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The one thing N. Lee Plumb knows for sure about being laid off from Amazon last week is that it wasnt a failure to get on board with the companys artificial intelligence plans. Plumb, his teams head of AI enablement, says he was so prolific in his use of Amazons new AI coding tool that the company flagged him as one of its top users. Many assumed Amazon’s 16,000 corporate layoffs announced last week reflected CEO Andy Jassys push to reduce our total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains from using AI extensively across the company. But like other companies that have tied workforce changes to AI including Expedia, Pinterest, and Dow last week it can be hard for economists, or individual employees like Plumb, to know if AI is the real reason behind the layoffs or if it’s the message a company wants to tell Wall Street. AI has to drive a return on investment, said Plumb, who worked at Amazon for eight years. When you reduce head count, youve demonstrated efficiency, you attract more capital, the share price goes up. So you could potentially have just been bloated in the first place, reduce head count, attribute it to AI, and now youve got a value story, he said. Amazon said in an emailed statement that AI was not the reason behind the vast majority of these reductions. These changes are about continuing to strengthen our culture and teams by reducing layers, increasing ownership, and helping reduce bureaucracy to drive speed and ownership, it said. Plumb is atypical for an Amazon worker in that he’s also running what he describes as a long shot bid for Congress in Texas, on a platform focused on stopping the tech industry’s reliance on work visas to replace American workers with cheaper foreign labor. But whatever it was that cost Plumb his job, his skepticism about AI-driven job replacement is one shared by many economists. We just don’t know, said Karan Girotra, a professor of management at Cornell University’s business school. Not because AI isnt great, but because it requires a lot of adjustment and most of the gains accrue to individual employees rather than to the organization. People save time and they get their work done earlier. If an employer works faster because of AI, Girotra said it takes time to adjust a company’s management structure in a way that would enable a smaller workforce. He’s not convinced that’s happening at Amazon, which he said is still scaling back from a glut of hiring during the COVID-19 pandemic. A report by Goldman Sachs said AI’s overall impact on the labor market remains limited, though some effects might be felt in specific occupations like marketing, graphic design, customer service, and especially tech. Those are fields involving tasks that correlate with the strengths of the current crop of generative AI chatbots that can write emails and marketing pitches, produce synthetic images, answer questions, and help write code. But the bank’s economic research division said in its most recent monthly AI adoption tracker that, since December, very few employees were affected by corporate layoffs attributed to AI, though the report was published Jan. 16, before Amazon, Dow and Pinterest announced their layoffs. San Francisco-based Pinterest was the most explicit in asserting that AI drove it to cut up to 15% of its workforce. The social media company said it was making organizational changes to further deliver on our AI-forward strategy, which includes hiring AI-proficient talent. As a result, weve made the difficult decision to say goodbye to some of our team members. Pinterest echoed that message in a regulatory disclosure that said the company was reallocating resources to AI-focused roles and teams that drive AI adoption and execution.” Expedia has voiced a similar message but the 162 tech workers the travel website cut from its Seattle headquarters last week included several AI-specific roles, such as machine-learning scientists. Dow’s regulatory disclosures tied its 4,500 layoffs to a new plan utilizing AI and automation to increase productivity and improve shareholder returns. Amazon’s 16,000 corporate job cuts were part of a broader reduction of employees at the ecommerce giant. At the same time as those cuts, all believed to be office jobs, Amazon said it would cut about 5,000 retail workers, according to notices it sent to state workforce agencies in California, Maryland and Washington, resulting from its decision to close almost all of its Amazon Go and Amazon Fresh stores. That’s on top of a round of 14,000 job cuts in October, bringing the total to well over 30,000 since Jassy first signaled a push for AI-driven organizational changes. Like many companies, in technology and otherwise, but particularly those that make and sell AI tools and services, Amazon has been pushing its workforce to find more efficiencies with AI. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said last week that 2026 will be when AI starts to dramatically change the way that we work. Were investing in AI-native tooling so individuals at Meta can get more done, were elevating individual contributors, and flattening teams, he said on an earnings call. Were starting to see projects that used to require big teams now be accomplished by a single very talented person. So far, Metas layoffs this year have focused on cutting jobs from its virtual reality and metaverse divisions. Also driving job impacts is the industry shifting resources to AI development, which requires huge spending on computer chips, energy-hungry data centers and talent. Jassy told Amazon employees last June to be curious about AI, educate yourself, attend workshops and take trainings, use and experiment with AI whenever you can, participate in your teams brainstorms to figure out how to invent for our customers more quickly and expansively, and how to get more done with scrappier teams. Plumb was fully on board with that and said he demonstrated his proficiency in using Amazon’s AI coding tool, Kiro, to solve massive problems in the company’s compensation system. If you werent using them, your manager would get a report and they would talk to you about using it, he said. There were only five people in the entire company that were a higher user of Kiro than I was, or had achieved more milestones. Now he’s shifting gears to his candidacy among a field of epublicans in the Houston area looking to unseat U.S. Rep. Dan Crenshaw in the March primary. Cornell’s Girotra said it’s possible that increasing AI productivity is leading companies to cut middle management, but he said the reality is that those making layoff decisions just need to cut costs and make it happen. Thats it. I don’t think they care what the reason for that is. Not all companies are signaling AI as a reason for cuts. Home Depot confirmed on Thursday that it was eliminating 800 roles tied to its corporate headquarters in Atlanta, though most of the affected employees worked remotely. Home Depots spokesman George Lane said that Home Depots cuts were not driven by AI or automation but truly about speed, agility and serving the needs of its customers and front-line workers. And exercise equipment maker Peloton confirmed on Friday that it is reducing its workforce by 11% as part of a broader cost-cutting move to pare down operating expenses. Matt O’Brien, AP technology writer AP Retail Writer Anne DInnocenzio contributed to this report.
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An outbreak of Nipah virus outbreak in India is currently causing alarm for health officials and travelers across a number of countries in Asia. On January 26, health officials from India notified the World Health Organization (WHO) of two laboratory-confirmed cases of Nipah virus (NiV) infection in West Bengal State. No additional NiV cases have been detected. Following news of the outbreak, authorities in some Asian countries, including Hong Kong, Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore, have ramped up airport health screening efforts. However, according to Reuters, the screenings are more for “reassurance” than a tactic to stop the spread. The WHO says risk of spread at the national, regional, and global levels is low. The latest developments Both recent West Bengal cases involved healthcare workers who began showing typical NiV symptoms in late December 2025. The cases were confirmed by Reverse Transcription Polymerase Chain Reaction (RT-PCR) and Enzyme-Linked Immunosorbent Assay (ELISA) testing, according to the WHO. Local health officials identified 196 contacts, all of whom tested negative for NiV and showed no symptoms. NiV is serious, but rare. It is a zoonotic virus, meaning it usually spreads from animals to humans. Fruit bats or flying foxes are natural hosts for the virus. However, the virus can also be transmitted through contaminated food and from person to person through close contact with an infected persons bodily fluids, such as saliva or urine. Person-to-person contact is less common, according to the National Emerging Special Pathogens Training & Education Center (NETEC). Person-to-person transmission is most commonly reported in hospital or healthcare settings. According to the WHO, the case fatality rate is estimated to be 40% to 75%. There are no licensed medications or vaccines for NiV infection, but early supportive care can improve survival. Additional details can be found in the WHO’s January 30 disease outbreak news report. A brief history of the virus NiV was first identified in 1998 in Malaysia during an outbreak among pig farmers. Since then, cases have been reported in less than a handful of countriesBangladesh, India, Malaysia, and Singapore. The most recent outbreak marks the third NiV infection outbreak reported in West Bengal.
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Want more housing market stories from Lance Lamberts ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. Back in 2023, this single-family home at 19374 Rizzuto St. in Venice, FL (34293 ZIP Code) was purchased for $565,000. By the time the transaction closed, the housing market had already begun to enter a period of cyclical coolingwith Florida seeing a sharper power swing to buyers and some pockets of Southwest Florida moving into what ResiClub considers correction mode. By February 2025, the homeowner listed the property above for sale at $519,000. After 4 subsequent price cuts and a brief delisting, the home finally sold in December 2025 for $455,000or -19.5% below its 2023 sales price. While thats certainly a material home price correction from its Pandemic Housing Boom peak, we should note that the December 2025 sales price ($455K) was still +38.7% above the $328,000 price the same property fetched in 2017. As weve closely documented for ResiClub readers for the past few years (heres our past feature on just Punta Gorda), Southwest Florida has been one of the two weakest regional chunks of the U.S. housing market. Among major U.S. metros, only Austin, Texas metro area (-27.3% since its 2022 peak) has seen a larger overall price drop this cycle than metros in Punta Gorda, FL (-25.3% from its 2022 peak), Cape Cape Coral-Fort Myers, FL (-18.8% from its 2022 peak), and North Port-Sarasota-Bradenton, FL (-17.4% from its 2022 peak). The North Port-Sarasota metro is where the home highlighted above is located. Pulling from the ResiClub Terminal, single-family home prices in the ZIP Code highlighted in todays article (34293) are down -11.3% year-over-year. Pulling from the ResiClub Terminal, single-family home prices in the highlighted ZIP Code (34293) are down -21.5% from their 2022 peak. Thats broadly in line with the -19.5% decline at which the highlighted property sold relative to its 2023 price. Pulling from the ResiClub Terminal, single-family home prices in the highlighted ZIP Code (34293) are still up +37.3% above March 2020 levels. Thats broadly similar to the +38.7% increase the highlighted property sold for in December 2025 relative to its pre-pandemic sale in 2017 ($328,000). Again, todays ResiClub article is not about a property in a market performing anywhere near the U.S. average right now. Instead, it highlights a market that has been among the weakest since the Pandemic Housing Boom fizzled out. Indeed, U.S. home prices, as measured by the Zillow Home Value Index, entered 2026 at +1.9% above their July 2022 levels. Meanwhile, home prices in the North PortSarasota metrowhere the home in the 34293 ZIP Code is locatedentered 2026 at -17.4% below their July 2022 levels. Click here to view an interactive of the chart below There are several factors that have come together to tilt the supply-demand balance in Southwest Florida more decisively toward homebuyers since the Pandemic Housing Boom ended. One key factor is that home prices in Southwest Florida rose too far, too faststretching housing fundamentals well beyond what local incomes could reasonably support in a region that also happened to have relatively lower building costs and ample entitled land. When the Pandemic Housing Booms domestic migration surgeparticularly the influx of retirees and near-retireesbegan to decelerate, the Southwest Florida market experienced an even bigger demand shock. With fewer in-migrants, Southwest Florida increasingly had to rely on local incomes to support pricesin a market that already had strained fundamentals. At the same time, as market conditions shifted, elevated levels of new single-family andmultifamily supply came online across parts of Southwest Florida. Builders and landlords were forced to offer larger incentives to move product, which pulled some marginal demand away from the resale market and added another layer of cooling. Put more simply: Pockets of Southwest Florida had overshot, and the market needed a period of mean reversion. Click here to view an interactive of the chart below There are other factors, of course. Following the Surfside condo collapse in June 2021, which killed 98 people, Florida passed new structural safety rules, requiring more inspections and additional funds for repairs to be set aside by the end of 2024. That has led to Florida HOAs issuing sky-high special assessments and monthly HOA fee increases to cover these costs. This has had a greater impact on older coastal Florida condo buildings. Looking ahead, one big question is whether home prices in markets like Punta Gorda and Cape Coral (and metro area Austin, TX) have fallen enough to recapture the attention of homebuyers, mom-and-pop single-family investors, and single-family acquisition capital? Its worth noting that while many pockets of Southwest Florida still have inventory/months of supply levels above the national average, the pace of inventory growth has slowed significantly over the past yearand some areas in SWFL have even begun to see modest year-over-year declines in active listings. Back in spring 2022, while working at Fortune, I suggested that pockets of Southwest Florida could be at greater risk of a home price correction. At the time, Moodys Analytics model believed Punta Gorda, for example, was overvalued by 57.8%. The correction Punta Gorda has gone through since thencoupled with additional income gainsmeans the market is now only overvalued by 9.0%, according to Moodys model. In other words, the ongoing correction in Southwest Florida has significantly reduced downside risk going forward relative to where things stood a few years ago.
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In the early 20th century, sociologist Max Weber noted that sweeping industrialization would transform how societies worked. As small, informal operations gave way to large, complex organizations with clearly defined roles and responsibilities, leaders would need to rely less on tradition and charisma, and more on organization and rationality. He also foresaw that jobs would need to be broken down into specialized tasks and governed by a system of hierarchy, authority, and responsibility. This would require a more formal mode of organizationa bureaucracyin which roles and responsibilities were clearly defined. Power would be entrusted to institutions, not individuals. Yet today, according to Gallup, our faith in institutions has been shattered. From political institutions to schools to big business, support has fallen precipitously, and now only the military and small business enjoy majority support. In essence, the process Weber described has been reversed: weve discarded institutions and embraced individuals. It is not serving us well. How Institutions Shape Societies In 1776, Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations. Today, regarded as the seminal work of capitalism, it wasnt seen that way at the time (the term did not exist in common usage). Rather, it was a powerful critique of mercantilism, the dominant economic model at the time, which sought to accumulate a countrys resources through promoting exports and minimizing imports. Yet Smith pointed out that the wealth of a nation lies in what it produces, not what it can sock away in vaults. Moreover, he argued that when wealthy merchants have the opportunity, they tend to corrupt political systems in order to extract more wealth for themselves, and that free markets are the most effective way to allocate resources productively. More recently, economists Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson build on Smiths ideas in Why Nations Fail. They explain why the fate of nations rests less on innate factors such as geography, culture, or climate and more on the quality and types of institutions they build: inclusive institutions or extractive institutions. Inclusive institutions protect property rights broadly across society, establish fair competition, and reward innovation. Extractive institutions, on the other hand, concentrate wealth in the hands of a small elite who exploit the broader population. These elites control resources and use state power to enrich themselves at societys expense. In other words, the wealth of nations is linked to the well-being of their people and this is largely a function of institutions. We depend on schools to educate, corporations to produce, governments to serve, and the media to inform. The health of a society is inextricably tied up in the health of its institutions. Institution Building And Institutional Capture Great leaders are remembered for the institutions they create. Napoleon is remembered for his civic code as much as for his military victories. Franklin Roosevelt will always be associated with the New Deal and Lyndon Johnson with the Great Society. We recognize great industrialists like Walt Disney not just for their individual deeds, but for the organizations they left behind. Autocrats understand that their power is directly a function of their ability to control or influence institutions. Many of these, of course, are political institutions, such as ministries, parliaments, and courts. Many others, such as corporations, religious organizations, educational institutions, and the media, are not. Thats why when Vladimir Putin assumed the presidency in Russia, he moved quickly to consolidate private media under Gazprom, install his own oligarchs and cultivate a close partnership with the Orthodox Church. Power is never monolithic, but distributed across institutions. To control a society, you need to control its institutions. Pro-democracy activists often employ a similar strategy. They target institutions that are important to the regime. For example, the Serbian activist group Otpor targeted the police with an elaborate strategy that both hampered their efforts and gradually recruited them to join the cause. When major protests broke out after an attempt to steal an election, the key security forces defected and joined the protestors. As Dostoevsky explained in The Grand Inquisitor, there will always be a conflict between churches and their messiahs. If people truly love the messiah, they wont need priests to provide mystery and authority. They would be free to pursue truth for themselves. The Erosion of Institutional Authority In his first inaugural address, Ronald Reagan declared, Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem, and vowed to unleash the private sector. What followed was not a renaissance of institutional strength, but a steady erosion of it. His deregulation led to the Savings and Loan crisis. Then came the dot-com bubble and crash, two long and destructive wars, the Great Financial Crisis, and the Covid pandemic. Each time there was a villain to execrate: Big Business, Wall Street, Neocons, the Military-Industrial Complex, Big Banks, Big Pharma, the media, and of course, nameless government bureaucrats (sometimes also known as public servants). As the Gallup dat clearly shows, we no longer trust our institutions. It is, in a strange sort of way, like The Grand Inquisitor in reverse. With no more churches to worship, weve gone in search of messiahs: demagogues, tech billionaires, podcast hosts, and many others. Were not craving altars. We seek parasocial relationships, hoping that our personal saviors will free us from institutional authority. The difference today is that we are often interacting with institutions without even knowing it. As the Filipino activist Maria Ressa has long documented, nation states are fighting an active information war, seeding our conversations on social media with divisive messaging, then amplifying the response with massive bot farms. Those tech oligarchs and podcast hosts arent just passive observers, but often actively pursuing an agenda for their own benefit. What were left with is the worst of both worlds: less freedom and less prosperity. The End Of History All Over Again In the 1990s, Western-style liberal democracy was triumphant. The Berlin Wall had fallen and the Cold War had been won. Teams of diplomats and consultants rushed to spread the Washington Consensus, an agreed-upon set of reforms that poor countries were pressured to undertake by their richer brethren. Francis Fukuyama noted at the time that we had reached an endpoint in history, when one model had achieved dominance over all others. Yet even as he laid out the rational case, he invoked the ancient Greek concept of thymos, or spiritedness, to warn that even at the end of history, some would insist on going their own way, no matter the consequences. The truth is that every revolution inspires its own counterrevolution and the pendulum will continue to swing until there can be some agreement about shared values and how to move forward. Today, we can see the consequences. Populists arent so much anti-elite as they are anti-institution, and todays media environment rewards those who attack them. The result is a world that feels far more divided and dangerous than it did even during the Cold War. Our mistake was that we were far too triumphant about a unipolar world to recognize that we needed to redesign our institutions to adapt to a new era. We are still largely living in a society governed by postwar institutions designed for how the world was nearly 80 years agono Internet, no cheap air travel, global GDP roughly five percent of what it is today. Today, much like after World War II and in 1989, we are in the midst of a fundamental realignment. To build a different future, we need to rethink our institutionswhat values we want to embed in them and what our relationship to them should be. How should schools educate? Corporations produce? Governments serve? And the media inform? We dont need saviors or messiahs. We need to redesign and rebuild institutions that can serve and sustain us for the 21st century.
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Over the past two decades, the concept of mindfulness has become hugely popular around the world. An increasingly ubiquitous part of society, its taught everywhere from workplaces and schools to sports programs and the military. On social media, television, and wellness apps, mindfulness is often shown as one simple thingstaying calm and paying attention to the moment. Large companies like Google use mindfulness programs to help employees stay focused and less stressed. Hospitals use it to help people manage pain and improve mental health. Millions of people now use mindfulness apps that promise everything from lowering stress to sleeping better. But as a professor of religious studies who has spent years examining how mindfulness is defined and practiced across different traditions and historical periods, Ive noticed a surprising problem beneath the current surge of enthusiasm: Scientists, clinicians, and educators still dont agree on what mindfulness actually isor how to measure it. Because different researchers measure different things under the label mindfulness, two studies can give very different pictures of what the practice actually does. For someone choosing a meditation app or program based on research findings, this matters. The study youre relying on may be testing a skill like attention, emotional calm, or self-kindness that isnt the one youre hoping to develop. This makes it harder to compare results and can leave people unsure about which approach will genuinely help them in daily life. From ancient traditions to modern science Mindfulness has deep roots in Buddhist, Hindu, Jain, Sikh, and other Asian contemplative lineages. The Buddhist Satipatthana Sutta: The Foundations of Mindfulness emphasizes moment-to-moment observation of body and mind. The Hindu concept of dhyna, or contemplation, cultivates steady focus on the breath or a mantra; Jain samayika, or practice of equanimity, develops calm balance toward all beings; and Sikh simran, or continuous remembrance, dissolves self-centered thought into a deeper awareness of the underlying reality in each moment. In the late 20th century, teachers and clinicians began adapting these techniques for secular settings, most notably through mindfulness-based stress reduction and other therapeutic programs. Since then, mindfulness has migrated into psychology, medicine, education, and even corporate wellness. It has become a widely usedthough often differently definedtool across scientific and professional fields. Why scientists disagree about mindfulness In discussing the modern application of mindfulness in fields like psychology, the definitional challenge is front and center. Indeed, different researchers focus on different things and then design their tests around those ideas. Some scientists see mindfulness mainly in terms of emphasizing attention and paying close attention to whats happening right now. Other researchers define the concept in terms of emotional management and staying calm when things get stressful. Another cohort of mindfulness studies emphasizes self-compassion, meaning being kind to yourself when you make mistakes. And still others focus on moral awareness, the idea that mindfulness should help people make wiser, more ethical choices. These differences become obvious when you look at the tests researchers use to measure mindfulness. The Mindful Attention Awareness Scale, or MAAS, asks about how well someone stays focused on the present moment. The Freiburg Mindfulness InventoryFMIasks whether a person can notice thoughts and feelings as they come and accept them without judgment. The Comprehensive Inventory of Mindfulness ExperiencesCHIMEadds something most other tests leave out: questions about ethical awareness and making wise, moral choices. As a result, comparative research can be tricky, and it can also be confusing for people who want to be more mindful but arent sure which path to take. Different programs may rely on different definitions of mindfulness, so the skills they teach and the benefits they promise can vary a lot. This means that someone choosing a mindfulness course or app might end up learning something very different from what they expected unless they understand how that particular program defines and measures mindfulness. Why different scales measure different things John Dunne, a Buddhist philosophy scholar at the University of WisconsinMadison, offers a helpful explanation if youve ever wondered why everyone seems to talk about mindfulness in a different way. Dunne says mindfulness isnt one single thing, but a family of related practices shaped by different traditions, purposes, and cultural backgrounds. This explains why scientists and people trying to be mindful often end up talking past each other. If one study measures attention and another measures compassion, their results wont line up. And if youre trying to practice mindfulness, it matters whether youre following a path that focuses on calming your mind, being kind to yourself, or making ethically aware choices. Why this matters Because mindfulness isnt just one thing, that affects how its studied, practiced and taught. Thats important both at the institutional and individual level. Whether for places like schools and health care, a mindfulness program designed to reduce stress will look very different from one that teaches compassion or ethical awareness. Without clarity, teachers, doctors, and counselors may not know which approach works best for their goals. The same rough idea applies in business for organizational effectiveness and stress management. Despite the disagreements, research does show that different forms of mindfulness can produce different kinds of benefits. Practices that sharpen attention to the moment are associated with improved focus and workplace performance. Approaches oriented towards acceptance tend to help people better manage stress, anxiety, and chronic pain. A focus on compassion-based methods can support emotional resilience. Programs that emphasize ethical awareness may promote more thoughtful, prosocial behavior. These varied outcomes help explain why researchers continue to debate which definition of mindfulness should guide scientific study. For anyone practicing minfulness as an individual, this is a reminder to choose practices that fit your needs. Ronald S. Green is a professor and chair of the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Coastal Carolina University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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