Spotify has inked an exclusive deal to distribute Kim Kardashian West’s new podcast, a spokesperson confirmed to Axios.
Why it matters: The deal, unlike Spotify’s purchase of “The Ringer” in February and its exclusive arrangement to distribute “The Joe Rogan Experience” beginning this fall, includes female producers and hosts, which could lure a more diverse, female-centric audience to the platform.
Details: The podcast will be co-produced and co-hosted by West and television producer Lori Rothschild Ansaldi, according to the Wall Street Journal, which was first to break the news.
A Spotify spokesperson confirmed details of the Journal’s report, which notes that the podcast will be adjacent to West’s work with the Innocence Project, a nonprofit that focuses on exonerating wrongfully convicted individuals and criminal justice reform.
You can now work remotely from the Baltic European Union country of Estonia. It just became the first country to offer e-residency to digital nomads, irrespective of where they may be physically based.
As the majority of us suddenly learn that we did not in fact need to waste our lives commuting to get to a common office location to work effectively with colleagues and be productive, gainfully-employed members of society, working remotely might actually be a trend that will stick around, hopefully longer than the virus does. And now for those who operate their own businesses that don’t require physical infrastructure, Estonia is offering an e-residency that allows you to set up operations in the EU country.
Located in northern Europe, with Finland to the north and Latvia to the south, Russia to the east and Sweden to the west, Estonia is opening itself up to people who would like to incorporate and grow their business in the EU. The residency is aimed at those who work online and may not be based in any one country or location for an extended period of time; freelancers; startups looking to set up operations in the EU; and other digital entrepreneurs working in finance, tech and marketing who would like a European presence. The country is expected to issue 1,800 e-residency permits every year.
Remote working has meant many people are skipping their morning commute.
COVID-19 has lead to more and more employees working from home.
98% of people surveyed said they would like the option to work remotely for the rest of their careers.
But not everything is positive, with workers finding the biggest challenge is ‘unplugging’ from work.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, nearly one-third of the U.S. workforce, and half of all “information workers”, are able to work from home. Though the number of people working partially or fully remote has been on the rise for years now, the COVID-19 pandemic may have pressed the fast-forward button on this trend.
With millions of people taking part in this work-from-home experiment, it’s worth asking the question – how do people and companies actually feel about working from home?
By 2030 all baby boomers will have turned 65 and Generation X will start their contribution to the expanding older cohort.
Retirement villages — walled, gated and separate seniors’ enclaves — have had their day.
The word “retirement” is redundant and engagement between people of all ages is high. That’s how participants in the Longevity By Design Challenge envisage life in Australia in 2050.
Their challenge was to identify ways to prepare and adapt Australian cities to capitalise on older Australians living longer, healthier and more productive lives. Their vision, outlined in this article, offers a positive contrast to much of the commentary on “ageing Australia”.
We have been repeatedly warned about a looming “crisis” when by 2050 one in four Australians will be 65 or older. They have been portrayed as dependent non-contributors, unable to take care of themselves.
This scenario of doom is based on underlying assumptions that everyone over 65 wants to, can or should stop any kind of productive contribution to Australia.
The tech industry is rushing to offer remedies to the crisis and, in the process, trying to rehabilitate its image.
Before the pandemic, Yiying Lu was known for her work designing the Twitter Fail Whale and the dumpling and boba tea emojis. In the past few weeks, Lu said she was called to a higher purpose. From her apartment in San Francisco, she toiled away in a Slack channel with two dozen people she has never met to create a free website called Corona Carecard. It asks Americans to buy gift cards to their favorite local shops, providing a much-needed source of income while stores are shuttered.
Lu is one of hundreds, if not thousands, of workers across Silicon Valley trying to, in their words, hack the virus. The pandemic has stirred up a missionary zeal throughout Silicon Valley. Apple Inc. and Google put aside a decade-long rivalry to form an alliance to track the spread of infections. Facebook Inc. and Salesforce.com Inc. are procuring millions of masks for health-care workers. Jeff Bezos is donating $100 million and Jack Dorsey $1 billion.
In other corners of the Valley, people are developing test kits and possible vaccines, as well as software to treat the social and economic maladies of the pandemic. Smaller companies have created entirely new business models in response to the virus. The projects can be as simple as an app reminding people to wash their hands or one that connects users with barbers in Brooklyn for lessons on how to cut their hair at home.
There’s a feeling among some technologists that some of their work in recent years had become mercenary or frivolous—attempts to capitalize on a prolonged tech boom with apps that cater to the whims of wealthy coastal elites, rather than meeting the urgent needs of the rest of the world. “Facebook, Snapchat and the last decade of tech has brought us together in some ways but has also pushed us further away from real life,” said Lu, a former creative director at venture capital firm 500 Startups. “The virus is a warning for people in the Bay Area that we can’t just come here and take and take. We have to give, too.”
Uber has announced a duo of new services as the company chases fresh revenue streams to offset the impact of COVID-19.
With billions of people around the world forced into lockdown during the coronavirus crisis, tech firms across the spectrum have been adapting to this “new normal.” For platforms that enable remote working, this has meant catering to a surge in demand. But for Uber, which relies significantly on physical interactions, it has had to get creative. Shelter-at-home policies enforced by the COVID-19 pandemic has decimated Uber’s core ride-hailing business, leading the company to fast-track the global launch of Uber Eats for business, accept phone orders for food deliveries, and even expand into grocery deliveries.
Now, Uber is looking to deliver pretty much anything, from pet food and medical supplies — and it even wants to deliver goods between friends and family living at different addresses.
Every Western institution was unprepared for the coronavirus pandemic, despite many prior warnings. This monumental failure of institutional effectiveness will reverberate for the rest of the decade, but it’s not too early to ask why, and what we need to do about it.
Many of us would like to pin the cause on one political party or another, on one government or another. But the harsh reality is that it all failed — no Western country, or state, or city was prepared — and despite hard work and often extraordinary sacrifice by many people within these institutions. So the problem runs deeper than your favorite political opponent or your home nation.
Part of the problem is clearly foresight, a failure of imagination. But the other part of the problem is what we didn’t *do* in advance, and what we’re failing to do now. And that is a failure of action, and specifically our widespread inability to *build*.
The world may soon pass “peak virus.” But true recovery will take years—and the ripple effects will be seismic. Parag Khanna and Karan Khemka forecast the aftershocks.
In chaos theory, the butterfly effect describes a small change that can have massive, unpredictable consequences. An insect flaps its wings and, weeks later, causes a tornado.
The coronavirus is more like an earthquake, with aftershocks that will permanently reshape the world.
If we are lucky, the world will pass “peak virus” within the next six months. But the economy, governments, and social institutions will take years to recover in the best-case scenario. Indeed, rather than even speak of “recovery,” which implies a return to how things were, it would be wise to project what new direction civilization will take. That too will be a bumpy ride. The next 3-5 years will remind us that COVID-19 was the lightning before the thunder
“They have all said it looks like the safest place to be is New Zealand right now. That’s been a theory since before COVID-19.”
As the COVID-19 pandemic worsens across the United States, some of the country’s richest citizens have fled for a remote oasis: New Zealand.
This is not a new phenomenon; New Zealand has long been a destination getaway for those with the time and money to fly there. In fact, so many people consider it ideal for an emergency home that New Zealand passed a law two years ago that bans foreigners from purchasing real estate in the country
The rapid spread of COVID-19 and subsequent economic fallout in the U.S. brought renewed interest to New Zealand as a place to run away from the troubles of the world. Though non-essential travel to and from the U.S. has now been locked down — and New Zealand closed its own borders in mid-March — plenty of people made it out in time.
Now they’re holed up in luxury bunkers waiting for the pandemic to blow over.
In science fiction stories, research can accidentally create superintelligent animal species. As the ability to alter animals’ brains grows, some say we should be wary of fiction becoming reality.
This article appears in VICE Magazine’s Stupid Issue, which is dedicated to the entertaining, goofy, and just plain dumb. It features stories celebrating ridiculous ideas, trends, and products; pieces arguing that unabashed stupidity can be a great part of life; and articles calling out the bad side of stupidity.
In the 2011 movie Rise of the Planet of the Apes, James Franco plays a scientist developing a treatment for Alzheimer’s. The drug, ALZ-112, is designed to restore a human’s brain function, and when tested on a healthy chimpanzee, it causes the monkey’s intelligence to increase dramatically. She passes the intelligence on to her baby, Caesar, who goes on to lead a pack of super-intelligent apes and releases a version of the drug that’s fatal to humans.
Crews build an ADU in the backyard of the McCauley residence in Gramercy Park.
But homeowners have to be willing to rent out the units.
Davita and Martin McCauley were starting to think about how, in the years to come, they would care for her mother as she aged .
The McCauleys own a classic World War II-era Southern California home: a peach-hued stucco bungalow in Gramercy Park, with a grassy lawn in the front and a detached garage in the back.
They were toying with the idea of eventually moving her into their three-bedroom house, and adding a second story to make more space, when they were introduced at church to a mutual friend working for a new company called United Dwelling.
At no cost to homeowners, the company builds “granny flats” in the backyards of single-family homes, finds a tenant to rent them out to, and splits the lease revenue with the homeowner for up to 25 years, at which point the homeowner owns the unit outright.
I just got back from my first trip to Japan, and I’m now in love with the country. The ramen, yakitori and sushi. The gorgeous volcanoes. The fascinating people and culture. But of all the things I fell in love with, there’s one that I can’t stop thinking about: the toilets.
Japanese toilets are marvels of technological innovation. They have integrated bidets, which squirt water to clean your private parts. They have dryers and heated seats. They use water efficiently, clean themselves and deodorize the air, so bathrooms actually smell good. They have white noise machines, so you can fill your stall with the sound of rain for relaxation and privacy. Some even have built-in night lights and music players. It’s all customizable and controlled by electronic buttons on a panel next to your seat.
In Japan, these high-tech toilets are everywhere: hotels, restaurants, bus stations, rest stops and around 80% of homes. It’s glorious. Then, I come back to the United States, and our toilets are stuck in the age of dirty coal mines and the horse and buggy. They basically have one feature: flush. No heated seats. No nice smells and sounds. No sanitizing blasts of liquid. It’s like cleaning your dishes without water. It’s gross. And it got me thinking: Why can’t we have high-tech toilets too?
