Atari is celebrating its 50th anniversary with some smoking new kicks. The venerated gaming company announced on Thursday that it is collaborating with sustainable footwear maker, Cariuma. The collection will feature five designs atop two of Cariuma’s most popular sneaker styles, the Chuck Taylor-esque OCA Low and the Vans-adjacent Catiba Pro.
The Catiba Pros retail for $98 and will come in black and white variants while the $89 OCA Lows will include a red color scheme in addition to the black and white. Though both prominently feature the Atari logo, the two styles will be discernible from a distance given the Lows sport the words “Game On” opposed to the Pro’s depiction of a pixelated Cariuma logo. The sneakers are constructed from eco-friendly materials including GOTS-certified organic cotton canvas, natural rubber and recycled plastics. What’s more, for every pair purchased, Atari and Cariuma will plant two trees in the Amazon rainforest.
Despite the pandemic shuttering offices and upending commutes across the nation for more than two years, America’s roads and bridges remain critical to its economic and social well being, acting as a circulatory system for goods and people. But like the ticker found in your average American, our transportation system could stand more routine checkups and maybe a few repavings if it wants to still be around in another four decades. The guy whose job it is to make sure that happens, US Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigeig, took to the SXSW stage at the Austin Convention Center last week to discuss the challenges that his administration faces.
The Secretary’s hour-long town hall presentation touched on a wide range of subjects beginning with the projects his agency plans to focus on thanks to the recent passage of a $1.2 trillion infrastructure package, roughly half of which is earmarked for transportation programs. “There are five things that we’re really focused on,” Secretary Buttigeig said. “Safety, economic development, climate, equity and transformation.
“It’s the reason the department exists,” he continued. “We have a Department of Transportation, first and foremost, to make sure everybody can get to where they need to go safely.”
But despite his agency’s efforts, the Secretary noted that some 38,000 Americans died on the road last year, compared to air travel where, “it’s not unusual to have a year where there are zero deaths in commercial aviation in the United States… I don’t believe it has to be that way.”
These investments will also help position the country to better compete economically. He points to China, which has invested extensively in its infrastructure for decades, “because of how important it is for their economic future,” he said. “This is what countries do. This is what the United States, historically, has done except we sort of skipped about 40 years.”
We need not look further than the collapse of Pittsburgh’s Forbes Avenue bridge in January to see the impacts of nearly half a century of investment austerity upon the nation’s roadways. Hours before President Biden was scheduled to speak in the city, promoting his infrastructure plan no less, when the elevated span fell, sending ten people to the hospital with non-life-threatening injuries and highlighting Pennsylvania’s ongoing struggles to ensure the proper upkeep of its nearly 500 bridges.
Ensuring the safe operation of transportation also promotes economic development, Buttigeig argued, “so we’re going to make sure that we drive economic opportunity through great transportation, both in the installation of electric chargers and the laying of track.”
Tempering the capitalist urges that a functional transportation network seems to rouse are the agency’s climate goals. “Every transportation decision is a climate decision, whether we recognize it or not,” Buttigeig said, noting that the transportation sector is the US economy’s second leading source of greenhouse gas, behind the energy sector. “Not only do we have to cut emissions from transportation on our roads by making it so that you don’t have to drag two tons of metal along to get to where you need to go all the time, we’ve got to prepare for the climate impacts that are already happening.”
Secretary Buttigeig also touched on how to most equitably distribute the benefits from those mitigation efforts and the incoming investment funds. “Infrastructure can and should connect, but sometimes it divides,” Buttigeig said, referencing the nation’s historical red-lining practices and “urban renewal” projects that tore apart black communities for generations.
“We have a responsibility to make sure that doesn’t happen this time around, and to make sure that the jobs that are going to be created, are available to everybody,” he continued. “Including fields that have been traditionally very male, or very white, but could be open to everybody. A lot of great pathways in the middle class, through these kinds of construction and infrastructure jobs that are being created.”
Looking ahead, “I will say that I think the 2020s will probably be one of the most transformative periods we’ve ever seen in transportation,” Buttigeig told the SXSW audience, nodding to recent advances in EVs, automation, UAVs and private space flight. “These things are happening, they’re upon us, and we have an opportunity to prepare the way to make sure that the development of these innovations benefits us in terms of public policy goals.”
But for the Transportation Secretary’s excitement at these future prospects, he had no misconceptions about how long it will likely take to achieve them. “I get a lot of interviews where the first question is, ‘all right, what are we going to see this summer,’” he said. “I will say, you will see more construction starting to happen as early as this summer in some places as a result of this bill.”
This is not a 2009 economic stimulus-style plan where “the idea was to get as much money pumped into our economy as possible to stimulate demand and deal with high unemployment,” he said. “This is a very different economic reality right now. And there’s a very different purpose behind this bill. It’s not about short-term stimulus. This is about getting ready for the long term.”
Following the release of its dual-motor variant late last year, Polestar announced on Wednesday that the 270-mile long range, single-motor version of its Polestar 2 EV is now available for sale in the US.
Starting at $45,900 — $33,400 after federal and state incentives — the single-motor Polestar 2 is $4,000 less expensive than its AWD sibling (which starts at $51,200) and provides 16 extra miles of driving range to the all-wheel’s 249 miles. Other than the number of e-motors affixed to their axles, the two are functionally identical.
“All variants of the Polestar 2 exude the brand’s leadership in cutting-edge technology with the Google infotainment system, premium sustainable materials, and unparalleled avant-garde design,” Gregor Hembrough, Head of Polestar North America, said in a press statement. The $4,000 creature comfort “Plus” upgrade and $3,200 “Pilot” sensor and safety package are likewise available with either powertrain setup.
Folks looking to stick it to their local petrochemical conglomerate can schedule a test drive either through the Polestar 2 configurator site or at one of the company’s physical retail locations located in major cities throughout the US.
As the scope and focus of human spaceflight has evolved, so too have NASA’s methods and operations. Regions that were once accessible only by the world’s most powerful nations are today increasingly within reach of Earth’s civilian population, the richest uppermost crusts, at least. The business community is also eyeing near Earth space as the next potentially multi-trillion dollar economy and is already working with the space agency to develop the technology and infrastructure necessary to continue NASA’s work in the decades following the ISS’ decommissioning. At SXSW 2022 last week, a panel of experts on the burgeoning private spaceflight industry discussed the nuts and bolts of NASA’s commercial services program and what business in LEO will likely entail.
As part of the panel, The Commercial Space Age Is Here, Tim Crain, CTO of Intuitive Machines, Douglas Terrier, associate director of vision and technology of NASA’s Johnson Space Center, and Matt Ondler, CTO and director of engineering at Axiom Space, sat down with Houston Spaceport director, Arturo Machuca. Houston has been a spacefaring hub since NASA’s founding and remains a hotbed for orbital and spacelift technology startups today.
“We’re going from a model of where we’ve had primarily government funded interests in space to one that’s going to be focused a lot on the commercial sector,” Terrier said, pointing out that Axiom, Intuitive Machines, and “SpaceX down in Boca Chica” were quickly being joined by myriad startups offering a variety of support and development services.
“[Space is] the most important frontier for the United States to continue to have world leadership in and our goal is to ensure that we continue to do that in a new model that involves harnessing the innovation and the expertise from both inside and outside of NASA in the community represented here,” he continued.
Axiom is no stranger to working with both sides of the government contractor dynamic. It is scheduled to launch the first fully private crew mission to the ISS in April and plans to build, launch and affix a privately funded habitat module to the station by 2028. “This commercial space, very similar to the beginning of the internet,” Older explained. “There were a few key technologies that really allowed the internet to explode and so there’s a few things in aerospace that will really allow commercial space to take off.”
“We think that the low Earth orbit economy is a trillion dollar economy, whether it’s bioprinting, organs, whether it’s making special fiber optic cable,” he continued. “I am completely convinced that 15 to 20 years from now we’re going to be surrounded by objects that we can’t imagine how we [had] lived without that were manufactured in space.”
“For the last 20 years humans have lived on the International Space Station continuously,” Terrier agreed. “My grandchildren are living in a world where humans live on the moon, where they’ll get a nightly news broadcast from the moon? I mean, the opportunities from a societal- and civilization-changing standpoint is beyond comparison.. is actually beyond comprehension.”
The space-based economy is already valued at around $400 billion, Terrier added, with government investment accounting for around a quarter of the necessary upkeep funding and the rest coming from the private sector. He noted that NASA plays two primary roles as President Kennedy dictated in his 1962 “Why Go to the Moon” speech at Rice University: the scientific exploration of space for one, but also “to create the conditions for commercial success for United States in space,” Terrier said.
“It’s synergistic in a sense that the more companies operating in space, the more of an industrial base we can call on — driving the price down, amortizing the access to space — so that NASA doesn’t have to bear that cost,” he said. “It creates a role where there are things like exploring out among the planets, for which there isn’t a business case — clearly the government needs to take the lead there. And then there are things where we’re now commercializing low Earth orbit and that is success for everybody.”
This won’t be the first time that the US government hands off control of technology it previously had monopoly power over, Crain added. He points to NACA as “NASA for aviation in the 20s” and guided the government’s commercialization of aircraft technology.
“The only reason we can build a commercial space station is because of 25 years of flying the international space station and all the things that we’ve learned from NASA,” Ondler said. “NASA has learned about keeping humans alive [in space] for long periods of time. We’re really leveraging so much history and so much of the government’s investment to build our commercial station.”
Ondler pointed out that construction of the 7-foot x 3-foot Earth Observatory window being installed in Axiom’s station module, “by far the largest space window ever attempted,” would not have been possible without the knowledge and coaching of a former NASA space shuttle engineer. “her expertise, just her helping an engineer in one little area,” Ondler said, “allowed him to design a really good window on his first try.”
“We definitely stand on the shoulder of the great work that the space community has done until now, in terms of technology,” Crain agreed. The Apollo era, he notes, was dominated by producing one-off spacecraft parts meticulously designed for often singular use cases but that system is no longer sufficient. “The more we can make our supply chain, not custom parts, but things that have already been used already in a terrestrial market, the better off we are,” he said.
“Our mindset has to shift from ‘well, let’s go all in, I’m building this first lander’ to doing it the first time already looking at the second lander,” Crain continued. “What are the differences between the two, how do we regularize that production in a way so that our design, the core of that vehicle, is basically the same from flight to flight?”
Once the Artemis missions begin in earnest, that supply chain will begin to stretch and expand. It will extend first to LEO, but should attempts to colonize the moon prove successful, it will grow to support life and business there, much like how towns continually grew along the trade and expansion routes of the American West. “You don’t load up your wagons in Virginia and go straight to San Francisco,” Terrier said. “You stop in Saint Louis and reprovision, and people build up an economy around that.”
“The cool thing is that it’s not just aerospace engineering anymore,” Crain added. He noted that, for example, retinal implants can be more accurately and efficiently printed in microgravity than they can planetside, but the commercial process for actually doing so has yet to be devised. “There’s a completely different industry that we’re gonna need. Folks to figure out, how do we build that [retinal implant printing] machine? How do we bring it and the raw materials up and down [from LEO]? We need marketing people and all those sort of folks. It’s not just aerospace engineering and I think that’s really what we mean when we talk about the trillion dollar economy.”
With its newly minted bi-directional charging capabilities, the Ford F-150 Lightning can now serve as a backup home power supply in a pinch. Soon, the automaker hopes it might do the same for your office space thanks to a new partnership with Cisco, makers of Webex conference software.
Ford CEO Jim Farley announced on Tuesday, “We’re going all in, creating separate but complementary businesses that give us start-up speed and unbridled innovation.” So far that effort has seen the company announce in recent months plans to separate its EV and ICE businesses, produce in excess of 600,000 EVs annually by in 2023, and introduce seven new EV models to the European market in the next few years.
And what better way for Ford to fully capture the hearts and minds of the American driving public than to outfit their electric vehicles with the internet’s most popular pastime since March 2020, online conference calling? “We’re looking at ways to bring the human connection in,” Darren Palmer, Vice President, Ford Electric Vehicle Programs, said in a press statement. “We don’t see why people wouldn’t be using their vehicles as a fantastic quality office, to be able to collaborate together.”
To that end, Ford and Cisco have partnered to “unlock the browser experience on SYNC4A,” the automaker’s infotainment system, and are currently developing a WebEx app capable of running natively on the HTML 5-centric OS. “Ford is excited to be collaborating with Webex by Cisco for next-gen experiences in our electric vehicles,” Palmer continued. “We see Webex as providing a secure and immersive collaboration experience.”
Your cat jumping in front of the webcam can be quite cute when you’re conference calling from home. Your kids loudly melting down in the back seat about who may or may not be touching whom is decidedly less adorable. To help prevent those high-decibel interruptions, future Ford EVs will be outfitted with Webex’s Optimize for My Voice feature which automatically mutes out everybody in the cabin who isn’t part of the meeting. To further minimize distractions to the driver, “We’ll make sure that any collaboration like Webex is deployed only when the vehicle is stationary, or audio-only when driving,” Palmer said. The companies did not disclose a timeline for the application’s eventual release.
Volkswagen’s electrification efforts in North America will receive an additional $7.1 billion investment over the next five years, the company announced on Monday.
VW intends to spend that money on “[boosting] its product portfolio, regional R&D and manufacturing capabilities,” per a release, in hopes that doing so will help drive 55 percent of its US sales to be EVs by 2030. The company intends to ramp down its internal combustion production capacity over the same time frame, transitioning American assembly plants to produce the ID.4 in 2022, the ID.Buzz in 2024, and a yet-to-be-released SUV starting in 2026.
The company estimates that 90 percent of the vehicles it sells in North America are already assembled in North America. Its production facilities in Chattanooga, TN have already begun the electrification process with its factories at Pueblo and Silao, Mexico coming online by the middle of the decade.
VW is also betting big on batteries, having already invested more than $2.7 billion in North American supplier partnerships ahead of the ID’4’s launch. The company also plans to officially open its Battery Engineering Lab (BEL) in Chattanooga this May and is considering constructing a battery production plant stateside as well though that’s still in its most initial planning stages.
These investments are already paying dividends to drivers. During a press event Monday morning, Scott Keogh, President and CEO, Volkswagen Group of America noted that VW intends to bring OTA updates and new software features like plug-and-charge, which automates the transaction portion of recharging on a public station allowing drivers to simply plug in without having to swipe a debit card or fiddle with NFC readers, later this year.
For ICE (internal combustion) vehicles, higher a drag coefficient translates into lower fuel efficiency and more frequent trips to the pump. For EVs, a low drag coefficient is even more critical because it directly impacts the vehicle’s driveable range, a continuing concern for many potential EV buyers. As such, designing optimally aerodynamic vehicles is in every automaker’s interest but doing so does require the use of a specialized wind tunnel technologies, much like the $124 million state-of-the-art HALO facility Honda opened on Monday in Central Ohio.
HALO (Honda Automotive Laboratories of Ohio) is “the world’s most advanced wind tunnel” according to Honda, offering three distinct testing capabilities — aerodynamics, aeroacoustics, and racing — with which to develop Honda and Acura products as well as conduct general science and research work with third parties.
Honda
“I can tell you our new HALO wind tunnel will be an incredible new asset to our engineers as well as others evolved in aerodynamic research in America, providing a critical new resource for future innovation,” Jim Keller, EVP of Honda Development and Manufacturing of America said in a Friday press call. “This new wind tunnel and our safety research center will provide our R&D engineers with two world-class facilities in Ohio to support the design and development of new products.”
When vehicles are operated in a wind tunnel, they drive on what is essentially a giant treadmill belt. These belts are designed to control the boundary layer between the floor and the vehicle, a critical factor in generating accurate aerodynamic data, Mike Unger, Wind Tunnel Lead at HALO, explained during the call. HALO uses two, 40-ton belt modules: a standard “wide” belt, which sits under the entire vehicle and works well for sedans and other low-riding vehicles, and the 5-belt system which puts one under each tire, a fifth under the whole vehicle and is meant for testing SUVs. Each can be swapped out for the other in under four hours.
Honda
For acoustics testing, the HALO utilizes more than 500 exterior microphones studded throughout the wind tunnel and another 54 mics within the vehicle itself. Thanks to a novel microphone array, Honda techs can switch the wind tunnel from aerodynamic testing to aeroacoustic testing in just half an hour — a process that used to take around half a day to complete.
Determining the frontal area of a new vehicle, a stat necessary to properly calibrate the tunnel’s results, is done with lasers and optical cameras that precisely measure the vehicle’s front and side proportions. The tunnel is also equipped with a 180-degree turntable, Unger said, “which allows us to test various, and sometimes extreme, yaw angles as well load the car as quickly and as efficiently as possible.” There’s also an 80-ton diagnostic tool.
Honda
“Essentially, it’s a big giant big robotic arm that we can attach a sensor on the end of and locate anywhere in the tunnel,” he continued. With it techs can “measure any kind of phenomena we’re looking for — it could be pressure, velocity, sound, or any other thing… this tool will allow the test engineer to look into detailed phenomena to understand exactly what’s going on with the flow field.” The system is so precise that it can measure drag forces with a sensitivity of +/- 2.5 Newtons, roughly the weight of a standard D battery.
The tunnel itself is an eighth of a mile long with a test area measuring 3m x 5m x 15m, large enough to accommodate up to a full-size delivery van. It’s 8m-diameter fan is outfitted with a dozen hollow carbon fiber fixed-pitch blades which spin up to 253 rpm, driven by a 5MW 6,700HP electric motor, and generates wind speeds in excess of 190 MPH.
Honda
Honda began development on the HALO facility in 2015 in what was initially an effort to mitigate the expenses the company was incurring flying its technicians and the prototypes being developed at the Honda R&D Center in Ohio, around the world in order to get access to suitable aerodynamic testing facilities, like the company’s existing wind tunnel in Japan. Those considerations as well as “the arrival of the electrified era, made building Honda’s own wind tunnel a smart decision,” Wind Tunnel Business Strategy Lead, Chris Combs, said during the call.
The company does not plan to bogart its new facility’s research capabilities, however. “Honda has partnered with the Transportation Research Center to form a consortium for the purpose of promoting aerodynamic research that will be shared amongst consortium members,” Combs said. “We look forward to hosting college students in the future to advance in STEM careers and overall aerodynamic endeavors. It is anticipated that some non-auto parties will utilize the facility for projects focused on renewable energy like wind turbines and even architectural design.”
Sure you could replace the President with a self-aware roboclone, take the moon hostage, threaten to release a millennia-old Eldritch horror to wreak unspeakable terror upon the populace, or just blew up a few financial servers in your pursuit of global dominion, but a savvy supervillain knows that the true path to power is through holes — the deeper, the better.
In the excerpt below from his newest book, author Ryan North spelunks into the issues surrounding extreme mining and how the same principles that brought us the Kola Superdeep Borehole could be leveraged to dominate humanity, or turn a tidy profit. And, if you’re not digging the whole hole scheme, How to Take Over the World has designs for every wannabe Brain, from pulling the internet’s proverbial plug to bioengineering a dinosaur army — even achieving immortality if the first few plans fail to pan out.
The world’s deepest hole, as of this writing, is the now-abandoned Kola Superdeep Borehole, located on the Kola Peninsula in Russia, north of the Arctic Circle. It’s a hole 23 centimeters (cm) in diameter, and it was started in May 1970 with a target depth of 15,000m. By 1989, Soviet scientists had reached a depth of 12,262m, but they found they were unable to make further progress due to a few related issues. The first was that temperatures were increasing faster than they’d expected. They’d expected to encounter temperatures of around 100°C at that depth but encountered 180°C heat instead, which was damaging their equipment. That, combined with the type of rock found and the pressure at those depths, was causing the rock to behave in a way that was almost plastic. Whenever the drill bit was removed for maintenance or repair, rocks would move into the hole to fill it. Attempts to dig deeper were made for years, but no hole ever made it farther than 12,262m, and the scientists were forced to conclude that there was simply no technology available at the time that could push any deeper. The Soviet Union dissolved in 1991 in an unrelated event, drilling stopped in 1992, the site was shut down, and the surface-level opening to the hole was welded closed in 1995. Today, the drill site is an abandoned and crumbling ruin, and that still-world-record-holding maximum depth, 12,262m, is less than 0.2% of the way to the Earth’s center, some 6,371 km below.
So, that’s a concern.
But that was back in the ’90s, and we humans have continued to dig holes since! The International Ocean Discovery Program (IODP) has a plan to dig through the thinner oceanic crust, hoping to break through to the mantle and recover the first sample of it taken in place — but this project, estimated to cost $1 billion USD, has not yet been successful. Still, a ship built for the project, the Chikyū, has briefly held the world record for deepest oceanic hole (7,740m below sea level!), until it was surpassed by the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig, which dug a hole 10,683m below sea level and then exploded.
The evidence here all points to one depressing conclusion: the deepest holes humanity has ever made don’t go nearly far enough, and they’ve already reached the point where things get too hot — and too plastic — to continue.
But these holes were all dug not by supervillains chasing lost gold but by scientists, a group largely constrained by their “ethical principles” and “socially accepted morals.” To a supervillain, the solution here is obvious. If the problem is that the rocks are so hot that they’re damaging equipment and flowing into the hole, why not simply make a hole wide enough that some slight movement isn’t catastrophic, and cool enough so the rocks are all hardened into place? Why not simply abandon the tiny, 23cm-diameter boreholes of the Soviets and the similarly sized drill holes of the IODP, and instead think of something bigger? Something bolder?
Something like a colossal open-pit mine?
Such a mine would minimize the effects of rocks shifting by giving them a lot more room to shift — and us a lot more time to react — before they become a problem. You could keep those rocks cool and rigid with one of the most convenient coolants we have: cold liquid water. On contact with hot rocks or magma, water turns to steam, carrying that heat up and away into the atmosphere, where it can disperse naturally — while at the same time cooling the rocks so that they remain both solid enough to drill and rigid enough to stay in place. It would take an incredible amount of water, but lucky for us, Earth’s surface is 71% covered with the stuff!
So if you build a sufficiently large open-pit mine next to the ocean and use a dam to allow water to flow into the pit to cool the rocks as needed, then you’ll be the proud owner of a mine that allows you to reach greater depths, both literal and metaphorical, than anyone else in history! This scheme has the added benefit that, if we’re clever, we can use the steam that’s generated by cooling all that hot rock and magma to spin turbines, which could then generate more power for drilling. You’ll build a steam engine that’s powered by the primordial and nigh-inexhaustible heat of the Earth herself.
The exact dimensions of open-pit mines vary depending on what’s being mined, but they’re all shaped like irregular cones, with the biggest part at ground level and the smallest part at the bottom of the pit. The open-pit mine that’s both the world’s largest and deepest is the Bingham Canyon copper mine in Utah: it’s been in use since 1906, and in that time it has produced a hole in the Earth’s crust that’s 4km wide and 1.2km deep. Using those dimensions as a rough guide produces the following chart:
Penguin Randomhouse
… and here we have another problem. Just reaching the bottom of the crust needs a hole over five times the length of the island of Manhattan, dozens of times wider than any other hole made by humanity, and easily large enough to be seen from space. Reaching the bottom of the lower mantle would require a hole so huge that its opening would encompass 75% of the Earth’s diameter, and to do the same with the outer and inner cores requires holes that are wider than the Earth itself.
Even if you could turn almost half the Earth into an open-pit mine cooled by seawater, the steam created by cooling a pit that size would effectively boil the oceans and turn the Earth into a sauna, destroying the climate, collapsing food chains, and threatening all life on the planet — and that’s before you even reach the hostage-taking phase, let alone the part where you plunder forbidden gold! Things get even bleaker once you take into account the responses from the governments you’d upset by turning their countries into hole; the almost inconceivable amount of time, energy, and money required to move that much matter; where you’d put all that rock once you dug it up; or the true, objective inability for anyone, no matter how well funded, ambitious, or self-realized, to possibly dig a hole this huge.
So.
That’s another concern.
It pains me to say this, but… there is absolutely no way, given current technology, for anyone to dig a hole to the center of the Earth no matter how well funded they are, even if they drain the world’s oceans in the attempt. We have reached the point where your ambition has outpaced even my wildest plans, most villainous schemes, and more importantly strongest and most heat-resistant materials. Heck, we’re actually closer to immortal humans (see Chapter 8) than we are to tunneling to the Earth’s core. It’s unachievable. Impossible. There’s simply no way forward.
It’s truly, truly hopeless. It’s hard for me to admit it, but even the maddest science can’t realize every ambition.
I’m sorry. There’s nothing more I can do.
. . . for that plan, anyway!
But every good villain always has a Plan B, one that snatches victory from the jaws of defeat. And heck, if you’ve got your heart set on digging a hole, making some demands, and becoming richer than Midas and Gates and Luthor in the process—who am I to stop you?
You’re going to sidestep the issues of heat and pressure in the Earth’s core by staying safely inside the crust, within the depth range of holes we already know how to dig. And you’re going to sidestep the issues of legality that tend to surround schemes to take the Earth’s core hostage by instead legally selling access to your hole to large corporations and the megarich, who will happily pay through their noses for the privilege. Why?
Because instead of digging down, you’re going to dig sideways. Instead of mining gold, you’re going to mine information. And unlike even the lost gold of the Earth’s core, this mine is practically inexhaustible.
It all has to do with stock trading. In the mid-twentieth century, stock exchanges had trading floors, which were actual, physical floors where offers to buy and sell were shouted, out loud, to other traders. It was noisy and chaotic, but it ensured everyone on the trading floor had, in theory, equal access to the same information. Those floor traders were later supplemented by telephone trading, and then almost entirely replaced by electronic trading, which is how most stock exchanges operate today. At the time, both telephone and electronic trading could be pitched as simply a higher-tech version of the same floor trading that already existed, but they also did something more subtle: they moved trading from the trading floor to outside the exchanges themselves, where everyone might not have access to the same information.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the resulting economic sanctions against the aggressor nation are already causing economic havok the world over. Inflation is on the rise, causing the price of essentials like food, medicine and fuel to spike. Domestically, these additional financial strains are being deeply felt by gig economy workers and delivery drivers who are now struggling to stay on the road as gas averages $4.41 a gallon nationwide. In response, some delivery apps have extended financial lifelines to the “independent contractors” that their businesses rely upon — but not all of them and not entirely without a catch.
Instacart is the latest service to adjust its pricing in response, announcing on Friday morning that it will institute a 40-cent per order surcharge “over the next month” to help offset the increased costs to its drivers, which have seen a 71-cent increase since February 28th.
Uber has already imposed a fuel surcharge of its own, though the amount depends on which state the driver is in and how far the trip is going. Roughly, the surcharge for a passenger Uber ride will be between $0.45 to $0.55 per trip while having the food brought to you instead of the other way around will see a $0.35 to $0.45 per trip charge added on. The charge went into effect on Wednesday and will be reevaluated in 60 days, according to the company. Uber, beacon of fair labor practices that it is, has made assurances that the added charges will go directly to drivers. And yes, cheapskates, the surcharge applies even if you and/or your food is riding in an EV.
Nearly identically, Lyft announced on Monday that it will charge a flat $0.55 per trip fee — ICE vehicle or not — starting next week and leave it in place for 60 days. Additionally drivers can get 4 – 6 percent cashback on gas through June if they use the company-branded debit card.
“We’ve been closely monitoring rising gas prices and their impact on our driver community,” Lyft senior communications manager CJ Macklin told Engadget in a statement. “Driver earnings overall remain elevated compared to last year, but given the rapid rise in gas prices we’ll be asking riders to pay a temporary fuel surcharge, all of which will go to drivers.”
“Beginning on March 17th, drivers for Doordash will be able to receive 10% cashback on gas purchases, though only if they’re enrolled in the company’s own DasherDirect Visa cards,” Engadget reporter Amrita Khalid explains. “On top of that, drivers who drive a certain amount of miles per week will qualify for weekly gas rewards, ranging from $5 to $15 per week. Unlocking the $5 discount requires drivers to complete at least 100 miles worth of trips in a week. Drivers who total more than 225 miles worth of trips will earn a $15 weekly bonus.”
That translates into around $2 of rewards per gallon, depending on the distance a Dasher drives.
Amazon Flex workers — drivers who use their own vehicles to make deliveries for the online retailer’s Prime, Whole Foods and Fresh branded orders — have, not unsurprisingly, largely been left to their own devices in navigating these higher fuel prices. “We’ve already made several adjustments through pricing surges in impacted areas to help ease some of the financial challenges,” an Amazon spokesperson told MSNBC on Thursday. “As the situation evolves, we’ll continue to make changes where we can to help support our partners.” The company is “closely monitoring the situation,” said the spokesperson.
Engadget has reached out to Caviar (owned by DoorDash), GrubHub, Postmates (owned by Uber) and Shipt for comment and will update this post upon their replies.
Maserati announced on Thursday that it will offer electric versions of its entire vehicle lineup by 2025 and is starting its efforts off with the GranTurismo EV, a 1,200 HP roadster slated for release next year.
Stellantis
The GranTurismo “Folgore” will be the first entry into Maserati’s new line of electric vehicles. Its thousand-plus horses will translate into a limitered top speed of 190 MPH and a sub-3-second 0-60. It will be joined by an electrified version of the new Grecale SUV and Grancabrio GT in 2023 followed by EV variants of the MC20, the Quattroporte and the Levante SUV by 2025. The company also announced its intention to halt production of internal combustion vehicles and go fully electric by 2030.
The company, a subsidiary of the Stellantis Group, did not elaborate on the expected MSRPs for the upcoming vehicles, but given Maserati’s current offerings, interested buyers will likely be looking to pay anywhere from the high five-figures to the mid-sixes.
