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These predictions have enormous implications for the millennial generation now entering the workforce. They have never known a world not defined by Moore’s Law. But unlike their generational predecessors, to this new cohort social networks and iPhone apps are old hat.

What obsesses them is hardware—drones, robots, 3-D printing—that is even more closely connected to the fortunes of Moore’s Law. Their careers will rise and fall on how well they ride the curve of an equation devised during the Johnson administration

And what a curve it will be. Moore’s Law is creative destruction on steroids. It regularly fosters the next wave of entrepreneurial opportunities made possible by the latest jump in chip performance. It can be blamed for much of the 90% mortality rate of electronics startups.

The great turning took place a decade ago, while we were all distracted by social networking, smartphones and the emerging banking crisis. Its breathtaking climb since tells us that everything of the previous 40 years—that is, the multi-trillion-dollar revolution in semiconductors, computers, communications and the Internet—was likely nothing but a prelude, a warm-up, for what is to come. It will be upon this wall that millennials will climb their careers against almost-unimaginably quick, complex and ever-changing competition.

Crowd-sharing, crowdfunding, bitcoin, micro-venture funding, cloud computing, Big Data—all have been early attempts, of varying success, to cope with the next phase of Moore’s Law. Expect many more to come. Meanwhile, as always, this new pace will become the metronome of the larger culture.

Rigid command-and-control structures in every walk of life, from corporations to governments to education, become vulnerable to competition by adaptive and short-lived alliances and confederacies. Now that process is going to attack every corner of society.

Even the human brain will be challenged by artificial intelligence—the latter enjoying the advantage of continuously improving at the pace of Moore’s Law.

Millennials face one of the greatest opportunities any generation has ever known: to completely remake the world through boundless digital technology.

The good news is that this generation seems to be already, often unconsciously, preparing for this adventure—through robotics competitions, gatherings of tech enthusiasts, engineers and tinkerers at Maker Faires and other do-it-yourself events, and playing with new applications for their drones and 3D printers. Having lived their entire lives at the pace of Moore’s Law, they seem to sense that the time has come to hit the accelerator. If millennials don’t entirely get it yet, they soon will.

The government frequently faces criticism for its handling of women's issues, including the failure to stem high rates of violence and low female participation in the workforce.

Plainclothes police began shoving members of the group, and many women fled the square when riot police fired rubber bullets into the crowd.

You see the power of women. We are here despite every obstacle and we will continue to fight for our cause."

Turkey has sharply limited the right to peaceful assembly in recent years, giving police wider powers to detain protesters and the courts more power to prosecute them.

Female candidates also were barred from speaking to male voters and required to segregate campaign offices, the organization said.

n the end, 979 women candidates and 130,637 women voters registered to participate in the election, according to Saudi election officials. A total of 5,938 men ran for the local offices

The move to allow women to vote has been described as a step forward for equality in the male-dominated kingdom.

informal system of male guardianship over women that requires women be accompanied by a male guardian to travel or go to school.

Two years later, he ordered that at least 20% of seats in the Consultative Council be set aside for women.

The number of women in the Saudi workforce also has been increasing, from 23,000 in 2004 to more than 400,000 in 2015, according to the government.

The most vocal proponent — leading Republican candidate Donald Trump — has proposed various measures, including mass deportations, seizure of remittance payments made with illegal wages, raising fees on temporary visas issued to Mexican CEOs and diplomats and other measures.

"The Mexican government has taken the United States to the cleaners," Trump said in a position paper on immigration. "They are responsible for this problem, and they must help pay to clean it up."

Once those undocumented immigrants had been removed, it would take another $315 billion in higher enforcing costs to keep them from coming back, according to AAF.

AAF estimated the removal of that many people would shrink the pool of U.S. workers by 6.4 percent, which means that 20 years from now the U.S. economy would be nearly 6 percent cent smaller. That works out to a loss of $1.6 trillion in lost wages, spending and other economic activity.

While this impact would be felt across the country and throughout the economy, sectors such as agriculture, construction, retail and hospitality would be hardest hit, the AAF report.

But the immigration reform plan spelled out in S. 744 would more than offset those costs, thanks to much higher tax collections, both because the workforce would expand and undocumented workers would now pay taxes. Those higher tax receipts would boost federal revenues by $459 billion over the same decade, the CBO estimated.

There is no longer any room for teachers, medical technicians, firefighters or construction workers, who may drive two or more hours and sleep in their cars for an hour before work to avoid longer commutes.

Gardeners, cleaning people, babysitters and dog walkers cram into small apartments, sometimes 12 in two bedrooms, according to Marroquin.

In East Palo Alto, once a low-income community where many people of color lived, the median price of homes is $953,000. The school district has reported that more than half of its students are homeless, and some teachers commute more than two hours each way because they cannot find affordable local housing.

illionaires of Silicon Valley play real-life monopoly, buying up houses on their blocks and down the street for family, staff, art collections, or to hold political and philanthropic events.

Zuckerberg’s people, for instance, knocked on doors in his neighborhood and offered “well over the fair market value of the house, some would argue at double the value”, said Repka of DeLeon Reality, which did over $800m in sales last year. “He did it as a privacy buffer around his house.”

When the former Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer throws a party at her Palo Alto house for hundreds of guests, residents brace for the delivery trucks, caterers, decorators, electricians, and valets. At Mayer’s annual Christmas party, a generator the size of a shipping container buzzes for days to maintain her ice skating rink.

For the vast majority of the workforce, “single-family homes have become untouchable”, said the prominent urban planner Peter Calthorpe, who grew up in Palo Alto.

“What’s this going to mean for future communities, if only totally affluent, young people can afford to move in?”

in some of capitalism’s most rarefied circles including Harvard Business School, where last fall Seth Klarman, a highly influential billionaire investor, delivered what he described as a “plaintive wail” to the business community to fix capitalism before it was too late.

“It’s a choice to maintain pleasant working conditions . . . or harsh ones; to offer good benefits or paltry ones.” If business leaders didn’t “ask hard questions about capitalism,” he warned that they would be asked by “ideologues seeking to point fingers, assign blame and make reckless changes to the system.

Leading politicians, such as Trump, Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), were advocating positions on tariffs, wealth taxes and changes in corporate governance that would have been unthinkable a few years ago.

One of the most popular classes at Harvard Business School, home to the next generation of Fortune 500 executives, was a class on “reimagining capitalism.” Seven years ago, the elective started with 28 students. Now there were nearly 300 taking it

“Winners Take All,” a book by Anand Giridharadas, a journalist and former McKinsey consultant, that had hit the bestseller list and was provoking heated arguments in places like Silicon Valley, Davos and Harvard Business School. Giridharadas’s book was a withering attack on America’s billionaire class and the notion that America’s iconic capitalists could use their wealth and creativity to solve big social and economic problems that have eluded a plodding and divided government.

For many of the students, schooled in the notion that business could make a profit while making the world a better place, Giridharadas’s ideas were both energizing and disorienting. Erika Uyterhoeven, a second-year student, recalled one of her fellow classmates turning to her when Giridharadas was finished. “So, what should we do?” her colleague asked. “Is he saying we shouldn’t go into banking or consulting?

Added another student: “There was a palpable sense of personal desperation.”

“The best thing that happened to me was that I lost my 2014 election,” he said. “Had I won . . . maybe I would’ve been a traditional neoliberal. It really forced my self-reflection and it pointed out every weakness I ever had.”

Mixed in with the valley’s usual frothy optimism about disruption and inventing the future was a growing sense that the tech economy had somehow broken capitalism. The digital revolution had allowed tech entrepreneurs to build massive global companies without the big job-producing factories or large workforces of the industrial era. The result was more and more wealth concentrated in fewer hands.

some feared things were only going to get worse. Robots were eliminating much factory work; online commerce was decimating retail; and self-driving cars were on the verge of phasing out truck drivers. The next step was computers that could learn and think.

thinking computers might be able to diagnose diseases better than doctors by drawing on superhuman amounts of clinical research, said Brockman, 30. They could displace a large number of office jobs. Eventually, he said, the job shortages would force the government to pay people to pursue their passions or simply live

To Brockman, a future without work seemed just as likely as one without meat, a possibility that many in the valley viewed as a near certainty. “Once we have meat substitutes as good as the real thing, my expectation is that we’re going to look back at eating meat as this terrible, immoral thing,”

The same could be true of work in a future in an era of advanced artificial intelligence. “We’ll look back and say, ‘Wow, that was so crazy and almost immoral that people were forced to go and labor in order to be able to survive,’ ” he said

Khanna had a different view. He saw the country’s problems primarily as the product of growing income inequality and a lack of opportunity.

Once completed, the telescope will be an amalgamation of several complex pieces of hardware. Most of the assembly for Webb took place at NASA’s facility in Maryland, the Goddard Spaceflight Center, where it underwent a barrage of tests. In January 2016, scientists and engineers dunked the telescope’s sensitive instruments into a cylindrical chamber that simulates the extreme conditions of outer space. By November 2017, the delicate mirrors and instruments were joined together, and mission members put them through the ringer to make sure they could survive the vibrations and sounds of a powerful rocket launch. They bolted the telescope to metal plates and shook it violently, then wheeled it into an acoustic chamber and blasted it with noise through giant, vuvuzela-shaped speakers.

The GAO report starts out by praising the Webb mission for making “considerable progress” in the last few months in hardware integration, but things go downhill from there.The GAO places blame on Northrop Grumman for delays. “For several years, the prime contractor has overestimated workforce reductions, and technical challenges have prevented these planned reductions, necessitating the use of cost reserves,” the report said. Northrop Grumman did not respond to a request for comment about this assessment.

If the GAO report is any indication, there may be more troubling news for Webb to come. An independent review board for the Webb mission will conduct its own audit of the project early this year to determine whether it will make its new 2019 launch target.In the meantime, the Webb team has been reviewing and selecting research proposals for its first year of operations. The telescope, 100 more times powerful than Hubble, will be able to see deeper into the universe than ever before. Hundreds of astronomers, from many countries, want their time on it. In its first few months, Webb will focus on nearby targets—the planets in our solar system—and distant ones—glittering galaxies way out in the cosmos. It will return stunning images of it all in tremendous clarity and color. Perhaps then, when we lay eyes on these photographs, the long wait will have seemed worth

Attempts to explain this picture result in a frank contradiction: Experts blame natives’ nonwork on a reduced number of jobs for low-skill labor, while at the same time attributing the influx of millions of low-skill immigrants to the shortage of workers available to do those very jobs.

Do immigrants “steal” jobs from natives? A more accurate assessment, based on what business managers say, is that as the native work ethic deteriorated, immigrants increasingly filled the void.

While native work effort dwindles, immigrant men continue to put in long hours — an average of 49 full-time weeks per year for workers without a high school diploma, compared with just 35 weeks for comparable natives. And Hispanic immigrant men work 10 more weeks per year than native-born black men.

Without drastically curtailing low-skill immigration, there is little incentive to make the significant cultural and practical changes needed to improve and reintegrate native workers.

If the influx of foreign low-skill workers were ended, employers who wish to keep their plants running would have to aggressively pursue native labor with advertising campaigns, better working conditions, and perhaps relocation incentives and higher wages.

Reducing immigration would encourage other long overdue changes as well, including strengthening work requirements as a condition of government aid, tightening eligibility standards for disability benefits, and abandoning the college-for-all mindset that devalues blue-collar occupations.

Finally, low-skill natives themselves should embrace the social expectation — once unquestioned in our society — that they must work at the jobs that are actually available, even if sometimes arduous and unpleasant.

Work is a vital source of dignity, respect, self-reliance, and connection. When able-bodied people are idle, whole communities can become dysfunctional. Putting Americans back to work should be a top policy priority. Pursuing that goal starts with cutting off the “narcotic” flow of low-skill foreign labor.

On failures of capability, the shutdown began at the worst possible moment for the federal workforce. Beyond the obvious short-term impairment of capabilities caused by furloughing tens of thousands of employees, December and January are crucial months to recruit entry-level employees for the coming year

The president has also undermined institutional memory with the slowest appointments process in recent history

The result is a federal bureaucracy on autopilot with limited alertness in a moment of great vulnerability.

These threats to policy, capability and management reflect a governmentwide failure of imagination. Congress and presidents have plenty of expertise in 20/20 hindsight but have shown little interest over the years in long-range planning.

Congress must own its failure to address the bureaucratic vulnerabilities that trigger failure. Congress has not enacted a significant ethics, personnel or reorganization bill since the 1970s, and it has not conducted a significant examination of the federal bureaucracy’s functioning since the 1990s

The S&P 500-stock index has risen more than 23 percent since Election Day last year. Along with a rising real estate market, that's helped to push the nation's total household wealth to $96.9 trillion. However, as NPR noted last spring, only about half the people in the country own stocks either directly or through retirement accounts.

first sign something could be wrong came in the May 2017 presidential election.

There are several reasons Iran’s economy hasn’t taken off in the way Rouhani had promised.

But perhaps more important than the uncertainty over the agreement are Iran’s own demographics. Half of all Iranians are under the age of 30. More people are entering the workforce each year than jobs exist or are being created. This all but ensures that a country with near universal literacy—with no gender disparity—will continue to have double-digit unemployment for the foreseeable future.

The protests were able to spread because of, among other things, the penetration of the smartphone—more than 40 percent of Iranian households have access to at least one—which enabled Iranians to use messaging apps to spread the word about the demonstrations.

Ultimately this might have been what prevented them from getting bigger.

This is ultimately what could imperil the Iranian regime. Rouhani’s economic promises have yet to materialize.

“The Islamic Republic,” Takeyh warned, “is entering a period of prolonged transition where it will no longer be able to proffer a theocracy with a human face.”

The tax bill has become proof, in their eyes, of the potential success of this strategy. They think they can hold back a Democratic wave in November by rallying the tribe behind their leader, and by giving an economy at peak employment a stimulus of over $1 trillion in tax cuts. And, for all their cynicism and fiscal irresponsibility, they may be right.

I see tribalism deepening and the constitutional crisis intensifying. It’s quite clear now that the GOP has thrown itself in completely with the Trump movement. (Paul Ryan is pledging to “cleanse” the FBI!)

Trump, to make things worse, sees no distinction between the tactics he deployed as a private citizen in lawsuits for decades and the tactics he is deploying as president, because he has no conception of a presidency committed first of all to the long-term maintenance of the system rather than the short-term pursuit of personal interest. He simply cannot see the value of institutions that might endure through time, under both parties, as a way to preserve objective fact-finding and the neutral enforcement of justice.

Since the tax law passed, the Democratic lead in the generic congressional polling has been more than halved from 13 points to a mere 6. Trump’s own approval ratings were negative 20 points in mid-December. Now they are negative 15.

If you keep an eight-year recovery going artificially — through massive deregulation and tax cuts — the very bottom of the workforce is going to feel the dividends simply because of supply and demand. And they will react accordingly.

I think these tax cuts are extraordinarily fiscally irresponsible, and are already creating a bubble. But if the bubble doesn’t burst before Election Day this year, whatever Mueller finds may well be moot.

The Rainbow Coalition is now ever more indistinguishable from mainstream Democratic politics, as the Dems find themselves defending more porous borders, and designating any position to the right of them on immigration as “racist.

We are in a different zero-sum political world. This is a tribal scorched-earth war, underpinned by racial and gender divides, thriving regardless of the consequences for our democratic institutions, discourse, and way of life.

When the president is already suspected of having had ties with the Russian government during an election when that government tried to tilt the results to Trump, his refusal to obey Congress’s specific intent to punish Moscow is more than troubling.

Can we truly expect this presidency to exist within the framework the Founders constructed? Can we trust our elections anymore? Or is tribalism getting closer and closer to something we used to call treason?

Slavery, the Klan, Jim Crow, the Klan again. Internment of Japanese Americans. Gender discrimination and scientific racism. McCarthyism. George Wallace. All leading to a president whom Meacham considers “an heir to the white populist tradition,” a leader eager to undermine the law, the truth and “the sense of hope essential to American life.

Trump is normal in that he embodies recurring maladies of American public life; perhaps the main anomaly is that he brings so many of them together

every generation considers itself under siege and that, with the right leadership, Americans usually find a way forward rather than back. “The good news is that we have come through such darkness before,” he writes.

if you’re living in the gloom, awareness of historical patterns bestows limited consolation. It might, however, inject small doses of those qualities that latter-day resistance requires: Inspiration. Patience. Even humility.

even the exemplars are imperfect. Woodrow Wilson, who signed women’s suffrage into law, also resegregated the federal workforce, suppressed free speech and screened “The Birth of a Nation” in the White House.

King would marvel that it took a white Southerner, Lyndon Johnson, to help fulfill that vision. Progress in America, Meacham explains, “comes when the whispered hopes of those outside the mainstream rise in volume to reach the ears and hearts and minds of the powerful.”

For all his emphasis on elected leaders, however, Meacham argues that “what counts is not just the character of the individual at the top, but the character of the country.”

Franklin Roosevelt, who saved the country from the Great Depression, also sought to pack the Supreme Court and, more damning, detained Americans for no other cause than their Japanese ancestry. “A tragic element of history is that every advance must contend with forces of reaction,” Meacham writes.

In the 1920s, Klansmen held 11 governorships and 16 U.S. Senate seats, while more than 300 delegates at the 1924 Democratic National Convention were Klan members.

The opposition of the press “had the perverse effect of boosting the Klan rather than undercutting it,” Meacham notes. “Hostility from the journalists of the East convinced a number of middle Americans that a cause under such assault must have something to recommend it.” The elite news media as the enemy of real America is hardly just a Trumpian conceit.

the American soul proves expansive and malleable, sometimes dangerously so

When industrial upheaval and urbanization upended rural life, Meacham recalls, the Ku Klux Klan promised “racial solidarity and cultural certitude” — an apt summation of white-nationalists’ appeal a century later.

Trump-like figures are most evident among the latter forces. It is difficult to read Meacham’s descriptions of politicians such as President Andrew Johnson, Sen. Joseph McCarthy and Gov. George Wallace and not feel the current president looming.

it could signal the beginning of a new era of virtual assistants that will redefine our relationships with intelligent machines.

providing someone with valuable insights about their productivity, stress levels during meetings or lifestyle habits that impact their ability to perform their job

“We set out to discover whether there was a way to move the needle from an almost backward way of assessing people’s workplace performance to using more objective measures.

research shows that conscientious people, who are often more detailed-oriented and disciplined, tend to be more productive

If it was possible to predict someone’s mental health by analyzing their social media feeds and smartphone data, Campbell wondered, could similar data be leveraged to improve employee performance evaluations?

The workers were fitted with a wearable fitness tracker that monitored heart functions, sleep, stress, and measurements such as weight and calorie consumption, as well as a smartphone app that tracked their physical activity, location, phone usage and ambient light.

Location beacons placed in the home and office measured participants time at work and breaks from their desk, giving researchers a comprehensive window into their day from one hour to the next.

The information was processed by cloud-based machine-learning algorithms that classified performance using factors such as the amount of time spent at the workplace, quality of sleep, physical activity and phone usage

“We want to use that information to empower workers to tell them whether they’re being influenced by levels of stress or sleep or other factors that may not be immediately obvious to them.”

What the research does not explain, he said, is what habits make someone conscientious in the first place, leaving a gap in knowledge that researchers hoped to fill.

“Very often when people try to detect what drives performance, they rely on personality, which actually reveals little about someone’s ability to do their job well,” he said. “Evaluations can be biased because they are infused with stereotyping of people or political influences inside an office. But when you can extract a pattern over weeks and months, we can be more certain that assessment is objective and neutral.

the results showed, perhaps not surprisingly, that high performers tended to have lower rates of phone usage.

They also experience deeper periods of sustained sleep and are more physically active than their lower performing colleagues.

Researchers discovered that high-performing supervisors tended to be more mobile during the day, but they visited a smaller number of distinct places during their working hours

High-performing non-supervisors, meanwhile, tend to spend more time at work during the weekends,

Future versions, they said, could be tailored to individual jobs and provide workers with meaningful information about changes in their mental well-being during meetings or suggestions for reducing stress each week

But they also acknowledge that the valuable private data could prove volatile if it falls into a company’s hands without employee consent. Campbell suggested there might be a middle ground, such as companies offering incentives to employees who opt into a program that treats precise assessment data as one tool among several for evaluating performance.

“If there was any point down the road where I could have an application on my phone that could provide an objective assessment of my performance, that might be an incentive for workers to use it," he said. “Imagine being able to say, ‘Here’s the evidence that I deserve to be promoted or that my boss is standing in my way.’"

“I can’t really look into a crystal ball, but I’m hopeful this passive sensing technology will be used to empower the workforce rather than used against them," he added.

The plan was published Sunday by the American Enterprise Institute. Its lead author — Scott Gottlieb, former Food and Drug Administration commissioner in the Trump administration

“The goal is to outline a plan that will allow a gradual return to a more normal way of life without increasing the risk” that the epidemic will resurge.

Most economists and health experts say there is no way to restart the economy without addressing the underlying problem of the coronavirus. As long as the pandemic continues to spread, the markets will be in turmoil and any businesses will struggle to stay open, they say.

instead of giving false reassurances and deadlines, the White House should tell people the hard truth about the current situation and a coherent strategy they can work toward. “The social distancing, being stuck at home, the deaths we’re going to be seeing. People want to know what it’s for. That there’s a plan.”

the road map Gottlieb’s group outlined stresses the need to move away from the current decentralized system and “toward more coordinated execution of response.”

The plan divides coming months into four phases and sets “triggers” for states to move from one phase to the next.

The latest proposal is a 19-page plan with a step-by-step timeline, with clear benchmarks states and regions would need to meet to safely move forward to the next step

With most of the nation now in phase one of the epidemic, the goal should be a sharp increase in hospital critical care beds and an increase of testing to 750,000 people a week to track the epidemic — a number Gottlieb said could be achieved in the next week or two.

For a state to move to phase two, it should see a sustained reduction in new cases for at least 14 days, and its hospitals need to be able to provide care without being overwhelmed.

“The reason we set it at 14 days is that’s the incubation period of the virus,” said Rivers of Johns Hopkins. “That way you know the downward trend is certain and not because of a holiday or blip or some other delay in reported cases.”

States that have moved into phase two would begin gradually lifting social distancing measures and opening schools and businesses, while increasing surveillance.

The key goals thereafter would be accelerating the development of new treatments and deploying tests to determine who has recovered from infection with some immunity and could rejoin the workforce.

Phase 3 occurs when the nation has a vaccine or drugs to treat covid-19 in place and the government launches mass vaccinations

For weeks, World Health Organization officials have stressed such lockdowns are only helpful for slowing down the virus and buying time to deploy more targeted and comprehensive measures, which the U.S. has not yet done.

Trump has repeatedly returned to strategies of bans and movement restriction

Phase 4 involves rebuilding the nation’s capacity to deal with the next pandemic by building up its scientific and public health infrastructure.

Mike Ryan, WHO head of emergency programs, recently urged countries to focus on finding and isolating infected people and their contacts. “It’s not just about physical distancing, it’s not just about locking down,”

Many experts’ recent proposals for a U.S. strategy have similar stressed the importance of large-scale contact tracing — because it was a cornerstone for successful efforts like South Korea and Singapore.

as countries have shown success with it against this coronavirus, that thinking has changed.

such contact tracing is “impractical now in many places but more practical once case numbers have been reduced and testing scaled up” and “could alleviate the need for stringent social distancing to maintain control of the epidemic.”

Rapidly building up that capacity — either with community volunteers or short-term hires — will be crucial in coming months, said Rivers of Johns Hopkins. “If you build capacity up and bring cases down, it starts looking a lot more possible.”

Many proposals tackle the problem of the tanking economy.

Gottlieb-Johns Hopkins plan, for example, calls for widespread use of blood tests to identify people who have had the infection and now are immune — called serology testing

People who are immune could return to work, or take on high-risk roles in the health care system and help people, especially the elderly, who are still quarantined at home.

Such serology tests have not been deployed before like this on such a large scale

during Ebola outbreaks in Africa, survivors were often the ones who provided care, watched over the children of sick patients and buried the dead.

One challenge unaddressed by most proposals and op-eds, however, is how to get such detailed plans adopted by the White House, whose response has weighed down by infighting and unclear leadership ping-ponging in recent weeks among Trump, Pence and health advisers like Anthony S. Fauci and Deborah Birx and others.

Health officials and scientists involved in the federal response, especially from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, have fought to be heard while straining to avoid offending Trump, who bristles at being publicly contradicted, undercut or overshadowed by praise for ideas or people beside himself, according to people who spoke on the condition of anonymity about sensitive deliberations.

On Thursday, Trump unveiled a plan of his own, though scarce in detail. He said he planned to help communities ease their restrictions and reopen for business by using on “robust” surveillance and categorizing counties across America into three “risk levels” — low, medium and high. More details are likely in coming days, White House officials said.

Employees who are selected to make the switch can make $19 per hour, a $2 raise on top of the pay hike Amazon announced earlier this month.

“As we continue to see a significant increase in demand for grocery orders, we are offering temporary opportunities for associates across our fulfillment network to provide additional support,” an Amazon spokesperson said on late Friday, confirming the action.

Amazon has been doubling down on the grocery industry since its $13.7 billion acquisition of Whole Foods in 2017.

Since the outbreak, grocery delivery has become a lifeline for people to get household staples while trying to avoid stepping outside.

So far, coronavirus has spread to at least 17 Amazon warehouses in the U.S., prompting workers and lawmakers to question if enough safety measures have been taken to protect employees on the frontlines.

Grocery stores are competing for workers to fulfill online orders. Walmart, with a fast growing online grocery business, plans to hire 150,000 employees at stores, distribution and fulfillment centers through May.

Dennis C. Dickson, a custodian who worked at police headquarters, died Thursday, Shea said.

On Friday, 4,122 NYPD employees were out sick, a senior NYPD official said. That's about 11% of the department's workforce.

At least 442 uniformed NYPD members and 70 civilian members have tested positive for coronavirus, the official said.

Officers have been looking for groups of people congregating and telling them to disperse.

"Men and women of the New York Police Department are stepping up. They're here for you. They're out there putting themselves -- uniform and civilian -- at risk to keep you safe," Shea added.

“Losing two months is close to disastrous, and that’s what we did,” Ashish Jha, director of the Harvard Global Health Institute, told Bloomberg.

if we are being honest with ourselves, we would have to admit that the United States has long been failing. We remain one of the richest countries in the world, but by international standards we look more like a Third World nation.

we lag in almost every measure of societal well-being among the wealthy nations (now 36) of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

we had the second-highest poverty rate, the highest level of income inequality and the highest level of obesity.

We were also below average on renewable energy, infrastructure investment and voter turnout.

We spent the most on education but produced less-than-average results

We are the only OECD nation that doesn’t mandate paid family leave.

One area where we do lead is gun violence. Our homicide rate is nearly 50 percent above the OECD average.

We spend more on health care than any other country in the world, but we are the only OECD country without universal medical coverage (27.9 million Americans lacked health insurance in 2018)

Child mortality in the United States is the highest in the OECD, and life expectancy is below average

We have far fewer hospital beds per 1,000 people than other advanced democracies (2.4 compared to 12.2 in South Korea), which makes us particularly vulnerable to a pandemic.

Why has America become so backward? That is a complex topic. I would direct readers to the work of analysts such as Jonathan Rauch, Francis Fukuyama, and Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann

I would ascribe a lot of what’s wrong to growing partisan polarization that makes it almost impossible to address our most pressing needs. Republicans are getting more conservative and Democrats more liberal — although not to the same degree. The GOP is far more extreme than the Democratic Party.

President Trump has exacerbated the problem, but he didn’t start it. He is himself the product of decades of right-wing revolt against government and increasingly against reason itself.

America is unusual in having a major party — and a major television network — devoted to climate denialism and protecting the “right” of everyone to own an assault rifle. The GOP and the right-wing media have long been a hotbed of nutty conspiracy theories, and their reluctance to face the reality of the new coronavirus set back efforts to save lives.

The Republicans’ decades-long demonization of government has consequences

the federal civilian workforce has fallen as a percentage of total nonfarm employment from 18 percent in 1980 to 15 percent today, and their salaries top out at just under $200,000 — “only slightly more than an entry-level engineer makes at Google.”

There are still plenty of high-quality civil servants, but their ranks are too thin, and they are too much at the mercy of political yahoos.

“When a typical European parliamentary government changes hands from one party to another, the ministers and a handful of staffers turn over,” Fukuyama notes. “In the U.S., a change of administration (even within the same party) opens up some 5,000 ‘Schedule C’ job positions to political appointees.”

We must not only beat this pandemic; we must also address a host of other ills that have been festering for decades. In recent years, America has been “exceptional” mainly in the scale of our governmental failures compared with those of other industrialized democracies.

“In a rational world, we would be ramping up production of basic essential supplies – test kits, masks, respirators – not only for our own use, but for poorer countries, too. Because it’s all one battle. But it’s not necessarily a rational world. So there could be a lot of demonisation and calls for isolation. Which will mean more deaths and more suffering worldwide.”

prior to 9/11, the US government had been in the process of developing serious regulations designed to give web users real choice about how their personal information was and wasn’t used. “In the course of a few days,” Zuboff says, “the concern shifted from ‘How do we regulate these companies that are violating privacy norms and rights’ to ‘How do we nurture and protect these companies so they can collect data for us?’”

“People have a hard time remembering privacy rights when they’re trying to deal with something like a pandemic,” says Vasuki Shastry, a Chatham House fellow who studies the interplay of technology and democracy. “Once a system gets scaled up, it can be very difficult to scale it back down. And then maybe it takes on other uses.”

The US Department of Justice has, since the outbreak began, filed a request with Congress for a new rule that would allow judges to suspend courtroom proceedings in emergencies, creating the possibility of people being jailed without ever being able to formally object.

In a 2008 report on the legal aspects of pandemic response, prompted by the increase in pandemic flu outbreaks, a team of historians and medical ethicists assembled by the American Civil Liberties Union bemoaned a common tendency – resurgent, in their view, since 9/11 – for government to address public health problems using mindsets more appropriate to tracking down criminals.

here’s another school of thought that looks at crisis and sees glimmers of possibility

“Ideas that used to be seen as leftwing seem more reasonable to more people. There’s room for change that there wasn’t beforehand. It’s an opening.”

Covid-19 has revealed the political status quo to be broken. Long before anyone had heard of the new coronavirus, people died of diseases we knew how to prevent and treat. People lived precarious lives in societies awash with wealth. Experts told us about catastrophic threats on the horizon, including pandemics, and we did next to nothing to prepare for them

At the same time, the drastic measures governments have taken in recent weeks testify to just how much power the state does have – the extent of what government can accomplish (and quickly!) when it realises it must act boldly or risk being seen as fundamentally illegitimate. As Pankaj Mishra recently wrote: “It has taken a disaster for the state to assume its original responsibility to protect citizens.”

For years, in mainstream politics the conventional line – on everything from healthcare to basic living expenses such as housing – has been that even if the world has its problems, expansive government intervention is not a feasible solution

Instead, we have been told that what works best are “marketplace” solutions, which give large roles to corporations motivated not by outdated notions like “the public good” but by a desire to make a profit

From this perspective, the task today is not to fight the virus in order to return to business as usual, because business as usual was already a disaster. The goal, instead, is to fight the virus – and in doing so transform business as usual into something more humane and secure.

disasters opened up human reserves of improvisation, solidarity and resolve, pockets of purpose and joy, even in the midst of loss and pain

In her 2007 book, The Shock Doctrine, the Canadian writer Naomi Klein laid out a dark account of crisis politics. In Klein’s view, there is always Disaster 1 – the earthquake, the storm, the military conflict, the economic slump – and Disaster 2 – the bad things that people with power subsequently get up to, such as ramming through extreme economic reforms or gobbling up post-crisis opportunities for self-enrichment, while the rest of us are too dazed to notice

Both address crisis not in terms of what inevitably – or “naturally” – happens as they unfold, but in terms of choices that people make along the way. And both were well-timed to contribute to the political conversations taking shape in the rubble of the financial crash

We may not quite all be “in it together” – as always, the poor are hit worse – but there is more truth to the idea than there ever was in the wake of 2008.

In this, the optimists believe, there is hope that we might begin to see the world differently.

Maybe we can view our problems as shared, and society as more than just a mass of individuals competing against each other for wealth and standing. Maybe, in short, we can understand that the logic of the market should not dominate as many spheres of human existence as we currently allow it to.

in the years since publishing The Shock Doctrine, Klein has made climate change her central focus, framing it as the paradigmatic emergency that must be wrenched from the clutches of fossil-fuel profiteers and their enablers in government.

the two problems have suggestive similarities. Both will require unusual levels of global cooperation. Both demand changes in behaviour today in the name of reducing suffering tomorrow. Both problems were long predicted with great certainty by scientists, and have been neglected by governments unable to see beyond the next fiscal quarter’s growth statistics

both will require governments to take drastic action and banish the logic of the marketplace from certain realms of human activity, while simultaneously embracing public investment.

“What is possible politically is fundamentally different when lots of people get into emergency mode – when they fundamentally accept that there’s danger, and that if we want to be safe we need to do everything we can. And it’s been interesting to see that theory validated by the response to the coronavirus

Now the challenge is to keep emergency mode activated about climate, where the dangers are orders of magnitude greater. We can’t think we’re going to go ‘back to normal’, because things weren’t normal.”

Most people do not feel they or their loved ones could die from the climate crisis this month, and so emergency mode is harder to activate and sustain

Alongside these hopeful signs, a far less heartening story is unfolding, which fits Klein’s “shock doctrine” framework. Disaster 1: Covid-19. Disaster 2: the dismantling of even the meagre existing rules designed to protect the environment

advocacy groups funded by the plastics industry have launched a public relations blitz on behalf of single-use plastic bags, spreading the unproven claim that the virus is less likely to stick to plastic than to the cloth fabric of reusable bags.

On 26 March, following lobbying from the energy industry, the US Environmental Protection Agency announced that, in recognition of the pandemic’s effects on the workforce, it will not punish violations of pollution regulations so long as companies can link those violations to the pandemic. China’s environmental ministry has started waiving inspections that assess the environmental impact of industrial facilitie

“It’s good that we’re entering emergency mode about the pandemic,” she said. “But unless we also do it for climate … ” She didn’t finish the sentence.

We need to learn to be scared together, to agree on what we’re terrified about.” Only then, she said, would governments be forced to act.

The historian Philip Mirowski, author of Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown, warns against complacency. “The left thought it was so obvious to everyone that the crisis revealed the utter bankruptcy of a certain way of looking at the economy,” he told me. “And it wasn’t obvious to everyone, and the left lost.”

How do we prevent the world from going back to a version of the way it was before Covid-19, with the virus vanquished but all of the old ongoing disasters still unfolding?

“The political outcome of the epidemic,” said Mike Davis, “will, like all political outcomes, be decided by struggle, by battles over interpretation, by pointing out what causes problems and what solves them. And we need to get that analysis out in the world any way we can.”

the past few weeks have exposed the fact that the biggest things can always change, at any minute. This simple truth, both destabilising and liberating, is easy to forget. We’re not watching a movie: we’re writing one, together, until the end