And we’re off!

Numbers for brick-and-mortar Black Friday sales won’t be out for a few days but online sales are already jumping.

Digital sales hit a historic high on Thanksgiving Day–$3.7 billion. That’s a 28% spike from last year’s $2.9 billion on the same day, say the folks at Adobe Analytics. And more and more people are shopping on their phones (37% compared to 29% last year).

“Mobile stole the show Thanksgiving Day with smartphones representing more than 50% of traffic to retail sites, as well as record amount of revenue,” says Taylor Schreiner of Adobe Digital Insights.

The online rush had several major retailers, including Walmart and Lululemon. reporting minor website delays or disruptions. “We knew it would be a busy day, and I suppose technology got away from us this time around,” Lululemon posted on Facebook.

Today’s online sales are expected to hit $6.4 billion.

While surveying the devastating damage caused by the deadly California fires, President Donald Trump was asked last week whether the experience altered his views on climate change.

“No. No. I have a strong opinion: I want great climate, we’re going to have that,” he responded—as if one can command “great climate” by ordering it on Amazon Prime.

He also—wrongly—suggested raking leaves from the forest floor might help.

It would seem laughable if only the consequences weren’t so dire. On Friday, the US government released the second volume of the Fourth National Climate Assessment, which warns about the potential long-lasting impact of climate change if we don’t make major changes.

The  report, like many before it, stresses the importance of cutting greenhouse gas emissions and investing in renewable energy technology before it’s too late.

“The impacts of climate change are already being felt in communities across the country,” the report says. “More frequent and intense extreme weather and climate-related events, as well as changes in average climate conditions, are expected to continue to damage infrastructure, ecosystems, and social systems that provide essential benefits to communities.”

Related:Trump’s clean car rollback will cost the U.S. $457 billion

The health risks are also real: With changes in temperatures come poor air quality, increased exposure to waterborne and foodborne diseases, and a decrease in water and food. Extreme weather directly causes both cold and heat-related deaths. The report even outlines how climate change is expected to affect the distribution of disease-carrying insects, exposing populations to Lyme disease ticks and mosquitoes that transmit viruses such as Zika, West Nile, and dengue.

Economic devastation

And in what might be the only angle that might appeal to Trump, it outlines how the issue could cost the economy billions of dollars, perhaps more than 10% of the GDP by the end of the century. For example, regional economies and industries that depend on natural resources and favorable climate conditions—agriculture, tourism, and fisheries—are at risk. Rising temperatures increase energy demands, meaning higher electricity costs.

CNN reports that the 1,600-page assessment was composed by a team of 13 federal agencies by way of the US Global Change Research Program. It was a collaboration of 1,000 people, including 300 leading scientists, half of whom are from the government.

The first volume, released in November 2017, found that this period is now the warmest in the history of modern civilization. And mankind is to blame: “It is extremely likely that human activities, especially emissions of greenhouse gases, are the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century,” reads the report. “There is broad consensus that the further and the faster the Earth system is pushed towards warming, the greater the risk of unanticipated changes and impacts, some of which are potentially large and irreversible.”

The second volume’s release comes just one day after President Trump tweeted,“Brutal and Extended Cold Blast could shatter ALL RECORDS – Whatever happened to Global Warming?”

Brutal and Extended Cold Blast could shatter ALL RECORDS – Whatever happened to Global Warming?

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 22, 2018

The tweet demonstrates a common misconception about global warming–that it literally means only warmer weather, instead of evaluating extreme weather as a whole and larger ongoing climate trends. Thousands of studies attest to dramatic changes in surface, atmospheric, and oceanic temperatures. This includes melting glaciers, rising sea levels, as well as an increase in forest fires, storms, and intense heavy rainfalls.

Related: Ad industry supergroup forms to battle climate change

The report stresses that immediate action is imperative.

“Decisions made today determine risk exposure for current and future generations and will either broaden or limit options to reduce the negative consequences of climate change,” reads the report. “While Americans are responding in ways that can bolster resilience and improve livelihoods, neither global efforts to mitigate the causes of climate change nor regional efforts to adapt to the impacts currently approach the scales needed to avoid substantial damages to the U.S. economy, environment, and human health and well-being over the coming decades.”

Usually, practice makes perfect, but in the case of resume writing, meticulous editing and fine-tuning are what’ll lead you to the perfect resume. However, keep in mind that refining your resume requires a very unique set of lenses to be able to see its flaws and imperfections. With so many contradictory guidelines and common misconceptions about what makes a job-winning resume, it’s hard to know for sure what to change or where to even begin.

To demystify some of the ambiguities surrounding the resume editing process, here’s a hand-picked list of some of the most important dos and don’ts to be aware of during this stage.

Do list your most impressive and relevant achievements first

While you might have jotted down the different sections of your resume in whatever order they happened to pop into your mind, this is not always optimal. Instead, you want to move your most impressive accomplishments to the top of your resume. That way, your resume will make a great first impression as soon as the hiring manager begins reading it.

Do optimize for applicant tracking systems

No matter how good your resume looks to the human eye, it might still have trouble getting past applicant tracking systems. These resume robots are used by large organizations (and sometimes small ones, too) to weed out unqualified candidates during the initial hiring process. They work by scoring your resume based on how well it matches the job description and meets the predefined requirements.

Some common tactics to get past these robots include incorporating the appropriate keywords, formatting your resume properly, and utilizing standardized resume headers. For a more complete guide on how to beat these pesky programs, check out this detailed article.

Do include soft skills

You might have forgotten to include them in your initial draft, but they’re important to mention. Soft skills refer to the intangible assets that employers look for in candidates, such as communication skills, problem-solving prowess, and teamwork ability. While you shouldn’t list these soft skills in your “Skills” section, the bullet points on your resume should be written in a manner that implies that you possess them.

Do tailor your resume for different jobs

Resume editing isn’t a one-and-done deal. In fact, you’ll often need more than one resume at your disposal so you can submit the most appropriate one to the job you’re applying for. This is why professional resume writers often craft multiple resumes for a single client.

For example, suppose that you’ve had working experience in both finance and accounting, but you’re currently applying for a job that is strictly finance. You’ll definitely make a stronger impression and appear to be a better fit by emphasizing your finance-related accomplishments while downplaying your accounting experience on the resume you submit.

Do try getting your resume to fit exactly one page

With your initial draft, your resume is usually never exactly one page in length. While you might read from other online sources that this is all fine and dandy, I always suggest that job seekers make the extra effort to get their resume to fit on one full page unless they have over 15 years of work experience. After all, why take the unnecessary risk of irritating a hiring manager who’s fussy about resume length?

Admittedly, sometimes it’s hard to get it just right. Maybe you’re having trouble filling the page up because you have little to no work experience. If you haven’t already, consider adding in the names of the most impressive courses you’ve taken in school, or perhaps include a summary or objective statement at the top.

Don’t mention the obvious

While it’s great to have the mind-set of leaving no stone unturned, everyone already assumes you have experience with Microsoft Word and Outlook. There’s also no point in mentioning that you know English if it’s obvious that you’ve worked in an English-speaking country your entire life. Instead, save your precious resume real estate for more technical skills that are far more impressive.

If you do know a second language though, be sure to mention it, as it’s currently a very sought-after talent that companies love.

Don’t get overly fancy with pictures and colors

Unless you’re in an industry like fashion or graphic design that openly encourages resumes with unique and aesthetically pleasing layouts, it’s almost always better to stick with a basic resume template.

This is true for a number of reasons. For one, hiring managers are used to seeing standard resume formats. They don’t want to spend extra time getting accustomed to your unique layout. To be quite frank, some hiring managers won’t even bother reading resumes that aren’t formatted according to industry standards. They assume the resume is all style and no substance.

On top of that, let’s not forget that resumes need to appease the resume robots. As you might expect, robots are heartless, and they don’t care for pretty colors or aesthetics. In fact, they might have trouble processing your resume, and this could severely hurt your chances of moving past the first stage of the hiring process.

Don’t use weak action verbs

You didn’t “help lead” a group initiative. You “spearheaded” one. Always look to use stronger and more impressive power verbs at the beginning of your bullet points, while avoiding weaker ones like “help” or “assisted.”

Don’t be inconsistent

I see this all the time. The resume begins every one of its bullet points with a verb, but then suddenly, out of nowhere, one lone bullet point decides it’s perfectly fine to start itself off with a noun. While it may seem like no big deal, some recruiters can get really ticked off by this inconsistency and conclude that you’re not a detail-oriented job candidate. Just remember to keep things consistent–it’s not hard if you look out for it!

Don’t forget to ask someone to proofread

It’s great that you took the time to edit and refine your resume. Now let your friends and family members help as well. If even professional writers and authors have editors to proofread and make changes to their works, then you should too.

It’s easy at times to think that what you wrote makes perfect sense, because after all, you wrote it! But unfortunately, we’re all prone to making some mistakes or suboptimal writing decisions that we simply can’t catch and fix ourselves. So never skip this final step–it might just be the most important one.

This article originally appeared on Glassdoor and is reprinted with permission. 

From anti-war marches in the 1960s to the Tea Party rallies of 2010 and the progressive protests in 2018, marching in the streets are a fixture of modern American life. But do protests actually accomplish anything in terms of election results or the balance of party power?

Absolutely yes, according to a new study based on 30 years of data.

Coauthored by Sarah A. Soule at Stanford Graduate School of Business and Daniel Q. Gillion at the University of Pennsylvania, the study finds that spikes in both liberal and conservative protest activity can increase or decrease a candidate’s vote by enough to change the final outcome.

“Many people are skeptical that protests matter to electoral outcomes, but our paper finds that they have a profound effect on voter behavior,” says Soule. “Liberal protests lead Democrats to vote on the issues that resonate for them, and conservative protests lead Republicans to do the same. It happens on both sides of the ideological spectrum.”

On average, a wave of liberal protesting in a congressional district can increase a Democratic candidate’s vote share by 2% and reduce a GOP candidate’s share by 6%. A wave of conservative protests, like those by the Tea Party in 2010, will on average reduce the Democratic vote share by 2% and increase the Republican share by 6%.

Related: The startup resistance takes on the Trump agenda

On top of that, big protests by progressives have spurred increases in the quality of Democrats who decide to challenge incumbents. (Conservative protests haven’t had the same impact motivating Republican challengers, however.) That seems to be what has happened in 2018, when record numbers of women both marched in the streets and decided to run as Democrats for Congress, but the pattern isn’t unique to this year.

The study is based on a detailed analysis of both local protest activity and voting patterns in every congressional election from 1960 to 1990. The data on protests came from news reports. Soule and Gillion focused only on local protests, which they scored by both their ideological leaning and their intensity or “salience.”

Liberals march more

To rate the protests on an ideological spectrum, the researchers looked at each protest’s focal issues. Not surprisingly, given the anti-war and civil rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s, 90% of the protests during those decades were on the left side of the political spectrum. But the share of conservative protests increased gradually to 14% in the ’80s and 21% by 1990.

To rate “salience,” Soule and Gillion looked at whether the protests attracted large numbers of people; had organizational backing; attracted police presence; or resulted in damage, injuries, or death.

Interestingly, conservative protests of similar intensity appear to give Republicans a proportionately bigger boost in vote share. Soule and Gillion say that probably reflects the fact that conservative street protests were rare until the 1990s, which probably made them more electrifying to Republican voters.

The researchers argue that local political protests provide important signals to voters as well as to candidates and potential challengers. For voters, they can focus attention. To incumbent lawmakers, they are signals about intensity of local discontent. For prospective challengers, they can signal the incumbent’s vulnerability.

Indeed, the paper finds that an increase in liberal protest activity correlates with an increase in the number of “quality” Democratic challengers, such as those who have held elected offices before. The odds of a solid challenger entering a congressional race climbed from 20% to 50% as the intensity of protest activity increased.

“It’s a form of information gathering,” Gillion says. “When politicians run for office, they try to know every single issue in their backyard as well as the sentiments of their constituents. Protests are a way of signaling discontent, and they inform politicians about the most salient issues.”

Gillion adds that the volume and intensity of progressive protests have been higher in 2018 than at any time since the late 1960s.

Other studies, including a new one by Robb Willer of Stanford, find that violent protests can lead people to think poorly of the protesters. However, Soule and Gillion say they found little evidence that protests produce a backlash in actual voting behavior.

This article was originally published on Stanford Business and is republished here with permission.

I’m not a superhero. I don’t have any superpowers. I’m a regular human being that goes through ups and downs like anyone else. But I’m also an entrepreneur and a CEO, which means people around me tend to put me in a category above themselves.

I don’t think like that, and I believe that those who do are making a mistake.

The myth of the flawless leader

So many employees put their leaders on a pedestal. Some leaders do the same thing. They either subscribe to the notion that they are separate and distinct from the people who work for them, or they purposely create that separation themselves. With this kind of mentality comes a different type of pressure to perform. Unfortunately, our society has also conditioned us to believe that no one wants to follow a flawed leader.

That needs to change. Every single human being has imperfections, and anyone who convinces themselves otherwise is just setting themselves up for disappointment. A study coming out of the University of California San Francisco showed that 30% of entrepreneurs admit to struggling with depression. And as a CEO myself who has built a multimillion-dollar business without an MBA, I’m telling you that there are many more issues we struggle with in addition to depression.

I get it; there’s a massive risk for CEOs and entrepreneurs who come clean about their struggles with mental health. Every decision falls on our shoulders–not just our own, but that of our staff. We need mental strength to manage all of those things. And if we admit that from time to time, we struggle to muster such strength, people might question our ability to handle those responsibilities.

But if we don’t allow ourselves to be open and vulnerable, we’re doing everyone around us a disservice. For all you know, you might have employees and peers who are struggling with mental health issues. Only one in four employees report their battles with persistent stress and excessive anxiety, according to research from the Anxiety Disorders Association of America. Sure, external factors might be to blame for this, but this kind of work culture starts at the top.

When you’re transparent about your issues, you make your employees feel less alone. In turn, they’ll probably have more respect for you as a leader. This is why I’ve decided to be completely transparent when it comes to my struggles with anxiety. Here are the approaches I’ve chosen to adopt:

I talk about it in real time

I practice explaining to my team that I’m going through anxiety when it’s actually in the process of happening. I’ve noticed that this gesture gives my team a moment to shine by supporting me through a difficult time, and also empowers my employees to be empathetic. They can look at me and say, “Hey, our leader is going through something and is asking for help, so it’s okay if we go through something, too.” That’s more powerful than you know.

I make sure to do something

My favorite quote when it comes to dealing with anxiety is, “Idle hands are the devil’s playground.” That may mean different things to different people, but I know for me, the moment I stop putting my brain to use, that’s the moment that it starts to turn against me. I’m passionate about what I do, so it’s easy for me to throw myself into my work without feeling overwhelmed. And if I can keep my team occupied and engaged in doing meaningful work, then that helps them to feel good about themselves and what they’re doing.

I find a way to help someone else

Helping people might seem like this selfless act, but I get just as much out of it as the person I’m assisting. Your team needs to see that you’ll be there for them when they need you. They need to know you can be that support for whatever they’re going through. That starts with showing that you’re capable of asking for help, then making yourself available to assist someone else. Do this and watch it spread through the workplace.

The pressure we put on ourselves to perform as CEOs and entrepreneurs can lead to actions that strain our mental health. We’re trying to build something out of nothing. That’s not easy. Add to that the expectations from board members, team members, and investors and it’s easy to see how coming out with your own issues can jeopardize their confidence in your abilities. But that’s because we’re all still stuck in this mindset that mental health is parallel to your mental strength. It’s not. You’re not weak for admitting that you’re struggling with something. We desperately need to get over that.

Peter Holgate, cofounder and former CEO of Ronin8 Technologies, previously wrote in Fast Company that to build up the emotional intelligence necessary to combat these bad habits and inherent tendencies, we need to be aware of our weaknesses. Once we know our weaknesses, we can take steps to create an environment that supports a more healthy and constructive approach to leadership that doesn’t compromise our mental health.

If we can be vulnerable and show that there’s nothing unstable about enduring mental health, then we give license to those we lead to do and feel the same. That makes you a strong business leader.

Jason Saltzman is the CEO and founder of Alley–a post-business incubator and shared workspace for entrepreneurs. 

If you’ve signed up recently for Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal, or one of the other streaming audio services that now account for more than half of all music consumption, you may have noticed that your listening habits have changed. Now that you don’t have to pay for each CD or digital download, it could be that you’re venturing away from your longtime favorites and checking out the likes of Trombone Shorty, rockabilly chanteuse Wanda Jackson, or some obscure punk band from Finland whose name you aren’t even sure how to pronounce.

If that’s the case, it wouldn’t surprise Bart J. Bronnenberg, a Stanford Graduate School of Business marketing professor who’s been researching consumer demand for musical variety and how it influences their choices.

Related:Spotify’s $30 billion playlist for global domination

“The thing with CDs and iTunes is that when you bought a title, more variety would cost you more money,” explains Bronnenberg, whose own eclectic musical tastes range from blues to classical. “With streaming, that’s not the case. Once you buy a subscription, the incremental variety to you is free. We were interested in figuring out the consequence of this cost shock on consumers.”

In a study recently published in the journal Marketing Science, Bronnenberg and coauthors Hannes Datta and George Knox, both of the Netherlands’s Tilburg University, found a way to discern the effect on consumers when they switched from purchasing individual songs or albums to subscription streaming. They analyzed more than two years’ worth of data from a popular online service that tracks members’ listening history across a wide variety of platforms, ranging from iTunes and Windows Media Player to streaming services like Spotify. The tracking app, which the researchers promised to keep anonymous, then makes music recommendations to its members based on their consumption across multiple platforms.

The researchers could identify when users switched from purchasing music by the song or album to streaming, and then could track what happened to their music consumption–including the total number of songs, unique artists, and distinct genres they listened to.

While it may seem intuitive that subscribers freed of economic limits on consumption would consume more, the sheer magnitude of the shift was startling. In the first week, the number of songs played by new converts to streaming increased by 132%, while the number of unique artists heard jumped by 62%.

What’s even more surprising is that those trends persisted, even after the novelty wore off. Six months after the switch to streaming, users’ music consumption on digital platforms was still 49% higher than it previously had been, and the number of unique artists that they listened to was 32% higher, according to Bronnenberg.

“All these effects are very sizable, and they actually seem to represent a long-run behavioral shift,” Bronnenberg explains. “You end up listening to more music and, on balance, the variety expansion is quite large–you tend to listen to the same thing less often.”

At the same time, users’ consumption of music by superstar artists actually declined slightly, by 7%. Instead, the researchers observed users trying many new artists and songs. “There’s a lot more discovery going on,” Bronnenberg says. Most of the additional music was only listened to once, since “when you get more venturesome, you also end up trying things you don’t like.” But because those choices didn’t cost anything except users’ time, they continued to explore. And in the process they also discovered new songs and artists that they did like, which they continued to listen to repeatedly.

Bronnenberg emphasized that the research looked at streaming music from the demand rather than the supply side. But he suspects that the changes in consumer behavior that he and his colleagues observed could have important implications for an industry that is already being transformed by streaming services.

Smaller producers benefit

Spotify, the largest of the streaming providers, now has 40 million paying subscribers worldwide. For $10 a month, the customers have access to a library of more than 30 million songs. The company has another 60 million members who can listen for free but have less control over what they can listen to. The musicians and their labels get paid based on the number of times a song gets streamed.

“The shift from ownership to streaming potentially levels the playing field to the benefit of smaller producers,” the researchers write. “Our results point to a more fragmented market, potentially more amenable to smaller artists and labels.”

Bronnenberg also thinks that the advent of curated lists on streaming services—a phenomenon that the study didn’t examine—could create value for consumers by guiding their musical exploration. “For a company like Spotify, which has a catalog of millions of songs, consumers are also appreciating and probably willing to pay for good curated lists,” he says.

This article was originally published on Stanford Business and is republished here with permission.

1. Janelle Monáe

CEO, Wondaland

Ask Janelle Monáe how she gets everything done—the critically acclaimed albums, the world tours, the film roles, the activism—and she’ll answer with a single, slightly unexpected word. “Slack!” she says, with a cheerful laugh. “Email used to stress me out. Now I can organize every conversation, and I go into the channel when I need to—I don’t check it every hour. Like, when I get up, the first thing I do is not look at my phone. The first thing I do is I take at least 10 deep breaths.” She demonstrates, seemingly shifting her mind from the cacophonous, dimly lit restaurant, where she’s occupying a prime corner table, to a mellower internal place: “Inhale . . . exhale; inhale . . . exhale. That really calms you down.”

Read more

2. Beth Ford

CEO, Land O’Lakes

“I work a lot through email and text. I say to my team: ‘Please don’t write me a novel, I won’t read it.’ I just don’t have the time.”

3. Mellody Hobson

President, Ariel Investments

“I [travel with] what I call my utility bag—my pajamas, dopp kit, running shoes, and workout clothes. My suits are sent [via] FedEx to me in each city, in a white box, and then I just send them back. When I open that box, I have shoes, suits, all of those things for that city.”

4. P.K. Subban

Defenseman, Nashville Predators, National Hockey League

“Sometimes you get out there and your body is feeling great, and you don’t have to push it. Sometimes you get out there and your legs feel like they’re 80 pounds apiece, and you gotta do a little extra.”

5. Reese Witherspoon

Founder, Hello Sunshine

“I have a 6-year-old who likes to have milk at 6 o’clock every morning, so from 6 a.m. to 7 a.m., he drinks milk, and my husband [CAA agent Jim Toth] and I drink coffee. We talk and catch up on the news—Jim likes to hear it, I like to read it. After that, I work out for an hour, then go to work.”

Read more

6. April Ryan

Washington bureau chief, American Urban Radio Networks

“I’m on the phone quite a bit. I talk to congressional leaders and call people in different communities, formulating what I’m going to ask [during a White House press briefing], and how I’m going to ask it. It’s all about the information you obtain. The right questions can help put something on the table and change procedures and policy.”

7. Jonathan Van Ness

Hairdresser, podcast host, and star of Netflix’s Queer Eye

“When I’m burning the candle at both ends, my internal critic comes out a bit. Recently, I was really fighting to stop myself from looking at negative comments on Instagram—you know, really Insta-stalking people. I said to myself, “Oh my God, girl. What are you going through?” So for the past two weeks in my morning meditations, I have been trying to think of the word gratitude as I inhale. And as I exhale, I think about stress leaving my body.”

Read more

8. Yi Qin

VP of product management, Instant Brands

“Every family dinner is like I’m testing out my own products. Later, since we also have a team in China, we have night calls from 10 p.m. to after midnight quite a few times during the week.”

9. Laura Vanderkam

Time management expert and author

In order to liberate minutes, if not hours, from a tight daily schedule, I recommend establishing the 20/45 rule: Most 30- or 60-minute meetings can be trimmed to 20 or 45, with discipline. That wins you back precious time that you can use for exercise, networking, volunteering, reading, meditating, or any of the other priorities that keep getting bumped from your to-do list.

10. Jennifer De Haro

Managing attorney, Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services (RAICES)

“After I experience sadness over having lost a case or some awful new policy, like separating children from their parents, I try to find an outlet—either exercise or talking with coworkers. Humor helps.”

11. Lee Child

Author

“I drink about 30 cups of coffee a day. I like to work before I eat. If I’m hungry, then I’m on the ball. I have two computers, at different ends of a room. One is connected to the internet, and one isn’t. When I want to go online, I have to walk across the room, which usually disincentivizes me.”

12. Cal Henderson

Cofounder and CTO, Slack

“I’ve never exchanged an email with somebody else who works at Slack. I check my email maybe once a day. It’s quite peripheral to how I work . . . A lot of my productivity around using Slack is knowing to prioritize what information I need to see. That means [heavily] muting channels or not joining channels, and “starring” the ones that are really important to me.”

Read more

13. Peter Shankman

Founder and CEO, The Geek Factory, Inc. 

Work backward to map out how you’ll prepare for an event or meeting. That can include getting enough sleep the night before and choosing an outfit. Since Peter Shankman wakes up at 3:45 a.m. to exercise, he simplifies his morning routine by sleeping in his workout clothes.

Editor’s Note: This story is part of our feature, “Secrets of 13 of the most productive people.” See the complete 2018 list here.

An estimated 269 billion emails are sent each day worldwide. And some days it can feel like all of those are coming to your inbox. No one seems to like sending and receiving email, and yet most of us can’t pull ourselves away from impulsively checking it.

Still, it’s helpful to remember that email should be a tool to help you get your job done, it shouldn’t become your job itself. If you want to reclaim some of your time from your inbox, here are three approaches to dealing with the daily deluge.

Moderate

Put your devices away. “Seventy-five percent of Americans can reach their phones without moving their feet 24 hours a day,” says Adam Alter, author of Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked. “It’s easier to resist the charms of your inbox if it’s not within reach.”

Aggressive

Check email three times a day: when you arrive at your desk, before lunch, and at the end of the day. Try a tool like Inbox Pause, which delivers emails at preset times.

Extreme

Consider a service such as Shortwhale, which allows you to limit the length of emails and set up an FAQ page, reducing the number of messages you receive or need to respond to. “It ensures that they aren’t occupying your time needlessly,” says Alter.

The 1997 movie Gattica, which depicted a disturbing future world where people genetically altered their future offspring, seemed like far-off science fiction at the time. Well, that future is now here. Yesterday, the MIT Technology Review published a story about documents it unearthed by a Chinese researcher, He Jiankui, who has been recruiting couples to create the world’s first gene-edited babies. Hours later, the Associated Press came out with an article where He said he’s already worked with seven couples. He added that a pair of twins was born last month as a result of his clinical trial.

The gene-editing tool CRISPR has become a well-known tool in the science research arsenal. But this is the first time it’s ever been used to create new human babies–and this news will surely lead to outcry from the global scientific community. As the Tech Review writes, gene editing can create myriad risks–including unknown mutations down the line as a result.

The Chinese scientist told the AP that this trial was an attempt to give the future offspring the genetic ability to resist the AIDS virus. (Scientists are already noting that He’s research may be foolhardy, as others are already using CRISPR to research new AIDS treatment methods, but with adults.) For all of the couples, the men had HIV–but the virus was already suppressed via other medicine to not risk spreading it. “Instead,” writes the AP, “the appeal was to offer couples affected by HIV a chance to have a child that might be protected from a similar fate.”

Included in He’s team is a U.S. professor, Michael Deem, who traveled to China to do the trial because this sort of work is currently banned in the United States. Deem was He’s advisor at Rice University in Houston, where he studied before opening a lab in Shenzhen, China.

What’s perhaps most concerning is that it seems He and Deem seem to have started their work before disclosing what they were doing. What’s more, the AP notes that the people participating may not have been fully aware about what they were participating in; “consent forms called the project an ‘AIDS vaccine development’ program.” This is also their first time ever running human clinical trials. Put together, there are a lot of real ethical concerns at play.

Overall, this news indicates we’re entering into an unknown new world of genetic research–one full of risks that could potentially have life-altering effects on the participants. This week, the world’s top genetic researchers will meet at the Second International Summit on Human Genome Editing. Though not on the agenda, this news will surely be discussed.

You can read the MIT Technology Review‘s story here and the AP’s here.

The family news from Southern China wasn’t good. Nisa Leung’s distant uncle had liver cancer. “We were looking all over for good therapeutics for him in China, but there weren’t many,” says Leung, who graduated with an MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business in 2001.

At the time, the Hong Kong-based venture capitalist was working at a U.S.-based VC firm and “thought it would be great to bring in some U.S.-based medical technologies to help all these Chinese patients.” She quit her job and started a company distributing cancer treatments and medical devices in China.

Seventeen years later, she’s a managing partner and lead healthcare investor for Qiming (pronounced Chi-ming) Venture Partners, with offices in Shanghai, Beijing, Shenzhen, and Hong Kong. Qiming manages $4 billion in assets and investment in more than 270 companies.

Prior to joining Qiming in 2006, Leung was cofounder of Biomedic Holdings, with operations and investments in medical devices, pharmaceuticals, and healthcare services in China. Before that, she was a venture partner at PacRim Ventures in Menlo Park and with Softbank/Mobius Venture Capital in Mountain View.

Leung, who sits on the boards of at least nine health companies, was named Venture Capital Professional of the Year by Asian Venture Capital Journal in 2017. That same year, Qiming created its first U.S. fund and set up offices in Seattle, Boston, and Palo Alto.

What sort of value are you looking for when you consider funding a Chinese health company?

Nisa Leung: We look on the macro side. We’re always thinking, “Why are we still using these 30- and 40-year-old drugs? Why are we using these diagnostic tools that have a 50% accuracy rate? Can we develop drugs or diagnostics in China that have a much better efficacy at a cheaper price and with cheaper development costs?” It’s really about investing in opportunities where we feel there’s a big empty space that needs to be filled and then looking at the entrepreneurs, the management team, the structure. The products are important as well, but I think in the last 10 or 15 years it’s been all about investing in the Genentechs of China, the GEs of China, where the whole space is empty and there are lots of comparable products in the U.S., Europe, and Japan. There’s not a lot of innovation coming from China yet, but it’s slowly changing.

And Qiming also got into the game early, right?

NL: We’re very fortunate to have identified this sector as an opportunity when we did. Through the years we were able to build up a tremendous network of entrepreneurs and people in the field. So it’s easy for us to make a phone call to the country head of a big pharma firm and ask for a reference check. The fundamental network we’ve built up is strong. As a result, many entrepreneurs like to join our ecosystem of healthcare companies. We’re fortunate to have that reputation.

Are there challenges unique to investing in startups in China, and what advantages do you think you bring to that mission?

NL: That’s the thing about doing business in China. It’s the Wild, Wild West, but we’re exploring new ground all the time. What was very useful to me was that I’d already gone through the red tape, the bureaucracy, the difficulty of hiring from multinationals for jobs in China. So the ability to talk to the government and understand what is happening in their world makes a huge difference. The majority of VCs do not have deep operating experience in China, and definitely not entrepreneurship experience.

Are there differences between investing in China and the U.S. that American investors might find unfamiliar or even startling?

NL: How the entrepreneurs behave is very different. Most of our companies, our entrepreneurs still own a good part of their company because they really bootstrap. And by the time they go public, they own a lot more of their company than founders in the U.S. We almost never replace a CEO or a founder in China, whereas in the U.S., the VCs regularly replace founders and bring in professional CEOs. Because of this, we also work very closely with the founder in a long-term way and our relationship is very close. And of course, we don’t see as many serial entrepreneurs.

Do you have specific red flags that make you pass on potential investment opportunities?

NL: We’re always looking for companies that want to make a difference. If we ever detect an entrepreneur who wants to make a quick buck, to take the company public and get out, that’s not the type of business we like to invest in. As a case in point, there’s a company that recently made a lot of news about children’s vaccines in China. I looked at that company and decided to pass because of the quality of the products and reputation of the chairperson, and also the questionable transfer of state-owned enterprise assets to a private company. But I still believe we need to have a Chinese vaccine company that can develop world-quality children’s vaccines. China can’t afford the imported products, but Chinese drug companies don’t have the ability to develop world-class vaccines at a reasonable price. So what to do?

What did you do?

NL: We decided to invest in a company called CanSino, which stands for Canada and China. The four founders were senior executives at American and Canadian vaccine plants. Their lives were very cushy, but they wanted to do something for their home country. So they moved back to China and started this vaccine company. Right now they’re conducting clinical trials on 7 of the top 10 children’s vaccines. It’s the first time a company has ever developed a whole suite of children’s vaccines with no live virus in them. It’s very exciting.

What other type of health care companies are you backing?

NL: All along I told people that it’s very difficult to invest in mobile health in China the way they do in the U.S., because the healthcare systems in China and the U.S. are so different. But we did invest in a couple of mobile health companies, including one called WeDoctor. Many people who use mobile health are from rural areas with no doctor access.

That seems tailor-made for the Chinese market.

NL: The year before we invested, WeDoctor booked 100 million doctor appointments in China. They received the first internet hospital license in China and probably the world [to book appointments, do follow-up consultations, prescribe drugs, and operate physician-staffed clinics]. Three years later, it’s now the largest internet hospital in China. As of April of this year, WeDoctor was seeing 70,000 patients a day through its internet platform. It’s a very good way to reach people throughout the entire country. That’s the kind of thing we’re really interested in investing in–companies that can make a huge difference.

Any particular Stanford professors that you found to be particularly influential as you advanced through your career?

NL: I just had lunch with one of them in the Bay Area a couple weeks ago. John Glynn, the CEO of Glynn Capital, was one of the first-generation VCs in Silicon Valley, and he taught an entrepreneurship and venture capital class for many years at Stanford GSB. He shared with us the history of venture capital and talked about how he evaluated different companies and what he considers important. What he said was so helpful and gave us a basis for thinking. I am very appreciative of his teaching and continue to practice what he taught us.

This article was originally published on Stanford Business and is republished here with permission.

At a steel mill outside Beijing, reactors attached to the building capture emissions from the factory. Those waste gases can then be turned into fuel. LanzaTech, a biotech startup that designed a way to turn those emissions into ethanol, recently blended that ethanol into jet fuel that powered a Virgin Atlantic flight from Orlando to London.

The jet fuel–with a carbon footprint smaller than regular fuel, but a comparable cost–is one way that the airline industry can begin to tackle its climate problem. In 2017, flights produced 859 million metric tons of CO2. By midcentury, like other industries, airlines will have to reach net zero emissions for the world to stay on track to meet the goals of the Paris climate agreement.

For short flights, airlines can begin to shift to electric planes. Eviation, one startup with an all-electric nine-seater airplane, plans to begin making its first commuter flights in 2021. Zunum, which designed a hybrid-electric plane, plans to be in the air in 2022. Others are also on the way.

“We do see an electric plane for short distances,” says Sophia Mendelsohn, the head of sustainability and environmental social governance for JetBlue. The company’s venture arm invested in Zunum in 2017. But electric technology likely isn’t in the near future for larger, longer flights. “It’s physics,” she says. “It’s going to work for a certain amount of energy. After a certain amount of energy, the battery won’t be worth putting up in the air.”

For most flights, the industry is beginning to turn to new fuels. In September, JetBlue made its first flight using a renewable blend fuel. Though chemically identical to regular jet fuel, 15.5% of it came from used cooking oil from restaurants, which otherwise would have been wasted. Next year, the airline will begin buying around 33 million gallons of biofuel a year, or about 20% of the fuel it uses annually at JFK.

A few days before JetBlue’s first biofuel flight, United flew a 787 from San Francisco to Zurich with a fuel made partly from a mustard seed-based biofuel (for now, all of these fuels are blends for safety reasons, though fuels that use no fossil ingredients may be possible in the future). United isn’t new to biofuels–it made its first test flight with a biofuel in 2009, and since 2016, has been making regularly scheduled flights from LAX using fuel from World Energy, an L.A.-based startup that turns agricultural waste into biofuel.

United is now working to scale up its use of biofuels and synthetic fuels. “Supply is definitely a challenge,” says Aaron Robinson, senior manager for environmental strategy and sustainability at United. “If we went out to the market and said, ‘Hey, we want to buy some more biofuels for aviation’ today, there just isn’t supply for us to buy. That is part of why United has been investing early to get these companies off the ground–to make a commitment not only on paper, but in dollars, to bringing these companies to fruition.”

Fulcrum BioEnergy, one of the companies that United invested in, broke ground on a new plant in May in Reno that turns household waste into a liquid fuel. By 2020, the plant will produce 10.5 million gallons of fuel a year. “The interesting part about Fulcrum is by using municipal solid waste, you’re also reducing methane emissions because that waste isn’t ending up in a landfill to sit there for millennia,” says Robinson. Methane, which is produced by food as it decomposes (and other natural sources), is 84 times more potent than CO2.

Some airlines may soon also begin using synthetic fuel made from CO2 pulled directly from the atmosphere. Carbon Engineering, one startup in the new “direct air capture” industry, is raising funds for its first commercial plant, which will capture carbon from the air to make a fuel that the company says will be able to compete with regular jet fuel on cost in some markets that have policies in place to support technology with lower carbon emissions. Eventually, the fuel could be competitive everywhere. “They could capture carbon from the air, and if there was cheap renewable electricity [to run their plants], one could imagine that they could have a product that could be close to cost parity or cost-competitive over the long term,” says Adam Klauber, a principal at the nonprofit Rocky Mountain Institute.

All of these fuels can be used in planes without any changes in the current system. “We don’t have to modify our engines, we don’t have to change the planes, we don’t have to change the infrastructure at the airport to use this biofuel, which makes it a lot easier to implement as well,” Robinson says. “These biofuel producers just become another fuel supplier for the airlines.”

It’s a positive direction–but there’s still a very long way for the industry to go. United uses more biofuel than any other airline. But the over 1 million gallons it uses annually is only 1% of its overall fuel use. World Energy, its supplier in Los Angeles, is still the only major producer of its kind in the world. Fulcrum, the company that will make jet fuel from household waste, will supply United with nearly 10 billion gallons of fuel over 10 years, but hasn’t yet started production. Right now, state and local incentives and the market also mean that fuel producers can make more money supplying diesel to trucks rather than jet fuel to airlines.

According to one industry report, Klauber says, the world would need to add a significant number of commercial-scale plants making alternative fuel every year, from 2020 to 2050, to meet carbon goals. Until 2035, that number of new plants might need to be as high as 328 annually. Right now, only around 20 are in planning, and some of those are years from breaking ground. “What this is suggestive of is that the private sector and investment community alone are unlikely to mobilize the capital necessary to make those investments,” he says. Support from the public sector could help, similar to grants from the Department of Energy that helped Fulcrum get off the ground in Nevada. “We obviously need to see much more than that.”

Most alternative fuels also need to come down much more in cost. “We see this as a chicken-and-egg problem,” says Mendelsohn. “The customer on our flight to Disneyworld [is] saying, we want to fly on a fuel that puts less emissions into the air. At the same time, the customer is going to select a ticket largely based on price, so we need that fuel to be flying the customer in something that’s price-comparable to fossil fuel. Well, fossil fuels have been around for 150 years. That’s a 150-year jump-start on infrastructure, subsidies…that renewable jet fuel is trying to leapfrog in five years.”

Airlines will also have to make other changes, Klauber says, likely including significant changes in the design of planes, such as manta-ray-like “blended wing” designs that combine the body and wings to make a plane more efficient. “It would radically change the way aircraft are produced and require investment and new production capabilities and processes,” he says. But radical change is possible. A recent report created by the Energy Transitions Commission found that airlines, along with other industries that have particularly difficult climate challenges, can feasibly reach net zero emissions by the middle of the century.

While Black Friday and Cyber Monday may be the biggest online shopping days in the U.S., the total those two days bring in pales in comparison to America’s chief economic rival in the east. Earlier this month, China held its annual Single’s Day–a 24-hour Chinese shopping holiday that celebrates the pride of being alone, or single.

Single’s Day takes place on November 11 every year, and this year the Chinese shopping holiday took in a record-breaking $30.7 billion in online sales in just a single (sorry for the pun) 24-hour period.

How does that stack up against this year’s Black Friday and Cyber Monday online sales? Our U.S. shopping holidays can’t compete–it’s not even close. This Black Friday took in a record-breaking $6.22 billion in online sales, and today’s Cyber Monday online sales are expected to take in another $7.8 billion. Taken together, that’s $14.02 billion–less than half of what China’s Single’s Day brought in. And again, remember that $14.02 billion in U.S. sales covers a 48-hour period. China’s Single’s Day haul took in $30.7 billion in just 24 hours.

Even adding Thanksgiving’s Thursday online sales of $3.7 billion to the mix, that still only brings U.S. online spending to $17.72 billion over a 72-hour period–yet that still doesn’t even reach two-thirds of what Chinese consumers spent online in Single’s Day’s 24-hour period.

The lesson here is that even with America’s Black Friday and Cyber Monday hauls, the true king of online spending is the Chinese consumer.

Without a doubt, even from the vantage of today, 2016 will go down as one of the saddest sack years in recent history. A reality show billionaire was elected president. Prince and Bowie died. And, on a perhaps far lesser but also important plane of societal loss, Apple ditched the 3.5 mm headphone jack in the iPhone 7 for a Lightning connector.

In an industry where a CEO can’t order a quinoa bowl without checking how Apple did it first, the 3.5 mm jack disappeared from mid-tier and high-end smartphones almost overnight. Google ditched it. HTC ditched it. Motorola ditched it. Huawei ditched it. Xiaomi ditched it. Sony ditched it. Nokia (they’re still kinda around, yeah!) ditched it. To this day, LG and Samsung are the only two sizable companies to stand their ground and keep the technology around–but rumor has it even Samsung will abandon the 3.5 mm jack in the upcoming Galaxy Note 10, too.

Most of us assumed that we’d get used to it. Like a frog gets used to slowly boiling water. Or a kid gets used to skim milk. But no! Two years after losing the headphone jack, I’m here to remind everyone that life is still terrible without it.

In the old days (and by that I mean anytime before October 2016), the right pair of headphones was the pair of headphones in front of you, or in your pocket, or mangled at the bottom of your bag. It didn’t matter. Now, whenever I need to make a call, I find myself frantically searching for the one pair of USB-C earbuds that came with the Pixel. If I can’t find them? Panic. Then I have to search for the 2-inch dongle–yes, that little appendage that plugs into your phone to give you back a headphone jack–and an old pair of headphones.

Where is that adapter? Is it plugged into my computer? Is it stuck to an old pair of headphones? Where is the socially responsible adult place to store this rubbery appendix? Has Martha Stewart made some reclaimed barnwood USB-C-to-3.5-mm-dongle-holder that I should know about? What would Marie Kondo recommend? Throw out the adapter, or just throw out my phone? (Note: Do NOT throw out the adapter. It’s like $10 to replace 10¢ of wire.)

My daily 3.5 mm grind continues in the car, where I have both USB-C dongles and Lightning dongles, because iPhones and Android phones have different ports. In these moments as I search for the right adapter among dehydrated McDonald’s fries and other unmentionables in the console of my car, I find myself wishing–if only there was one universal audio port they both could use . . . like . . . I don’t know . . . some time-honored plug that’s been around for more than a century . . . that’s probably in a trillion cords worldwide . . . that would play Spotify through my mid-tier car stereo just as well as this newfangled stuff. What a world that would be!

That isn’t even the worst of it. The absolute crappiest environment to lose that 3.5 mm jack is on a plane. There you are, sitting on the tarmac, delayed two hours, trying to tune out the hell-canister of recycled toilet fumes that is commercial air travel, and you see your battery is at 30%. Not bad, but not good either. You still need enough battery to call a Lyft and make your way to the hotel without getting lost.

But with a Lightning connector or USB-C, you can’t listen and charge at the same time. You have to choose. Your only alternative is to pull out one of the few, glorious remaining pieces of technology in your life with a 3.5 mm headphone jack, your 15-inch Macbook Pro, and sacrifice any hope of long-term knee health just so you can silently mouth the words to Taylor Swift’s “Delicate.” But wait. All you’ve got with you is your Lightning or USB-C headphones. Do those new headphones work on your computer? Nope!

I know, I know, You’re probably reading this while AutoPiloting your Tesla with your AirBuds in, sipping on 145-degree coffee from your Ember mug. “Why doesn’t he just get some Bluetooth headphones?” you wonder. I won’t start about how many times I’ve tried to use wireless headphones only to find them dead, because anything wireless is just another battery to worry about.

Look. Workarounds aren’t really the point, because workarounds shouldn’t have to exist in the first place. Good design isn’t meant to operate this way. Technology should always bend to the user, not vice versa. And no human’s life is measurably better since Apple had the “courage” to remove the 3.5 mm jack. But a lot of our lives are just a little worse.

Editor’s Note: This story is part of our feature, “Secrets of 13 of the most productive people.” See the complete 2018 list here.

The [82-game NHL] season can be tiring, with the travel and the physicality of the sport. But I’m not complaining. I wake up every morning [thinking], “I don’t want to waste this day. How can I use this day to be better for tomorrow?”

The night before a big game, I start to visualize the next day. I go through my checklist of things I need to do–not so much on the ice, but I’ll think: “I gotta wake up at 8. I gotta have my breakfast at 8:30. I need to make sure that I get my 6 liters of water.” You don’t want to forget those things or it’ll mess you up–mentally more than physically. At one point, when I was about 20, I used to drink nine espresso shots before a game. Now I have less than a quarter cup of coffee.

I usually get to the game three hours before, and I’ll go through my structural warm-up, get my equipment set up, and start my balance and [muscle] activation exercises. Then we have our meetings. I’ll do a little bit of foam rolling. Then it’s more of an active warm-up, and then I go out and do my sprints and stuff to get ready.

On the ice, my warm-up routine can be tweaked based on how I feel. Sometimes you get out there and your body is feeling great, and you don’t have to push it. Sometimes you get out there and your legs feel like they’re 80 pounds apiece, and you gotta do a little extra.

Everyone needs a break once in a while. Sometimes I just want to be in a room by myself, not even have the TV on. I just want to relax, lie down, and not hear anything. When I moved to Nashville, I surprised a lot of people. I was single at the time, and most of the single guys lived downtown. I went and got a house in a suburb, in a gated community on a golf course. But that’s what I love. When I go home, it’s quiet, and no one bothers me. As I’ve gotten older, I realize how important that is.

[Last year] I pledged $10 million to the Montreal Children’s Hospital. People knew that I loved to give back, and they were always asking me to go to this or that event. I learned that you can’t just give yourself all the time. I thought, “If I want to extend myself beyond my profession, I want to be organized.” That’s when I decided to make the pledge. Today, I barely have bad days. No matter how bad it gets, I know I helped a lot of people.

Time he gets up

“Between 7:45 and 8:30 when we’re in season. During the off-season, I get up a lot earlier: 5 or 5:30 a.m. to start working out.”

First thing he does in the morning

“Check my phone to see if my girlfriend [pro skier Lindsey Vonn] has messaged me, and to make sure everyone in my life is okay.”

Mantra

“It’s not my dad’s quote, but he would always say this to me: ‘The rent we pay on earth is our service to others.’ If you live your life putting people first, you get a lot more out of it.”

Last thing he does at night

“Call my girlfriend.”

Time he goes to bed

“When I’m with [Vonn], I’m in bed by 8:30 or 9. When I’m not, it’s more like 10:30 or 11.”

Editor’s Note: This story is part of our feature, “Secrets of 13 of the most productive people.” See the complete 2018 list here.

Alexa can do more than tell you whether it’s going to rain or help you order a pizza. While nearly a third of Americans own smart speakers, such as the Alexa-powered Amazon Echo, Google Home, or Apple HomePod—a number that’s expected to rise to 48% by the end of the year, according to Adobe—most of us use these devices for mundane requests like playing music or checking the temperature. To get the AI brainpower behind these devices—Alexa, Google’s Assistant, and Siri—to work harder for you, start employing these magic words.

“Schedule a meeting”

Instead of clicking through a calendar app, ask your voice assistant to block off your schedule. You can specify the date, time, and event name in your request, and Alexa can even invite contacts to your events. (For anything else, you’ll need an old-fashioned app.)

“Play some white noise”

This seems like an obvious one, but few people actually do it. Background noise is a great way to drown out distractions and get into a work mind-set. Try asking for different kinds of noise—like rain, a fireplace, or forest sounds—to see what works best for you.

“Remind me to stop procrastinating . . . in 15 minutes”

If you find yourself slipping down a Twitter or Instagram rabbit hole too often during the day, ask your Assistant to rein you in. Alexa users can also say, “Start tomato helper” to start a version of the Pomodoro Technique, a popular time-management strategy that encourages switching frequently between work and break times.

“Make a phone call”

Amazon Echo, Google Home, and Apple HomePod all beat dinky smartphone speakers when you need to be hands-free during a call. They’ll even display your regular phone number to the other party.

“Broadcast”

If you have multiple Amazon Echo or Google Home speakers around your office, use this command to record and send out a one-way message to all your colleagues. Home-office workers: It’s also handy for telling the kids to “quiet down, please.”

Musk told Axios that his neuroscience company, Neuralink, will have the technology “probably” within the next decade to fuse humans with artificial intelligence. In order to do this, Musk says Neuralink will produce an “electrode-to-neuron interface at a micro level,” basically “a chip and a bunch of tiny wires” that will be implanted into your skull.

So why does Musk want to turn us into cyborgs? He says it’s humanity’s only hope to survive the upcoming glut of super-intelligent machines powered by artificial intelligence that will take over the world and would otherwise push humanity to extinction.

Musk said the rise of such machines could force the surviving humans into small pockets of the Earth much like monkeys only inhabit tiny patches of the planet now because a smarter being–Homo sapiens–came along.

Musk also warned that humanity wasn’t seeing the obvious “existential threat” that AI poses to us–not just years into the future, but even today. One example Musk gave is someone using AI to power drones packed with explosives that could identify their kill targets via facial recognition:

“You could make a swarm of assassin drones for very little money. By just taking the face I.D. chip that’s used in cell phones, and having a small explosive charge and a standard drone, and just have it do a grid sweep of the building until they find the person they’re looking for, ram into them and explode. You could do that right now. . . . No new technology is needed.”

Oh, and if we think fake news is bad today, Musk says AI will make it infinitely worse, noting that AI that watches online feedback of humans reacting to news could then tweak its desired message “within milliseconds” to influence human behavior in everything from elections to the direction of their society.

Musk also warned that Washington is at risk of losing the war to control artificial intelligence:

“The way in which regulation is put in place is slow and linear. And we are facing an exponential threat. If you, if you have a linear response to an exponential threat, it’s quite likely the exponential threat will win. That, in a nutshell, is the issue.”

And as for the rest of us:

“We’re like children in a playground . . . We’re not paying attention. We worry more about . . . what name somebody called someone else . . . than whether AI will destroy humanity. That’s insane.”

That’s according to data compiled by merchant account and card payment fee comparison firm Merchant Machine. The firm looks at mobile payment spending across the world in 2017, the most recent year full figures are available for, and found the top 10 countries where mobile wallets are the most popular.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, China leads the pack, with 47% of people there using a mobile wallet. But in second place, rather surprisingly, is Norway, a country with only 5.2 million people–but a full 42% of them use a mobile wallet. In a distant third place are the Brits, with 24% mobile wallet penetration. And as for Americans, well, we are in seventh place, with just 17% of us using mobile wallets.

Here’s the full top 10 list:

1. China: 47%
2. Norway: 42%
3. United Kingdom: 24%
4. Japan: 20%
5. Australia: 19%
6. Colombia: 19%
7. United States: 17%
8. Singapore: 17%
9. Canada: 16%
10. Austria: 16%

As for the most popular mobile wallets, WeChat Pay is No. 1 with 600 million users. That’s followed by Alipay with 400 million users. Next up is PayPal with 210 million users. In fourth place is Apple Pay with 87 million users. And rounding out the top five is Samsung Pay with 34 million users.

These are the 100 Year Pants. The manufacturer, the adventure clothing brand Vollebak, claims that the pants will last a century because the materials are so tough, you can walk through fire in them. “The only pants more advanced than these are on spacesuits,” the company says.

An overstatement? Probably. But according to Vollebak’s cofounder Steve Tidball, the company did in fact look to astronaut clothing, in addition to military gear, to design the pants.

The pants are made from an innovative, three-layer material. The outer layer is designed to resist abrasions and can repel water. The middle layer is fireproof and automatically expands, like an airbag, if it touches any flame, putting a barrier between you and the fire. The inner layer is made of aramid fiber–a nylon-related synthetic that can’t burn or melt.

The material was developed by the Swiss brand Schoeller, a 150-year-old company that develops protective textiles for the military and police, in addition to other high-performance fabrics. “It was originally designed to help soldiers handle the most extreme situations, but without having to dress like firefighters,” says Vollebak cofounder Nick Tidball. “Most fire resistant clothing is made from heavy, uncomfortable, chemical laden materials, but this is the world’s first intelligent material than can be comfortably worn every day, then alter its behavior in the face of fire.”

This isn’t the first time Vollebak has made big promises about its gear. The company previously released a hoodie that it claimed was indestructible, and more recently, it unveiled the world’s first graphene jacket, which is designed to do everything from absorb heat to repel bacteria. Are the garments as tough as Vollebak claims? You’ll just have to live another 100 years to find out.

The 100 Year Pants are available now for $645, although they have already run out of stock for extra-small and small sizes. It seems expensive until you realize you that it’s only $6.45 per year. Just make sure to leave them to someone your size in your will.

You’ve likely heard by now that multitasking is bad for your productivity. Experts say that when you try to multitask, individual tasks usually take longer, and you don’t execute them as well. According to productivity consultant Julie Morgenstern, stripping multitasking from your work routine would help you “gain back 30% to 40% of your actual time and mental clarity per day.”

But attempting to multitask—or even wading through your email inbox for hours, which you may be doing while multitasking—can be a difficult habit to shake. In fact, the root problem may be something else altogether, and multitasking is just a symptom. Below are three reasons you could be losing hours of your workday, be it to multitasking or distractions like social media.

You don’t have a roadmap

“We live and work in a distraction-filled environment,” Morgenstern says. “And one of the ways to combat that is to have a roadmap for your day.”

A big reason why workers lose focus is because they don’t have a plan to begin with, which can help steel them against distractions (or “nibblers,” as Morgenstern calls them). “There’s nobody in the workplace, other than a customer service representative, whose job it is to react,” she says. “Everyone else has a backlog of to-dos—what I call big legato tasks and staccato tasks.” Morgenstern recommends planning for your workday the night before (at minimum), which also allows you to foresee where your day might get derailed. If you know a task may take longer than you have allocated or a meeting may go late, creating a roadmap can help you anticipate those potential speedbumps—and time sucks—in your day.

Let’s say you do map out every workday, but that you wait until the morning to do it. “It’s too late,” Morgenstern says. “The day is already crashing down on you.” She adds that when you plan ahead, you can schedule legato tasks—those that takes a bigger chunk of time—as your first order of business in the morning.

“That fuels you with an enormous infusion of a sense of accomplishment, control, and energy,” she says. “That actually makes you more efficient in everything else you do the rest of the day.”

You’re striving for perfection

Creating a roadmap for your workdays also helps protect against crippling perfectionism and procrastination, which Morgenstern says are interrelated. Perfectionists tend to indulge in black-and-white thinking, she says, which leads them to believe their work is terrible if it doesn’t meet their inordinately high standards. “It’s paralyzing,” she says. “You’ve set yourself up to such high standards that you put it off. Perfectionists tend to procrastinate, and most procrastinators are perfectionists.” In other words, you may spend hours on a task that doesn’t merit the time investment.

Morgenstern’s technique for battling perfectionism is to determine three “levels of performance” for any given task. That means figuring out the minimum you could do, the moderate level of execution, and the maximum one. Morgenstern says you should write down that criteria—say, when you’re compiling your work plan the night prior. “When you define those three levels for any task, you get away from the all-or-nothing thinking,” she says. “You discover there are options.”

Once her clients start doing this, they often look back at their definitions of the “maximum” level of performance and find it untenable. “Perfectionism is a mindless approach to work,” Morgenstern says.

You aren’t taking time to unfocus

Ask author and productivity expert Chris Bailey why you’re spending too much time on certain aspects of your job, and he’ll probably argue that, in part, it’s a symptom of not having enough work. Bailey adds that you should take stock of how much time you spend doing busy work, and evaluate how much of your job entails that type of work. “The more busy work we do, the more our work is expanding to fit how much time we have available to us,” he says.

He also believes people need time to not be busy, so they can let their minds wander and ideate. Maintaining focus is imperative, as he points out, but letting yourself unfocus can actually help with focus. “We actually think about our goals and our future 14 times as often when our mind is wandering versus when we’re focused on something,” he says. “If you’re looking at the same email for the fifth time, that’s a cue that you need to take a step back.” When you unfocus, you should try to do something you love—and that doesn’t mean refreshing your social media app of choice.

Of course, few tips can supplant the productivity you derive from pursuing work that you love. As Bailey says, “The best productivity hack is finding a job that you give a shit about.”

NASA’s InSight lander has been soaring through space for nearly seven months now with the sole purpose of landing on Mars. Today is its big day–when we’ll finally see if it can successfully enter the Martian planet’s atmosphere and begin its real journey.

The device will begin to enter the planet’s atmosphere around noon today, hurdling at a rate of over 12,000 miles per hour. The hope is that its protective covering will keep it safe from heat friction and sandstorms as the InSight comes to screeching halt while landing.

This is the first time in six years that NASA has attempted to put one of its devices on Mars, so it’s a monumental occasion. And it should be noted that failure is an option. In fact, only 40% of the world’s attempts to explore Mars since 1960 have been successful. Although the Associated Press notes that the U.S. has pretty good track record of seven successful landings and only one failure.

The InSight is planning to go where no space robot has gone before: underneath Mars. The spacecraft will land on a (hopefully) flat surface and then try to bore a probe about 16 feet underground, as a way to measure the heat inside the planet’s core, among other things. Meanwhile, the InSight will also place a seismometer on Mars’s surface, which has never before been successfully done.

According to NASA, the lander is expected to touch land at 3 p.m. EST today. The agency will have coverage of the event all day, including live commentary on its public channel.

But if you want to watch the landing with only audio from Mission Control, you can do that here. And if you want to make some new friends, maybe you can find a watch party happening nearby.

For now, all we can do is watch and hope it lands safely. Learn more about the lander and its mission here.