Americans check their phones an average of 205 times a day, a 42.3% increase from last year. Millennials are leading the charts in frequency, attachment, and anxiety over phone use, while Gen Z spends the most time daily on their devices at over six hours. PCMag reports: There's a good chance that you're currently reading this article on your phone. If you're like one of the Americans surveyed by Reviews.org, this is one of 205 times today that you'll be checking the device in your hand. To spare you opening the calculator app, that's about once every five minutes you are awake or two and a half full months out of your year.

That's an alarming 42.3% rise from last year when the reviews company asked the same question and found people checked their phones 144 times per day. Some of the ways they spend those 205 moments are:

- 80.6% check their phones within the first 10 minutes of waking up
- 65.7% use their phone on the toilet
- 53.7% have texted someone in the same room
- 38.1% use or look at their phone while on a date
- 27% use or look at their phone while driving

And, of course, there are those many, many times when people check their notifications, with 76% checking their phones within five minutes of receiving one. Millennials are the fastest on the draw, with 89.5% of them checking within 10 minutes. Gen Z and Gen X have found common ground (finally), with 84% of each group looking at notifications shortly after receiving them. Boomers and the Silent Generation aren't as anxious to see who is trying to reach them, with 69% and 53.3%, respectively, checking their notifications within a few minutes.

South Korean officials said Monday they will conduct safety inspections of all Boeing 737-800 aircraft operated by the country's airlines, as they struggle to determine what caused a plane crash that killed 179 people a day earlier. From a report: Sunday's crash, the country's worst aviation disaster in decades, triggered an outpouring of national sympathy. Many people worry how effectively the South Korean government will handle the disaster as it grapples with a leadership vacuum following the recent successive impeachments of President Yoon Suk Yeol and Prime Minister Han Duck-soo, the country's top two officials, amid political tumult caused by Yoon's brief imposition of martial law earlier this month.

New acting President Choi Sang-mok on Monday presided over a task force meeting on the crash and instructed authorities to conduct an emergency review of the country's aircraft operation systems. "The essence of a responsible response would be renovating the aviation safety systems on the whole to prevent recurrences of similar incidents and building a safer Republic of South Korea," said Choi, who is also deputy prime minister and finance minister.

Nvidia has completed its acquisition of Run:ai, a provider of GPU cloud orchestration software for AI workloads, and announced plans to open-source the platform. The deal, valued at $700 million, brings the Israel-based startup under Nvidia's umbrella after their collaboration since 2020.

Run:ai's software helps enterprises manage and schedule Nvidia GPU resources for AI applications across cloud and on-premises environments. Founded in 2018, the company's platform currently supports only Nvidia GPUs, but open-sourcing will enable expansion to other AI ecosystems, according to founders Omri Geller and Ronen Dar. The acquisition strengthens Nvidia's software portfolio as the company, now valued at $3.56 trillion, expands beyond its core graphics chip business into AI infrastructure management.

President-elect Donald Trump has defended the H-1B visa program for skilled foreign workers. "I've always liked the visas. I have many H-1B visas on my properties... It's a great program," Trump told The New York Post.

His comments follow recent support for the program from Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy. The H-1B program allows 85,000 skilled workers to immigrate annually, including 20,000 spots for those with U.S. advanced degrees. Trump's businesses have received approval to hire over 2,100 foreign workers since 2008, with about 70 positions through H-1B visas, mostly over a decade ago.

America's aerospace industry is overseen by the Federal Aviation Administration (or FAA) — which also handles safety warnings from the industry's whistleblowers. But the Seattle Times says an analysis of reports to Congress found "an overwhelmed system delivering underwhelming results for whistleblowers... More than 90% of safety complaints from 2020 through 2023 ended with no violation found by the FAA, while whistleblowers reported them at great personal and professional risk." Aside from the FAA's in-house program, employees of Boeing, Spirit and the FAA can report safety hazards to the Office of Special Counsel, which has no FAA ties, or through internal employer complaint programs, such as Boeing's Speak Up and Spirit's Quality 360, to trigger company reviews... In the aftermath of the door-plug blowout over Portland, Boeing specifically asked its employees to use the Speak Up program or the FAA's internal process to report any concerns, according to Boeing spokesperson Jessica Kowal. Both have done a poor job protecting whistleblowers from retaliation, according to a congressionally appointed expert panel... While both were designed to guard against retaliation, critics say they have instead become enablers of it...

A panel of aviation safety experts in February rebuked Boeing's Speak Up program in a report to Congress. Whistleblower advocates criticized Speak Up for commonly outing whistleblowers to the supervisors they're complaining about, exposing them to retaliation. Managers sometimes investigated complaints against themselves. Employees mistrusted the program's promise of anonymity. Collectively, the befuddling maze of whistleblower options sowed "confusion about reporting systems that may discourage employees from submitting safety concerns," according to the expert panel's report....

[Boeing quality inspector Sam Mohawk, who alleged the 737 MAX line in Renton was losing track of subpar aircraft parts], continues to pursue his FAA claim, originally submitted through Boeing's Speak Up program. Months passed before Boeing addressed Mohawk's complaint. When it did, Mohawk's report was passed to the managers he was complaining about, according to Brian Knowles, Mohawk's South Carolina-based lawyer. "If you do Speak Up, just know that your report is going to go straight to the guys you're accusing of wrongdoing. They aren't going to say, 'Thanks for speaking up against us,'" Knowles said.
The article includes this quote about the FAA's in-house whistleblower program from Tom Devine, a whistleblower attorney with nearly a half-century of experience across a spectrum of federal agencies, and legal director of the nonprofit Government Accountability Project, which helps whistleblowers navigate the federal system. "It's been a disaster from the beginning. We tell everyone to avoid it because it's a trap... We've warned whistleblowers not to entrust their rights there."

Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter has died. Born in 1924, he had just celebrated his 100th birthday on October 1st. If you want to catch a glimpse of his political charisma, YouTube has a clip of Carter's appearance on "What's My Line" when he was still only governor of Georgia. Within five years he'd be president of the United States, serving from 1977 to 1981.

But it seems like today everyone has a story to tell. More than two decades later, long-time Slashdot reader destinyland saw Jimmy Carter speak in Las Vegas in 2001 on the final day of the CTIA Wireless tradeshow. "I feel thrilled to be a part of this," 77-year-old Carter had said.... Carter applauded the work of "entrepreneurs and scientists and engineers that are transforming the face of the globe." And he noted their technologies could address problems targeted by the Carter Center.

Interrupted by a few cellphone rings, the former President conversed on a stage at the Sands Expo and Venetian Hotel with Tom Wheeler, the president of the wireless communications trade association. Wheeler reminded the audience of Carter's decidedly nontechnical background, discussing An Hour Before Daylight, Carter's memoir about growing up on a farm in Georgia during the Great Depression. "We were the only family blessed with an outhouse," Carter told the crowd.

Wheeler also asked a question many in the technology community could relate to. Carter, he pointed out, had been involuntarily retired. "What's it feel like?" The former President told the audience he'd re-focussed his energies into humanitarian efforts through the Carter Center, which is active in providing health services around the world as well as monitoring elections. Carter donated his appearance fee to the Carter Center...

Midway through the hour-long discussion, the former President touted his administration's record of deregulating several industries, including transportation, energy, and communications, saying "If it hadn't been for that deregulation, this environment in which you all live wouldn't have been possible." Carter also shared with the business crowd that it was a belief in free enterprise that made him want to enter politics, drawn from his experiences selling peanuts as a young boy for a dollar a day.

The audience greeted the former president warmly, giving him a standing ovation both when he took the stage and when he left. Carter joked it was almost enough to make him want to get back into politics.
Everyone has their own opinion. When a friend of mine was in high school, she got to meet Jimmy Carter early in his presidency. He'd seemed unusually kind and good, she said, but remembered her first reaction. "They're going to eat you alive." And yet then, pointing to the humanitarian work he would continue for four decades, she said he was also clearly America's very best ex-president.

And the liberal blog Talking Points Memo argues Carter's accomplishments as president are being re-evaluated: Some found him to be distinctly unsung, with little attention given to his brokering of peace with the Camp David Accords and emphasis on global human rights. And some just liked him. A serious, intelligent, faithful, deeply honest man who spurned political expediency and burned through hundreds of pages of memos a day, he preached self-restraint, stewardship and commonality to an electorate that cast him off four years later for the glib excesses of Ronald Reagan.... "People assume that because he wasn't warm and cuddly with Congress that he didn't get much through," said John Alter [who wrote the first independent Carter biography in 2020]. "He signed more legislation in four years than Clinton or Obama did in eight. He has the most prodigious legislative record since World War II, with the exception of Lyndon Johnson."

That record includes, by Alter's count, 14 major pieces of environmental legislation. In one of Carter's more creative moves, he dusted off the 1906 Antiquities Act to keep pristine 56 million acres of Alaskan wilderness. His piecemeal approach, cloaked in distinctly unsexy bills like the 1978 Public Utilities Regulatory Policies Act, planted the seeds for a changing national energy system in the face of climate change. Carter had started underlining passages in scientific journals about what is now the most existential crisis of our time as early as 1971. What's most wrenching about Carter's improvements in energy and environmental policy now is what he wasn't able to accomplish. On his way out of office, he issued a report that included recommendations for cutting carbon emissions — at exactly the same rate the Paris Climate Accords coalesced behind 35 years later....

His Carter Center has virtually eradicated certain devastating diseases on the African continent, part of the work for which he received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002. He and Rosalynn have also helped build and repair over 4,000 homes for Habitat for Humanity, work that continued well into his 90s.
I've got my own story. As a young boy I saw Jimmy Carter give a speech in 1977 — just six months after he'd assumed the presidency. A crowd of teenagers thrilled to see the president gave him a long, loud round of applause. And when it finally died down, Carter said...

"I wish I got that kind of reception from Congress."

The Washington Post shares some good news from 2024: Researchers were able to detect a significant dip in atmospheric levels of hydrochlorofluorocarbons — harmful gases that deplete the ozone layer — for the first time, almost 30 years after countries first agreed to phase out the chemicals.

A new satellite launched in March to track and publicly reveal the biggest methane polluters in the oil and gas industry — an important step in tackling the greenhouse gas that accounts for almost a third of global warming. The NASA/Carbon Mapper satellite, which measures CO2 and methane emissions, also launched, providing detailed images from individual oil and gas facilities across the world.

Back on Earth, the world's largest plant for pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere opened in Iceland. Norway became the first country to have more electric than gas-powered vehicles, while one Japanese island began using a new generation of batteries to help stockpile massive amounts of clean electricity.

There were also small but important victories for animal conservation. The Iberian lynx, a European wildcat once on the brink of extinction, is no longer classed as an "endangered" species — in what experts have hailed as the "greatest recovery of a cat species ever achieved through conservation...."

Despite a large number of powerful tornadoes to hit the United States in early 2024, the death tolls were fortunately not as high as meteorologists feared, in part due to improved forecasting technology.
The article also notes America's Food and Drug Administration approved a new therapy which uses a patients' own cells to attack skin cancer for adults for whom surgery isn't an option. "Experts said the decision could open the door to similar treatments for far more common cancers."

And one more inspiring story from 2024: 105-year-old Virginia Hislop, of Yakima, Washington received her master's degree from Stanford University...

A Linux Foundation project focused on understanding the health of the open source community just studied the outcomes for three projects that switched to "more restrictive" licenses and then faced community forks.

The data science director for the project — known as Community Health Analytics in Open Source Software (or CHAOSS) — is also an OpenUK board member, and describes the outcomes for OpenSearch, Redis with fork Valkey, and Terraform: The relicensed project (Redis) had significant numbers of contributors who were not employed by the company, and the fork (Valkey) was created by those existing contributors as a foundation project... The Redis project differs from Elasticsearch and Terraform in the number of contributions to the Redis repository from people who were not employees of Redis. In the year leading up to the relicense, when Redis was still open source, there were substantial contributions from employees of other companies: Twice as many non-Redis employees made five or more commits, and about a dozen employees of other companies made almost twice as many commits as Redis employees made.

In the six months after the relicense, all of the external contributors from companies (including Amazon, Alibaba, Tencent, Huawei and Ericsson) who contributed over five commits to the Redis project in the year prior to the relicense stopped contributing. In sum, Redis had strong organizational diversity before the relicense, but only Redis employees made significant contributions afterward.

Valkey was forked from Redis 7.2.4 on March 28, 2024, as a Linux Foundation project under the BSD-3 license. The fork was driven by a group of people who previously contributed to Redis with public support from their employers. Within its first six months, the Valkey repository had 29 contributors employed at 10 companies, and 18 of those people previously contributed to Redis. Valkey has a diverse set of contributors from various companies, with Amazon having the most contributors.
The results weren't always so clear-cut. Because Terraform always had very few contributors outside of the company, "there was no substantial impact on the contributor community from the relicensing event..." (Although the OpenTofu fork — a Linux Foundation project — had 31 people at 11 organizations who made five or more contributions.)

And both before and after Elasticsearch's relicensing, most contributors were Elastic employees, so "the 2021 relicense had little to no impact on contributors." (But the OpenSearch fork — transferred in September to the Linux Foundation — shows a more varied contributor base, with just 63% of additions and 64% of deletions coming from Amazon employees who made 10 or more commits. Six people who didn't work for Amazon made 10 or more commits, making up 11% of additions and 13% of deletions.")

So "Looking at all of these projects together, we see that the forks from relicensed projects tend to have more organizational diversity than the original projects," they conclude, adding that in general "projects with greater organizational diversity tend to be more sustainable..."

"You can dive into the details about these six projects in the paper, presentation and data we shared at the recent OpenForum Academy Symposium.

Thursday New York's governor signed new legislation "to hold polluters responsible for the damage done to our environment" by establishing a Climate Superfund that's paid for by big fossil-fuel companies.

The money will be used for "climate change adaptation," according to New York state senator Liz Krueger, who notes that the legislation follows "the polluter-pays model" used in America's already-existing federal and state superfund laws. Spread out over 25 years, the legislation collects an average of $3 billion each year — or $75 billion — "from the parties most responsible for causing the climate crisis — big oil and gas companies."

"The Climate Change Superfund Act is now law, and New York has fired a shot that will be heard round the world: the companies most responsible for the climate crisis will be held accountable," said Senator Krueger. "Too often over the last decade, courts have dismissed lawsuits against the oil and gas industry by saying that the issue of climate culpability should be decided by legislatures. Well, the Legislature of the State of New York — the 10th largest economy in the world — has accepted the invitation, and I hope we have made ourselves very clear: the planet's largest climate polluters bear a unique responsibility for creating the climate crisis, and they must pay their fair share to help regular New Yorkers deal with the consequences.

"And there's no question that those consequences are here, and they are serious," Krueger continued. "Repairing from and preparing for extreme weather caused by climate change will cost more than half a trillion dollars statewide by 2050. That's over $65,000 per household, and that's on top of the disruption, injury, and death that the climate crisis is causing in every corner of our state. The Climate Change Superfund Act is a critical piece of affordability legislation that will deliver billions of dollars every year to ease the burden on regular New Yorkers...."

Starting in the 1970s, scientists working for Exxon made "remarkably accurate projections of just how much burning fossil fuels would warm the planet." Yet for years, "the oil giant publicly cast doubt on climate science, and cautioned against any drastic move away from burning fossil fuels, the main driver of climate change."
"The oil giant Saudi Aramco of Saudi Arabia could be slapped with the largest annual assessment of any company — $640 million a year — for emitting 31,269 million tons of greenhouse gases from 2000 to 2020," notes the New York Post.

And "The law will also standardize the number of emissions tied to the fuel produced by companies," reports the Times Union newspaper. "[F]or every 1 million pounds of coal, for example, the program assigns over 942 metric tons of carbon dioxide. For every 1 million barrels of crude oil, an entity is considered to have produced 432,180 metric tons of carbon dioxide." Among the infrastructure programs the superfund program aims to pay for: coastal wetlands restoration, energy efficient cooling systems in buildings, including schools and new housing developments, and stormwater drainage upgrades.
New York is now the second U.S. state with a "climate Superfund" law, according to Bloomberg Law, with New York following the lead of Vermont. "Maryland, Massachusetts, and California are also considering climate Superfund laws to manage mounting infrastructure costs." The American Petroleum Institute, which represents about 600 members of the industry, condemned the law. "This type of legislation represents nothing more than a punitive new fee on American energy, and we are evaluating our options moving forward," an API spokesperson said in an emailed statement... The bills — modeled after the federal Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act, known as Superfund — would almost certainly spur swift litigation from fossil fuel companies upon enactment, legal educators say.

Slashdot reader DevNull127 writes: This year the London Stock Exchange got a new listing for "Raspberry Pi Holdings plc." It's the computer-making commercial subsidiary of their larger educational charity, the Raspberry Pi Foundation. "Access to the public market will enable us to build more of the products you love, faster," explained CEO Eben Upton in June. And in May Foundation head Philip Colligan added that beyond the $50 million already donated to their educational charity by the commercial subsidiary, the IPO would allow the conversion of some stock sales to "an endowment that we will use to fund our educational programmes... The Foundation will use any funds that we raise through the sale of shares at the IPO — or subsequently — to advance our ambitious global strategy to enable every young person to realise their full potential through the power of computing and digital technologies."

So how's that working out? A finance site called Proactive Investors UK reports that in September Raspbery Pi Holdings plc "reported underlying profits (EBITDA) of US$20.9 million, up by 55% from a year ago, on revenues up 61% to US$144 million... The Pi 5 single-board computer (SBC), launched at the end of last October [2023], sold 1.1 million units in the first half, with overall unit growth at 31%."

And then in December its stock price suddenly shot up to more than double where it was at the end of November — giving Raspbery Pi Holdings plc a valuation "just under £1.3 billion."

ewhac (Slashdot reader #5,844) writes: Retraction Watch is reporting that the entire editorial staff (save one) for the Journal of Human Evolution has resigned in protest over creeping harmful changes imposed by its publisher, Elsevier.

In an open letter posted to social media, the editors recount Elsevier's changes to their journal's scientific and editorial processes (inserting itself into those processes) — along with staff and budget reductions negatively impacting their ability to review and publish submissions. The letter alleges that when the editorial board complained of Elsevier's eliminating support for a copy editor, Elsevier responded that the editors shouldn't be paying attention to language, grammar, readability, consistency, or accuracy of proper nomenclature or formatting. When the editors fiercely protested Elsevier's ending of JHE's dual-editor model, Elsevier allegedly responded that it would support a dual-editor model by cutting the compensation rate by half.

But perhaps most damning is a footnote revealing Elsevier's use of so-called "AI" in the publication process. "In fall of 2023, for example, without consulting or informing the editors, Elsevier initiated the use of AI during production, creating article proofs devoid of capitalization of all proper nouns (e.g., formally recognized epochs, site names, countries, cities, genera, etc.) as well italics for genera and species. These AI changes reversed the accepted versions of papers that had already been properly formatted by the handling editors. This was highly embarrassing for the journal and resolution took six months and was achieved only through the persistent efforts of the editors. AI processing continues to be used and regularly reformats submitted manuscripts to change meaning and formatting and require extensive author and editor oversight during proof stage."

Except for one unnamed associate editor, the editorial board for the Journal of Human Evolution determined that the situation with Elsevier was no longer tenable, and resigned.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Lyft is suing the city of San Francisco, claiming the city unfairly charged the ride-hailing company over $100 million in taxes, Bloomberg reports. The lawsuit alleges that, over the course of five years, San Francisco unfairly labeled money earned by Lyft drivers as company revenue. In the complaint, Lyft maintains that its drivers are its customers, not employees. "Accordingly, Lyft recognizes revenue from rideshare as being comprised of fees paid to Lyft by drivers, not charges paid by riders to drivers," the complaint reads.

jjslash shares a report from TechSpot: A Valve employee recently provided PC Gamer with a rough calculation of the company's per-employee income, revealing that Valve generates more money per person than several of the world's largest companies. While the data is a few years old and doesn't account for some significant recent trends in the tech sector, Valve's ranking in this metric likely hasn't shifted much over that time. Exact figures for Valve's per-hour and per-employee net income remain redacted. However, a chart from 2018 confirms that Valve's per-employee income exceeded that of companies like Facebook, Apple, Netflix, Alphabet/Google, Microsoft, Intel, and Amazon. Facebook ranks second with a high revenue per employee of $780,400 annually, or $89 per hour, surpassing competitors like Apple and Microsoft due to its relatively smaller workforce of under 70,000. Amazon, by contrast, with over 1.5 million employees, earns significantly less per employee at $15,892 annually, or $1.81 per hour.

Further reading: Valve Runs Its Massive PC Gaming Ecosystem With Only About 350 Employees

President Biden on Monday signed the SHARE IT Act (H.R. 9566) into law, mandating federal agencies share custom-developed code with each other to prevent duplicative software development contracts and reduce the $12 billion annual government software expenditure. The law requires agencies to publicly list metadata about custom code, establish sharing policies, and align development with best practices while exempting classified, national security, and privacy-sensitive code. FedScoop reports: Under the law, agency chief information officers are required to develop policies within 180 days of enactment that implement the act. Those policies need to ensure that custom-developed code aligns with best practices, establish a process for making the metadata for custom code publicly available, and outline a standardized reporting process. Per the new law, metadata includes information about whether custom code was developed under a contract or shared in a repository, the contract number, and a hyperlink to the repository where the code was shared. The legislation also has industry support. Stan Shepard, Atlassian's general counsel, said that the company shares "the belief that greater collaboration and sharing of custom code will promote openness, efficiency, and innovation across the federal enterprise."

Montenegro has approved the extradition of cryptocurrency entrepreneur Do Kwon to the United States over his role in the collapse of TerraUSD and Luna tokens, which wiped out $40 billion from investors and destabilized global crypto markets. The BBC reports: "The Minister of Justice, Bojan Bozovic, issued a decision approving the extradition of the accused, Kwon Do Hyung, to the United States of America," the Ministry of Justice announced said in a statement. "It was concluded that the majority of the criteria prescribed by law favor the extradition request from the competent authorities of the United States of America," the statement said. It added that Kwon had consented to be extradited to both South Korea and the United States.

In February, US regulators charged Kwon and his company Terraform Labs with "orchestrating a multi-billion dollar crypto asset securities fraud." "We allege that Terraform and Do Kwon failed to provide the public with full, fair, and truthful disclosure as required for a host of crypto asset securities, most notably for Luna and TerraUSD," US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) chairman Gary Gensler said in a statement at the time. The US alleged that Kwon repeatedly claimed that the tokens would increase in value, and misled investors about the stability of TerraUSD.

A ninth U.S. telecommunications company has been compromised in a Chinese espionage campaign that targeted private communications, particularly around Washington D.C., White House Deputy National Security Adviser Anne Neuberger said Friday.

The intrusion, part of the "Salt Typhoon" operation that previously hit eight telecom firms, allowed hackers to access customer call records and private messages. While the total number of affected Americans remains unclear, many targets were government officials and political figures in the Washington-Virginia area.

theodp writes: In 2012, now-Microsoft President Brad Smith unveiled Microsoft's National Talent Strategy, a two-pronged strategy that called for tech visa restrictions to be loosened to allow tech companies to hire non-U.S. citizens to fill jobs until more American schoolchildren could be made tech-savvy enough to pass hiring standards. Shortly thereafter, tech-backed nonprofit Code.org emerged (led by Smith's next-door neighbor Hadi Partovi with Smith as a founding Board member) with a mission to ensure that U.S. schoolchildren started receiving 'rigorous' computer science education instruction. Around the same time, Mark Zuckerberg's FWD.us PAC launched (with support from Smith, Partovi, and other tech leaders) with a mission to reform tech visa policy to meet tech's need for talent.

Fast forward to 2024, and Newsweek reports the debate over tech immigration policy has been revived, spurred by the recent appointment of Sriram Krishnan as senior policy adviser for AI at the Trump White House. Comments by far-right political activist Laura Loomer on Twitter about Krishnan's call for loosening Green Card restrictions were met with rebuttals from prominent tech leaders who are also serving as members of the Trump transition team. Entrepreneur David Sacks, who Trump has tapped as his cryptocurrency and AI czar, took to social media to clarify that Krishnan advocates for removing country caps on green cards, not eliminating caps entirely, aiming to create a more merit-based system. However, the NY Times reported that Sacks discussed a much broader visa reform proposal with Trump during a June podcast ("What I will do is," Trump told Sacks, "you graduate from a college, I think you should get automatically, as part of your diploma, a green card to be able to stay in this country"). Elon Musk, the recently appointed co-head of Trump's new Dept. of Government Efficiency (DOGE) had Sacks' and Krishnan's backs (not unexpected -- both were close Musk advisors on his Twitter purchase), tweeting out "Makes sense" to his 209 million followers, lamenting that "the number of people who are super talented engineers AND super motivated in the USA is far too low," reposting claims crediting immigrants for 36% of the innovation in the U.S., and taking USCIS to task for failing to immediately recognize his own genius with an Exceptional Ability Green Card (for his long-defunct Zip2 startup).

Vivek Ramaswamy, who Trump has tapped to co-lead DOGE with Musk, agreed and fanned the Twitter flames with a pinned Tweet of his own explaining, "The reason top tech companies often hire foreign-born -- first-generation engineers over "native" Americans isn't because of an innate American IQ deficit (a lazy -- wrong explanation). A key part of it comes down to the c-word: culture." (Colorado Governor Jared Polis also took to Twitter to agree with Musk and Ramaswamy on the need to import 'elite engineers'). And Code.org CEO Partovi joined the Twitter fray, echoing the old we-need-H1B-visas-to-make-US-schoolchildren-CS-savvy argument of Microsoft's 2012 National Talent Strategy. "Did you know 2/3 of H1B visas are for computer scientists?" Partovi wrote in reply to Musk, Loomer, and Sachs. "The H1B program raises $500M/year (from its corporate sponsors) and all that money is funneled into programs at Labor and NSF without focus to grow local CS talent. Let's fund CS education." The NYT also cited Zuckerberg's earlier efforts to influence immigration policy with FWD.us (which also counted Sacks and Musk as early supporters), taking note of Zuck's recent visit to Mar-a-Lago and Meta's $1 million donation to Trump's upcoming inauguration.

So, who is to be believed? Musk, who attributes any tech visa qualms to "a 'fixed pie' fallacy that is at the heart of much wrong-headed economic thinking" and argues that "there is essentially infinite potential for job and company creation ['We should let anyone in the country who is hardworking and honest and will be a contributor to the United States,' Musk has said]"? Or economists who have found that immigration and globalization is not quite the rising-tide-that-raises-all-boats it's been cracked up to be?

Data center construction is driving an unprecedented influx of electricians to central Washington state, where abundant hydropower and tax incentives have attracted major tech companies building AI infrastructure, New York Times is reporting.

Microsoft alone projects needing 2,300 electricians in coming years for facilities across three counties along the Columbia River. Union electricians earning up to $2,800 weekly after taxes are transforming agricultural communities like Quincy, where data centers now account for 75% of local tax revenue.

While the construction boom has funded community improvements including a new high school, rising housing costs and limited long-term employment opportunities raise concerns about sustainable economic benefits for longtime residents.

The bald eagle is now officially the national bird of the US, after President Joe Biden signed a law on Christmas Eve bestowing the honour upon the white-headed and yellow-beaked bird of prey. BBC News: The bird has been a national emblem in the US for years, appearing on the Great Seal of the US -- used on US documents -- since 1782. But it had not been officially designated to be the national bird until Congress passed the bill last week, sending it to Biden's desk to be signed.

"For nearly 250 years, we called the bald eagle the national bird when it wasn't," said Jack Davis, co-chair of the National Bird Initiative for the National Eagle Center, in a statement. "But now the title is official, and no bird is more deserving." Not everyone has always agreed about the national status of the bald eagle. Founding Father Benjamin Franklin objected to the creature being chosen to represent the country, calling it a "bird of bad moral character."

Three more EU member states -- including the most populous, Germany -- have joined the list of countries with "ultra-low" fertility rates [non-paywalled source], highlighting the extent of the region's demographic challenges. Financial Times: Official statistics show Germany's birth rate fell to 1.35 children per woman in 2023, below the UN's "ultra-low" threshold of 1.4 -- characterising a scenario where falling birth rates become tough to reverse.

Estonia and Austria also passed under the 1.4 threshold, joining the nine EU countries -- including Spain, Greece and Italy -- that in 2022 had fertility rates below 1.4 children per woman. The fall in birth rates partially reflects the "postponement of parenthood until the 30s," which involves a "higher likelihood that you will not have as many children as you would like because of the biological clock," said Willem Adema, senior economist at the OECD.