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The US braces for more protests over the death of Breonna Taylor. Two police officers suffered minor gunshot injuries last night in Louisville, Kentucky, after one of their colleagues was charged with “wanton endangerment” for firing into a neighboring apartment during the drugs raid in which Taylor was killed.
Car makers are suing the US government over China. Mercedes-Benz said the Trump administration is engaged in “an unprecedented, unbounded, and unlimited trade war,” while Tesla called tariffs on Chinese parts “arbitrary, capricious, and an abuse of discretion.” Meanwhile, new gas-powered cars will be banned in California (paywall) from 2035.
The UK’s annual financial plans are in the trashcan. The government scrapped its Budget, in which it lays out its spending agenda for the rest of the year. Instead, chancellor Rishi Sunak is set to unveil new emergency measures to protect employment as a second coronavirus wave crashes over Britain.
Donald Trump might not walk away if he loses. The US president said he would have to “see what happens” in the November election. He also called the election “a scam” (again), and thinks the whole thing will end up in the Supreme Court.
Why did Quibi fail?
The bite-sized streaming platform underestimated, well, a lot of things.
😴 Content: The shows just aren’t good enough. No video platform—no matter how innovative the technology or elaborate the marketing—will work without stuff viewers want to watch.
😰 Competition: Quibi thought it would corner “in-between moments,” but turns out social media already has. So by trying to sidestep competition with the big streaming services, it simply put itself up against other big platforms—TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, and Snapchat.
🤐 Shareability: At first, Quibi didn’t allow sharing content or even taking screenshots. You know what tends to be a show’s best free marketing? A viral meme.
And that’s not all. Adam Epstein details the missteps of the little streaming engine that couldn’t.
Charting Africa’s bitcoin activity
In August 2018, a report on the state of cryptocurrency regulation across Africa came back with one obvious conclusion: most countries hadn’t decided what to do. But now, in a major shift, Nigeria and South Africa—two of the continent’s largest economies—are stepping up regulatory plans.
Local users and cryptocurrency startups across the continent are not exactly waiting for regulation to catch up. Cryptocurrency trading has taken off, partly powered by homegrown exchanges which continue to operate in regulatory gray areas. Yomi Kazeem follows how the regulators of Africa’s big economies are trying to stay on top of a cryptocurrency trading spike.
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The history of the home office
Working from home is a revival of an old idea. Before the Industrial Revolution, the template for residential architecture included a space for doing business. English “workhouses” combined a workshop with the family’s living quarters, “longhouses” gave shelter to farmers and their animals, and merchants often lived above their workshops and storefronts. In the US, middle-class homes typically had a “den” or “gentleman’s study” close to the front door where the master of the house received clients.
What changed with the Industrial Revolution is now seeing another big shift. In 1967, US broadcaster Walter Cronkite concluded his report on the home office by predicting, correctly, that “with equipment like this in the home of the future, we may not have to go to work—the work will come to us.” Our latest field guide offers guidance on how to make the most of that shift.
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Obsession interlude: Future of work
The gig economy has opened up a wave of flexible work options, but in doing so risks eroding hard-won worker protections. Companies whose business model rests on gig work are often criticized for exploiting workers and fighting attempts to change the game.
In Hustle and Gig, sociologist Alexandrea Ravenelle interviewed 80 gig workers in the US to put their experiences in the context of America’s employment history. She concluded that for all its app-enabled modernity, the sharing economy “is truly a movement forward to the past.”
In a cruel irony, workers in the sharing economy—hailed as the height of the modern workplace—find themselves without any of the worker protections enjoyed by their great-grandparents. Although workplace protections still exist for full-time and part-time employees, gig workers as independent contractors, are outside the social safety net of basic workplace protections.
Keep up with the rest of our Future of Work obsession.
We’re obsessed with the Everglades
“There are no other Everglades in the world.” Conservationist Marjory Stoneman Douglas used these words to describe the vast sheet of slow-moving water that blankets South Florida, a unique wetland ecosystem unlike any other on Earth. In the 20th century, Floridians turned millions of acres of swamp into real estate, one of the grandest water engineering projects in human history—and one of mankind’s most ecologically destructive acts. Now, the state’s Everglades damage control could become a global model for environmental (and self-)preservation. The Quartz Weekly Obsession takes you on an airboat ride into the swamp.
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Surprising discoveries
Nobel laureates will win more than $100,000 extra this year. In case you were worried about tenured Ivy League professors.
Grow less weed. After the share price of Canada’s Aurora plunged this year, an anxious analyst advised the firm to chill with the growing.
Something smelled fishy. A meticulous two-year-long scientific investigation hooked two fraudulent fishermen with felonies.
Your favorite cereals come back. The nostalgia play from General Mills will see classic recipes return to breakfast cereals like Cocoa Puffs and Trix.
Robots are making a killing in London. The rolling droids emit ultraviolet light to disinfect St. Pancras International, one of the country’s busiest transport hubs.
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