Tuesday, September 5, 2023

On Our "Virtual Route 66" As September Dawns: #RandomThoughts


 





INSIDE TECH

For September 01, 2023
INSIDE
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Welcome to the latest Inside Tech!

Here are today's top stories:

  • Trump trial in Georgia will be live-streamed on YouTube.
  • Meta is exploring paid ad-free options for Facebook and Instagram in the EU.
  • Tech layoffs decreased in August.
  • Google has canceled Pixel Pass.

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Beth
p/beth-duckett

1

Former President Trump's election interference trial in Fulton County, Georgia, will be live-streamed on YouTube, a judge has ruled. The move sets apart the Georgia case from Trump's other legal cases in Manhattan, Washington, D.C., and Florida, where cameras are generally prohibited inside the courtroom. 

More:

  • All the proceedings, including hearings and trials, will be live-streamed on the Fulton County Court YouTube channel, according to Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee, who is overseeing the case.
  • In addition, laptops, cameras, and press pool coverage will be allowed in the courtroom.
  • Scheduled for Oct. 23, the trial involves Trump and co-defendants facing charges in a wide-ranging racketeering case tied to attempts to overturn Georgia's 2020 presidential election results.
  • On Thursday, Trump pleaded not guilty to all 13 charges and waived his right to appear at his arraignment.

Zoom out:

  • Although Trump also faces two federal indictments, which involve mishandling classified information and election interference, federal courtrooms generally prohibit cameras.
  • If a defendant succeeds in transferring their case to federal court, McAfee's ruling won't apply
   
2

Meta is exploring the idea of offering ad-free paid options for Facebook and Instagram users in the European Union, according to The New York Times. The potential move is described as a reaction to regulatory scrutiny in the EU.

More:

  • In the potential scenario, users could pay for ad-free subscriptions on the platforms, sources told The Times.
  • Free versions with ads would still be offered in the EU.
  • The paid subscriptions highlight how tech companies may offer different services in the EU than elsewhere due to new data privacy rules and other regulations.
  • Recent rulings and fines targeting tech giants like Meta, including one that bars the company from combining data without user consent, are the result of Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, which took effect in 2018.

Zoom out:

  • A week ago, the EU's latest tech giant regulations took effect, designed to improve online safety.
  • Known as the Digital Services Act, the rules ban data-driven targeted ads in certain areas and prohibit "dark patterns," along with other restrictions.
   

3

Tech layoffs in August fell to a new low not seen since September 2022, according to the most recent Layoffs.fyi data. 

What the numbers show: Nearly 70 tech companies laid off close to 7,550 employees in August 2023, down from roughly 10,600 employees let go in July and the peak of nearly 90,000 in January. According to Layoffs.fyi, nearly 1,000 tech firms have collectively laid off over 232,000 employees in 2023, a notable increase from the 165,000 tech workers laid off during all of 2022.

The bigger picture: Major tech giants such as Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Yahoo, Meta, and Zoom laid off thousands of workers this year, citing the broader economic landscape and other issues. However, tech giants are now scaling back their widespread layoffs amid a cooling job market. Lightcast Senior Economist Layla O’Kane confirmed that the tech and media layoff surge appears to be subsiding and never spread to the broader economy, which could be reassuring for those concerned about a potential recession triggered by the tech layoffs. "I think that the big wave is over and people are starting to rehire some of those employees after adjusting," she said.

Q: Do you think the decline in tech layoffs points toward a more positive economic outlook? Join the conversation here.

   
4

Google announced it is canceling the Pixel Pass subscription service, which bundled a Pixel phone with YouTube Premium and other services. According to a Google support page, Pixel Pass is no longer available for new Pixel purchases or for renewal.

More:

  • Google launched Pixel Pass with the Pixel 6 series in 2021, spreading out the phone and services costs over two years.
  • At launch, the subscription service cost $45 per month, bundling YouTube Premium, Google Play Pass, Preferred Care protection, and Google One cloud storage.
  • The Pixel Pass was also offered for the Pixel 7, but not the Pixel 7a or the Pixel Fold.
  • According to Google, current subscribers can still maintain their subscription for the remaining two years from their sign-up date.
  • Beyond that, they can upgrade their Pixel device, but the option to renew Pixel Pass will no longer be available. 

The Tech Blog

By Peter H. Diamandis, MD

Presented By

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Turning Cynicism into Opportunity: The Abundance Mindset

 

Is there any reason to be optimistic?

 

Diseases, inflation, war… the list goes on.

 

A glance at the headlines is enough to set anybody on edge. And with an endless media stream, it’s hard to escape those headlines.

 

Worse, as we saw in the last blog, evolution shaped our brains to be acutely aware of any potential dangers. As a result, our news media and politicians focus on the grim to capture your mindshare.

 

This dire combination has a profound impact on our mindset: it literally shuts off our ability to take in good news.

 

So, what’s the solution to this challenge?

 

For me, it’s about cultivating an Abundance Mindset—shifting from cynicism to hope, from pessimism to optimism, and from scarcity to abundance.

 

Making this mindset shift is especially important for entrepreneurs, who need to see opportunities where others see problems.

 

In today’s blog, I’ll summarize science writer Matt Ridley’s important work on developing a more optimistic and abundance-focused perspective, combatting what Ridley calls “moaning pessimism.”

 

Let’s dive in…

 

 

Making the Shift from Pessimism to Optimism

 

One of the best stories about the importance of shifting one’s mindset from pessimism to optimism involves Matt Ridley, the award-winning author of the brilliant book, The Rational Optimist.

 

Ridley is an Oxford-trained zoologist, but he’s spent most of his career as a science writer, specializing in the origins and evolution of behavior.

 

And lately, the behavior that has most caught his attention is humanity’s predilection for bad news. As Ridley puts it:

 

“It’s incredible, this moaning pessimism, this knee-jerk, things-are-going-downhill reaction from people living amid luxury and security that their ancestors would have died for. The tendency to see the emptiness of every glass is pervasive. It’s almost as if people cling to bad news like a comfort blanket.”

 

In trying to make sense of this pessimism, Ridley, like the psychologist Daniel Kahneman, sees a combination of cognitive biases and evolutionary psychology as the core of the problem.

 

He identifies the cognitive bias “loss aversion”—a tendency for people to regret a loss more than a similar gain—as the bias with the most impact on abundance. Loss aversion is often what keeps people stuck in ruts. It’s an unwillingness to change bad habits for fear that the change will leave them in a worse place than before.

 

But this bias is not acting alone.

 

“I also think there could be an evolutionary psychology component,” Ridley contends. “We might be gloomy because gloomy people managed to avoid getting eaten by lions in the Pleistocene.”

 

Either way, Ridley has come to believe that our divorce from reality is doing more harm than good and has lately started to fight back. “It’s become a habit now for me to challenge such remarks. Whenever somebody says something grumpy about the world, I just try to think of the other side of the argument and—after examining the facts—again and again I find they have it the wrong way round.”

 

This conversion to positive thinking did not happen overnight. As a cub science reporter, Ridley encountered hundreds of environmentalists fervently prophesying a much glummer future.

 

So, the question is: What caused the shift?

 

 

How Data Drives Optimism

 

About 25 years ago, Ridley started noticing that the doom predicted by experts was still nowhere in evidence.

 

Acid rain was the first sign that the facts were not matching the fanfare.

 

Once considered our planet’s most dire environmental threat, acid rain develops because burning fossil fuels release sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides into the atmosphere, causing an acidic shift in the pH balance of precipitation—hence the name. First noticed by English scientist Robert Angus Smith in 1852, acid rain took another century to blossom from scientific curiosity to presumed catastrophe.

 

But by the late 1970s, the writing was on the wall.

 

In 1982, Canada’s minister of the environment, John Roberts, summed up what many were thinking, telling Time magazine: “Acid rain is one of the most devastating forms of pollution imaginable, an insidious malaria of the biosphere.”

 

Back then, Ridley agreed with this opinion.

 

But a few decades passed, and he realized that nothing of the sort was happening: “It wasn’t just that the trees weren’t dying, it was that they never had been dying—not in any unusual numbers and not because of acid rain. Forests that were supposed to have vanished altogether were healthier than ever.”

 

To be sure, human innovation played a huge role in averting this disaster.

 

In America, that handwringing produced everything from amendments to the Clean Air Act to the adoption of catalytic converters for automobiles.

 

The results were a reduction in sulfur dioxide emissions from 31 million tons in 1970 to just 1.8 million tons in 2021—a 94% reduction. Nitrogen oxide emissions declined from over 27 million tons to 7.6 million tons during the same period.

 

This absence got Ridley curious.

 

He began looking into other dark prophecies and found a similar pattern: “Predictions about population and famine were seriously wrong… Age-adjusted cancer rates, for example, are falling, not rising. Furthermore, I noticed that people who pointed these facts out were heavily criticized but not refuted.”

 

All this led Ridley to another question: If the really negative predictions weren’t coming true, what about the veracity of more common assumptions, such as the idea that the world is getting worse?

 

To figure this out, Ridley began examining global trends: economic and technological; longevity and healthcare related; and a host of environmental issues.

 

The result of this inquiry became the backbone of his book The Rationale Optimist, which makes the case that optimism rather than pessimism is the sounder philosophical position for assessing our species’ chances at a brighter tomorrow.

 

 

Why This Matters

 

The incredible news today, as compared to even a few decades ago, is that exponential technologies are giving each of us unparalleled access to knowledge, experts, and global communications at little-to-no cost.

 

One the best ways to see this is to look at how the internet revolution has continued to rapidly spread across the planet. In 2010, we had just under 2 billion people connected to the internet.

 

That number is now over 5 billion.

 

By 2030, it will rise to at least 7.5 billion—or 90% of the planet.

 

When we couple this with rapidly advancing AI, 100 billion sensors, robots and more, we’re creating an intelligent brain for the entire planet. This global intelligence layer empowers us to solve problems by mobilizing resources around the world.

 

This is at the core of what it means to have an Abundance Mindset: the idea that next year will bring more opportunities than this year.

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