This week’s Current Climate newsletter also looks at tough market conditions for Tesla’s Semi and how offshore wind farms can stabilize New England’s electricity grid.
Live Nation executives have reportedly sidestepped the Justice Department’s antitrust division to negotiate directly with more sympathetic senior officials in the hopes of avoiding a monopoly trial. Citing “people familiar with the matter,” Semafor reports that some talks have excluded antitrust chief Gail Slater, who has pushed for a trial to take place in March […]
Kit Rocha and Courtney Milan have a knack for drawing attention to a cause. The bestselling romance novelists helped raise half a million dollars for Georgia voting rights in 2020. Now, their cause is whistles, because whistles let neighbors alert each other when they see ICE agents abducting people. They’ve helped create a group that’s […]
New York’s state legislature is set to consider a pair of bills that would require labels on AI-generated content and would put a three-year pause on new data center construction. The New York Fundamental Artificial Intelligence Requirements in News Act (NY FAIR News Act, for short) would require that any news “substantially composed, authored, or […]
Thirty years ago today, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a bill credited with creating the groundwork for the modern internet, became law and set off a chain of events that would make it a lightning rod for the techlash. The statute has survived everything from the dot-com bubble to a Supreme Court challenge […]
300 journalists have lost their jobs at The Washington Post. Over 300,000 readers have canceled their subscriptions. Owner Jeff Bezos, who purchased the legendary publication in 2013, has driven his reputation into the ground by using his vast empire to churn out content designed to make President Donald Trump happy: Amazon MGM Studios spent $40 […]
Fortnite developer Epic Games says the account some people believed to be linked to Jeffrey Epstein is a “ruse.” In a reply on X, the developer writes, “an existing Fortnite account owner changed their username” to “littlestjeff1,” an alias spotted in several emailed receipts from YouTube in the Epstein files. The email suggests that “littlestjeff1” […]
There are bold-faced tech names all over the Epstein files. Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Sergey Brin, Eric Schmidt, Larry Page, Reid Hoffman, Steven Sinofsky, Peter Thiel, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, on and on and on. These men (and they’re pretty much all men) had wildly varying degrees of interaction with Epstein, and the details matter […]
He might be dead, but it sure seems like Jeffrey Epstein won. Sure, Epstein was arrested on charges of sex trafficking minors. Sure, he died in jail. (I am not going to wade into the debate about how.) But he subscribed to a racist, misogynist ideology that meant rich white men like him could do […]
Is the long freeze on Chinese automakers selling cars in the US finally starting to thaw? China is the largest auto market in the world and now the largest car exporter, too. But high tariffs and geopolitical tensions have kept Chinese automakers away from US customers. Many of those cars are ready for primetime and […]