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Blame the gig economy or just sheer laziness, but fewer of us stopping for lunch in the working day can surely only be a bad thing
A long time ago, when I worked in an office, we used to take lunch quite seriously. This meant getting up from our desks, walking on our legs, and eating with another human being for the purposes of chat. Sometimes this even happened outside, or at a restaurant. It seems absurd now. Who has the time to hang out in the middle of the day or drop $20 on a sandwich when you could be sitting at your desk, staring at the internet, grazing leftovers from a plastic container from home? (Or, if you’re already at home, let’s be honest, taking a nap.)
If this killjoy reflex is a side-effect of age – for most people, time becomes less their own as they get older – it is also, it seems, a sign of the times. Two recent pieces of research in the US indicate that, over the past four or five years, Americans have been spending less money at lunchtime – 3.3% less, according to a payments app, Square – and also moving around less in the middle of the day.
Continue reading...© Photograph: Bettmann/Bettmann Archive
© Photograph: Bettmann/Bettmann Archive
Americans are spending less on weekday lunches, opting instead to save for weekends. Is a once-cherished meal in its death throes?
“The lunch rush is dead,” an NBC News headline announced this week. Blame it on working from home, tighter budgets, inflation or all of the above: transaction data pulled by the digital-payments app Square found that midday food spending was down 3.3% nationwide last year compared with 2019. The decrease was steeper in some cities, including Boston, Atlanta and Dallas.
While a full obit for the humble lunch break might be premature, a recent report from the University of Toronto backed up the hypothesis that Americans want to spend more on weekend luxuries than a lunch bill. The study found that foot traffic in major US cities remains low on workdays, but higher during the weekend.
Continue reading...© Photograph: Marcio José Sánchez/AP
© Photograph: Marcio José Sánchez/AP
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The post FUD: How Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt can ruin your security program appeared first on Security Boulevard.
It's unclear how much life is left in the 4-year-old Nest Audio or 8-year-old Google Home speakers, but Google is at least bringing back a feature it stripped away from users after losing a legal case. In 2022, Google lost a patent case brought by Sonos, and rather than pay a licensing fee, Google reached into customer homes and removed the ability to control speaker volume as a group. Some of Sonos' patent wins were thrown out in October 2023, and now Android Authority's Mishaal Rahman reports that the feature is back in Android 15 Beta 2.
Google's "group speaker volume" feature is a fairly simple idea. Several Google Home/Nest Audio speakers can work together to seamlessly play music throughout your entire house, using onboard microphones to fix tricky multi-speaker issues like syncing the audio delay. When you're casting from your phone to a bunch of speakers, it would make sense that you want them all at the same volume instead of one being screaming loud and one being very quiet. While casting, the phone's volume button would control a unified volume bar for all active speakers. When Google killed the feature, the only option for controlling speaker volume from your phone became opening the app and adjusting a slider for each speaker.
Sonos and Google's history with connected speakers has been a contentious one. Sonos' side of the story is that Google got an inside look at its operations in 2013 as part of a sales pitch to bring Google Play Music support to Sonos speakers. Three years later, Google launched its first smart speaker. Sonos claims Google used that access to "blatantly and knowingly" copy Sonos' features for the Google Home speaker line. Google says it developed its smart speaker features independently of Sonos, and for some of Sonos' patents, it had the features shipped to consumers years before Sonos filed for a patent. Some of Sonos' patents were overturned because they were filed in 2019, after everyone had already released all of this smart speaker stuff to market.
While the big beasts of Wall Street rail against WFH, Mike Regnier of Santander UK says he wouldn’t have taken the job if he had had to commute all week
At a time when banking bosses from Wall Street to Canary Wharf have been cracking down on working from home, Santander UK’s chief executive remains an outlier.
While Goldman Sachs’s David Solomon has described home working as an “aberration”, and JP Morgan’s Jamie Dimon calls himself a “skeptic” of the trend that took off during the pandemic, Mike Regnier made home working a condition of taking the job in 2022. He says he would have turned down the Spanish-owned lender had it refused to let him work from his family home in Harrogate, Yorkshire, where he has lived since the early 2000s.
Continue reading...© Photograph: Sophia Evans/The Observer
© Photograph: Sophia Evans/The Observer
We’re keen to hear from employers in Britain which job openings they have been having trouble to recruit for, and why
Employers in the UK have cut back on hiring new staff, pushing the number of advertised vacancies down on the quarter by 43,000 to 908,000, while the unemployment rate rose unexpectedly to 3.9% in January from 3.8% in December, according to the Office for National Statistics.
We’re interested to hear from UK employers whether there have been vacancies in their companies they have been struggling to hire qualified staff for, and why they think that has been the case.
Continue reading...© Photograph: Philip Toscano/PA
© Photograph: Philip Toscano/PA
Enlarge / This is essentially the kind of water heater the author has hooked up, minus the Wi-Fi module that led him down a rabbit hole. Also, not 140-degrees F—yikes. (credit: Getty Images)
The hot water took too long to come out of the tap. That is what I was trying to solve. I did not intend to discover that, for a while there, water heaters like mine may have been open to anybody. That, with some API tinkering and an email address, a bad actor could possibly set its temperature or make it run constantly. That’s just how it happened.
Let’s take a step back. My wife and I moved into a new home last year. It had a Rinnai tankless water heater tucked into a utility closet in the garage. The builder and home inspector didn't say much about it, just to run a yearly cleaning cycle on it.
Because it doesn’t keep a big tank of water heated and ready to be delivered to any house tap, tankless water heaters save energy—up to 34 percent, according to the Department of Energy. But they're also, by default, slower. Opening a tap triggers the exchanger, heats up the water (with natural gas, in my case), and the device has to push it through the line to where it's needed.
Enlarge / GM used a Silverado EV to power a 10,000-square-foot house as a demo of its Home Energy system. (credit: General Motors)
LOS ANGELES—Let's face it: The American power grid is a hot mess. The system is outdated and overstressed by amp-sucking appliances, air conditioning units, and extreme weather. Depending on where you live, it's likely only a matter of time before your home will experience a blackout. GM Energy, a subsidiary of General Motors, is here to help.
At a demonstration in a swanky 10,000-square-foot mansion in Beverly Hills, California, where I counted 51 recessed lights in the great room, the new home products from GM Energy easily kept the electrons flowing, eschewing the grid and drawing power from the 200 kWh battery in a 2024 Chevrolet Silverado RST.
It all starts with the GM Energy PowerShift charger. On an 80 A circuit, the charger can charge your EV at a whopping 19.2 kW, and its bi-directional technology can push electrons from the truck's battery into an inverter to convert it to the AC power your home requires. The happy little AC current then goes into the Home Hub that distributes the power to the appropriate circuits, and voilà—the lights are on.
A study analyzing Apple, Microsoft, and SpaceX suggests that return to office (RTO) mandates can lead to a higher rate of employees, especially senior-level ones, leaving the company, often to work at competitors.
The study (PDF), published this month by University of Chicago and University of Michigan researchers and reported by The Washington Post on Sunday, says:
In this paper, we provide causal evidence that RTO mandates at three large tech companies—Microsoft, SpaceX, and Apple—had a negative effect on the tenure and seniority of their respective workforce. In particular, we find the strongest negative effects at the top of the respective distributions, implying a more pronounced exodus of relatively senior personnel.
The study looked at résumé data from People Data Labs and used "260 million résumés matched to company data." It only examined three companies, but the report's authors noted that Apple, Microsoft, and SpaceX represent 30 percent of the tech industry's revenue and over 2 percent of the technology industry's workforce. The three companies have also been influential in setting RTO standards beyond their own companies. Robert Ployhart, a professor of business administration and management at the University of South Carolina and scholar at the Academy of Management, told the Post that despite the study being limited to three companies, its conclusions are a broader reflection of the effects of RTO policies in the US.
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