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Imagine A World With Empty Roads But With Skies Jammed With These Flying Vehicles

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“For those of us who commute, we’ll spend over a year of our lives stuck in traffic.” So said engineer Todd Reichert as he introduced an alternative at TED 2017: a 100% electric flying vehicle under development now. A recreational version of the vehicle, called the Kitty Hawk Flyer, is expected to launch in late 2017.

Using electronic sensors similar to those found in cell phones, the device controls and stabilizes eight electric rotors. “With this kind of control, we can make flying as simple as playing a video game, using a very similar set of joysticks,” Reichert says. The vehicle, with room for one person, is designed to make it possible for anyone to learn to fly in minutes.

Rapidly advancing battery technology makes it possible to run the vehicle on electricity. “We’re just crossing this threshold now where [batteries] start to make sense for flight,” he says. “This is incredibly exciting for us–it opens up an entirely new set of design possibilities. We can design with multiple, small, lightweight electric motors in a variety of different configurations.”

The first version of the vehicle, classified as an “ultralight” aircraft, somehow doesn’t require a pilot’s license and can avoid complex regulations. With current battery technology, it can fly about 15 miles before it needs to be recharged, though that range will increase as batteries continue to evolve. For now, it’s designed to be flown only above water, at a low height, to keep it as safe as possible. But the team plans to rapidly iterate other models that they want to be used more widely–and over city streets.

The Flyer takes off and lands vertically, like a helicopter, so it doesn’t require a runway. Ultimately, a future version might replace a car for your morning commute. The company, which is backed by Google founder Larry Page and run by Sebastian Thrun, the founding director of Google’s X lab, envisions it as a new form of transportation. In theory, it could help provide more room on congested roads–though if the technology succeeds, it’s not clear how cities could avoid equally crowded skies.

“This is the first step in a new type of freedom,” Reichert says. “We’re on the brink of a very exciting future, where safe and accessible flight will be a part of our everyday lives.” For now, though, probably best to stay above the lake.


Here’s What To Expect From Twitter’s Q1 Earnings

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On the eve of its earnings report for the first quarter of 2017, things aren’t looking too good for Twitter. This has, of course, become something of a pattern, as Twitter’s user growth has stagnated over the past two years. Is it any surprise that the company has been reporting earnings at the crack of dawn? Bleary-eyed tech journalists be damned!

But this quarter, analysts are predicting that even Twitter’s revenue could take a hit. For the first time since it went public, analysts are expecting a drop in year-over-year revenue. Their prediction: Twitter will see a 14% decline in revenue, from $595 million in Q1 last year to $512 million this quarter. As Twitter noted in its letter to shareholders last quarter, this is to be expected, given a decrease in ad revenue during Q4 and the “escalating competition for digital ad spending” (read: Snap and Facebook are gobbling up ad dollars). Plus, Twitter reportedly cut back on ad products like promoted tweets, in favor of investing more in areas like video.

Can Live Video Save The Day?

One bright spot in last quarter’s earnings report was indeed its live video push: Twitter streamed 600 hours of live video in Q4, attracting 31 million unique viewers. But those gains could be attributed to the election cycle and its Thursday Night Football streaming deal with the NFL, which Twitter has since lost to Amazon; it’s unclear what its video scoreboard will look like for this quarter.

Twitter has recently attempted to shift the focus from its sluggish growth in monthly users by emphasizing an upswing in daily user activity. This also explains why most of Twitter’s announcements over the past couple months have centered on curbing abuse—from limiting the reach of abusive tweets to nixing the default egg icon, which became synonymous with troll accounts. This isn’t to say Twitter has given up on acquiring new users, but the more optimistic goal now, it seems, is upping the engagement of existing users.

As Recode wrote earlier today, we might see renewed talk of a sale now that Twitter’s market cap has dipped to just over $10 billion. In fact, Twitter’s shareholder meeting next month will address a proposal to turn the company into a co-op—the unlikely result of a petition penned by users who worry a sale might compromise the platform. There might be hope after all.

These Environmental Heroes Stood Up To Corporate Interests—And Won

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In the mid-’90s, when he was 10 years old, Mark Lopez walked around his home of East Los Angeles, knocking on doors to tell people about the dangers of lead in their house paint. Lopez’s grandmother had, in 1986, helped to found the advocacy group Mothers of East Los Angeles (MELA), which made it their mission to protect their community from harmful practices of the state or local corporations. When Lopez was an infant, he rode in a stroller as MELA successfully protested the development of a new state prison in East L.A.; by the time he was old enough to take action himself, the issue was lead poisoning.

“There was an understanding that if the company would put its own workers at risk, it would not hesitate to put its surrounding community at risk.” [Photo: courtesy The Goldman Environmental Prize]
But as Lopez–now the executive director of the local advocacy group East Yard Communities for Environmental Justice (EYCEJ) and a winner of the 2017 Goldman Environmental Prize–would learn over the next 20 years, the issue of lead in Los Angeles could not be eradicated through protest alone. As Lopez was going door-to-door as a child, his mother and grandmother requested a tour of the 15-acre lead-battery recycling plant, owned by Exide Technologies, at the edge of East L.A. As they moved through the facility, “the Exide folks were trying to tell my family that everything was fine, there was nothing to worry about,” Lopez tells Fast Company. “So my grandmother responded by saying that if there was nothing to worry about, why did they make her put on protective gear—and why aren’t the workers wearing any?” At that moment, Lopez says, “there was an understanding that if the company would put its own workers at risk, it would not hesitate to put its surrounding community at risk.”

The suspicions that the Exide plant–which opened in 1922 and operated without a full permit since 1981–was, in addition to house paint, poisoning the residents of East L.A. were borne out by unnaturally high levels of lead in the soil of local homes and schools. In some cases, the lead was found to be 100 times over the California health standard, enough to cause brain damage and developmental issues. When Lopez returned to East L.A. after completing his degree at U.C. Santa Cruz and learned from his grandmother that Exide was still operating, he began to advocate for its closure–and for the state to take responsibility for the cleanup of the more than 10,000 homes estimated to be tainted by the plant’s unregulated release of lead into the communities. For his ongoing effort, Lopez was honored with the $175,000 Goldman Environmental Prize–along with five other activists from each continent who made standing up to corporate environmental injustices their personal responsibility.

With Exide, Lopez says, there was a sense that the state had abandoned East L.A. “They allowed Exide to operate without a permit; they allowed this to happen to our communities,” Lopez says. Through EYCEJ, Lopez agitated for an investigation into Exide’s operations that eventually brought about the closure of the plant in 2015. The reason: The plant had failed to comply with a new more stringent emissions standard–and standard that Lopez had worked with the South Coast Air Quality Management District to pass.

But when it came to community remediation, Lopez turned to the governor’s office. Framing the lead poisoning of East L.A. as “Jerry Brown’s Flint,” he and EYCEJ lobbied the state to funnel $176 million from the general fund into testing and cleaning up the contaminated properties in the area. It’s not enough, Lopez says–to reach every one of the 10,000 homes affected by Exide, it will take half a billion dollars–but it’s a start. “Community organizing and protest really moved the state on this matter,” Lopez says. “That’s been true all along the process, from getting the state to acknowledge that Exide was pouring 7 million pounds of lead into our community to agreeing to clean up first two homes, then all of the 10,000. Any progress that has been made has been under community pressure.”

The mining industry, “they just love the easy money.” [Photo: courtesy The Goldman Environmental Prize]
Environmental injustice is carried out and maintained when the government decides to prioritize profits and corporate interest over its people. It involves a willful blindness to the harmful by-products of lucrative ventures, and an inherent assessment of who or what is worth protecting, and who or what is not. The six 2017 Goldman Prize winners, each in their own way, have resisted that injustice.

In Australia, Wendy Bowman, an 83-year-old sixth-generation farmer, under pressure from the government of New South Wales, twice had to sell property she owned in the bucolic Hunter River Valley to make way for new mining companies. While the mining industry, Bowman tells Fast Company, had the backing of the government–“they just love the easy money,” she says–the industry was destroying the livelihoods of local farmers by draining water resources and releasing harmful dust into the air.

In 1991, Bowman founded Minewatch NSW to track the environmental effects of the industry on the region, but despite her efforts, Yancoal, a Chinese-owned mining company, proposed expanding an existing coal mine near Bowman’s property in 2010. Bowman protested, but the courts ruled in 2014 that Yancoal could proceed–only if it acquired Bowman’s property. She refused, and continues to refuse. To date, she’s blocked 16.5 million tons of coal from being mined. It’s her intention to continue to resist, but she believes her struggle would be less protracted, and less difficult, if the state were to look past the money and toward the reality. “The problem is that none of the politicians ever come up to look at the land. You’ve got the Department of Mineral Resources allocating lease areas and the Department of Planning approving new mines, but none of them understand how they affect our underground aquifers and how the water flows, and how degraded the land has become.”

Katembo–who was, at one point, arrested and tortured for stopping a crucial development in Soco’s process–amassed enough evidence to prove that Soco was violating international law. [Photo: courtesy The Goldman Environmental Prize]
But even the job of protecting natural resources can fall prey to corporate interests. Rodrigue Katembo, 41, has served as a ranger in Virunga National Park in the Democratic Republic of the Congo since 2003. He took the job, he tells Fast Company through an interpreter, because ever since a young age, he wanted to protect his country’s wild lands. In 2010, the British oil company Soco International came to Virunga to explore for oil. They met with Katembo and told him that they had secured authorization to drill in a section of the park known as Block V, home to many species including the endangered mountain gorilla. “I was surprised, and said to them that their permit means nothing because our law is very clear: Oil exploration within a protected national park is not permitted,” Katembo says.

Soco had given money to organizations like the central government and the Ministry of the Environment for a permit, but acting on it, under both Congolese and international law, was illegal. Undeterred, Soco threatened parks staff and bribed Congolese militia to help them enter the park. Aiming to halt Soco’s process and preserve the land and its species, Katembo worked with the park director to devise a plan to expose Soco’s illegal operations. Using body cams during meetings in which Soco tried to offer him as much as $5,000 to let them drill, Katembo–who was, at one point, arrested and tortured for stopping a crucial development in Soco’s process–amassed enough evidence to prove that Soco was violating international law. His efforts were featured in Orlando Von Einsiedel’s 2014 documentary Virunga, and on November 3, 2015, Soco withdrew from the park.

“It was very dangerous for us because we knew that Soco had a lot of power to corrupt, and because they were handing out a lot of money, we would be running up against many different kinds of people,” Katembo says. More than 160 Virunga rangers were killed in the process of resisting Soco; the organization Global Witness has found that the death rate of “land defenders”–those who stand up to corporate encroachment on natural resources–has risen dramatically over the past decade. “We needed to document the corruption while remaining uncorrupted ourselves, and keeping the integrity of our mission, which is to protect the park,” Katembo says.

Exide is one of the world’s largest battery manufacturers; Soco International is a company with a net worth of around $500 million; the mining industry in Australia accounts for 8% of the country’s GDP and 60% of its exports. (The other three awardees fought a toxic cement kiln in Slovenia, protected indigenous land from an aluminum mine in India, and halted a nickel mine in Guatemala). Working with far fewer resources, the Goldman Prize winners show the power of grassroots resistance to stem the spread of corporate profiteering and protect the communities too often forgotten or overlooked.

Will The Third Industrial Revolution Create An Economic Boom That Saves The Planet?

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First, the bad news: GDP is slowing all over the world because productivity has been in decline for two decades. The result has been higher unemployment (especially among young people) and economists talking about 20 more years of slow growth. According to new numbers from Oxfam, just eight people are as rich as half the globe. In addition to this unprecedented inequality, we face climate change that’s taken us into the sixth extinction wave in the history of the planet, and the last time that happened was 65 million years ago. To turn things around before it’s too late, we need a plan that’s both compelling and doable. Economic theorist Jeremy Rifkin thinks he has just that plan: creating what he calls the third industrial revolution, which will be sparked by harnessing renewable energy and enabling automation and the internet of things to result in a prosperous new economy powered by clean energy.

The good news is that people are listening. On February 7, the European Union unveiled its “Smart Europe” plan influenced by Rifkin’s work, which outlines how the 350 regions of Europe will start building out the road maps to transition into a new infrastructure of 5G internet, renewable energy, and automated driverless transport internet, all riding on top of an internet of things platform. Regions in the north of France, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands have already begun their transition over the last few years. There’s a similar plan taking place in China: After Premier Li Keqiang read Rifkin’s seminal book, The Third Industrial Revolution, he made Rifkin’s strategies core to the country’s 13th Five-Year plan that was announced last March, and includes billions in renewable energy investment by 2020.

The Revolution Will Be Televised

While his plans are in the works in Europe and Asia, The Third Industrial Revolution, a new film about Rifkin and his work, that recently premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival, aims to explain his framework for a plan for the U.S. While President Trump and Republican and Democratic lawmakers have made some attempts toward putting together a massive $1 trillion infrastructure plan, any details remain murky. Rifkin wants a plan that instead would take power from the bickering tug-of-war of federal politics, and give it to the people, businesses, and local officials who can affect change on the ground.

The film (a Vice production) is based around the theories Rifkin presented in his book of the same name, and two other of his books, The Empathic Civilization (2009) and Zero Margin Cost Society (2014). The film explores the challenges of climate change and globalization, the opportunities created by the rise of the internet and automation, and how governments and corporations should be preparing for–and working to build–a society and economy driven by sustainable innovation, and powered by renewable and distributed energy. “I think the green shoots are coming up everywhere; we’re seeing telltale signs of what’s in the film,” Rifkin tells Fast Company. “My hope is if people see the film it will make sense to them because it’s already on the tip of their tongue. They know all the sentences, they just hadn’t put the chapters together. Then it just makes sense. And once that happens, they never go back. I think a lot of people are right there.”

The doc takes place in an empty Brooklyn warehouse. It’s a version of speeches Rifkin has been giving around the world, told over two hours in An Inconvenient Truth-style, lo-fi lecture. Rifkin is in his 70s, and looks a bit like if the Monopoly Man was a college professor. In addition to being a best-selling author, he’s also a senior lecturer at the Wharton School’s Executive Education Program, and president of the Foundation on Economic Trends in Washington, D.C. In the film, as in person, he comes across as friendly and down-to-earth, able to outline and articulate complex problems and proposed solutions in a way that makes you feel like you’re just having a beer with a favorite uncle, and just happen to be chatting about the link between global economics and climate change.

While in Europe and China, Rifkin has spent years consulting with top government officials, but this new film with Vice represents a starkly different approach for U.S. audiences. Rifkin sees the real potential for change and influence in American business and local community leaders. So the documentary will be his calling card, a TLDR version of his books, to screen for everyone from CEOs to university students, to quickly get people excited and motivated to help boost the economy and save the planet. Could it possibly work?

Communication, Transportation, Energy

There have been, according to Rifkin, at least seven major economic paradigm shifts in history, and they all share a common denominator–at a moment in time, three defining technologies emerge and then converge to create an infrastructure that fundamentally changes how we manage, power, and move economic activity across the value chains. First, new communication technology more efficiently manages economic activity. Second, new sources of energy more efficiently power economic activity. And third, new transportation and logistics more efficiently move economic activity.

The first industrial revolution was led in Britain by steam-powered printing, which converged with cheap coal, then the steam engine to move the coal. The second industrial revolution kicked off in the U.S. when centralized communication was introduced by the telephone (later came radio and TV). When the telephone converged with cheap Texas oil, powered by the combustion engine, and the automobile and interstate highways, it created the advancements of the 20th century.

Today, Rifkin says the new paradigm is the convergence of a digital communication internet, a digital renewable energy internet, and a digital automated transportation and logistics internet, to create a super-internet of things infrastructure. The first aspect is already well underway and sitting in your pocket right now in the form of your smartphone. But the second and third elements–a decentralized renewable energy power structure and an automated transportation infrastructure–are still in their infancy.

Rifkin sees decades of potential employment growth in getting them up to speed. If all the buildings in a city must be outfitted with solar panels to collect and then store power, it will take humans to retrofit our cities. Automated transportation still needs humans to organize, analyze, and implement the information collected along our highways.

The end result? Decentralized power grids that know your family’s energy consumption habits, in cities and towns that generate and store much of their own power at zero marginal cost through wind, solar, and geothermal sources, sending excess back to the grid for wider distribution. Smart, driverless transportation, where the cars come pick you up and drop you off at your destination. Transport trucks efficiently crisscross the country, while collecting and distributing data on everything from road conditions to weather patterns. Free high-speed Wi-Fi everywhere you go. Big business and SMEs operating on an even playing field market thanks to smart, efficient manufacturing technology, and the sharing economy. More efficient and equal power, transportation, and business that simultaneously work to minimize or reverse the cause and effects of climate change. But first, we have to build it.

Rust Belt On the Rise

For a peek into the potential future, we need look no further than northern France. The Hauts-de-France region is the country’s former rust belt, with its steel and auto factories, and this is an area that’s gone through a decline, much like similar areas in the U.S. It’s the third largest region in France. Political and business leaders began working with Rifkin in 2012, and now the region is buzzing with about 970 different projects deployed in setting up its own third industrial revolution future.

If this were a railway, Hauts-de-France is in the laying tracks phase, with calls for new projects as others around intelligent power networks and smart mobility get underway. According to a 2016 report, innovative small and medium smart-energy enterprises, as well as new research and development laboratories, are now based in the region, with 11,000 new jobs being created in the energy sector, which at the time counted 16,582 employees representing 7% of the region’s industry sector. The third industrial revolution organizing committees in the region, CCI Nord du France and REV3, have partnered with the University of Lille to fund and support projects and research around sustainable transport to reduce critical overcrowding of transit networks in Lille. To date, more than $545 million per year has already been invested in third industrial revolution-related businesses, projects, and research.

The region’s vice-president, Philippe Rapeneau, says that collaborative approach, with business and government creating a plan together, is perhaps the most significant development. “There are many technical challenges, but the best is the way political and economic domains have been working together,” Rapeneau tells Fast Company. “For us, it’s important to see how we’ve created a new form of governance, where the political and the economic domains work together with the same vision, and pull in the same direction.”

Similar programs have been underway in both Luxembourg, and the Metropolitan Region of Rotterdam and the Hague in the Netherlands. Rotterdam Mayor Ahmed Aboutaleb met Rifkin in 2014, and began talking to officials in France about their progress. He was convinced a third industrial revolution-type framework could help his region as well.

“We started the process with working groups on all themes and economic sectors, consisting of representatives from the authorities and regional business and knowledge communities,” writes Aboutaleb in an email. “The result of their public-private collaboration found its way into the (plan’s) framework, uniting all different interests and ambitions, and creating co-ownership for everyone.”

That collaborative process resulted in a 534-page plan unveiled last November, that lays out concrete goals and objectives for the Metropolitan Region of Rotterdam and the Hague to transform its economy and become a zero carbon metro region. Far from a bureaucratic edict, to create this road map, which aims to navigate a 40-year build out and scale up, the 23 municipalities of the region ceded their traditional role as a centralized manager to become more of a lateral facilitator for regional stakeholders–business, society groups, local government, academia–working together as equal partners.

Luxembourg’s Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of the Economy Etienne Schneider sees his country as the ideal life-size laboratory to test Rifkin’s ideas on a national scale. He cites the country’s ability to reinvent itself over the last century, first from an agricultural country to an industrial nation, mainly relying on the steel industry. In the ’70s and ’80s, the country attracted global corporations like DuPont and Goodyear, and began to establish itself as a major financial center. It too unveiled a strategy plan in November, developed with Rifkin, talking to more than 300 socioeconomic stakeholders across business, government, academia, and civil society groups. It includes aims to refurbish and retrofit buildings and other infrastructure to make them more energy efficient so that a high share of electricity, heat, and cold generated by renewable energy technologies can be installed. Luxembourg has introduced a feed-in tariff to encourage early adopters to transform buildings and property sites into micro-power generation facilities. According to the report, the feed-in tariffs guarantee a premium price above market value for renewable energy generated locally and sent back to the electricity grid.

“By calling on a world-renowned specialist in economic and scientific prospective such as Jeremy Rifkin, we are once again confirming that we are ahead of our times,” writes Schneider in an email. “By embracing his strategic vision, we are positioning the Grand Duchy as a country that wishes to continue, even in a far-distant future, to maintain high standards of living through sustainable economic development. Conceptually, Luxembourg is already deploying the necessary technological infrastructure to apply Rifkin’s vision concretely. The economic sectors we foster are in line with the change in energy sources and the digitalization that are at the heart of Jeremy Rifkin’s thoughts.”

Maros Sefcovic, vice president of the European Commission, heads up Europe’s Energy Union. He first met Rifkin in 2015 and says the examples of Hauts-de-France and Rotterdam are significant because they go beyond theory and offer concrete examples in how high-carbon regions can develop long-term strategies to address climate change at their local and regional levels.

Sefcovic says there is still plenty of work to be done in Europe, but also invites America to pick up its pace in the race for the new global economy. “The clean energy transition does not run counter to economic interest, as some attempt to claim,” says Sefcovic. He says solar energy is now the second largest energy sector employer in the U.S. with 260,000 jobs, with more than 51,000 jobs created in the U.S. solar industry in 2016, an increase of nearly 25% over 2015, and 12 times faster than the rest of the economy. More than the jobs created by the oil and gas extraction and pipeline sectors combined.

“Yet, the highest number of green jobs are currently neither in the EU nor in the U.S.,” says Sefcovic. “They are in China. So either we join the global race to the new economy, or we lose it. This should be a priority. That is why I invite and encourage American business leaders and government officials to join Europe in this quest. The energy transition cannot be stopped. The only question is who will be leading it.”

Coming To America

In January, the biggest hit at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit wasn’t a car, but a plan. Ford CEO Mark Fields unveiled his company’s vision for the “City of Tomorrow,” an extension and elaboration on what Bill Ford outlined in a 2011 TED talk. That Ford’s future wasn’t as a car company, but as a mobility company. In a corresponding Medium post, Fields said the company has come a long way over the last year–forming the Ford Smart Mobility LLC, hiring new talent and doubling the company’s presence in Silicon Valley, creating the FordPass app, launching Ford GoBikes in San Francisco, as well as acquiring San Francisco-based Chariot, a private transit service. In December, Ford unveiled its plan for a fully autonomous car by 2021, as well as its plans for electric vehicles over the next decade. Fields is one of the few American CEOs who has already seen the Vice film, and the company’s strategy aligns with Rifkin’s pitch.

For Marcy Klevorn, Ford’s chief information officer, what resonated most with her in The Third Industrial Revolution was how Rifkin describes the inflection point around energy, transportation, and communications. “In our quest to become a mobility and technology company, we’re thinking very seriously about all three of these inflection points, our role in society, mobility trends, what’s going on in cities, and how we can help see these come together to improve people’s lives, which is our mission,” says Klevorn.

Anne Pramagiorre, the CEO of ComEd Chicago and, perhaps surprisingly, a fan of Rifkin’s work, says The Third Industrial Revolution has been required reading for her leadership team for years, and that, as with Ford, Rifkin’s ideas align perfectly with where she sees the future of power utilities. Her company has developed a pilot project with the Illinois Institute of Technology to develop a micro-grid in Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood. The project recently took a legislative hit, but is still moving forward. She says Rifkin’s ideas don’t threaten her business, but it does sum up the challenge of future-proofing.

“The way we think about this is we’ve got two parallel paths to walk simultaneously,” says Pramagiorre. “One is running the business for today, as efficiently as possible for our customers and taking care of shareholder investment. At the same time we’re designing the business of the future, and we have to understand we don’t know all the parameters and features that will have, but we do know enough to start to make steps into that new future business. It’s our job to figure that out. If you look at the history of businesses that have gone through digital transformation, you do not succeed by putting a moat around the old business model, and you don’t succeed by not designing your business model to serve what the customer is telling you they want. Customer orientation and a willingness to adapt is the key.”

When Gord Hicks, CEO of Toronto-based real estate management firm Brookfield Global Integrated Solutions, first read The Third Industrial Revolution, he says it was the first time someone was able to articulate to him a really rational, sound approach to driving an economy to be prosperous while improving our ecological footprint. He hosted Rifkin in Toronto for the launch of the Building Energy Innovators Council (BEIC), an industry organization to accelerate the collaboration, innovation, and adoption of clean building technologies across Canada, and which includes Cisco, Philips, Enwave, and the University of Waterloo among its founding partners.

“What we need to do is make sure we get the narrative right so the broader society understands clearly where and why the government is investing in new technology, rather than more old technologies, and why they’re investing in energy efficiency initiatives, like solar and wind,” says Hicks. “In reality, the Acadia Center did a study and found that one dollar in energy efficiency improvement in buildings created $5 to $8 in GDP growth. There’s just this multiplier effect that happens when you make critical investments in certain areas. What ultimately is good for the economy, is good for the environment.”

With major American business leaders supporting his strategic framework–and plenty more companies, mayors, and regions who are pushing Third Industrial Revolution-type ideas without knowing it–Rifkin hopes the film acts as a catalyst to help kick-start discussions that will lead to more collaboration between government and business, as well as between industries.

“This is not entertainment, we see this as a start of a conversation that will lead them to roll up their sleeves and actually deploy economic plans like we’re doing in Europe and China,” says Rifkin. “The green shoots are there. I see it in the news. I hear it from executives. But too often you talk to city leaders and there are too many one-off projects without the paradigm shift. You can have bike lanes or hydrogen buses, but they’re siloed projects that aren’t joined by a digital infrastructure, so they’re not going where they need to go. They think these little projects are it, but it’s the infrastructure that will drive the paradigm shift. That’s what we’re really going to focus on as a counter-narrative to Trump’s plan.”

Rifkin is quick to say that the ideas he outlines in The Third Industrial Revolution film aren’t exclusively his, and, just like his framework, getting it done is going to take a lot of work from a lot of different people. “The narrative isn’t from just me, we just brought together like-minded interests over years and years,” he says. “It didn’t happen overnight, it isn’t a eureka moment. From a business perspective, it’s just the next step in the journey. Can we get there? There is so much that can go wrong, even with ideas whose time has come. I said in the film that we need not only be on mission for three generations, we have to have passion and commitment that sees this as the primary narrative if we’re going to save this planet. But we have to have a little luck along the way.”

If we’re going to spend $1 trillion on infrastructure, hopefully someone talks to Rifkin–or at least watches his new documentary–first.

Fox Continues To Explore VR’s Selling Power With “Alien: Covenant In Utero”

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Fox and director Ridley Scott are increasingly dipping their toes into virtual reality—and that’s good news for science fiction and horror fans. Today, Fox is launching a new virtual reality experience for Oculus Rift called Alien: Covenant In Utero that lets users see the world through the eyes of a newly hatched neomorph alien.

Those neomorphs–not the xenomorphs of past Alien movies but an entirely new breed of icky genetically engineered science fiction monster–are at the center of this virtual horror show. In Utero isn’t a game, but more of a virtual reality short film where participants are put into the neomorph’s point of view during a crucial part of the upcoming Alien sequel.

David Karlak, In Utero’s director, says the short is about “how a neomorph would perceive the world–a creature engineered through an evil version of Mother Nature to be a hunter.” According to Karlak, Alien: Covenant director Scott contributed significantly to the look and feel of the virtual reality experience. Scott even weighed in on whether a neomorph in virtual reality should have a heartbeat (it should, but only a faint one) and recommended looking at crocodiles as a source of inspiration.

Turning a science fiction franchise into a virtual reality experience also requires departures from the movie. Matthias Whittmann, a VR-VFX supervisor at Technicolor’s MPC, which worked on this project, noted that what works in a movie won’t necessarily work in a virtual reality setting. A chase scene in a movie, for instance, would disorient a user wearing a virtual reality headset. “You have to think about what you keep in virtual reality and what you discard,” he adds.

Alien: Covenant In Utero also plays into Fox’s larger strategy of promoting their properties using emerging virtual reality tech. Fox worked on the Alien project with Scott’s RSA Films, which launched a virtual reality section earlier this year. Fox and RSA previously worked together on a virtual reality project for The Martian.

A group inside Fox called the FoxNext worked on both projects. One of Fox’s partners on the project, AMD, is also taking the virtual reality project (and Oculus Rifts to experience them on) to movie theaters across the country as well.

The experience is launching on the Oculus Video app today (April 26), and will be available for Samsung Gear VR, Google Daydream View, HTC Vive, and PlayStation VR when the film is released on May 10.

Fox Next’s next VR project? A VR experience for the next Planet of the Apes film.

How To Look For A Job, No Matter How Long It’s Been

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Job hunting takes different forms at different times in your life. Did you take a new job six months ago that isn’t working out, and are you ready to fire up your search all over again? That’s fine, just don’t use the same resume and cover letter. Since you’re hitting the job market so soon after getting out of it, you’ll need to change up your approach.

It cuts the other way, too; your job search will be different if you’ve spent a long time at one company and start looking again for the first time in years. How employers see you depends a lot on how long or short your job tenure has been.

That can be a good thing, though—as long as you get your strategy right. Here’s what it takes to position yourself effectively in the job market, no matter how long it’s been since you last waded into it.

When You’ve Been In Your Job For Less Than A Year

So-called “job hopping” is commonplace. Some wager that the average employee should plan on changing jobs at least every three years, and the recent rise of “passive job seekers”—those who’d consider a new gig even if they aren’t actively looking for one—has been deemed an opportunity by some and a sign of trouble by others.

But while you can’t control how a hiring manager might view your short tenure, you do have a chance to spin it. Veteran recruiter Jason Niad shared one piece of advice with Fast Company in 2015 that’s still worth heeding: Focus relentlessly on your accomplishments—in your resume, cover letter, and job interview. That’s something you’d be doing anyway, of course, but whenever a hiring manager tries to steer the conversation toward your short stints (and a good one will), you should steer it back to the impact you’ve made, even in a short time.

“Since one of the worries regarding job hopping is lack of loyalty to the company,” Niad points out, “this can help show that you were invested in your past employers enough to make a measurable difference.” Emphasis on measurable—come armed with anecdotes and a couple of key stats.

Katrina Spigner, a South Carolina–based executive coach, says job seekers often have more leverage than they think, even those with job hoppers’ resumes. Crunching U.S. government data last week, Pew researchers overturned one of many stereotypes about millennialsthe false notion that they change jobs more frequently than their elders did—but “rather than step away from how you show up generationally,” Spigner suggests, you should just “lean into it.”

That narrative goes like this, she explains: “I’ve gained tremendous lessons from each one of those stopping points. Those lessons are now portable. I help an organization become a learning organization because I can deposit that [knowledge] into your company.” You don’t even need to be a millennial to turn this stereotype to your advantage. If a hiring manager thinks job hopping is something younger people do, let them: You bring the same fresh perspective, no matter how old you are.

When You’ve Been In Your Job For Two To Five Years

How do you stand out when you’re looking for a job after a pretty ordinary length of time? Spigner suggests going old school. “There’s a lost art of conversation,” she says. “There’s a lost art of developing a relationship.” So since you’re already researching employers you’d like to work for by checking out their Glassdoor rankings and hitting up past and current employees on LinkedIn, offer to take it offline. “I don’t mean being on the buddy system with them”—i.e., trying to get a referral from somebody you don’t know—”I mean having coffee,” Spigner explains.

When you pretty much look like the norm, it can be next to impossible to stand out as a job candidate, especially when you’re up against an army of applicant tracking systems. Companies may be straining to hire for emotional intelligence and other soft skills, says Spigner, but it’s hard to demonstrate those when “everything is so automated [and] everything’s online—your interview might even be online.” One solution? “This might sound a little elementary, but it works: Explore shadowing,” she suggests. “Spend a day.”

Get in touch and ask if there’s anyone in a department that interests you—regardless of whether there’s an opening—who wouldn’t mind if you looked over their shoulder for a few hours one day. It’s pretty low-stakes for a company to say yes to, even if they’re initially taken aback; Spigner says some of her clients have even landed jobs this way.

“There’s a lost art to even picking up the phone to make that request!” she adds.


Related:How Shadowing Coworkers Can Make You Better At Your Job


When You’ve Been In Your Job For Over Five Years

Maybe you’re a little rusty when it comes to job searching. The longer it’s been, the more likely you’ll be to weigh your options broadly—to cast a wide net. This can be a mistake.

“The first thing is to get clear about what you want to do,” Spigner counsels. “Be very specific so that your search doesn’t take you all over the place because you don’t have a sense of direction.” The second thing is to double-check that your terminology is up to date. Since you last looked for a job, the names of titles and job functions may have changed, so do your research. Search sites like LinkedIn and PayScale to see how people at similar levels to you are being labeled, then update your resume and cover letter to reflect the current lingo.

On interviews, when you’re asked why you’re leaving after such a long time, emphasize your excitement to do something new, but don’t smear your current employer. One HR consultant Fast Company spoke with previously suggested phrasing it like this: “I feel like I can be doing more, and the next step for me there is too limiting or not really available.” Spigner also advises people who haven’t been in the job market for a while to come to interviews with “a set of questions that are deal breakers for you if a company can’t answer. Sometimes we put ourselves at the mercy of the company” when we’re out of practice as interviewees and worried about whether we’re still marketable.

In many cases, Spigner observes, “We’re allowing the structure and technology and systems to determine how we approach these opportunities,” making assumptions about how we’ll be perceived by employers. It’s not that our assumptions of their assumptions about us are wrong, she says, but we can probably influence them more than we think.

“We have forgotten our creativity and the power we have to not just abide by the rules we see, but to even create our own rules.”

How To Prepare For An Interview When The Job Is A Stretch

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First things first: Your job interview is going to stress you out—even if just a little bit, and even if you think you’ve got it in the bag. You have one shot to impress people who don’t know you that well, and it’s a fact of human psychology that we just aren’t naturally comfortable in situations like that. Plus, you’re competing against a number of other people for the same position, and if you really want the job, you’re already emotionally invested in getting it.

If only it stopped there, but it usually doesn’t. On top of all that, you might feel like the job is a bit of a stretch for you. You may not be completely qualified to step into the role on Day 1 and do a stellar job. That’s actually completely fine, but it can make preparing for your interview even more anxiety inducing than it already is. Here’s how to stop freaking out and nail it anyway.

It’s Not Worth Your Time If It Isn’t A Stretch

Of all the reasons to stress about a job interview, your qualifications to do the job should not be one of them. The first rule of career advancement is that if you’re completely qualified for the job you’re applying for, you’ve aimed too low. New jobs are an opportunity for growth, and good employers know that. They aren’t hiring you for your ability to do the job completely from the start. They’re hiring you for your potential to become great in the role.

So if your resume accurately reflects your prior experience, then the people interviewing you already have a sense of your qualifications. Keep this in mind while you’re preparing for the interview, because it can significantly change what you focus on: You don’t need to convince them that your experience makes you worth considering—they’ve already decided it does by inviting you in chat.

A big source of stress in these situations is imposter syndrome. Many people assume that everyone else is highly qualified for the roles they occupy, and that they’re the only ones who might not be. This is a really common worry, and one reason why it’s so dangerous is because it might lead you to hide your weaknesses. Squaring off with a hiring manager, you might hesitate to reveal what you don’t know and discuss the mistakes you’ve made. This might be interpreted as overconfidence and could hurt your chances.

Scour Your Resume For Proof Of What You’ve Learned

So your first step is to make an honest list of the things you don’t know—the ones that are likely stressing you out by making you feel underqualified. Itemize all the ways you’d have to grow in the role. Now practice talking forthrightly about these deficits, not as “weaknesses” but in terms of your potential. Not sure how? These tipscan help youreframe the narrative.

Everyone is learning on the job. Nobody has the entire skill set they need to do their job perfectly; there are some things they do well and others that they’re still getting the hang of.

That means you want to emphasize your ability to learn on the job—and share proof that you’re really good at doing that when given the chance. Look over your resume and jot down a few anecdotes you can tell from past positions. You want to be prepared to give examples of situations where you made a mistake and learned from it—or where you didn’t have enough information to do something right, so you went out and gathered it. You want to show that you’re willing (and excited!) to be mentored.

Your goal isn’t to convince an interviewer to hire somebody who’s “underqualified,” to dupe them into gambling recklessly on you. It’s to show your prospective employer that their faith in your potential is well-placed.

Ask About Training Opportunities

Once you’ve lined up some examples of how quickly you learn on the job, you’ll want to line up a few questions to ask your hiring manager. After all, one of the best ways to turn a stressful interview from an interrogation into a conversation is to interject questions of your own.

And as recruiters at companies like Amazon and Spotify recently told Fast Company, one of the questions they love to answer but seldom get asked is about training opportunities. But you don’t have to pose it bluntly like, “What training opportunities do you offer employees?” You can ask the hiring manager how they personally have learned and grown on the job. One exec at a health startup suggests putting it like this: “What growth opportunities and changes have you witnessed at the company level that have been most exciting?” or even asking how their own role has changed since joining the business.

The fact is that some companies don‘t want to train the people who work for them—they only want employees who can execute tasks perfectly without supervision. So in order to find out what type of employer you’re dealing with, you’ve got to ask.

Ultimately, if you honestly reveal what you can and cannot do and the company chooses not to hire you, that’s probably a good thing for you. No matter how qualified you are for a job, you’re eventually going to be given some set of tasks that are beyond your current skill set. If the company isn’t willing to help you grow and develop, then your career there won’t advance anyway.

Are Your Buying Habits Remotely Ethical? This Bank Account Will Tell You

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After footage of 69-year-old David Dao being forcibly dragged off a United Airlines flight bubbled to the surface of the internet earlier in April, customers cut up their United credit cards and swore to never again fly the airline. It’s stock lost $250 million dollars in value. The response to the United incident (and the #deleteUber campaign before it) is just the latest example of customers voting with their wallet–choosing to support or divest from a company with how they allocate their dollars. But the problem with voting with your wallet based on such incidents is that while they undoubtedly reflect something seriously awry within the company’s ethics, they don’t show the whole picture.

[Image: courtesy Aspiration]
“When a controversy springs up around, say, Uber, people get upset, but what does that really tell you about how the company is acting day in and day out?” Andrei Cherny, CEO of the ethical financial firm Aspiration, tells Fast Company. (Well, about Uber, maybe a lot). “It doesn’t say much about its actual practices or how it’s treating the environment–it’s just one data point.”

A new feature within Aspiration’s mobile banking app will go a lot further toward fleshing out the complete pictures of the places we most often spend our money. Called Aspiration Impact Measurement (AIM), the program analyzes not one, but thousands of data points to generate two scores for companies: The “People” score gauges how well companies treat their employees and communities, and the “Planet” score assesses companies’ sustainability and eco-friendly practices. Every time an Aspiration customer swipes the debit card associated with their account to make a payment toward a company, that company’s Planet and People scores are funneled into the customer’s personalized AIM score, which reflects the positive (or negative) impact of where they shop.

[Image: courtesy Aspiration]
“People have been hungering for this exact kind of information,” Cherny says. “We see this in our customers, we see this in all these surveys that are coming out about how younger people especially, but consumers overall, are thinking about how a company behaves and how its products are created as they make decisions on where to buy. But until now, they haven’t really had the information to be able to do so.”

In the year-and-a-half since Aspiration launched, the financial firm has gained recognition for democratizing access to banking and taking an ethical approach to investing. The company offers a “pay-as-you-wish” model that allows customers to give Aspiration whatever amount they feel reflects the firm’s performance, including $0. Despite that, Cherny says over 85% of customers choose to pay, and Aspiration puts 10% of what it earns toward financing microloans for underserved populations, particularly immigrant women. And rather than funneling investments into projects like the Dakota Access Pipeline, Aspiration’s main investment product is the Aspiration Redwood Fund, which, Cherny says, skirts fossil fuels and firearms in favor of supporting companies with strong diversity profiles and environmental track records.

AIM is a concrete way to translate Aspiration’s “Do Well, Do Good” ethos into everyday consumerism. To create AIM, Aspiration worked with private data analyzers that dig into companies’ public reports and private data to craft an analysis of their practices, mainly for use by large hedge funds and investment firms. “We have contracts with those analysis companies, but instead, we’re taking that data and repurposing it for a consumer approach rather than an investment approach,” Cherny says. For 5,000 different businesses, Aspiration funneled their data into a proprietary algorithm that weighted all the different data points and sorted them into categories that build out the overall People and Planet scores. People, for instance, includes metrics like the percent of women and minority employees and the spread between CEO earnings and those of entry-level workers. In the Planet category are measurements like greenhouse gas emissions and the amount of waste sent to landfill.

[Image: courtesy Aspiration]
The companies featured in AIM are mostly chain businesses like Starbucks and Target. “It turns out we’re not all as unique from each other as we like to think we are,” Cherny says. “We’re mostly spending our money at the same places.” The program also notes which companies are more transparent with their data, and which are not; through future versions of the app, customers will be able to directly Tweet at businesses they frequent and ask them to release their data. “It will create some bottom-up pressure on these companies,” Cherny says. And smaller businesses, like local coffee shops, will be able to self-report their data starting on day one of AIM’s release.

For now, you’ll only be able to see the People and Planet scores of a company after you shop there, as a retroactive assessment of your purchase. In future iterations of the feature, Cherny says, customers will be able to research companies before choosing to shop there. But in AIM’s current iteration, the program will suggest similar companies after you’ve made a purchase, so you can start filing away data on businesses for future reference. This feature, Cherny says, “is maybe even more important than a company’s overall score because while currently, if you make a decision on where to shop, you’re looking at factors like cost and convenience and quality; now you can factor in conscience as well.”

This ethos, Cherny says, derives from his long career of working with politicians striving to make a difference: 20 years ago, he was with Al Gore at the White House as the then-vice president toured the country making speeches about climate change that nobody was listening to, and he worked with Senator Elizabeth Warren as she was starting to work for what became the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. “A lot of that went into creating Aspiration, with the idea that if you founded a financial firm that was helping to drive sustainability and conscience, you’d be able to have a big impact,’ Cherny says. “And AIM is a manifestation of that: If people can start thinking about the impact of their daily spending on people’s lives and the environment, we can really force companies to start paying attention.”


Whatever Happened To Trump’s Voter Fraud Investigation?

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It’s been almost three months since President Trump called for a major investigation into voter fraud, citing the author of a study who claimed that at least 3 million votes were cast illegally in the 2016 election. Since then, he’s obsessively tweeted about the issue, most recently claiming that he “would still beat Hillary in popular vote” despite the fact that he actually lost the popular vote by about 3 million votes. Yet as of today not much progress has been made on either front, and voting data experts are skeptical that any such study’s results will be accurate given the complexity of the task, and the fact that almost every previous probe has uncovered no evidence of significant fraud.

True the Vote, the nonprofit group behind the study cited by the president, hasn’t gotten very far. It’s still in the process of gathering voter rolls from states and sending out public records requests to government agencies, which is a far cry from actually identifying any fraudulent voters. But the leaders of True the Vote, whose board member Gregg Phillips’s tweets about voter fraud were retweeted by the president in February, is determined to carry out the project no matter how long it takes.

“It’s a Herculean task,” the group’s president, Catherine Engelbrecht, a Texan who founded a Tea Party group in 2009, told Fast Company, pointing out the challenge of dealing with states that each have their own process for releasing information about voters. “I originally said late spring, but what I hadn’t factored in was the snail’s pace that we would see some of these data sources crawling in.”

They’re not the only ones moving slowly on the effort. In early February, the White House announced that Vice President Pence was leading a task force into voter fraud, and he was “starting to gather names and individuals to be a part of it.” A month later, Pence’s office told NPR that the task force was “still doing the necessary groundwork.” By last week, a senior administration official told CNN that the task force “has not been the topic of a lot of conversation” in the White House. And as of today it still appears to have no staff and there is no indication of when it will start its work. A spokesman for Pence did not return requests for comment from Fast Company.

No predictions this time

True the Vote’s task consists of two parts: collecting voter rolls from every state (which list the individuals who voted in the 2016 election) and then comparing them to lists from a panoply of government agencies that include immigration records, prison records, among others. By filtering out noncitizens, felons, and others who are not legally allowed to vote, they hope to tally the number of people who illegally voted last November.

Engelbrecht is careful not to make predictions, noting that Phillips was “crucified” and “tried in the court of public opinion” over his claim that 3 million illegal votes may have been cast in November, though she does anticipate that True the Vote will have somewhere close to 200 million records to analyze. Phillips, whose findings were called suspect by the fact-checking group PolitiFact, did not return several calls for comment.

“There are enough fissures and wormholes and rabbit holes in the voting process that have afforded the opportunity for fraud to be institutionalized,” says Engelbrecht. “Are we going to find noncitizens voting? Dead people voting? Yes. And that points to a bigger problem and a bigger conversation that we need to have.”

Except most election experts don’t think it’s a problem at all, citing cleaner voter rolls, updated voting systems, and stricter voter ID laws in many jurisdictions. During the George W. Bush administration, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft set up a “voting access and integrity initiative,” which hardly found any examples of voter fraud. And in 2012, Florida’s governor, Rick Scott, sought to “purge undocumented immigrants from the voter rolls,” reports Politico, but his list of 180,000 names was so full of errors that in the end only 85 people were kicked off the rolls.

And election experts question True the Vote’s approach, emphasizing that it’s not statistically sound for such a complicated data challenge.

“If I were to undertake an effort like this, I would not obtain the voter rolls of every state and then compare them to these lists of noncitizens and felons and others,” cautions David Becker, a former Justice Department attorney who is now executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research. “You will get an enormous number of false positives. You need much more data, not to mention that voter rolls are riddled with errors in the first place.” He points out that such rolls don’t have Social Security numbers or driver’s license info, and might not even have birth dates in some cases. 

“Comparing first name and last name and maybe date of birth—any statistician will tell you that’s an awful way to match and it will not deliver credible results,” he continues. “If you have one David Becker and my birthday and another record with David Becker and my birthday and you think you’ve got a match, you’re statistically wrong.”

Engelbrecht insists that her method is valid, noting that she’s got a team of 10 statisticians and academics to analyze the research, though she declined to identify any of them. “This is an important question that Americans want the answers to—is it true that millions of illegal votes were cast? If it’s not true, then let the data bear that out. If that’s true, then let’s fix this, and technology is there for that.”

She says that the group has not yet been contacted by Vice President Pence’s task force. “We’d love to be involved if we’re called to service.”

These Six Things Are Likely Holding You Back At Work

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When it comes to running your day, it’s easy to get swept up in distractions and tasks that don’t move you forward. The average person loses up to three hours each day due to interruptions from phone calls, email and coworkers, according to a study by CareerBuilder.

Research may show that cat videos make you happy and less stressed, but try explaining that at your next meeting. Leadership consultant Jones Loflin, author of Always Growing: How To Be a Strong(er) Leader In Any Season, calls distractions “weeds,” and says they can hold you back from being a productive and strong leader.

“We often think of a weed as nasty, prickly things we need to yank out, but weeds for leaders are different–weeds are plans out of place,” he says. “They prevent us from being more strategic in our thinking and more proactive in relationships, and they’re holding us back from carrying out our key components.”

Loflin shares six of the most common things that hold you back from success:

1. An Overloaded Schedule

One of the biggest weeds is simply being too busy, says Loflin. “You fill your schedule, and then are overwhelmed with everything you have to do,” he says.

While your mind wants you to get as much done as possible, it could derail you from what’s important. “Endorphins go off in your head when you get things done,” says Loflin. “That makes us tend to grab what’s quick and easy.”

Unfortunately, the things leaders need to do can’t be accomplished in five, 10 or even 30 minutes. “Their tasks are more complex, such as building relationships, strategizing, and researching trends,” says Loflin. “These are not things you simply check off, and when you default to the little things like email you lose focus on your most important opportunities.”

Instead, schedule your day for the important stuff, suggests Loflin. “How can you be forward focused and engaged in strategic, proactive conversations?” he says. “Instead of letting little things drain you from being fully focused, chunk them together and schedule a time each day or every few days to get them done–maybe an afternoon when there is not a lot going on.”

2. An Inability to Effectively Delegate

Leaders often hold on to too much, says Loflin. “The buck often stops with them, and it’s difficult to let go,” he says. “Instead, begin to think, ‘What am I holding onto that will give someone else an opportunity to grow?’”

Shifting the motivation for delegating can help you through the process. “Giving employees stretch assignments gives them an opportunity to work on things that take them outside of their comfort zone and give them a better understanding of the company,” says Loflin. “When we hold on to too much, we deny our team members.”

If delegating is difficult, start small, suggests Loflin. “Transfer something that will save you 15 or 30 minutes a week,” he says. “Know what you are going to do with that time. Invest it in something that’s strategic, proactive and relationship building.”

3. Not Engaging In Continuous Improvement

When we get busy, we tend to get comfortable with our skill set, but we need to be a model of growth for our people, says Loflin. Make time to work on your soft skills, for example. Understand the latest research with the demographics of the consumers you serve.

“You can’t grow others if you don’t grow yourself,” says Loflin. “It’s critical for leaders to be strong in our changing workplace.”


Related link: No, Millennials Aren’t A Bunch Of Job-Hopping Flakes


4. Stereotyping Generations

Believing generational stereotypes can hold you back from forming strong team relationships. If you take the time to dig deeper you’ll probably find that you’re not much different, says Loflin.

“Find an opportunity to get to know what motivates someone to deliver their best work,” he says. “If you don’t have conversations with the newest members of the workplace, you limit your ability to make them an effective part of your team.”

Loflin suggests “listening aggressively,” and making bridging statements, such as “Tell me more about that.” Or, “You sound passionate about this; where does that come from?”

“As you’re listening, identify something that connects with who you are and what your team is about,” he says. “Building bridges ignites employees to deliver their best work.”

5. Forgetting To Cut Back

Just like you would prune a garden, look for areas in your business that can be cut back so you can grow forward, says Loflin.

“Often, we keep adding responsibilities to our own plates and expectations to others’, but we rarely take anything away” he says. “Team members can often tell a leader what needs to change, but the leader has to be willing to listen to uncomfortable suggestions. What isn’t a priority? What processes and procedures are cumbersome? How are people working together? Then look at what you can eliminate and streamline.”

6. Passing Over Accomplishments

It’s easy to feel an overwhelming sense of never getting it all done, but in reality you never will, says Loflin. “There are always limits on resources, time, information, money, people, and skills,” he says. “But it’s important for leaders to take more opportunities to celebrate what is getting done versus beating yourself up for what’s not.”

Step back and ask yourself, ‘What did I grow today? Relationships? Opportunities? Results? “Reflect and get a sense of accomplishment, and do it as a team,” he says. “Too often leaders are the first to talk when things are not going well. Instead, look and acknowledge what is going well.”

How To Handle Your Boss’s Condescension

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Maybe your boss is fond of saying things over and over again—as if you didn’t hear the first time. Maybe she tends to overexplain the obvious—as if you couldn’t possibly understand. Or maybe he throws in a snide remark or two whenever he’s having a bad day. Your boss might have an extensive menu of ways to condescend to you, which range from mildly annoying to totally infuriating.

Here’s the thing, though: Unless you’re weirdly lucky, you’ll have to deal with a boss who condescends to you—at least once in a while—at some point in your career. So it’s worth knowing how to respond to it. Here are a few helpful guidelines.


Related:How To Curb Passive Aggression In Your Office


Don’t Just Sit There And Take It

Your first reaction might be to just accept what’s coming and wait for it to pass. Defending yourself is only going to make it worse, right? Wrong.

When your boss is being condescending, clamming up is the last thing you should do. If you don’t muster some sort of a response, you’ll come across as disengaged—like you don’t really care about what’s happening. In fact, staying silent will likely ratchet up the condescension level. You need to stand up for yourself, without being so confrontational that it blows up into an all-out argument with your boss.

And here’s where it gets tricky. While some degree of pushback is necessary, the way you push back depends on your company culture, your boss’s personality, and the relationship between the two of you. If their patronizing attitude only turns up when there’s a difference of opinion, that’s something you can work with. Here are a few waysto express different views—and say “no” if you need to—no matter how condescending your boss gets. In some situations or companies, open (even heated) disagreement is actually encouraged. In other companies, you need to tread more carefully.

Either way, you still need to somehow let your boss know that their condescension isn’t productive—that it’s going to spark some form of respectful pushback they might not have planned on.

It’s Not Really About You

But that’s only half the battle. In fact, if you focus all your energy on coming up with a way to counter your boss’s remarks, you’ll probably just get more exasperated than you need to be.

Instead, you should remind yourself that your boss’s condescension isn’t really about you. Your boss is obviously upset about something, and you happen to be on the receiving end of whatever it is. Maybe it’s an issue in their personal life that you aren’t privy to. Maybe your boss is frustrated with something business-related that isn’t your fault.

Or maybe it really does involve something you did. But if it was only about you, your boss would offer constructive criticism, not condescension. Passive aggression, of any kind, is usually a sign of something aggravating that doesn’t have a clear outlet.

I recently worked with an executive from a global apparel company who told me that her CEO was very condescending. I asked her if he treated other people this way, too. “Absolutely!” she said. So I told her that in all likelihood, it probably wasn’t personal, that she should listen carefully for what the real issues were behind the condescension. Eventually, she was able to develop a constructive relationship with her CEO—she even ended up advocating for him when the board criticized his behavior. It wasn’t something she would’ve expected months earlier.

Like so much office behavior we tend to find grating, the worst of it often isn’t personal. Dealing with it usually gets easier once we realize that.

“Venture Capital For The People”: Making The Case For A Basic Income

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Poverty is normally seen as a deep, complex, social problem. But to the Dutch historian Rutger Bregman it comes down to something simple: a lack of cash.

In a well-received talk at TED’s 2017 conference, Bregman argued that we can end poverty by giving people the cash they don’t earn–that is, by adopting a universal basic income. And, contrary to some basic income naysayers, he says the policy needn’t be particularly expensive. Raising every American above the poverty line would cost about $175 billion, he says–about a third of what we spend on national defense.

Bregman, author of the book Utopia for Realists (our review here), argues that we’re too moralistic about poverty. We tend to see people’s incomes as a function of their drive and intelligence (or lack of those things). But plenty of research shows the opposite: that people are poor, or lacking in intelligence, because of their circumstances.

That sounds like an anti-meritocratic or even anti-American thing to say. But Bregman points to studies showing that when people live in circumstances of scarcity–unable to pay bills and stressed out all the time about money–they run a cognitive “deficit” compared to richer peers. One experiment showed a decrease of 13 IQ points among participants facing severe financial difficulties. That’s the equivalent of failing to sleep at night or the mental gap between a chronic alcoholic and a moderate drinker.

Rutger Bregman, author of the book Utopia for Realists (our review here), argues that we’re too moralistic about poverty.  [Photo: Bret Hartman/TED/Flickr]

To Bregman, this shows that low-income people can be more successful if we take away everyday burdens and that basic income should be seen less as a handout and more as “venture capital for the people.” “Poverty is not a lack of character. It’s a lack of cash,” he says.

Some estimates for the cost of a U.S. basic income put the cost at as much as $3 trillion a year, or 15% of total national income. That assumes paying every adult $1,000 a month regardless of their other income. But Bregman favors a form of means-testing through the tax code: what’s known as a negative income tax. People above the poverty line would continue paying taxes as they do now; those falling below the line would have their incomes raised via tax credits to a level that covers their essential needs. The idea has a long history. The libertarian economist Milton Friedman proposed one version in the 1960s, and the city of Dauphin, in Canada, implemented one between 1974 and 1979. It led to no decrease in employment, an uptick in the high school completion rate, and a reduction of hospitalizations and medical costs, researchers who studied the relevant data say.

Bregman is a little idealistic for some (many) tastes. He brushes over contrary evidence and argues that we already have “the research and the means” to implement a basic income right now, which we probably don’t. The Canadian experiment was 40 years ago and more modern experiments have taken place in India and Kenya, which may not be too relevant to the American context. (Current trials underway in Canada and Finland may yield more relevant evidence).

But then perhaps this is nitpicking. Bregman calls himself a utopian and utopians, for better or worse, don’t have to be accountants or rigorous social scientists. What matters to Bregman is the idea and that existing social programs have become moribund. “I’m a historian. And, if history teaches us anything, it’s that things can be different,” he says. “We need new ideas.”

How To Apply For A Job When You’re Underqualified

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You’re dying to apply for a killer job you just found. It looks nearly perfect. But there’s one tiny problem—you’re underqualified.

Do you go for it, or let it pass on by?

It depends. And while there’s no perfect answer or formula for this, here are a few instances in which you should (and shouldn’t) take a run at a job that looks amazing, even it feels slightly out of reach.

Should: You’re Just A Bit Shy On Years Of Experience

The job description asks for seven to 10 years of experience. You have just under six, and a little more if you count the (entirely) relevant internship you took on while finishing your degree.

Dear heavens, go for it. Now, you’ll want to make sure and make it clear that you’ve got the knowledge, business acumen, and maturity of someone with that seven to 10 years of experience (your cover letter is a good place to strongly hint toward all these things), and you may want to include that internship (just in case they’re officially doing the math), but don’t let a small shortage scare you away.

Shouldn’t: You’re Not Even In The Ballpark

Now, if you’re only a year or two into your career, you may be wasting your time going after a role that requires several additional years. Is it impossible? Maybe not, but it’s improbable, especially if you follow the “normal” application process of uploading your resume through an online portal.


Related: I Built A Bot To Apply To Thousands Of Jobs At Once—Here’s What I Learned


Instead, I’d consider working to uncover a similar, but maybe earlier stage opportunity at same company or, if you are hell-bent on taking a run at it, find a direct “in” at that organization. You’re going to need an opportunity to state your case directly with a human decision maker (because the resume-scanning software will more than likely rule you out).

Should: You Lack A Degree, But It Doesn’t Say “Required”

The education section of a job description is an important one to examine. Most companies are quite clear on their minimum requirements, as well as their stance on considering candidates with an equitable mix of education and experience.

If the description doesn’t say the degree is a must, then it’s fair to assume that the potential employer will consider a highly qualified candidate without it. Not sure? If you can uncover a contact at the company of interest (if no one’s listed on the job description, start with their talent acquisition or HR team), you may want to do something many of your competitors won’t—pick up the phone and call.

(Gasp!)

“Hi. I see that you’re looking for a senior project manager. The job description suggests that you are considering highly qualified candidates that do not have a bachelor’s degree. Can you confirm this?”

Done.

Shouldn’t: The Job Description Makes It Clear That Degree Is Mandatory

Some companies have hard and fast minimum degree requirements. It’s hard to get around this, and may be a waste of time if you apply to a blind mailbox (or through an online portal) without that piece of paper. Also, realize that a bunch of other candidates who apply will have the degree, so when a blob of resumes comes in through the system, whose do you think will be reviewed first?


Related:Can Using Artificial Intelligence Make Hiring Less Biased? 


That’s right, the ones with the mandatory degree.

If you feel very strongly about making a case for yourself, you need to get directly to someone of influence on the inside and state your case, rather than relying on the scanning software.

Should: You Lack A Preferred Credential (Or Two), But Have Almost Everything Else

You do realize that most job descriptions are giant wish lists, yes? Few people are going to match every single qualification. That’d be like making a list for Santa and waking on Christmas morning to discover every last item you requested under the tree.

Right.

That said, as long as you’re at about an 80% match to the job requirements, in most instances you should take a run at it, especially if the ones you’re lacking are listed under the “preferred” section (as opposed to the “required”).

Shouldn’t: You Lack A Required License Or Certification

Now, if you’re at 80% (or even 90%) yet lack a required license or certification (e.g., real estate license, registered nurse designation, lawyer who has passed the state bar, etc.), you are more than likely wasting your time.

In some fields, you just simply cannot be hired without certain credentials. So your choice is to either go get those credentials, or select another path.

Should: The Job Description Says, “Local Candidates Only” And You’re Moving To That Town

When you’re preparing to relocate to a new city, it’s completely natural that you’ll begin sleuthing out opportunities there, even if you’ve not yet established concrete timing for the move.

If the plans are already in motion—and you’re expecting to cover moving costs on your own—don’t be discouraged if you come across the phrase, “local candidates only.” More often than not, this is code for, “We’re not funding your move,” not, “If you didn’t graduate from the local high school, forget about it.”

You’ll need to make it clear in your cover letter that the move’s imminent, of course, but don’t let this phrase dissuade you.

Shouldn’t: It Says, “Local Candidates Only” And You Expect A Relocation Package

Again, this phrase is your blaring announcement that they’re not paying to move someone into town for the job, probably not even if they love you. Relocations are expensive, adding an easy five figures to any new hire.

If you’re looking to move on a company’s dime, it’s probably best to steer away from job descriptions that (kindly) state “forget about it” right there in the job description.

Are there exceptions to these rules? Sure, sometimes there are (outside of jobs that require certain licenses—you won’t get around that one). But don’t count on being the anomaly. It will likely waste your time and theirs, and leave you feeling unnecessarily frustrated.

Instead, apply for jobs that align pretty well with your background and aspirations and—when you know you’ll only make sense to the decision makers if you have opportunity to explain—then find a way to get to them directly.


This article originally appeared on The Daily Muse and is adapted and reprinted with permission.

More From The Muse:

Heineken Just Put Out The Antidote to That Pepsi Kendall Jenner Ad

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WHAT: “World’s Apart,” a new Heineken ad that involves some frank conversations between people with differing views.

WHO: Agency Publicis London

WHY WE CARE: Earlier this month, Pepsi tried to walk in step with the #Resistance, and ended up falling on its face. Hard. The company’s tone-deaf ad–which used Black Lives Matter iconography and Kendall Jenner to suggest that carbonated beverages can heal America’s wounds–inspired such a seething backlash it was pulled almost instantly, and savagely parodied. It would’ve been a fine time for Coca-Cola to step up and deliver a perfectly calibrated topical ad, thereby eating Pepsi’s lunch. In truth, though, Coke had to do absolutely nothing to achieve the same result. Instead, Heineken has come along a couple weeks later with an ad that gets to the heart of political engagement in a straightforward way that makes Pepsi’s self-congratulatory ad seem even more embarrassing.

The main political problem in post-Brexit UK, as well as post-Trump America, is the depth of our division. People with opposite views believe in their own opinions so vehemently, they’re convinced everyone on the other side is practically from a different species. Making matters worse, these people from opposing sides rarely get to meet each other outside of Twitter @-replies, which are among the most contentious places to be on the planet. In Heineken’s “Worlds Apart” experiment, complete strangers who have been selected for their political opinions, but not told what the experiment entails, are matched up and made to converse. The climate change denier meets face-to-face with the environmental doomsayer, and both are made to hear out their respective views. Other issues explored throughout the ad include feminism and transgender rights. This kind of heady material is impossible to fully explore in a meaningful way within the space of a beer commercial. However, encouraging actual dialogue is a thousand times more of a mature and responsible way to address our current international predicament than glamorizing, fetishizing, and whitewashing the protest movement.

[via Upworthy]

The Winner Of The $1 Million TED Prize Is Bringing Health Care To The World’s Most Remote Communities

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If you live in a remote village in Liberia and you get sick, seeing a doctor might involve a canoe ride down a river and two days of walking through the rainforest. Clinics are similarly hard to reach for roughly a billion people around the world.

The winner of this year’s $1 million TED Prize–Rajesh Panjabi, the founder of a nonprofit called Last Mile Health–has a solution for poor, remote communities that can’t afford to hire doctors and nurses. Instead of recruiting trained medical professionals, the organization hires local community members, some of whom may have only a middle-school education. Then it gives them the training needed to screen and treat common illnesses like malaria, providing local jobs as it fills the health care gap.

The organization hires local community members, some of whom may have only a middle-school education. Then it gives them the training needed to screen and treat common illnesses. [Photo: Bret Hartman/TED/Flick]
It’s a system that the organization has proven can work in Liberia, where community health workers now carry backpacks with modern but low-cost medical equipment such as a $1 rapid test for malaria, and a smartphone to track and report on epidemics. Now the organization wants to scale up to reach the rest of the world. Using the prize money, Last Mile Health plans to create the Community Health Academy, a digital platform that will train workers on skills like administering vaccines or how to treat a malnourished infant.

The platform, inspired by other digital education platforms like Khan Academy, will be piloted in Liberia and then go global.  [Photo: Bret Hartman/TED/Flick]
The platform, inspired by other digital education platforms like Khan Academy, will be piloted in Liberia and then go global. Last Mile Health also was a Skoll Prize awardee earlier this year.

“We know that there are still millions of people dying from preventable causes in rural communities around the world,” Panjabi said at TED 2017. “What we also know is that if we trained an army of health care workers to learn even just 30 life-saving skills, we could save the lives of 30 million people by 2030 . . . If we can help these countries scale, we could save millions of lives, and at the same time, we could create millions of jobs.”


Amazon’s Q1 Earnings: Four Things We’ll Be Looking For

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How much higher can Amazon shares go? We’ll know a little more tomorrow afternoon when the Seattle e-commerce juggernaut releases its first-quarter 2017 earnings. If we look at presentations over the past year, we see the company doing very well but still missing some key numbers—namely, revenue expectations that didn’t quite hit the mark three months ago. By contrast, tomorrow’s report could easily show a blockbuster quarter thanks to stronger revenue and the slew of new products that Amazon is investing in. If things go well, Amazon’s stock could inch even closer to $1,000 a share, which is an astounding landmark.

Analysts are expecting the company to hit revenue of $35.31 billion, compared to $29.1 billion during the same period last year. Earnings-per-share is expected to hit $1.13, compared to $1.07 a year ago, reports the Seattle Times. That would be welcome news: Last quarter was considered a slight miss for Amazon, with revenue hitting $43.7 billion compared to expectations of $44.68 billion. Once tomorrow’s numbers are announced, all eyes will be on Wall Street’s reaction and whether the stock will go up or down. Lest we forget, it was about one year ago when Jeff Bezos made $6 billion in 20 minutes, thanks to a healthy earnings report.

Amazon is a huge company with its myriad tentacles in a growing number of operations. Needless to say, we’ll be looking out for quite a lot. But here are a few of the most important things we’ll be keeping track of tomorrow:

  • Web Services: While Amazon’s cloud segment has been seeing good growth–it is most definitely the leader in the space–AWS missed revenue expectations last quarter. As MarketWatch points out, Amazon has had to cut prices recently thanks to growing competition from the likes of Microsoft, Alphabet, and IBM. We’ll be looking at whether the cloud operation’s growth has taken a hit.
  • Video Dreams: For well over a year, Amazon has been pushing its digital content, both in the United States and in new markets like India. We’ll be interested to see if this Prime Video expansion will continue and how much the company plans to spend on original programming.
  • Prime: Amazon Prime is one the company’s most popular services. In the U.S. alone, estimates put Prime subscriptions at 80 million, which makes it larger than Costco, notes L2 analyst Cooper Smith. Legacy retail outlets like Walmart and Target are feeling the pinch, but how much bigger can Prime scale? We’ll be keeping an eye out for more specifics.
  • Products: Amazon has been slowly building and offering more features for its Echo product line, as well as expanding Alexa integrations. We’d like to know how well these product ventures are doing, and we’ll be looking out for clues about future projects down the line.

There is so much more to look out for–international sales numbers, details about brick-and-mortar Amazon stores, grocery efforts, etc.–and we’ll be paying close attention to all of that. Tune in tomorrow for Fast Company’s coverage of the earnings.

GirlTrek Has A Simple Health Intervention For Black Women: Walking

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After Vanessa Garrison saw her grandmother die at the age of 66, her aunt at 55, and another aunt at 63, she realized that her family’s experience wasn’t unusual: Black women have the highest obesity rates in the U.S. and die earlier than other groups from preventable, obesity-related diseases.

Government interventions and public health campaigns to encourage exercise haven’t worked well. But Garrison is attempting to get women moving through something that draws inspiration from the civil rights movement and earlier black history in America–walking.

“The best advice from hospitals and doctors and the best medicines from pharmaceutical companies to treat the congestive heart failure of my grandmother didn’t work because they didn’t acknowledge the systemic racism she had dealt with since birth,” Garrison said at TED 2017. GirlTrek–borne out of the personal experiences of Garrison and her cofounder T. Morgan Dixon–does.

“Walking through pain is what we’ve always done.” [Photo: Marla Aufmuth/TED/Flickr]
Through the program, thousands of women have pledged to walk regularly. The organization reaches women “through the best practices of the civil rights movement,” Garrison says. “We huddled up in church basements, did grapevine sharing of information through beauty salons, we empowered mothers to stand on the front lines.”

When one woman who had signed up to walk lost her 23-year-old son to gun violence, she posted online that she didn’t know how to move forward–but she walked for her son, and “it felt good to be out there to walk.”

“Walking through pain is what we’ve always done,” says Dixon, sharing the story of her mother walking into a desegregated school. “Changemaking is in my blood. It’s what I do. This health crisis ain’t nothing compared to the road we have traveled.”

Walking 30 minutes a day can reduce the risk of diseases such as diabetes, stroke, heart disease, and even Alzheimer’s. But it has a secondary effect of strengthening communities.

“Once walking, women get to organizing–first their families, then their communities, to walk and solve problems together,” Garrison says. “They walk and notice the abandoned buildings. They walk and notice the lack of sidewalks, the lack of green space, and they say, ‘No more.'”

“I can’t help but wonder what would have happened if there were groups of women walking on Trayvon’s block that day,” says Dixon. “What would happen in the south side of Chicago every day if there were groups of mothers and aunts and cousins walking. Or along the polluted rivers of Flint, Michigan. I believe that walking can transform our communities because it’s already starting to.”

What If You Could Filter Dirty Air Just By Riding A Bike?

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Riding a bike in a smoggy city–and sucking in exhaust from the tailpipes of the cars in front of you–can undo the benefits of exercise. In Beijing, artist Daan Roosegaarde is beginning to imagine one potential solution: a bike that could pull in dirty air, filter it, and release clean air.

The concept is one part of Roosegaarde’s larger Smog Free Project. At TED 2017, Roosegaarde, who works in both the Netherlands and China, outlined the project so far, including a seven-meter tall tower designed to sit in parks or playgrounds and purify surrounding air (though there are some questions about how well this works). Roosegaarde has also turned the black soot from Beijing air into smog jewelry. In theory, the new bikes will work in a similar way to the tower.

If we can use this design to bring back the prestige of the bicycle, that would really create an impact on pollution on a short-term scale.” [Image: courtesy Studio Roosegaarde]
“We’ll be morphing to the bicycle–making it smaller and more energy-friendly or energy-neutral,” Roosegaarde tells Fast Company. “But it would give clean air to the person who cycles. Beijing was a cycling city 10 years ago, and then everyone wanted a car. If we can use this design to bring back the prestige of the bicycle, that would really create an impact on pollution on a short-term, a 10-14 month scale.”

He envisions that the design, which is still in development, could be added to China’s rapidly growing network of bike-shares. At least half a million shared bikes are now in use in Beijing. One bike-share company alone, Mobike, has more than 10 million users in 21 cities.

“If we can update those bikes with this kind of thing, then you can create an impact on the average pollution, and then it becomes fascinating,” Roosegaarde says. “It should be more than a one-off.”

The bikes will likely become part of a program–that includes the Smog Free Towers and other yet-to-be-designed smog-sucking technology–that the designer is pitching to polluted cities as a way to temporarily purify pockets of air while cities work on larger reforms.

“It will always be connected with big programs of government and green technology and electric cars,” Roosegaarde says. “They do top down, we do bottom up, and we meet in the middle.”

Fighting Climate Change Means Building Dense, Diverse, Walkable Cities

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“Let me add to the complexity of the situation we find ourselves in: At the same time we’re solving for climate change, we’re going to be building cities for three billion people,” said the urban designer Peter Calthorpe at the beginning of his talk at TED 2017. By 2050, he said, we will see the urban population double, and if we don’t manage to sustainably and practically build to accommodate that growth, “I’m not sure that all the climate solutions in the world will help save mankind,” Calthorpe said.

But there is a real enemy to target in this situation, Calthorpe said, and it is sprawl. When most people think of sprawl, they think of the low-lying scattering of buildings that circle metropolises and eventually fade into the suburban and the rural. But sprawl, Calthorpe said, can happen anywhere, at any density: Its key attribute is that it isolates people.

Separating people into economic enclaves and land-use enclaves, dividing them from nature, and prioritizing vehicle transportation (all key features of sprawl) doesn’t allow for the kind of close-knit, communicative growth that allows cities to develop in a way that hinders, not hastens, climate change.

Future compact development could slash California’s hypothetical carbon footprint. [Photo: senaiaksoy/iStock]
“The antidote to sprawl is what we need to be thinking about,” Calthorpe said.

How, exactly, is the main question. Calthorpe’s software and urban modeling company, Calthorpe Analytics, has developed a tool called UrbanFootprint that gives planners and developers a way to test out the impact of future development models. For the state of California, Calthorpe Analytics used UrbanFootprint mapped out two different scenarios for 2050–one in which the state continued its “business as usual” sprawl-driven development and one in which it shifted to compact development, prioritizing dense housing and mixed-use streets.

Contrasted to the sprawl model, compact development slashed the California’s hypothetical carbon footprint in half by reducing the miles traveled by vehicles by 10,500 and drove down the health care costs associated with inhaling smog and embracing a sedentary lifestyle. “Why not just stop polluting?” Calthorpe asked. “Why not use our feet and bikes more?”

The economic viability of compact development, he added, even has the potential to sway typically pro-vehicle and anti-regulation conservative policymakers.

And for an example of somewhere already in the midst of overhauling its development strategy, Calthorpe turned to China, whose model of sprawl–tall, densely located building blocks lacking mixed-use streets and opportunities for human interaction–has long been a threat to its sustainability goals. Calthorpe’s firm developed a set of seven principles for the country to apply to its cities: preserving natural ecologies; creating mixed-use and mixed-population neighborhoods; designing walkable streets and human-scale neighborhoods; promote biking; increase the connectivity of the road systems; develop efficient transit systems; and match density to transit capacity.

While China is in the process of integrating these principles into its cities, they’re guidelines that can and should be adopted worldwide. Only by promoting what works for humans and fostering social wellbeing, economic equality, and a sense of connectedness, will we stand a chance, as a global society, to fight climate change. “The way we shape cities is a manifestation of the kind of humanity we bring to bear,” Calthorpe said.

The Flint Water Crisis Is Far From Over: They Still Need New Pipes

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Three years ago, the city of Flint, Michigan, in search of a cheaper water supply, connected its system to the nearby Flint River. The switch was meant to be temporary; as such, officials neglected to treat the water flowing into the pipes to ensure it wouldn’t cause corrosion. Almost immediately, residents, 40% of whom live in poverty, took note of the strange taste and color of the water, but their complaints fell on deaf ears. By the time officials acknowledged that the water from the Flint River had corroded the pipes, high levels of lead had already seeped into the water supply of 100,000 people.

Residents became sick and children broke out in rashes. In one home, lead levels rose to 397 parts per billion–more than high enough to cause kidney damage, high blood pressure, and memory and neurological problems. The action level set by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is 15 parts per billion.

By last spring, the Flint water crisis had become national news. Criminal charges were filed against three officials for negligence, and Michigan Governor Rick Snyder outlined a plan for state agencies to make amends. Barack Obama journeyed to Flint and drank filtered tap water, and authorize $100 million from the EPA to be funneled toward fixing the pipes. Many assumed that Flint was taken care of, that the crisis was over.

“Things are not fine in Flint, and we’re going to deal with it ourselves.” [Photo: Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images]
It’s not. The EPA money was authorized by Obama, not current President Trump. While the initial $100 million will still make it to Flint, the EPA faces a potential budget cut of 31%, which constricts the possibility of further aid. As the situation stands currently, it will likely take three more years of navigating bureaucratic hurdles before Flint’s pipes are fixed. For the organization Green For All, which advocates for an inclusive green economy, that’s too long. In a Facebook live announcing the organizations fundraising campaign for Flint, called #FixThePipes, CNN moderator and Green For All founder Van Jones said, “Everybody thinks they had it fixed. If there’s anything called fake news, the news that everything is fine in Flint is the fakest of fake news. Things are not fine in Flint, and we’re going to deal with it ourselves.”

Launched on April 20, #FixThePipes aims to raise $500,000 to replace pipes in Flint homes; Green For All estimates the cost of fixing the water systems in a home to be around $10,000. The city’s whole system was affected by the corrosive water supply, but the service pipes–those connecting the main lines to the homes–were the most affected as they are made of lead, while the water mains are cast iron. The fundraising goal is not a ceiling, Vien Truong, Green For All’s director, tells Fast Company. The aim is to bypass the bureaucratic process, which Truong says lacks awareness of the urgency of the situation, and get as much money directly to Flint families as possible. Green For All will raise the money, Truong says, and work together with local organizations to decide the most effective use, whether it be toward coordinating teams of volunteers or picking up the bill for switching out the corroded pipes.

The aim is to bypass the bureaucratic process. [Photo: LindaParton/iStock]
When Flint headlines were dominating the national news last spring, Truong organized an advocacy effort through Green For All that brought celebrities like Mark Ruffalo and billionaire environmental activist Tom Steyer on board a campaign to petition Governor Snyder to change the pipes. On the ground, Truong heard from local groups like Flint Rising that what they needed was policy advice and financial support. “A year later, this still a crisis,” Truong says.

Through the #FixThePipes campaign, “we thought it was important to remind people that not only are the pipes in Flint not fixed, but the environmental justices are deeply profound in Flint, and in so many communities around the country that look like Flint,” Truong says. Truong lives in a zip code in the Fruitvale neighborhood of Oakland that, late last year, was shown to have worse lead poisoning than Flint.

In addition to the fundraising aspect of #FixThePipes, Green For All will use the campaign as an opportunity to share the stories of other communities affected by environmental injustice–which are often, like Flint, home to low-income residents of color. They will highlight the Vietnamese community in New Orleans, who suffered after the city moved a landfill onto their community green space after Hurricane Katrina hit, then watched as many among them lost their fishing jobs as a result of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010. They’ll share the story of the farm workers in California’s Central Valley, who are forced to work in fields filled with harmful pesticides. “What we’ve seen around the country is that communities are deeply poisoned and forgotten about, and the Trump slashes to the EPA budget are going to make everything worse,” Truong says.

#FixThePipes will be fundraising on an ongoing basis. “People in Flint feel forgotten,” Truong says. Green For All is working to ensure that they won’t be.

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