How many new oil wells did you drill this year? Did your oil and gas reserves deplete? Do you operate your pipelines through a master limited partnership? Those questions likely don’t mean anything to the average person. They’re only relevant to Big Oil companies—which can get tax breaks for such actions. The questions appear on “Trumpo Tax,” a satire website (a nod to Intuit’s tax-preparation software TurboTax) created by United to End Polluter Handouts (UTEPH), a coalition of climate groups that highlights how Americans’ tax dollars fund oil and gas corporations. On Tax Day, (Wednesday, April 15), a “Trumpo Tax”…
Author: Staff Writer
The fall of former direct-to-consumer darling Allbirds has taken a very weird turn. Allbirds, the sustainable shoemaker that caught fire with the Silicon Valley set about a decade ago, will start selling silicon itself. The company said in a press release that it will transform itself into a business focused on leasing GPUs—the powerful graphics processing unit chips underpinning the AI boom that are in short supply and high demand, much to the chagrin of gamers and tech CEOs. The husk of the shoe company that once was will “pivot its business to AI compute infrastructure, with a long-term vision…
It’s a brutal hiring market for new grads. Hiring has slowed across multiple industries, and competition is especially fierce, given that AI has recently begun to take on tasks usually associated with entry-level roles. According to a recent analysis from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the unemployment rate for college graduates ages 22 to 27 is up, hitting 5.8% at the end of 2025. Overall, hiring is down 7% year over year, and still well below pre-pandemic levels, says Kory Kantenga, LinkedIn’s head of economics. In an effort to help new graduates manage the intimidating start to their…
Not sure what to order on your next Starbucks run? Now, ChatGPT can help. Starting April 15, users will be able to turn to ChatGPT to help them decide on their next Starbucks order through a new integration with the coffee chain. To activate the feature, users simply tag @starbucks within a chat with the AI agent to trigger the new in-platform beta Starbucks app. Users will be able to prompt ChatGPT to offer drink order advice based on mood, cravings, or even an image. For instance, a user might prompt ChatGPT with “@starbucks, I’m looking for an iced pick-me-up.”…
After introducing a new strategy for performance reviews to include evaluations of how effectively workers use AI, Duolingo founder and CEO Luis von Ahn said employees started questioning the decision: “For a while,” von Ahn said, AI usage was a metric of company performance reviews. But it won’t be anymore, once employees pushed back. Now, Duolingo has backtracked on using AI use as a performance metric. Employees had asked if they were simply using AI for AI’s sake. “At the end, we backtracked, and we said, ‘No, look. The most important thing in your performance is you are doing whatever…
The world can’t seem to escape the Brooklyn-based Gen Z band Geese. Some call them “America’s Most Thrilling Young Rock Band,” while the band and their frontman, Cameron Winter, are drawing endless comparisons to their predecessors the Strokes and Julian Casablancas. Just last week, the band took the stage at Coachella as they gear up for an already sold-out tour. But as Geese finds their footing in the limelight, suspicion is mounting over their relatively quick rise to fame—and now some are saying the seemingly indie artists might have fallen into our laps on purpose all along. In a now…
The organizer behind SantaCon, a Santa-themed crawl that raises money for local charities, is being charged with defrauding ticket-buyers and establishment owners. On Wednesday, 50-year-old Stefan Pildes was arrested in New York and charged with wire fraud, which carries a maximum sentence of twenty years in prison. Prosecutors claim Pildes, who served as the president of and controlled the nonprofit entity that organizes the event called Participatory Safety, Inc. (“PSI”), diverted funds that were meant to go to charity to his own accounts. Per the indictment, from November 2019 through April 2026, Pildes allegedly defrauded tens of thousands of participants…
When Pokémon launched in 1996, the brand offered just a pair of video games, a single region within its world for players to explore, and 151 creatures for them to capture and train. 30 years later, Pokémon mania is stronger than ever. The most recent mainline games in the series, Pokémon Scarlet and Violet, sold 10 million copies in their first three days, while the accompanying Pokémon Trading Card Game printed 10.2 million new cards between 2024 and 2025. The franchise now features 1,025 Pokémon across its more than a hundred video game titles under the Pokémon umbrella, including the…
At first blush, it sounds too good to be true: a learning experience that’s precisely tailored to a child’s needs, strengths, and struggles, speeding up or slowing down as the moment demands, with infinite patience. For a decade or more, that’s been the promise fueling the education technology industry—customized learning that fuels rapid progress. Yet, for the most part, it was too good to be true. Not because the ambition was wrong, but because the prevailing vision has had it backwards. A FAILED PERSONALIZED LEARNING APPROACH? The vision of AI in education that has drawn the most attention and investment…
On Wednesday, April 15, Snap CEO Evan Spiegel announced in a letter to employees that the company would lay off about 1,000 people, including 16% of its full-time employees. “We believe that rapid advancements in artificial intelligence enable our teams to reduce repetitive work, increase velocity, and better support our community, partners, and advertisers,” Spiegel said in the letter. That statement could have been pulled from a number of tech CEO’s recent bold statements that AI will replace employees. Spiegel joins the ranks of CEOs like Block’s Jack Dorsey who have been unabashed in citing AI in their decisions to lay…