If you have, well, a phone number, you’ve probably received a robocall before. It was likely one of those annoying calls from an unknown number featuring a computer voice badgering you about some stupid service you supposedly need to buy. If you’ve been noticing more and more of these correspondences, you’re not alone.

Data backs this up too. According to the voicemail and call-blocking services company YouMail, the volume of robocalls increased 50% from February to July, reports NBC News.

It’s also not you that’s causing this influx, but perhaps your area code. Certain regions receive markedly more robocalls than others. The Georgia area code 404 received the most, with people getting an average 68.9 calls during the month of September. After that is Washington, D.C.’s 202 and Louisiana’s 225 area codes.

It’s true, some of these calls aren’t bad. The robot calling you to remind you to pick up your prescription at Walgreen’s technically counts as a robocall, but the number of spammy ones is huge. According to the data, 40% of the 4.4 billion robocalls made in the U.S. during September were from scams. That’s 1.76 billion robocalls in one month.

Even if you put yourself on a Do Not Call list, illegal spammers can still very easily push robocalls your way. Carriers and tech companies are trying to figure out ways to crack down on the problem, but no real fix has been made yet. Let’s hope the volume goes down soon.

You can read the full report here.

Gilbert Passin, the company’s vice president of manufacturing, has left the company. Passin’s departure is just the latest in a string of high-level execs abandoning the company in the last 12 months. But the thing about Passin’s departure is no one seems to be certain of just when he left.

Business Insiderfirst reported on Passin’s departure yesterday, citing a source familiar with the matter. The site noted that emails sent to his Tesla email bounced back as well. Yet Passin’s LinkedIn page says he’s still with the company. Sure, maybe he’s just forgotten to update his profile.

However, CNBC is reporting about a source who says Passin left Tesla months ago. In an email to CNBC a Tesla spokesperson said, “We’re not confirming, denying, or commenting on personnel matters.”

Passin had been with the company for nine years during which time he helped to launch the manufacturing of the Model S. Other execs beside Passin who have left the company in the last year include Tesla’s VP of engineering Doug Field, chief accounting officer Dave Morton, and chief people officer Gaby Toledano.

Facebook has tentatively concluded that a hack last month that resulted in data of up to 30 million users being stolen was likely pulled off by spammers and not a nation-state, according to the Wall Street Journal. The Journal is citing sources familiar with Facebook’s investigation. The group behind the attack are believed to be a collection of Facebook and Instagram spammers that present themselves as a digital marketing company.

It was originally believed that up to 50 million users had some of their details stolen before Facebook revised that number down to 30 million. Of the users who did have their data accessed, Facebook says 14 million of them had sensitive details like their names, contact info, recent location check-ins, and more accessed. Another 15 million users only had their name and contact info accessed, while the final 1 million users just had their access tokens stolen–digital passes that let a user log in to their account without needing to type in a password. As a precaution, Facebook has reset the access tokens of all affected users.

This week, at the research institute AI Now‘s annual symposium, experts debated some of the most critical issues in society through the lens of AI. The event brought together law and politics professors, lawyers, advocates, and writers to discuss how we as a community can ensure that the technology doesn’t destabilize justice and equity.

For the audience, the discussions offered a compelling introduction to the false claims and ethical dilemmas that surround AI right now. It was a valuable primer for anyone, from designers who are starting to work with machine learning to users who simply have questions about the way their data is being used in society.

Here are four insights about how all of us–from developers to designers to users alike–can see more clearly through the hype. They cast a skeptical eye on the AI’s true abilities, its efficiency-oriented value systems, and the way technology companies are approaching ethics.

AI is not neutral

Virginia Eubanks, associate professor of political science at SUNY Albany, studies how algorithms impact the way welfare is distributed in the U.S. for those living below the poverty line. In her book Automating Inequality, Eubanks explores how algorithms are brought in to decide who is worthy of receiving benefits and who is not.

While they provide a veneer of neutrality and efficiency, these tools are built on what she calls the “deep social programming of the United States”–discrimination against poor people, racial discrimination, gendered discrimination.

“Particularly in my work in public services, these tools get integrated under the wire. We see them as being administrative changes, not as consequential political decisions,” she says. “We have to reject that they’re just creating efficiencies . . . It buys into this idea that there’s not enough for everyone. But we live in a world of abundance, and there is enough for everyone.”

In other words, AI might sound “efficient” on the surface–after all, machines are supposed to be impartial–but in practice, it’s anything but. Chances are, it’s simply faster at making decisions that are rife with the same systemic injustices. Beware of any claim that AI is neutral.

“AI” usually relies on a lot of low-paid human labor

If someone claims their product, service, or app is using AI, don’t necessarily believe it. AI is often used as a marketing tool today–and obscures the humans who are really doing the work.

“So much of what passes for automation isn’t really automation,” says writer and documentarian Astra Taylor. She describes a moment when she was waiting to pick up her lunch at a cafe, and another customer walked in, awestruck, wondering aloud how the app knew that his order was ready 20 minutes early. The woman behind the counter just looked at him and said, “I just sent you a message.”

“He was so convinced that it was a robot,” Taylor says. “He couldn’t see the human labor right in front of his eyes.”

She calls this process fauxtomation: “Fauxtomation renders invisible human labor to make computers seem smarter than they are.”

Don’t just talk about ethics–think about human rights

“Ethics” has become the catchall term for thinking about how algorithms and AI are going to impact society. But for Philip Alston, a law professor at NYU who is currently serving as the UN Human Rights Council’s Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, the term is too fuzzy.

“In the AI area we’re well accustomed to talking about inequality, the impact of automation, the gig economy,” Alston says. “But I don’t think the human rights dimension comes in very often. One of the problems is that there’s neglect on both sides. The AI people are not focused on human rights. There’s a tendency to talk about ethics which is undefined and unaccountable, conveniently. And on human rights side, it’s out of our range.”

In a 2017 report, Alston documented his travels across the U.S. studying extreme poverty. He questions whether policy makers are giving enough thought to how the use of machine learning technology is impacting the most vulnerable people in the country–and if it is violating human rights. “It is extremely important for an audience interested in AI to recognize that when we take a social welfare system and . . . put on top of it ways to make it more efficient, what we’re doing is doubling down on injustices,” he says.

Despite rhetoric that claims AI will solve a host of human ills, we have to be careful it doesn’t enable or exacerbate them first.

If you’re designing with AI, ask yourself these questions

Eubanks says she often is asked for a “five-point plan to build better tech.”

While she doesn’t think that tech is the answer to the problem of policy (instead, “we need to move toward political systems that act like universal floors not moral thermometers”), there are a few questions she always asks designers to think about as they’re building technology.

1. Does this tool increase the self-determination and dignity of the people it targets?
2. If it was aimed at someone other than poor people, would it be acceptable?

While these questions are tailored toward Eubanks’s focus on welfare distribution algorithms, the first, in particular, is a question that every designer should be asking of their work. When you’re trying to help people using technology, you need to ensure, first and foremost, that your tool is going to affirm the self-determination and dignity of your users.

“I like getting lost, I like that shit. Exploring, makin’ a left turn.”

Wearing a red Louis Vuitton cabana shirt, open-toed Golf sandals of his own design, and a bucket hat, Tyler, the Creator cruises his McLaren 675 through Los Angeles while appreciating the view from the port side.

“There’s just a different tone of yellow in the sky today,” he says. Northern California’s wildfires have given everything a permanent tinge of the golden hour. “It’s been like this all day. It’s weird. Like, it’s probably me and five other people who notice it too.”

Tyler weaves between cars and curses at speed-limit-abiding minivans and a stalled pickup truck looking like a haute Gilligan while gleefully singing along with every song that plays on his iPhone. It’s a mix of soul-funk and old-school hip-hop, plus some lovely contemporary stuff. Pure Pleasure. Blackstreet. Janet. John Legend. He cues trumpets with a slick point of his finger, accentuates bass drops by jutting out his chin. Fans spot him from the sidewalk or nearby cars and shout, “Tyler!”

“There’s a lot of ’70s music on this playlist,” I say, sure I can almost hear the warm, retro chords of his Grammy-nominated 2017 album, Flower Boy, somewhere in this mix.

“Oh, it’s just on shuffle,” Tyler says dismissively. He then flips quickly between a few tracks, turns the stereo to max, and I hear the ominous first notes of “Freeee” by Kanye West and Kid Cudi. That’s when, as if by his own will, L.A. traffic drains away, and Tyler floors it.

The engine crescendos into a whir that competes with the speakers, and the world blurs. With each guitar riff, Tyler yanks the steering wheel like a mixer, zigzagging the car in an angry staccato. His face has transformed from L.A.’s charming cruise director into the mutineer who points the ship straight into the iceberg just to hear the sound of the crash. With his eyes wide, he turns to me and shouts along with the track, “I feel freeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!”

As he pulls the car into a strip-mall doughnut shop, he confesses, “I don’t get this shit called anxiety. I guess it’s when someone’s nervous.”

“But uh, when I was driving like that, were you nervous?”

This is the A side, B side of Tyler Okonma, aka Tyler, the Creator. He’s high-octane, high-fructose. The 27-year-old rapper-producer-director-comedy writer–fashion designer–festival organizer is a polarizer and a crowd-pleaser. He’s a human fidget spinner, and a prolific artist with a keen attention to detail. He’s a provocateur who gleefully shares his favorite YouTube clip of an anaconda eating a vomiting dog, and an asthmatic with a dog allergy who can’t help but pet the nearest puppy. He’s an artist banned in the U.K., in part, because of homophobic lyrics, and yet he has an increasingly open penchant for men himself.

Tyler has released four singles this year and is working on more new music; he’s expanding his relationship with Converse (his first five critically lauded collections sold out); he’s significantly increasing the number of products that his own fashion label, Golf Wang, will release in the coming year, and likely launching a Golf Home line in 2019. This past summer, he signed an exclusive, first-look deal with Sony to make new TV shows, and season 2 of his cartoon series, The Jellies, will air on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim next year. He’s worked with composer Danny Elfman on an original song that’ll appear in the film adaptation of The Grinch that hits theaters November 9. He also stars as a bedsheet ghost in one of several music videos he’s directed this year, which definitely counts for something.

By crossing so many artistic boundaries at once, Tyler is also able to connect with his young fans in a way that they crave. They don’t want him to be just a musician or an influencer. They don’t want him to be just a spokesperson. They’re embracing his unique perspective. For the business executives who want to work with someone like Tyler—and more and more do—the old ways of corporate sponsorships no longer apply. “My core is to explore,” Tyler says. “That curiosity, people lose that, because they think they know everything.” Brands that work with him must prepare to strap in.

Anxiety optional.

“People love when I’m like, Aarrrgh“

“Even when Tyler was a younger version of himself, he was always wildly magnetic,” says Christian Clancy, who serves as Tyler’s manager, along with Clancy’s wife, Kelly. The Clancys won the job only after Christian saved Tyler’s life and bought him waffles—both of which happened in the same night. In 2010, Christian was driving the members of Tyler’s hip-hop collective, Odd Future, in a van to their first paying gig. On the expressway, a semi-truck approached them head on, forcing him to swerve off the road to avoid an accident. After the gig, he took Tyler and his bandmates out to eat. The Odd Future crew split their unimaginable windfall of $500 in the bathroom, and then they all enjoyed a late-night breakfast, Tyler sealing his bond with the Clancys in syrup. “[Christian] took us to Denny’s and paid for the meal,” Tyler says. “It was probably like 50 bucks, but that fucking worked. I was like, This the dude.”

Born out of L.A.’s skater scene, Odd Future’s home-recorded, highly experimental mix tapes, filled with uncensored teenage angst and unedited hormones, were redefining hip-hop, which Tyler coproduced in a leading role. “This was the punk rock of that generation,” says Mark Williams, the record executive who signed Odd Future to Sony in 2011. “It’s YouTube and beats instead of guitars. But the energy, attitude, DIY, and rebellion was what I had seen in the late ’70s and ’80s with the Sex Pistols and Ramones.” Adds Kelly Clancy: “[Tyler] inspired kids because before, everything sounded and looked the same.”

Tyler had no shortage of ideas—for album covers, videos, clothing, and even a carnival. He’d sketch in a notebook for Christian while the two sat together on Tyler’s grandmother’s couch. Christian’s persistent challenge, to this day, has been “to play chess with the ideas,” he says. “How do I get this done? How do I help a kid, who at the time was more controversial, navigate [corporations]?”

Fortuitously, Odd Future wasn’t just punk, the group was hilarious. In early videos, Tyler would rap to a webcam while Hodgy and Left Brain danced in sync behind his head; in another, Curious George walked into a bedroom to find his bunny rabbit girlfriend in relations with another stuffed animal.

As it happened, that kid had been posting on Adult Swim’s message boards for years, explaining to no one and everyone that one day he’d have his own Cartoon Network show. So Newman and Weidenfeld met with Tyler, along with Odd Future member Jasper Dolphin and a few others. “I’d never been in a meeting like that before or since,” says Newman, laughing. “Tyler can’t sit down, he and Jasper are slapping each other, whispering. They’re doing what you’d normally never do in a meeting.”

Adult Swim is known for its unfiltered content, which is beloved by adolescent males. But the channel was also part of Turner, owned by Time Warner (and now part of WarnerMedia, a subsidiary of AT&T, which has more than $160 billion in annual revenue). “Adult Swim seemed like a good place for Tyler to dip a toe into the corporate world,” says Christian Clancy.

The network green-lighted an Odd Future sketch-comedy show called Loiter Squad, and Newman paired the band with the production company Dickhouse, the team behind Jackass, to turn the idea into a TV series. Loiter Squad’s three-season run ended in 2014, right as Tyler’s team thought the project had finally gelled. Adult Swim threw some other ideas at Tyler and his writing partner, Lionel Boyce (whom Tyler befriended in high school drama class), but they passed. “At first I thought, ‘Should we just try?’ But it was Tyler who said, ‘We don’t have to,’ ” Boyce recalls. “He always says it’s in your mind that you feel obligated.”

Instead, the duo produced their own cartoon, The Jellies, a surreal comedy loosely inspired by 1980s family dramedies, where the parents are jellyfish and their adopted human child, Cornell, is an overly sensitive teen whom many critics read as a stand-in for Tyler. They released the first season of The Jellies on Tyler’s own digital platform; Adult Swim’s Newman acquired it last year and contracted the pair to make a second season. “At Adult Swim, we wonder, who has figured out something different—comedically, visually, whatever,” says Newman. “Tyler automatically works from that space.”

“Know your worth”

When Tyler was 9 years old, he was listening to Jamiroquai’s disco-funky Love Foolosophy alone in his room in L.A.’s South Bay. Some kids from the neighborhood came by and asked what he was doing, and Tyler was ecstatic. Finally, he could nerd out with other people about music! He was never into toys; his pastime was reading album liner notes. Jamiroquai—white guys out of the U.K. making music that sounded like it came from people with his skin color—was upending his world.

“Ten seconds into the track, they said, ‘This shit is gay,’ ” Tyler recalls. “It was hard being 9 and black.”

Tyler would find affirmation from his role models. Not just Pharrell Williams but also Outkast’s Andre 3000 and Kanye West. They inspired him sonically and stylistically; their confident, coifed looks broke the tropes of black manhood Tyler saw around him. “I love that man,” Tyler says of West. “What he did for young black kids is like crazy. It’s no rules. I grew up not liking basketball, not wanting to wear do rags and big white shirts. With him, Andre, and P, it was like, ‘Oh shit! They’re doin’ what I want to do! It’s okay!’ ”

Tyler was impressed with them as entrepreneurs as well. By 2013, Pharrell had two clothing lines, a YouTube channel, and collaborations on everything from textiles to fine jewelry. West, meanwhile, was expanding into fashion and creating spectacles, such as debuting the video for his song “New Slaves” by projecting it onto the facades of 66 buildings around the world, including the Chanel boutique in Beverly Hills.

Thanks to relationships Christian Clancy had made while getting his “PhD in bullshit” in the record industry before becoming a manager, Tyler signed to do a collaboration with Vans and scored a deal with PepsiCo to write and direct three Mountain Dew commercials.

At the same time, though, Tyler was dealing with the continued blowback from the music he had made as an angry teenager that contained violent and homophobic imagery. It didn’t matter that he stopped performing those songs, or that they were from an Eminem-esque alter ego. It didn’t matter that supporters like Mark Williams, the record exec, knew that the day would come when Tyler would share the hidden depths they sensed within him.

The experiences helped him realize, “You just gotta know where you sit, and that’s where people fuck up,” he says. “I know I can’t do an I Heart Radio fuckin’ festival. People don’t know that they don’t matter at certain places.”

Tyler has yet to apologize for his past; he rolls his eyes preemptively at any whiff of a question on the topics of provocation or controversy. “Do I look like a terrorist?” is how he cuttingly summed up his feelings on being banned by Theresa May from performing in the U.K.

He is more reflective in his art. On Flower Boy, three songs allude to his attraction to men; in “I Ain’t Got Time,” he admitted to kissing white boys since 2004. On another track, “Where This Flower Blooms,” he expresses a message of inclusion for his young fans, rapping, “Tell these black kids they can be who they are/dye their hair blue/shit, I’ll do it, too.” He’s been deliberately enigmatic as cultural critics have tried to get him on the record about his evolution, but as Mark Williams says, “He could have made that record a little earlier, but like most artists who come from where he comes from, there’s a natural sense of editing and holding things back. It’s almost like, ‘I’m not ready to reveal that yet.’ ”

“He’s just reaching the point where people in the public are seeing him how people who know him see him,” says Boyce, his friend and writing partner. “Everyone is weird and crazy when you get to know them. He displays that side of himself first. If you can get along with this side, you can get along with my other side.”

“Everything is trust. Everything”

After Tyler severed his relationship with Vans in 2016, “he came to me and was like, ‘Let’s do our own shoe,’ ” says Christian Clancy in his ever-relaxed California drawl. “And I’m like, ‘OK, cool. Let’s figure that out.’ ”

They found an overseas manufacturing partner, and when the samples came back, they were . . . terrible. “We both realized quickly that’s a crazy business for a bunch of different reasons,” Clancy says. Pharrell Williams then introduced them to Paul Mittleman, Converse’s creative director of apparel. “We thought, Regardless of where this goes, let’s learn from someone who knows what they’re doing.”

At the time, Converse had painted itself into a corner. It made a big bet in 2015 on updating its signature shoe, the Chuck Taylor, mimicking the strategy used successfully by Nike, Converse’s parent company: Improve the technology, market the performance, and profit.

The Chuck Taylor II, if you will, flopped hard. By early 2016, Converse sales, which had been delivering low double-digit revenue growth, dropped 1.5%. Nike installed its chief marketing officer, Davide Grasso, as Converse’s CEO, with the mandate to shake up the brand. To help him do it, Converse needed a collaborator the way Kanye and Pharrell elevated Adidas.

As Converse dug through its archives looking for product ideas, its leaders rediscovered a low-top called the One Star, which had debuted in 1974 and had been popular for tennis and skateboarding but had since faded from relevance. Mittleman saw Tyler’s name on a short list of potential partners and moved him to the top.

Their first release, in July 2017, was a limited-edition powder blue One Star, which quickly sold out on Tyler’s site and Converse.com. They quickly followed up a month later with a full collection, available exclusively at Foot Locker. “I haven’t talked about a Converse shoe on the earnings call for a long time,” Foot Locker CEO Richard A. Johnson told investors in August 2017, “but we had a great collaboration with Converse One Star and Tyler, the Creator. . . . We saw kids lined up.”

Converse worked with Tyler to design his own silhouette, a modification of the One Star, which it dubbed “Le Fleur.” Over several collections, he’s played with bright colors and a rich, suede texture, fashioning a daisy that boldly enveloped a Converse star. He also conceptualized their creative campaigns, down to how the shoes were photographed. In one instance, he sent the Converse team an instructional video of himself re-lacing the sneakers so they could be depicted specifically as he wore them. “When we think about Tyler, we talk about a cocreator,” says Grasso, contrasting this relationship with how a lot of collaborations are just co-marketing exercises.

Converse won’t share sales numbers, but executives disclosed that they have increased production of Tyler’s line by a factor of 10. For his November 2018 collection (which will launch exclusively at Camp Flog Gnaw), Tyler has taken a sharp left turn from this aesthetic in his expanded line, which will include a burlap Chuck Taylor with the daisies hidden from sight. “Expectations are low-key trash,” Tyler says. “When you don’t know what to expect, that shit is fun.”

Converse is, like Adult Swim, a platform within a larger company (Nike generated $36 billion in revenue in its fiscal 2018) where Tyler can get the kind of mutual buy-in he needs. “You buy a car, you trust that the manufacturer has it safe enough for you to drive,” he says. “And [companies I work with] trust that whatever art I put out, or whatever we collaborate on together, is gonna work.”

“Everyone has their base thing. I’ve just figured out ways to switch it up to keep people engaged”

“What are you working on?”

“A song,” Tyler responds, with the deflated confidence of a 13-year-old caught writing poetry.

We’re at a recording studio that Tyler calls “Dr. Dre’s house,” a mandala and Christmas light–infused space where some of the most famous hip-hop artists have cut records. Most days, Tyler wakes up early and composes at home, but today he’s going to be working into the evening, sampling his new album for some friends.

First, he has a bridge to write. He turns to me, and for the first time asks me to cut the recorder. Then his hands fiddle on the keyboard, finding a series of beautiful chords that harken back to 1979.

Gradually, he gets down the progression that he’s looking for. Then he switches instruments on his keyboard, pulling up a bass. He rips off a deep electric riff spiritually reminiscent of “Freeee.” His engineer, Vic Wainstein, steps out of the room. “Save me some!” Tyler yells, as he often does when anyone heads to the bathroom. “Save me some pee pee this time. I always ask, and you never do!”

It’s just the two of us in this windowless studio, and time melts away while he coaxes the trickiest four bars of a song together. The fidget spinner is finally at rest.

The song is haunting and hooky, with an ethereal, distorted refrain: “Running out of time running out of time running out of time . . . to make you love me.” Only when I hear the words do I realize this song has been in his head all day. He’s been singing it to himself everywhere we went. Tyler lives his life to a soundtrack of his own making, a grand composition full of sunsets and sudden, aggressive chord changes that sound right only three seconds in retrospect.

Austin Feinstein, an L.A. guitarist with Cole Sprouse looks, walks in and listens to the track. Tyler wants acoustic guitar, not electronic chords. Feinstein can’t discern the notes and asks which key they’re in. “You know I don’t know what the fuck keys are,” Tyler responds.

After Feinstein deciphers the chords, Tyler exclaims, “Aaahh! When that guitar happens, all those white [girls] at Coachella are gonna love that shit.” (Tyler was disappointed in his 2018 Coachella performance.) We celebrate by ducking out for Starbucks, where an exultant Tyler grinds on the café’s umbrella like a stripper pole and orders a white hot chocolate with the peppermint mixed in and a caramel drizzle on top. “Y’all never experimented?” he shouts, defending his beverage choice when we wretch. “Or y’all straight?”

“Just take a different way home”

It’s 10 p.m. in the studio, and Tyler’s last task before his night is done is closing out another music project, remixing his almost-finished Grinch theme. His most significant tweak is making the choir of singing children more prominent. “This movie is for fucking 10-year-olds, so bring them up,” he says. “That shit’s important to me.”

During moments like this, Tyler seems, well, more grown-up. There are signs in his fashion ambitions as well. Golf Wang started by selling T-shirts, hats, and hoodies, but it will soon sell a needlepoint cardigan, a bike, a helmet, a forest-green bulletproof vest that reads no violence, and a jacket that looks straight out of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. Golf has doubled its products from 293 to 508 in the past year, and with each new category, Tyler finds new and better partners to realize his vision. Two years ago, his puffy coat was “kind of trash,” in the words of Brad Scoffern, Tyler’s former road manager who grew to run operations, strategy, and marketing for Golf Wang. Now, that coat is made by a company that works with North Face and Patagonia.

In August, Golf Wang relocated from a Spanish-style bungalow on a residential street in West Hollywood to a large warehouse in Culver City, leveling up in the same way that his other projects are. What if Golf Wang gets too big for him to manage? “Oh, when it gets to that point I know how to let shit go,” he says without hesitation. “If it’s ever something I don’t take time for, then that means I don’t care about it and it shouldn’t exist.”

Two days later, Tyler rolls into Whole Foods on his bicycle along with his close friend and Golf Wang model Wyatt Navarro. They don’t have locks. “I’m gonna leave them out there, they’re okay, they’re good,” Tyler muses. “And if they get stolen, that’s kinda sick.” Travis Bennett, aka Taco, a DJ and former Odd Future member, sits down as well.

Tyler is eating the most adulting food I’ve seen him consume all week—a salmon bowl with extra teriyaki sauce—but he still somehow looks more youthful than the numerous occasions I’ve watched him catch gummy bears in his mouth (or eye) from across the room. In this moment, Tyler and his friends could be the characters from some 1980s monster movie, solving a mystery in their small town after the authorities didn’t take them seriously.

Pulling at his necklace, Tyler shows me I’m not far off. About a year ago, Tyler assembled his closest confidants, his “ride or dies”—Dolphin, Boyce, Navarro, and Bennett—and gifted them each with a piece of custom jewelry, a chain with a daisy charm, modeled from the Flower Boy cover art Tyler drew himself. Each necklace is a different monotone hue; Tyler’s features multicolored petals from them all.

“It’s like he’s Captain Planet,” Bennett later tells me, laughing, before confessing how moving he found the gesture. He’s never taken the chain off.

“We don’t dress the same. We don’t listen to all the same music. We have different opinions for shit—that’s why I love them,” Tyler says. “We’ll be on each other’s team during the zombie apocalypse.” He feels the same way about his fans, encouraging them to see his art and his personal style as not a model to be copied, but as proof-of-concept to be emulated. “For his generation,” says Kelly Clancy, “he’s made people think they can do it too.”

Tyler turns to debating how to spend the rest of his afternoon. Should he get strawberries or ice cream? Should they ride their bikes more? “I want a Jamba Juice like a motherfucker,” Tyler declares, turning to Navarro. “Where should we go?”

Navarro looks up from his iPhone. “Wherever the wind takes us.”

Yondella Hall has lived in Portland, Oregon, all her life. “I love the rain,” she says. She grew up in north Portland, where, due to the city’s history of segregation, residents of color mainly clustered. Now with two young children, she lives in Cully, another diverse neighborhood slightly to the east.

As much as she loves the city’s wet weather, it became a problem for her a few years ago when her house, which was built in the 1940s, sprung a leak in the roof. Hall, who works as a family advocate for a local nonprofit, learned about how to access a home repair loan through Habitat for Humanity from a client, who also told her about another nonprofit called NAYA, that was providing weatherization services and energy efficiency upgrades to Cully residents to help them remain in place amid a flood of gentrification. Hall went from coping with a leaky roof and a house in which she could see her breath in the winter, to a more insulated home and a drastically lower energy bill. A new set of windows, a patched roof, and some insulation, she tells Fast Company, means that she no longer has to seek out a second job to pay her energy bill through the winter.

For Hall, the small energy efficiency upgrades have been transformative enough that she’s now attending community meetings, talking to her fellow residents about a ballot measure up for a vote this November that would create a pool of money to help other low-income Portlanders access similar resources. Called the Portland Clean Energy Fund, the measure was developed by a diverse coalition of groups, including the NAACP Portland Branch, the Asian Pacific American Network of Portland, the Coalition of Communities of Color, the Sierra Club, and a local clean energy nonprofit called Verde. For low-income communities, it aims to create both a funding stream and jobs around green energy projects like Hall’s energy efficient retrofit, but also increased tree canopy and renewable energy installations. And it will do so by levying a surcharge on some of most profitable businesses operating in the Portland area.

“It’s a community-of-color-led initiative that is really born out of both a strong desire to address climate change and out of frustration at bearing the brunt of the fossil fuel economy, and not seeing the benefit of Portland’s clean-energy transition in their communities,” says Tony DeFalco, Verde’s deputy director. The PCEF specifically targets companies in the Portland area that make more than $500,000 in revenue locally and more than $1 billion nationally, and would require that they pay a 1% surcharge on a fee they already pay to operate in Portland. Groceries, medicine, and healthcare services would be exempt. The measure targets large companies–in the Portland area, around 120 including Apple, Walmart, and Target meet the terms of the measure–because they have the longest and most complex supply chains, and as such, emit high rates of carbon that disproportionately impact low-income communities of color.

The PCEF generated double the number of signatures required to land it a spot on the ballot in November, when residents will decide whether to approve it. While there has been pushback to the initiative, mainly from companies and local business councils, many in Portland, including city commissioner Chloe Eudaly, are excited about the initiative. “The Portland Clean Energy Fund is the first environmental measure led by communities of color to make it onto our local ballot, and as far as I know, it’s the first in the state and possibly the country,” Eudaly tells Fast Company. Contextualizing the initiative within the larger “just transition” movement, which aims to create greater justice and equity for marginalized communities alongside the shift to a green economy, Eudaly believes that the measure will begin bringing some benefits to residents and communities within the city that have long been overlooked and left out in the conversation surrounding sustainability in Portland.

Bridging a Divided Portland

Cully, where Hall lives, is one of those communities. It’s bounded by an industrial zone and interrupted by commercial roads and contaminated factory sites that have fallen into disuse; it’s poorly served by transit and lacks the pedestrian and bike paths, parks, and neighborhood cohesion that may spring to mind when one first imagines Portland.

The PCEF does not claim that the businesses from which it’s aiming to raise revenue directly caused this stark division in Portland. Though known in the pop-culture discourse as a haven of artisanship and environmental sustainability, Oregon history isn’t as discussed; upon joining the union 1859, it originally forbade black people from living within its borders. Today, Portland, at around 72% white, is the whitest city in America, and its lower-income communities of color have ended up pushed up against its industrial past, and locked out of the city’s clean energy efforts, encapsulated in the city’s Climate Action Plan, which tend to reach its whiter, wealthier residents first.

“Portland has a reputation as a hotbed of sustainability, but people of color and people in low-income communities have not been driving the city’s sustainability investments or really benefitting from them,” DeFalco says. One of those investments is the Oregon Energy Trust, which offers a rebate for residents who install energy efficiency upgrades in their homes. But Brian Allbritton, executive director of the Oregon Energy Fund, which helps people facing financial emergencies pay their electricity bills, points out that “you have to spend money to get the credit for the upgrades.” If you don’t have money to buy the energy-efficiency upgrades, “there’s nothing to help you,” he says.

As the Portland area faces the likelihood of more extreme heat in the summer and frigid temperatures in the winter, the gulf between people who can afford upgrades and those like Hall, who need outside assistance to install them, will grow. Already, low-income households in the Portland area pay up to 9% of their monthly income on their energy bills, according to a 2016 report from the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy. It’s nowhere near as much as the nearly 25% low-income people sometimes pay in Memphis, but too steep, Allbritton says, for families already living on few financial resources, and much higher than the 4% wealthier households pay. The report names Portland as one of the five cities that’s invested the most in utility-scale energy efficiency programs to date, but notes that “even when cities do have strong utility programs, there is no guarantee that low-income households will benefit.” Often, that’s due to a lack of up-front funding for upgrades and green-energy projects, and a lack of communication with communities in need. The PCEF aims to address both.

Creating Greener Neighborhoods

Portland knows it will take significant work and investment to bring neighborhoods like East Portland and Cully up to speed with the rest of the city’s sustainability progress. In its 2015 Climate Action Plan, the city of Portland delves into statistics that illustrate the divide between the city’s neighborhoods of color and the rest: While 44% of residents in the rest of the city live less than a quarter mile from a bike route, only 21% of East Portland residents do. Similarly, transit service is notably reduced, and sidewalks have not been maintained. Residents in these neighborhoods, as a result, face much higher exposure to exhaust, which leads to poor health outcomes like asthma and heart disease. Asthma rates in East Portland reach up to 25%, compared to just around 3% to 10% in whiter, more affluent parts of the city.

While the city has pledged, in the report, to prioritize transit, cycling, and pedestrian infrastructure in East Portland–both to drive down carbon emissions from driving, and create greater connectivity with the rest of the city–the Climate Action Plan is less clear on how it will deliver other crucial upgrades, like individual home energy efficiency projects and tree canopy cover.

While seemingly a small issue, residential energy efficiency projects of the variety the PCEF wants to fund not only help people like Hall pay less for their bills and live more comfortably, they also represent a significant opportunity to drive down emissions at scale. According to a report from Habitat for Humanity on the need for energy-efficiency projects in low-income neighborhoods, “energy efficiency remains our greatest single energy resource, generating more available energy than oil, natural gas, coal, and nuclear.” Furthermore, carrying out both energy efficiency upgrades and renewable projects, like solar panel installations, represents an opportunity to build out a job market in the communities that stand to benefit from those projects. The same report points out that even though clean energy projects in low-income neighborhoods produce tangible benefits both for residents and cities as a whole, financing such projects remains a hurdle, which is what the PCEF wants to address.

Community health projects, like increasing tree cover and green space, face similar financing hurdles–despite the fact that greenery is a known tool to both reduce pollution and mitigate heat islands in the summer, which Portland is increasingly dealing with. A 2016 study from the U.S. Forest Service, for instance, found that every $1 spent on urban trees delivered over $5 in benefits, from improving public health to driving down local temperatures, which in turn drives down the need for air conditioning–something weatherization also helps with. The PCEF committee wants to drive home how interconnected all of these solutions are, and to ensure that the people who stand to benefit most from them have a say in how they’re implemented.

Why Target Big Business?

Often, communities rely on the public or nonprofit sectors to fund these upgrades. DeFalco and the community groups that developed the PCEF maintain that big businesses have a role to play. Their operations, after all, depend heavily on the carbon economy, and they traditionally invest less in local communities than their smaller counterparts: According to the PCEF coalition, for every dollar spent at a national retailer like the 120 targeted by the measure, 58¢ get recirculated back into the community, as opposed to 73¢ from a dollar spent at a local store. The PCEF, DeFalco says, could essentially service as a corrective to this dynamic, and one that encourages large corporations to use their financial resources in way that offsets the damage done by their operations, and creates more opportunity for local investments.

In Portland, businesses must pay a fee to secure a license allowing them to operate in the city; the heft of that fee varies in accordance with how much revenue the business rakes in. The PCEF calls for a surcharge of 1% that business’s annual fee, and that additional amount would go into the fund. The PCEF coalition expects the fund will raise over $30 million annually–the city won’t disclose exactly how much each business pays in license fees to the city, and how much, consequently, their 1% surcharge payment will amount to, DeFalco says. A steering committee made up of leaders from the supporting organizations will direct the fund into a variety of community projects, from the type of weatherization upgrades from which Hall benefitted, to solar and tree canopy installations in underserved areas, to job training initiatives in green-energy sectors for people from lower-income neighborhoods of color. “It’s a measure that could really tackle climate change and inequality,” DeFalco says.

While the PCEF is unique in its structure–and placing a surcharge on businesses is especially significant in Oregon, which lacks a sales tax–it does fall in line with a spate of recent efforts to hold large companies more accountable to their spillover effects on communities. It’s not, however, always an easy battle. Seattle, recently, enacted a “head tax” on large companies like Amazon and Starbucks to fund housing for homeless and low-income individuals, only to retract it after pushback from those same companies. More successfully, California’s cap-and-trade program is financing an initiative to expand access to solar energy for affordable housing residents.

The Pushback

As with any legislation that ultimately asks businesses to pay more money to operate, the PCEF is meeting with some pushback. Leadership of the Portland Business Alliance, a group of over 1,900 companies including local heavy-hitters like Nike and smaller local entities like Deschutes Brewery, maintains that while they applaud the equity goals of the fund, they take issue with the mechanism of raising the money. It’s important to note that the Alliance leadership does not speak for all its members–Nike, for instance, according to DeFalco, is remaining neutral on the proposal. Apple, which is not an Alliance member but will be affected by the surcharge, is also remaining mum.

“It’s tiny,” DeFalco says, “and when you look at the businesses–Home Depot, Walmart, Bank of America, Nike–that would be affected, it’s really tiny.” But many of those businesses, both under the umbrella of the Portland Business Alliance and a smaller coalition called the Keep Portland Affordable PAC, formed specifically to push back against the measure, say that small as the surcharge is, it’s ultimately consumers that will be paying it. Pat McCormick, a spokesperson for the Keep Portland Affordable PAC who runs a public relations firm in Portland, says that the PCEF bears too much similarity to Measure 97, an unsuccessful statewide initiative in 2016 to levy a gross receipts tax on large companies to raise revenue for issues like education and healthcare. Ultimately, what sunk Measure 97 was lobbying from the opposition campaign, with which McCormick was involved, that reminded voters that “much of the taxes are going to be paid by consumers in the form of higher prices,” he tells Fast Company. “That’s the same concern being raised about this measure.”

In a statement provided to Fast Company, Tiffany Wilson, director of communications for Walmart, echoed his sentiment: “We shouldn’t make life even more difficult for families already struggling to get by, and that’s what this duplicative tax would do.” Because the PCEF is arriving before voters as an activist-backed ballot initiative, not a proposal from the local government, the City of Portland has not performed an analysis of how the surcharge would affect local pricing. But the City Club of Portland, a nonprofit research organization that examines issues facing the area, conducted research into the likely effects of the 1% surcharge on prices people will actually see in stores, and found that there’s little evidence they will change. “Current research does not support that a municipality-specific corporate surcharge will increase prices or negatively influence the labor market in any significant way,” the City Club concluded in a report on the initiative.

And at Business for a Better Portland, the city’s nonprofit commerce organization that advocates for business as a player in community equity efforts, response to the PCEF has been positive. “We are very sensitive to the concern about impact on consumer-facing prices,” says Ashley Henry, BBPDX’s chief collaboration officer, “but we think that the impact would be minimal, if at all. But more importantly, it’s the low-income communities and communities of color themselves that are the primary proponents of this measure, and our sense was that if they were the ones advocating for it, it was an indication that there is not much cause for concern about the impact on pricing.”

An Incomplete Solution

For as much as the state of Oregon positions itself as a progressive leader, particularly in the sustainability arena, its lack of recourse for raising funds from businesses poses a real problem. On top of its lack of sales tax, Oregon’s corporate taxes are among the lowest in the country, and the state’s “kicker,” or rebate, returns revenue to individual and corporate taxpayers when the state lands itself with a budget surplus, rather than saving it for projects like that which the PCEF aims to fund. Revenue generation in the state of Oregon, in short, “is a battle royale,” DeFalco says. The state lacks a consistent mechanism for creating balance between businesses that are permitted to operate relatively freely, and people at the bottom end of the socioeconomic ladder, who often lack assistance for basic needs.

In the context of climate justice, residents feel this absence acutely. Portland was the first city in the U.S. to develop a climate action plan, which it’s updated every several years since 1993. The latest iteration, from 2015, lays out a plan to move to reduce carbon emissions 80% by 2050, and gestures, for the first time, toward building equity initiatives, like energy cost mitigation for low-income households, into the strategy. But as the PCEF coalition has noted, there’s a difference between calling for greater equity, and actually putting the financial and organizational resources behind supporting it.

The $30 million in annual revenue the PCEF would raise would not, in itself, come anywhere close to accomplishing the goals of the Portland Climate Action Plan, which as of 2017, also include a shift to 100% renewable energy by 2035. (The city does not release numbers on the total cost of implementing the Climate Action Plan, but the city has requested $30 million in funding just for ecosystem restoration projects around the Willamette River–one small component of the overall strategy.)

The PCEF coalition does not disagree. Rather than a way to fully meet the demands of the Climate Action Plan, the PCEF, DeFalco says, “is one tool to move us there,” and on top of that, it’s a way for disenfranchised communities in Portland to say to large businesses: “You need to pay your fair share to address some of the impacts that your operations have, and to put back into the communities where you operate and pull capital out of,” DeFalco says.

With the money generated through the surcharge, the PCEF committee can begin funding crucial energy efficiency projects and upgrades in communities that, unfortunately, have too often been left out of the conversation in Portland, and in Oregon as a whole. The state and the surrounding Multnomah County have been outspoken about their commitments to a transition to a clean-energy, low-carbon economy, but have lagged in making equity a priority. Too often in the state and the city, it’s an unseen issue. The PCEF creates visibility for communities and people that have faced a history of disenfranchisement, and puts them first in the conversation around how to create equity while transitioning to a green economy.

You think this would be common knowledge, but apparently not. Privacy-focused search engine DuckDuckGo was bewildered by people who were growing leery of Facebook and its data and privacy policies and breeches and thus jumped ship from apps like Facebook Messenger to WhatsApp. Didn’t people know Facebook also owns the latter?

Apparently not, according to a study carried out by DuckDuckGo. The study found that over half of Americans (50.42%) had no idea Facebook owns WhatsApp. And even more Americans (56.28%) had no idea Google owns Waze. As DuckDuckGo wrote in a blog post about its findings:

This means that a majority of Americans who are using WhatsApp and/or Waze are doing so without realizing that all of their information, whether it be routes, travel time, messages, photos, or location data, is privy to Facebook (for WhatsApp) and Google (for Waze).

But just why is this a big deal? Because this lack of knowledge of which tech giants own which apps mean Americans who want to be more privacy-focused about their data can’t necessarily make informed choices about what services to use. As DuckDuckGo points out:

The lack of awareness over Facebook and Google’s reach is even more alarming as more and more Americans are looking to take control of their privacy online, but don’t have the information to make conscientious choices. It misleads people into believing they can avoid the treacherous waters of Google and Facebook privacy practices by standing in a smaller stream like Waze or WhatsApp, without knowing each directly flows into the very same oceans they attempted to escape.

The study was conducted in August 2018 using a sample of 1,297 random U.S. adults who were demographically similar to the general population.

I’m guessing Michael Grimes makes more money than most of us. He’s a technology banker at Morgan Stanley, meaning he works with some of the most highly valued companies around and probably sees a fat multimillion-dollar salary. Despite this, Grimes still reportedly spent years driving an Uber car–not because he needed more money, but because he wanted a leg up on the other banking competition who are vying to help take the company public.

According to the Wall Street Journal, this is just one thing bankers have done to grab the attention of prospective customers. This long game Grimes reportedly took may pay off royally. If Uber chooses Morgan Stanley as its top underwriter, the bank will stand to make millions of dollars in fees. In essence, if his alleged ploy works, Grimes may get the biggest bonus any Uber driver ever did see.

As both Lyft and Uber reportedly prepare to go public, it’s the banks who will reap the benefits. Both companies have large valuations, as well as continue to raise more and more money given that the businesses are generally not profitable. And banks know they are in the position to benefit. So it’s unsurprising that Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs are reportedly in a war to woo Uber–and that Grimes had the foresight to drive for the company to prove his worth.

The real question remains: After these businesses go public, how will they fare? While an IPO will raise money to keep them afloat and continuing to scale, how long will it take until investors see real profits?

For now, the real race is with the banks. And you can read the full story about that here.

The satellite radio company is looking for a way to move beyond vehicles to where more people listen to its content in their homes, reports Reuters. That’s why Sirius XM is partnering with Amazon to promote its Echo devices.

As part of the deal, Amazon will offer a free three-month subscription to Sirius XM to some buyers when they purchase an Echo device through Amazon’s website. Sirius XM in return will give away Amazon Echo Dots to customers that sign up for its subscriptions through Sirius XM’s website.

The partnership comes as more people than ever are shunning radio for streaming services–and the smart speaker market is heating up with most of the major tech players competing against Amazon’s Echo lineup in the home. In a statement, Amazon and Sirius XM said they are planning more initiatives together, including Sirius XM integration with Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant, later this year.

I love the Lighthouse Office, by L.A.-based design and build studio Knowhow Shop. It’s a microbuilding that looks like it was plucked from a mine.

Everything was designed and handmade by Kagan Taylor and Justin Rice, who founded the studio back in 2010 because they loved traditional craft, architecture, and digital design. They tell me via email that they could have never given this project to a regular contractor, so they had to build it themselves.

Made with structural insulated panels (SIPs) and joined with hardware borrowed from the film industry, the Lighthouse Office feels more like a high-end sailboat than a building.

The Lighthouse Office was a case study of sorts. Now, Taylor and Rice can develop similar designs for others–especially since many cities have relaxed laws around building backyard cottages, called accessory dwelling units, to ease the housing crisis. “We absolutely intend to build more of these for clients,” they say. They won’t look exactly the same, but they’ll hew to the same design language: a faceted form with the barest elements of architecture–a door, a window, and a skylight–each occupying full facades. “Within that language, there is room for a lot of different permutations,” they say.

I only know that I want one for myself, to work and even to sleep, as a peaceful cabin within a house. If you want one too, you can find Taylor and Rice here.

As the unemployment rate continues to drop and the labor market turns into a seller’s game, employees are getting pickier about what they will tolerate. And, increasingly, the rush hour blues are getting the better of them.

A new survey by staffing firm Robert Half found that nearly one-quarter of workers have left a job due to a bad commute. While roughly 4 in 10 workers have said the commuting has gotten better, nearly one-quarter say their trips to and from work have gotten worse. And 60% say their companies have done nothing to help.

Paul McDonald, senior executive director at Robert Half, which is based in Menlo Park, California, says that, as he’s watched the unemployment rate drop over the past five years to its current 3.7% rate, he’s surprised that more people aren’t leaving for a better commute. “It has created so much stress in their lives to have a long commute,” he says.

Helping to shoulder the burden

Some companies have, perhaps spurred by altruism or tax incentives, created suites of commuter benefits. For example, real estate platform Zillow Group, which is headquartered in Seattle, tries to accommodate the various ways people get to work. The company covers the cost of public transit getting to and from work up to a monthly maximum of $300. It also offers a flexible spending account (FSA) for employees who pay for parking, allowing them to save up to $260 per month in pretax dollars. In New York and Cincinnati, the company covers annual memberships to CitiBike and Cincinnati Red Bike bike share services, and many of its offices also offer secure bike storage areas. Sixty percent of the company’s employees take advantage of these benefits.

Adobe, based in San Jose, California, contributes the first $100 to a commuter FSA that can be used for qualified commuting costs and lists other commuter benefits for eight U.S. locations on its website. It also encourages employees to use Scoop, which helps people find opportunities to carpool. The company reimburses employees for emergency taxi rides home, such as when they need to pick up a sick child from school, or when they work late and can’t or prefer not to use public transportation.

“We want to make sure employees have convenient, inexpensive, and sustainable ways to get to and from work. Adobe’s Commuter Program is designed to help employees manage and ease their commutes, while providing commute options, such as carpooling, public transit, and bicycling, that help reduce pollution,” says Scott Ekman, senior director, workplace strategies & solutions at Adobe.

San Francisco healthcare technology company Grand Rounds also offers a commuter FSA. Employees report making the most of commuting time by learning new languages, catching up on phone calls to family and friends, and listening to audio books and podcasts. And flexible work benefits can also help. Doximity, a San Francisco-based social network for doctors, offers an employee stipend that can be used for public transportation, ride shares like Uber and Lyft pools, and parking, but also has a company-wide “Work from Home Wednesdays” policy, allowing employees to skip their commute midweek.

A new challenge

And while companies may be seeking ways to mitigate the impact of a tough commute on turnover, offering such benefits has gotten more complicated. Historically, companies have been able to deduct the cost of fringe benefits like those for commuting, but the Tax and Jobs Act of 2017 eliminated those deductions, says Aaron Schwartz, CPA, a tax consultant with Melville, New York-based Nussbaum, Yates, Berg, Klein & Wolpow. “Technically, by pure reading of the new tax laws, you would not be able to deduct [these expenses],” he says.

However, more guidance may be forthcoming from the Internal Revenue Service, he adds, emphasizing the need for companies to work with a good payroll service or employee benefits provider to ensure that they’re complying with all federal, state, and local commuter benefits laws and requirements. Some cities, such as San Francisco, New York, and Washington, D.C., require companies meeting certain criteria to provide pre-tax commuter benefits.

Even if it gets more expensive, McDonald says that helping employees better manage difficult commutes is part of a bigger retention picture–at least until flying, autonomous cars are the norm. Leaders need to stay in touch with employees and have regular conversations with them to identify stressors and problems before it’s too late, he says. “In the offensive rather than the defensive, it’s better to have that relationship with your worker, knowing what the stress level is, rather than having the resignation happen and find out that [it was because] the commute’s too long,” he says.

The cookware industry thrives on making you feel like you need hundreds of highly specialized tools to make your dinner. This is perhaps why, in the decade and a half since I graduated from college, I have accumulated heaps of kitchen tools, most of which are poorly made and don’t get much use. I recently took a glance at my utensil drawer and found: 12 different knives, five spatulas (some metal, some silicone), slotted spoons, regular spoons, a pasta spoon, a ladle, a pizza cutter, a garlic smasher, metal tongs, and plastic tongs. As someone who likes clean, minimal spaces, opening this drawer often puts me on the verge of a minor heart attack.

Material Kitchen is here to help. This direct-to-consumer startup, which launched earlier this year, creates a grand total of nine tools (plus a base to hold them in). Material sells the products entirely through its website, cutting out middleman costs and brick-and-mortar overhead, which means products are less expensive than others on the market of comparable quality. Material’s founders–Eunice Byun and David Nguyen–focus on design and functionality in equal measure.

“We both love to cook for our families,” Byun says. “After years of working at hard-charging corporate jobs, we now want to spend more time at home. We set out to create the tools that we wished we had as home cooks.”

Material’s focus on fewer but more functional tools can be partly attributed to the fact that its founders don’t come from the kitchen or restaurant industries. Nguyen spent years at Chanel and Valentino, leading business planning, and Byun was most recently a VP of digital marketing at Revlon. “Being outsiders in this industry can sometimes be helpful,” says Byun. “We don’t feel pressure to keep selling customers more and more products. We’d rather they own a few Material products that they really need and love.”

You can buy the entire set for $245, or buy individual items piecemeal; a knife, for instance, costs $75. This is more expensive than the average Target set, and is on par with entry-level sets from Williams-Sonoma. It’s significantly cheaper than the higher end of the market, where a knife can cost upwards of $200. And importantly, Materials’ founders believe these tools will allow you to do more with less, meaning you won’t need as many products. “And we believe that these nine tools can cover almost all your bases,” Byun says. “And we worked to make these items as functional as possible.”

While the founders have emphasized a less-is-more approach in their design, they still give you the ability to customize your utensil set to fit your kitchen. You can choose either white or black handles, and you can choose a darker or lighter wood for the base. And there are tiny aesthetic details on the utensils that people may not notice on first glance, like the “M” engraved in the stainless steel tip of every tool, or the delicate asymmetrical pattern on the spatula.

Ultimately, Byun and Nguyen believe that while beautiful tools don’t necessarily result in more delicious food, they may make the cooking experience more pleasurable, especially when you look at your tools every single day. “Our goal is to make cooking a more delightful experience,” says Byun. “We think that if you love your tools, you’ll be more likely to cook more.”

If you’ve heard about Australian software giant Atlassian lately–and you’re not a programmer–it may have been over the death of its group messaging app, HipChat. After years of trying to keep up with hot new rival Slack, Atlassian announced in July that it would close down HipChat and Stride, a year-old collaboration app it envisioned as the next step beyond HipChat.

But chat was never the core of Atlassian’s business, and certainly not what’s driven it to a valuation of about $19.5 billion. From its founding in 2002, the company, co-headquartered in Sydney and San Francisco, has focused on project management tools–especially for software developers.

Atlassian’s biggest product line, Jira, dates to the company’s 2002 founding. It’s a de facto standard for coordinating software projects, with anywhere from a handful of coders to hundreds of them assigned to discrete parts. “It’s like writing a book with a different writer on every paragraph,” says Sean Regan, head of growth for software teams at Atlassian, of the challenge that programs like Jira take on.

Others are gentler in their assessment. “Even given that there are pros and cons, I’m yet to see another system . . . that is so flexible,” writes Marat Kiniabulatov, a product manager for warehouse management software developer SkuVault. He was one of over a half dozen people who responded to a request for input that I posted on Twitter. Kiniabulatov may be more patient than others, however. He also leads an Atlassian user group in Russia.

Related:How unsexy collaboration apps made Atlassian a quiet powerhouse

One thing that everyone—including Atlassian’s leadership—agrees on is that Jira needs a refresh. “If you look at the companies that have succeeded over the long-term, they’re the companies that have disrupted themselves,” says cofounder and co-CEO Scott Farquhar.

To stave off disruptive rivals, Atlassian is formally rolling out a suite of changes today to make the interface more flexible and user friendly. (Different pieces of the revamp have been rolling out to groups of users for testing over the past year.)

The updates introduce basic interface features–drop-down menus, checkboxes, drag and drop–that are taken for granted in modern software design. Yet they had been lacking in some key parts of the very planning tool that programmers use to create modern software.

Atlassian is also responding to a fundamental–and not exactly new–change to how software is created, known as agile development. Instead of going heads-down on programming from start to product launch, companies are making steady fixes and improvements. We all experience the phenomenon in the unceasing flow of software update reminders that pervade our lives.

While Jira has had many big upgrades over the years, it also faces a mind-numbing roster of project- and task-management competitors, such as Asana, GitLab, Microsoft Azure DevOps, Pivotal Tracker, and Rally. Many rivals are newer, built with agile development in mind, and designed to run as subscription-based cloud services rather than on-premises software.

Atlassian launched its first cloud-based version of Jira in 2007, but the current version dates to 2016. That’s when Atlassian decided to fork its code base, resulting in independent, ultimately incompatible versions of Jira–one for in-house servers and one as a cloud offering. Today’s upgrades apply only to the cloud-based version.

The Trello lesson

In 2017, Atlassian bought one popular Jira alternative, Trello, for $425 million. Jira’s new upgrade shows the influence of the acquired service, which lives on under Atlassian ownership.

“Trello has been very instructive for us,” says Farquhar. “It starts with very little structure and control, and you build up and add those things.” Jira has been the opposite, rigidly controlled by an administrator with special access rights to make updates and customizations.

In Jira in its classic form, “as an administrator, some things are easy and other things are unnecessarily complicated,” says Victoria Guido, an engineer at consulting company Blackstone Federal who replied to me on Twitter. “It’s easy to see how people can quickly make it into something ugly and cumbersome.” Guido leads an Atlassian user group in Washington, D.C.

It’s the kind of drag-and-drop flexibility you’d expect in software today, but a big upgrade for Jira. Until now, changes to the board required going into a separate interface, called the workflow editor—a flowchart rat’s nest of rectangles and arrows defining the order for every step in a process.

Unlike Trello, which starts from a blank slate, Jira lays out basic board templates for different project styles. In the past, users would have to commit to a style at the beginning, such as the popular scrum or kanban organizational methods. Now Jira allows users to turn different elements on or off rather than being locked into one method.

Scrum, for instance, is based on a time-defined unit of work called a sprint, typically running for two weeks. With the new upgrades, even teams that didn’t start with a scrum system can activate sprint scheduling at any time if they want to change their workflow.

Atlassian also made it radically easier to filter views of the boards–for example, to see just the issues that a particular developer had worked on in the past week. Previously, users had to code a custom query in JQL (Jira Query Language) even to get basic information, such as viewing all the projects they were working on. Now they just click an icon with their photo. (Writing custom queries is still available for more complex searches, though.)

Mike Solomon, VP of people operations at Group Nine Media, the publisher of sites such as Thrillist, is a Jira user. After chatting with him on Twitter, I asked Atlassian to give him access to the new features. “This is a huge improvement for the look and feel of Jira,” says Solomon, who works with nontechnical teams and found the new design much friendlier.

Twine is currently split between Jira for its technical teams and Trello for the others, but now it might be easier for everyone to use Jira. That’s a key part of Atlassian’s plans for expansion. “Software is the center of work for most companies these days,” says Farquhar, making the case for integrating all company planning into Jira.

Related: How GitHub employees use GitHub for projects beyond coding

But Atlassian may have a lot of convincing to do–especially as it competes with rivals designed with more mainstream use in mind. “It’s a difficult task manager for non-engineers to follow,” says Ryan Bednar, an engineer and CEO of search engine optimizing service RankScience. “We switched from Jira to Asana and experienced a major productivity boost.”

And all the new interface upgrades are currently only in the version of Jira for developers, called “Jira Software.” The company hasn’t confirmed if the upgrades will come to Jira Core and other specialized versions of the service.

Playing nicer with others

Along with the big changes to Jira’s design is the ongoing process of improving integration with many other pieces of software. It has to work closely with outside code repositories like GitHub, for example, as well as other Atlassian products like Confluence–a kind of wiki for developers to keep notes on their work. (Jira and Confluence account for more than two-thirds of the company’s revenue, which was $874 million for the fiscal year ending in June.) Atlassian also runs a marketplace with about 3,000 third-party apps that plug into its products.

Jira has long had some integration with Slack, as well. The companies may have been rivals in the group-messaging market, but they also had to work together for the many users they had in common. Jira can currently post updates on projects to Slack channels, for instance. Regan says to expect tighter integration in the near future, though he doesn’t provide details.

Slack actually purchased the intellectual property for HipChat and Stride, to aid migration of users to Slack after the Atlassian services shut down in February 2019. And Atlassian made what Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield called a “small but symbolically important investment” in his company in a series of tweets in July. The former rivals now talk about a partnership.

I press Farquhar on any takeaways from the HipChat experience but don’t get an indication it will change much. HipChat was just one of about two dozen acquisitions that Atlassian has made over years, he says, most of them successful. The company will make more acquisitions when it makes sense, he says. It will build new products, and it will do partnerships.

“We pride ourselves as a company on making the tough, right decisions,” says Farquhar. “We want to be around here in 50 years’ time.”

We’re now more than a week out from when the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change dropped its terrifying report detailing the urgency to dramatically reduce emissions and stop global warming in the next three decades or so. Meat eaters, we are sorry to report that we have bad news for you: You’re a big part of the problem.

New research from the World Resources Institute finds that, taking into account trends in population growth and meat consumption, agriculture alone could eat through the majority of our emissions budget for keeping global warming below 2 degrees Celsius–the point at which climate-change effects would create wide-scale devastation. Under these circumstances, the real aim–limiting global warming to no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius–would be impossible to attain.

The global population is expected to grow to 10 billion people by 2050, and if current trends hold, meat and dairy consumption is expected to boom right along with it: WRI mapped trends in animal-based food consumption from 1961 and extrapolated them out to 2050, and found people in 2050 will probably eat 70% more meat and dairy, and 80% more beef.

There’s no getting around it: For us to avoid a total climate disaster in the next few decades, we have to collectively alter our diets. Beef, for instance, creates 220 tons of CO2 emissions for every million calories consumed. That’s around 30 times the amount of emissions required to produce the same caloric quantity of beans. And that’s not even considering land-use implications–because producing beef requires both land to grow feed, and land upon which cows can graze or pasture, it’s radically less efficient than just using that land to grow produce that humans can consume. The same logic applies to all animal-derived products.

Given this knowledge, doing anything other than dramatically reducing our animal-product consumption would be, frankly, insane. Fortunately for the meat and dairy lovers out there, plant-based alternatives are gaining momentum: You can now order the Impossible Burger everywhere from White Castle to Air New Zealand flights; Memphis Meat makes plant-based chicken that tastes like the real thing; Sonic is offering a half-beef, half-mushroom burger; Ripple Foods is making eerily convincing milk from peas. This is just scratching the surface, and startups like Bolt Threads and Modern Meadow are also delving into ways to create leather substitutes in the lab, to tackle our animal consumption problem in the fashion world.

WRI, too, is not sitting on this problem: The organization, in partnership with the UN Environment, Carbon Neutral Cities Alliance, and others, launched a new initiative to get restaurants, companies, and hospitals to up their share of plant-based food offerings with a goal of reducing food emissions by 25% by 2030. The Cool Food Pledge officially launched at the Global Climate Action Summit in San Francisco this year with 10 signatories including Genentech, Morgan Stanley, WeWork, and the Swedish restaurant chain Max Burger. They’ll take steps from redesigning menus and cafeterias to promote plant-based options, to tweaking recipes to ensure that those options taste good enough to tempt people away from meat.

And if you’re looking for a way to begin reducing your meat consumption at home, start with this: Researchers have found that if everyone in the U.S. immediately swapped out beef for beans, we could hit 50% to 75% of our greenhouse-gas-reductions targets for the year 2020. It may not be glamorous, but it’s certainly easy and effective.

When your boss is a jerk and ends up leaving suddenly, it’s a cause for celebration. Losing a great boss, on the other hand, can be a major blow, especially when you don’t expect it. But while it’s always hard to say goodbye to a strong manager, one of the most challenging situations you can be in as an employee is having your boss leave without knowing who the replacement will be. Here are some steps to take if this happens to you.

1. Don’t panic

There’s something naturally unsettling about change, and losing a boss no doubt falls into that category. Throw in an absent replacement, and it’s an unquestionable recipe for self-doubt.

But rather than let yourself fall victim to it, convince yourself not to panic–because there’s really no need to. Sure, you might end up with an ogre of a boss who makes your life miserable, but there’s no reason to assume that will happen. Similarly, losing your boss doesn’t mean your job is now on the line. Quite the contrary: You might find that you’re even more valuable now that your manager has moved on.

2. Speak up

You probably have a number of concerns now that you’re boss-less. Rather than keep them bottled up, sit down with your manager’s old boss, or whoever the appropriate contact is at your company, and voice them. If the person in charge of replacing your boss is able to reassure you that only candidates with a similar background, outlook, and management style are being sought, that might set your mind at ease. Similarly, if you’re hoping to have a say in identifying the right replacement, speak up about that as well. Employee input often plays a huge role in hiring decisions, so express your willingness to help in any way you can.

3. Stay in touch

When your boss leaves, the best person to help you and your company find a new manager could end up being none other than–wait for it–your boss. That’s why it pays to stay in touch with managers after they move on. Your old boss will be more than familiar with the role, and therefore might be in a position to recommend a suitable replacement, thereby expediting the hiring process and limiting the limbo period you and your colleagues might get stuck in.

4. Seize the opportunity to take charge yourself

It’s easy to let major projects crumble in the absence of a boss, but if you do the opposite, you’ll be furthering your career in a very big way. While the rest of your team is reeling from your boss’s departure, focus your energy on moving existing projects forward, even if that means stepping up and managing some of them yourself. It’s a great way to show your company’s higher-ups that you’re a strong leader. And who knows: You might impress them so much that you’re offered the chance to become the boss yourself.

Losing a terrific boss is hard, especially when there’s no replacement in sight. Just remember that the situation is only temporary. Until it’s resolved, the best you can do is focus on your own performance while doing your part to help keep up your team’s morale.

This article originally appeared on The Motley Fool and is reprinted with permission. 

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What happens when a robotic arm goes crazy on the job? That’s the idea behind Out of Order, a hanging LED lamp designed by Dutch studio BCXSY and Atelier Robotiq, a Rotterdam-based collective that uses industrial robotics to make lighting fixtures and furniture. Out of Order is meant to evoke the product of a computer mind gone haywire.

Robots, the designers say, are usually perceived as “flawless workers.” Obviously, robots are neither flawless nor workers–they’re machines that are programmed to carry out tasks. But if we’re going to anthropomorphize machines, we can also imagine that they’ll get eventually get tired of following our commands. “But what would happen once the flawless worker becomes less impeccable?” BCXSY founders Boaz Cohen and Sayaka Yamamoto tell Dezeen. “What if it would grow tired of its daily routine, or becomes absent-minded while daydreaming?”

Maybe the repetition would grow maddening–enough so that the machine would revolt, and start doing whatever it wanted.

Gmail users can now work with online services like Box, Dropbox, and Atlassian’s Jira without ever leaving their inboxes.

With a new feature called “compose actions,” users can save files directly to Dropbox, attach Jira or Bitbucket links with comments included, and attach files from Dropbox, Box, or Egnyte. (The Dropbox actions actually launched over the summer, but the others are new.) Google says more compose actions are coming soon, and they’ll be available through the G Suite marketplace.

Compose actions are an extension of Gmail add-ons, which launched last year. They also make use of Google’s recent Gmail redesign that added lots of new features and a fresh look. It’ll be interesting to see what other actions emerge as more developers get on board.

With a few taps on the color touchscreen of Square’s new mobile payment terminal, the bike salesperson selects a BMX helmet and chain. Then he hands the terminal over to his bearded customer, who checks the total cost of the transaction and taps his Apple Watch to complete the sale.

Okay, full disclosure: We’re in a conference room at Square’s San Francisco headquarters; the “salesperson” is the company’s head of hardware, Jesse Dorogusker. And his “customer” is Jack Dorsey, the cofounder and CEO of both Square and its neighbor on the next block, Twitter. The two have been engaging in a little play-acting to demonstrate the new Square Terminal to me.

It was probably inevitable that the company–which has been on a roll–would get around to building something along these lines. “Payment terminals have been around for longer than Square has been around,” says Dorsey. “So it’s never not been on our mind. There are entire companies that just make these things.”

Square Terminal fills a distinctly different niche than Square’s existing hardware: Its tiny original smartphone reader, larger Bluetooth-enabled reader for chip cards and mobile payments, and big-screen Square Register. Unlike the readers, the terminal is an all-in-one gadget that doesn’t require a smartphone or tablet for brains and connectivity. And unlike Square Register, it’s ultraportable, designed for passing-around scenarios such as the one Dorogusker and Dorsey acted out. It sells for $399, with a $300 processing credit for new Square merchants, and is available starting today on Square’s website.

Since Square’s 2009 launch, the company–and, once spurred to respond, its competitors–have done much to modernize the act of accepting credit cards. But the situation with payment terminals remains messy. Many of the terminals out there are clunky and outmoded, difficult to update with new capabilities, and provided to merchants as part of a payment-processing service agreement–assuming that a merchant gets approved, which is still not always the case with small businesses in 2018.

“Even if you do get accepted by a traditional terminal provider to accept payments, you typically sign up for a contract that is at best opaque and probably not so fair,” says Dorogusker. “There’s a teaser rate, there are monthly fees, there’s a variety of other fees, different cards cost different amounts.”

“Square Terminal is our way to fix basically all of those things,” he declares. Rather than sporting a plasticky keypad and a tiny display, the device has a 5.5″ color touchscreen which, along with its Android-based software, makes it feel like a smartphone embedded in an angled base sculpted out of Square’s signature white plastic. Customers can insert a chip cart into the front of the terminal, swipe a mag-stripe card along its right edge, or tap a smartphone or smartwatch to make a mobile payment. A built-in printer spits receipts out of the back, the battery is designed to last for a day on a charge, and Wi-Fi and Ethernet compatibility allow for both wireless and wired connections to the internet.

As with other methods of accepting Square payments, the company charges a flat rate of 2.6% plus 10¢ for Square Terminal transactions and doesn’t make anyone sign a contract. The goal is to get new users up, running, and back to operating their businesses within minutes. “It’s not even in the category of things they want to think about,” says Dorsey. “They want to think about things like like hiring people and introducing new ingredients.”

“We’ll probably be surprised at how people use it”

Square says that its new terminal will appeal to everyone “from dentists to bowling alleys.” Though the company has recently been successful getting larger companies to embrace its services and says there’s no upper limit to the sort of outfits that might use the terminal, small businesses are an obvious focus, including both ones upgrading from older terminals and those that are taking credit cards for the first time.

But Dorsey emphasizes that Square isn’t sure where the terminal will go, and that’s part of the point. “What’s exciting to me about it is that it kind of resonates back to when we first started the company and we built the reader,” he says. “We had some idea of who would use it, but really no idea how it would end up being used. This has very similar properties where we’ll probably be surprised at how people use it.”

With any luck, once merchants get the terminal in their hands they’ll instinctively figure out how to make it work for them. When I ask Dorsey about the new device’s competition, however, he returns to the theme that it’s a challenge to get small businesses to think about payments at all.

“The biggest thing we’re competing with, honestly, is that sellers tend to develop systems of doing things and it’s the adage of ‘If it’s not broke, don’t fix it,’ he says. “We experienced that when we first came on the scene, especially around the merchant account. And then they actually saw how broke it was in terms of how much extra they were paying and how much math they had to do just to understand that basic fact.”

Square may still be associated, above all, with its well-designed payments hardware. But along with its potential to expand Square’s payment-processing business, Square Terminal certainly looks like a good way for the company to find new prospects for its expanding range of offerings. According to Dorsey, each item in the portfolio helps buttress the others. And that does get busy owners of small businesses to pay attention.

“Our approach has been to not just stop at the device, but the connection to the broader ecosystem of tools,” he says. “We can handle your payroll, we can give you a loan, we can handle your appointments if you’re a salon, in addition to the walk-ins who come in to buy product and use [the terminal] to swipe a card. If we can tell a story that is bigger than one piece of hardware that is visible, then we tend to shift minds.”

George Clooney is back with a Nespresso coffee in hand in a new commercial costarring Game of Thrones‘s Natalie Dormer. It starts with him dressed as an American-accented knight, then veers into a breaking-the-fourth-wall fantasy. Before we go any further, it’s just best that you watch it in all its unabashed dorkiness.

Created by agency McCann, this follow up to last year’s “Comin’ Home” sure looks great. It clearly didn’t skimp on talent, production design, or music licensing. But the sum total of those investments is what I imagine might pop up if you typed “bloated budget celebrity commercial” into McCann’s AI creative director. I mean, Peter Gabriel’s “Solsbury Hill”?

Watching this makes me feel like Bobby Moynihan’s Danny DeVito when SNL spoofed an earlier entry in the Clooney Nespresso canon. Just that feeling of, this is coffee, right? We’re talking about coffee? WHAT IS HAPPENING? I mean, at least “Comin’ Home” had Clooney bouncing around through different classic movie sets. Sure, nobody on the planet ever–besides Andy Garcia in this ad–has ever said or will ever say, “It’s a perfect Nespresso morning here,” but it was all cute enough, and hey, there were Muppets. But this new one is full-on Mugatu territory.

I have a theory, though. You guys, I think we’re all getting pranked. Clooney is a notorious prankster. He’d put buckets of water over Julia Roberts’s doorway. He found a painting in the garbage, framed, signed it, and gave it to his buddy Richard Kind for his 40th birthday. He put a bumper sticker on Brad Pitt’s car that was a pot leaf and the words, “Fuck cops.” But over the years, he’s developed more long-tail pranks that take months, even years, to reveal themselves. Back in 2015, Clooney told Graham Norton that he wrote many, many letters to many celebrities on fake Brad Pitt stationary and would wait up to a year to tell either party about it.

These Nespresso ads hark back to the secret foreign commercial days, when celebrities would go to Japan or elsewhere to cash in on ads largely unseen by North American audiences. The only explanation can be that it’s part of some grand prank on either all of us, Nespresso’s marketing budget, or both. If not, to quote SNL’s spoof tagline, “Nespresso: What?“

The disappearance of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi has led to a number of tech companies, as well as Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, pulling out of a Saudi Public Investment Fund conference scheduled for later this month. And several (including Sam Altman, president of Y Combinator, and Dan Doctoroff, CEO of Alphabet unit Sidewalk Labs) have cut ties to the Saudi Arabia’s Neom smart city project after being named as advisors, CNBC reports.

But so far, Amazon CEO and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos has been silent on the matter, which is curious when you consider some of the especially gruesome details emerging around the story. Turkish officials have reportedly said they have recordings indicating that Khashoggi was killed and dismembered inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul when he traveled there on routine business.

Asked about Bezos’s silence on the matter, a Washington Post spokesperson told Fast Company that, “Publisher and CEO Fred Ryan and Editorial Page Editor Fred Hiatt are the two speaking on behalf of the company at this time.”

Bezos was among a number of tech executives who met with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman when he visited the United States in March. What’s more, Amazon has reportedly been in talks to open data centers in Saudi Arabia, according to the Wall Street Journal. The company didn’t immediately respond to an inquiry from Fast Company.

Saudi Arabia has become a major tech backer in recent years, investing significant funds in companies like Uber, Tesla, and WeWork and contributing billions of dollars to SoftBank’s Vision Fund as it looks to move its economy beyond oil. That puts Silicon Valley in a sensitive position in responding to Khashoggi’s disappearance. And Bezos, who owns the newspaper where Khashoggi wrote, is in a doubly sensitive position.