Tag: bunch of people
The Fight Against Robotaxis in San Francisco
A few weeks ago, Dan Afergan, a software engineer, met a few friends at 540 Rogues, a bar in San Francisco’s Inner Richmond neighborhood. As Afergan and his companions nursed their drinks, someone walked in with some unusual news: “There’s a Cruise out there with a cone stuck on it.”
Afergan stepped outside to check it out. Sure enough, a self-driving cab from the company Cruise, which is majority-owned by General Motors, stood frozen in the middle of the
LK-99 and the Appeal of ‘Unidentified Superconducting Objects’
This has been a landmark summer in the world of “floaty rock drama.” Two weeks ago, in a pair of draft papers that have not been peer-reviewed, scientists in South Korea claimed to have found a room-temperature ambient-pressure superconductor, and described how to make it. In theory, this magical material could revolutionize our world. It also levitates. The purported discovery became an internet sensation. Researchers and DIY enthusiasts alike rushed to replicate; stocks soared; the internet gossiped.
Why Didn’t Anyone Do Anything About Silicon Valley Bank?
On January 18, a prominent financial newsletter noted that if Silicon Valley Bank were liquidated that day, “it would be functionally underwater.” Months before the nation’s 16th-largest bank collapsed, incomplete information provided to regulators indicated that the bank was stable, whereas public signals—such as SVB’s overreliance on longer-term securities hammered by rising interest rates—told a very different story. So why didn’t anyone do something?
To help answer this question, I turned to Natasha Sarin, a lawyer and an economist teaching