Tech News: Twitter Takes a Poison Pill

April nineteenth, twenty twenty two. And you know, it's been a whole week since we learned of Elon Musk's desire to outright purchase controlling shares of Twitter, And as Emperor Palpatine would say, everything is proceeding exactly as I have foreseen, which is, you know, a more fun way to say

I told you so. You might remember last week on Tuesday, I said that Musk's decision not to take a seat at the board of directors at Twitter could indicate that he was actually going to try for a hostile takeover, you know, that kind of situation, And then the next day we learned that's exactly what he was doing. Then you might remember on last Thursday, I said that Twitter's board of directors might choose a pathway to foil that plan by implementing a poison pill strategy, and sure enough,

that's what they did. So look at me, I can see the future except, of course, I think pretty much anyone paying any attention to this would have come to the same conclusion. So really I'm nothing special. Anyway. You might wonder what the heck a poison pill is, and there's actually a couple of different versions of it, but the one that Twitter looks to be employing looks like a flip in poison pill to me. I'd have to

actually read more about it to find out. But this is where a company seeing that's in danger of being acquired ends up offering up new shares of stock to existing shareholders, but they exclude the party that's actually trying to acquire the company. So they're saying, hey, we've got new shares and you can buy them in discount, so you can buy them cheaper than what they're going for on the market. That gets a live shareholders to buy

up shares. That dilutes the would be acquirers ownership. Right, You've got more shares of the stuff going out there, but the acquirer can't get hold of them, so their steak in elon Musk's case, we're talking around nine two starts to get smaller because there's more, there's more pie out there and they're not allowed to get any more of the pie. This also can have a big impact on the value of the stocks themselves, and in the short term, it can make it way more expensive to

complete a takeover. And Musk has already kind of given his um his his final bid of what he will spend. But you know, if he has to buy even more shares of stock in order to get that controlling interest, that it's going to cost him more because there are more shares out there now. Usk has in return tweeted that should his acquisition succeed, one of the first moves he's gonna make is he's going to reduce the salary

of the board of directors to zero dollars. Yeah, this is kind of a knockdown, drag out, ugly business fight in the tech space. Uh, still too early to say exactly what's gonna happen. I would be surprised if the acquisition goes through. I would actually be surprised if Elon Musk is really sincere about going after it. But I don't know the man, and um it could very well be that this is legit what he wants to do.

Bloomberg reports that Tesla's factory in Shanghai is really shifting into a higher gear pun intended, and this is in the wake of shutdowns in the region due to COVID. Now you might remember that China takes a pretty drastic approach to addressing COVID outbreaks. The government forces entire regions to shut down and isolate. That includes regions that host massive industrial facilities like the Shanghai Tesla facility, which was

closed for three weeks because of COVID. So now the bosses at the factory are looking at a way to make up for lost time and also to prevent future shutdowns, and they are doing this by forcing employees to stay in the factory for several weeks all the time, like they're not allowed to go home, so that includes sleeping at the factory. Reportedly, the company has been handing out mattresses and sleeping bags to employees and they will have

to stay on the premises. Now, presumably this is also to head off the possibility of another outbreak, because if one does occur in Shanghai, while the factory would then have to shut down, but by having all of its employees already at the factory, they can just shut down in place and just keep on producing cars even while the rest of the region is on lockdown. UM as for the employees, you know, quality of life, I guess

it's not all bad. They will have designated places where they're allowed to sleep on the floor of the shiny Tesla factory. Uh. They'll also have access to shower facilities. They will get three meals a day, and they will get an allowance equivalent to about sixty dollars a day luxury. I'm being a bit facetious here. Tesla initiated the plan yesterday and they will continue to force employees to live at the factory until at least May first. Oh brave

New world to have such corporations in it. And news related to electric vehicles are j Scaringe, the CEO of the electric adventure vehicle company Rivian, has echoed concerns that Elon Musk made a few months ago, so really repeating something that Musk has already said, which is that the world's ability to produce batteries that are suitable for electric vehicles is way behind what demand is going to be

in just a few years. As governments around the world are passing legislation that will ban the sale of new internal combustion engine vehicles in the not too distant future. The general assumption is that electric vehicles are going to take their place. But electric vehicles need batteries, and right now, the world just doesn't produce that many of them, certainly not enough to meet global demand assuming a shift to E VS from I sees, that is, electric vehicles from

internal combustion engine vehicles. Now. Our j told The Wall Street Journal that, quote, the world's cell production combined represents well under ten percent of what we will need in ten years end. Quote. So this point is, unless there's a massive change, including huge investments in production, and that's going to involve everything from mining the raw materials to

manufacturing the batteries themselves. Unless there's this massive increase across the board, we are going to encounter a supply change shortage that makes the semiconductor crisis look quaint by comparison. The demand for vehicles will still be very high, but supply will be insufficient. Like if you're in a world where you can't sell internal combustion engine vehicles and it has to be an electric vehicle, but you're only able to produce ten of the electric vehicle batteries needed to

meet the world's demand. You could easily imagine that vehicle prices would hit the stratosphere. I mean, demand is always going to be intense, people are always going to need vehicles, Supply will be very very low. That means that even a simple car like one that doesn't have a lot of bells and whistles on it could be well beyond

the purchasing range of most people. And so people like Musk and r J are making the argument that while a change to e VS makes sense from an environmental standpoint, like it makes sense for us to get off of internal combustion engine vehicles, there's no denying that there are still practical challenges that we have to acknowledge and tackle if we are going to make it happen. So, in other words, it's not this is a bad idea, but

rather this is unsupportable unless we figure something out. Otherwise we're just going to be in a different crisis of our own making. In our ongoing coverage of how the labor movement in the United States is affecting the tech sector, the Washington Post reports that employees at the main Apple store in New York City have begun to circulate petitions in an effort to unionize. The employees leading the effort have taken the quaint name fruit Stand Workers United, because

you know Apple fruit Stand cute. Among the employees, concerns are that pay has remained stagnant even as inflation increases, which just means that employees are effectively earning less over time. Also, they claim that employees have been subjected to quote unquote unfair or abusive practices. The process of forming a union requires several steps. First, the employees have to collect signatures. This is getting people to sign a union card, and at least of the employees at the store would have

to sign a card. They would then submit those signed cards to the National Labor Relations Board, which would then authorize a vote for the employees to to hold about whether or not to form a union. UH This would take a majority vote for the n l r B

two back an employee union. Apple would then have to either acknowledge the union or try to fight back and refuse to acknowledge it, at which point the employees would likely have to lean on the n l r B to support them in order to force Apple's hand and accept the union's existence. Now, according to the Post employees. At least a few other app stores are also exploring

the possibility of forming unions. So, like I've said several times in the recent past, it does look like we're seeing a bit of a labor movement in the US these days. We've got more to say about labor and tech and lots of other stuff, including some cool science fiction e stuff. But first, let's take a quick break over at Amazon. The company has a court mandate ordering

them to reinstate Gerald Bryson. So two years ago, Bryson protested working conditions in the Staten Island fulfillment center where he worked. He argued that conditions in the facility were unsafe, particularly due to COVID, because this was just as COVID was starting to become a major thing, and that he and his fellow co workers were in danger working in those conditions. Amazon subsequently terminated his employment, and Bryson brought a lawsuit against the company and argued that the grounds

for termination were purely retaliatory for his protest. So, in other words, it was the company striking back at him for bringing attention to these matters, and that's against the law here in the United States. The court agreed with Bryson.

They ruled that Amazon had unfairly fired him in retaliation for his protest, and Judge Benjamin W. Green has ordered Amazon to reinstate Bryson to his former position, as well as pay him back pay owed to him because he should have been employed that whole time, since the termination was unjust. Bryson worked at the same facility in Staten Island that recently held its own successful push to unionize, so again ties into what we were talking about before

the break. Amazon also released a statement last week two shareholders announcing that it has hired a law firm that's led by Lauretta Lynch, a former U. S Attorney General, to conduct an awe it on the company's policies and practices with regard to how they affect racial equity. However, Amazon's current plan only focuses on hourly employees. It does not cover salaried employees. Current and former employees who have filed lawsuits against Amazon arguing that you know Amazon's work

place conditions have led to things like racist treatment. They say that Amazon's plan is not enough. In fact, some of those employees are or were salaried ones, and they point out that their cases, their complaints wouldn't register in such an audit, they wouldn't count, and that Amazon's plan was designed specifically to limit the damage the audit might do. In addition, the plan won't extend to employees at places

like Whole Foods Market. It's just that the Amazon facilities themselves and Amazon reps say that the audit will cover the largest part of the company's workforce. That you know, the hourly workforce makes the vast majority already of Amazon's payroll, so this is a good audit. Critics, however, claim that it's really Amazon's way to have a little bit of damage control. Um. I'm sure the truth is somewhere in the middle, and we'll have to wait to see what

the audit uncovers. Janko Ritger's of Protocol reports that Amazon has a couple of job listings that might indicate the company's foray into mixed or extended reality endeavors. One such listing says the employee will work on creating extended reality concepts that will eventually at least coalesce into a product of some sort, but no other real details were mentioned.

I guess that makes sense. I mean, you don't want to spell everything out in a job listing, but the listings in general indicate the Amazon is interested in developing, producing, and marketing those kinds of devices. So we're talking about stuff that could be virtual reality or augmented reality or something in between. And since everyone is gung ho for the metaverse, this should not come as a huge surprise.

The vision of the metaverse includes the back end, which is the actual stuff we will encounter as we navigate through the metaverse. But then you also have the front end, the technology that we will be using to access the metaverse in the first place. Right now, companies like Meta are way in the lead on that front, having at least reached modest success with their VR products. A R has had a bit of a tougher go, partly because the really cool stuff has it made it to the

consumer market. I mean, I think the Microsoft hollow lens demonstrations I saw. I never got to try one myself, I only got to see videos of them. Those demonstrations were super nifty. I thought they were really cool. But Microsoft has kind of held that tech back from consumer technology. Uh, they market it to companies for all sorts of official purposes, like for training and for engineering and that kind of stuff, which makes sense, but you know, I really want to

get my grubby little hands on the thing. Plus, one of the demos they showed off included a Minecraft demo, and come on, you're gonna show off Minecraft. It's got to become a consumer technology, right Anyway, I wouldn't say that Amazon getting into this space really comes as a surprise. It's just interesting to see confirmation in the form of

job listings. As for what kind of timeline we should expect before we start seeing Amazon branded mixed reality systems, I would guess that's gonna take a couple of years at least, because I mean, you know, starting from ideation to production, it takes some time. Business Insider ran an article about a former TikTok Global account director named Pabo Martinez that gives a bit of insight into how the

company does business, and it ain't pretty so. According to Martinez, employees at TikTok corporate headquarters are encouraged, which I often find is really a euphemism to mean they were directed to work very long hours and even attend work meetings

on weekends so on their days off. Now, Martinez referred to this as adhering to the nine nine six culture, and nine is in reference to a pretty brutal work schedule that a lot of Chinese companies, particularly in the tech sector, followed, and I guess some of them still do. So means you start your work day at nine am and you work until nine pm, and you do that six times a week, nine nine six. If you think

that sounds horrible, you're right. In fact, it was bad enough in China that ultimately the Chinese Supreme Court declared that it was an illegal practice. Whether or not companies have actually stopped doing that, I don't know, but you know they're supposed to. And apparently that kind of merciless approach to work and the complete denial of a work life balance filtered down through Bite Dance, which is the Chinese company that is the parent company to TikTok, and

it's saturated into the TikTok work culture. Now, considering that the narrative TikTok has been pushing for years is that TikTok is really an American company and that it has very little connective tissue to its Chinese parent company, I would say this revelation ain't exactly good news for TikTok. The company has constantly had to deny that it is filtering information data back to Bite Dance, and that in fact, it could be seen as sort of a surveillance company

on behalf of China. That's an accusation the company has denied for a long time. But if it turns out that they are employing practices that are very similar to Chinese work culture practices, that raises some doubts, right uh. And even if it were to turn out that there were no directives coming down from Bite Dance, that no one from Bite Dance was telling TikTok, hey, you need to institute these work practices. There's been a lot of pushback against this kind of thing lately here in the US.

I mean, we've seen it in the video game industry in particular, where there's a real effort to eliminate crunch. Uh. That also happens in other kinds of production. So I think it's just a bad, bad look for TikTok, as the kids say, so, we'll have to wait and see if TikTok has a response to this. As I record this episode, I have not seen one from the company. Preston Dunlap, the former Chief architect officer for the U S Department of Defense, gave an interview to Bloomberg News

to explain why he decided to resign his position. Now essentially done. My apps major complaint is that the US government is so bureaucratic that it is impossible to move with any alacrity when adopting new technological strategies. You can't move fast like the Silicon Valley philosophy, at least for the longest time, has been move fast and break things. You're not allowed to do that when you're working a government job. Though, first of all, moving fast is impossible,

and breaking things is really frowned upon. So Dunlap argues that the US is falling further and further behind technologically, particularly in the realm of defense, and he said, quote, by the time the government manages to produce something, it's too often obsolete end quote. Now, I could definitely see how that would be really frustrating, And in fact, we've seen manifestations of this in different aspects of politics where

it intertwines with tech. It's nearly always the case that technological evolution greatly outpaces the government's pace and its capability of handling tech. So we've seen this in realms where the government has been considering passing regulations to limit the negative impact of certain technologies. By the time all that gets hashed out and signed into law, you're already onto the next thing. So it's always the government's always behind

and trying to catch up. But we also see it when the government is trying to implement technology and technological solutions, same sort of thing. By the time you've gotten all the approvals and you've gotten the budget and you've you've put the team together and everybody's actually building stuff and you've got it all finished, it's already out of date. So Dunlap is not the first official to resign while

citing frustrations with issues with bureaucracy. Last year, Nicholas Chiland stepped down and warned that China is pulling ahead of the United States in the field of artificial intelligence. So we've actually seen other officials make this same argument. Uh, And honestly, it's kind of hard to come up with solutions for this unless you're talking about forming departments that have way less oversight and way more freedom. But then

you get into dangerous territory. As well. Right, like we've all seen and read and experienced media that's all about some secret department that doesn't have oversight and all the terrible things that it can do. Uh. That is a risk you run when you go that way. But on the flip side, if you have endless layers of oversight, it's really hard to make any progress whatsoever. Hopefully there's some sort of middle ground there where progress can be made.

And um, yet you aren't giving people free reign to be evil mad scientists. A boy can dream. All Right, we're gonna take another break. When we come back, we've got a couple more news stories stick with us. Okay. Before the break, I talked about how Preston Dunlap stepped down from the Department of Defense, citing the issues with the you know, the government uh departments adopting technological solutions. This does not mean that the US military is in

the Stone Age. It is far from it. The U. S. Navy recently issued a press release revealing that back in February of this year, a trial of the layered Laser Defense System or l l D, proved successful in bringing down a high speed drone that was kind of standing in for a cruise missile. They also took down other style drones and some other targets. The laser that the Navy used is an all electric laser, which simplifies the

operations compared to older chemical based laser systems. So essentially, the the weapons system would have power as long as the ship it's on is powered, and the system includes a telescopic targeting system. It's guided by artificial intelligence and can be used to attack aerial or naval targets. So now we've got our pew pew lasers that could be standard issue on US Navy vessels in the not too distant future. Uh, really useful for defense like shooting down

cruise missiles or targeting military drones. Very useful kind of technology. Interesting that we've gotten to the point where we can have a powerful enough laser take down those targets that quickly, because obviously, uh, you know, the lasers that I'm familiar with are ones that would take a sustained amount of time on a target to do any real damage. Obviously, when you're talking about something like a cruise missile, the

time of operation has to be super fast. So I'm very curious to learn more about the actual technicals specs of the l l D. I imagine they are terrifying. In the U S. State of Pennsylvania, legislators have introduced a measure that I hope to see deployed around the world. And it's a small thing, but it's a meaningful one and it's being called click to cancel. And this isn't about making it easier to punish people for saying and doing awful things. It's not that kind of canceling. This

is actually about canceling service subscriptions. So if you're like me, you've probably got at least half a dozen different subscribed services under your belt. In fact, if I counted all the ones that I'm subscribed to, I'm sure there's at least ten or twelve, and I'm probably forgetting a few in that as well. And that's a big problem for a lot of people. Um it could be difficult just keeping track of all the subscriptions, let alone being able to get out of them if you don't want them anymore.

So this legislation would require companies to make it very clear to customers that they have an active subscription to the company services. And moreover, that should be as simple as clicking and on screen option to cancel that subscription. So, in other words, you should receive regular notices about the services you're subscribed to, and you should have the option

to piece out of them whenever you want. Now, considering the fact that a lot of companies make it inconvenient to even find out how to unsubscribe, then they can set customers on a wild goose chase in order to see it through. This would be a big change, one that would be really positive for consumers, and I think it would be pretty much welcome everywhere. I'll keep an eye on the story to see if this proposed legislation makes it all the way into law and what effect

that might have in other areas. Maybe you will see this become a trend. Euro News reports something pretty darn interesting. Some scientists in Sweden came up with a way to store solar energy that could allow for long term storage. And it all involves shape changing molecules. All right, so follow me on this one. If you want to make something change shape, you have to exert energy to do it, right, Like if you want to compress a spring, you have

to push down on the spring to do it. Then if you let go the spring goes back to its original shape. It's effectively pushing back. The scientists did something similar to this by creating an engineered molecule that, when it is exposed to solar energy, changes shape. If that molecule is then immersed in liquid, it will hold that

changed shape. But then if you mix a certain catalyst into the mixture, the molecules will revert to their original shape, and in the process, the molecule has to release energy. Remember it took energy to make it change shape in the first place, so when it goes back, it has to relinquish that energy. That energy is in the form

of heat. So you could use a system like this to absorb solar energy, store it in liquid, and then release it on demand, and you could use the heat to do some sort of useful work, like using it to help generate electricity. So far, the amounts that the scientists have generated in electricity, those those amounts are very small. It's far too small to really do any useful work. But the concept is solid and could be incredibly useful in the future. It's almost like bottling liquid sunshine. And

I just thought that was really nifty. And finally, I have to mention that NASA recently announced that way back in they beamed hologram doctors to the International Space Station and didn't even tell us about it. And I, for one, I'm offended that they sat on this for so long. I mean, come out, we're talking Star Trek Voyager kind of stuff here, if you if you watch Voyage or you know they had a holographic doctor. Anyway, the team of doctors were led by flight surgeon doctor Joseph Schmid.

And you might wonder how the heck they manage this? How did they get a hologram aboard the I S S Well, they use some technology that's been available for a little while, including the Microsoft hollow lens, which I mentioned earlier in this episode, and a Connect camera. You might remember the Connect was a peripheral for the Xbox consoles, and um, that camera is able to sense depth, and then when you combine that with a projection system, you

can project three dimensional images. So the hollow lens is an augmented reality device which can overlay digital information on top of your view of the real world around you. So astronauts in the International Space Station we're wearing a hollow lens and thus able to see and interact with the doctors. The doctors remained back here on Earth. The experiments that a record for the long distance in hollow portation, as they called it. I hate that term, but I

get what they're saying, hollow teleportation. So this was kind of like an even geekier version of telepresence or video chat something like that. Also, I should add in this case, the hollowportation was only in one direction, so the astronauts wearing the hollow lens they could see the holograms of the doctors, but the doctors were not wearing hollow lens. There was no connect camera aboard the I s S, so they weren't able to see the astronauts the same

way the astronauts were able to see them. NASA says it does plan to create future systems that will allow for two way hollow presence, and that could be really useful. Like you could imagine, let's say an astronaut has to conduct a specific experiment that involves operating some really tricky high tech equipment. You could get the person who designed the equipment or who built it, or an expert in the field to be in a hollow presence with that astronaut.

You know, the expert doesn't have to travel up to the International Space Station. They're here on Earth, but through cameras they can see what the astronauts sees and help guide them through the experiment. That could be incredibly useful, which I think is also really nifty. And that's it for today's episode of tech Stuff. If you have suggestions for future topics I should tackle on the show, please reach out to me. The best way to do that, at least until Elon Musk buys it, is on Twitter.

The handle for the show is text Stuff H s W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.