China has just taken another decisive step toward the future of money, and once again, the West is pretending this is simply about “payment efficiency.” The People’s Bank of China has now expanded its digital yuan program by adding 12 additional banks, bringing the total number of participating institutions to 22. China launched the digital yuan back in 2019, and despite already having dominant digital payment systems like Alipay and WeChat Pay, they continue to push forward aggressively. The reason is simple. Those systems are private. The digital yuan is not. This is a direct liability of the central bank,…
Author: Staff Writer
Minecraft is, perhaps, the ultimate sandbox game. Infinite space, multiple game modes, and seemingly endless updates: The game’s limitless possibilities have helped it sell more than 350 million copies since it launched in 2011 (only Tetris has sold more games, and it had a 27-year lead). In 2014, Microsoft acquired Minecraft developer Mojang for $2.5 billion. That same year, Mojang Studios began trying to figure out how to turn an open-ended game into a narrative film for Warner Bros. By 2022, the adaptation coalesced around Napoleon Dynamite director Jared Hess, featuring Jason Momoa as Garrett Garrison, a human trapped in-game,…
A senior Trump administration tasked with managing America’s disaster response won’t stop talking about teleporting. Gregg Phillips, who leads FEMA’s Office of Response and Recovery, first made claims about teleportation on a podcast, describing the feeling of his car being “lifted up” and relocated into a ditch near a church. In another instance, Phillips described finding himself teleported to a Waffle House miles away from his previous location. The Trump administration named Phillips, best known for profiting from election conspiracy theories, to one of the top roles at the disaster relief agency in December. “Teleporting is no fun. … It…
Top executives at the major U.S. airlines have been vocal in sharing their frustrations amid the ongoing partial government shutdown, which has resulted in Transportation Security Administration (TSA) staffing shortages, lengthy airport security lines, and flight delays. The partial shutdown began on February 14 when funding for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) lapsed. TSA officers are classified as essential workers, meaning they’re still required to show up, even without pay. Because of financial uncertainty, many employees called out sick or quit altogether. As the weeks went by, staffing shortages worsened, and wait times grew longer. Airline bosses are at…
Below, co-authors Joshua Steiner and Michael Lynton share five key insights from their new book, From Mistakes to Meaning: Owning Your Past So It Doesn’t Own You. Joshua has worked in government, finance, and the nonprofit sector. After serving as chief of staff at the U.S. Department of the Treasury, he became a banker at Lazard before co-founding two investment firms and serving as an executive at Bloomberg LP. Michael has spent his career in the media and entertainment business. He is the former CEO of Sony Entertainment and now serves on the boards of the Rand Corporation and the Smithsonian.…
Eva Longoria, 51, has come a long way from being a Desperate Housewife on Wisteria Lane over 20 years ago. After becoming a star on the hit show, she says she’s continued to rely on hustle, passion and versatility to be wildly successful in a range of pursuits, from advocacy to entrepreneurship. “I always ask myself what defines success for me,” Longoria said to AARP The Magazine. “As I get older, it’s not some superficial thing. I’m at a point where I don’t want to waste my days.” These days, she’s busy as a mother of a seven-year-old son, host of…
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a woman with a family and a career is in want of more hours in the day. However, despite this, typically conversations around gender inequity at work focus on a pay gap, rather than the consequences of what happens when women don’t have as much time as their male counterparts. In a new study published in the International Journal of Management Reviews, researchers analyzed 88 studies on the interaction between “gender, time, and organizations” in Africa. The researchers wanted to spotlight African organizations to understand how caregiving and other cultural expectations play out…
ASIA: The major Asian stock markets had a mixed day today: • NIKKEI 225 decreased 1,276.41 points or -2.38% to 52,463.27 • Shanghai decreased 29.267 points or -0.74% to 3,919.285 • Hang Seng decreased 177.50 points or -0.70% to 25,116.53 • ASX 200 decreased 92.30 points or -1.06% to 8,579.50 • SENSEX increased 185.23 points or 0.25% to 73,319.55 • Nifty50 increased 33.70 points or 0.15% to 22,713.10 The major Asian currency markets had a mixed day today: • AUDUSD decreased 0.00173 or -0.25% to 0.69106 • NZDUSD decreased 0.0029 or -0.50% to 0.57239 • USDJPY increased 0.522 or 0.33%…
Days after a U.S. district court judge ordered the White House to stop construction on its proposed ballroom expansion, a powerful federal commission just granted the project its formal approval. At the April 2 meeting of the National Capital Planning Commission (NCPC), a largely-Trump aligned panel voted with a large majority to support the design of the White House ballroom. Eight of the 11 commissioners at the meeting voted in support. Two commissioners voted “present” and only one, Washington D.C. Council chair Phil Mendelson, voted no. The vote is a crucial approval for the ballroom, known officially as the East…
We love a good old social media roast, and Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan found himself on the business end of a doozie Wednesday. Tan, who in a past life worked as an engineering manager at Palantir and has more recently been a vocal proponent for AI acceleration, bragged that he and his AI coding agents have been deploying 37,000 lines of code per day across five separate projects. “Absolutely insane week for agentic engineering,” Tan wrote in an X post on Monday, adding in a follow-up post that he was on a 72-day shipping streak. Absolutely insane week for…