Brazil's Ministry of Justice said on Monday it has fined U.S. tech giant Facebook 6.6 million reais ($1.6 million) for improperly sharing user data. From a report: The ministry's department of consumer protection said it had found that data from 443,000 Facebook users was made improperly available to developers of an App called 'thisisyourdigitallife.' The data was being shared for "questionable" purposes, the ministry said in a statement.

France's government can pursue plans to trawl social media to detect tax avoidance, its Constitutional Court ruled last week, although it introduced limitations on what information can be collected following a privacy outcry. From a report: The new rules, part of a broader law on tax changes passed by the lower house of parliament earlier this month, add to the state's surveillance powers by letting it collect masses of public data, as part of a three-year online monitoring experiment. Customs and tax authorities will be allowed to review people's profiles, posts and photographs on social media for evidence of undeclared income or inconsistencies.

The internet's full power remains relatively unknown to many people on the tiny island nation Tuvalu (located halfway between Hawaii and Australia), but its evolution has made Tuvalu's .tv domain one of its most valuable resources. From a report: Thanks to the rise of livestreamed programming and competitive video gaming, Tuvalu earns about 1/12th of its annual gross national income (GNI) from licensing its domain to tech giants like Amazon-owned streaming platform Twitch through the Virginia-based company Verisign. And in 2021, when Tuvalu's contract with Verisign expires, that percentage figures to push significantly higher. [...] Compulsory public education has brought the nation's adult literacy rate up to nearly 99 percent, and the World Bank classifies Tuvalu as an upper-middle-income economy, with its territorial fishing rights accounting for the biggest chunk of its GNI at an estimated $19 million in license fees in 2018. But another sizable portion stems directly from its licensing of its .tv URL suffix, thanks to the recent surge in streaming sites. As sites utilizing .tv grow in prominence, Tuvalu's domain on the web may eventually supersede that of its seas.

Few Tuvaluans are able to access the streaming services powered by .tv. The nation's Internet, though widely accessible, is limited to a satellite connection with reduced streaming capacity. However, with more than 140 million people around the world consuming content via Twitch.tv and other streaming platforms, the monetary benefits have helped Tuvalu in more tangible ways than entertainment. "[.tv] has provided a certain, sure income," said Seve Paeniu, Tuvalu's Minister of Finance. "It enables the government to provide essential services to its people through providing schooling and education for the kids, providing medical services to our people, and also in terms of improving the basic economic infrastructure and service delivery to our communities." To monetize .tv, the government of Tuvalu has negotiated a series of agreements allowing foreign companies to market the top-level domain for commercial use. Under the current deal, signed in 2011, Virginia-based network infrastructure firm Verisign pays Tuvalu around $5 million per year for the right to administer .tv. For a nation whose annual domestic revenues tend to hover around $60 million, this is a substantial benefit.

"It was the year of 'OK boomer,' and the generations were at each other's throats," argues the national features writer for The Washington Post, starting with a quote from New York University's Michael North, who studies ageism in the workplace.

"Age-based prejudice is the last acceptable form of prejudice. People are making age-based generalizations and stereotypes that you wouldn't be able to get away with about race or background..." People are getting away with it. This year, the baby boom was blamed for almost everything: the fate of the planet, Congress, college debt, plastic straws, the ending of "Game of Thrones." An entire generation was perceived to be operating as a giant monolith, mind-melded in its intention to make young people miserable for the rest of their long lives. Never mind that old people were once young, struggling, loaded with debt, facing a lousy job market, expensive housing, inflation. (Yes, there was something called inflation. It had to be whipped. Ask your parents.)

And, guess what, millennials? You are acquiring property. So, you know, patience.

The sewer of mockery flowed both ways, upstream and down. It was funny, except when it wasn't. If young folk derided the Olds for leaving an environmental and fiscal mess, the baby boom was happy to sling verbal mud in their direction. After "OK boomer" erupted, AARP senior vice president and editorial director Myrna Blyth said in an interview with Axios, "Okay, millennials, but we're the people that actually have the money." (AARP long stood for American Association of Retired Persons, but now a growing number of older Americans can't or won't retire....) What distinguishes these latest ageist salvos are their intensity and frequency. It's an intergenerational quipping contest, fueled by the rapid, reductionist and unrestrictive nature of social media, which makes it far too easy to cast verbal stones. "Social media amplifies previously latent sentiment," North says....

Any day now, boomers won't be blamed for everything that is not okay. This is the year -- can you feel it? -- that, according to Pew's analysis of census projections, millennials are scheduled to surpass the baby boom in sheer size, 73 million to 72 million, because of, well, death. By 2028, Gen X is also projected to be larger than the baby boom, so we'll probably start blaming them.

In the meantime, perhaps the generations need to be kinder to each other.

"A new intercontinental weapon that can fly 27 times the speed of sound became operational Friday, Russia's defense minister reported to President Vladimir Putin," according to the Associated Press: Putin has described the Avangard hypersonic glide vehicle as a technological breakthrough comparable to the 1957 Soviet launch of the first satellite. The new Russian weapon and a similar system being developed by China have troubled the United States, which has pondered defense strategies. Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu informed Putin that the first missile unit equipped with the Avangard hypersonic glide vehicle entered combat duty... [Putin] noted that Avangard is designed using new composite materials to withstand temperatures of up to 2,000 Celsius (3,632 Fahrenheit) resulting from a flight through the atmosphere at hypersonic speeds... It carries a nuclear weapon of up to 2 megatons.

Putin has said Russia had to develop the Avangard and other prospective weapons systems because of U.S. efforts to develop a missile defense system that he claimed could erode Russia's nuclear deterrent. Moscow has scoffed at U.S. claims that its missile shield isn't intended to counter Russia's massive missile arsenals... Earlier this week, Putin emphasized that Russia is the only country armed with hypersonic weapons. He noted that for the first time Russia is leading the world in developing an entire new class of weapons, unlike in the past when it was catching up with the U.S... The Defense Ministry said last month it demonstrated the Avangard to a team of U.S. inspectors as part of transparency measures under the New Start nuclear arms treaty with the U.S.

U.S. officials have talked about putting a layer of sensors in space to more quickly detect enemy missiles, particularly the hypersonic weapons. The administration also plans to study the idea of basing interceptors in space, so the U.S. can strike incoming enemy missiles during the first minutes of flight when the booster engines are still burning.

The Pentagon also has been working on the development of hypersonic weapons in recent years, and Defense Secretary Mark Esper said in August that he believes "it's probably a matter of a couple of years" before the U.S. has one.

An anonymous reader quotes CNN: CNN reports that government shutdowns of the internet are becoming the new normal: An ongoing internet blackout in Indian-controlled Kashmir is now the longest ever in a democracy -- at more than 135 days -- according to Access Now, an advocacy group that tracks internet freedom. Only the autocratic governments of China and junta-era Myanmar have cut off access for longer... Kashmiris have been without internet access for so long that WhatsApp has reportedly begun deleting their accounts for inaction... India's increased internet censorship has been greeted with delight in China, however, where state-run media pointed to it as an endorsement of Beijing's own authoritarian approach. The People's Daily said this week that India's example showed "shutting down the internet in a state of emergency should be standard practice for sovereign countries...."

African states have also embraced the tactic, with Zimbabwe, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Chad and Ethiopia all cutting off internet access in an attempt to rein in anti-government protests. This is in line with a general pattern of increased online censorship. It's partly due to the spread of more sophisticated technology that makes it easier, and cheaper, to monitor and filter traffic online. It's also influenced by a shifting perception of internet censorship, which once used to be seen as something of a losing battle. China's Great Firewall, however, has proved beyond doubt that not only can the internet be controlled, but that doing so can help prop up the regime and prevent opposition movements from getting off the ground...

Shutdowns give police a freer hand to reign in unrest without the type of hyper-scrutiny on social media that has become common in highly-connected societies, and enable the government to ensure that its message is the only one heard on a particular topic. In 2018, there were 196 internet shutdowns globally -- mainly in Asia, Africa and the Middle East -- according to Access Now. In the first half of this year alone, there were 128, and 2019 looks to be the worst year on record. According to Freedom House, a Washington-based NGO, almost half of the world's population lives in a country "where authorities disconnected internet or mobile networks, often for political reasons."

Bloomberg looks back at what tech industry titans predicted would be happening "by 2020." - Here's what Huawei Technologies Co. said in 2015 predicting a "superphone" by 2020, according to ZDNet: "Inspired by the biological evolution, the mobile phone we currently know will come to life as the superphone," said Shao Yang, a strategy marketing president of Huawei. "Through evolution and adaptation, the superphone will be more intelligent, enhancing and even transforming our perceptions, enabling humans to go further than ever before." It's not entirely clear what that means, but it probably hasn't happened yet. In the interim, Huawei found itself in the middle of a trade war, and the Chinese company is focusing largely on mid-priced phones for its domestic market...

- In 2013, Elon Musk outlined his vision for a new "fifth mode of transportation" that would involve zipping people through tubes at speeds as fast as 800 miles per hour. Several tech entrepreneurs heeded Musk's call and went to work on such systems inspired by the billionaire's specifications. In 2015, one of the leading startups predicted a hyperloop spanning about 60 miles would be ready for human transport by 2020. Rob Lloyd, then the CEO of Hyperloop Technologies, told Popular Science: "I'm very confident that's going to happen." It hasn't. His company, now called Virgin Hyperloop One, has a 1,600-foot test track in California and hopes to build a 22-mile track in Saudi Arabia someday. Musk has since experimented with hyperloops of his own, and even he has had to scale back his ambitions. Musk's Boring Co. is building a so-called Loop system in Las Vegas, starting with a nearly mile-long track that consists of a narrow tunnel and Tesla cars moving at up to 155 miles per hour...

- It was barely two years ago when the maker of blowdryers and vacuum cleaners said it would sell an electric car by 2020. Dyson canceled the project this year, calling it "not commercially viable."
Other predictions include John McAfee's infamous 2017 prediction that one bitcoin would be worth $1 million by the end of 2020, "about three weeks before a crash would erase 83% of value over the next year."

And in 2012 Intel predicted that by 2020 we'd have computer chips that consumed almost no energy

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: Clint Eastwood's new movie Richard Jewell recounts the incredible tale of the security guard. Jewell was later [erroneously] considered a suspect after being hailed by the media for saving many from injury or death by discovering a backpack containing three pipe bombs in Atlanta's Centennial Park during the 1996 Summer Olympics and helping to evacuate the area before the bomb exploded. Despite never being charged, he was subjected to an intense "trial by media" before receiving an apology from Attorney General Janet Reno and ultimately being completely exonerated.

The movie prompted Henry Schuster, an investigative producer for CNN at the time of the bombing, to offer an overdue apology in the Washington Post for his and the press's role in turning Jewell from a hero to a villain by serving as "the FBI's megaphone...."

Schuster warns, "Think how much worse it would have been for Jewell in 2019."
The article mostly shares the thought processes of that investigative producer. (He remembers that in 2005, "I sat at the computer and started my letter of apology, got frustrated and hit save. A year after that, Jewell died at 44, after months of failing health; my letter remained unfinished and unsent.")

But the CNN producer also writes that in the 23 years since the incident, social media has "made the rush to judgment instantaneous -- as quick as machine trading on Wall Street, but without any circuit-breakers." Would that have changed the way things played out if the incident happened in 2019? It's an interesting thought exercise -- so share your own thoughts in the comments.

Would social media have made life worse for Richard Jewell?

"The Financial Times is reporting that Los Angeles may now force Uber and Lyft to use electric cars," reports Electrek: Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti said, "We have the power to regulate car share. We can mandate and are looking closely at mandating that any of those vehicles in the future be electric...."

Mayor Garcetti's concept to require rideshare services to use EVs has not yet moved beyond the idea phase. But the Los Angeles city council is considering how to exert more control over rideshare services, including by creating a driver-registration program. The state's Public Utilities Commission currently regulates ride-hailing services in California.

Implementing the EV policy for Uber and Lyft drivers could be tricky. Most drivers own their vehicles. Regardless, Mayor Garcetti is seeking any means to use city powers to mitigate climate change. He said:

"Local actors, no matter who is in power, are the most critical elements of whether or not we win the fight against climate change. It is local governments and regional governments that regulate or directly control building codes, transportation networks, and electricity generation, which together are 80% of our emissions."

In October the Register reported that 20 Stack Exchange moderators had distanced themselves from the geeky Q&A site to protest policy changes and the removal of moderator Monica Cellio "over alleged violations of as-yet unpublished Code of Conduct changes."

Cellio just posted an update to the GoFundMe page where she'd raised $25,314 for legal action -- a new announcement from Stack Overflow: Stack Overflow and Monica Cellio have come to an agreement. We believe that Ms. Cellio was not acting with malicious intent. We believe she did not understand all of the nuances and full intent and meaning of our Code of Conduct and was confused about what actions it required and forbade.

We acknowledge our responses to her requests for clarification were not satisfactory. The verbiage in our Code of Conduct could have been more explicitly detailed about what was expected. We always valued Ms. Cellio's contributions to the community and respect her intelligence, integrity, and professional writing skills.

While our initial statement did not address her specifically, we regret that we used her name when responding to a reporter's follow-up. We regret any damage to Ms. Cellio's reputation and any other damage she may have suffered.

We have since updated some of our policies and processes to help ensure we are more careful in our public communications, and that there is a clearer process anytime a moderator's status is revoked as well as a process for reinstatement.

We respect Ms. Cellio and believe she is a good person with much to offer and contribute. We sincerely hope she remains an active member of our community. In recognition of the mistakes that led us here, we invited Ms. Cellio to apply for possible reinstatement on all six sites following our new reinstatement process. Ms. Cellio expressed concerns about the new process and has not applied."
That announcement was also published at Meta.StackExchange.com -- where it's been downvoted 886 times.

At GoFundMe, Cellio posted only that "No further donations are needed. Thank you everybody for your support!" And she plans to honor earlier pledges to donate all funds raised in excess of costs to The Trevor Project, "an organization providing crisis-intervention services to LGBTQ+ youth and related resources to everyone."

An anonymous reader quotes Reuters' reports on some more bad news for the Geneva-based Libra Association: Facebook's Libra project has failed in its current form and needs reworking to be approved, said the president of Switzerland where the cryptocurrency is seeking regulatory consent. "I don't think (Libra has a chance in its current form), because central banks will not accept the basket of currencies underpinning it," Ueli Maurer, who is Switzerland's finance minister and outgoing president, told Swiss broadcaster SRF.

"The project, in this form, has thus failed," he added in an interview.

Libra did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Los Angeles Times: There was only one job that robots could not do when Fast Retailing, the owner of Uniqlo, replaced 90% of its workers with robots at its flagship warehouse in Tokyo last year. But now, with the help of a Japanese start-up called Mujin, the world's third-largest retailer says it has cracked the final barrier to full automation, a priority for Uniqlo as Japan's aging population creates labor shortages. The two companies have invented a robot with two arms that can pick up soft T-shirts and place them neatly in boxes to be shipped to customers.

While it sounds easy, the ability to lift soft textiles has been a challenge for clumsy robotic arms. Add to this the need to sort through constantly changing seasonal clothes, in shades that are hard to distinguish and wrapped in various forms of packaging, and humans have always come out on top. The jointly developed robot, which was made by Yaskawa Electric Corp., is already operating in Fast Retailing's main warehouse in Tokyo, but Takino admitted that the robot was not able to handle all of the facility's products, and that it needed further development. For instance, the plastic packaging of the thermal underwear in Uniqlo's Heattech line is relatively simple for the robots to pick up, but this could become more difficult as Fast Retailing aims to switch to more eco-friendly paper bags. The robots are able to pick up belts, but they typically become unbundled as they are dropped into boxes. One solution would be for Fast Retailing to ensure that belts are sold in bundled forms. "We've been putting off working with an apparel company because it's so difficult," said Issei Takino, co-founder and chief executive of Mujin. "But Fast Retailing's strength is its ability to overhaul its entire supply chain to make it fit for automation. If we're going to take on this challenge, we had to do it with Fast Retailing."

sciencehabit quotes a report from Science Magazine: The U.S. military thought it had cleared the decks when, on 9 July 1962, it heaved a 1.4-megaton nuclear bomb some 400 kilometers into space: Orbiting satellites were safely out of range of the blast. But in the months that followed the test, called Starfish Prime, satellites began to wink out one by one, including the world's first communications satellite, Telstar. There was an unexpected aftereffect: High-energy electrons, shed by radioactive debris and trapped by Earth's magnetic field, were fritzing out the satellites' electronics and solar panels.

Starfish Prime and similar Soviet tests might be dismissed as Cold War misadventures, never to be repeated. After all, what nuclear power would want to pollute space with particles that could take out its own satellites, critical for communication, navigation, and surveillance? But military planners fear North Korea might be an exception: It has nuclear weapons but not a single functioning satellite among the thousands now in orbit. They quietly refer to a surprise orbital blast as a potential "Pearl Harbor of space." And so, without fanfare, defense scientists are trying to devise a cure. Three space experiments -- one now in orbit and two being readied for launch in 2021 -- aim to gather data on how to drain high-energy electrons out of the radiation belts. The process, called radiation belt remediation (RBR), already happens naturally, when radio waves from deep space or from Earth -- our own radio chatter, for example, or emissions from lightning -- knock electrons trapped in Earth's Van Allen radiation belts into the upper atmosphere, where they quickly shed energy, often triggering aurorae.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The spectacle of Earth suspended in space was so overwhelming for Edgar Mitchell that the Apollo 14 astronaut and sixth man on the moon wanted to grab politicians by the scruff of the neck and drag them into space to witness the view. Such drastic measures may not be necessary, however. Scientists are about to welcome the first participants on an unprecedented clinical trial that aims to reproduce the intense emotional experience, known as the "Overview effect," from the comfort of a health spa. If the trial goes well, what led Mitchell to develop "an instant global consciousness" and a profound connection to Earth and its people could be recreated with nothing more than a flotation tank, a half tonne of Epsom salts, and a waterproof virtual reality (VR) headset.

Pratscher will recruit about 100 volunteers who are willing to don the VR headset and clamber into a dark, salt-laden flotation tank at the city's Clarity Float spa. The silence and buoyancy will mimic the sensation of floating in space, while the VR headset plays high-definition, 360 degree immersive video recorded by the Silicon Valley startup, SpaceVR. The volunteers will be randomly assigned to have either the full flotation tank VR experience, to float without VR, or have VR while lying on a bed. Before and after their one-hour session, the participants will complete a series of questionnaires to assess whether they had any mystical experiences, felt more connected to others, or had what psychologists call an "emotional breakthrough" moment. The persistence of any effects will be assessed after one week and again a month later. Pratscher does not expect everyone who steps into the tank wearing a VR headset to emerge having experienced the Overview effect. But the experiment will reveal what, if anything, people do experience when their senses are fooled into believing they are looking down on Earth from space.

After a longstanding campaign by Consumer Reports, The Television Viewer Protection Act of 2019 passed the House and the Senate last week buried inside a giant appropriations bill that now awaits President Trump's signature. Techdirt reports: The bill bans ISPs from charging you extra to rent hardware you already own (something ISPs like Frontier have been doing without penalty for a few years). It also forces cable TV providers to send an itemized list of any fees and other surcharges to new customers within 24 hours of signing up for service, and allows users shocked by the higher price to cancel service without penalty.

The bill's not perfect. Because of the act itself it largely only applies to cable TV, not broadband service where the problem is just as bad. And cable TV providers can still falsely advertise a lower rate, thanks to what appears to be some last minute lobbying magic on the part of the cable TV sector: "Initial versions of the legislation actually had the provision as truth in advertising, so you had to advertise the entire fees," said Jenna Leventoff, senior policy counsel at Public Knowledge, a Washington-based public-interest group. "But it's still an improvement over what currently exists, because you have a right to cancel after signing up." The trick now will be enforcement by a government and FCC that has routinely shown it's entirely cool with industry repeatedly ripping consumers off with bullshit fees to the tune of around $28 billion annually.

Alabama resident John Orange has filed a class-action lawsuit accusing Amazon and Ring of failing to do enough to secure their security systems against hacks, including Orange's. Engadget reports: He alleged that a stranger compromised his Ring outdoor camera and spooked his kids as a "direct and proximate" result of the company's inability to protect its devices "against cyber-attack." He pointed to other incidents to support the argument for a class action, including a highly publicized event in December where a remote intruder harassed a Mississippi girl.

Orange also claimed that Ring's response was evidence of the company blaming customers. It told Orange that there was "no evidence" someone had hacked the firm's infrastructure, and that his incident may be the result of a breach at a "non-Ring service" where the perpetrators reused info to sign into Ring accounts. In other words, Ring couldn't help it if people reused passwords with sites and services it can't control. The suit formally levels accusations of breach of contract, invasion of privacy, negligence, unjust enrichment and violating California's Unfair Competition Law (through misleading representations of security). If it achieves class action status, it would ask Amazon and Ring to compensate victims and implement "improved security procedures and measures."

Rog Srigley, writer who teaches at Humber College and Laurentian University, offered his students extra credit if they would give him their phones for nine days and write about living without them. "What they wrote was remarkable, and remarkably consistent," he writes. "These university students, given the chance to say what they felt, didn't gracefully submit to the tech industry and its devices." An anonymous Slashdot reader shares what some of them said: "Believe it or not, I had to walk up to a stranger and ask what time it was. It honestly took me a lot of guts and confidence to ask someone," Janet wrote. (Her name, like the others here, is a pseudonym.) She describes the attitude she was up against: "Why do you need to ask me the time? Everyone has a cell phone. You must be weird or something." Emily went even further. Simply walking by strangers "in the hallway or when I passed them on the street" caused almost all of them to take out a phone "right before I could gain eye contact with them."

To these young people, direct, unmediated human contact was experienced as ill-mannered at best and strange at worst. James: "One of the worst and most common things people do nowadays is pull out their cell phone and use it while in a face-to-face conversation. This action is very rude and unacceptable, but yet again, I find myself guilty of this sometimes because it is the norm." Emily noticed that "a lot of people used their cell phones when they felt they were in an awkward situation, for an example [sic] being at a party while no one was speaking to them." The price of this protection from awkward moments is the loss of human relationships, a consequence that almost all the students identified and lamented. Without his phone, James said, he found himself forced to look others in the eye and engage in conversation. Stewart put a moral spin on it. "Being forced to have [real relations with people] obviously made me a better person because each time it happened I learned how to deal with the situation better, other than sticking my face in a phone." Ten of the 12 students said their phones were compromising their ability to have such relationships. Peter: "I have to admit, it was pretty nice without the phone all week. Didn't have to hear the fucking thing ring or vibrate once, and didn't feel bad not answering phone calls because there were none to ignore." "It felt so free without one and it was nice knowing no one could bother me when I didn't want to be bothered," wrote William.

Emily said that she found herself "sleeping more peacefully after the first two nights of attempting to sleep right away when the lights got shut off." Stewart: "Actually I got things done much quicker without the cell because instead of waiting for a response from someone (that you don't even know if they read your message or not) you just called them [from a land line], either got an answer or didn't, and moved on to the next thing."

Mac developer Michael Tsai reports that Apple News no longer supports RSS. The news comes from user David A. Desrosiers, who writes: Apple News on iOS and macOS no longer supports adding RSS or ATOM feeds from anywhere. Full-stop, period. It will immediately fetch, then reject those feeds and fail to display them, silently without any message or error. I can see in my own server's log that they make the request using the correct app on iOS and macOS, but then ignore the feed completely; a validated, clean feed. They ONLY support their own, hand-picked, curated feeds now. You can visit a feed in Safari, and it will prompt you to open the feed in Apple News, then silently ignore that request, after fetching the full feed content from the remote site. Simon Willison, creator of Datasette and co-creator of Django, points out that Apple News still hijacks links to Atom/RSS feeds -- "so if you click on one of those links in Mobile Safari you'll be bounced to the News app, which will then display an error."

Tobi Lutke, the founder and CEO of $48 billion e-commerce cloud-software company Shopify, took to Twitter to remind us all that we don't need to work 80 hours a week to be successful. Business Insider reports: "I realize everyone's twitter feed looks different. But I'll go ahead and subtweet two conversations that I see going by right now: a) How the heck did Shopify get so big this decade and b) You have to work 80 hours a week to be successful," he tweeted. He says he and his cofounders have grown this company from a profitable bootstrap to its multibillion-dollar status without him ever sleeping under his desk. "I've never worked through a night. The only times I worked more than 40 hours in a week was when I had the burning desire to do so. I need 8ish hours of sleep a night. Same with everybody else, whether we admit it or not," he tweeted.

Shopify has had a spectacular few years. Its revenues have doubled since 2017, solidly beating Wall Street estimates quarter after quarter, growing from over $171 million in Q3 September, 2017, to over $390 million in Q3 September 2019, its latest complete quarter. It's expected to finish the year at about $1.5 billion in revenues. And Wall Street has noticed. Shopify went public in 2015. In the past year, the stock has soared over 200% from around $134 to about $407 giving the company a $47.6 billion market cap. But even at the scale of its current operations, he says he doesn't let his job overshadow the rest of his life. "I'm home at 5:30pm every evening. I don't travel on the weekend. I play video games alone, with my friends, and increasingly with my kids. My job is incredible, but it's also just a job. Family and personal health rank higher in my priority list," he tweeted. "For creative work, you can't cheat. My belief is that there are five creative hours in everyone's day. All I ask of people at Shopify is that four of those are channeled into the company," he wrote. "What's even better than people are teams," he wrote. "We don't burn out people. We give people space. We love real teams with real friendship forming." He adds: "None of that is even about product, or market fit, or timing. It's all about people. Treating everyone with dignity."

"We are not moist robots. We are people and people are awesome."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Turkey unveiled its first fully domestically-produced car on Friday, saying it aimed to eventually produce up to 175,000 a year of the electric vehicle in a project expected to cost $3.7 billion over 13 years. The project has been a long-time goal of President Tayyip Erdogan and his ruling AK Party as a demonstration of the country's growing economic power. Speaking at the unveiling ceremony, Erdogan said Turkey aimed not only to sell the car domestically but also wanted it to become a global brand, starting with Europe.

Erdogan said the charging infrastructure for electric cars would be ready nationwide by 2022. The new project, launched in October, will receive state support such as tax breaks, and establish a production facility in the automotive hub of Bursa in northwest Turkey, according to a presidential decision in the country's Official Gazette. Five models of the car will be produced, the statement said, adding the government had guaranteed to buy 30,000 of the vehicles by 2035. "We're all together witnessing Turkey's 60-year-old dream become reality," Erdogan said, referring to failed plans in the past to build a fully home-produced car. "When we see this car on roads around the whole world, we will have reached our goal."