An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: The Justice Department is in the late stages of an investigation into Apple and could file a sweeping antitrust case taking aim at the company's strategies to protect the dominance of the iPhone as soon as the first half of this year, said three people with knowledge of the matter. The agency is focused on how Apple has used its control over its hardware and software to make it more difficult for consumers to ditch the company's devices, as well as for rivals to compete, said the people, who spoke anonymously because the investigation was active. Specifically, investigators have examined how the Apple Watch works better with the iPhone than with other brands, as well as how Apple locks competitors out of its iMessage service. They have also scrutinized Apple's payments system for the iPhone, which blocks other financial firms from offering similar services, these people said.

The Justice Department is closing in on what would be the most consequential federal antitrust lawsuit challenging Apple, which is the most valuable tech company in the world. If the lawsuit is filed, American regulators will have sued four of the biggest tech companies for monopolistic business practices in less than five years. The Justice Department is currently facing off against Google in two antitrust cases, focused on its search and ad tech businesses, while the Federal Trade Commission has sued Amazon and Meta for stifling competition. The Apple suit would likely be even more expansive than previous challenges to the company, attacking its powerful business model that draws together the iPhone with devices like the Apple Watch and services like Apple Pay to attract and keep consumers loyal to its products. Rivals have said that they have been denied access to key Apple features, like the Siri virtual assistant, prompting them to argue the practices are anticompetitive.

Huawei's newest laptop runs on a chip made by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., a teardown of the device showed, quashing talk of another Chinese technological breakthrough. From a report: The Qingyun L540 notebook contains a 5-nanometer chip made by the Taiwanese company in 2020, around the time US sanctions cut off Huawei's access to the chipmaker, research firm TechInsights found after dismantling the device for Bloomberg News. That counters speculation that Huawei's mainland Chinese chipmaking partner, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp., may have achieved a major leap in fabrication technique.

Huawei caused a stir in the US and China last August when it released a smartphone with a 7nm processor made by Shanghai-based SMIC. A teardown by the Canada-based research outfit for Bloomberg News showed the Mate 60 Pro's chip was only a few years behind the cutting edge, a feat that US trade curbs were meant to prevent. That revelation spurred celebration across the Chinese tech scene, and a debate in the US about the effectiveness of sanctions.

The Food and Drug Administration has allowed Florida to import millions of dollars worth of medications from Canada at far lower prices than in the United States, overriding fierce decades-long objections from the pharmaceutical industry. From a report: The approval, issued in a letter to Florida Friday, is a major policy shift for the United States, and supporters hope it will be a significant step forward in the long and largely unsuccessful effort to rein in drug prices. Individuals in the United States are allowed to buy directly from Canadian pharmacies, but states have long wanted to be able to purchase medicines in bulk for their Medicaid programs, government clinics and prisons from Canadian wholesalers.

Florida has estimated that it could save up to $150 million in its first year of the program, importing medicines that treat H.I.V., AIDS, diabetes, hepatitis C and psychiatric conditions. Other states have applied to the F.D.A. to set up similar programs. But significant hurdles remain. The pharmaceutical industry's major lobbying organization, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, or PhRMA, which has sued over previous importation efforts, is expected to file suit to prevent the Florida plan from going into effect. Some drug manufacturers have agreements with Canadian wholesalers not to export their medicines, and the Canadian government has already taken steps to block the export of prescription drugs that are in short supply.

Little noticed, days before the holiday break, Boeing petitioned the Federal Aviation Administration for an exemption from key safety standards for the 737 MAX 7 -- the still-uncertified smallest member of its newest jet family. Seattle Times: Since August, earlier models of the MAX currently flying passengers in the U.S. have had to limit use of the jet's engine anti-ice system after Boeing discovered a defect in the system with potentially catastrophic consequences. The flaw could cause the inlet at the front end of the pod surrounding the engine -- known as a nacelle -- to break and fall off.

In an August Airworthiness Directive, the FAA stated that debris from such a breakup could penetrate the fuselage, putting passengers seated at windows behind the wings in danger, and could damage the wing or tail of the plane, "which could result in loss of control of the airplane." Dennis Tajer, a spokesperson for the Allied Pilots Association, the union representing 15,000 American Airlines pilots, said the flaw in the engine anti-ice system has "given us great concern." He said the pilot procedure the FAA approved as an interim solution -- urging pilots to make sure to turn off the system when icing conditions dissipate to avoid overheating that within five minutes could seriously damage the structure of the nacelle -- is inadequate given the serious potential danger.

"You get our attention when you say people might get killed," Tajer said. "We're not interested in seeing exemptions and accommodations that depend on human memory. ... There's just got to be a better way." In its petition to the FAA, Boeing argues the breakup of the engine nacelle is "extremely improbable" and that an exemption will not reduce safety. "The 737 MAX has been in service since 2017 and has accumulated over 6.5 million flight hours. In that time, there have been no reported cases of parts departing aircraft due to overheating of the engine nacelle inlet structure," the filing states.

China's top diplomat warned the US that decoupling would be "self defeating" as the country set out to implement a recent agreement made between their leaders. From a report: Foreign Minister Wang Yi, speaking on Friday at an event to mark the 45th anniversary of US-China diplomatic relations, cited a slew of initiatives that reflect improved ties including streamlined visas for US travelers, a counternarcotics working group to battle the flow of the synthetic fentanyl to the US, and the sending of pandas to the US by the end of the year. "Any decoupling attempt to stem the tide will only be counterproductive and self defeating," Wang said.

David Meale, deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing, joined Friday's event as charge d'affaires with Ambassador Nicholas Burns out of town. Tensions between China and the US started to ease after President Joe Biden and Chinese leader Xi Jinping met in November. The talks resulted in a resumption of high-level military-to-military ties, a promise to collaborate on the fentanyl problem and a commitment to boost interactions between people in the two countries.

According to MoffettNathanson, the U.S. pay-TV industry had its worst-ever third quarter after losing about 900,000 subscribers. "That poor result, the research firm added, left the total pay-TV industry shrinking at a record pace of -7.3%, widened from a year-ago decline of -5.9%," reports Light Reading. "It also left pay-TV penetration of occupied households (including vMVPDs) at just 54.8% -- a level last seen in 1989, five years before the debut of DirecTV." From the report: Drilling down on Q3 results, traditional pay-TV providers (cable, telco and satellite) shed 1.97 million subscribers, widened from a loss of 1.94 million in the year-ago quarter. Within that category, US cable lost 1.10 million video subs in Q3, versus a loss of -1.09 million in the year-ago period. Satellite operators (Dish Network and DirecTV) lost 667,000 subs in Q3, versus -567,000 in the year-ago quarter. Telco TV providers lost 198,000 video subs in the period, an improvement when compared to a year-ago loss of -250,000 subs.

vMVPDs, meanwhile, added 1.08 million in Q3, down from a year-ago gain of about 1.34 million. Despite those gains, vMVPDs recaptured only 21.7% of traditional pay-TV's subscriber losses in the period, according to MoffettNathanson. Meanwhile, YouTube TV continues to dominate the vMVPD category. MoffettNathanson estimates that YouTube TV added about 350,000 subs in Q3, extending its total to 7 million -- representing 40% of the vMVPD sector's 18 million subscriber total. "Based on our Q3 estimate, YouTube TV has now surpassed Dish Network [6.72 million satellite TV subs at the end of Q3] to become the country's fourth largest MVPD of any kind," Moffett noted. "At the current trajectory, YouTube TV should pass DirecTV for third place in less than a year."

A federal criminal complaint has revealed that state and local agencies in New Jersey bought millions of dollars worth of banned Chinese surveillance cameras. The cameras were purchased from a local company that rebranded the banned equipment made by Dahua Technology, a company that has been implicated in the surveillance of the Uyghur people in Xinjiang. According to 404 Media, "At least $15 million of the equipment was bought using federal COVID relief funds." From the report: The feds charged Tamer Zakhary, the CEO of the New Jersey-based surveillance company Packetalk, with three counts of wire fraud and a separate count of false statements for repeatedly lying to state and local agencies about the provenance of his company's surveillance cameras. Some of the cameras Packetalk sold to local agencies were Dahua cameras that had the Dahua logo removed and the colors of the camera changed, according to the criminal complaint.

Dahua Technology is the second largest surveillance camera company in the world. In 2019, the U.S. government banned the purchase of Dahua cameras using federal funds because their cameras have "been implicated in human rights violations and abuses in the implementation of China's campaign of repression, mass arbitrary detention, and high-technology surveillance against Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and other members of Muslim minority groups in Xingjiang." The FCC later said that Dahua cameras "pose an unacceptable risk to U.S. national security." Dahua is not named in the federal complaint, but [404 Media's Jason Koebler] was able to cross-reference details in the complaint with Dahua and was able to identify specific cameras sold by Packetalk to Dahua's product.

According to the FBI, Zakhary sold millions of dollars of surveillance equipment, including rebranded Dahua cameras, to agencies all over New Jersey despite knowing that the cameras were illegal to sell to public agencies. Zakhary also specifically helped two specific agencies in New Jersey (called "Victim Agency-1" and "Victim Agency-2" in the complaint) justify their purchases using federal COVID relief money from the CARES Act, according to the criminal complaint. The feds allege, essentially, that Zakhary tricked local agencies into buying banned cameras using COVID funds: "Zakhary fraudulently misrepresented to the Public Safety Customers that [Packetalk's] products were compliant with Section 889 of the John S. McCain National Defense Authorization Act for 2019 [which banned Dahua cameras], when, in fact, they were not," the complaint reads. "As a result of Zakhary's fraudulent misrepresentations, the Public Safety Customers purchased at least $35 million in surveillance cameras and equipment from [Packetalk], over $15 million of which was federal funds and grants."

Intuit is being questioned by US lawmakers who say federal tax credits the company received could have been better spent to build a free government alternative to Intuit's popular online tax preparation software, TurboTax. From a report: "For years, Intuit's corporate lobbyists have argued that the federal government should not set up a program for Americans to file their taxes online and for free because it would be too costly for taxpayers," the lawmakers, including Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, wrote in a letter to the company. "Your company's disclosure reveals that Intuit's research tax break from 2022 alone could have been enough to fund a year of a free e-File program for millions of Americans."

The lawmakers asked Intuit to provide details on its research expenses dating to 2018. Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat, and Sanders, an Independent from Vermont, were joined on the letter by Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat, and Representative Katie Porter, a Democrat from California. The Internal Revenue Service, in a report to Congress last year, estimated it would cost $64 million to $249 million annually for the agency to run a free-filing program. In the fiscal year ending in July 2023, Mountain View, California-based Intuit received $106 million in federal research and experimentation credits, which amounted to about 4% of its total R&D expenses, according to a regulatory filing.

Montana and North Carolina have joined a growing list of states that now require identification to view porn, or are blocked from viewing it altogether, as new age verification laws went into effect on January 1. From a report: A year ago, Louisiana paved the way for a wave of age verification laws that target porn sites; eight states have since passed copycat age verification laws of their own. Montana's SB 544 and North Carolina's HB 8 are nearly identical to Louisiana's and other states' laws. The laws' text make unsubstantiated claims about the addictive potential of pornography and its apparent harms to viewers' health. North Carolina's law was passed as part of unrelated legislation that adds a computer science course to high school graduation requirements. Rather than try to make its users jump through hoops to view its content, Pornhub's parent company has blocked viewers in Montana and North Carolina altogether, as it has in other states with similar legislation.

Retired officers and departing defense officials are flocking to investment firms that are pushing the government to provide more money to defense-technology startups. The New York Times: When Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III and other top officials assembled for an event this month at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, they walked into a lesson in how the high-stakes world of Pentagon lobbying is being altered by the rise of defense technology startups. Inside, at this elite gathering near Los Angeles of senior leaders from government and the arms industry, was a rapidly growing group of participants: former Pentagon officials and military officers who have joined venture capital firms and are trying to use their connections in Washington to cash in on the potential to sell a new generation of weapons.

They represent a new path through the revolving door that has always connected the Defense Department and the military contracting business. Retiring generals and departing top Pentagon officials once migrated regularly to the big established weapons makers like Lockheed Martin and Boeing. Now they are increasingly flocking to venture capital firms that have collectively pumped billions of dollars into Silicon Valley-style startups offering the Pentagon new war-fighting tools like autonomous killer drones, hypersonic jets and space surveillance equipment.

This new route to the private sector is one indicator of the ways in which the United States is trying to become more agile in harnessing technological advances to maintain military superiority over China and other rivals. But the close ties between venture capital firms and Defense Department decision makers have also put a new twist on long-running questions about industry access and influence at a time when the Pentagon is under pressure to rethink how it allocates its huge procurement budget.

AI represents a mixed blessing for the legal field, U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts said in a year-end report published on Sunday, urging "caution and humility" as the evolving technology transforms how judges and lawyers go about their work. From a report: Roberts struck an ambivalent tone in his 13-page report. He said AI had potential to increase access to justice for indigent litigants, revolutionize legal research and assist courts in resolving cases more quickly and cheaply while also pointing to privacy concerns and the current technology's inability to replicate human discretion.

"I predict that human judges will be around for a while," Roberts wrote. "But with equal confidence I predict that judicial work - particularly at the trial level - will be significantly affected by AI." The chief justice's commentary is his most significant discussion to date of the influence of AI on the law, and coincides with a number of lower courts contending with how best to adapt to a new technology capable of passing the bar exam but also prone to generating fictitious content, known as "hallucinations." Roberts emphasized that "any use of AI requires caution and humility." He mentioned an instance where AI hallucinations had led lawyers to cite non-existent cases in court papers, which the chief justice said is "always a bad idea." Roberts did not elaborate beyond saying the phenomenon "made headlines this year."

Hope Thelps writes: A number of films including the earliest ones featuring Mickey and Minnie Mouse finally enterd the public domain today. The BBC reports:

Steamboat Willie, a 1928 short film featuring early non-speaking versions of Mickey and Minnie, is widely seen as the moment that transformed Disney's fortunes and made cinema history.

Their images are now available to the public in the US, after Disney's copyright expired.

It means creatives like cartoonists can now rework and use the earliest versions of Mickey and Minnie.

In fact, anyone can use those versions without permission or cost.

But Disney warned that more modern versions of Mickey are still covered by copyright.

'We will, of course, continue to protect our rights in the more modern versions of Mickey Mouse and other works that remain subject to copyright,' the company said.

US copyright law says the rights to characters can be held for 95 years, which means the characters in Steamboat Willie entered the public domain on Monday, 1 January 2024.

Those works can now legally be shared, performed, reused, repurposed or sampled.

The early versions of Mickey and Minnie are just two of the works entering the public domain in the US on New Year's Day.

Other famous films, books, music and characters from 1928 are now also available to the American public.

They include Charlie Chaplin's silent romantic comedy The Circus; English author AA Milne's book The House at Pooh Corner, which introduced the character Tigger; Virginia Woolf's Orlando; and DH Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover.

One of the country's most influential courts has asked the nation's top securities regulator for its views on an uncomfortable subject: whether audit reports by outside accounting firms actually matter. From a report: The court already ruled that, at least in one case, they didn't. That case, where an insurer overstated profits and an auditor signed off on its books, led to an investor lawsuit against the auditor that was dismissed. In its ruling, the court said the audit report was so general an investor wouldn't have relied on it. The decision could have broad ramifications for the Securities and Exchange Commission, which oversees corporate financial disclosures, and for the auditing industry, which charged about $17 billion last year for blessing the books of publicly listed companies in the U.S.

The ruling, by a three-judge panel of the Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, prompted three former SEC officials to tell the court it got the answer wrong. They asked the court to reconsider its decision, noting that the SEC in a previous enforcement case had said that "few matters could be more important to investors" than whether a company's financial statements had been subjected to a properly conducted annual audit. The court responded by inviting the SEC to file a brief expressing its views on the former officials' arguments. The SEC in a court filing said that "the commission has an interest in ensuring its views on this issue are considered by the court." Its brief is due Feb. 16. The court ruling involved a lawsuit by investors over an audit gone wrong. AmTrust Financial Services, an insurance company, had overstated its profit, and BDO USA, its outside accounting firm, had blessed the numbers.

"This year has been a major turning point in American health care," reports USA Today, "and patients can anticipate several major developments in the new year," including the beginning of a CRISPR "revolution" and "a new reckoning with drug prices that could change the landscape of the U.S. health care system for decades to come." Health care officials expect 2024 to bring a wave of innovation and change in medicine, treatment and public health... Many think 2024 could be the year more people have the tools to follow through on New Year's resolutions about weight loss. If they can afford them and manage to stick with them, people can turn to a new generation of remarkably effective weight-loss drugs, also called GLP-1s, which offer the potential for substantial weight loss...

In 2023, mental health issues became among the nation's most deadly, costly and pervasive health crises... The dearth of remedies has also paved the way for an unsuspecting class of drugs: psychedelics. MDMA, a party drug commonly known as "ecstasy," could win approval for legal distribution in 2024, as a treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder. Another psychedelic, a ketamine derivative eskatemine, sold as Spravato, was approved in 2019 to treat depression, but it is being treated like a conventional therapy that must be dosed regularly, not like a psychedelic that provides a long-lasting learning experience, said Matthew Johnson, an expert in psychedelics at Johns Hopkins University. MDMA (midomafetamine capsules) would be different, as the first true psychedelic to win FDA approval.

In a late-stage trial of patients with moderate or severe post-traumatic stress disorder, close to 90% showed clinically significant improvements four months after three treatments with MDMA and more than 70% no longer met the criteria for having the disorder, which represented "really impressive results," according to Matthew Johnson, an expert in psychedelics at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland. Psilocybin, known colloquially as "magic mushrooms," is also working its way through the federal approval process, but it likely won't come up before officials for another year, Johnson said. Psychedelics are something to keep an eye on in the future, as they're being used to treat an array of mental health issues: eskatimine for depression, MDMA for PTSD and psilocybin for addiction. Johnson said his research suggests that psychedelics will probably have a generalizable benefit across many mental health challenges in the years to come.
2024 will also be the first year America's drug-makers face new limits on how much they can increase prices for drugs covered by the federal health insurance program Medicare.

"For several years, thousands more high-earning, well-educated workers have left California than have moved in," reports the Los Angeles Times: Even though California has experienced lopsided out-migration for decades, the financial blow has been cushioned by the kinds of people moving into the state: The newcomers were generally better educated and earned more money than those who left. Not now: That long-standing trend has reversed...

The reversal, largely in response to the state's high taxes and soaring cost of living, has begun to damage California's overall economy. And, by cutting into tax revenues, has delivered punishing blows to state and local governments. State budget analysts recently projected a record $68 billion deficit in the next fiscal year because of a 25% drop in personal income tax collection in 2023. Some city, county and other local taxing authorities, particularly in the San Francisco Bay Area, have also recorded revenue declines. With investors and high-income taxpayers receiving substantial compensation in the form of stocks, last year's sluggish stock market accounted for a major share of the decline in state income tax revenues. So did layoffs and financial weakness in the tech sector. But rising unemployment in the state and the growing flight of professionals, business operators and others making good salaries were also notable contributors. And those factors will be harder to reverse, at least in the foreseeable future.

"There's a price to pay for the movement of middle- and upper-income people and corporations," said Joel Kotkin, a fellow at Chapman University who has researched the flight from California and the resulting threat to the state's fiscal outlook. "People who are leaving are taking their tax dollars with them."

The accelerating exodus from California in recent years, of both companies and people, has been well documented. The pandemic-induced rise in remote work, inflated housing prices and changing social conditions have spurred more Californians to pull up stakes... Moody's Analytics economist Mark Zandi analyzed moves in and out of California for The Times using Equifax credit data, to zero in on the age of the movers. He found that since the pandemic in early 2020, California has lost residents in every age group, but by a significant margin the biggest net out-migration came from those 35 to 44 years old. "This is probably motivated by the severe housing affordability crisis in California," Zandi said. "It's all but impossible for them to become homeowners in the state."

Eric McGhee, a senior fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California, who has written about demographic trends in migration, thinks the increased loss of higher-educated Californians to other states in recent years can be traced in significant part to the rise of remote work since the pandemic. As more employers call workers back to the office, and the share of fully remote work appears to have settled at around 10% of all employees, McGhee expects the net out-migration from California to slow...

Even if the outflow of residents reverts to pre-pandemic levels, the broader economic climate doesn't bode well for the state's budget and economic outlook, at least in the immediate future. The U.S. economy is slowing, and California's economy is decelerating faster than the nation's, with the state's unemployment rate, most recently at 4.8%, already a full point higher than nationwide.
The article clarifies that "it's not just the sheer numbers of people who have left. What's different is that in each of the prior two years, more than 250,000 Californians with at least a bachelor's degree moved out, while an average of 175,000 college graduates from other states settled in California, according to an analysis of census data by William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution. In prior periods over the last two decades, that balance was about even or slightly in California's favor."

And besides billionaires, "There's been a broader exodus of ordinary Californians in the upper-income spectrum as well. In the tax filing years 2020 and 2021, the average gross income of taxpayers who had moved from California to another state was about $137,000. That was up from $75,000 in 2015 and 2016, according to migration and personal income data from the Internal Revenue Service."

It was a half a century ago that America passed legislation to protect vanishing species and their habitats — and since then, more than five dozen species have recovered. Just one example: In 1963 only 417 nesting pairs of bald eagles were found in the lower 48 states. But today there's more than 300,000 bald eagles, writes USA Today. "[T]hough its future remains uncertain, many experts say it remains one of the nation's crowning achievements."

But 1,252 species are still listed as endangered in the U.S. — 486 animals, and 766 plants — with 417 more species categorized as "threatened." The perils of the changing climate add urgency to calls for increased funding and more protection. In North Carolina, for example, the rising sea steadily creeps over a refuge that's home to the sole remaining wild red wolf population. Off New England, warming waters forced changes in the foraging habits of the endangered North Atlantic right whale, putting the massive marine mammals in harm's way more often... One in 5 plant and animal species in the nation remain at risk of extinction, says Susan Holmes, executive director of the Endangered Species Coalition. "Loss of habitat and climate change are absolutely some of the most important threats that we have."

"We are at what I would say is a pivotal moment with the threats of climate change," she said. "We have to act faster than ever in order to ensure that these species are going to thrive."

"Electric cars are already upending America," argues a new article in the Atlantic, citing booming sales and new models that are "finally starting to push us into the post-gas age." Americans are on track to buy a record 1.44 million of them in 2023, according to a forecast by BloombergNEF, about the same number sold from 2016 to 2021 total. "This was the year that EVs went from experiments, or technological demonstrations, and became mature vehicles," Gil Tal, the director of the Electric Vehicle Research Center at UC Davis, told me.... Nearly 40 new EVs have debuted since the start of 2022, and they are far more advanced than their ancestors. For $40,000, the Hyundai Ioniq 6, released this year, can get you 360 miles on a single charge; in 2018, for only a slightly lower cost, a Nissan Leaf couldn't go half that distance....

All of these EVs are genuinely great for the planet, spewing zero carbon from their tailpipes, but that's only a small part of what makes them different. In the EV age, cars are no longer just cars. They are computers... The million-plus new EVs on the road are ushering in a fundamental, maybe existential, change in how to even think about cars — no longer as machines, but as gadgets that plug in and charge like all the others in our life. The wonderful things about computers are coming to cars, and so are the terrible ones: apps that crash. Subscription hell. Cyberattacks... If cars are gadgets now, then carmakers are also now tech companies. An industry that has spent a century perfecting the internal combustion engine must now manufacture lithium-ion batteries and write the code to govern them. Imagine if a dentist had to pivot from filling cavities to performing open-heart surgery, and that's roughly what's going on here.

"The transition to EVs is completely changing everything," Loren McDonald, an EV consultant, told me. "It's changing the people that automotive companies have to hire and their skills. It's changing their suppliers, their factories, how they assemble and build them. And lots of automakers are struggling with that...." Job cuts are already happening, and more may come — even after the massive autoworker strike this year that largely hinged on electrification. Such a big financial investment is needed to electrify the car industry that from July to September, Ford lost $60,000 for every EV it sold. Or peel back one more onion layer to car dealerships: Tesla, Rivian, and other EV companies are selling directly to consumers, cutting them out. EVs also require little service compared with gas vehicles, a reality that has upset many dealers, who could lose their biggest source of profit.

None of this is the future. It is happening right now.

"Remote-work numbers have dwindled over the past few years as employers issue return-to-office mandates," reports USA Today. "But will that continue in 2024?" The numbers started to slide after spring 2020, when more than 60% of days were worked from home, according to data from WFH Research, a scholarly data collection project. By 2023, that number had dropped to about 25% â' much lower than its peak but still a fivefold increase from 5% in 2019. But work-from-home numbers have held steady throughout most of 2023. And according to remote-work experts, they're expected to rebound in the years to come as companies adjust to work-from-home trends. "Return-to-office died in '23," said Nick Bloom, an economics professor at Stanford University and work-from-home expert. "There's a tombstone with 'RTO' on it...."

Though a number of companies issued return-to-work mandates this year, most are allowing employees to work from home at least part of the week. That makes 2024 the year for employers to figure out the hybrid model. "We're never going to go back to a five-days-in-the-office policy," said Stephan Meier, professor of business at Columbia University. "Some employers are going to force people to come back, but I think over the next year, more and more firms will actually figure out how to manage hybrid well." Thirty-eight percent of companies require full-time in-office work, down from 39% one quarter ago and 49% at the start of the year, according to software firm Scoop Technologies...

[Stanford economics professor] Bloom called remote-work numbers in 2023 "pancake-flat." Yes, large companies like Meta and Zoom made headlines by ordering workers back to the office. But, Bloom said, just as many other companies were quietly reducing office attendance to cut costs.
Bloom thinks holograms and VR devices are possible within five years. "In the long run, the thing that really matters is technology."

One paper estimates that currently 37% of America's jobs can be done entirely at home, according to the article, and ZipRecruiter's chief economist seems to agree, predicting as much as 33% America's work days will eventually be completed from home. "I think the numbers will gradually go up as this becomes more of an accepted norm as future generations grow up with it being so widely available, and as the technology for for doing it gets better."

And the article notes that the ZipRecruiter economist sees another factor fueling the trend. "Reluctant leaders aging out of the workforce will help, too, she said."

In 2021, Philips pulled its popular sleep apnea machines and ventilators off the shelves after discovering that an industrial foam built into the devices to reduce noise could release toxic particles and fumes into the masks worn by patients. "But as Philips publicly pledged to send out replacements, supervisors inside the company's headquarters near Pittsburgh were quietly racing to manage a new crisis that threatened the massive recall and posed risks to patients all over again," reports ProPublica. "Tests by independent laboratories retained by Philips had found that a different foam used by the company -- material fitted inside the millions of replacement machines -- was also emitting dangerous chemicals, including formaldehyde, a known carcinogen."

"Though Philips has said the machines are safe, ProPublica and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette obtained test results and other internal records that reveal for the first time how scientists working for the company grew increasingly alarmed and how infighting broke out as the new threat reached the highest levels of the Pittsburgh operation. The findings also underscore an unchecked pattern of corporate secrecy that began long before Philips decided to use the new foam." From the report: The company had previously failed to disclose complaints about the original foam in its profitable breathing machines, a polyester-based polyurethane material that was found to degrade in heat and humidity. Former patients and others have described hundreds of deaths and thousands of cases of cancer in government reports. After the introduction of the new foam in 2021, this one made of silicone, the company again held back details about the problem from the public even as it sent out replacement machines with the new material to customers around the world.

One of the devices was the DreamStation 2, a newly released continuous positive airway pressure, or CPAP, machine promoted as one of the company's primary replacements. Federal regulators were alerted to the concern more than two years ago but said in a news release at the time that the company was carrying out additional tests on the foam and that patients should keep using their replacements until more details were available. The Food and Drug Administration has not provided new information on the test results since then, and it is still unclear whether the material is safe. That leaves millions of people in the United States alone caught in the middle, including those with sleep apnea, which causes breathing to stop and start through the night and can lead to heart attacks, strokes and sudden death.

The new foam isn't the only problem: An internal investigation at Philips launched in the months after the recall found that water was condensing in the circuitry of the DreamStation 2, creating a new series of safety risks. "Loss of therapy, thermal events, and shock hazards," the investigation concluded. The FDA issued an alert about overheating last month, warning that the devices could produce "fire, smoke, burns, and other signs of overheating" and advising patients to keep the machines away from carpet, fabric and "other flammable materials." Philips has said that customers could continue using the devices if they followed safety instructions. ...

Boeing instructed customer airlines to inspect their 787 Max jets for loose bolts, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) announced this week. From a report: The request comes after the manufacturer discovered two aircraft with missing bolts in the rudder control system, raising concerns about faults across all aircraft. "The issue identified on the particular airplane has been remedied," Boeing told CNN in a statement. "Out of an abundance of caution, we are recommending operators inspect their 737 Max airplanes and inform us of any findings." The inspection request entails a two-hour probe of the aircraft's safety-critical parts for each of the approximately 1,300 787 Max jets in service, the FAA said.