The world’s biggest tech companies have consolidated their power in recent years, driving huge profits and soaring market values. Apple (phones), Google (search), Microsoft (software), Facebook (social) and Amazon (retail) dominate their respective sectors thanks to winning products and services. But perhaps their most prized and valuable attribute: strong brand names.
(Photo by Tomohiro Ohsumi/Getty Images)
A robust brand helps drive demand and pricing power. The five tech brands above do it better than anyone else and are the five most valuable brands in the world by Forbes’ count, worth a combined $586 billion, up 20% from last year.
Leading the pack as the world’s most valuable brand for the eighth straight year is Apple, with a value of $182.8 billion, up 8%.
Only Apple, thanks to its hard-core fan base, could get away with pricing a phone at $999 and proceed to sell 29 million of them in less than two months, as Apple did at the end of 2017, per Canalys research. Nearly one-quarter of those sales were in China, which hints at Apple’s global reach. Despite some gloom-and-doom forecasts for China ahead of its earnings announcement this month, Apple announced 21% revenue growth for the quarter in the world’s most populous country.
Samsung Electronics actually sold more phones than Apple during the fourth quarter of 2017, but Wall Street firm Canaccord Genuity estimated Apple captured 87% of smartphone industry profits, thanks to the introduction of the pricey iPhone X to its phone lineup. The profit disparity is reflected in their brand values, with the Apple brand worth four times as much as Samsung ($47.6 billion and ranked seventh overall).
Google ranks second overall among the top brands for the third straight year, with a value of $132.1 billion, up 30%. Apple has a 38% lead on the search brand in terms of value, but Google has closed the gap in recent years, as the difference was 121% three years ago.
Google’s parent, Alphabet, dabbles in other sectors with smart-home technology, self-driving cars, aging research and more. But almost all of those “Other Bets” lose money. It is the search business that pays the bills, with operating profit margins 26% last year. Google is the ubiquitous term for search despite the best efforts of Yahoo, Baidu and Microsoft’s Bing to cut into Google’s 80%-plus global market share. It is Google with a lower case “g” that appears in the Oxford Dictionary as the term for search on the Internet.
The fellow tech brands that round out the top five most valuable brands all had big gains, including Microsoft ($104.8 billion, up 21%), Facebook ($94.8 billion, up 29%) and Amazon ($70.9 billion, up 31%).
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The World’s Most Valuable Brands 2018
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Amazon overtaking Coca-Cola was the only change in the top five this year. Coca-Cola’s brand value inched up 2% to $57.3 billion, and it was the only non-tech brand in the top seven. Coca-Cola branded sales represented 45% of the company’s total last year, with 13 billion cases sold. Changing drinking habits globally are impacting Coca-Cola, but brand remains uber-important in a sector where you are selling sugar and water. Coca-Cola continues to lead the pack.
Forbes evaluated more than 200 global brands to determine our final list of the 100 most valuable. Brands were required to have a presence in the U.S., which knocked out some big brands like China’s Alibaba and Tencent. The top 100 includes product brands like Proctor & Gamble’s Gillette, as well as brands marketed under their corporate name like American Express.
Forbes valued the brands on three years of earnings and allocated a percentage of those earnings based on the role brands play in each industry (e.g., high for luxury goods and beverages, low for airlines and oil companies). We applied the average price-to-earnings multiple over the past three years to these earnings to arrive at the final brand value (click herefor the complete methodology).
The 100 most valuable brands are worth a cumulative $2.15 trillion, up 10% from a year ago. They range from Apple at nearly $200 billion to No. 100 KFC at $7.4 billion. Credit climbing profits for the jump in values overall. Earnings before interest and taxes rose 14% on average for the 100 brands.
Tech brands are the most prevalent, representing 20% of the final list, including the top five. Financial services, led by Visa ($24.5 billion), had 13 brands make the cut, followed by autos with 12 brands. Toyota ($44.7 billion) ranked ninth overall and was the top auto brand.
The top 100 is a global list with brands from 16 different countries, but the U.S. dominates with 54 entries, down from 56 last year. Germany (12 brands), along with France and Japan (7 each) were the next best-represented countries.
Netflix ($11.5 billion, up 35%) and PayPal ($7.5 billion, up 33%) were the biggest gainers in the top 100. Netflix doubled its global subscriber base over the past three years to 125 million. Netflix’s premium brand helped push through a U.S. price increase last year and still add to its subscriber base. PayPal’s subscriber base hit 237 million this year, up 43% versus 2015. Customer engagement is high, with 35 transactions per account over the last 12 months.
Finally, some good news. Following weeks of leaks which delivered significant blows to Galaxy Note 9 expectations, one of the industry’s best insiders has a massive upgrade coming to Samsung’s new smartphone…
The ever-mysterious yet consistently accurate Ice Universe, says Samsung has plans to double the Galaxy Note 9’s storage to a massive 512GB while also pushing its RAM to 8GB. Both would be firsts for Samsung’s Galaxy ranges.
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Galaxy Note 9 concept was too ambitious
Furthermore, it is worth noting that the Galaxy Note 9 will retain a microSD slot (compatible with up to 512GB) which means this could be the world’s first mass-market 1TB-capable smartphone. Given the recently released Galaxy S9 also only has 4GB of RAM (the Plus variant has 6GB), a jump to 8GB would deliver bragging rights as well.
But there’s one problem.
Ice Universe reveals both moves will happen “If you are lucky” aka Samsung is working on providing them, but has yet to fully commit ahead of the Galaxy Note 9’s early release.
How much should we read into this? Given Ice Universe’s track record, a lot. Previously the leaker broke the Galaxy Note 8 design, revealed the first real-world photos of the Galaxy S8 and provided every single specification of the Galaxy S9. So let’s hope we “are lucky”.
Judge rules in favor of couple seeking to have son evicted from house
A 30-year-old man court-ordered to vacate his parents’ home on Tuesday said he should be given more time to leave because of how much his parents “harassed” him about moving out.
Michael Rotondo, of Camillus, New York, had been living rent-free in his parents’ Syracuse-area home for eight years when a State Supreme Court judge ruled on Tuesday in his parents’ favor, ordering him to move out.
Rotondo, who plans to appeal the decision, said he stopped speaking to his parents when they “alluded” to wanting him to leave the house in October, just one month after he lost custody and visitation rights of his son.
“I’m not bothering them by living here,” Michael Rotondo said in an interview with ABC News’ “Good Morning America.” “It’s little to no cost to them, and considering how much they’ve harassed me, I think it’s the least that they should be required to do, which is just let me hang here a bit longer and use their hot water and electricity.”
By the end of October, Michael Rotondo said his parents were demanding he get a full-time job, health insurance and sessions with a therapist, but he said he “didn’t need any of those things.”
“My parents alluded to the fact that they no longer wanted me living in the house, and I was devastated from the loss, and not seeing my son anymore,” Rotondo said. “After that, I was like, ‘I’m done with you guys.'”
Mark and Christina Rotondo said they gave their son multiple notices to vacate and even offered him money to help him find a place of his own.
Michael Rotondo admitted that he accepted the money, but used it for “other things.”
“I took it but with consideration for my plans, and how my finances interacted with those plans, I did use the money for other things, but I don’t regret that,” he said. “I would have preferred to have kept the money and given it back to them … but I had to use it, and that’s just how it is.”
He also accused his parents of trying to “stir something up” to support their court case against him.
“Me and my father recently tried to occupy the same space at the same time … so I said ‘excuse me,’ and he said, ‘I will not excuse you, Michael,’” he said “He’s just trying to stir something up so that he could get me to say something. It’s my overwhelming belief that he’s trying to make it so that he could try and call the police or something to support his case.”
Michael Rotondo had asked for six months to vacate, but the judge disagreed.
He said he was shocked by the ruling and that he couldn’t believe the judge would “make it so that these people can just throw me out instead of letting me stay here.”
Michael Rotondo also addressed critics, including some in his own neighborhood, who claim he wants to live rent-free forever.
“I don’t like living here at all,” he said. “My parents and myself are like two parties that don’t speak the same language.”
“It’s a very serious thing to me to get out, but I have rights, and that’s really what it boils down to. I just want a little more time to get out of here.”
Since Michael Rotondo’s looking for employment, Villa Italian Kitchen, a chain of pizza stores with hundreds of locations nationwide, is offering him a job.
“At Villa, we feel for millennials, across the board,” the company’s COO, Andrew Steinberg, said in a statement. “It’s tough out there. With that said … Michael, hey dude. We are offering you a store-level gig, complete with extensive training to get you up to speed, at any one of our 250 locations worldwide. We heard your parents offered you $1,100 to get out. We’ll do you one better. Literally, one. Offer from us is on the table for $1,101 to come join our team. Consider it a signing bonus. We gotchu, bud.”
A sinkhole has opened up on the White House North lawn and, no, this is not a metaphor.
Voice of America reporter Steve Herman reports that the swamp now has a new drainage system, it’s a result of the ground beneath this administration rapidly crumbling, again it is not a metaphor, and—like Robert Mueller probe—it is expanding.
According to Herman, a second sinkhole—a vice sinkhole, if you will—opened up next to the first in celebration of Gemini season. Both holes have set up GoFundMe accounts to support their progress in rapidly opening up the gates of Hell. At the timing of this writing, both GoFundMe campaigns had exceeded their goal.
It’s a bold but unsurprising resistance action on the part of the planet Earth, one of the Trump administration’s biggest enemies.
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Experts expect Trump to declare war on the planet at some point before the midterm elections, so presumably this sinkhole is a preemptive first strike. We reached out to the sinkhole for comments. “Not to get too political,” the sinkhole said, “but I’m really looking forward to swallowing this entire White House into the molten lake of lava that sits in the middle of this planet, next to the dragon cave and the Starbucks.”
The unexplained rapid dissolution of the ground on which the White House stands is, again, not metaphorical but actually happening and hopefully will be captured on a live webcam. Is there anything more American than tuning in in real-time to watch the once-hallowed halls now trod by creeps and Dick Tracy villains tumble into the abyss like a Bluth Company model home?
It’s all happening. And by that I mean, The Happening. The Happening is happening.
Breaking: the sinkhole just inked a multi-year sitcom deal to star in a revival of What’s Happening?
The good news for the president is that a live cam of the sinkhole would probably give him the best ratings of his life, so things are looking up for everyone. The bad news is that the sinkhole currently has a 98% approval rating.
It’s also being reported that Robert Mueller has recently brought a spelunker on to his team and will be following the investigation where ever it leads him, up to and including the La Croix-filled, left-leaning, atrophying core of the planet.
OXNARD, Calif. — Kevin de León is one of the most prominent Democratic figures in the nation’s most Democratic state. He has drawn national attention from the Democratic left for a spirited challenge to Senator Dianne Feinstein and for the aggressive legislative challenges to President Trump’s policies advanced by the State Senate under his leadership.
But these days, Mr. de León is struggling for a toehold as he tries to negotiate the fraught and complicated terrain of trying to topple someone widely seen as a California institution. At 84, Ms. Feinstein is a five-term senator who began her political career as a member of the San Francisco board of supervisors in 1969, when Mr. de León was just 4 years old.
Mr. de León, 51, represents what many party members see as one of the leading faces of the next generation of California Democratic leadership amid calls for Ms. Feinstein to step aside to make room for the next class of leaders.
But Mr. de León’s struggles suggest that this moment of transition remains a work in progress. He would seem to have the right political makeup to lead the party to its next chapter. He is more liberal than Ms. Feinstein at a time when the left is on the rise. He is Latino in a state where the power of Latino voters continues to grow. And he is coming off almost four years as president of the Senate, giving him a platform to present himself as one of the state’s most aggressive leaders in opposing Mr. Trump.
Yet he is running against a powerful remnant of California’s old guard who enjoys strong historical, cultural and sentimental ties to many Democrats who have followed Ms. Feinstein’s career over the decades. Mr. de León’s run is exposing the challenges for a candidate who at any other time — or against another opponent — would seem to be a potentially powerful competitor.
Mr. de León is not, for the most part, facing questions on his record; rather, in the view of many of Ms. Feinstein’s supporters, she is a highly successful senator and foil to Mr. Trump, especially on national security issues, and there is simply no reason for her to go.
Ms. Feinstein’s hometown paper, The San Francisco Chronicle, in endorsing her, referred to Mr. de León as “the Young Turk.” In many ways, Mr. de León — who was blocked from seeking re-election to the Senate because of term limits — may end up being the right person but at the wrong time.
“I am not delusional,” he said over an açaí bowl at a diner in San Diego. “Listen, I am not naïve to the fact that people are not shouting my name all over the state of California. What we’ve identified is after 25 years of unchallenged incumbency, people in California want a change. And a new voice representing them. I want to be that voice.”
But he said, “It’s a tough race.”
Mr. de León did have a moment of triumph, as it were, a few months ago when he drew 54 percent of the delegate vote at the state Democratic convention in San Diego. That was enough to block Ms. Feinstein from winning the party’s endorsement (she drew 37 percent) but shy of the 60 percent needed to secure it for himself.
Since then, there is little sign that any electricity generated from the convention floor has powered him to greater political success. The other day, he sat down for 90 minutes with the editorial board of The Chronicle making a case for its support; less than 24 hours after he left, the paper posted its endorsement of Ms. Feinstein. A few weeks later, another indignity — President Barack Obama, who has almost without exception stayed out of nonlocal Democratic primaries since leaving the White House, weighed in with a rare endorsement. He backed Ms. Feinstein.
Polls, while of questionable accuracy given the mostly unknown field of candidates from both parties, suggest Mr. de León is struggling to win one of the top two spots in the June 5 nonpartisan primary. Ms. Feinstein has $10.4 million in the bank, including $5 million she lent her campaign, compared with $672,000 for Mr. de León, as of March 31.
So it was that Mr. de León could be found one recent Saturday driving himself around in his blue Chevy Volt from rally to picnic, singing along to Morrissey on the radio, in a one-car campaign caravan that took him from downtown Los Angeles to Thousand Oaks to Oxnard.
Mr. de León has earned applause from some Democrats for leading the Senate as it challenged Mr. Trump.
But Mr. de León’s tenure was also marked by a flood of sexual harassment cases involving lawmakers and legislative aides. Nearly 200 women signed a letter complaining of rampant sexual misconduct in Sacramento, and the disclosures forced Mr. de León and other legislative leaders to revamp disciplinary procedures.
He has hammered Ms. Feinstein for showing a willingness to work with Mr. Trump and he has taken positions on issues — military intervention, health care, tax cuts, among them — that stand in contrast to the more moderate and measured senator.
More pointedly, he made a point of contrasting his background with Ms. Feinstein, portraying her as the wealthy doyenne of San Francisco Democratic politics and himself as the working-class son of a San Diego barrio seeking to become this state’s first Latino senator. Mr. de León recently took a reporter on a tour of Logan Heights, the San Diego neighborhood where he grew up, and lingered at a single-room apartment where he shared a bed with his single mother who worked as a housekeeper. The tour was memorialized by an aide for a Facebook Live feed.
“You hear people say, ‘Well, a four-year degree isn’t needed,’ ” Connie Ballmer, the philanthropist and wife of the former Microsoft C.E.O. Steve Ballmer, recently told me.
“But then if you turn to them and say, ‘What do you want for your child?’ they wouldn’t dream of not having their kid go to a four-year college,” she continued. “They said it’s not needed — but they need it.”
Ballmer is right. The boomlet of skepticism about college comes disproportionately from upper-middle-class people who have the luxury of airing hypothetical concerns about education, without having to worry that their own children will be influenced by them. Yet the misplaced skepticism can do real damage to poor and working-class teenagers who hear it and take it seriously.
The evidence remains overwhelming: College is the single most reliable path to the middle class and beyond. No, it doesn’t guarantee a good life. Nothing does. But earning a good living without a college degree today is difficult.
College graduates earn vastly more and are far more likely to be employed. They live longer, are more likely to be married and are more satisfied on average with their lives. These relationships appear to be at least partly causal, too. If you want more details, you can read some of mypreviouscolumns or dig into a longtrailofacademicstudies.
I was talking to Connie Ballmer because she and her husband recently donated $20 million to an organization with a track record of helping more low- and middle-income students go to college. It’s called College Advising Corps. It started in 2005 and now oversees about 650 recent college graduates. They work for two-year stints in high schools across the country, advising students about two- and four-year colleges.
The advisers are needed because many high-school guidance counselors are overworked. Nationwide, the average counselor is responsible for almost 500 students, according to Nicole Hurd, the founder of College Advising Corps. The student advisers also have the advantage of empathy: Many are themselves recent first-generation college graduates.
As Ballmer says, the counselors are sending an implicit message to the students: “You can do this.” The Ballmer gift will allow the advising corps to grow by about 50 percent in coming years to 1,000. It will also help the organization evaluate its results and try to improve. One area where it can do better: lifting the college graduation rate of the low-income students it advises.
Department of disagreement. A good example of skepticism about college is an op-ed that ran in The Times this week, called, “College May Not Be Worth It Anymore,” by Ellen Ruppel Shell, a Boston University professor of journalism. I disagree with it, for all the reasons mentioned above. More important, the authors of the research cited in the piece disagree with it.
One of them, Tim Bartik, an economist at the Upjohn Institute, wrote on Twitter: “It draws the wrong conclusions from our work, and omits some important findings.” He wrote a series of tweets with further explanation.
The research by Bartik and his colleague Brad Hershbein finds huge returns on four-year college degrees for all students, including those from lower-income families. For a typical student, a degree is worth about $500,000.
The full Opinion report from The Times follows, including Marguerite Joutz on the college that almost closed.
There are several tenets of preventing school violence that everyone needs to know. I want to give you a look at them and then leave it up to you to read, see, and implement them.
It can happen to anyone, any-where, at any time, for any reason.
It doesn’t matter how small your school is, it can happen there. Firearms have been confiscated in schools as small as a couple of hundred students. Shootings have occurred in schools that serve an entire county, Faucett Missouri 1988, which is the incident that got me started thinking about school violence.
2.Take responsibility and be accountable
For parents they need to take responsibility for their children and what they do and not deny or freak out if someone accuses their teenager of doing something wrong. Likewise, schools need to be accountable for the things that they do and don’t do to prevent these, injurious or not, incidents
3. The CHH attitude
The most dangerous attitude that anyone within the school can have. It extends to parents, students, teachers, administrators, and the school district officials. It means that they believe it can’t happen here to their school…for whatever reason.
4. We can either choose to act upon or ignore the warning signs
If you act upon the warning signs, all 22 of them, then you may prevent an incident. No guarantees of this but Sometimes they are ignored and… Look at the warning signs that were ignored by the Broward County Sheriff’s office and FBI in Parkland Florida.
5. Warning signs
If you see as many as 4 of the warning signs in another student or teenager then you probably don’t have too much to worry about. But if you begin to see 7 or more it may be time to worry and take action.
6. Hold the school accountable for physical security
A parent doesn’t need to know every security measure that the school has in place, but they do need to know if measures are in place to protect their children. The schools need to know what measures they need to have and then take the initiative to install or implement them, without costing the tax payer millions of dollars on elaborate ideas when simple ones would work just as well or better.
7. Training
Most schools have an active shooter plan but are afraid to run drills for fear of alarming parents and students. They are afraid to upset the mentally and psychologically fragile teenagers we seem to be raising. By upsetting them, they risk having a parent filing a lawsuit because their lil angel was traumatized. They would be traumatized worse if an incident occurred by seeing blood splatter everywhere, or on them, and hearing gun shots reverberating in their heads.
Use the Fight, run, or hide method
This is contrary to every thing you have heard about an active shooter incident. It can prevent your teenager or child from becoming prey to a predator that walks on 2 legs and carries a deadly weapon. 2 recent incidents in the news has proven this out very well, Antioch, TN. In a Waffle House on April 22nd and Phoenix on the 9th of May in a Circle K.
These are the basic items that you need to learn in helping to prevent violence in our schools and our children from being murdered there. Remember parents don’t necessarily need to know all of the security measures. They just need to be assured that children are safe and secure inside the school as they should be. The school needs to remember that if they lie or mislead parents about security measures…they open themselves up to lawsuits and will cost everyone, especially our children, financial resources that could have been used elsewhere for their betterment and education.
Robert D. Sollars has more than 35 years of experience in the security field and assists organizations to safeguard the lives of their employees & students to lessen their risk of violence as well as other security related issues with time tested and proven ideas.
He is now the author of 3 books on preventing violence in both schools and businesses, the latest: Murder in the Classroom: A Practical Guide for Prevention
All three of them available, by June 25, on Amazon.
A sexuality expert said that parents should ask babies for consent before changing their diapers. And people reacted.
Deanne Carson, who works with Australia’s Body Safe, a child sexual abuse prevention organization, appeared on ABC to speak about starting consent education as early as possible, such as when the baby is — well — just a baby.
“We work with parents from birth … just about how to set up a culture of consent in their homes. ‘I’m going to change your nappy now; is that OK?’ Of course a baby’s not going to respond ‘Yes, Mum, that’s awesome. I’d love to have my nappy changed,'” Carson said.
People seem to be pretty split in their reactions to what she’s saying. On one hand, leaving room for a baby to hear that they have bodily autonomy seems absolutely important; on the other, some people have referred to this advice as “lefty lunacy.”
Carson herself chimed in after the outrage began. “Sadly, some people have chosen to ridicule me (oh no! Pink hair! Must be a lesbian!) and the notion of giving infants bodily autonomy (poo in nappies har har amiright?!),” Newsweek reported the educator wrote on Facebook.
Whether or not you think Carson’s example was good, her message is right on.
It’s easy to dismiss Carson’s ideas. After all, have you met a baby? They don’t know what’s going on half the time, and asking if you can change their diaper isn’t going to produce a viable response. And the alternative, of course, is not to leave them in a wet diaper for the rest of the day — we can all agree on that.
Take a second to really think about what Carson’s saying, though, and it doesn’t appear nearly as controversial. What you’re doing by making eye contact, making your intentions known, and leaving space for the baby is setting up a “culture of consent.” The idea is that as the child ages, they’ll be more likely to recognize their body is their own, that other people shouldn’t touch it without permission, and that it’s OK to say no.
The message of consent is especially important considering the staggering child sexual abuse statistics in America.
While it’s not known exactly how many children are victimized sexually each year, in 2010, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services reported that of children who’d been maltreated, 9.2% had been sexually abused. In addition, 20% of adult women and up to 10% of adult men recalled instances of child sexual abuse. The valid warnings to never get into a car with a stranger or take candy from someone we don’t know don’t always incorporate the reality that the majority of those who’ve been victimized are hurt by people they know well. That’s why the idea of consent — that your body is your own and you are able to say no and speak out — needs to be taught as early as possible.
That’s a message that’s both important and a little easier to understand.
“[Carson’s] simply making the very reasonable case for establishing a ‘culture of consent’ in households and with children from the youngest possible age,” Katie Russell, a spokesperson for the nonprofit sexual violence organization Rape Crisis England and Wales told Newsweek. “This is about both getting parents and carers into positive habits of not assuming consent from their children and about teaching children that they have a right to decide what happens to their bodies.”
And as they grow, that kind of autonomy will help them be more assertive when it comes to non-consensual touch and to recognize that they shouldn’t touch others without their consent either. Sure, Carson’s example may have come across as a little out of left field, but we could all do better in making sure that children understand consent and learn to set boundaries at every step of the growing process.
Neil deGrasse Tyson is a celebrated astrophysicist, a sought-after intellectual, a Harvard and Columbia grad, and the Frederick P. Rose Director of the Hayden Planetarium. Yet, despite all of his accolades, he can’t read a room.
Buzzkill Lightyear struck again on Thursday after tweeting about the lunar inaccuracies in the historical drama Chappaquiddick. But since the film focuses on the tragic death of Mary Jo Kopechne, a 28-year-old campaign strategist who drowned when Senator Ted Kennedy drove his car off of a bridge in 1969, Tyson’s preoccupation with the phase of the moon is in poor taste.
“Chappaquiddick occurred just 2 days before the first lunar landing. So you’d think the Film producers would get the Moon right for July 18, 1969,” Tyson tweeted. “Kennedy sees it full, but the actual phase was a 4-day old waxing crescent that set long before the midnight tragedy. I’m just saying.”
At best, highlighting the wrongful usage of the full moon is a needless tangent, but Twitter users accused Tyson of glossing over the tragic event to make it about himself and his ability to “well actually” any situation.
Tyson is constantly policing everything from pop culture to the English language. On Earth Day — a day that should be celebrated through awareness building and clean energy resourcefulness — and as a famed scientist, Tyson had a real opportunity to showcase better environmental practices and raise awareness. Instead, he tweeted that “the perennial cry to ‘Save Earth’ is odd,” since, as most people already know, Earth “survives massive asteroid strikes” and all that.
The groan-worthy tweets don’t end there. Earlier that month, Tyson went after Friday the 13th, explaining that the date is insignificant (despite its historic cultural significance) and appearing to suggest we all stop enjoying fun holidays. As one microbiologist aptly pointed out: “Your bio should say, ‘Special skills: Ability to suck the fun out of any room.’
However, Tyson’s buzzkill tweets might be more damaging than that, and scientists are beginning to express concern with the way in which Tyson contributes to scientific discourse online.
“Neil deGrasse Tyson’s bullshit is worth criticizing because he popularizes a rhetoric which he can promote factually, objectively wrong things from a faulty basis,” data scientist Emily Gorcenski tweeted. “This pattern has been weaponized in online rhetoric.”
Tyson’s “well actually” tweets are more than just condescending; they are sometimes factually inaccurate and harmful. The science community was livid when he tweeted in 2016: “If there were ever a species for whom sex hurt, it surely went extinct long ago.” This massive misunderstanding of sexual selection isn’t doing cats, squid, anglerfish, or nearly one in 10 women any favors.
Scientists are getting sick of the way Tyson’s tweets are pitting science against facts, films, and general fun, which is not the best usage of the discipline. So Tyson, please, for the love of science and its continued use, the next time you want to dismiss the retelling of a historic tragedy just because the moon in the background wasn’t a waning crescent, maybe take Entertainment Editor James Grebey’s advice and just don’t.
Tom had just come out of his physiotherapist’s checkup and was worried about what he heard. Like many other Americans who commute to work by car he was suffering from frequent pain in the back of his thighs. Tom’s doctor informed him that he was suffering from sciatica, a condition stemming from his 4 hour round-trip work commute. His doctor advised to significantly reduce driving time to heal his thighs and avoid future injuries.
Driving is not only one of the leading causes of human physiological deterioration but also radically affects their psychology by routinely exposing them to stressful and emotionally draining situations. Furthermore, human driving is a direct cause of serious loss of life and property all over the world. Data from the Association for Safe International Road Travel (ASIRT) says that all around the globe more than 1 million people die and 50 million people are injured in roads each year. Put differently, more than 3,000 people die and 136,000 people are injured in road accidents every day in the world.
How would we react if aircraft crashed and killed 3,000 people every day?
These accidents cost a whopping $518 billion (U.S. dollars) globally, which accounts for about 1.22% of each country’s annual GDP but this doesn’t factor collateral costs from loss of income to families, loss of productivity, and other macro- and micro-economic repercussions. As a way of example, about every 10 years the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) prepares a report about the country’s economic and societal impact of motor vehicle crashes. The latest study concluded about 33,000 people die and 3.9 million people are injured every year in the U.S. due to road accidents with a cost of $871 billion (including some collateral costs) per year averaging $2,680 per person. Safe human driving requires more training and ability than most people possess. As vehicular density increases the probability of human-caused accidents increase exponentially. Policy and training are well-intended but only hinder transportation network performance and often worsens the problem. It is an epidemic of catastrophic proportions hiding in plain sight.
The solution is simple: get rid of human drivers and replace them with self-driving cars. These cars are utilizing very advanced and reliable technologies that have been developed by a number of large companies —some I’ve personally worked with— such as Uber, Google, Amazon, among others. In their most simple form there are three main advantages of utilizing self‑driving vehicles as a primary form of transportation.
1. Health
In a study published at the National Center for Biotechnology Information, U.S. National Library of Medicine, it is statistically established that longer driving times are associated with stressful conditions like insufficient physical activity, sleep deficiency, smoking, alcohol use, obesity, and psychological distress that can increase the risk of other physiological conditions.
Vehicle sales around the world have been increasing at a very fast pace, which is also a major cause of worry as more cars equals more car accidents, pollution, and transportation costs. The passenger to car ratio is not getting better as most people still commute alone.
Crashes, deaths, and injuries are the worst by-products of human drivers, but also stress, anxiety, bad posture, muscular injury, cardiovascular issues, and more are just some of the negative influences driving has on humans. Human-driven cars are a health hazard and it won’t be long before governments worldwide begin to push for autonomous vehicles. Only a few years back I participated in studying and lobbying for the use of self-driving cars in the U.S. through the use of multi-vehicular platforms including cars, trucks, and aircraft. The U.S. government acknowledged these issues presented and put in place policies aimed at achieving this goal. The Department Of Transportation (DOT) recognized these facts very early on and allocated a large budget for related research of vehicles, technology, and a system that supports it. The National Highway and Transportation Safety Administration(NHTSA) released new federal guidelines for Automated Driving Systems, and the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCLS) has a nice database showing some of the recent state of legislation at various government levels.
Anyone who has driven any vehicle at rush hour in pretty much any major city around the world will know how extremely aggravating and stressful driving can be. Some of the situations that lead to stress are the following:
Full-stop traffic or start-stop driving associated with congestion.
Over-regulation from traffic lights, roadwork, and speed restrictions on empty roads.
Aggressive drivers, including honking and forceful overtaking.
Unpredictable and dangerous events like sudden unforeseen traffic stops or pot-holes.
Weather.
Lack of signaling, erratic driving (from intoxicated or distracted individuals).
Running traffic lights or stop signs.
Verbal abuse or road rage by other drivers.
Pressure to drive faster by vehicles behind.
Detours.
Double parking.
School buses.
2. Money
To operate a vehicle, you need to be willing to sacrifice a significant portion of your wealth.
Insurance: according to the National Association of Insurance Commissioners the average amount spent to insure a car in the U.S. was $815 in 2012. However, anyone who pays either less or more than that can tell you there are a lot of variables that affect these rates.
Fuel: according to AAA‘s annual “Your Driving Costs” study, the average cost of fuel to operate a sedan 15,000 miles in the U.S. sits at 14.45 cents per mile, or $2,167.50 per year.
Maintenance and repairs: everyone knows vehicles break and other than driving as smooth as silk and praying to the road gods, there isn’t much more that can be done. The average cost of repairs, maintenance, and tires is $99 a month for a new car, according to AAA.
Depreciation: the moment you drive your vehicle out of the dealership it loses value and that continues every year until it reaches zero. According to Black Book, cars lose 20% to 30% of their value in the first year and 15% to 18% over each of the next five years, depending on the vehicle and market conditions.
Parking: this can go through the roof if you commute every day to a large metropolis such as New York with rates of $606.37 per month according to the 2017 Global Parking Index, a report based on Parkopedia’s own dataset, which covers more than 50 million parking spaces across 6,500 cities in 75 countries.
Lastly: there are many factors that cause collective and individual financial losses but an interesting one to consider is the investment loss from training human drivers. I know it sounds cold but it takes a fortune to train humans and it gets more expensive every year. Training amortizes over time and ideally lasts until retirement at 65. Crashes are the leading cause of death among people ages 15‑29, those in the most recently trained segment of the population taking the worst possible hit. This doesn’t even take into account grief and trauma that affect a survivors’ productivity, much of which lingers for years and some people never recover.
3. Time
No, this is not the same as money. Time is much more valuable. You can find ways to earn more money per hour but nobody found a way to earn time (yet). According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the average worker commutes for 26 minutes to travel to work. That’s the longest it has been since the Census began tracking this data in 1980 when the average commute time was just 21.7 minutes. The average American commute has increased nearly 20% in the last 40 years. As per the survey, there were a little over 139 million workers commuting in 2017 in the U.S. alone. At an average of 52 minutes round-trip, five days a week, 50 weeks a year, that works out to around 1.8 trillion minutes Americans spent commuting in 2017 or a collective 3.4 million man-years. To put it in perspective, this is enough time to build the Pyramid of Giza with ancient methods (131,200 man-years according to this Civil Engineering Magazine article, PDF) every 2 weeks. That is 26 Giza Pyramids in a year. Mind-blowing.
After looking at the colossal amount of time the entire nation is wasting why not take it back put it to productive use? Why not allow self-driving cars do the stressful, hazardous jobs, and let humans enjoy all their recouped time?
These are the three main arguments, but there are more reasons such as financially viable on-demand mobility for disabled or elder individuals, faster logistics due to the elimination or traffic restrictions, high-efficiency disaster mobilization for evacuation and/or rescue, active and passive drastic pollution reduction…the list goes on.
The purpose of this article is to inform readers about the benefits of using self-controlled vehicles and adopting them to improve everyone’s lives. I urge you to learn, understand, and support policies and actions towards the adoption of a mass-transit self-driving vehicular matrix to save the nation — and the world — the huge loss of time, money, lives, and health that we are losing through manually driving cars. After all — before cars became popular — almost no one believed such machines would ever replace a horse.
About the Author:
Patricio Feder is a High‑Tech Business Strategist and Serial Entrepreneur specialized in the analysis, creation, development, and exit of high-tech companies. He founded and architected the vision and culture of multiple startups and has been the inventor of many technologies and products. He currently leads Magna Lucrum, a technology agnostic high‑ROI focused investment group, and has executive and board roles in a number of other enterprises. Patricio held management positions at leading edge technology companies like Siemens, SynQor, Feder Aerospace, Quercegen Pharmaceuticals, and Brunswick Labs giving him an in‑depth experience that spans the corporate technology spectrum across a variety of markets like real estate, investments, telecommunications, information technologies, AI, aerospace, defense, biotech, and electronics.