California lawmakers return to work on Wednesday for the start of an election-year legislative session dominated by decisions on artificial intelligence and the state’s struggling budget.
The budget is a big issue every year in California, which is the nation’s most populous state and has an economy larger than that of all but four countries. But this year, lawmakers and Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom will have to figure out how to cover an estimated $68 billion def
America’s healthcare system is on the brink. Cracks exposed by the COVID-19 pandemic nearly four years ago have grown and multiplied. Many healthcare systems are operating at a loss, causing hospitals to limit their services or even close, with these lapses in healthcare availability hitting rural and underserved communities the hardest. Healthcare worker staffing shortages are causing declines in care quality and availability nationwide, contributing to an increasing sense of job diss
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A few Fast Company technology sto
Dedicated Starbucks customers know that the use of the company’s mobile app and digital payment cards to pay for coffee and other goodies comes with restrictions.
You can only add money to the card in $10 increments and must choose a tip from predetermined choices. That means no loading an exact amount for a single purchase or giving an odd tip amount to get your balance down to zero.
And you can’t split a payment between two cards if one doesn’t have
Elon Musk’s New Year’s hangover is showing some staying power. While 2024 is not even 48 hours old, the ride has already been a little bumpy for the world’s richest man.
Both Tesla and X/Twitter saw significant blows in the early hours of the year (starting with the final moments of 2023), with one losing its dominant position in its industry and the other being dismissed by one of the leading influencers in social media, just as reports emerged about its shrink
In any high-growth company, there comes a point when the founders, CEOs, and other company leaders are required to scale their own roles to support business growth. This effective “self-scaling” usually comes down to three questions: What does the company need? When is it time to let go? Where to next? Here’s how I saw it play out in my career and what I learned along the way.
What does the company need?
When I started at Lucid over
Tesla dethroned: China-based EV maker BYD surpassed Tesla as the world’s top seller of electric cars for the fourth quarter of 2023. The fast-growing company said it sold 525,409 battery-powered vehicles in the quarter, compared to Tesla’s 484,507. Tesla still sold more cars for the year at 1.8 million, although the figure was below earlier projections. Full story.
Mickey goes public: Creatives are already having a field day with their own interpretations of Mickey Mou
The year 2023 proved to be an important one for space missions, with NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission returning a sample from an asteroid and India’s Chandrayaan-3 mission exploring the lunar south pole, and 2024 is shaping up to be another exciting year for space exploration.
Several new missions under NASA’s Artemis plan and Commercial Lunar Payload Services initiative will target the Moon.
The latter half of the year will
Artificial intelligence is poised to upend much of society, removing human limitations inherent in many systems. One such limitation is information and logistical bottlenecks in decision-making.
Traditionally, people have been forced to reduce complex choices to a small handful of options that don’t do justice to their true desires. Artificial intelligence has the potential to remove that limitation. And it has the potential to drastically change how democracy functions.
As we kick off 2024, it’s not too late for an old-fashioned airing of grievances.
For all the improvements technology is supposed to bring, making use of it can still be a frustrating exercise. Even as someone who provides tech advice for a living, I’m often confounded by how often products degrade, features don’t work as advertised, and long-stated promises fail to materialize.
As I look through my piles of phones, computers, gadgets, and apps, here a