Tax Day isn’t normally a cause for celebration. The annual due date for filing taxes usually comes with headache-inducing financial stress and mountains of difficult-to-decipher paperwork. But this year, Tax Day apparently came with an unexpected upside for some New Yorkers, thanks to an announcement from New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani. “When I ran for mayor, I said I was going to tax the rich,” Mamdani said in a video posted to social media on April 15. “Today, we’re taxing the rich.” Mamdani went on to say he had secured a new pied-á-terre tax, or second home tax, a…
Author: Staff Writer
Trader Joe’s is settling a class action lawsuit for more than $7 million, after a complaint claimed that the grocery giant printed 10 digits—the first six and last four—of customers’ debit and credit cards on transaction receipts. The 2019 class action lawsuit alleged that Trader Joe’s violated the Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act (FACTA) amendment to the Fair Credit Reporting Act. No customers reported identity theft as a result, Trader Joe’s said on the settlement website; however, identity theft is not a requirement to prove a FACTA violation. The Los Angeles County Superior Court did not rule on the…
In 2002, 45% of the world’s top 250 companies reported on sustainability. Today, 96% do. Sustainability metrics that once differentiated companies have become the new baseline. This doesn’t mean sustainability has stalled. Rather, it has matured. As geopolitical and regulatory risks continue progressing, what it means to be a sustainable business is evolving. For leaders guiding their companies into the future, sustainability must be more than an aspiration or a value. It’s a practical tool for operating stronger, more resilient businesses. The leaders best positioned for success are the ones integrating sustainability as a core business function, operating at the…
In 2025—not long after Trump fired off executive orders that targeted diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs in the workplace—the Justice Department announced the Civil Rights Fraud Initiative. Its purpose was to investigate companies and academic institutions that accepted money from the government, by invoking a federal law called the False Claims Act. This past week, IBM agreed to pay $17 million over claims that its DEI programs allegedly violated the law—the first instance of an employer settling a case that the government brought under this initiative. In the settlement agreement, the federal government argued that as a federal contractor, IBM…
Election after election, Democratic strategist James Carville’s maxim, “It’s the economy, stupid!” has held true. But in coming political campaigns, candidates will encounter an especially virulent strain of economic anxiety—driven by artificial intelligence—that is proliferating among lower-wage, working Americans. AI’s advances are directly intersecting with Americans’ economic security. Candidates across parties, states, and offices will have to adapt to this new reality, quickly. New data show why. As AI reshapes the labor market and impacts individual economic prospects, these voters view it in increasingly dire terms. Merit America, the workforce development nonprofit that we co-lead, recently commissioned a national survey of more than 3,000 low-income Americans. The goal was to gauge their feelings about economic mobility, affordability,…
QUESTION: Do you think the blockade will be effective in bringing Iran to collapse? You also said that Iran is winning. Could you explain that? Will ANSWER: Regardless of how you might feel about the Iran war, as I previously stated, when I was called in to give me a briefing on Russia, I was told that we would NOT be at war with Russia – it would be with China. As they say, you only know who your friends are in times of trouble. This war has revealed that our supposed allies are really enemies waiting for the opportunity to…
As tech’s titans sprint to build a sprawling web of data centers to power the AI boom, some cities and states are racing to stop them. Maine just became the first state to pass a ban on large data centers, sending a strong signal that many communities aren’t on board with an AI-powered future arriving quite so suddenly. Lawmakers in Maine passed a bill this week to block the construction of large data centers in the state until November 2027. In the meantime, the state plans to use the breathing room to evaluate how the massive, power-guzzling tech complexes might…
The same ChatGPT chatbot that gave OpenAI’s chief financial officer Sarah Friar a tilapia recipe for a recent Sunday night dinner at home is also now doing her most mundane tasks at work like summarizing her emails and Slack messages. Friar and other company executives are banking OpenAI’s future on more of the latter as it shifts its focus to business-oriented products while shedding some of its consumer offerings as a pathway to profitability. OpenAI says it will introduce a new artificial intelligence model for “high-value professional work” as the company faces heightened competition with rival Anthropic in attracting corporate…
Welcome to AI Decoded, Fast Company’s weekly newsletter that breaks down the most important news in the world of AI. You can sign up to receive this newsletter every week via email here. Is the Altman firebomb just the start of extreme doomer violence? On April 10, someone threw a molotov cocktail at OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s house in San Francisco. The alleged assailant, 20-year-old Daniel Moreno-Gama, didn’t stop there. He then went to OpenAI’s headquarters and told the security guards there that he intended to burn down the building and everyone inside. Two days later, someone allegedly fired two shots from a car driving past Altman’s…
Warren Buffett is seldom wrong, especially regarding investment and innovation. As most of us know, the Oracle of Omaha offers wisdom that goes beyond industries, generations, and cultures. And that wisdom, even if it seems obvious (ever catch yourself saying, “Wait, I could’ve said that myself!”), is usually right on the mark. Like this piercing bit of truth-telling: If you get to my age in life and nobody thinks well of you, I don’t care how big your bank account is, your life is a disaster. That’s what Buffett once shared with a group of students at Georgia Tech when they asked him about his idea…