Adam Clare

No Better Time than now to Work from Home

Office room

For many office workers there is little reason to go to the office thanks to the advances in technology (it seems the only reason to be in an actual office is to be watched by a manager). The environmental gains from telecommuting are obvious and the cost saving for workers and the employers are also obvious, so why isn’t telecommuting more popular? Companies are looking into their work-from-home practices due to the outbreak of the most recent coronavirus. One positive thing that might come out of the bad news of the flu is that we commuting will be easier for all of us.

The carbon benefits of working from home largely depend on how a person gets to work. If youâ€™re like me and take a train to work, staying home doesnâ€™t do all that much to reduce your greenhouse gas emissions. If youâ€™re among the 76 percent of Americans who drive to work alone, then staying home a couple days a week could dramatically reduce your individual carbon footprint while also reducing all the congestion and pollution that results from so many cars on the road.

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In the ideal world, the positives would be enough to encourage employers to create flexible work policies. However, saving money is the real push, said Lister. Luckily for the planet, economics and the environment go hand in handthese days, so companies are also seeing the financial benefits of setting and meeting internal sustainability goals. These work-from-home measures may appeal to investors (and consumers!) that are interested in a companyâ€™s environmental and societal impact.

Play a Game about the Trolley Problem

Wero Creative released Dr. Trolley’s Problem yesterday and you should go play it right now. The game presents a lot of trolley problem situations you can play through to test your ethics. You’ll find yourself trying to decide which way a runaway trolley should go – towards the upstanding citizen or towards a dog? The game includes an autonomous car mode which echos the choices AIs will have to make when they get into sticky situations.

I think this game is great because I made it, so don’t trust my thoughts on it – go make your own opinions. You can download it now for PC & Mac or get the game on iOS.

Dr. Trolley is an infamous robot mad scientist from another dimension who has sequestered you in its simulation to answer the most pressing questions.

The game includes dozens of dilemmas plus randomly generated problems which last anywhere from 30 seconds to one minute each. Some situations involve reading what is presented on screen. Within each situation the player decides whether or not to act to save a character (or not).

Check it out!

Amazon Workers Protest How Amazon Treats the Amazon

happy workers in a factory

Amazon’s growth has been surprising to many, and their reach into markets seems endless. This expansion means they can greatly influence markets and the global environment. Companies like IKEA are trying to make their systems more efficient so they harm the environment less, and this eco-strategy is gaining popularity amongst other responsible companies. Amazon has done nothing.

The company’s environmental neglect is being noticed by everyone including their employees. And unlike the executives at Amazon, the workers are sick of the company’s negligence.

Employees at Amazon have increasingly criticized the company in recent years for its contracts with large oil and gas firms. In spring 2019, more than 8,700 employees signed an open letter to the CEO, Jeff Bezos, urging him to take bolder action on climate change. The presidential candidates Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have also offered support of employees for speaking out.

The employee activism is part of a broader trend in the tech industry of employee walkouts and protests against corporate policies. Google workers staged internal protests over sexual harassment policies in 2018 that continued into 2019 and gig workers at Instacart and Uber have organized strikes to fight for better pay and benefits. In June 2019, workers at the online furnishings retailer Wayfair walked off the job to oppose the companyâ€™s contracts with detention centers for immigrants.

Be Happier by Blocking Ads

blank billboard

A debate has been going on for years about the effectiveness about advertising and how the exposure to ads makes us feel. We now have an answer. Advertising is effective and makes us wants things we otherwise wouldn’t and that makes us unhappy. This is good because it provides us with a simple solution: get rid of ads as much as possible.

To help reduce ads in your life you can use a tracker blocker while you’re on the internet, ProPublica has a good list of options.

So ads make us want what we donâ€™t or canâ€™t have?

The idea here is a very old one: Before I can decide how happy I am, I have to look over my shoulder, consciously or subconsciously, and see how other people are doing. Many of my feelings about my income, my car, and my house are molded by my next-door neighborâ€™s income, car, and house. Thatâ€™s just part of being human: worrying about relative status. But we know from lots of research that making social comparisons can be harmful to us emotionally, and advertising prompts us to measure ourselves against others. If I see an ad for a fancy new car, it makes me think about my ordinary one, which might make me feel bad. If I see this $10,000 watch and then look at my watch, which I probably paid about $150 for, I might think, â€œMaybe thereâ€™s something wrong with me.â€ And of course nations are just agglomerations of individuals. Now, in this paper we donâ€™t prove that the dissatisfaction is coming from relative comparisons, but we suspect thatâ€™s what happening.

Canada to Update Digital Privacy Laws, Hold Companies Accountable for Breaches

computer screen

Last year Canadians witnessed too many data breaches of their data and the federal government is reacting. Large Canadian corporations didn’t do enough to protect their databases against attackers and as a result personal data of Canadians is now in the hands of criminals. Canada will now follow the lead of Europe and other jurisdictions by holding corporations financially responsible for any future breaches. This should help force companies to respect their customers.

“It will be significant and meaningful to make it very clear that privacy is important. Compensation, of course, is one aspect of it,” said Bains, adding that the government also wants “to demonstrate to businesses very clearly that there are going to be significant penalties for non-compliance with the law. That’s really my primary goal.”

Statistics Canada says that about 57 per cent of Canadians online reported experiencing a cyber security incident in 2018.

Ryan Berger, a privacy lawyer with Lawson Lundell in Vancouver, said legislating compensation could get private companies to start taking privacy more seriously.

“It will incentivize organizations … to take steps to protect that information and ensure that, for instance, health information is encrypted,” he said.

“So right now, there aren’t the sorts of financial implications for them if they fail to do that.”