Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, began firing staff on Wednesday, Bloomberg reported, citing people familiar with the matter. The company announced that it would sack up to 11,000 staff. The reductions come as part of the first major effort to cut costs since the founding of Facebook in 2004. The drastic measure follows a sharp slowdown in digital advertising revenue and disappointing earnings for the company.
The unnamed sources told the media that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg had admitted his responsibility for the problems, telling executives on Tuesday that the issues the group faces “are on me.” According to a separate report by Insider, the reductions will affect about 10% of the company, which employed over 87,000 people as of September 30. In September, Zuckerberg warned employees that Meta intended to reduce its expenses and restructure its teams. “This is obviously a different mode than we’re used to operating in,” Zuckerberg said in a Q&A session with employees at the time. “For the first 18 years of the company, we basically grew quickly basically every year, and then more recently our revenue has been flat to slightly down for the first time. So we have to adjust.” The layoffs come amid similar steps taken by tech rivals. Snap is scaling back as well, saying in August that it would eliminate 20% of its workforce, while Twitter fired around 50% of its employees following the sale of the company to Elon Musk.
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The Argentine foreign ministry has confirmed that Chinese mining company Tibet Summit Resources will invest $2.2 billion in two lithium exploration projects in the South American country. The Shanghai-based company is expected to create around 10,000 jobs in Argentina, according to the statement released on Friday. The ministry noted that the plans were shared by Jianrong Huang, the president of Tibet Summit Resources, with Argentine ambassador Sabino Vaca Narvaja at the China International Import Expo in Shanghai. Under the plan, the Chinese firm will invest around $700 million into the Salar de Diablillos project in Salta province, which is expected to produce 50,000 tons of battery-grade lithium carbonate starting next year. Meanwhile, another $1.5 billion will be used for construction of a plant at the Arizaro salt flat, also located in Salta, which is expected to produce between 50,000 and 100,000 tons of lithium carbonate by 2024.
Argentina, along with Bolivia and Chile, is part of the Lithium Triangle, a region of the Andes that accounts for around 54% of the world’s white metal reserves. Globally, the South American nation is ranked the fourth biggest lithium producer, after Australia, Chile and China, according to a report from the Argentine Chamber of Mining Entrepreneurs (CAEM). Elon Musk’s electric carmaker Tesla plans to begin mass production of its Cybertruck at the end of 2023, Reuters reported this week, citing sources. The electric pickup was first unveiled back in 2019, with production initially scheduled to start in late 2021. However, it has since been pushed back three times for various reasons.
The Cybertruck has become something of a legend among Tesla fans over the past three years, despite the fact that neither the approximate cost of the final production version nor the exact characteristics of the vehicle have been unveiled. In 2019, the initial price was to be under $40,000, but Tesla has subsequently hiked prices across its lineup. According to the report, several hundred thousand buyers have so far paid $100 to reserve a Cybertruck, but the company hasn’t disclosed the exact amount of orders. Tesla shut down pre-orders outside North America this past May, with Musk saying the company had “more orders of the first Cybertrucks than we could possibly fulfill for three years after the start of production.” Last month, Tesla reported that it was working on preparing its plant in Austin, Texas, to start producing the new model. The United States launched at least 251 military interventions between 1991 and 2022. This is according to a report by the Congressional Research Service, a US government institution that compiles information on behalf of Congress. The report documented another 218 US military interventions between 1798 and 1990. That makes for a total of 469 US military interventions since 1798 that have been acknowledged by the Congress.This data was published on March 8, 2022 by the Congressional Research Service (CRS), in a document titled “Instances of Use of United States Armed Forces Abroad, 1798-2022.” The list of countries targeted by the US military includes the vast majority of the nations on Earth, including almost every single country in Latin America and the Caribbean and most of the African continent. From the beginning of 1991 to the beginning of 2004, the US military launched 100 interventions, according to CRS. The report shows that, since the end of the first cold war in 1991, at the moment of US unipolar hegemony, the number of Washington’s military interventions abroad substantially increased. Of the total 469 documented foreign military interventions, the Congressional Research Service noted that the US government only formally declared war 11 times, in just five separate wars. The data exclude the independence war been US settlers and the British empire, any military deployments between 1776 and 1798, and the US Civil War. It is important to stress that all of these numbers are conservative estimates, because they do not include US special operations, covert actions, or domestic deployments. The report likewise excludes the deployment of the US military forces against Indigenous peoples, when they were systematically ethnically cleansed in the violent process of westward settler-colonial expansion. CRS acknowledged that it left out the “continual use of U.S. military units in the exploration, settlement, and pacification of the western part of the United States.” The Military Intervention Project at Tufts University’s Center for Strategic Studies has documented even more foreign meddling. “The US has undertaken over 500 international military interventions since 1776, with nearly 60% undertaken between 1950 and 2017,” the project wrote. “What’s more, over one-third of these missions occurred after 1999.” The Military Intervention Project added: “With the end of the Cold War era, we would expect the US to decrease its military interventions abroad, assuming lower threats and interests at stake. But these patterns reveal the opposite – the US has increased its military involvements abroad.”
Researchers from the National University of Singapore (NUS) stumbled upon a discovery that could forever revolutionize how we acquire hydrogen from water, according to a press release from the institution published on Thursday.
Light as a trigger The team was led by Associate Professor Xue Jun Min, Dr Wang Xiaopeng and Dr Vincent Lee Wee Siang from the Department of Materials Science and Engineering under the NUS College of Design and Engineering (NUS CDE). The discovery they made was that light could trigger a new mechanism in a catalytic material used in water electrolysis. “We discovered that the redox center for electro-catalytic reaction is switched between metal and oxygen, triggered by light,” said Jun Min. “This largely improves the water electrolysis efficiency.” It all began with an accidental power trip of the ceiling lights in Jun Min’s laboratory almost three years ago. Back then, the ceiling lights in Jun Min’s research lab were normally turned on for 24 hours. When the lights went off due to a power failure, there was an opportunity to observe something that scientists had never witnessed before. When the researchers returned the next day, they found that the darkness had influenced the performance of a nickel oxyhydroxide-based material in the water electrolysis experiment. It had fallen drastically. “This drop in performance, nobody has ever noticed it before, because no one has ever done the experiment in the dark,” said Jun Min. “Also, the literature says that such a material shouldn’t be sensitive to light; light should not have any effect on its properties.” Jun Min and his team knew they had stumbled on something significant, and they embarked on numerous repeated experiments to test out their new theories. They eventually had enough data to publish a paper. Now, the team is working on new ways to improve industrial processes to generate hydrogen such as making the cells containing water to be transparent, so as to introduce light into the water splitting process. Six of the 12 nuclear reactors in France that were found to have corrosion issues in May have been repaired and will be restarted soon, French Energy Minister Agnès Pannier-Runacher has revealed. She told France Inter radio on Wednesday that, at the moment, there was “no reason” to believe that energy operator EDF would not be able to meet the schedule for restarting all shutdown reactors before winter.
Earlier, media reports stated that EDF had hired about 100 American welders from Westinghouse in order to repair the power units on time. France generates roughly 70% of its electricity from a nuclear fleet of 56 reactors, all operated by EDF. However, many of them have been closed down for maintenance, some due to corrosion-related issues. Currently, only 31 units are reportedly operating. EDF has pledged to restart all shutdown reactors before winter to avoid power shortages in the country. However, since October 6, there have been strikes among EDF employees involved in repair work at 19 reactors, delaying maintenance by several weeks. Last month, the French national electricity grid operator RTE warned that it would not rule out the risk of blackouts this winter due to prolonged strikes halting the repair. According to RTE, outages could only be avoided if power consumption was reduced by 1% to 5%, while in the event of an extremely cold winter – by 15%. Failure to restart the plants on time could have “heavy consequences” for power supply over the winter period, the operator has warned. The new Super Lead Overdrive pedal was designed to get the signature Soldano sound onto your pedalboard. The new Super Lead Overdrive pedal is designed to provide the perfect balance of gain, sustain, and touch response the SLO is known for. Crafted using the same cascading gain stages as the flagship amp, the SLO pedal is the perfect way to get that signature Soldano sound onto your pedalboard.
The SLO pedal front panel boasts the same controls for Gain, Volume, Presence, and a 3-band EQ as the 100-watt tube amp. The side-mounted Deep switch nails the amp’s depth-knob low-end punch. These controls take you from harmonically rich crunch to some of the most famous high-gain in history. Features
An asteroid the size of a large skyscraper is zipping past Earth around Halloween at a relatively close distance of just over 2 million kilometers, according to NASA estimates.
The celestial body, designated 2022 RM4, was detected last weekend and is considered “potentially hazardous” due to its parameters – which are between 330 and 740 meters (1082 to 2427 feet). Its closest approach to Earth on November 1 will make it about 2.3 million kilometers (1.4 million miles) away, roughly six times more than the average distance to the Moon. The US space agency flags as potential threats all asteroids that come within some 7.5 million kilometers (4.6 million miles) and measure at least 140 meters (459 feet). Such objects are tracked by many astronomers to check if their orbits were calculated correctly. Last month, NASA crashed a robotic spacecraft into the asteroid Dimorphos to test how big of an impact it would have on its trajectory. The project was researching possible actions to take in order to divert a catastrophic collision, should humanity be able to detect the threat in time to launch countermeasures. |
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