 |
|
|
|||||
U.S. employers added a surprisingly strong 130,000 jobs last month, but government revisions cut 2024-2025 U.S. payrolls by hundreds of thousands.The unemployment rate fell to 4.3%, the Labor Department said Wednesday.The report included major revisions that reduced the number of jobs created last year to just 181,000, weakest since the pandemic year of 2020, and less than half the previously reported 584,000.The job market has been sluggish for months even though the economy is registering solid growth.But the January numbers came in stronger than the 75,000 economists had expected. Healthcare accounted for nearly 82,000, or more than 60%, of last month’s new jobs. Factories added 5,000, snapping a streak of 13 straight months of job losses. The federal government shed 34,000 jobs.Average hourly wages rose a solid 0.4% from December to January.The unemployment rate fell from 4.4% in December as the number of employed Americans rose and the number of unemployed fell.Weak hiring over the past year reflects the lingering impact of high interest rates, billionaire Elon Musk’s purge last year of the federal workforce and uncertainty arising from President Donald Trump’s erratic trade policies, which have left businesses unsure about hiring.Dreary numbers have been coming in ahead of Wednesday’s report. Employers posted just 6.5 million job openings in December, fewest in more than five years.Payroll processor ADP reported last week that private employers added 22,000 jobs in January, far fewer than economists had forecast. And the outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas reported that companies slashed more than 108,000 jobs last month, the most since October and the worst January for job cuts since 2009.Several well-known companies announced layoffs last month. UPS is cutting 30,000 jobs. Chemicals giant Dow, shifting to more automation and artificial intelligence, is cutting 4,500 jobs. And Amazon is slashing 16,000 corporate jobs, its second round of mass layoffs in three months.The sluggish job market doesn’t match the economy’s performance.From July to September, America’s gross domestic productits output of goods and servicesgalloped ahead at a 4.4% annual pace, fastest in two years. Consumer spending was strong, and growth got a boost from rising exports and tumbling imports. And that came on top of solid 3.8% growth from April through June.Economists are puzzling out whether job creation will eventually accelerate to catch up to strong growth, perhaps as President Donald Trump’s tax cuts translate into big tax refunds that consumers start spending this year. But there are other possibilities. GDP growth could slow and fall into line with a weak labor market or advances in AI and automation could mean that the economy can roar ahead without creating many jobs.Wednesday’s report included the government’s annual benchmark revisions, meant to take into account the more-accurate jobs numbers that employers report to state unemployment agencies. They cut 898,000 jobs from payrolls in the year ending March 2025.Despite recent high-profile layoffs, the unemployment rate has looked better than the hiring numbers.That is partly because President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown has reduced the number of foreign-born people competing for work.As a result, the number of new jobs that the economy needs to create to keep the unemployment rate from risingthe “break-even” pointhas tumbled. In 2023, when immigrants were pouring into the United States, it reached a high of 250,000, according to economist Anton Cheremukhin of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. By mid-2025, Cheremukhin found, it was down to 30,000. Researchers at the Brookings Institution believe it could now be as low as 20,000 and headed lower.The combination of weak hiring but low unemployment means that most American workers are enjoying job security. But those who are looking for jobsespecially young people who can be competing at the entry level with AI and automationoften struggle to land one. Paul Wiseman, AP Economics Writer
Category:
E-Commerce
There are few things everyone can rally behind as much as finding a lost dog. But what if that mission is actually a workaround for mass surveillance? Thats the question many people are asking following a Super Bowl commercial from Ring, Amazon’s doorbell camera and home security brand. The 30-second video shows a series of missing dog posters and claims that 10 million pets go missing every year. It pitches Rings Search Party feature as the solution. Launched in November, Search Party takes a photo of the pet and taps into Ring cameras across the area. They can then use AI to identify the missing pet and send an alert. The ad claims that at least one dog a day has been found since the feature launched. It sounds like a happy ending, except that critics of Search Party see the ads framing as a way to normalize widespread biometric identification and a loss of privacy. Take a response from WeRateDogs, a dog-lovers’ account connected to 15/10 Foundation, a nonprofit raising money to get necessary medical help for shelter dogs. In a video posted to Bluesky on Tuesday, the brands creator, Matt Nelson, states, Neither Rings products nor business model are built around finding lost pets, but rather creating a mass surveillance network by turning private homes into surveillance outposts and well-meaning neighbors into informants for ICE and other government agencies. Solutions for finding lost dogs already exist Nelson further claims that Rings success rate of one dog found per day equals about 0.03% of reports shared. Instead of using Search Party, he suggests dog owners get their pet microchippeda common means of tracking lost dogs. Vets and some shelters can microchip dogs. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a nonprofit focused on defending civil liberties in the digital world, takes a similar stance on Ring. “The addition of AI-driven biometric identification is the latest entry in the companys history of profiting off of public safety worries and disregard for individual privacy, one that turbocharges the extreme dangers of allowing this to carry on, EFF wrote in response to the ad. The nonprofit continues: People need to reject this kind of disingenuous framing and recognize the potential end result: a scary overreach of the surveillance state designed to catch us all in its net. EFF points to instances such as in 2023, when Ring had to pay $5.8 million to settle with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) after Ring employees were found to have had extensive access to customer footageincluding in intimate spaces. In reaching the settlement, Ring denied violating the law. [Photo: Amazon] In early 2024, Ring claimed it would stop providing footage to the police without a warrant. But both Nelson and the EFF point to Rings late-2025 partnerships with Flock Safety and Axon. The companies can request footage from Ring customerswithout a warrantfor a case and then send it to thousands of law enforcement agencies. Fast Company has reached out to Ring for comment and will update this post if we hear back. A May 2025 report by 404 Media found that police using Flocks AI license plate reader regularly put the reason as ICE. In a specific case, the Johnson County Sheriffs Office in Texas, used Flock in its search for a woman who self-administered an abortion. How to turn off Rings Search Party feature Rings Search Party feature is on by default, but users can turn it off. According to Amazons Ring support, you can turn off the Search Party feature by: Going to the Ring app and tap the menu icon (three lines) Clicking Control Center Choosing Search Party Tapping Enable or Disable Search for Lost Pets (Click the blue Pet icon next to it if you want to turn it on or off for specific cameras) Nelson’s post on Bluesky has attracted thousands of shares and hundreds of comments, with some pointing to a Reddit thread in which users are saying they plan to return their Ring camera for a refund.
Category:
E-Commerce
The trove of documents released by the Department of Justice (DOJ) in relation to Jeffrey Epstein have revealed just how close the convicted child sex offender and financier was to all sorts of politicians, academics, business leaders, and other prominent figures. These figures not only talked about visits to Epsteins private island, but also shared news articles, discussed personal events, and had long debates about science and philosophy. Epsteins views, those conversations reveal, included peddling climate denialism and ecofascismand illustrate how the ultra-wealthy undermine meaningful climate action. ‘Potentially a good thing for the species’ In a series of July 2016 emails with Joscha Bach, a German philosopher, AI researcher, and cognitive scientist, Epstein brings up climate change in the middle of a discussion about cognition and race. Maybe climate change is a good way of dealing with overpopulation, Epstein writes. the earths forest fire. potentially a good thing for the species. Linking the conversation back to the earlier topic of how brains function, Epstein adds: too many people . . . [it] is the fundamental fact that everyone dies at some time. make it [impossible] to ask so why not earlier. if the brain discards unused neurons, why [should] society keep their equivalent. (Regarding his correspondence with Epstein, Bach recently told SFGate that he hadn’t been aware of Epstein’s crimes after his 2008 conviction and that “his second arrest came as a shock.”) Citing climate change as a solution to overpopulation isnt a totally surprising position for someone like Epstein, says Michael Mann, a climatologist and coauthor, with Peter Hotez, of the 2025 book Science Under Siege: How to Fight the Five Most Powerful Forces That Threaten Our World. The overpopulation quote is entirely keeping with the ethos of this group, Mann tells Fast Company via email, referring to Epstein and his elite associates. Studies suggest that becoming richer makes you less empathetic, and that those with more power often care less about those with little power; the ultra-wealthy can then therefore be more dismissive of the needs of poor people, communities in developing countries, and their lived realities. An example of this way of thinking, Mann notes, comes from Bjorn Lomborg, a political scientist who has been criticized for spreading climate denialism. Lomborg, who also makes an appearance in Epstein’s emails, has argued that poor people need fossil fuels. Lomborg cynically uses his feigned concern for the poor and downtrodden people of the Global South to justify continued fossil fuel dependence, when in fact it is they who will suffer the most from continued planetary warming, Mann says. According to the Epstein files, Lomborg had a meeting with the financier in September 2012. That conversation was about philanthropic investments, a spokesperson for Lomborg’s think tank, the Copenhagen Consensus Center, told Drilled Media. But there wasnt any contact afterward, and the think tank did not receive money from Epstein. Epstein and climate misinformation In some places where the topic of climate change appears in the Epstein emails, Epstein is revealed to have shared messages that perpetuate climate myths. In December 2016, for example, Epstein sent a YouTube video featuring a climate change denier to theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss. That video, titled Nobel Laureate Smashes the Global Warming Hoax, features Ivar Giaever (now deceased), who had long denied the climate crisis. Krauss does push back. So you are listening to an old Nobel laureate whose expertise has nothing to do with this, who has never studied this in detail, built models, done experiments, he replies. But Epstein isnt fully deterred. i liked the argument that more co2 is good for plants? he says, repeating a classic myth from the climate deniers playbook. (In reality, excess CO2 from the burning of fossil fuels leads crop yields to drop and also worsens drought, heat, and disasters that destroy harvests.) In a later reply, Epstein repeats another piece of climate change misinformation: is the south pole getting colder and more ice? Krauss responds that the west Antarctic ice sheet is melting at an unprecedented rate. This wasnt the first time that the two discussed climate changeand seemed to disagree about it. In a 2013 email, Krauss sends Epstein an op-ed he wrote for The New York Times, headlined “Deafness at Doomsday,” which touched on how poicymakers should not ignore scientists about climate change. As usual i dont have to agree but will support your decisions, congratulations, Epstein replies. (Krauss recently told Nature, in response to questions about his interactions with Epstein, that he did not know about the “horrendous crimes” Epstein was accused of and that he was “as shocked as the rest of the world when Epstein was arrested.) How plutocrats promote climate denialism Manns book details five forces that threaten science: plutocrats, pros, petrostates, phonies, and the press. The Epstein Files is almost an advertisement for Science Under Siege because we see all of the key promoters of climate denial and anti-science that we talk about in the book, Mann says. That includes, he notes, propagandists like Lomberg and Steven Koonina theoretical physicist who is only mentioned in the emails when others are sharing his work. In 2014, Nathan Myhrvold, former CTO of Microsoft, sent Epstein a Wall Street Journal piece headlined Climate Science Is Not Settled, by Koonin, calling it “a good summary.” Koonin has criticized climate science and was also an author on the Trump administrations 2025 Department of Energy report that downplayed the climate crisis. The Epstein files also mention connections to “petrostates” (nations whose economies are heavily driven by the extraction and export of petroleum, natural gas, and other fossil fuels), including Russia and Saudi Arabia. And finally, its filled with plutocrats, like Elon Musk and Bill Gates. (Musk has denied a personal connection to Epstein; Gates has said he “regrets” his time spent with Epstein and maintains that Epstein’s claims about him in the files are false.) Gates often writes and lectures about climate change; the billionaire Microsoft cofounder has invested billions of dollars into technologies like carbon capture and nuclear power. But Mann has also long criticized Gates’s approach for straying from the straightforward solution of stopping fossil fuel use. To Mann, this is a common tactic from the wealthy, one he describes as stopping short of denying the basic science of climate change, but downplaying the impacts, dismissing the real solutions (i.e., clean energy), and ultimately acting as enablers of the fossil fuel status quo. The Epstein files have offered a glimpse into the world of billionaires and the way they collect and wield their powerincluding billionaire philanthropists who are influencing our reactions to crises like climate change. At a time when public sentiment of billionaires has become increasingly negative, people are questioning just how much influence the ultra-wealthy should have on our society. Mann has previously made the point that the solution to the climate crisis isnt going to come from benevolent plutocrats. If nothing else, he tells Fast Company, the Epstein Files really drive home this point.
Category:
E-Commerce
All news |
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||