An anonymous reader shares a column: Derek Thompson, writing in the Atlantic last month, highlighted the ways in which contemporary millennial lifestyles are in many ways subsidized by venture capital. Unprofitable businesses are currently offering up great deals to urbanites who otherwise would be unable to afford their fancy city-living in large part because of losses incurred as the cost of buying up market share. "If you wake up on a Casper mattress, work out with a Peloton before breakfast, Uber to your desk at a WeWork, order DoorDash for lunch, take a Lyft home, and get dinner through Postmates, you've interacted with seven companies that will collectively lose nearly $14 billion this year," Thompson wrote of the "Millennial Lifestyle Sponsorship." He doesn't mention it, but there's another key player in the MLS field: Netflix. As Richard Rushfield has noted in his excellent newsletter on Hollywood business, The Ankler, Netflix is in a tricky position. The vast majority of Netflix's viewers (upwards of 80 percent, according to him) watch licensed content ("Friends" and the like) and in order to create a library of programming audiences will pay for, they've gone massively in debt: "Netflix is currently in the hole for about $20 billion in debt and obligations and still operating at a loss."

Those benefiting from the "Netflix and Chill" branch of the Millennial Lifestyle Subsidy tree don't care. And it's all well and good for a Silicon Valley unicorn, one of those rare tech beasts whose valuations do not match profit-loss statements because there's no real competition yet and everyone believes first-mover status is an insurmountable advantage. But with the rapid rise of vicious streaming competition -- the ascendancy of Hulu and niche programmers such as Criterion; the creation of streaming services by Disney, Warner Brothers and Apple, to name a (very) few -- Netflix's advantage seems to be fading. One can already sense a sort of nostalgia for the golden age of bingeing while reading the Hollywood Reporter's roundtable with seven studio heads. "Doesn't it bum you out that you can't make 'The Irishman?'" asked THR's Matthew Belloni. And while one might expect studio heads to go the diplomatic route and say no -- everyone in Hollywood believes in their own product, after all, and there are no regrets ahead of time -- you believe the execs when they answer in the negative. "You know, it actually doesn't. It would bum me out if no one made the movie," Universal's Donna Langley said. "It's never been a better time for filmmakers and storytelling and for things to find their way into the world that were getting squeezed over the last five or six years or even longer."

Following months of conflict over a controversial data-sharing policy, Los Angeles has temporarily suspended Uber's permit to rent electric scooters and bicycles on city streets and sidewalks. From a report: The company's subsidiary, Jump, must appeal the decision by Friday or leave the city, the Transportation Department told the company in a letter last week. For now, customers can still rent the vivid red scooters and electric bikes through the Jump app. In response, Uber threatened in a letter to sue the city over the "patently unfair and improper" suspension. The letter also questioned the validity of the "eleventh-hour administrative review process" that the city created last month. "Every other company that is permitted in Los Angeles is following the rules," said Transportation Department spokeswoman Connie Llanos. "We look forward to being able to work with Uber on getting them into compliance." The suspension follows months of tension and failed attempts at compromise between Uber and the city over a data-sharing rule in L.A.'s one-year pilot permit program. Companies are required to transmit real-time data on all trips made within the city, including the start point, end point and travel time.

"Waymo wants to deploy a robotaxi service for the general public in parts of California as soon as possible," reports the Los Angeles Times. "But that's unlikely, the company says, because California says it has to offer the service for free." Last year, the California Public Utilities Commission allowed driverless "robotaxi" pilot programs in the state but banned permit-holders from charging fares. The ban is considered temporary but has no timeline. Some industry analysts say the uncertainty could put California's reputation as the world leader in driverless technology at risk.

The free-or-nothing mandate makes no sense to Waymo, the driverless vehicle arm of Google's Alphabet, or to other driverless vehicle start-ups hoping to establish themselves in a new industry that could produce the biggest change in ground transportation since the invention of the automobile. Waymo requires a "commercial path forward" before it can offer Californians the kind of driverless taxi service it's already running across 100 square miles in Phoenix, according to George Ivanov, Waymo's head of policy development and regulatory initiatives...

In July, Waymo began a commission-approved pilot program to ferry Waymo and Google employees and guests through parts of Silicon Valley in driverless cars for free. Waymo doesn't need fare money to fund operations -- Alphabet is an enormous profit machine, and holds more than $100 billion in cash. But Ivanov explained that experimenting with customer response to different fare structures is essential to building out the robotaxi business, which would be like Uber or Lyft but without a human driver.

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: To make good on the proposal that snagged it a share of the Amazon HQ2 prize last year, the State of Virginia pledged to produce an additional 25K-35K grads annually with computer science or closely related degrees. And while university leaders in the Greater Washington DC area appear to be on the same page with Amazon when it comes to filling the region's ever-growing demand for tech talent, the Washington Business Journal reports there's an understanding that as universities in the region grow their faculty to meet the demands of Amazon, the schools will likely also have to compete with Amazon for those same educators.

At a panel discussion on the future of Amazon HQ2 and education, interim president of George Mason University Anne Holton noted that the local schools are all going to be competing for faculty talent ("It's going to be elbows out"). Turning to Ardine Williams, VP of workforce development at Amazon, Holton added, "We are jostling with you for the new people too."

So, if the people who are qualified to educate the next generation of STEM students for Amazon can also get paid more to work for Amazon, is professor poaching history likely to repeat itself?

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CBS News: New details about how Uber responded to a massive hack attack in 2016 raise questions about the way it handled sensitive customer information. Instead of reporting the hackers to police, the company allegedly paid $100,000 in exchange for a promise to delete 57 million user files the men stole off a third party server, prosecutors said. Within weeks of paying the ransom, Uber employees showed up at Brandon Glover's Winter Park, Florida, home and found Vasile Mereacre at a hotel restaurant in Toronto, Canada, the Justice Department said. The pair admitted their crimes, but Uber didn't turn them over to the cops. Instead, they had the hackers sign non-disclosure agreements, promising to keep quiet. The two hackers pleaded guilty on Wednesday.

But there was a third person involved who was unknown to Uber, U.S. attorney for Northern California Dave Anderson told CBS News correspondent Kris Van Cleave in an exclusive interview. Anderson, who investigated the hack, said there's "no way to know definitively" what actually happened to the stolen data. [...] The hackers also targeted a company owned by LinkedIn in December of 2016, but prosecutors say LinkedIn did not pay and promptly reported the hack to police. Uber eventually did as well -- a year after the hack, when new CEO, Dara Khosrowshahi, publicly disclosed the attack. The two known hackers were eventually arrested and pleaded guilty on Wednesday to conspiracy to commit extortion charges. They face a maximum of five years in prison. The third person involved remains at large.

Only 1 percent of Uber customers always tip, while nearly 60 percent never do, according to a new study from the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). From a report: The average tip is 50 cents a ride, but for those who do tip, the average is more like $3. Men are more likely to tip than women, but female drivers get tipped more than male ones. Tipping has long been a source of fierce debate, especially as it relates to ride-hailing companies like Uber. For years, the company rejected efforts to add a tipping option to its app, arguing it would overly complicate the seamlessness of the experience. But Uber eventually caved and now drivers earn hundreds of millions of dollars in tips every year. The NBER study on tipping with Uber is sure to throw more fuel on the fire.

Former TechCrunch writer Sarah Lacy started PandoDaily in 2012. But now she's "selling the company, quitting journalism, and ditching Silicon Valley after 20 years," reports Business Insider, citing Lacy's blog. She says her decision comes from years of sexual harassment and threats in her two decades covering Silicon Valley. "I have absorbed so many more stories than I have reported, more than I can ever report, about the dark side of Silicon Valley," she said in the blog post...

"It's a place where I've been lied about, where VCs have arm-twisted editors to fire me, where billionaires have threatened those doing business with me to cut all ties. It's a place where I've had people turn on me again and again and again simply for doing my job. It's a place I've been betrayed by people I trusted. It's a place where one-time friends threatened my children because I wrote about things they did."

Some incidents she mentioned were related to Uber's threatening her over her reporting of the company's misconduct.
Lacy's blog adds that "of course I'm not the only one, and my experience was far from the worst: In the last few years I have been overwhelmed by stories of sexual assault and harassment told by so many incredible women in the Valley..."

The blog post also notes journalistic travails she's faced over the years. ("We withstood a combined threatened $400 million in baseless legal fights.") But in a reminiscent passage, she also calls Silicon Valley "a place where I've gotten to know some of the most fascinating people on the planet and made many lifelong friends. It's a place where people have believed in me enough to give me millions and millions of dollars to build my own companies....

And yet..."

"Facebook is facing a lot of pushback for Libra, its proposed cryptocurrency, but that's not stopping the social media giant from forging ahead," reports the Motley Fool: Earlier this week, it announced the 21 founding members of its digital token project at the signing of the Libra Association charter in Switzerland. The founding members include Uber, Lyft, Spotify, and PayU, among others... Despite all the odds against it, Facebook is forging ahead, pulling out all the stops to convince the world's skeptics that it is capable of controlling a digital currency that can't be regulated.

Its latest attempt: warning regulators of the impending danger from China if Libra fails. David Marcus, the Facebook executive heading up the Libra initiative, told Bloomberg that China is moving ahead with its own digital payments system, which could have global appeal. That could be a big threat to the U.S. if regulators drag their heels in approving Facebook's digital coin. He painted a picture of an environment five years hence in which a large portion of the world won't have to worry about sanctions from the U.S. because they will have a digital currency waiting in the wings.

"In the dot-com bubble, public investors got hosed," remembers The Atlantic. "Today, it's public investors that are doing the hosing." When the web browser Netscape went public on August 9, 1995 -- the day many cite as the beginning of the dot-com bubble -- its stock skyrocketed from $28 to $75 in a matter of hours, even though the company wasn't profitable. In today's market, the opposite is happening: Unicorns with no positive earnings are getting slaughtered at the gates. WeWork's valuation fell more than 80 percent pre-IPO when investors balked at its mounting losses. Peloton, Lyft, and Uber have also struggled to persuade public markets to grade them on a curve; all saw their stock prices fall on the day of the public offering. Institutions and retail investors are refusing to fork over to unicorns the valuations that private investors were expecting -- particularly Softbank, a major backer of Uber, Lyft, and WeWork.

This isn't a picture of mass mania. It's a picture of public sobriety, where the masses are diagnosing an acute fever in private markets.

Second, there is little sign of a crisis for firms whose main product is pure software. Judging from the news, you might think this has been a terrible year for technology companies. But tech IPOs have been strong for the past two years, "as long as what you're buying is actually a real tech company," JP Morgan's chair of market and investment strategy, Michael Cembalest, wrote in an October 7 research note. By "real tech," Cembalest was referring to companies whose principal product is software, rather than, say, WeWork, which is in truth a real-estate company caught wearing an Actual Tech Company costume before Halloween.
The article makes it case by citing three "real tech" companies which grab fewer headlines because they sell cloud services or business-to-business software. "But all of them are trading more than 100 percent above their listed IPO price."

Personal car ownership in the US has increased in the past 10 years, even in the frenzied urban places where Uber and car-share have become verbs. From a report: According to research from former New York City transportation official Bruce Schaller, the number of vehicles has grown faster than the population in some of the cities where ride-hail is most popular: Boston, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago. Moreover, some services targeted to the aspirationally or actually car-free have hit the skids. Car2Go, the car-sharing company now jointly owned by Daimler and BMW, said earlier this month it would pull out of half of the North American cities where it operates. (The company, which allows users to pick up and drop off cars at regular street parking spaces, says it will focus its firepower on its remaining North American cities: New York, Montreal, Seattle, Vancouver, and Washington.) BMW-owned ReachNow, a wide-ranging experiment in ride hailing and car rental, folded in the US this summer. The scooter-share folks at Lime last month killed their experimental LimePod car-share service in Seattle. General Motors wound down its Maven car-sharing service in eight of its 17 North American cities this summer. Uber and Lyft, now public companies, are losing gobs of money, and the services' most popular times are Friday evenings, which seems to indicate less that people are ditching their personal cars than ditching their personal cars while drinking.

Uber has just laid off around 350 employees across a variety of teams within the organization, marking what the company says is its third and final phase of layoffs of the process it began earlier this year, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said to employees today in an email. From a report: Those affected include employees from Eats, performance marketing, Advanced Technologies Group, recruiting, as well as various teams within the global rides and platform departments. Some employees have also been asked to relocate. "Days like today are tough for us all, and the ELT and I will do everything we can to make certain that we won't need or have another day like this ahead of us," Khosrowshahi wrote in the email. "We all have to play a part by establishing a new normal in how we work: identifying and eliminating duplicate work, upholding high standards for performance, giving direct feedback and taking action when expectations aren't being met, and eliminating the bureaucracy that tends to creep as companies grow." In total, the layoffs represent about 1% of the company, an Uber spokesperson told TechCrunch. Further reading: Uber Posts $5.2 Billion Loss and Slowest Ever Growth Rate (August 2019).

A computer programmer at America's tax-collecting agency "stole multiple people's identities, and used them to open illicit credit cards to fund vacations and shop for shoes and other goods," write Quartz, citing a complaint unsealed last week in federal court.

An anonymous reader quotes their report: The complaint accuses the 35-year-old federal worker of racking up almost $70,000 in charges over the course of two years, illegally using "the true names, addresses, dates of birth, and Social Security numbers" of at least three people.

The US Treasury Department's Inspector General for Tax Administration, which oversees internal wrongdoing at the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), is investigating the crime, although the complaint doesn't specify how the employee obtained the information. The arrest, however, comes just months after the Government Accountability Office -- the federal government's auditor, essentially -- issued a report raising concerns about the security of taxpayer information held at the IRS. The report said that unaddressed shortcomings left taxpayer data "unnecessarily vulnerable to inappropriate and undetected use, modification, or disclosure," which could allow employees or outsiders to illegally access millions of people's personal information. An IRS call center employee in Atlanta pleaded guilty last year to illegally using taxpayer data to file fraudulent tax returns, ultimately collecting almost $6,000. In 2016, another IRS worker in Atlanta admitted to improperly accessing the personal information of two taxpayers, amassing close to half a million dollars from illicit tax refunds....

The IRS employee's alleged scheme took place between January 2016 and February 2018, according to court filings. Investigators say he used a fraudulently obtained American Express card to fly to Sacramento and Miami Beach. He also used the card for some 37 Uber rides, nine payments on his father's Amazon account totaling $1,200, various purchases at Lowe's, the Designer Shoe Warehouse, BJ's Wholesale Club, and a flooring outlet, as well as a $7,400 payment to a business he owned. The complaint says the employee, who works for the tax agency as a software developer, obtained a second fraudulent credit card, which he used to fly to Montego Bay, Jamaica. A third fraudulent card was used to travel to Iceland.

In a particularly brazen move, investigators say the suspect linked this card to a phony PayPal account he opened using his official IRS email address.
Two of the credit cards were delivered to his home address, while a third was sent to his parents' address, according to the article. "The phone numbers listed on the accounts also belonged to the suspect, and he accessed emails associated with the accounts from his home IP address."

Ride-hailing firm Uber said it launched an app called Uber Works to connect temporary workers looking to work shifts with businesses trying to plug gaps in their rosters. From a report: The app, made available only in Chicago for now, will show workers the available shifts in a certain area and help businesses that struggle to staff up during peak demand, and with missed shifts and high turnover, Uber said in a blog post. "Uber Works has a business dashboard and we connect directly with businesses, including restaurants and others, to assist them with filling empty shifts," a company spokesman told Reuters. The move to diversify its core business comes at a time when Uber's main ride hailing operations face competition in Asia, while the U.S. company is also facing regulatory scrutiny for classifying its drivers as independent contractors. Last month, a driver with Uber sued the company after California legislators voted to help thousands of those workers become employees and enjoy associated benefits. A new California law designed to limit the use of "gig" workers goes into effect on Jan. 1.

At the start of 2018, Wag looked like tech's next Big Thing. From a report: In January, the founders of the dog-walking startup announced they had landed a $300 million investment from SoftBank's Vision Fund. The world's largest tech investor, SoftBank had $93 billion at its disposal and a network of global connections second to none. Unlike almost any other venture capital firm, it was capable of single-handedly supercharging businesses and shaking up entire industries. Launched in 2015 at the height of the on-demand boom, Wag was founded by brothers Joshua and Jonathan Viner, along with Jason Meltzer, who previously ran a traditional dog walking business. Together, they followed Uber's playbook: connect pet owners with Wag's network of dog walkers, who work as independent contractors. The startup attracted endorsements from celebrities including singer Mariah Carey and actress Olivia Munn, who is also an investor. By the time of the SoftBank deal, Wag had reached 100 US cities. With SoftBank's backing, and the appointment of a veteran CEO around the same time, Wag looked primed to become a global pet care services leader.

More than a year and a half later, SoftBank and Wag have fallen short. Wag has gone through multiple rounds of layoffs, endured management changes, and shuttered its customer service hub in the Hollywood Hills, according to interviews with 17 former employees who've recently left Wag, some as part of layoffs. Most spoke with CNN Business on condition of anonymity, citing non-disclosure agreements or fears of retaliation. Some of the former employees claim that Hilary Schneider, a veteran tech executive who joined Wag as CEO in January 2018, has yet to get a handle on fundamental issues facing the business -- including growth, safety of pets, and customer service.

Anyone who has taken an Uber, sent a Slack message or enjoyed a free beer at a WeWork owes a little something to Masayoshi Son. The New York Times: Through his Japanese conglomerate SoftBank and a $100 billion investment fund, Mr. Son plowed huge sums into these and other companies that aim to change how people work, travel and live. His investments enabled the young companies to throw caution to the wind and run up big losses as they expanded at a breakneck pace in recent years. Even in the start-up world, where idealism is abundant and losses are a badge of honor, Mr. Son's approach and ambition stood out.

His early bet on the Chinese technology giant Alibaba earned a return of more than $100 billion and cemented his reputation as a farsighted investor. He has outlined a 300-year plan to make SoftBank a leader in artificial intelligence, robotics and other advanced technologies. But this year, his grand designs collided with reality. In what may turn out to be a reckoning for Mr. Son, Wall Street has started running from companies backed by SoftBank and its Vision Fund. The chief executive of WeWork stepped down this week after a botched initial public offering. Uber's stock has fallen nearly 30 percent from its I.P.O. price in May. And shares in Slack, which provides a workplace messaging service, have tumbled more than 40 percent from their first day of trading in June.

The rapidly growing internet sector accounted for $2.1 trillion of the U.S. economy in 2018, or about 10% of the nation's gross domestic product (GDP), an industry group said on Thursday. From a report: The Internet Association, a group representing Amazon.com, Facebook, Alphabet, Twitter, Uber and many other firms, released its estimate as the tech sector has come under increasing criticism, with some lawmakers calling for the breakup of major firms and renewed antitrust scrutiny. The study says the internet sector represents the fourth largest sector of the U.S. economy, behind real estate, government and manufacturing. Last year, manufacturing accounted for about $2.3 trillion in U.S. GDP. The study found that the internet sector has nearly 6 million direct jobs, which accounts for 4% of U.S. jobs, while U.S. internet firms spent $64 billion in capital expenditures. The study also found the internet sector indirectly supports another 13 million jobs.

The special investigations team inside Uber, which fields complaints from riders and drivers, is not allowed to escalate those issues to law enforcement or file official police reports "even when they get confessions of felonies," according to The Washington Post. They are also not allowed to advise victims or potential victims of crimes to seek legal counsel, according to the report, which was based on interviews with "more than 20 current and former investigators" who worked at Uber's investigations unit in Arizona. The Verge reports: The investigators are also allegedly instructed to "first to protect Uber" and make sure it is "not held liable" for any crimes that are committed by people using the company's ride-hailing platform. In that vein, the investigators told the paper that even the language they use when communicating with alleged victims is carefully worded to avoid the appearance that Uber is taking a side. The investigators also said they're not supposed to specifically ask alleged perpetrators about claims against them. Uber told the Post that it's "the victim's choice to report an incident to police," a position the company tells The Verge it arrived at after consulting experts. That said, the company has started giving people the "option to allow [Uber] to contact law enforcement on their behalf" if the customer is reporting an incident that may be a crime, according to the Post.

"At the end of the day, we're not the judge and jury to determine whether a crime has occurred," Tracey Breeden, Uber's global head of women's safety, told the Post. "We're here to gather information, make a business decision. We're not law enforcement." In a statement to The Verge, a spokesperson for Uber said the company has "made substantial investments in both the [special investigations] team and in our safety technology, policies and processes," and that investigators "receive more targeted training based on years of guidance from experts in the field." "We are very proud of this team's work and know they approach their jobs with tremendous compassion and understanding," the spokesperson said. "Characterizing this team as anything but providing support to people after a difficult experience is just wrong. We will continue to put safety at the heart of everything we do and implement new approaches, based on expert guidance, to the benefit of both our customers and employees."

Reuters: Uber Technologies sued New York City on Friday over a new rule limiting how much time its drivers can spend in their vehicles in Manhattan without passengers, saying the rule threatens to undermine the company's ride sharing model. In its complaint filed in a New York state court in Manhattan, Uber called the "cruising cap" rule adopted last month "arbitrary and capricious," and said it was based on a flawed economic model.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Silicon Valley is terrified. In a little over three months, California will see the widest-sweeping state-wide changes to its privacy law in years. California's Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) kicks in on January 1 and rolls out sweeping new privacy benefits to the state's 40 million residents -- and every tech company in Silicon Valley. California's law is similar to Europe's GDPR. It grants state consumers a right to know what information companies have on them, a right to have that information deleted and the right to opt-out of the sale of that information.

Since the law passed, tech giants have pulled out their last card: pushing for an overarching federal bill. In doing so, the companies would be able to control their messaging through their extensive lobbying efforts, allowing them to push for a weaker statute that would nullify some of the provisions in California's new privacy law. In doing so, companies wouldn't have to spend a ton on more resources to ensure their compliance with a variety of statutes in multiple states. Just this month, a group of 51 chief executives -- including Amazon's Jeff Bezos, IBM's Ginni Rometty and SAP's Bill McDermott -- signed an open letter to senior lawmakers asking for a federal privacy bill, arguing that consumers aren't clever enough to "understand rules that may change depending upon the state in which they reside." Then, the Internet Association, which counts Dropbox, Facebook, Reddit, Snap, Uber (and just today ZipRecruiter) as members, also pushed for a federal privacy law. "The time to act is now," said the industry group. If the group gets its wish before the end of the year, the California privacy law could be sunk before it kicks in. TechNet, a "national, bipartisan network of technology CEOs and senior executives," also demanded a federal privacy law, claiming -- and without providing evidence -- that any privacy law should ensure "businesses can comply with the law while continuing to innovate." Its members include major venture capital firms, including Kleiner Perkins and JC2 Ventures, as well as other big tech giants like Apple, Google, Microsoft, Oracle and Verizon

"It's no accident that the tech industry launched this campaign right after the California legislature rejected their attempts to undermine the California Consumer Privacy Act," Jacob Snow, a technology and civil liberties attorney at the ACLU of Northern California, told TechCrunch. "Instead of pushing for federal legislation that wipes away state privacy law, technology companies should ensure that Californians can fully exercise their privacy rights under the CCPA on January 1, 2020, as the law requires."

California Governor Gavin Newsom signed a sweeping new law that could force gig companies like Uber and Lyft to reclassify their workers as employees. From a report: The hotly contested legislation, Assembly Bill 5, dictates that workers can generally only be considered contractors if they are doing work that is outside the usual course of a company's business. The law codifies a 2018 state supreme court ruling, and applies it to a wide range of state laws. It could upend the business models of companies that depend on armies of independent contractors, who aren't guaranteed employment protections like minimum wage and overtime.

The bill is slated to go into effect on Jan. 1. While the legislature has adjourned until next year, fierce lobbying and deal-making efforts are expected to continue in the meantime, and could potentially yield separate legislation in 2020. In a statement, Newsom called the bill "landmark legislation," and said that, "A next step is creating pathways for more workers to form a union, collectively bargain to earn more, and have a stronger voice at work -- all while preserving flexibility and innovation." Lorena Gonzalez, the state assemblywoman who authored the bill, said in a statement that, "California is now setting the global standard for worker protections for other states and countries to follow." Further reading: Drivers? Never Heard of Them, Says Uber.