Some places are simply nicer to walk through than others. Compare a tree-lined path along the Seine in Paris to the side of a six-lane highway in Tallahassee, Florida, and the differences are obvious. But what exactly makes a place walkable is a matter of some debate.
Those of the urbanist persuasion might point to a place’s density or mix of land uses. Platforms like Walk Score might favor accessibility, proximity, and travel times. One person might want to have a café within walking distance, while another might want the safety of working streetlights. Conditions are varied, and uneven.
To better understand what exactly makes a place walkable, the architecture firm Perkins Eastman turned to a novel form of data analysis. In a new study, the firm combined qualitative pedestrian preference surveys, visual streetscape imagery from Google Street View, artificial intelligence, and computer vision to identify the specific type and mix of urban design elements that most influence people’s walking habits. Focusing specifically on older adults, the study is a window into the ways cities enable pedestrian activity, and how they can encourage more.
[Image: Perkins Eastman]
What the walkability study found is that people prefer to walk in places with a higher proportion of several basic streetscape elements, including benches, shade trees, sidewalks, and crosswalks. When those elements are provided in combination with one anotherplentiful benches and crosswalks, for examplepeople are likely to walk even more.
[Image: Perkins Eastman]
The study was based in the Kowloon district of Hong Kong, where a decennial survey collects detailed information from more than 100,000 pedestrians about the experience of walking through this part of the city. This survey data was analyzed alongside Google Street View imagery of the district to see what streetscape elements were predominant in places people reported being most likely to walk. This analysis led to a set of urban design guidelines that suggest ways of making more spaces more walkable.
[Image: Perkins Eastman]
The resulting study, Are these streets made for walking?: How visual AI can inform urban walkability for older adults, was led by Haozhou Yang, a student at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design who was a design and wellness research fellow at Perkins Eastman from 2023 to 2024. He says most previous walkability studies rely on zoomed-out data from geographic information systems (GIS), inferring walkability from data points like the existence of sidewalks or a neighborhood’s proximity to retail. They’re not from the human perspective, Yang says. This [study] really puts the elements people encounter every day at the front.
[Image: Perkins Eastman]
Google Street View offered Yang a deep pool of data about the real world conditions experienced by pedestrians in Hong Kong. His study used 32,512 images from Google Street View, separated throughout the district at 10-meter intervals. Machine learning techniques then broke each image down to identify individual streetscape objects within the frame and how much space they accounted for. One image might show tree canopy covering roughly half the image and sidewalk making up about a quarter. Other images show benches and walls. Still others highlight crosswalks and how much space is dedicated to car traffic.
With new AI computer vision, we can really understand the quantifiable amount of those elements in the open environment, Yang says.
By focusing in on seven categories of streetscape elementssidewalks, streetlights, trees, crosswalks, benches, walls, and windowsYang and collaborators from Perkins Eastman were able to draw correlations between the presence and combination of those elements in places with high rates of pedestrian activity. These correlations then informed a set of urban design guidelines developed by Perkins Eastman’s senior living team. These guidelines include combining street furniture with greenery and open space, pairing crosswalks with improved street lighting, and increasing the social interactivity of a space by having more benches in areas with a higher amount of street-facing windows, balconies, and patios.
The study draws these connections through the lens o improving walking conditions for older adults, with the health and social benefits that come from being more mobile and independent. But the implications of the research are much broader, according to Perkins Eastman senior living principal Alejandro Giraldo. These are things that are universal design,” Giraldo says. “It’s not just addressing the seniors. It absolutely will, but it’s also addressing people with mobility issues or children.
Yang says that even though the data in this study is from Hong Kong, AI enables the model to be tuned or tweaked to the conditions in other cities, informing what might improve the walkability of that stretch along the Seine River or the side of that highway in Tallahassee. Although there might be some cultural differences and context-related differences, the model can be applied to other cities, Yang says.
For Perkins Eastman, which has designed senior living projects for more than 40 years, the designers are already looking at ways of integrating these findings into current and future projects and improving conditions for older adults. You want to find the differentiatoras a community, as a developer group, as a residentof what is making me live here, Giraldo says. To change the perception of aging is very critical for us. Demonstrating these tools allow us to create a more sensitive communities.
There are so many ways to die. You could fall off a cliff. A monk could light you on fire. A bat the size of a yacht could kick your head in. Youve only just begun the game, and yet here you are, stranded on some strange mountaintop, surrounded by ruins. If youre a newcomer, youll be dead within moments. If youre a hardcore gamer, youll probably be dead a few moments later.
But death isnt the end. Death is the beginning. Youll respawn in a graveyard, and that graveyard will lead you to a vast chasma pitchblack pit of certain doom. Taking the plunge down into that pit will surely lead you to more death. If the fall doesnt kill you, its reasonable to assume that the monsters lurking down there will.
You can bypass this chasm if you want tothe game will let you keep exploring and playing for hours and hours and hours. In fact, as far as the games concerned, you need never take the plunge at all. And if you were a reasonable human being, you wouldnt.
But you arent a reasonable human being. Youre a gamer. You choose the plunge.
You jump down into the crevasse, and its a good thing you do. Because in Elden Ring, the only way to access the built-in tutorial is by taking that leap. Its there, in that graveyard, down that pitch-black pit of certain doom, that your learning begins.
The drop-out
Stacey Haffner dropped out in her senior year of high school. She had enough credits to graduate, but life just kind of pulled me away, she says. In years to come, she would return to schooling three more times, and each time, life would pull her away before she finished. She did eventually get a high school diploma, but that was it.
She never got a two-year degree. She never got a four-year degree. And she certainly never got a graduate degree.
Where did this dropout life lead her?
To Microsoft, where she worked on a Windows product serving hundreds of millions of users. To Xbox, where she launched the Xbox Live Creators program, democratizing console game development. And then to Unity, where she became the director of product working on DevOps and eventually transitioning to AI and machine learning. Her role focused on guiding large, multidisciplinary teams with the goal of launching new products within the company. Basically, I ran a mini startup within the company, she explains. My collaborator and I built the whole strategy and vision, from org[anization] culture to final product.
Stacey didnt get where she is today by studying like an A-plus student. She got there by studying like an A-plus gamer, leveling up the way every gamer levels up: you see something scary, you take the plunge.
Thats how she learns new software (I kind of just jump into it.). Its how she learned to overcome her fear of public speaking (I just started putting myself on stage.). And its how she navigated every step of her careerjust following the next challenge wherever it led.
After dropping out of high school, she says, I didnt know what I wanted to be. I really had no clue. So I just tried things that sounded interesting. With each job, she got inquisitive about what she loved and what she hated, and then she used those insights to guide her next cycle around the loop.
Eventually that process would lead her into game development, where shed go toe-to-toe with the NBA in a virtual duel to the death. But not until shed tried a string of dead-end jobs.
The career game loop
First she answered phones at a staffing agency. She found that work unbearably mundane, but loved learning new skills every time she got to fill in for recruiters who played hooky. So she switched to human resources (HR) and recruiting.
Working in HR and recruiting, Stacey realized that her role was pretty adversarial. She was tasked with protecting her company rather than its people. And its people feared her. That wasnt going to fly for Stacey, but she did love playing analyst every now and thencrunching the data on employee performance, turnover rates, recruitment metrics, and so on. So she became an analyst next.
It turned out that analyst work was only fun in short bursts, not as a full-time job. When Stacey told her staffing agency that she wanted something new, they offered her a project management role at Microsoft. And it turned out that project management was the perfect fit.
About a decade later, she manages the managers.
Staceys cycled the Core Career Game Loop many, many times, and each time, shes had to level up. Shes used all kinds of strategies along the way, always evaluating what skill she needs to learn, what learning opportunities are available to her, and which methods will support her best.
Shes used booths at conferences, classes at a local college, company-provided training, coaching from bosses and peers, and the most reliable tactic of all: taking the plunge and figuring things out on the fly.
Ill watch tutorials, or read a book, or do whatever, she says. And then at some point, Ill get bored of the tutorial, and Ill just go try, and play around, and do a thing.
Thats how shes learned everything shes learned. Its how shes achieved everything that shes achieved. And its how she eventually beat the NBA at its own game.
Nothin but net
When Stacey isnt handling AI for Unity, she creates games for her studio, What Up Games. Shes the CEO, and her husband, Ben, is the CTO.
About 10 years ago, she went to a conference where she tried virtual reality (VR) for the first time. For Stacey, it was love at first sight, and she raced home to tell Ben about it.
Ben hadnt experienced VR yet, but what he had experienced was sticker shock: the developer equipment was outlandishly expensive.
Stacey insisted he give it a try anyway, and Ben was willing. So they got some goggles and, as Stacey puts it, Two hours later, Ben finally took off the headset, and he was like Lets go make a game.
Before doing anything else, Ben wanted to get his head around the virtual physics of VR experiences. So the two of them got to work on a basketball simulation.
Basketball seemed like a fun way to figure out the mechanics of VR gravity, but the duo didnt actually know anything about sports. They didnt care much either. And, again, they were entirely new to VR technology.
Im reiterating this because I really want to emphasize: these two could not possibly have been worse prepared to go up against a multibillion-dollar pro-ball brand. But did that stop them? Of course not. We already covered this. Gamers are not reasonable human beings.
Once theyd nailed the basic physics, Stacey and Ben figured they might as well introduce some competition. So they built their first game mode: a VR version of H.O.R.S.Ethe schoolyard basketball game where players compete to out-aim each other. Then came multiplayer mode, and before they knew it, What Up Games had a fully operational basketball experience on its hands. They called it Nothin But Net.
The next time a major games conference hit their calendars, Stacey and Ben brought the game with them. And it absolutely killed. The pair had to lay down duct tape to accommodate the unexpected queue of enthusiastic players, which grew and grew as the day went on.
Then came the official release date. And then came the weeping. We were devastated, Stacey says. I cried so hard!
Completely unbeknownst to Stacey and Ben, a major studio with official NBA licensing had also been developing their own VR basketball game all this time. By some cruel twist of fat, that blockbuster game dropped on precisely the same day as Nothin But Net.
In an instant, years of development were made completely moot. Everything Stacey and Ben had worked for. Every innovation theyd pursued. When we saw that game release, we thought that no one would even look at ours, Stacey says. They were about to be blown out of the water by a gaming goliath.
Except, when Stacey stopped crying and checked the industry news a few days later, it turned out that this goliath couldnt reach the net. The official NBA game had tanked. Hard pass. Avoid it, read one review.
Excerpted from The Career Game Loop: Learn to Earn in the New Economy by Jessica Lindl. Read more at www.careergameloop.com. Published by Wiley, 2025.
One of the core theories of the office market circa 2025 is the flight to quality. Workers, either hybrid staff who spend ample time at home or those prodded back into traditional five-day workweeks, have grown used to the comforts of home and bored with drab, standard office spaces. They need something spectacular to justify a commute or keep them happy, so companies increasingly seek out top-flight officesClass A or Trophy assets, as a broker would saywhich has pushed landlords and developers to spend millions on office renovations and solely focus on building new, top-of-the-line workspaces.
That same dynamic, where the top-of-the-market bustles with activity while less desirable, Class B spaces sit largely vacant, has also been reshaping how coworking company WeWork manages and thinks about its portfolio of offices.
In March, the company announced that it was increasing the cost of its All Access product in three cities, San Francisco, New York, and London; the $299 basic version of the service, a pandemic-era creation that allows for desk access across the companys network of spaces, has been eliminated, leaving users to upgrade to the $339 Plus version.
A significant driver of the change, according to Luke Robinson, the companys regional president for North America, is that the same dynamic has hit the coworking world. In these three cities, the company plans to invest $90 million in refurbishing its top-performing locations with newer finishes and amenities because a sizable portion of the desk demand has migrated to these top-tier locations.
201 Spear Street [Photo: WeWork]
You can go get cheap space, but you’re likely in a less desirable building that’s likely dead, that doesn’t have energy, Robinson says. At the end of the day, people that are coming to the office aren’t just coming to sit at a desk. They want the experience that goes along with that, right, somewhat of a vibe.
This does sound a bit like the original WeWork marketing message; its just missing the free beer. But its a reality that can be found across urban office markets. Data from office analytics firm CompStak has shown that across the big U.S office markets, rents for Class B (functional space in a good location) and C office (typically older and basic) space barely budged from 2019 to today, rising from $42.45 to $43.50 a square foot. Even rents for regular Class A space, full-service offices in sought-after locations, saw a slight bump during the same time period, from $45.90 to $54.68 a square foot.
30 Churchill Place [Photo: WeWork]
The story is much different for Prime Class A space, or trophy space, which started at $60.85 in 2019 and, beginning at the end of 2021, began to skyrocket, hitting $91.41 by the end of last year.
WeWorks shifting space utilization mirrors that demand, with newer stock in preferred locations garnering more attention and booking. In New York City, locations at 134 N. 4th Street in Williamsburg, 33 Irving Plaza, and 154 W. 14th Street near Union Square are the companys busiest in New York City. Bookings are up 11% year-over-year, and the locations typically fill up by the time the doors open in the morning (citywide, occupancy is above 80% overall).
In San Francisco, locations at 650 California Street, 44 Montgomery Street, and the Salesforce Towerwith a 7% jump in bookings in Marchhave been packed. The companys space at 201 Spear, which opened in August, also tends to fill up, with roughly half the members of that space belonging to a group of AI startups.
123 Buckingham Road [Photo: WeWork]
And in London, 123 Buckingham Palace Road, 30 Churchill Place, and 10 York Roadwhich has seen bookings skyrocket 29% this March compared to last yearhave been slammed.
The massive shock of instability and uncertainty that has hit the economy in the past few months has pushed more workers, entrepreneurs, and even companies to embrace more coworking, says Robinson. WeWorks internal survey of clients found that 72% of companies plan to expand their workforce in the next two years, with the majority choosing coworking and flex. A recent report from brokerage Cushman & Wakefield also found the coworking inventory in the U.S increased by 13% year-over-year, with strong growth in markets like Nashville and Indianapolis. And the $400 million acquisition of competitor Industrious by real estate firm CBRE earlier this year shows continued confidence in flexibility.
If companies are going to act fast, it’ll probably be with us, because you can’t make that big of a mistake, says Robsinon. Sign a 10-year deal too early, then youve got a problem.
When Trump first landed in the White House in 2016, even he seemed surprised to be there. Without a transition staff in place, the Obama administration team helped shepherd in the new president while positions sat unfilled. Whereas Hillary Clinton had a complete digital site built to usher in her new presidency that would never be seen, Trump had none.
But for his second term, Trumps team was more prepared. On the first day of his presidency, he appeared on WhiteHouse.gov with a heros welcome. In a video worthy of Michael Bay, helicopters fly through the mountains before delivering Trump to the White House lawn to herald a new age. Fighter jets thunder overhead. Trump squints into the distance. A bald eagle flies by.
[Screenshots: White House/YouTube]
The 100 days that have followed have proven blindsiding to anyone who thought Trumps second term would constitute little more than a few tax cuts to the rich. In this brief window, Trump has rewritten the propaganda playbook for the modern political age by marrying well-proven tactics from decades past with a savvy approach to our current media landscape.
His approach to governing is as much a practice of world-building as it is policy building. He has woven together imagery, rhetoric, and technology to create an unnervingly convincing (if in large part illegal!) vision of the world he wants to sell (or force upon) his constituents. Trump has leveraged craftily designed aesthetics to position his destructive policies as necessary and his self-concerned personality as heroic, all while he dismantles the institutions in place to question him.
A playbook from the pastand present
From the earliest days of the presidency, weve witnessed a mass erasure of both the topics and people that the administration doesnt support. It happened in the digital world with the deletion of trans rights pages from WhiteHouse.gov and stories about Navajo Code Talkers removed from the pages of the Department of Defense. In the physical world, the erasure shows up as Trump eliminates civil rights artifacts from Smithsonian institutions and scrubs the Black Lives Matter mural from 16th Street in Washington, D.C.
Many of these deletions are part of an executive order around restoring truth in American history. Fascists routinely erase history to write a new one. And when it comes to this, and all of Trumps other communication tricks, theres not much thats original about them.
[Screenshot: whitehouse.gov]
All the techniques he uses are techniques of the past. The aesthetics are aesthetics of the present, says Barbie Zelizer, the Raymond Williams professor of communication and director of the Center for Media at Risk at the University of Pennsylvania. Shes also co-editor of Journalism: Theory, Practice and Criticism.
Zelizer believes that the entire ethos of Trump’s messaging is anchored in the early Cold War when, in the name of national security, Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy declared an all-out war on communism and anyone suspected to be supportive of it. Zelizer points out that Trumps statement from 2016I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any votershas historical precedent from this era. In 1954, pollster George Gallup described McCarthys unchecked appeal to the public with a similar framing: Even if it were known that McCarthy had killed five innocent children, [voters] would probably still go along with him.
The key word uniting the messaging of Trump and McCarthy? Enmity.
Its us versus them. When he is able to claim accolades for himself or for his administration, it is always based on an assumption that his administration is winning out over the enemy, says Zelizer, who notes there is always an enemy beyond (like China) and an enemy within (like student protestors or the judges upholding our legal system). And whomever the enemy is at any pointif thats democratic leaders, or the media, or universities, take your pickthey’re all substitutes in a rotation.
Where Zelizer sees Cold War influence, Edel Rodriguezthe Cuban-born illustrator and leading visual critic of Trumpsees the influence of the UFC and WWE. Without a hint of irony, Rodriguez points to the machismo-laden, fight-first mentality of this programming as parallel to both power-assertive fascist leadership and the greater Trump media strategy. He also admits to their strange appeal. I watch Ultimate Fighting videos because theyre nuts. But its drama. Its something, he says. And on the other side, you have the Democrats doing
Raymond Ward wants to see solar panels draped over every balcony in the United States and doesnt understand why that isnt happening.
The technology couldnt be easier to usesimply hang one or two panels over a railing and plug them into an outlet. The devices provide up to 800 watts, enough to charge a laptop or power a small fridge. Theyre popular in Germany, where everyone from renters to climate activists to gadget enthusiasts hail them as a cheap and easy way to generate electricity. Germans had registered more than 780,000 of the devices with the countrys utility regulator as of December. Theyve installed millions more without telling the government.
Here in the U.S., though, there is no market for balcony solar. Ward, a Republican state representative in Utah who learned about the tech last year, wants that to change. The way he sees it, this is an obvious solution to surging power demand. You look over there and say, Well, thats working, he told Grist. So what is it that stops us from having it here?
His colleagues agree. Last month, the Legislature unanimously passed a bill he sponsored to boost the tech, and Republican Governor Spencer Cox signed it. H.B. 340 exempts portable solar devices from state regulations that require owners of rooftop solar arrays and other power-generating systems to sign an interconnection agreement with their local utility. These deals, and other soft costs like permits, can nearly double the price of going solar.
Solar modules on the balconies of a building in Erfurt, Germany, in January 2025 [Photo: Martin Schutt/picture alliance/Getty Images]
Utahs law marks the nations first significant step to remove barriers to balcony solarbut bigger obstacles remain. Regulations and standards governing electrical devices havent kept pace with development of the technology, and it lacks essential approvals required for adoptionincluding compliance with the National Electrical Code and a product safety standard from Underwriters Laboratories. Nothing about the bill Ward wrote changes that: Utahans still cant install balcony solar because none of the systems have been nationally certified.
These challenges will take time and effort to overcome, but theyre not insurmountable, advocates of the technology said. Even now, a team of entrepreneurs and research scientists, backed by federal funding, are creating these standards. Their work mirrors what happened in Germany nearly a decade ago, when clean energy advocates and companies began lobbying the countrys electrical certification body to amend safety regulations to legalize balcony solar.
In 2017, Verband der Elektrotechnik, or VDE, a German certification body that issues product and safety standards for electrical products, released the first guideline that allowed for balcony solar systems. While such systems existed before VDE took this step, the benchmark it established allowed manufacturers to sell them widely, creating a booming industry.
Relentless individuals were key to making that happen, said Christian Ofenheusle, the founder of EmpowerSource, a Berlin-based company that promotes balcony solar. Members of a German solar industry association spent years advocating for the technology and worked with VDE to carve a path toward standardizing balcony solar systems. The initial standard was followed by revised versions in 2018 and 2019 that further outlined technical requirements.
The regulatory structure has continued to evolve. Ofenheusle has worked with other advocates to amend grid safety standards, create simple online registration for plug-in devices, and enshrine renters right to balcony solar. Politicians supported such efforts because they see the tech easing the nations reliance on Russian natural gas. Cities like Berlin and Munich have provided millions of euros in subsidies to help households buy these systems, and the country is creating a safety standard for batteries that can store the energy for later use.
Balcony solar systems feature one or two small photovoltaic panels and a microinverter; they generate enough power to charge a laptop or power a small fridge. [Photo: Tobias Schwarz/AFP/Getty Images]
Meanwhile, the United States has yet to take the first step of creating a safety standard for the technology. U.S. electrical guidelines dont account for the possibility of plugging a power-generating device into a household outlet. The nation also operates on a different system that precludes simply copying and pasting Germanys rules. The U.S. grid, for example, operates at 120 volts, while that countrys grid operates at 230 volts.
Without proper standards, a balcony solar system could pose several hazards.
One concern is a phenomenon called breaker masking. Within a home, a single circuit can provide power to several outlets. Each circuit is equipped with a circuit breaker, a safety device within the electrical panel that shuts off power if that circuit is overloaded, which happens when too many appliances try to draw too much electricity at the same time. That prevents overheating or a fire. When a balcony solar device sends power into a circuit while other appliances are drawing power from the circuit, the breaker cant detect that added power supply. If the circuit becomes overloadedmagine turning on your TV while a space heater is running and youre charging your laptop, all in the same roomthe circuit breaker might fail to activate.
This was a concern in Germany, so it developed standards that limit balcony solar units to just 800 watts, about half the amount used by a hairdryer. That threshold is considered low enough that even in the countrys oldest homes, the wiring can withstand the heating that occurs in even the worst of worst-case scenarios, said Sebastian Müller, chair of the German Balcony Solar Association, a consumer education and advocacy group. As a result, Ofenheusle said there havent been any cases of breaker masking causing harm. In fact, with millions of the devices installed nationwide, Germany has yet to see any safety issues beyond a few cases where someone tampered with the devices to add a car battery or other unsuitable hardware, he said.
Another issue in the U.S. is the lack of a compatible safety device called a ground fault circuit interrupter, or a GFCI. They are typically built into outlets installed near water sources, like a sink, washing machine, or bathtub. Theyre designed to minimize the risk of electric shock by cutting off power when, for example, a hairdryer falls into a sink. Yet there are no certified GFCI outlets in the U.S. designed for use with devices that consume power, like a blender, and those that generate it, like a balcony solar setup. Germanys equivalent of a GFCI, called a residual current device, can detect bidirectional power flows, said Andreas Schmitz, a mechanical engineer and YouTuber in Germany who makes videos about balcony solar.
Some people have raised concerns about the shock risk of touching the metal prongs of a plug after unplugging a balcony solar device. German regulators accounted for that by requiring the microinverterwhich converts currents from the panel into electricity fed into the homeshut down immediately in an outage or when it is suddenly unplugged. Most of them already have this feature, but any U.S. standard will likely need to formalize that requirement.
The lack of an Underwriters Laboratories, or UL, standard is perhaps the biggest obstacle to the adoption of balcony solar. The company certifies the safety of thousands of household electrical products; according to Iowa State University, Every light bulb, lamp, or outlet purchased in the U.S. usually has a UL symbol and says UL Listed. This assures customers that the product follows nationally recognized guidelines and can be used without the risk of a fire or shock.
While some companies have sold plug-in solar devices in the U.S. without a UL listing, the companys seal of approval typically is a prerequisite for selling products on the wider market. Consumers might be wary of using something that lacks its approval. Utahs new balcony solar policy, for example, specifies that the law applies only to UL-listed products.
Achim Ginsberg-Klemmt, vice president of engineering at the plug-in solar startup GismoPower, has been working on creating such a standard for more than a year and a half. In 2023, the Department of Energy awarded his company a grant to work with UL to develop a standard.
GismoPower sells a mobile carport with a roof of solar panels and an integrated electric vehicle charger. Unlike rooftop solar, the system doesnt need to be mounted in place but can be rolled onto a driveway and plugged in, generating electricity for the car, house, and the grid. Were basically taking rooftop solar to the next level by making it portable and accessible for renters, Ginsberg-Klemmt said. The product is in use at pilot sites nationwide, though a lack of standardized rules for plug-in solar has forced the company to negotiate interconnection agreements with local utilitiesa time-consuming and sometimes costly process.
GismoPowers product avoids one of the biggest technical challenges with balcony solar by plugging into a dedicated 240-volt outlet, the kind typically used for dryers. Such an outlet serves a single appliance and uses a dedicated circuit, sidestepping the risk of overloading. But it runs headlong into the same obstacle of lacking a compatible UL standard. Ginsberg-Klemmt is working with researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, other entrepreneurs, and engineers at Underwriters Laboratories to develop such a standard, but it hasnt been easy. We have found so many roadblocks, he told Grist.
One major sticking point is that any standard must comply with the National Electrical Code, a set of guidelines for electrical wiring in buildings that does not allow for the installation of plug-in energy systems like balcony solar. The rules are issued by the National Fire Protection Association, a nonprofit trade association, and adopted on a state-by-state basis.
The code is updated every three years, with the next iteration due later this year for the 2026 edition. Ginsberg-Klemmt and his working group submitted recommendations for amending the code to allow plug-in solarand every one of them was rejected in October.
Jeff Sargent, the National Fire Protection Associations staff liaison to the National Electrical Code committee, told Grist that this is the first time the organization had received public comments about plug-in solar systems. For now, it cannot consider amendments to allow their use until a compatible ground fault circuit interrupter exists, he said. Once thats available, he said, the association can ensure that outdoor outlets can be safely used for balcony solar.
Electrical standards are constantly evolving, and it often takes more than one cycle of code changes to allow for new products, said Sargent. Ginsberg-Klemmt said his group will continue to pursue other avenues to amend the codes.
Until that happens, a UL standard for plug-in solar is unlikely to go anywhere. But interest in plug-in energy solutions isnt going away, and decision-makers will have to adjust to that reality eventually, Ward said. It happened in Germany, where people across the political spectrum have embraced the technology. Ward believes the same thing will happen here. The way he sees it, Its just a good thing if you set up a system so people have a way to take care of as much of their own problems as they can.
This article originally appeared in Grist, a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Sign up for its newsletter here.
Elon Musks Department of Government Efficiency has torn through Washington at breakneck speed. During the first 100 days of President Donald Trumps second term, DOGE has played a central role in cutting more than 200,000 federal jobs. The organization has over that same time implemented aggressive cost-cutting measures (including to foreign food aid and medical research), overhauled longtime government cybersecurity systems, and targeted federal diversity, equity, and inclusion programs for elimination.
Most of these changes have been driven, in part, by AI toolsa move that has sparked serious concerns among experts. Critics say the rushed, untested use of artificial intelligence could lead to wrongful firings, mishandling of sensitive data, and lasting damage to core public services.
It’s misguided for us to think that people who control technology and the associated power levers are naive about AI’s capabilities, says Julia Stoyanovich, director of the Center for Responsible AI at New York University. And their goal is not to do things better, or to make it so that everything is more efficient; rather, their goal is just to reduce the size of government, to reduce government spending, and to do this in a way that is just disorienting to everybody in society.
Musk, who said earlier this month he would step back from DOGE to focus more on Tesla after the EV maker posted a dismal quarterly earnings report, has advocated for deploying AI to boost government efficiency. In practice, that has meant feeding sensitive Department of Education data into AI systems to identify programs for elimination; pushing to use AI to reassess benefits programs at the Department of Veterans Affairs; creating a chatbot for the U.S. General Services Administration to analyze contract data; and deploying AI toolsincluding Grok, the chatbot developed by xAI, which Musk ownsto monitor federal employee communications for critical sentiment toward Musk or Trump.
According to one anonymous government official who spoke to The Washington Post in February, the end goal is something even more drastic: the replacement of the human workforce with machines. (Neither the White House nor DOGE responded to Fast Companys requests for comment.)
To critics, such efforts represent a reckless and dangerous gamble. Experts warn that AI-driven government downsizing risks violating civil rights, mishandling some of the most sensitive personnel data in the country, and introducing hidden biases (even if accidentally) into critical decisions. As CNN reports, federal agencies, with their aging systems and complex missions, are ill-suited to abrupt automation, and without deep understanding of the underlying data, AI systems could misfirecutting essential staffers and services based on flawed outputs.
David Evan Harris, a chancellors public scholar with the University of California, Berkeley, tells Fast Company theres also a massive alarm bell going off around the question of data protection and whether DOGE is safeguarding the information it is plugging into outsize AI systems supplied by companies like Anthropic and Musks xAI.
It’s very unclear what kinds of security protocols the DOGE team is using, he says, and if they are taking any steps to make sure that private data of government employees and U.S. citizens, and even confidential data about U.S. government programs is not being turned into training data or retained improperly by any of these AI companies that they’re working with.
Perhaps even more concerning, as Harvard researchers Bruce Schneier and Nathan E. Sanders argued in The Atlantic in February, replacing federal civil servants with AI could fundamentally weaken democratic governance by concentrating executive power. As they see it, with fewer human workers exercising independent judgment, future leaders could reshape government agencies at the push of a buttonsidestepping traditional checks and balances designed to prevent abuses of power.
Still, there are signs the momentum around DOGE may be shifting. This month, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit against DOGE, seeking records about the agencys use of AI across federal programs, citing concerns about mass surveillance and politically motivated misuse. Meanwhile, a group of Democratic lawmakers wrote a letter to Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget, demanding more information on DOGE’s AI practices.
And despite Musks sweeping promises, analyses suggest the agencys impact has been overstated: According to recent estimates published by The New York Times, DOGEs touted cost savings might not actually amount to much, given that all the agency-related firings, rehirings, and lost productivity will cost some $135 billion this fiscal year. Public sentiment appears to be souring as well: A recent Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll found that 57% of Americans disapprove of Musks efforts with DOGEa significant uptick over February, when 49% disapproved.
These factors might force a reckoning for DOGE, but time is short. Once AI is entrenched in government operations, undoing the damage could be even harder than preventing it. The AI industry is famous right now for being locked in a race to the bottom and throwing caution to the wind so that they can launch products as fast as possible, says Harris. Combining that race to the bottom with DOGEs race to use AI for anything they can possibly think of is really concerning.
Middle management can be exhaustingparticularly at the beginning of a managerial career. On the one hand, these employees have to get down into the weeds and help members of their team do their jobs in the most effective ways. They may have some inexperienced reports who need help and development to work effectively and independently. On the other hand, their daily work is governed by layers of leadership above that restrict their autonomy and require them to convince others that new things they would like to try are worth the effort.
This combination creates a situation in which middle managers can feel locked in. They are constantly solving problems from their direct reports while determining how to carry out new orders from above. A heavy workload combined with a lack of autonomy can lead to burnout.
If you oversee middle managers, here are some things you can do to help detect whether there is a problem and intervene quickly:
Tap into your network
One significant problem middle managers have is that they may lack a good peer group. Frontline employees often band together and create a social group that creates camaraderie at work and may also extend to lunch outings or happy hour gatherings.
Middle managers (particularly when they first ascend into a supervisor role) often lose that social connection. With their promotion, they go from being one of the frontline staff to being one of them. Yet they may not be embraced immediately by other managers. So they not only struggle with the difficulties of the tasks they are given, but they may face that struggle alone.
It’s important to create a good social network that middle managers can plug into. This gives them the benefit of a community to talk to, and members of that team can alert other leaders if they see a colleague struggling.
Watch for defections
When managers start to burn out, they lose resilience. Resilience enables people to maintain a calm and even disposition, even when things go wrong. It enables managers to work closely with team members who need more training or who have made a mistake.
As emotional resilience breaks down, managers are more likely to react to mistakes and requests for assistance with anger and annoyance. They may be more likely to punish mistakes rather than use them as learning opportunities. These reactions are likely to create frustration among this managers direct reports.
As a result, members of this supervisor’s team may look for other jobs, either by transferring elsewhere in the company or leaving altogether. Exit interviews with frontline employees can help to detect this problem by gathering information about why people are leaving. If a manager is burning out, it will be more effective to work with them to help reestablish their resilience rather than putting them on a punitive performance improvement plan that does not address the emotional component of the problem.
Ask better questions
When you meet with your direct reports, you might expect to get information from them that would help you to see whether they are exhibiting signs of burnout. Unfortunately, most leaders often ask generic questions like How are you doing? While some workplaces create enough psychological safety to allow employees to feel comfortable talking about fatigue with the job, most new managers will put on a brave face and say they are fine.
To address this, it’s important to ask a few questions that require longer answers; these can provide you with insight into how your middle managers are handling the strain. One valuable approach is to ask your reports how they handled a particular situation, rather than how are they doing. This question gets your them to relive the situation in front of you, to describe what happened and how they addressed it.
A lot of what youre listening for in this response is the emotion behind it. If you see anger or frustration on the part of your supervisee, that’s a signal that they are having difficulty with the stress of the job. If they talk about losing patience with particular employees, that may also be a warning sign.
Use these conversations as a way to encourage middle managers you work with to talk with you when they are feeling overwhelmed. One of the best ways to help your team feel better about their work is for them to know that they are not dealing with stresses alone, and that you are available if they need help.
The cutting edge of zipper technology involves zippers that work remotely. Japanese zipper maker YKK says it has developed a prototype for a self-propelled zipper that zips up with just the push of a button.
These self-propelled zippers aren’t meant for your jeans or jackets, but rather for industrial uses, like tall tents that can’t be zipped up without using a ladder. Thats the mostly likely place you’ve seen YKK’s logo (it has 40% global market share). The company says the tech will save time and be safer than putting workers high up in the air to zip and unzip in hard-to-reach use cases.
YKK conducted experiments with the zippers in February. It says that in one trial, the self-propelled zipper was able to zip up a 16-foot membrane in 40 seconds; in another, it zipped two arched shelter tents together in 50 seconds.
The secret to the tech is a motorized screw that hooks the teeth of the zipper behind it as it moves forward. Video of the prototype shows the zipper and the button pushed to turn it on both connected to a cable, and the zipper itself is encased in a clear, transparent shell.
YKK isn’t releasing the self-propelled zipper yet, but says it will continue to develop the prototype for practical use. If the company can get the tech off the ground, its wide adoption could push tents, temporary shelters, and partition dividers higher than they already go without any human-ladder limitations in the way.
When the Vietnam War finally ended on April 30, 1975, it left behind a landscape scarred with environmental damage. Vast stretches of coastal mangroves, once housing rich stocks of fish and birds, lay in ruins. Forests that had boasted hundreds of species were reduced to dried-out fragments, overgrown with invasive grasses.
The term ecocide had been coined in the late 1960s to describe the U.S. militarys use of herbicides like Agent Orange and incendiary weapons like napalm to battle guerrilla forces that used jungles and marshes for cover.
Fifty years later, Vietnams degraded ecosystems and dioxin-contaminated soils and waters still reflect the long-term ecological consequences of the war. Efforts to restore these damaged landscapes and even to assess the long-term harm have been limited.
As an environmental scientist and anthropologist who has worked in Vietnam since the 1990s, I find the neglect and slow recovery efforts deeply troubling. Although the war spurred new international treaties aimed at protecting the environment during wartime, these efforts failed to compel post-war restoration for Vietnam. Current conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East show these laws and treaties still arent effective.
Agent Orange and daisy cutters
The U.S. first sent ground troops to Vietnam in March 1965 to support South Vietnam against revolutionary forces and North Vietnamese troops, but the war had been going on for years before then. To fight an elusive enemy operating clandestinely at night and from hideouts deep in swamps and jungles, the U.S. military turned to environmental modification technologies.
The most well-known of these was Operation Ranch Hand, which sprayed at least 19 million gallons of herbicides over approximately 6.4 million acres of South Vietnam. The chemicals fell on forests, and also on rivers, rice paddies, and villages, exposing civilians and troops. More than half of that spraying involved the dioxin-contaminated defoliant Agent Orange.
Herbicides were used to strip the leaf cover from forests, increase visibility along transportation routes, and destroy crops suspected of supplying guerrilla forces.
As news of the damage from these tactics made it back to the U.S., scientists raised concerns about the campaigns environmental impacts to President Lyndon Johnson, calling for a review of whether the U.S. was intentionally using chemical weapons. American military leaders position was that herbicides did not constitute chemical weapons under the Geneva Protocol, which the U.S. had yet to ratify.
Scientific organizations also initiated studies within Vietnam during the war, finding widespread destruction of mangroves, economic losses of rubber and timber plantations, and harm to lakes and waterways.
In 1969, evidence linked a chemical in Agent Orange, 2,4,5-T, to birth defects and stillbirths in mice because it contained TCDD, a particularly harmful dioxin. That led to a ban on domestic use and suspension of Agent Orange use by the military in April 1970, with the last mission flown in early 1971.
Incendiary weapons and the clearing of forests also ravaged rich ecosystems in Vietnam.
The U.S. Forest Service tested large-scale incineration of jungles by igniting barrels of fuel oil dropped from planes. Particularly feared by civilians was the use of napalm bombs, with more than 400,000 tons of the thickened petroleum used during the war. After these infernos, invasive grasses often took over in hardened, infertile soils.
Rome Plows, massive bulldozers with an armor-fortified cutting blade, could clear 1,000 acres a day. Enormous concussive bombs, known as daisy cutters, flattened forests and set off shock waves killing everything within a 3,000-foot radius, down to earthworms in the soil.
The U.S. also engaged in weather modification through Project Popeye, a secret program from 1967 to 1972 that seeded clouds with silver iodide to prolong the monsoon season in an attempt to cut the flow of fighters and supplies coming down the Ho Chi Minh Trail from North Vietnam. Congress eventually passed a bipartisan resolution in 1973 urging an international treaty to prohibit the use of weather modification as a weapon of war. That treaty came into effect in 1978.
The U.S. military contended that all these tactics were operationally successful as a trade of trees for American lives.
Despite Congresss concerns, there was little scrutiny of the environmental impacts of U.S. military operations and technologies. Research sites were hard to access, and there was no regular environmental monitoring.
Recovery efforts have been slow
After the fall of Saigon to North Vietnamese troops on April 30, 1975, the U.S. imposed a trade and economic embargo on all of Vietnam, leaving the country both war-damaged and cash-strapped.
Vietnamese scientists told me they cobbled together small-scale studies. One found a dramatic drop in bird and mammal diversity in forests. In the A Li valley of central Vietnam, 80% of forests subjected to herbicides had not recovered by the early 1980s. Biologists found only 24 bird and five mammal species in those areas, far below normal in unsprayed forests.
Only a handful of ecosystem restoration projects were attempted, hampered by shoestring budgets. The most notable began in 1978, when foresters began hand-replanting mangroves at the mouth of the Saigon River in Cn Gi forest, an area that had been completely denuded.
In inland areas, widespread tree-planting programs in the late 1980s and 1990s finally took root, but they focused on planting exotic trees like acacia, which did not restore the original diversity of the natural forests.
Chemical cleanup is still underway
For years, the U.S. also denied responsibility for Agent Orange cleanup, despite the recognition of dioxin-associated illnesses among U.S. veterans and testing that revealed continuing dioxin exposure among potentially tens of thousands of Vietnamese.
The first remediation agreement between the two countries only occurred in 2006, after persistent advocacy by veterans, scientists, and nongovernmental organizations led Congress to appropriate $3 million for the remediation of the Da Nang airport.
That project, completed in 2018, treated 150,000 cubic meters of dioxin-laden soil at an eventual cost of over $115 million, paid mostly by the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID. The cleanup required lakes to be drained and contaminated soil, which had seeped more than 9 feet deeper than expected, to be piled and heated to break down the dioxin molecules.
Another major hot spot is the heavily contaminated Bin Ho airbase, where local residents continue to ingest high levels of dioxin through fish, chicken, and ducks.
Agent Orange barrels were stored at the base, which leaked large amounts of the toxin into soil and water, where it continues to accumulate in animal tissue as it moves up the food chain. Remediation began in 2019; however, further work is at risk with the Trump administrations near elimination of USAID, leaving it unclear if there will be any American experts in Vietnam in charge of administering this complex project.
Laws to prevent future ecocide are complicated
While Agent Oranges health effects have understandably drawn scrutiny, its long-term ecological consequences have not been well studied.
Current-day scientists have far more options than those 50 years ago, including satellite imagery, which is being used in Ukraine to identify fires, flooding, and pollution. However, these tools cannot replace on-the-ground monitoring, which often is restricted or dangerous during wartime.
The legal situation is similarly complex.
In 1977, the Geneva Conventions governing conduct during wartime were revised to prohibit widespread, long term, and severe damage to the natural environment. A 1980 protocol restricted incendiary weapons. Yet oil fires set by Iraq during the Gulf War in 1991, and recent environmental damage in the Gaza Strip, Ukraine, and Syria indicate the limits of relying on treaties when there are no strong mechanisms to ensure compliance.
An international campaign currently underway calls for an amendment to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court to add ecocide as a fifth prosecutable crime alongside genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and aggression.
Some countries have adopted their own ecocide laws. Vietnam was the first to legally state in its penal code that Ecocide, destroying the natural environment, whether committed in time of peace or war, constitutes a crime against humanity. Yet the law has resulted in no prosecutions, despite several large pollution cases.
Both Russia and Ukraine also have ecocide laws, but these have not prevented harm or held anyone accountable for damage during the ongoing conflict.
Lessons for the future
The Vietnam War is a reminder that failure to address ecological consequences, both during war and after, will have long-term effects. What remains in short supply is the political will to ensure that these impacts are neither ignored nor repeated.
Pamela McElwee is a professor of human ecology at Rutgers University.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Since assuming office, the Trump administration has upended diversity, equity, and inclusion programs with startling efficiency. Over his first 100 days, President Donald Trump has taken a multipronged approach to derailing DEI initiatives across the federal government, academic institutions, and even the private sector.
Through an array of executive actions, Trump has targeted federal anti-discrimination measures that date back 60 years and threatened to withhold funding from public schools and universities that maintain DEI programs. By explicitly directing federal agencies to investigate private employers, Trumps orders have also had a chilling effect across corporate Americaleading a number of companies to cut back on DEI initiatives or at least create the illusion of doing so.
As each day seems to bring a new DEI-related action or court ruling, it’s clear that undoing the progress many employers and federal institutions have made on equity and inclusion continues to be a core priority for this government. Heres a closer look at how Trump has chipped away at DEI programs during just his first few months in office:
The federal workforce
Trump has moved swiftly to eliminate DEI programs that are squarely within his purviewnamely, reversing the equity requirements that President Joe Biden had put in place during his term. One of Trumps first edicts was an executive order that forced agencies to eliminate all illegal DEI efforts. The order explicitly noted that DEI offices would have to be disbanded and roles like chief diversity officer would have to be terminated. The Trump administration also told federal workers they were required to report anyone who tried to continue DEI work under a different nameor risk adverse consequences.
Since Trump handed down this order in January, federal agencies have cut at least 428 DEI roles and put those workers on administrative leave, according to The New York Times. (That figure only includes data from the agencies that have publicly reported those job cuts.) Some federal workers who were affected by the cuts claimed their roles had little to do with DEI. Others have said that even their employee resource groups were affected as agencies cracked down on DEI to comply with the executive order.
Through other executive actions, Trump reiterated the importance of merit-based hiring across the federal government, and that it should not be based on impermissible factors, such as ones commitment to illegal racial discrimination under the guise of equity, or ones commitment to the invented concept of gender identity over sex.
By rescinding an executive order that dates back to 1965, Trump also took aim at a key policy that has been critical to promoting racial equity and curtailing discriminatory hiring practices among federal contractors. For decades, this order has forced the hand of companies that do business with the federal government, compelling them to adopt affirmative action plans that diversified the workforce. With Trumps action, some of the largest employers in the country are no longer subject to those requirements.
The education system
In recent weeks, Trump has ramped up pressure on the education system, fixing his sights on some of the most elite universities in the country. The administration is currently in the midst of a very public fight with Harvard University, stripping the school of billions of dollars in federal funding, in part because of its refusal to amend its DEI policies and admissions practices. (A number of other universities have also been singled out by Trump over DEI-related issues and face similar threats to their funding.)
Last week, Trump pushed through an executive action aimed at college accreditors, who he argues have helped impose DEI requirements on universities. Trumps actions have already pushed many colleges to revise their DEI programs, regardless of whether they have been explicitly targeted: A recent Politico analysis found that more than 30 public universities have either closed their DEI offices or restructured them over the past few yearsincluding the University of Michigan, which was once known for its robust DEI program.
While Trumps ongoing battle with higher education has garnered more attention, other academic institutions have not escaped scrutiny over their DEI efforts. In a memo earlier this month, the Trump administration ordered all public schools to eliminate DEI programs, again threatening to rescind federal funding. For now, this directive has been blocked by federal judgesand a coalition of attorneys general in Democratic states have brought a lawsuit against the Trump administration. Since taking office, Trump has also mounted investigations into the public school systems in California, Colorado, and Maine over DEI-related concerns like gender-neutral bathrooms and the rights of transgender students.
The private sector
Beyond the executive order targeting federal contractors, the Trump administration has attempted to exert its influence over the private sector in other ways. In the same action, Trump clearly directed federal agencies to investigate private-sector companies over any DEI programs that constitute illegal discrimination or preferences. This edict has sparked fear and confusion among corporate leaders, with many executives reportedly losing sleep over the threat of federal investigations. Experts say that a major source of concern has been the lack of clarity around what might be considered illegal DEI.
Trumps orders have accelerated a shift in corporate America that had already been underway for some time. In the years since the racial reckoning of 2020, many companies have quietly backed away from the DEI initiatives they had seemingly embraced at the time.
Since the Supreme Court overturned affirmative action in 2023, however, employers have taken more drastic action in response to conservative activists like Robby Starbuck, who has waged social media campaigns to pressure companies into cutting their DEI program. Companies like Walmart and McDonalds have eliminated certain DEI policies and pulled out of the Human Rights Commissions Corporate Equality Index, an annual benchmarking survey that measures workplace inclusion for LGBTQ+ workers and is often touted by employers. Even tech giants like Meta and Google have made notable changes to representation goals, which had become common practice across the industry.
Some DEI experts argue that not all of these changes should be seen as a full-throated rebuke of diversity work. In some cases, employers are merely folding DEI work into other teams or tweaking programs to ensure they are legally soundnot to mention evaluating whether they continue to be effective. If you see that theres no longer a DEI title at this company, I think that could be bad news, Joelle Emerson, the cofounder and CEO of culture and inclusion platform Paradigm, previously told Fast Company. Or it could be that the company is actually very strategically embedding some of this expertise in ways that are going to have more impact on the business. In fact, a survey recently conducted by Paradigm found that only a fraction of companies19%had actually reduced funding for DEI programs.
Still, plenty of companies are now operating from a place of fear, carefully calibrating their external messaging on DEI and in some cases overcorrecting to avoid litigation or excessive scrutiny from Trump.
The administrations anti-DEI agenda also seems to be shaping the Equal Employment Opportunity Commissions priorities under new acting chair Andrea Lucas, who has issued guidance on what the agency considers unlawful DEI-related discrimination. In March, Lucas made a controversial decision to send letters to 20 prominent law firms requesting details on their DEI-related practicesfour of which have already reached settlement agreements with the EEOC and agreed to drop the term DEI.
