Business, Spoken

During her speech to the National Association of Business Economics on Tuesday, Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen made a rather startling admission: The Fed may have “misspecified” its models for inflation and “misjudged” the strength of wages and the job market. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Mark Zuckerberg took to Facebook Wednesday to once more defend himself and his platform. Responding to a cavalierly-tweeted charge of anti-Trump bias from the President of the United States, Zuckerberg again repeated his claim that Facebook was [a platform for all ideas,” and that, contrary to unfolding public opinion, his company did much more to further democracy than to stifle it. For evidence,...

In February, a grizzled 50-something white man approached two Indian avionics engineers at a bar outside Kansas City. He began haranguing them about an all-too-familiar topic: their visas. After bar patrons kicked out the agitator, he returned with a gun, screamed “Get out of my country!” and shot both engineers, killing one of them, Srinivas Kuchibhotla. The alleged shooter, Adam Purinton, is now...

This story is about Bridgewater Associates, the world’s largest and most successful private hedge fund. But first I want to talk about the Buddha. In the 13th century, the Japanese Buddhist philosopher Dogen wrote a famous series of precepts called the Genjo-Koan. In them, he preached that there was no such thing as an “abiding self.” “The buddha way is, basically, leaping clear of the many of the...

Facebook is now enmeshed in several investigations into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. Last week, the company agreed to give Congress 3,000 political ads linked to Russian actors that it sold and ran during the 2016 election cycle; it previously had handed that information to special investigator Robert Mueller. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This month, two magnificently embarrassing public-relations disasters rocked the Facebook money machine like nothing else in its history. First, Facebook revealed that shady Russian operators purchased political ads via Facebook in the 2016 election. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The backroom conversations politicians have with their base always seem to come back and bite them in the ass. You still remember Mitt Romney’s infamous "47 percent" remarks, when he told a room full of well-heeled donors during the 2012 campaign that 47 percent of the electorate are “dependent upon government,” “believe that they are victims,” and would vote for President Obama no matter what. Le...

It was early March, not yet two months into the Trump administration, and the new Not-Normal was setting in: It continued to be the administration’s position, as enunciated by Sean Spicer, that the inauguration had attracted the “largest audience ever”; barely a month had passed since Kellyanne Conway brought the fictitious “Bowling Green massacre” to national attention; and just for kicks, on Mar...

In a video introducing the iPhone X, Apple design chief Jony Ive speaks in his usual sonorous tones about features like polished stainless steel and new formulations of glass. Twice, he also calls out a feature of the $999 device that its owners will never see: the A11 “bionic” processor powering the phone. The new chip’s prominence reflects Apple’s deepening investment in chip design. Learn more...

Chamath Palihapitiya, an early Facebook executive and outspoken presence in Silicon Valley, is unapologetic about his frustrations with the venture-capital industry. There’s too much money chasing deals, making it harder to generate strong returns. Too many VCs conflate luck with talent. And everyone who benefits from the current system is resistant to change. Technically, Palihapitiya is a ventur...

It is a sure sign that Facebook’s algorithms have run amok when they allow anyone to target ads to people with an expressed interest in burning Jews. Likewise, when Russians can sow chaos in American elections by purchasing thousands of phony Facebook ads without Facebook realizing it, the automated systems selling those ads may need some oversight. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastc...

A lawsuit claiming Google systematically discriminates against women in pay and promotion could force the search giant, and other Silicon Valley companies, to change hiring and promotion practices. Three former Google employees filed the lawsuit Thursday in San Francisco, and said they would seek to make the case a class action, representing all women who have worked at Google since 2013. Learn mo...

The opioid crisis has hit Indiana hard. In 2012, Indiana was among a handful of states whose opioid prescriptions roughly equaled its population. Three years later, intravenous drugs caused the nation’s worst HIV outbreak in two decades, affecting 181 people in rural Scott County, Indiana. And since 2013, Indiana has had the dubious distinction of leading the nation in pharmacy robberies, beating...

When Apple CEO Tim Cook introduced the iPhone X Tuesday he claimed it would “set the path for technology for the next decade.” Some new features are superficial: a near-borderless OLED screen and the elimination of the traditional home button. Deep inside the phone, however, is an innovation likely to become standard in future smartphones, and crucial to the long-term dreams of Apple and its compe...

Amazon announced Thursday that it plans to spend $5 billion on a second headquarters--dubbed "HQ2" somewhere outside its current home of Seattle, Washington. The company hasn't decided where HQ2 will be yet, but Amazon says it will be in North America and expects around 50,000 people will work there within 10 to 15 years. The company currently employs around 40,000 people in Seattle. Learn more ab...

Last year Jillian York, a free expression activist, was temporarily booted off Facebook for sharing partially nude images. The offending photos were part of a German breast cancer awareness campaign which featured, well, breasts. Facebook flagged the post as a violation of its Community Standards, which strictly prohibits most types of female nudity. Though the account suspension lasted only 24 ho...

Amid ongoing concern over the role of disinformation in the 2016 election, Facebook said Wednesday it found that more than 5,000 ads, costing more than $150,000, had been placed on its network between June 2015 and May 2017 from "inauthentic accounts" and Pages, likely from Russia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The co-chair of the New America Foundation told staffers Wednesday that neither Google nor its executive chairman Eric Schmidt---both donors to the think tank---played a role in the recent ouster from the foundation of an antitrust scholar who had been critical of Google. “Neither Google nor Eric Schmidt attempted to interfere” with criticism of Google by the researcher, co-chair Jonathan Soros wr...

Over the past few months, as the Federal Communications Commission has moved closer to weakening net neutrality protections, countless tech companies have signaled their support for a strong and open internet. The lone voice missing through the debate: Apple. Yesterday, the final day to comment on the FCC's current net neutrality proceedings, the company finally broke its silence with a comment fi...

This past April, the Federal Communications Commission invited the American people to weigh in on whether the federal government should roll back the rules currently in place to protect net neutrality. By the time the online comment submission period ended last Wednesday, the agency had collected 21.9 million comments, an astounding level of participation on what at first glance appears to be a ra...

Among its peers, Google is an unparalleled lobbyist. Between April and June of this year, Google spent $5.4 million lobbying the federal government, more than double the lobbying budget for Apple, a comparable global behemoth that also has to fend off regulatory scrutiny. The tech giant has also long funded a lengthy roster of think tanks, academics, and nonprofits that grapple with issues that co...

How fast is a broadband internet connection? That question is at the heart of a controversy at the Federal Communications Commission. After a study about connection speeds in the US last year, the FCC decided that too few people had access to high speed internet. But that conclusion never sat right with the commission's Republicans, who argued that the agency set too high a bar in deciding what co...

When Google and Microsoft boast of their deep investments in artificial intelligence and machine learning, they highlight flashy ideas like unbeatable Go players and sociable chatbots. They talk less often about one of the most profitable, and more mundane, uses for recent improvements in machine learning: boosting ad revenue. AI-powered moonshots like driverless cars and relatable robots will dou...

Microsoft said last week that it had achieved a new record for the accuracy of software that transcribes speech. Its system missed just one in 20 words on a standard collection of phone call recordings—matching humans given the same challenge. The result is the latest in a string of recent findings that some view as proof that advances in artificial intelligence are accelerating, threatening to up...

The damage done by Hurricane Harvey is, as the National Weather Service, tweeted ominously over the weekend, “unknown & beyond anything experienced.” Rain continues to fall over the water-soaked region of Southeast Texas where the category 4 hurricane made landfall Friday night. It’s a living nightmare already drawing comparisons to Hurricane Katrina. One comparison offers a glimmer of hope amid t...