Ah, home sweet home! With the Covid-19 pandemic making working from home and hybrid working models the norm, the home has become a place where many of us spend most of our time now. But staying at home has also come with its own set of challenges. While housing costs are rapidly shooting up around the world, home spaces, especially in urban areas, seem to be shrinking.
Almost every one of us has a subscription to a streaming service today. We listen to music on platforms such as Spotify, watch films on Netflix and read books on a Kindle. But the subscription economy goes far beyond these services. Today, you can subscribe to literally anything, such as smoothies, food boxes and even underwear. There are even subscriptions to services that really need to be a one-time purchase, such as headphones and car features.
In November 2022, San Francisco city officials voted for the use of robots in the police force. These robots were meant to help police officers incapacitate violent criminals and were also authorized to use deadly force to stop crime. But just under a month after being approved, the city was forced to take back its decision due to massive public outcry.
As advancement in AI solutions expands and accelerates, AI will be more powerful and inseparable from our daily lives in the future, and that will also happen with the education industry. To provide a personalized learning experience, a combination of EdTech and AI can bring about an adaptive learning platform, which can track a student’s progress, learning patterns, knowledge gaps and so on.
“Moonlighting” is a term you might be hearing more and more these days. It’s a growing trend in the business world that startups, especially tech companies, should know about. But what exactly is moonlighting, and why should you care? Let’s take a closer look.
The state of cryptocurrency this year has been one for the comic books, where the protagonist—in the face of a crisis—says, “But it can’t get any worse than this, right?”, and it does. It just wasn’t crypto’s year. From rising interest rates to mistakes made by cryptocurrencies like Terra Luna and CEOs like Sam Bankman-Fried of the crypto exchange FTX, a host of factors stunted the digital currency’s growth. It also led to investors losing money and becoming skeptical about its future.
Global sporting events have often been the ground for contentious political statements. Given their magnanimity, they provide the ideal platform to spread a message. In 1968, athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their black-gloved fists during the national anthem in a black power salute. They aimed to turn the world’s attention to racial inequality and got a lot of mixed reactions at the time for doing so. Another popular footballer who stood against the racial divide was Colin Kaepernick.
The 1997 American film Picture Perfect has given us one of the most memorable phrases about corporate dressing: “In business, we dress for the job we want, not the one we have.” Even those who may not have seen this film must have heard the quote being used, especially when it comes to dressing up for a job interview.
The tech industry is facing a slew of staff cutbacks since the beginning of the year. In November 2022, the internet went into a frenzy at Elon Musk laying off most of Twitter’s employees. A few days later, Meta also announced its own round of layoffs, letting go of about 13% of the workforce. Later, Salesforce also confirmed it had dismissed hundreds of workers to cut expenses.
The recent FTX scandal has all the trappings of a Netflix drama series where the business tycoon—once lauded for his power moves—is brought down by greed, selfishness and the judiciary system (The Wolf of Wall Street, much?). The CEO of crypto exchange FTX, Sam Bankman-Fried, has come into the spotlight for bringing about the downfall of FTX and his other company Alameda Research. In November 2022, he filed for bankruptcy for both companies after a devastating collapse in the public eye.
Japan has the most hardworking people in the world. Grinding hard is so deeply ingrained into Japanese culture that 37% of companies in the country make their employees work 45 hours or more in overtime every month. The Japanese workforce hesitates to take time off work, so much so that in 2019 it was made legally mandatory for employees to take five days a year off.
Employees of a startup are essential to its success. They keep the company running to ensure that the vision gets carried out and that the day-to-day operations continue seamlessly. High turnovers can be harmful to a company, especially for startups with less established internal structures, organizations and systems to mitigate handover disruption. This makes retaining employees a particularly important goal for startups.
Over one-third of millennials feel that they will never be able to stop working. Many of them believe that, even though they want to retire before they turn 60, they will be performing some sort of casual job. A CNBC report revealed that 61% of millennials feel that they will be working a part-time job when they retire, with over 10% of them feeling unsure as to what their future is going to look like.
Elon Musk has always had a love-hate relationship with Twitter. He loves that he gets an audience for his dad jokes on the platform; he hates that few people laugh at them. Musk is the “it girl” from every American high school movie. He is Regina George from Mean Girls; he has all the power, and he has a burn book that he has brought to Twitter.
Let’s face it: no matter how much we love what we do, any sort of job can become tiring at the end of the day. If you have been feeling tired and unmotivated as of late, maybe it’s time to exercise your brain and keep it sharp by playing games! Compared to those that don’t play games regularly, studies have shown that expert video game players have a higher volume of gray matter, which promotes better memory, muscle control, sensory perception and connectivity between different brain subregions.
In the classic American sci-fi film Back to the Future II (1985), the main characters Marty McFly and Doc Brown travel into the future to the year 2015. The film indicated that 2015 would be the year of flying cars, remote control dog walkers and even hoverboards. This is not the only film to discuss these ideas. Other films and TV shows, like The Jetsons (1962) and Blade Runner (1982), also feature flying cars.
