SHRC (special high-risk charter) flights from one company in the entire country, because it's the only firm willing to take the contract for fear of negative press. But last month, those 767s were tied up with other, richer customers (i.e. the Dept. of Defense). So ICE was forced to take whatever the carrier offered—a 777 that was a couple of hundred seats bigger than what ICE needed, and double the price: $33,000/flight hr vs $17,000/flight hr. The company knows it's the only game in town and has no incentive to meet ICE halfway, according to ICE's primary charter broker, explaining why it can't put any pressure on the subcontractor to come down on its rate.
Every now and then, my faith is restored that the markets really know how to do their job. I'll use this as a lesson tonight to teach my kid the basics about supply and demand, and about how actions have consequences.
This is a super illuminating piece that shows the complexity of immigration control, public protest, and the business of deportation. Because ICE has garnered so much criticism few companies want to risk a public backlash and run the agency's charters. In fact, only one does it, which means it can charge
This is a super illuminating piece that shows the complexity of immigration control, public protest, and the business of deportation. Because ICE has garnered so much criticism few companies want to risk a public backlash and run the agency's charters. In fact, only one does it, which means it can charge whatever it wants.
Justin shows here how much this lack of competition is costing US taxpayers. It doesn't mean we should support all of ICE's activities but it does expose a dark side to an already dark law enforcement project.
The real life Irishman
Roll credits 🎬
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