Business, Spoken

Need masks and face shields? You got it. A network of tinkerers comes in handy when lives are on the line and the authorities are asleep at the wheel. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

For all the talk of moving production and supply chains out of China, governments and companies lack the trillions that would be needed as they battle the pandemic. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Instacart promised it would provide masks and sanitizer kits weeks ago. Now the company claims the delay is by design. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Faced with a pandemic on the one hand and slashed budgets on the other, some industry insiders say it’s time for influencing to evolve. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Some investors are urging their portfolio companies to leave government assistance for restaurants and hairdressers. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In the struggle to stay afloat, independent eateries in Portland, Oregon, are adapting their workflows, their menus, and their business plans to serve customers under lockdown. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Despite the EU's new copyright directive, Google has so far refused to pay fees in order to send sites traffic. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Most US schools are closed, with instruction shifting to the internet. That's a problem for millions of people without reliable broadband, including 20 percent of rural students. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

As Covid-19 keeps people indoors, delivery and other contract workers are more visible than ever—making this a pivotal time for them to secure basic rights. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Consumer advocates fear that the deal will lead to reduced competition and higher prices. But regulators and a federal judge let it proceed. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Over the course of two presidential campaigns, Sanders showed how effective a digital-first movement could be. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Svelte, created by a graphics editor for the New York Times, has attracted a following among programmers who want their pages to load faster. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Social distancing rules have reduced many eateries to delivery and take out. But apps like Uber Eats exact a 25 percent toll on their shrinking revenue. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

It alerts staff when a patient’s condition changes, allowing people to be sent home and monitored remotely. Two hospital systems will begin testing it this week. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

US companies have shifted production overseas, especially to China. We got cheaper products. But now we can't make vital health care supplies. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

UC Berkeley's Costas Spanos thinks you should track your workers and hand over the lights and temperature controls to artificial intelligence. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The social media giant gave $100 million to help local news during the pandemic, but still makes you hunt for trusted sources. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The team developed its own software to coordinate volunteers and synthesize voter data. Now, it’s posting the code to GitHub. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Due to Covid-19, Amazon is only accepting certain supplies at its warehouses. Small businesses are already feeling the pinch. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Accelerators like Y-Combinator have had online programs, but the pandemic might force even its elite core program to go entirely remote for the first time. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The food service industry is facing pandemic-related layoffs and closings, but tech-savvy chef Eric Rivera is using online platforms to keep his business in the black. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Food producers, distributors, and warehouse operators say supplies are plentiful, so long as stores can be restocked. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Health officials want to close beaches crowded with spring breakers to slow the spread of coronavirus. Local businesses fear the financial impact. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube all announced this week that thousands of content moderators are being sent home—leaving more of our feeds in the hands of machines. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Netflix is slowing streams in Europe in an effort to preserve bandwidth amid the pandemic. But US providers seem to be holding up to the surge in usage. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Drivers for Uber and Lyft in Seattle say demand for rides has plummeted, and they have few workplace benefits to fall back on. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Microsoft's founder has been slowly inching away from his company. Now Gates has stepped down from the board seat he held for 44 years. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Google and the White House are working together now, but they're still not describing the same website. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Digestive is a peculiar font. Its ornate, wiggly letters make it look a bit like calligraphy by aliens from outer space. But Digestive isn't just unusual in how it looks. It's also unusual in how it was sold. Thanks to Future Fonts, a platform for selling fonts that are still works-in-progress, Digestive was already gracing magazine covers, concert posters, and even perfume boxes, before designer Jérémy Landes considered it finished. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The announcement earlier this week that Intuit, the financial software giant, would be buying the personal finance company Credit Karma for $7 billion was striking. The tech industry is under more antitrust scrutiny than ever; just a few weeks ago, the Federal Trade Commission announced a broad inquiry into the past decade of acquisitions by the five biggest tech giants, with a focus on mergers that kill off budding rivals. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

On Thursday, 18 stories above the streets of Manhattan, the rooftop bar of one of the more than a dozen Marriott hotels in Midtown played host to an unusual crowd. Some were Airbnb hosts, others repped the burgeoning homesharing startup scene, most were wannabe rental empire titans—all were members of New York City’s booming short-term rental industry interested in learning how to turn their Airbnb side hustle into a hospitality superbrand. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Amazon is cracking down on third-party merchants who violate its policies while selling items related to the new coronavirus disease known as Covid-19. Following reports by WIRED and others of price gouging and misleading claims, the retail giant confirmed it had removed or blocked over one million products that falsely advertised to defend against or cure the illness, as well as tens of thousands of items—such as face masks—that were listed for inflated prices. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

This story is part of a collection of pieces on how we work today, from video conferencing to using productivity apps for off-label purposes to appeasing our robot overlords. When J. Lo and Shakira put on their “provocative” performance during the Super Bowl halftime show in January, was it an act of female empowerment or a demeaning objectification? Just kidding. People will never agree on that. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos may very well have fundamentally changed the fight against climate change this week. In an Instagram post Monday, the world’s richest man committed $10 billion of his personal fortune to set up the new Bezos Earth Fund, which would support “scientists, activists, NGOs—any effort that offers a real possibility to help preserve and protect the natural world. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The Federal Communications Commission is once again seeking comment on its repeal of its Obama-era net neutrality rules. But the new comment period isn't focused on the usual issues that underpin the net neutrality debate, such as blocking or throttling content. Instead it will focus on less-noticed aspects of the agency's decision with regards to public safety and the agency's oversight of broadband internet providers. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Fans of games like Dungeons & Dragons know that the fun comes, in part, from a creative Dungeon Master—an all-powerful narrator who follows a storyline but has free rein to improvise in response to players’ actions and the fate of the dice. This kind of spontaneous yet coherent storytelling is extremely difficult for artificial intelligence, even as AI has mastered more constrained board games such as chess and Go. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Artificial intelligence has made big strides recently in understanding language, but it can still suffer from an alarming, and potentially dangerous, kind of algorithmic myopia. Research shows how AI programs that parse and analyze text can be confused and deceived by carefully crafted phrases. A sentence that seems straightforward to you or me may have a strange ability to deceive an AI algorithm. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Zhongnan Hospital of Wuhan University in Wuhan, China, is at the heart of the outbreak of Covid-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 that has shut down cities in China, South Korea, Iran, and Italy. That’s forced the hospital to become a testbed for how quickly a modern medical center can adapt to a new infectious disease epidemic. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Onstage during last night’s primary debate in Nevada, Mike Bloomberg found himself with no friends. But he’s got a plan to make some new ones in California. In advance of the state’s pivotal primary on March 3, the Mike Bloomberg presidential campaign is hiring more than 500 “deputy field organizers” in the state, at a $2,500 monthly salary for part-time work. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

You stroll into the office a little past 9 am. You got here in a company-sponsored bus that featured cushioned seats, Wi-Fi, and a distinct lack of eye contact. You are wearing weekend casual, even though it is a Wednesday. The office kitchen has green juice and kombucha growlers, which are free, as are breakfast and lunch. The office is lined with screens where your remote colleagues might pop up as talking heads. The CEO hoverboards past you. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Have you ever really looked at a photon? Part wave, part particle, all perfection. Yet they bring out the worst in some ­people, who bring out the worst in me. Let's start with the obvious: Photons, in all their quantum quintessence, can improve the security of internet connections. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

A $10 billion climate fund has been proposed and bluetooth devices are exposed, but first: a cartoon about a modern day Lion King. Here's the news you need to know, in two minutes or less. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Garry Kasparov is perhaps the greatest chess player in history. For almost two decades after becoming world champion in 1985, he dominated the game with a ferocious style of play and an equally ferocious swagger. Outside the chess world, however, Kasparov is best known for losing to a machine. In 1997, at the height of his powers, Kasparov was crushed and cowed by an IBM supercomputer called Deep Blue. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Gabriel is a professional transcriber, and for years he earned a middle-class living. In the early 2000s he'd make up to $40 an hour transcribing corporate earnings calls. He'd sit at his desk, “knock it out” for hours using custom keystrokes, and watch the money roll in. “I sent my son to private schools and university on transcribing,” he tells me. “It was a nice life.” But in the past decade, the bottom fell out. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Last June, at a swanky, strobe-lit event in Washington, DC, Brendan Blumer, the 33-year-old CEO of a blockchain company called Block.one, unveiled a new product with Steve Jobs-like theatrics: a social network called Voice. A year earlier, Blumer’s company had raised $4 billion selling a crypto token called EOS. It was, by far, the largest-ever initial coin offering—more money than just about any US initial public offering that year. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The number of Airbnb listings in London has quadrupled in the last four years as more and more of the city’s housing stock has been gobbled up by short-term rental companies. As of May 2019, 80,770 properties in London were listed on Airbnb, with a staggering 23 percent, or 11,200, of these thought to be in breach of a legal 90-day limit in the capital. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

When Facebook bought WhatsApp for $22 billion in 2014, many observers scratched their heads. The smaller messaging platform had annual revenues in the low tens of millions. How could it be worth so much? Soon enough, however, Facebook’s logic became clear. While little noticed in the US, WhatsApp was already a juggernaut overseas, with hundreds of millions of users. In countries where Facebook was not as popular, the acquisition gave Mark Zuckerberg’s company an immediate foothold. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In 1997, Hiroaki Kitano, a research scientist at Sony, helped organize the first Robocup, a robot soccer tournament that attracted teams of robotics and artificial intelligence researchers to compete in the picturesque city of Nagoya, Japan. At the start of the first day, two teams of robots took to the pitch. As the machines twitched and surveyed their surroundings, a reporter asked Kitano when the match would begin. “I told him it started five minutes ago!” he says with a laugh. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

You’ll likely have one less choice for mobile service soon. Last year, nine states and the District of Columbia filed suit to block T-Mobile's $26.5 billion acquisition of Sprint. Tuesday, a federal judge ruled against the states, allowing the merger to move forward. The deal still needs approval from the California Public Utilities Commission, but it's not clear if the commission can actually block the deal. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

One evening last June, residents from the Hillesluis and Bloemhof neighborhoods on the south side of Rotterdam, in the Netherlands, crowded into a community room at their local playground. Many wore headscarves and some arrived after a protest march from a local mosque. The residents had assembled to learn more about a government system called SyRI that had quietly flagged thousands of people in their low-income communities to investigators as more likely to commit benefits fraud. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices