In an opinion article published last week on Wired, New York City Mayor and 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Bill de Blasio said as president he would issue a robot tax for corporations displacing humans and would create a federal agency to oversee automation. CNET reports: "The scale of automation in our economy is increasing far faster than most people realize, and its impact on working people in America and across the world, unless corralled, will be devastating," de Blasio wrote. De Blasio would call the new regulator the Federal Automation and Worker Protection Agency, which would safeguard jobs and communities. In addition, his proposed "robot tax" would be imposed on large companies that eliminate jobs as they become more automated. The tax would be equal to five years of payroll taxes for each employee eliminated, according to De Blasio.

When Amazon scrubbed plans to build a second headquarters in New York City earlier this year, the reason appeared rooted in a debate about unions, tax subsidies and housing costs. Then there was the burn book. [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source.] The Wall Street Journal reports: In a private dossier kept at the time, whose existence has gone previously unreported, Amazon executives cataloged in minute detail the insults they saw coming from New York politicians and labor leaders, according to a copy viewed by The Wall Street Journal. By late January, Amazon executives had been pummeled at two public hearings. The burn book, which was kept in a Microsoft Word document called "NY Negative Statements," had separate sections for a half-dozen politicians and officials who had gone from thorns in the company's side to formidable opponents of a deal that now looked to be in jeopardy.

The document recorded how opponents mocked the helipad Amazon planned to build, pushed the Twitter hashtag #scamazon, and brought up the company's work for the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a sore spot among some Amazon employees. It was an eight-page, bullet-pointed, Calibri font testimony to Amazon's sensitivities. The burn book is one indication of just how ill-suited Amazon and New York were to each other, a buttoned-up corporation that didn't talk publicly about its unhappiness up against a raucous political circus that had no problem running its mouth. This account is based on interviews with multiple people who were part of the deal.

Microsoft announced it will be holding a Surface hardware event in New York City on October 2nd, which could be where the company unveils its dual-screen Surface laptop / tablet hybrid that's been in development for more than two years. As The Verge reports, the new dual-screen device, codenamed "Centaurus," is "designed to be the hero device for a wave of new dual-screen tablet / laptop hybrids that we're expecting to see throughout 2020." From the report: Microsoft demonstrated this new device during an internal meeting earlier this year, signaling that work on the prototype has progressed to the point where it's nearing release. Still, it's not certain that Microsoft will show off this new hardware in October or even launch it. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella famously killed off the Surface Mini just weeks before its scheduled unveiling. If Microsoft does plan to show this dual-screen Surface device, then it won't be ready to ship immediately. Sources familiar with Microsoft's plans tell The Verge that the company is currently targeting a 2020 release date for its dual-screen Surface.

Alongside Centaurus, Microsoft will likely refresh other Surface devices. The Surface Book is long overdue an update, and Microsoft's Surface Laptop and Surface Pro hardware could finally see the addition of USB-C ports this year. Even Microsoft's Surface Go tablet is more than a year old now and could see a minor refresh.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: Masroor Nazir, a pharmacist in Kashmir's biggest city, Srinagar, has some advice for people in the region: Do not get sick, because he may not have any medicine left to help. "We used the internet for everything," said Mr. Nazir, 28, whose pharmacy is near the city's famed clock tower. He said he normally went online to order new drugs and to fulfill requests from other pharmacies in more rural parts of Kashmir Valley. But now, "we cannot do anything." As the Indian government's shutdown of internet and phone service in the contested region enters its 11th day, Kashmir has become paralyzed.

Shopkeepers said that vital supplies like insulin and baby food, which they typically ordered online, were running out. Cash was scarce, as metal shutters covered the doors and windows of banks and A.T.M.s, which relied on the internet for every transaction. Doctors said they could not communicate with their patients. Only a few government locations with landlines have been available for the public to make phone calls, with long waits to get a few minutes of access. The information blockade was an integral part of India's unilateral decision last week to wipe out the autonomy of Jammu and Kashmir, an area of 12.5 million people that is claimed by both India and Pakistan and has long been a source of tension. That has brought everyday transactions, family communications, online entertainment and the flow of money and information to a halt.According to Access Now, a global digital rights group, India is the world leader in shutting down the internet. The country has blocked the internet 134 times, compared with 12 shutdowns in Pakistan, the No. 2 country.

"Shutting down the internet has become the first go-to the moment the police think there will be any kind of disturbance," said Mishi Choudhary, founder of SFLC.in, a legal advocacy group in New Delhi that has tracked the sharp rise in web shutdowns in India since 2012.

Abusers leverage high-tech tools in the oldest of crimes, stalking their victims through tools like Facebook Messenger and Apple Maps. They spy on their targets through stalkerware apps and Amazon Alexas. But hackers are now teaming up with victim advocates to catch up. From a report: In a pilot study the New York City government has been running since 2018, technologists work in collaboration with the Mayor's Office to End Domestic and Gender-Based Violence to offer practical computer security and privacy services to survivors of intimate partner violence. The program, which involves a team of academics from Cornell Tech and New York University, has already seen early success and is growing, Cornell Tech's Sam Havron said on Wednesday at the USENIX Security Symposium in Santa Clara, California. There are hundreds of apps sold on the market today that stalkers use to track a victim's location, secretly record voice audio, steal text messages, or engage in other illegal surveillance. Since November 2018, the New York-based technologists have met with 44 clients and have discovered that 23 of them may have been targeted by spyware, account compromise, or exploitable misconfigurations. Over half the victim cases have connections to digital abuse, according to a newly published paper, "Clinical Computer Security for Victims of Intimate Partner Violence."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: British Airways announced that it is testing out virtual reality headsets for the rest of this year on flights between London's Heathrow and New York City's John F. Kennedy airport. The airline is tapping SkyLights for the VR eyewear headsets that will be available for its first-class passengers. The AlloSky hardware can present 3D views even when the viewer is lying flat. As far as programming, British Airways will have options. The VR headsets will offer visual entertainment in 2D, 3D, or 360-degree formats. The airline will also provide more therapeutic programs to help people who have a fear of flying. These VR experiences include guided meditation and sound therapy. This marks the first time British Airways is bringing virtual reality onto its aircrafts. The company also used SkyLights' hardware at its ticket counters in Heathrow to show passengers the experience of its first-class travel in an effort to encourage upgrades.

James Daunt fought Amazon and rescued the country's biggest bookstore chain. Now comes Chapter 2. From a report: Barnes & Noble has been sliding toward oblivion for years. Nearly 400 stores have closed since 1997 -- there are 627 now operating -- and $1 billion in market value has evaporated in the last five years. This week, Elliott Advisors, the private equity firm that owns Waterstones, closed its deal to buy Barnes & Noble for $683 million. James Daunt -- who in 2011 began to run Waterstones, Britain's largest bookstore chain, when it was on the verge of bankruptcy and steered it out of a death spiral -- will move to New York City this month and serve as the new chief executive. He has said little about his plans, but his playbook at Waterstones offers clues about what's coming. His guiding assumption is that the only point of a bookstore is to provide a rich experience in contrast to a quick online transaction. And for now, the experience at Barnes & Noble isn't good enough.

"Frankly, at the moment you want to love Barnes & Noble, but when you leave the store you feel mildly betrayed," Mr. Daunt said over lunch at a Japanese restaurant near his office in Piccadilly Circus. "Not massively, but mildly. It's a bit ugly -- there's piles of crap around the place. It all feels a bit unloved, the booksellers look a bit miserable, it's all a bit run down. "And every year, fewer people come in, or people come in less often. That has to turn around. Otherwise ..." The changes have filled Waterstones' 289 shops, mostly in Britain, with books that customers actually want to buy, as opposed to the ones that publishers are eager to sell. And store managers have been given plenty of leeway to transform their shops into places that feel personally curated and decidedly uncorporate.

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: MIT Technology Review's Karen Hao reports on China's grand experiment in AI education that could reshape how the world learns. "While academics have puzzled over best practices, China hasn't waited around," Hao writes. "It's the world's biggest experiment on AI in education, and no one can predict the outcome."

Profiled is Squirrel AI ("We Strive to Provide Every Student an AI Super Teacher!"), which has opened 2,000 learning centers in 200 cities and registered over a million students -- equal to New York City's entire public school system... Hao notes that the earliest efforts to "replicate" teachers date back to the 1970s, when computers first started being used in education. So, will AI-powered learning systems like Squirrel's deliver on the promise of PLATO's circa-1975 computer-assisted instruction?
From the article: Squirrel's innovation is in its granularity and scale. For every course it offers, its engineering team works with a group of master teachers to subdivide the subject into the smallest possible conceptual pieces. Middle school math, for example, is broken into over 10,000 atomic elements, or "knowledge points," such as rational numbers, the properties of a triangle, and the Pythagorean theorem. The goal is to diagnose a student's gaps in understanding as precisely as possible. By comparison, a textbook might divide the same subject into 3,000 points; ALEKS, an adaptive learning platform developed by US-based McGraw-Hill, which inspired Squirrel's, divides it into roughly 1,000.

Once the knowledge points are set, they are paired with video lectures, notes, worked examples, and practice problems. Their relationships -- how they build on each other and overlap -- are encoded in a "knowledge graph," also based on the master teachers' experience.

"The New York Police Department (NYPD) has been loading thousands of arrest photos of children and teenagers into a facial recognition database despite evidence the technology has a higher risk of false matches in younger faces," reports The New York Times. Some of the children included in the database are as young as 11, but most are teenagers between 13 and 16 years old. From the report: Elected officials and civil rights groups said the disclosure that the city was deploying a powerful surveillance tool on adolescents -- whose privacy seems sacrosanct and whose status is protected in the criminal justice system -- was a striking example of the Police Department's ability to adopt advancing technology with little public scrutiny. Several members of the City Council as well as a range of civil liberties groups said they were unaware of the policy until they were contacted by The New York Times.

Police Department officials defended the decision, saying it was just the latest evolution of a longstanding policing technique: using arrest photos to identify suspects. The New York Police Department can take arrest photos of minors as young as 11 who are charged with a felony, depending on the severity of the charge. And in many cases, the department keeps the photos for years, making facial recognition comparisons to what may have effectively become outdated images. There are photos of 5,500 individuals in the juvenile database, 4,100 of whom are no longer 16 or under, the department said. Teenagers 17 and older are considered adults in the criminal justice system. Civil rights advocates say that including their photos in a facial recognition database runs the risk that an imperfect algorithm identifies them as possible suspects in later crimes. A mistaken match could lead investigators to focus on the wrong person from the outset, they said.

Telecommunications firms and mobile-based apps make billions of dollars per year by selling customer location data to marketers and other businesses, offering a vast window into the whereabouts of cellphone and app users, often without their knowledge. That practice, which has come under increasing scrutiny and criticism in recent years, is now the subject of proposed legislation in New York [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source]. If passed, it is believed that the city would become the first to ban the sale of geolocation data to third parties. From a report: The bill, which will be introduced on Tuesday, would make it illegal for cellphone companies and mobile app developers to share location data gathered while a customer's mobile device is within the five boroughs. Cellphone companies and mobile apps collect detailed geolocation data of their users and then sell that information to legitimate companies such as digital marketers, roadside emergency assistance services, retail advertisers, hedge funds or -- in the case of a class-action lawsuit filed against AT&T -- bounty hunters. "The average person has no idea they are vulnerable to this," said Councilman Justin L. Brannan, a Brooklyn Democrat who is introducing the bill. "We are concerned by the fact that someone can sign up for cell service and their data can wind up in the hands of five different companies."

"Ninety-four million people in parts of 23 states remain under excessive heat warnings and heat advisories on Sunday as one last day of scorching temperatures hits the Midwest and East Coast," reports ABC News.

"Sunday is the last day of oppressive heat, with many places in the Upper Midwest already feeling cooler Sunday morning after heat indices of 115 to 120 on Friday and Saturday... New York City and Boston are just two of many cities that set or tied record-high minimum temperatures, with temperatures failing to drop below 80 degrees."

The high temperatures eventually caused power outages, reports the New York Daily News: Scorching heat slammed the city's power grid Sunday evening, putting more than 50,000 Con Ed customers in the dark, mostly in Brooklyn, the company said... As heat stressed the grid, Con Ed tried to keep the blackout from spreading by deliberately cutting power to 33,000 customers in Brooklyn, mostly in in Canarsie, Flatlands, Mill Basin and Bergen Beach. "The reason we did that was to prevent any further outages and also to protect the integrity of the energy system in that area," said Con Ed spokesman Sidney Alvarez.
And the weather also affected power supplies in the midwest, according to local news reports: According to DTE Energy, about 375,000 customers are without power as a result of the thunderstorms that rumbled through the region Friday and Saturday nights. The storms were marked by flashes of lightning, high winds and even in a few cases, hail...

Meanwhile Consumers Energy says the storms brought down more than 1,500 power lines. Jackson, Michigan-based Consumers said today that over 212,000 customers were affected by the storms.
ABC News reports that winds gusting 70 to 80 mph "brought down numerous tree limbs, and thousands of power lines from South Dakota to Minnesota, and in Wisconsin and Michigan."

On Saturday night in New York City a power outage struck Midtown Manhattan, hitting Hell's Kitchen north to Lincoln Center and from Fifth Avenue west to the Hudson River. The blackout darkened the huge, electric billboards of Times Square, forced Broadway shows to cancel performances, and even disabled some subway lines. But what caused it? From a report: According to reports, the outage was caused by a transformer fire within the affected region. Power was fully restored by early the following morning. [...] Saturday's blackout was most likely caused by a disabled transformer at an area substation. There are at least 50 of those in New York City, which are fed in turn by at least 24, higher-voltage transmission substations. When it comes to power, New York is unusual because of the city's age and the density of its population, both residential and commercial. That produces different risks and consequences. In Atlanta, where I live, storms often down trees, which take out aboveground power lines. In the West, where wildfires are becoming more common, flames frequently dismantle power infrastructure (sometimes the power lines themselves cause the fires). But across the whole of New York City -- not just Manhattan -- more than 80 percent of both customers and the electrical load are serviced by underground distribution from area substations. That makes smaller problems less frequent, but bigger issues more severe.

When a transformer goes down in a populous place like Manhattan, it has a greater impact than it would on Long Island, say, or in Westchester County, where density is lower. The amount of power that central Manhattan uses on a regular basis also contributes to that impact. Times Square, the theater district, hundreds of skyscrapers -- it's a substantial load. In New York's case, supplying that load is not usually the problem. Generating facilities can be located near or far away from where their power is used, and New York City draws power from a couple dozen plants. Some of it is imported from upstate. But much of New York's power is still generated locally, in large part at plants along the waterfront of Queens. Those plants are older, and more susceptible to disruption from local calamities, especially severe weather. When peak demand surges -- most common during heat waves, such as the ones that struck the region in 2006 and 2011 -- the older, less efficient generating stations have a harder time keeping up, and brownouts or blackouts become more likely.

[...] But new risks associated with climate change, cyberwarfare, and other factors haven't necessarily been accounted for in the design and operation of utility infrastructure. The perils build on one another. Climate change amplifies the frequency of heat waves, which increases electrical load, which puts greater pressure on infrastructure. At the same time, it increases the likelihood of superstorms that can cause flooding, fire, and other disasters that might disrupt nodes in the network. When utility operators designed their equipment years or decades ago, they made assumptions about load, storm surge, and other factors. Those estimates might no longer apply.

What's Google working on after shuttering Google+ ?

An anonymous reader quotes The Verge: Google's in-house incubator, Area 120, is working on a new social networking app called Shoelace which is aimed at organizing local events and activities. You use it by listing your interests in the app, allowing it to recommend a series of "hand-picked" local activities which it calls "Loops." You can also organize your own events, and there's a map interface to view and RSVP to other people's Loops.

Shoelace's soft-launch comes just months after Google shut down Google+, its most prominent attempt at building a social media platform. However, rather than trying to create a new all-encompassing social network to rival the likes of Facebook, Shoelace seems to have much more modest ambitions that take aim at Facebook's ubiquitous Events functionality...

[I]t's also only available in New York City at the moment; the team says it's hoping to expand to more cities across the US soon.

"More than 40,000 in Manhattan don't have power," reports CNN: Of the 42,000 customers without power in New York, most are in Midtown Manhattan and the Upper West Side, the utility company said. The city's fire department is responding to numerous transformer fires, the first of which occurred in Manhattan on West 64th Street and West End Avenue, officials said.

The outage is having a widespread effect, with the New York subway system also experiencing power outages in its stations, the agency managing the trains said. "We're working to identify causes and keep trains moving," the Metropolitan Transportation Authority tweeted... Photos from Times Square are showing some of the famous electronic billboards dark as dozens of people stand confused on the sidewalks.
Updates from CNN report that subway trains "have been stopped for more than 45 minutes and they can't move back to stations. Some people have been forced to walk through train cars to evacuate."

A ransomware attack in New York City's Monroe College has shut down the college's computer systems at campuses located in Manhattan, New Rochelle and St. Lucia. The attackers are seeking 170 bitcoins or approximately $2 million dollars in order to decrypt the entire college's network. Bleeping Computer reports: According to the Daily News, Monroe College was hacked on Wednesday at 6:45 AM and ransomware was installed throughout the college's network. It is not known at this time what ransomware was installed on the system, but it is likely to be Ryuk, IEncrypt, or Sodinokibi, which are known to target enterprise networks. The college has not indicated at this time whether they will be paying the ransom or restoring from backups while gradually bringing their network back online. "The good news is that the college was founded in 1933, so we know how to teach and educate without these tools," Monroe College spokesperson Jackie Ruegger told the Daily News. "Right now we are finding workarounds for our students taking online classes so they have their assignments."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Crunch has been one of the biggest topics in video game industry news over the last year with reports of massive studio layoffs at established studios following closely behind. Another topic relating to these issues that hasn't received as much attention, however, are the low and unfair wages developers are being paid in exchange for their increasingly demanding work. Just like issues with crunch and layoffs, it's a problem developers are afraid to speak openly about because of the fear of retaliation from current and future job opportunities. In light of all the news surrounding crunch and layoffs at studios, Beck Hallstedt sparked the conversation about developers being paid unlivable wages on Twitter, using the Quality Assurance (QA) jobs at Gearbox Software as a prime example.

They go on to say, "I know crunch is the big thing to criticize in games but please, please, please talk about how bad wages are too. People are living in their cars and pulling out loans to pay rent because of this stuff." They point out information from PayScale, which shows the average Gearbox Software salary at $54,000, but that number isn't the full picture. That average is taken from a small group of people -- in Gearbox Software's case, 10 -- who reported their earnings. Some of these individuals are senior level designers that are making as much as 105k, bumping up the average salary higher than it is. [...] Many game studios are located in major cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, and New York. This makes the cost of living far higher than it is in other places in the country. Since many studios do not allow their staff to work remotely, developers have to live in the city or relocate to find consistent work. Rent, food, transportation, and sometimes even student loans and medical care can factor into the cost of living.

Hallstedt has been working as a freelance concept artist for over three years, with their first in-house job being a 2D Art internship at High Voltage Software in Chicago. "I was hired at $12 an hour, which I'm honestly happy with for an intern position in the Midwest. I was learning as much as I was contributing, and the artists there spent time guiding me through adapting to a studio pipeline," they said. "It was great, and the generosity of those artists has guided my entire career." A few weeks after the internship ended, Netherrealm Studios reached out and asked Hallstedt to submit their resume as an associate concept artist. During the interview, they were offered to work on Injustice 2 for their standard 9-month temporary contract. The offer they received wasn't anywhere near what they imagined it would be. The salary was $11 an hour, which was $1 less than their prior internship had offered, except that this would a full-time commitment.

Remember when the small town of Lake City, Florida paid $460,000 for a ransomware's decryption key?

As they slowly recover 100 years of encrypted municipal records, the New York Times looks at the lessons learned, arguing that cyberattackers have simply found a juicy target: small governments with weak computer protections -- and strong insurance policies. The city had backup files for all its data, but they were on the same network -- and also inaccessible... The city's insurer, the Florida League of Cities, hired a consultant to handle the negotiations with the hackers via the email addresses that had been posted on the city server. The initial demands were refused outright, and city technicians raced to find a workaround. "We tried a lot of different solutions," said Joseph Helfenberger, the city manager. None of them worked. "We were at the end of the day faced with either re-creating the data from scratch, or paying the ransom," he said.

The insurer's negotiator settled on a payment of 42 Bitcoins, or about $460,000, Helfenberger said, of which the city would pay a $10,000 deductible. After the payment, the hackers provided a decryption key, and recovery efforts began in earnest.

As it turned out, recovery would not be simple. Even with the decryption key, each terabyte has taken about 12 hours to recover. Much of the city's data, nearly a month after the onset of the attack, has still not been unlocked... In Lake City, the information technology director, blamed for both failing to secure the network and taking too long to recover the data, wound up losing his job.
Mark A. Orlando, the chief technology officer for Raytheon Intelligence Information and Services, tells the Times it's unrealistic to expect cities to never pay the ransom. "Anyone who said that has never been in charge of a municipality that has half their services down and no choice."

But does that create an ever-widening problem? The FBI knows of at least 1,500 reported ransomware incidents last year, according to the article, although the Illinois computer programmer offering free decryption help at ID Ransomware says he's receiving 1,500 requests for assistance every day.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: A community-run operation named NYC Mesh is on a mission: to deliver better, cheaper broadband service to New York City. The locally-run nonprofit project says it's engaging in a dramatic expansion that should soon deliver a new, more open broadband alternative to big ISPs to a wider swath of the boroughs of Manhattan and Brooklyn. With the installation of a new "supernode," NYC Mesh has greatly expanded its coverage area to much of western Brooklyn, as well as much of lower Manhattan.

Born out of frustration in 2013, NYC Mesh isn't a traditional business. It's built on the backs of volunteers and donors who dedicate their time, money, bandwidth, hardware, and resources to building an alternative to the abysmal logjam that is shoddy US broadband. Initially, the mesh network was powered by a single "Supernode" antenna and hardware array located at 375 Pearl Street in Manhattan. This gigabit fiber-fed antenna connects 300 buildings, where members have mounted routers on a rooftop or near a window. These local "nodes" in turn connect to an internet exchange point -- without the need for a traditional ISP. Unlike a traditional ISP, users don't pay a fixed monthly rate, and there are no costly monthly usage caps or overage fees. A NYC Mesh rate sheet notes the project is funded by optional monthly member donations of $20 or $50 for a residential users, or $100 for a business. Users also pay $110.00 for a WiFi router and rooftop antenna, and a $50 installation fee. The organization announced that it will install a new Supernode 3 antenna and hardware array at Industry City in the Sunset Park neighborhood of Brooklyn. "According to NYC Mesh, this new supernode will have 50 times the capacity of the original node, allowing the project to extend availability to Sunset Park, South Slope, Park Slope, Gowanus, Red Hook, and beyond," reports Motherboard.

Public library cardholders in New York City will no longer have access to tens of thousands of movies through Kanopy as of July 1, when the New York, Brooklyn and Queens public libraries end their partnerships with the streaming service because of the cost, the libraries said Monday. From a report: The San Francisco-based platform, which notified library cardholders by email on Monday, offers well-known feature films, like "Lady Bird" and "Moonlight," as well as classic movies, documentaries and foreign-language films not always available on other services. In a statement, the New York Public Library said, "We believe the cost of Kanopy makes it unsustainable," adding that it would use its resources to purchase "more in-demand collections such as books and e-books." The Brooklyn and Queens libraries also cited what they said were Kanopy's rising costs in dropping the service. About 25,000 people with New York Public Library cards -- about 1 percent of the library's 2 million cardholders -- used the service in the past year. The New York library -- with branches in Manhattan, the Bronx and Staten Island -- and the Brooklyn Public Library first offered Kanopy in August 2017, and the Queens Library followed several months later.

New York lawmakers have agreed to pass a sweeping climate plan that could help the state achieve a net-zero economy in which all energy is drawn from carbon-free sources by 2050. "The bill would require New York to get 70 percent of its electricity from renewable sources by 2030, and by 2050, the state would have to cut emissions by at least 85 percent below 1990 levels," reports New York Magazine. "To offset the remainder, the state would enact measures to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, like mass tree-planting and the restoration of wetlands." From the report: The bill, if passed, would be one of the world's most ambitious climate plans, made more impressive by the size of New York's economy. If the state were its own country, its economy would be the 11th largest in the world, falling between those of Canada and South Korea. "This unquestionably puts New York in a global leadership position," Jesse Jenkins, an energy expert and postdoctoral fellow at Harvard, told the New York Times.

Of course, energy costs will go up in pursuit of the goal. New York gets around 60 percent of its electricity from carbon-free sources -- primarily an energy mix of hydroelectric and nuclear power. To make up the difference, the state will invest in large-scale offshore wind farms and rooftop solar projects. More challenging than the electric grid is the heat for homes and commercial buildings, which generally burn natural gas or oil, and take up around a quarter of the state's emissions. In New York City, for example, an April law requiring skyscrapers to retrofit to meet new energy standards is expected to cost building owners over $4 billion. The bill also marks the first major piece of legislation to include aspects of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's Green New Deal, routing hundreds of millions of dollars into polluted or environmentally vulnerable areas of the state in an attempt at both economic and environmental revival.