With $2 hotdogs, $2 sodas (with unlimited refills) and $5 beer, Mercedes-Benz Stadium will open this fall with the NFL’s lowest prices.

What: A one-take short film about a man who saves a woman’s life under unusual circumstances.

Who: Filmmaker Jim Cummings.

Why we care: Not all ‘in medias res’ beginnings are created equal. “It’s All Right, It’s Ok,” though, has one that’s a total stunner. It begins with some poolside CPR in progress. Only as the young girl who had apparently been drowning comes to, do viewers get the necessary background information that makes this short film so compelling. That’s when the man performing CPR is revealed to have a handcuff shackled to his right wrist, its twin dangling limply. Further factors of this situation are illuminated during the remainder of the film’s brief run time. What makes “It’s All Right” so impressive is how natural the exposition feels, given that the whole thing was filmed in one take. (Cummings says it took 18 takes to get it right.) It may not be as technically impressive a feat as the True Detective shootout or that Creed boxing match, but it packs an emotional wallop all the same.

[via Digg]

As the reality of Hurricane Harvey’s wreckage begins to set in, recovery efforts are being planned and people are asking for help. And crowdfunding platform GoFundMe has become one of the most ubiquitous websites for people to do just that. Currently on GoFundMe’s website there’s a link at the front page to “Support the victims of Hurricane Harvey,” which leads to a seemingly endless list of campaigns related to the disaster.

According to GoFundMe, over 850 Harvey campaigns have been made in the last week or so, and they have raised over $4.5 million. It seems the company is still taking its 7.9% cut (5% goes to GoFundMe and 2.9% goes to payment processing)–as well as its $0.30-per-donation fee. I asked the company and a spokesperson pointed me to a blog post detailing how it would handle the event and make sure donated money got into the right hands. The post said nothing about waving fees.

Not counting the $0.30-per-donation fee, the company has already made over $355,000 from Harvey’s destruction. Of course, this is GoFundMe’s entire business model, so it’s not surprising it wouldn’t waive the fee (unlike, say, Airbnb, which waived fees to coastal evacuees). The company has donated $100,000 to Hurricane Harvey relief efforts, which is what it did last year in the aftermath of the Orlando nightclub shooting.

As the destruction from Harvey’s aftermath piles up, so too will GoFundMe’s revenue.

Copywriter. Designer. Illustrator. Filmmaker. With how competitive the world has become, it’s no wonder why we’re obsessed with titles.

Focusing on a speciality makes you more appealing to employers and shows clearly where your skills lie. It’s easier to focus on doing one thing great. Yet a growing crop of research and anecdotal evidence suggests that spending time and energy on unrelated tasks, hobbies, and interests can actually supercharge our ability to learn and grow, making us even better at all our work.

Here’s the excuse you need to branch out and try something new:

The Specialist Versus The Generalist

From the day we start kindergarten, it seems, we’re told to pick a niche or a specialty. “Do you want to be a firefighter, or a doctor?” But that’s increasingly not how we work. As the And.co team found in their latest survey, 61% of freelancers “specialize” in two or three talents.

In a blog post for 99U, cognitive scientist Art Markman calls these people “Expert Generalists.” They’re often the best workers–they “have a wide variety of knowledge… [and] are able to use this knowledge to suggest new ways to look at problems [and] are also good at translating across areas of expertise.” The wider range of knowledge you have, the more dots you’ll have to connect.

Your Hobbies Create A “Ripple Effect” Of Learning

You probably think your hobby has no effect of the rest of your life. But according to San Francisco State University assistant psychology professor Dr. Kevin Eschleman’s study on the correlation between hobbies and job performance, that’s just not the case.

Related:5 Hobbies That Make People Better At Their Jobs 

Practicing your hobby “gives you a sense of mastery,” Eschleman explains. “You’re developing new skills, new thought processes and really challenging yourself to learn something new and develop your skill set.”

While Eschleman highlights yoga, improv, and playing team sports, the hobby with the most far-reaching benefits is learning to play an instrument. The benefits of learning an instrument run the gamut from improving your memory to keeping your brain healthy as you get older. Musical endeavours can also help with one of the most important workplace skills: writing.

For author Dani Shapiro, her childhood music lessons were “just as important as any writing workshop.” Those piano lessons prepared her for a lifetime of working with words. “The phrasing, the pauses, the crescendos, keeping time, the creating of shape, the coaxing out of a tonal quality. All of these are with me as I approach the page,” says Shapiro.

Your Weekend Side Hustle Amps You Up For The Workweek

Modern research shows that those people who spend time on passion projects are happier, work harder in general, and are actually 12% more productive than those who don’t have an outlet for their passion.

One example is Seattle-based digital marketer David Mulqueen, whose love of winter sports prompted him to open his own snowboard school side hustle on nights and weekends. Mulqueen explains how one benefits the other: “I think it makes me a more well-rounded individual; you take so much passion and pride into your side hustle that it energizes you, and that energy flows over into your day job.”

Your Unrelated Interests Open Your Mind To Innovative Ideas

So far, we’ve looked at practical skills like taking on a hobby or starting a side hustle, but what about the other completely unrelated interests you might have like watching anime, reading 1930s crime noir novellas or going to avant-garde art exhibits? Turns out, these can also have a positive effect on your work and creativity.

According to a study by University of Pennsylvania researcher Scott Barry Kaufman, high levels of openness to experience–or “the degree to which someone is willing to consider and experience new ideas”–can be related to creative output.

Related:How This 27-Year-Old Transformed His Side Project Into A Business 

The more rich and diverse experiences you have, the higher the likelihood of you creating something truly unique and innovative. Entrepreneur James Altucher gives the example of inventor Stan Weston, who took two seemingly unrelated interests, dolls and the army, to create the first “doll for boys” (The G.I. Joe action figure).

While they might seem completely unrelated to the work you do, those random interests combined with your day-to-day tasks can easily become the catalyst for uncovering something truly new and creative.

A 3-Step Guide To Setting Up Your Own Creative Cross-Training Routine

Hobbies and interests help. They just might be the creative spark you need. So how do you build them into your routine?

Here are a few ways to start creative cross-training:

1. Pick One Keystone Hobby, Hustle, Or Interest

Just like training for a marathon, your creative cross training needs to have some sort of order and system behind it. Just randomly plunking at a guitar once every few months won’t instantly make you a better writer.

In his book The Power of Habit, author Charles Duhigg suggests commiting to a keystone habit–a routine or system that you stick to no matter what. This could be writing 1,000 words a day, practicing piano for 20 minutes after dinner, spending your Sunday building your side hustle, or even going to an art show every week.

Related:How A Side Gig Can Be Your Key To Career Satisfaction

2. Work On More Than One Project At A Time

When creativity researchers Howard Gruber and Sara Davis looked at some of the world’s most successful creatives, they found a strong connection between their output and their tendency to work on multiple projects at once. Gruber and Davis have called this melting pot of different, sometimes seemingly unrelated projects a “network of enterprises,” which they say has four main benefits:

1. Multiple projects cross-fertilize. The benefits from doing one make their way to the other.
2. Switching between tasks keeps you excited and motivated.
3. Our ideas have a chance to incubate. While we’re paying close attention to one project, we may be unconsciously processing another (this is the basis of the “aha” moment that seems to always happen at the strangest times).
4. Each project in the network of enterprises provides an escape from the others.

3. Create Guidelines To Keep Your Multitasking Anxiety At Bay

With multiple interests and multiple projects on the go, it’s easy to never actually get anything done. There’s ample proof that we can’t really multitask.

So if you’re considering a creative cross-training routine, set it up with caution. Only take on as much as you feel you can realistically do. If you find yourself spiraling out of control stop, take a step back, and reassess your choices.

We all need a strong sense of focus to be able to do our best work. But denying ourselves hobbies, hustles, and other interests in the service of specialization can actually hold us back from doing our best.

The next time you feel a pang of guilt for spending time on something other than work, remember that you’re still moving forward.

The destination is the same, you’re just taking a new path.

A version of this article originally appeared on Zapier and is adapted with permission.

In the wake of Hurricane Harvey, Houston institutions are jumping in to to help their community. While some (notably Joel Osteen) seemed to take a few days to recognize the need, Mattress Mack immediately stepped up.

As the floodwaters rose, Houstonian Jim McIngvale, known as Mattress Mack, decided to turn his shop, Gallery Furniture, into a makeshift shelter, making all his showroom’s bedroom sets into real bedrooms. So he posted a video online and sent out a few tweets inviting anyone in need to come on over. He even gave out his personal phone number.

pic.twitter.com/fTAFZX5x7G

— MattressMack (@MattressMack) August 29, 2017

And they came by the hundreds to sleep on the recliners, love seats, sofas, and even mattresses, filling the stores he purposefully built to be flood-proof.

Our GF N FWRY & GF Grand PKWY stores are open for those in need. If you can safely join us, we invite you for shelter and food. God Bless. pic.twitter.com/IHHgjKmjMY

— MattressMack (@MattressMack) August 28, 2017

When people were trapped by flood waters and couldn’t make it to his stores, he turned his delivery trucks into rescue squads, sending out his drivers to save the stranded. Per CNN, his crews rescued around 200 people and brought them to his stores. McIngvale’s shops are now at capacity—he told NPR’s All Things Considered on Monday that 400 people were living at both of his stores.

McIngvale is an old hand at this—when Hurricane Katrina hit 12 years ago, he opened his stores to anyone seeking shelter. Now, locals are bringing donations to his stores, now an official shelter, and according to CNN, the store’s entrance is filled with neatly folded towels, shoes, clothes, and toys donated by locals to help those in need.

A Japanese tweeter claims his Twitter account was frozen after he made some serious death threats—against a mosquito.

According to SoraNews24, Twitter user @nemuismywife was assaulted by a mosquito and, solely in self defense, exacted his revenge. He then tweeted the carnage, probably as a warning to all future mosquitoes. SoraNews24 translated the rage-filled tweet: “Bastard! Where do you get off biting my all over while I’m just trying to relax and watch TV? Die! (Actually you’re already dead).” He accompanied the tweet with a photo of the mosquito’s squashed corpse.

Twitter responded to his threatening tweet with a notice that his account had been frozen for threats in violation of their terms of service. It’s likely that the tweet was flagged by an algorithm, instead of a human, proving that there’s at least one job that can’t be usurped by robots (or maybe algorithms are just really protective of mosquitos). While it’s nice that Twitter’s algorithm is protecting vicious bloodsucking insects, it could do more to protect women from vicious bloodsucking trolls.

The Trump presidency has caused nonprofit donations to surge, with more people giving in ways that protect social justice, equality, and women’s rights, all of which appear threatened by the administration’s agenda. So you might think that nonprofits themselves, flush with cash, might be staffing up quickly to take advantage of the climate and the financial infusion.

But according to a new report, while 51% of all nonprofits expect to increase their staff size in 2017, they might have trouble filling those roles with the best candidates. More than half of the sector doesn’t have a formal procedure in place to recruiting top talent, and most groups don’t see the need to change that either, according to the 2017 Nonprofit Employment Practices Survey, a report from Nonprofit HR, a human resources firm.

The analysis is built on a survey of 420 groups within the sector. While the number of organizations expecting to hire has actually climbed for the last few years, this year it didn’t. (See the chart below.) According to the report’s fine print, the number of organizations expecting to hire dropped 7% year-over-year, while it rose 4% among social enterprises in the private sector. And that changes the stakes of the hiring game a bit. It’s no longer nonprofit versus nonprofit. Not surprisingly, “nonprofits are facing increased competition for talent from the corporate sector, driven in part by the growth of . . . purpose-driven businesses,” notes the report.

As Fast Company has reported, many organizations face the sad paradox of supposedly being committed to a better world while struggling with internal racial bias and LGBT discrimination. The hiring report confirms that’s unlikely to change soon: Only 35% of these organizations have formal diversity, equity, and inclusion strategies, which would likely limit their ability to attract a diverse talent pool.

Toss in the fact nonprofit workers are generally underpaid compared to for-profit peers (NPO leaders make about 25% less across the board), and you’ve got an industry poised for disruption, and not necessarily in a good way. Here’s some free advice: “If your nonprofit hopes to keep up with increasing competition for talent, you must make the appropriate financial resources available to support your people,” the report notes.

Any pattern, any photo, any design. Right now, Vans can already do it, but it’ll take a little while and you’ll have to wait for it to land on your front door. But the brand has just unveiled a new, innovative machine that allows it to take any pattern, photo, or design and slap it on a pair of shoes in less than 15 minutes.

Check out the process from start to finished design in the exclusive video below.

The new machine is a natural extension of the brand’s long-running Customs program. In fact, now with its ability to bring unprecedented customization to people at events and in stores, the brand is harking back to its very beginning.

Vans vice-president of creative Jaime Reilly says it reflects how Vans builds its future in a way that is based on its past and staying true to who it is. “Heritage and innovation are linked, so one of the nice things about that is having this history of creative experimentation,” says Reilly.

The Customs program started the first day the brand opened its first store in Anaheim in 1966.”A customer walked into the shop on that first day, Paul Van Doren was there, and they wanted a different color of shoes than the ones he had,” says Reilly. “So Van Doren said, ‘Bring me the fabric you want your shoes made out of and I’ll make them for an extra 50 cents.'”

Director of innovation Safir Bellali says the Van’s overall innovation strategy is built around helping the brand deliver iconic products and experiences to enable and inspire creativity.

“This piece is one example of technologies we’re exploring as part of our commitment to creative expression,” says Bellali. “Understanding how big a role customization plays in enabling this commitment, it was natural for us to seek out ways to elevate the customization experience, remove barriers to creativity, and make the process more immediate.”

As more and more shoe brands offer their own versions of customization, Bellali says Vans aimed to find a way to not only offer people as many possible design options as possible, but to do as faster than anyone else.

“Everyone can customize product to a certain degree and with relative immediacy, what you don’t see out there is a process that allows you to customize your shoes with an all-over print of your choice in less than 15 minutes,” says Bellali.

They partnered with parent company VF Corporation’s Global Innovation Center and their advanced manufacturing team to develop a process to test the idea of on-the-spot customization and quickly learned its limitations. At that point, there were plenty of doubts the technology could work. “Instead my team got scrappy, got a new machine built, put it through end-to-end testing, got stoked, and kept going,” says Bellali.

Reilly says Vans has long taken its own inspiration from how people have customized their shoes. “The checkerboard is an iconic piece of Vans branding but it originally came from kids drawing on their shoes,” he says. “So this is just another cool way we can see what people want. The new machine fits into this as just another experiment to help us connect better with our customers and give them another platform for their own creativity and expression.”

By and large the tech companies of today don’t excel at hiring black, Latinx, and other professionals from minority backgrounds. These minority individuals often don’t have the connections to get hired in an ecosystem where it’s often who you know, not what you know, that gets you ahead.

It’s not that HR departments don’t want to make their companies more diverse. They’re just not always sure how to do it.

“The greatest challenge is the belief that there is a silver bullet,” says Laura Weidman Powers, founder of Code2040. “While many companies take a unique and nuanced approach to other aspects of their businesses, all too often they seek an out-of-box solution when it comes to diversity and inclusion.”

“Each company needs to look at its specific practices, attitudes, and norms and how these things may hinder or help the development of a diverse workforce,” says Powers. “We’re able to push back on this (one-size fits all) thinking through ongoing feedback generated in our student programs and the range of trainings and support we offer companies.”

Meeting the Needs of 2040

It hasn’t always been Powers’ mission to increase the number of minorities represented in the tech industry. In 2011, she was transitioning out of her old job when she noticed just how few people she met in the tech community at large were not white and male. This realization caught her attention so much that she knew she wanted to help change it.

“I’d noticed that when I went out to speak on panels, network at events, and when I read the daily tech blogs each morning, there appeared to be a significant lack of diversity in the field overall,” she says.

As it sunk in that by 2040 the population of the U.S. would be majority-minority, she saw that changing needs of the people could easily go unmet by the tech world.

“In 25 years, our country will look different. The consumer base will look different. The workforce will look different,” she says. “But these two trends are poised to interact in a way that could be debilitating. At the rate that we’re producing technologists, 70% of tech jobs will go unfilled in just five years.”

So Powers and her team designed multiple solutions to tackle the problem from different sides. Code2040 offers programs designed to help Black and Latino talent find “pathways to the innovation economy.” The goal is not only to deepen the pool of talent available to companies looking to hire diverse applicants, but also to simultaneously help companies make their cultures more inclusive.

The nonprofit offers its Fellows Program, a 10-week career accelerator that connects post-secondary black and Latinx computer science students with internships at top tech companies. It also has a “Tech Trek” program, which brings 50 Black and Latinx engineering students together from across the U.S. for an “alternative spring break” consisting of peer-bonding along with visits to tech companies.

Finally, Code240 will soon begin its Company Culture Transformation Program. Starting in the Fall of this year, the program offers diversity assessment, training, and coaching for partner companies.

“By being both student- and company-facing in our work, we are able to collect valuable data on industry hiring practices,” Powers says. “Additionally, our unique position of guiding students through the internship interview process allows Code2040 to ‘pattern spot’ what is and isn’t working at the companies we partner with and to provide them with solutions to improve their hiring process.”

When Demographics Flip

Part of what underscores Code2040’s work is that companies shouldn’t just want to change their hiring practices to look good. Demographics are actually changing, and organizations need to change too in order to cater to consumers. If they don’t, they may not survive.

“Companies struggle today to attract, hire, and retain the diverse talent that is already graduating from universities with technical expertise and the diverse talent that is already in the workforce. What happens when the demographics of emerging professionals are the flip of the demographics of established professionals?”

The country’s wage gap is also a concern for the folks at Code2040. With the average tech worker making more than the median household income of a black and a Latino family combined, it’s no wonder.

“Code2040 aims to close the wealth gap in the United States, and to advance racial equity in the workplace,” Powers says. “This challenge is also a tremendous opportunity. Because tech jobs aren’t just any jobs — they’re stable, high paying jobs. Ensuring better representation for communities of color in tech could have a huge impact on black and Latinx communities’ ability to build generational wealth.”

Beyond what having greater generational wealth will do for individual families, Laura believes the introduction of change into the system will strengthen the country as a whole.

“Ensuring that open roles in tech are filled with people from all backgrounds not only ensures companies have the best shot at success as America diversifies but also ensures families and communities with historically low access to wealth building opportunities can thrive as well, making the country as a whole stronger.”

Code2040 has doubled in size every year as an organization, currently with a team of about 25. It will work with more than 1,000 students and professionals and 50 different tech companies across their various programs this year. Around 90% of their fellows get return offers from summer employers, and 100% go on to work in tech. Several of their alums have founded their own tech companies.

“Our goal is to ensure that by the year 2040 Blacks and Latino/as are proportionally represented as technologists, investors, thought leaders, and entrepreneurs. We believe the tech sector, communities of color, and the country as a whole will be stronger if talent from all backgrounds is included in the creation of the companies, programs, and products of tomorrow.”

When Ivanka Trump took the stage at the Republican National Convention, she called her father, Donald Trump, a supporter of equal pay for women and said he would “fight for equal pay for equal work.” She also vowed to “fight for this, too, right alongside him.” But it turns out that doesn’t include actually supporting equal pay for women–at least as long as President Obama had anything to do with it.

Earlier this week, the Office of Management and Budget announced that it was not going to start collecting data under Obama-era rules that would have required companies with more than 100 employees to document how much they pay their workers, broken down by gender, race, and ethnicity. The program could have provided some hard data on pay discrimination in the hopes of combating it. Now its implementation has been halted–and that decision has Ivanka Trump’s blessing, as Newsweek reports.

“Ultimately, while I believe the intention was good and agree that pay transparency is important, the proposed policy would not yield the intended results,” Ivanka said in a statement per the Wall Street Journal. “We look forward to continuing to work with EEOC, [the Office of Management and Budget], Congress and all relevant stakeholders on robust policies aimed at eliminating the gender wage gap,” she added.

Equal rights advocates are calling foul. “This is not a technical tweak as they would have you believe. Make no mistake–it’s an all-out attack on equal pay,” said Fatima Goss Graves, president and CEO of the National Women’s Law Center in a statement. “Today’s action sends a clear message to employers. If you want to ignore pay inequities and sweep them under the rug, this Administration has your back.”

Pay discrimination is something that affects women across careers and across the nation: On average, women in the U.S. are paid 80 cents for every dollar men earn, according to federal data. The pay gap for women of color is even worse–Hispanic women earn 54 cents on the dollar, while black women make 63 cents.

Since her father took office, Trump has tried to position herself as an advocate for women in the workplace. In May, she released a leadership book, Women Who Work, which our Anjali Khosla said was sprinkled with “crumbs of Ivanka’s out-of-touchness.”

Today the public policy think tank New America found itself under fire over allegations that it fired a scholar who wrote a critical post about Google, which just happens to be one of the organization’s big donors. According to a statement from the think tank, “this claim is absolutely false.”

The story goes like this according to a New York Times report from this morning: Barry Lynn, a now-former New America employee, published a statement from New America that praised the EU for imposing an antitrust penalty on Google. Lynn’s statement, reportedly, didn’t sit well with Eric Schmidt, or with others at the organization. Ultimately, Lynn was fired.

The Times cites a few emails. One, sent to Lynn from New America president Anne-Marie Slaughter, details reasons for Lynn’s termination, saying it had nothing to do with the content of his work. In it, she said the scholar was “imperiling the institution as a whole.” In an earlier email sent about a conference Lynn was organizing–which Google was concerned about–Slaughter wrote: “We are in the process of trying to expand our relationship with Google on some absolutely key points … just THINK about how you are imperiling the funding for others.”

In its response, New America makes no mention of those emails, but it denies the report’s implication that Lynn was fired as a result of pressure from Google:

For the past two months, we have been working with Barry Lynn to spin out Open Markets as an independent program, as we have done with other programs, to preserve his leadership, keep the program together, and maintain a strong relationship with New America. As I reiterated to him in June, his repeated refusal to adhere to New America’s standards of openness and institutional collegiality meant that we could no longer work together as part of the same institution. I continued, however, to seek a cooperative solution with Barry; unfortunately, I have been unsuccessful.

Today, we made the difficult decision to terminate Barry Lynn. However, we are proud of the work Open Markets has done under his leadership and with the contributions of many others. We remain committed to continuing work on an open and competitive economy.

You can read the full rebuttal here.

Who’d have thought the voice of the resistance would belong to a talking horse?

As we begin to see the limits of Trump impersonation-based comedy, there’s a growing hunger for fresh political satire. The upcoming season of Netflix’s animated anthropomorphic sitcom, BoJack Horseman, turns out to be an unlikely but essential source for it.

The first three seasons of BoJack, the brainfoal of writer Raphael Bob-Waksberg and artist Lisa Hanawalt, mostly stayed out of government goings-on. Instead, the series, which follows the adventures of a washed-up horse-actor, stuck to its cornerstone themes of depression, failure, and Hollywood. Not anymore. Those familiar stomping grounds still get stampeded in season four, but they share space with a new political bent. While there are tiny nods to actual moments from the past year—Princess Caroline, a cat voiced by Amy Sedaris, wears a pussyhat at one point—overall, the message is timeless. Somehow, BoJack Horseman manages to pull off some of the most subtle, meaningful political satire of the Trump era.

[Warning: mild, general spoilers to follow]

The main story centers on Will Arnett’s title character reconnecting with his newly discovered secret daughter, voiced by Aparna Nancherla. An ongoing B-story, however, is a gubernatorial election that spans much of the season. Here, I would obviously make a “horserace” pun if the election subplot focused on BoJack. But the character running for governor is Mr. Peanutbutter, the Paul F. Tompkins-voiced lovable Labrador, who is endearingly dim.

At the top of the season, Mr. Peanutbutter is attempting to get California Governor Woodchuck Could Chuck Berkowitz–no relation to the author of this post–recalled to spur a special election. This plotline remains inexplicable until we meet Machiavellian campaign manager Katrina, who sees in Mr. Peanutbutter a useful idiot. Through a series of events too fun to spoil here, Mr. PB ends up in that special election with Berkowitz. The challenger quickly positions himself as an outsider, a populist candidate who will appeal to “regular schmoes like me who went to Northwestern,” as opposed to the current governor, who went to Dartmouth.

If it weren’t clear enough that Mr. Peanutbutter is supposed to be the most innocuous possible version of a Trumpian candidate, the lab’s fans start chanting his name in a menacingly zealous “Lock Her Up” cadence.

The show uses this election arc as a means to a number of fascinating, fruitful ends. It pokes fun at how malleable a candidate’s stance might be on important issues—like, say, fracking—in a way that’s as trenchant as just about anything Veep has done. It lays out the behind-the-scenes machinations of a candidacy, at one point using a Schoolhouse Rock-style interlude to explain how shady favors can be slipped into a bill.

Campaign Svengali Katrina even admits, in a way that would not seem out of place in the book, Devil’s Bargain: “[This election] is about hope and freedom, and powerful lobbyists who pay me to elect a governor I can control, so that we can get legislation passed that builds private prisons on what we now call protected wetlands.”

The season doesn’t just take aim at the main players in an election, it also sends up the institutions that help move these chess pieces across the board. The media gets its due as well, for instance. One segment from newsreading whale Tom Jumbo-Grumbo (of MSNBSea, naturally) is introduced thusly: “For the sake of fairness, we’ve brought on two experts with opposite opinions, who will now have equal time to just say those opinions, because that’s what news is.”

It’s a damning critique of the media-fueled false equivalency that helped usher America into its current cataclysmic state.

Elsewhere, the show satirizes the glacial pace of gun control. This subplot is unrelated to the election arc, but the way gun control is demonized here by an association with “a woman’s temperament” feels like a reaction to a popular line of attack against Clinton’s campaign.

The main thing BoJack’s political satire captures is the emptiness of it all; how nothing any candidate says may really matter, and by the time the electorate learns as much, it’s too late. Adapting a politically advantageous, environmentally unsafe position–in this case, on fracking–hits home here and has actual consequences. Mercifully, the show’s creative team packages its messages in a way that isn’t hella depressing.

By the end of the election arc, the show has become a fantasy about moving past the divisiveness in the country. It presents viewers with a zootopian ideal of how the election might have ended, but definitely never would have.

While some newly topical series smack of blood-in-the-water opportunism, BoJack’s political ambitions feel more organic. I got the feeling the writers were affected by the election, and channeled their outrage into a creative statement. Miraclulously, they managed to do so while remaining true to BoJack’s essence, and without ever taking viewers out of the show. It won’t overthrow the government, but it’ll get you through the day.

The heads of more than 100 of the world’s top artificial intelligence companies are very alarmed about the development of “killer robots.” In an open letter to the UN, these business leaders—including Tesla’s Elon Musk and the founders of Google’s DeepMind AI firm—warned that autonomous weapon technology could be misused by terrorists and despots or hacked to perform in undesirable ways.

But the real threat is much bigger—and not just from human misconduct, but from the machines themselves. The research into complex systems shows how behavior can emerge that is much more unpredictable than the sum of individual actions. On one level this means human societies can behave very differently to what you might expect just looking at individual behavior. But it can also apply to technology. Even ecosystems of relatively simple AI programs—what we call stupid, good bots—can surprise us, and even when the individual bots are behaving well.

The individual elements that make up complex systems, such as economic markets or global weather, tend not to interact in a simple linear way. This makes these systems very hard to model and understand. For example, even after many years of climatology, it’s still impossible to make long-term weather predictions. These systems are often very sensitive to small changes and can experience explosive feedback loops. It is also very difficult to know the precise state of such a system at any one time. All these principles—which apply to large groups of individuals acting in their own way, whether that’s human societies or groups of AI bots—make these systems intrinsically unpredictable.

My colleagues and I recently studied one type of a complex system that featured good bots used to automatically edit Wikipedia articles. These different bots are designed and exploited by Wikipedia’s trusted human editors and their underlying software is open-source and available for anyone to study. Individually, they all have a common goal of improving the encyclopedia. Yet their collective behavior turns out to be surprisingly inefficient.

These Wikipedia bots work based on well-established rules and conventions, but because the website doesn’t have a central management system there is no effective coordination between the people running different bots. As a result, we found pairs of bots that have been undoing each other’s edits for several years without anyone noticing. And of course, because these bots lack any cognition, they didn’t notice it either.

The bots are designed to speed up the editing process. But slight differences in the design of the bots or between people who use them can lead to a massive waste of resources in an ongoing “edit war” that would have been resolved much quicker with human editors.

Related: This Chatbot Helps Refugees Prepare For Asylum Interviews

We also found that the bots behaved differently in different language editions of Wikipedia. The rules are more or less the same, the goals are identical, the technology is similar. But in German Wikipedia, the collaboration between bots is much more efficient and productive compared to, for example, Portuguese Wikipedia. This can only be explained by the differences between the human editors who run these bots in different environments.

Exponential Confusion

Wikipedia bots have very little autonomy and the system already operates very differently to the goals of individual bots. But the Wikimedia Foundation is planning to use AI that will give more autonomy to the bots. That will likely lead to even more unexpected behavior.

Another example is what can happen when two bots designed to speak to humans interact with each other. We’re no longer surprised by the answers given by artificial personal assistants such as the iPhone’s Siri. But put several of these kind of chatbots together and they can quickly start acting in surprising ways, arguing and even insulting each other.

The bigger the system becomes and the more autonomous each bot is, the more complex and hence unpredictable the future behavior of the system will be. Wikipedia is an example of large number of relatively simple bots. The chatbots example is a small number of rather sophisticated and creative bots. In both cases, unexpected conflicts emerged. The complexity and therefore unpredictability increases exponentially as you add more and more individuals to the system. So, in a future system with a large number of very sophisticated robots, the unexpected behavior could go beyond our imagination.

Self-Driving Madness

For example, self-driving cars promise exciting advances in the efficiency and safety of road travel. But we don’t yet know what will happen once we have a large, wild system of fully autonomous vehicles. They may well behave very differently to a small set of individual cars in a controlled environment. And even more unexpected behavior might occur when driverless cars “trained” by different humans in different environments start interacting with each other.

Humans can adapt to new rules and conventions relatively quickly but can still have trouble switching between systems. This can be way more difficult for artificial agents. If a “German-trained” car was driving in Italy, for example, we just don’t know how it would deal with the written rules and unwritten cultural conventions being followed by the many other “Italian-trained” cars. Something as common as crossing an intersection could become lethally risky because we just wouldn’t know if the cars would interact as they were supposed to or whether they would do something completely unpredictable.

Now think of the killer robots that Elon Musk and his colleagues are worried about. A single killer robot could be very dangerous in the wrong hands. But what about an unpredictable system of killer robots? I don’t even want to think about it.

Taha Yesseri is a research fellow in Computational Social Science, Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford. This essay originally appeared at The Conversation. 

Immigration and Customs Enforcement reports that people are pretending to work for the agency and telling people in Texas to evacuate their homes in the wake of Hurricane Harvey, possibly in order to burglarize their homes once they’re empty. The federal agency says it’s not conducting immigration enforcement activity in the affected area while relief efforts are taking place.

Yesterday, emergency management officials warned about fake emergency workers charging for their services and began tamping down on rumors that immigration officers were detaining people at shelters. The mayor of Houston—which is home to over half a million undocumented immigrants—even vowed to personally defend any of those residents from immigration action.

ICE agents & officers carry official badges and/or credentials which members of the public can ask to see & verify https://t.co/35WqtXAqEHpic.twitter.com/pcjaajDr3z

— ICE (@ICEgov) August 30, 2017

Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo says would-be burglars are also impersonating local police, Reuters reports. Mayor Sylvester Turner has ordered a curfew in the city, telling people to stay off the streets between midnight and 5 a.m. to deter criminals.

At least 14 looters have already been arrested in the affected area, Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg reports. Anyone committing crime in a declared disaster area in Texas can face heightened penalties, with home burglars facing jail sentences of five years to life in prison.

“People displaced or harmed in this storm are not going to be easy prey,” Ogg said in a statement posted to Twitter.

To volunteer or donate to relief efforts, visit the National Voluntary Organizations Active In Disaster and see a list of other organizations here.

Related: How Houston Can Become More Resilient To Future Floods

The average age of an American farmer is now 58.3–a number that’s been increasing for three decades. About 40% of farmers are 65 and over. And fewer younger people are entering the profession than ever before. The last census from the U.S. Department of Agriculture shows the number of “new farmers” (defined as being on the job less than 10 years) fell by about 20% between 2007 and 2012.

While many young people are attracted to working the land and giving up dizzy-making urban lives, they’re also likely put off by prohibitively high startup costs. That’s according to Shawn Williamson, an accountant in St. Louis, Missouri, who recently carried out an in-depth analysis of what it would cost to set up a farm from nothing. The answer: an amount of money that makes the idea of creating a more robust independent farming economy seem impossible.

Williamson himself owns several farm properties (which he rents out). Recently he was thought-experimenting with some friends about what it would cost to set up an agricultural operation from scratch. That is, a farm that actually produces a decent income–say enough for a family of four to live comfortably (at least $50,000 a year).

Williamson estimated and collated the figures in twoarticles for the site Successful Farming. He worries that the costs for young people coming into the industry are too high, and that farming isn’t replenishing its stock of practitioners, so America can produce the affordable food it needs.

“Where’s a young guy or gal going to get $5 million or $3 million to be a farmer?,” he says in an interview. “Even if they do it gradually, how are they going to pull that off over 10 or 20 years? It’s a coming, quiet, slow moving emergency, I think. When you have the average farmer in his upper fifties and not many people coming behind, all of sudden there aren’t any farmers anymore.”

Williamson thinks it would actually be impossible for someone to borrow $5 million, just like that, to start a farm. “They would almost never do it that way because they couldn’t. No bank would say, ‘Oh, you have a million dollars, I’ll loan you four more, on a wing and a prayer,” he says.

Luckily, not many farms are started with an outright purchase of land and equipment and everything else. Williamson estimates 70% to 80% of farm-starts are family affairs–for instance, where Dad gives his sons some land to work with and his equipment on-loan. The other type of new farms, he says, are more recreational. For example, when biology, math or ag teachers acquire land over several years, eventually turning to full-time farming in semi-retirement. Again, this is backed up by census statistics. Of 2.1 million farm households in the U.S., 1.5 million earn less than 25% of their income from farming.

Land prices are a big reason farming is becoming more expensive. Farms in, say, Central Illinois, a prime area, have been changing hands at $17,000 an acre, four times their value in 1979. “A lot of prime farm land has gone from $5,000 to $10,000 an acre, or four to eight, in the last few years,” Williamson says. The prices are attracting Wall Street, which sees that it can make more money in the Midwest than in the stock market.

Young farmers who’ve tried the life caution others from entering the profession. Most small farmers operate at a loss. But, if there’s going to be a shortage of farmers, perhaps the economics will switch around in the future. “There’s probably a lot of opportunity for smart ambitious young people in the coming decades because of a lack of competition,” Williamson says.

If Ticketmaster’s Verified Fan program is supposed to thwart scalpers, you wouldn’t know it from looking at StubHub or Craigslist today. Tickets to Bruce Springsteen’s stint on Broadway are going for a few thousand dollars a pop–some have reported prices as high as $9,000–despite Ticketmaster’s anti-scalping program. After tickets (quite predictably) sold out within minutes, they started popping up on secondary ticketing sites almost immediately. Springsteen has extended his one-man show by 10 weeks in response to the crazy demand.

Verified Fan requires wannabe concertgoers to pre-register to buy tickets and then uses a proprietary, algorithm-driven system that assesses whether or not each user is a real fan, as opposed to a scalper. The controversial feature is primarily designed to keep bulk-purchasing software bots from sweeping up tickets en mass when events go on sale. But evidently, they’re not so great at keeping old-fashioned, flesh-and-blood ticket scalpers at bay.

@springsteen Ticketmaster duped me & Springsteen again!! Verified 37 yr. fan, no code, but Stub Hub got hundreds for EVERY PERFORMANCE, WTF!

— Dori St. George (@DoriStGeorge) August 30, 2017

For months, students around the country have been putting pressure on their universities to cut ties with Nike over what they describe as unfair labor practices at the company’s factories.

Last December, 17 Georgetown students took part in a sit-in in the office of the president to demand that the university end its licensing agreement with Nike at the end of 2016, when it was set to expire. One particular sticking point was that Nike would not allow the Worker Rights Consortium (WRC), an independent monitoring group, into its factories. As a result of the protest, Georgetown did not renew the contract which meant it stopped ordering university-branded Nike apparel.

Similar scenarios have been unfolding at universities across the country. Last May, the University of California Berkeley switched its sponsorship from Nike to Under Armour in a 10-year agreement worth $86 million. One condition of the new contract was that licensees “give the University or its Licensing Agent(s) and/or NGOs free and full access to all facilities, materials, and records that may be relevant to such investigation.” And just a few months ago, Northeastern University allowed its licensing contract with Nike to expire until the brand commits to “timely, expeditious, and unrestricted access for the university designated monitor, the Worker’s Rights Consortium.”

But the tide might be turning, with a major concession by Nike as part of a new deal that demonstrates the clout of university athletic systems and the impact of the protests. After months of negotiations, Nike and Georgetown have negotiated a new retail licensing agreement that allows the WRC formal access to collegiate licensing factories whenever there are reports of problems. This is a breakthrough, since student protests have often focused on Nike’s resistance to letting independent monitors enter factories.

To settle their differences, Georgetown brought in an expert mediator, Don Edwards, CEO of the Justice and Sustainability Associates, who helped the university, Nike, and the WRC talk everything out and arrive at a new contract. A team led by Nike’s COO, Eric Sprunk, participated in the conversation, and reported directly to CEO Mark Parker.

“I think it’s fair to say that we weren’t in a good place collectively at the beginning of the summer,” says Hannah Jones, Nike’s chief sustainability officer and VP of Nike Innovation Accelerator, who was intimately involved with the negotiation. “There had been a breakdown in trust and communication. We had spent too much time responding to one another by letter, instead of sitting in a room together to reset and talk things out.”

To seal the deal, Nike demanded that the WRC keep ongoing investigations confidential to give the company an opportunity to fix potential problems. The monitoring group also agreed to provide a list of all the brands that are making products at a given factory, rather than just calling out Nike. “There’s a period of time in which confidentiality is critical,” says Jones. “It is important that when they do talk about it in the public, to remain objective and neutral, rather than conflictual.”

From the WRC’s perspective this is a big win. “We’re obviously pleased with the creation of this protocol because it gives us the access we need inside these collegiate factories,” says Scott Nova, executive director of the WRC. “That’s important because the WRC is the monitor that operates globally entirely independently of the brands. We receive no corporate funding and no governance by the brands.”

The deal also requires Nike to abide by a set of labor code standards laid out by IMG College Licensing, a body that helps many universities manage their licensing agreements. Often universities have their own particular code of conduct for licensees, but Nike has argued that is is not feasible for it to abide by a wide range of labor codes stipulated by dozens of partner institutions across its more than 500 factories worldwide.

This agreement represents a new model, in which a third party–in this case, IMG College Licensing–creates a standard that all parties can work with, one that other universities may emulate. “We hope that this sets a benchmark for how we can operate with colleges across our licensing base,” says Jones. “The protocol gives clarity to everybody, which makes this scalable and repeatable.”

The University of Texas, which has a licensing contract with Nike, has been observing these discussions closely. “These conversations between Georgetown and Nike have helped set up some protocols of how the WRC will work with licensees,” says Jeff Orth, the associate athletics director for strategic relations at the University of Texas. “I think it will help clarify procedure, but don’t want to overstate it’s impact. It’s an evolving scenario, as we look at the challenges we face with the factories, factory owners, the location and access to the factories, and the cultural matters that can come into play.”

Georgetown, for its part, was very committed to breaking through the gridlock. The president’s office led the discussion but it brought in student activists, who sat on a committee that had a voice at the table. “Georgetown has a long relationship with Nike that goes back 35 years,” says Meghan Dubyak, Georgetown’s associate VP for strategic communications and public affairs. “Our position was that if Georgetown just walked away, it would prevent our institution from having influence on the improvement of worker’s conditions.”

Though it represents a step forward, some experts have concerns about the contract. Ellen Staurowsky, a professor of sport management at Drexel University who was not privy to the discussions, is concerned that IMG College Licensing (IMGCL) may not be the best organization to establish a standardized code of conduct for brands to abide by. “The proof is going to be in the details,” says Staurowsky. “IMG has an enormous stake in this game in terms of their corporate interests, so one of the questions that will be raised is whether IMG is really a distinguishable third party.”

Staurowsky point out that IMGCL makes its money from licensing agreements and has been working with Nike for decades, so it is invested in ensuring that Nike is able to continue to work with universities.

That said, the WRC, which has seen IMGCL’s codes, finds them effective. “I can tell you the standards themselves are strong,” says Nova. “IMGCL’s codes are now binding instruments. The model of binding standards coupled with independent monitoring has helped create real improvements for workers at these factories.”

Nonetheless, Staurowsky says this agreement has the potential to move the needle in terms of workers rights. “This agreement could potentially address the substantive issues about labor that have been concerns for decades,” she says. “Allowing the WRC to monitor these plants is a significant step forward. The fact that all of these parties are now putting on paper labor expectations that can be reviewed by the public, is a big improvement.”

This contract may also have a positive impact on worker’s rights more broadly. “It’s such a mammoth task to get your arms around the constellation of factories around the world producing products for colleges,” says Michael Posner, director of the center of business and human rights at NYU Stern School of Business, and the board chair with the Fair Labor Association. “The fact that Georgetown and the WRC have agreed to this new protocol with Nike is a very useful supplement to what organizations like the Fair Labor Association are doing more broadly to tackle worker’s rights.”

The Home button on the bottom of the iPhone is as old as the iPhone itself, and has always been central to operating the device. On current phones it’s used for turning on the display, authentication, app navigation, activating mobile payments, talking to Siri, and returning to the home screen. Even when you’re not quite sure how to get to this function or that, a press on the Home button is at least a good start.

Now, like the headphone jack before it, the Home button is reportedly going away–at least on one of the phones Apple is expected to announce in September.

Apple, Bloomberg‘s Mark Gurman reports, will instead use a new software bar at the bottom of the screen of the forthcoming top-of-the-line iPhone (possibly called the iPhone 8) as the focal point of some new screen gestures to accomplish at least some of the classic Home button functions. Users may swipe up on the bar to open the phone. They might use some other gesture to view and switch among the apps they have open.

One of the core functions of the Home button, fingerprint sensing for authentication and security, probably can’t be handled in the new software bar. Apple will likely have to place the Touch ID sensor on the back of the phone, or, as rumors have suggested, do away with Touch ID altogether and rely on a facial recognition laser and sensor on the front of the phone to identify users.

Either way, the removal of Touch ID from the front of the iPhone represents a fundamental change to the way we’ll use the device. The fingerprint sensor is used not only to secure data on the phone itself but also to secure mobile payments via Apple Pay and in apps like Uber.

Will people who have used iPhones for years be able to get used to all this? It might not be easy for some. For a while at least, I will likely find myself absent-mindedly pressing on the bottom front of the new phone to wake it up or find an app I want.

A Trade-off

Apple may not have set out to get rid of the Home button. But its importance was overridden by the desire to cover almost the entire front of the new iPhone with an OLED display, allowing the company to put a screen similar in size to that of the iPhone 7 Plus (or even bigger) in the smaller form factor of the iPhone 7.

Apple, a trusted source told me, tried for months to place a Home button sensor beneath the OLED screen on the front of the new phone, but could find no reliable way of doing so. It also considered placing the Home button on the back of the phone, but–if Gurman is right–apparently settled on the new software bar at the bottom of the display.

As for Touch ID, it’s anybody’s guess how Apple plans to relocate those functions to some other part of the phone. Samsung also removed the Home button from its new Galaxy S8 phones, and, like Apple, tried to build the fingerprint reader underneath the display on the front of the phone, failed, and ended up placing the sensor on the back of the phone near the camera. This ended up being one of the few design flaws in the S8–placing one’s finger on the sensor high on the back of a large phone feels awkward, and it’s too easy to accidentally smudge the camera lens. Let’s hope Apple finds a better solution.

Design challenges often become opportunities. After a period of getting used to the absence of the Home button, we may begin to appreciate gesturing for Home button functions rather than pressing for them. And here’s hoping that any new optical facial recognition technology on the front of the phone will offer authentication that’s as secure and easy to use as TouchID.

Another consequence of the edge to edge display is the need for a small inlet hanging down at the top of the display to accommodate the front-facing camera and possibly some facial recognition sensors. The Bloomberg report says Apple has designed the user interface around this inlet, placing information like cellular reception, Wi-Fi signal, time, and battery life to the left and right of the camera and sensor tab.

Apple is expected to announce the no-home-button iPhone along with two other models at a press event later this month. The company will also reportedly announce a new Apple Watch with a cellular radio and a new Apple TV that supports 4K video.

Since the first version of Nest’s Learning Thermostat debuted back in 2011, it’s sold for the same list price: $249. But according to Maxime Veron, Nest’s director of product marketing, the original pitch deck the company put together when it was seeking funding talked about a thermostat that would sell for significantly less than that. It’s just that it was hard to pull off what Nest was attempting to do while simultaneously hitting a low price point.

Six years later, Nest is finally ready to add to its thermostat lineup with a model designed with cost-conscious consumers in mind. Already the subject of scuttlebutt and leaks, it’s called the Nest Thermostat E. Veron says that the “E” stands for “everyone”—along with “Earth,” “energy savings,” and “everywhere.” It sells for $169, though rebates offered by utilities can drive the effective price down. (In Chicago, Veron says, a consumer who takes advantage of every available offer can essentially get one for free.) The price point puts it in range of “connected thermostats,” which typically sell for up to $150 and aren’t as smart and sensor-laden as Nest’s models and its direct competitors from companies such as Ecobee.

A lot hasn’t changed about the new thermostat, which runs the same software, talks to the same mobile app, and offers nearly all the same features as the current version of its $249 big brother. (The one thing it doesn’t do is show the current time and weather in views you can glance at from across the room.) Like all previous Nest thermostats, it’s round, with an LCD display in the middle and an interface you control by twisting an outer ring.

Aesthetically, though, the E is a signficant departure. It’s made of white polycarbonite (i.e., nice plastic) rather than metal, which Nest has tried to give a ceramic-like feel. And the company put a light gray polarizing filter in front of the LCD, giving the display a gauzy, subdued look rather than the crisp, smartphone-like appearance of its previous screens.

Like previous Nests, the new one is designed to be user-installable, with a push-button system for connecting wires that doesn’t require you to use a screwdriver. It’s compatible with 85% of home HVAC systems, down from 95% for the higher-end version. (Veron says that the reduction isn’t as much of a problem as it might sound, since the 10% of systems that work with the $249 model but not the $169 one are advanced ones of the sort found in households that are more likely to buy the top-of-the-line thermostat anyhow.)

Slideshow: Nest Thermostat E.

Overall, Nest’s goal with the Thermostat E is to build something that appeals to people who are interested in reducing energy costs rather than gadget enthusiasts who want everyone to notice they own a high-tech thermomstat. In fact, Nest isn’t marketing the new model as a “Learning Thermostat,” even though it’s just as smart as the costlier version. Its intelligent approach to adjusting the temperature based on factors like whether anyone’s at home can save a typical household $131 to $145 a year, Nest estimates, based on the big data it’s collected from all those thermostats it’s sold.

“The target customer for this is people who have other things to do besides talk about their thermostat,” says Veron. “We want to focus on benefits.”

Fader magazine and creative agency Cornerstone cofounders Rob Stone and Jon Cohen believe that creating and influencing culture is what has kept them ahead of the ever-changing game.