Each week, BIV staff will share with you some of the interesting stories we have found from around the web.
Kirk LaPointe, editor-in-chief, vice-president of Glacier Media:
In advance of the June 12 Singapore Summit between U.S. and North Korean presidents, political scientist Robert E. Kelly of Pusan National University in South Korea writes for the New York Review of Books about Donald Trump’s theatrics, bluster and hollow rhetoric that do not bode well for the meeting’s outcome - The New York Review of Books
http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/06/05/trumps-north-korean-nuclear-theatrics/
Justin Ling on the frightening new era of political lying - The Walrus
https://thewalrus.ca/weve-entered-a-new-era-of-political-lying-be-worried/
Zoe Williams reviews the new book from Jaron Lanier, one of the internet’s pioneers, on the arguments for deleting your social media accounts - The Guardian
Jia Tolentino on the city’s first gym tailoring to your face - The New Yorker
Timothy Renshaw, managing editor:
Limiting global warming through energy efficiency - Carbon Brief
The fight over harvesting solar energy versus agricultural products heats up in Australia -The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/jun/03/sweet-turns-sour-queensland-split-sugar-solar?
Relax: your new parking paradise awaits. Get My Parking partners with Europe’s largest parking operator APCOA Parking to Revolutionize Parking in 13 Countries - Business Wire
https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180531005795/en
The world has doubled its coal-fired power capacity since 2000 - Carbon Brief
https://www.carbonbrief.org/mapped-worlds-coal-power-plants?
Carrie Schmidt, editorial researcher:
“She wasn’t superhot, they pointed out, or super-charming; she wasn’t even very nice. How did she manage to convince an enormous amount of cool, successful people that she was something she clearly was not?”
More importantly, how did Anna Delvey manage to book so many luxury hotel rooms without a working credit card? An excellent lesson in the power of flashing cash, from The Cut
https://www.thecut.com/2018/05/how-anna-delvey-tricked-new-york.html
Emma Crawford Hampel, online editor:
What happens with a bad-tempered, distractable doofus runs an empire? This article compares Donald Trump to Kaiser Wilhelm II - The New Yorker
Glen Korstrom, reporter
Given Anthony Bourdain’s untimely death, I was inspired to read his New Yorker story from 1999, as it was one of the first articles to give him widespread public attention. It also morphed into being part of the basis for his best-selling book a year later, Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly – New Yorker
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1999/04/19/dont-eat-before-reading-this
Here is a link to download Deloitte Canada’s report, A society in transition, an industry ready to bloom. It discusses what the legal cannabis market will look like in Canada and who will be doing the buying. Much is based on a survey - Deloitte
Albert Van Santvoort, reporter:
Google has been trying to determine the best way to deal with the fallout over the company’s first AI contract with the U.S. Department of Defence. This New York Times article talks about how the contract has divided employees prompting a dozen to quit and more than 4,000 to sign an internal petition stating that google would not build warfare technology - The New York Times
One of these Google employees who lead the campaign was interviewed by Jacobin Magazine about how it started, grew and what lessons it holds for similar actions within the tech industry - Jacobin
https://jacobinmag.com/2018/06/google-project-maven-military-tech-workers
While Google apologizes to its employees, other tech companies like Facebook and Uber have been making public apologies for recent, widely covered scandals. The Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi explores how much these apologies actually address the company's fault - Rolling Stone
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/wells-fargo-apology-ad-w521172
Stepping away from tech, as Cannabis nears legalization lawyer Tina Fraser from CannaLaw Group has created an incredibly helpful table that explains various aspects of laws that are coming into place across the provinces and territories - Brazeau Seller Law report
https://www.dropbox.com/s/4xp8mq7ys7rtpq9/Legalization%20Chart%20Jun.5.18.pdf?dl=0
Finally, because I do a lot of data reporting for Business in Vancouver, I thought it was important to address a misconception about statistics that has developed in response to a different misconception about statistics. The following article presents a video that explains how correlation can equal causation - Popular Mechanics
https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/math/a27818/correlation-causality-statistics/
Tyler Orton, reporter:
Just how much are over-the-top services like Netflix and Amazon Prime changing the way we consume content (and boosting demand for content produced here?)
PwC’s Global Entertainment & Media Outlook 2018–2022 breaks it down - PwC
https://www.pwc.com/gx/en/industries/tmt/media/outlook.html
The transportation section of the State of Vancouver’s Green Economy acknowledges ride-hailing services and driverless cars, which “we cannot afford to ignore.”
Uber was punted from the City of Vancouver to the province a while ago and it’s still unclear when such services may come to B.C. - Vancouver Economic Commission
Chuck Chiang, reporter:
In the battle for tech supremacy in the age of disruptive innovation, China and the United States have been largely seen as the two biggest players. And while China has the advantage of a larger market and a singular, monolithic government-driven strategy that the U.S. can’t match, Americans often forget – as this one Chinese researcher working in America delineates - that the United States has a great strength (its attractiveness to the best talent in the world) that China cannot match. And that advantage is being eroded by Donald Trump’s anti-immigration stance – Foreign Policy magazine
https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/06/04/dont-close-the-door-on-chinese-scientists-like-me/
A look at how intense the battle for trade supremacy in certain sectors – in this case, solar panels – can be between different emerging markets, and how difficult it is for a newcomer like India to take that first step in the face of powerful, established suppliers in places like China - Bloomberg
People are being bombarded with speculation on what the Trump-Kim summit in Singapore – the first face-to-face meeting between a sitting U.S. president and a North Korean leader – will bring later this month. But people in the West often forget the various interests vying for geopolitical positions that may emerge from the summit, the most interesting of which may be how South Korea and Japan – two major U.S. allies who are directly impacted by happenings on the Korean Peninsula – hold some very different opinions on what the summit’s outcome should be - or, in this case, even the method of engagement on denuclearization - Defense News
Nelson Bennett, reporter:
Global warming temporarily slowed three times since 1891 due to natural causes - Phys.org
https://phys.org/news/2018-06-periods-global-slowdown-due-natural.html
Juvenile Chinook dying three months after entering ocean, warming conditions blamed - KCAW
https://www.kcaw.org/2018/05/29/changing-ocean-conditions-may-be-killing-young-king-salmon
World’s largest diamond miner, De Beers, is now selling synthetic diamonds - The Independent
