 |
|
|
|||||
Venice is charging day-trippers to the famed canal city an arrivals tax for the second year starting Friday, a measure aimed at combating the kind of overtourism that put the city’s UNESCO World Cultural Heritage status at risk. A UNESCO body decided against putting Venice on its list of cultural heritage sites deemed in danger after the tax was announced. But opponents of the day-tripper fee say it has done nothing to discourage tourists from visiting Venice even on high-traffic days. Heres a look at Venices battle with overtourism by the numbers: 510 euros (about $6$11) The fee charged to visitors who are not overnighting in Venice to enter its historic center during the second year of the day-tripper tax. Visitors who download a QR code at least three days in advance will pay 5 euros ($5.69)the same amount charged last year throughout the pilot program. But those who make last-minute plans pay double. The QR code is required from 8:30 a.m. until 4 p.m. and is checked at entry points to the city, including the Santa Lucia train station, the Piazzale Roma bus depot and the Tronchetto parking garage. 54 The number of days this year that day visitors to Venice will be charged a fee to enter the historic center. They include mostly weekends and holidays from April 18 to July 27. That is up from 29 last year. The new calendar covers entire weeks over key holidays and extends the weekend period to include Fridays. 2.4 million euros That is the amount Venice took in during a 2024 pilot program for the tax. The city’s top budget official, Michele Zuin, said last year the running costs for the new system ran to 2.7 million euros, overshooting the total fees collected. This year, Zuin projects a surplus of about 1 million euros to 1.5 million euros, which will be used to offset the cost of trash collection and other services for residents. 450,000 The number of day-trippers who paid the tax in 2024. Officials say 8,000 day-trippers paid in advance to enter the city on Friday, among the 77,000 who have already registered so far to enter the city this year. Another 117,000 have registered for exemptions, which apply to anyone born in Venice, those paying property taxes in the city, studying or working in the historic center, or living in the wider Veneto region, among others. 75,000 The average number of daily visitors on the first 11 days of 2024 that Venice charged day-trippers. That’s about 10,000 people more than the number of tourists recorded on each of the three important holidays during the previous year. City council member Giovanni Andrea Martini, an opponent of the measure, said the figures show the project has not deterred visitors. 48,283 The number of official residents in Venices historic center composed of over 100 islands connected by footbridges and traversed by its famed canals. The population peaked at 174,000 in 1951, when Venice was home to thriving industries. The number shrank during Italy’s postwar economic boom as residents moved to the mainland for more modern housingincluding indoor plumbing, which was lacking in Venice. It has been shrinking dramatically over recent decades as local industry lost traction, families sought mainland conveniences, and housing prices rose. Activists also blame the mono-culture of tourism, which they say has emptied the city of basic services like shops for everyday goods and medical care. 51,129 The number of beds for tourists in Venices historic center, including 12,627 in the less regulated short-term rental market, according to April data from the Ocio housing activist group. The number of tourist beds surpassed the number of permanent residents in 2023, according to Ocio’s monitor. Anyone staying in a hotel within the city limits, including on the mainland districts of Mestre and Marghera, pays a lodging tax and is therefore exempt from the day-tripper tax. 25 to 30 million The number of annual arrivals of both day-trippers and overnight guests roughly confirmed by cellphone data tracked from a Smart Control Room since 2020, according to city officials. Colleen Barry, Associated Press
Category:
E-Commerce
The Fast Company Impact Council is an invitation-only membership community of leaders, experts, executives, and entrepreneurs who share their insights with our audience. Members pay annual dues for access to peer learning, thought leadership opportunities, events and more. It’s been five years since the intense early days of the COVID-19 pandemic and the first round of lockdowns that mandated work-from-home for companies around the world. Among the debate at the time: concerns about how younger workers and new recruits would cope without access to experienced colleagues and mentors. Doomed to impersonal video conferencing in converted bedrooms, these youngsters couldnt hope to gain the confidence and deep experience of their predecessors. They would make their mistakes out of sight, and fail to learn. Now imagine those new workers and interns are digital, not human. Since OpenAI launched ChatGPT at the end of 2022, its not unusual to see generative AI systems referred to as interns, coworkers or even colleagues. In that case, its tempting to see their offspring, AI agents, as more experienced employees. Using the brain of a large language model, agents are given a specific purpose and granted access to an organizations software tools and data in order to autonomously fulfil their task. For many enterprises, the question is not whether they should adopt agentic AI, but how quickly and how widely. Gartner forecasts that, agentic AI will address and resolve 80% of regular customer service issues with no human intervention by 2029, and this will result in a 30% reduction in operational costs. With stats like that, other business functions will surely followand fast. Chain of thought Big-name tech companies such as Salesforce are going all-in on an agentic future and AI companions are already a common feature in business tools such as Zoom and Slack. AI rivals are reaching agreement at an unprecedented pace on new technology protocols that allow the integration of AI models with all types of business tools and applications. In this new era, the digital workers are being handed the keys to the enterprise. What can possibly go wrong? Potentially, quite a lot. All the major models are fallible and flawed. As Anthropic, maker of the popular Claude family of AI models, explains in a new research paper: Language models like Claude aren’t programmed directly by humansinstead, theyre trained on large amounts of data. During that training process, they learn their own strategies to solve problems. These strategies are encoded in the billions of computations a model performs for every word it writes. They arrive inscrutable to us, the models developers. This means that we dont understand how models do most of the things they do. [Italics added for emphasis.] Anthropics own research shows Claude being tricked into naming the ingredients for a bomb, though stopping short of giving instructions on how to make one. Separate Anthropic-backed research found that more advanced reasoning models, which show the chain of thought they use to reach their conclusions, dont always say what they think. Without the ability to rely on chain of thought, there may be safely-relevant factors affecting model behavior that remain hidden, the researchers concluded. (The researchers evaluated the faithfulness of two state-of-the-art reasoning models, Claude 3.7 Sonnet and DeepSeek-R1.) Connecting AI models to business tools, via agents, raises the safety stakes. An agent that has access to an email system can be exploited as a useful tool for attacker intent on phishing. Access to database systems can be levered to extract valuable data from an organization. Even instances of accidental misuse can have significant consequences in terms of disruption, cost, and reputational damage to an organization. An adult in the room In the absence of the ability to predict or drive the behavior, these new digital colleagueslike their human counterpartsneed chaperones to provide guidance and feedback. Its important there is at least one adult in the room to constantly monitor these (not very streetwise) interns, intervening in real time when they may be sent on a fools errand, tricked into handing over their wallet, or encouraged to say or do something offensive or illegal. We know from experience that attempting to rapidly introduce new technology across an enterprise can be a recipe for chaos. Someone, somewhereand likely many peoplewill find themselves in the headlines looking silly, at best. At worst, they may lose valuable intellectual property and suffer serious financial and reputational loss. The best solution for an agentic workforce is agentic oversightusing powerful, customized agents to simulate real-world scenarios and probe AI for weaknesses. Continuous, automated red teaming of these new technologies, at speed, can give enterprises the confidence they need before they send their armies of new interns and employees out to do real jobs. This agentic warfare approach offers the greatest chance of implementing enterprise AI for its intended purposes. After all, you wouldnt give an unvetted new employee completely unhindered and unsupervised access to your business systems, would you? Donnchadh Casey is CEO of CalypsoAI.
Category:
E-Commerce
The Fast Company Impact Council is an invitation-only membership community of leaders, experts, executives, and entrepreneurs who share their insights with our audience. Members pay annual dues for access to peer learning, thought leadership opportunities, events and more. Leadership transformation isn’t found in boardroomsit’s happening in our homes. In a world facing converging crises of climate, technology, and social displacement, how we create our spaces reveals everything about how we’ll lead through these transformative times. Integrity derives from the Latin word “integer”meaning whole, complete, undivided. This word describes both ethical leadership and structural soundness. A home lacks integrity when its foundation cracks or its systems fail to work as a unified whole. Similarly, leadership without integrity fragments under pressure, creates waste through misalignment, and fails to shelter those who depend on it. The decisions that shape our homesfrom material sourcing to energy systems to spatial designare fundamentally ethical choices. They reveal whether we truly understand our relationship to resources, community, and future generations. This connection between home and leadership becomes clearest when we contrast two fundamentally different approaches: The extractive mindset designs homes that deplete resources, prioritize appearance over performance, and externalize their true costs to communities and ecosystems. The regenerative mindset creates living spaces that work in harmony with natural systems, optimize for both human and planetary health, and regenerate the communities they exist within. The mindset we adopt when designing our homes reveals our relationship with material resources, directly reflecting our capacity to lead with integrity. The same patterns of thinking that have contributed to environmentally wasteful building practices in the past inevitably also surface in organizational decision making. The good news is that embracing regenerative practices creates a virtuous cycletransforming our homes, reshaping our mindsets, and ultimately enhancing our leadership abilities. Beyond four walls Visionary leaders recognize that their organizations, like homes, exist within living systems. Just as a sustainable home requires understanding energy flows, material lifecycles, and community impacts, effective leadership requires seeing beyond isolated metrics to the health of entire ecosystemsorganizational, financial, social, and ecological. These systems transform leadership in four critical dimensions: Holistic integration: The alignment of systems, values, and resources to create a unified whole greater than the sum of its parts. In homes, this means designing spaces where energy, water, materials, and human needs work in harmony. In leadership, it means cultivating organizations where purpose, people, profit, and planetary impact reinforce rather than undermine each other. Regenerative stewardship: Moving beyond sustainability to actively restore and enhance the systems that support life. In homes, this means creating spaces that give more than they take. In leadership, it means building organizations that actively heal social divides, regenerate depleted resources, and leave ecosystems healthier. Honest materiality: Embracing the true nature, origins, and impacts of what we build with. In homes, this means selecting materials for their authentic properties rather than superficial aesthetics. In leadership, it means fostering transparency about how value is created, and impacts are managed throughout the entire organizational ecosystem. Adaptive co-evolution: Designing for a dynamic relationship with changing environments rather than rigid control. In homes, this means creating spaces that respond to seasonal shifts, climate extremes, and evolving family needs. In leadership, it means developing organizations capable of thriving amid uncertaintysensing, responding to, and shaping emerging futures. As technological acceleration and climate impacts intensify, transformative leaders mirror sustainable builders: envisioning regenerative systems, pioneering new methods, and understanding the interconnectedness of people and planet. The next generation of breakthrough leaders won’t just manage extraction more efficientlythey’ll architect regeneration more intelligently. And like all great architects, they’ll understand that integrity isn’t just a virtueit’s structural necessity. The whole puzzle Traditional leadership focuses on optimizing fragments: profit centers, performance metrics, quarterly returns. This fragmentation is like building a house by perfecting individual rooms without ensuring they work togethera strategy that inevitably creates dysfunction at both local and planetary scales. The integrity-driven approach sees the whole puzzleunderstanding that a home, like an organization, exists within Earth’s living systems. When our homes and businesses operate with fragmented thinking, the collective impact accelerates climate destabilization. When we design with integrity, we create regenerative ripples beyond our immediate sphere. This planetary perspective transforms leadership from an exercise in optimization to an act of stewardship. It requires alignment between systems, purpose, and impact across scalesfrom the individual home to the global commons we all share. The future of leadership starts in the home because our profound transformations begin with reconsidering what we’ve taken for granted. By examining the integrity of our fundamental structuresour living spaceswe reveal the blueprint for leading organizations capable of thriving amid complexity while contributing to a flourishing world. The leadership our future demands builds on the same foundation as sustainable homes: the recognition that integrityboth structural and moralisn’t optional. It’s essential for creating systems that withstand time, resource constraints, and accelerating change. Gene Eidelman is cofounder of Azure Homes. Rachel Weissman is founder of Congruence.
Category:
E-Commerce
All news |
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||