American manufacturing's postwar boom from the 1940s through the 1970s resulted from conditions that cannot be recreated, a story on WSJ argues. Global competitors had been destroyed by war. Energy was cheap. Unions could demand concessions without fearing job losses to foreign rivals.

Strikes were frequent in steel, auto, trucking, rubber and coal mining. That relentless pressure from an organized working class raised real wages and created fringe benefits including health insurance and retirement pay. Government support for unions kept executive salaries at just a few times median income. Stock buybacks were illegal or frowned upon. President Eisenhower declared at the 1956 dedication of the AFL-CIO national headquarters that "Labor is the United States."

The system began unraveling by the mid-1960s. The Vietnam War drained federal coffers. Inflation accelerated as government deficits exploded. Nixon abandoned the gold standard in 1971, unleashing currency volatility. The 1973 OPEC oil embargo quadrupled energy prices. Foreign competition returned from Japan, Korea and West Germany. American companies carried mounting legacy costs like pensions that discouraged investment in upgrades and research.

Milton Friedman declared in a 1970 New York Times essay that the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits. Clinton signed NAFTA in 1993 and championed the World Trade Organization in 1995. Bethlehem Steel employed around 150,000 people in the mid-1950s. The company filed for bankruptcy in 2001. Its former hometown plant in Bethlehem, Pa., is now a casino.

An anonymous reader shares a report: US software company SAS Institute has withdrawn from mainland China and dismissed its local staff, according to a Beijing-based employee affected by the move, as the analytics specialist ended more than two decades of operations amid intense domestic competition and geopolitical tensions. The company on Thursday announced the lay-offs via an email and hosted a short video call, in which executives thanked local employees for their contribution and cited "organisational optimisation" for the exit, according to the employee.

"SAS is ceasing direct business operations in China," an SAS spokeswoman said on Friday in response to the Post's inquiry. "This decision reflects a broader shift in how we operate globally, optimising our footprint and ensuring long-term sustainability." The company would continue having a presence on the mainland via third-party partners, according to the spokeswoman.

The government shutdown-spurred airport chaos is about to get a whole lot worse. From a report: The Federal Aviation Administration said Wednesday it will reduce flight volumes by 10 percent across 40 major airports in response, a move that could threaten 3,000 to 4,500 flights daily. The cuts will affect "high volume" markets, including in Atlanta, Dallas, New York City and Los Angeles, according to CBS. The FAA has not formally announced which airports will have their capacity cut.

"I'm not aware in my 35-year history in the aviation market where we've had a situation where we're taking these kinds of measures," FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford said at a news conference, according to the AP. The government shutdown, which is now the longest in US history, has already been causing thousands of delays each day, as well as long waits at airport security. Some major airports have even been forced to operate without air traffic control for hours at a time.

A new Activate Consulting report reveals that 43% of Gen Z now prefer YouTube and TikTok over traditional TV or paid streaming. With global media revenues surging and traditional TV viewership collapsing, the average person now spends over 13 hours a day consuming content across platforms, effectively living a "32-hour day" through multitasking. Variety reports: Per the same survey, the popularity of "microdramas" -- one of the latest trends on those platforms, consisting of 1-2 minute scripted episodes of an ongoing storyline -- has been increasing at a fast rate with 28 million U.S. adults (52% aged 18-34) reportedly watching that new form of content.

Additional findings include projections for global internet and media revenue to increase by $388 billion by 2029, while average daily time spent streaming video will climb to 4 hours and 8 minutes as time spent watching traditional TV is set to collapse to just 1 hour and 17 minutes. Activate estimates that, as a result, streaming revenues (from ads and subscriptions) will grow 18-19% annually while traditional TV revenues will fall 4-6% year to year.

Solar geoengineering could increase the ferocity of North Atlantic hurricanes, cause the Amazon rainforest to die back and cause drought in parts of Africa if deployed above only some parts of the planet by rogue actors, a report has warned. The Guardian: However, if technology to block the sun was used globally and in a coordinated way for a long period -- decades or even centuries -- there is strong evidence that it would lower the global temperature, the review from the UK's Royal Society concluded.

The world is failing to halt the climate crisis and the researchers said that in future, a judgment might need to be made between the risks of geoengineering and the those of continued global heating, which is already costing lives and livelihoods. The logistics of a large-scale geoengineering effort would be daunting, the experts said, but the cost would be small relative to climate action -- billions of dollars a year against trillions.

The researchers emphasised that geoengineering only masked the symptoms of the climate crisis, and did not tackle the root cause -- the burning of fossil fuels. Geoengineering could only complement the cutting of emissions, not replace it, they said. If geoengineering was halted abruptly but emissions had not been reduced, there would be a termination shock of rapidly rising temperatures -- 1-2C within a couple of decades -- that would have severe effects on people and ecosystems unable to rapidly adapt.

Brazil is set to announce Thursday the establishment of a multibillion-dollar fund designed to pay countries to keep their tropical forests standing. The Tropical Forest Forever Facility would deliver $4 billion per year to as many as 74 countries that maintain their forest cover. The fund requires $25 billion from governments and philanthropies to begin operations.

Private investors would contribute the remaining $100 billion. Brazil has committed $1 billion. Countries would receive around $4 per hectare of standing forest after using satellite imagery to verify forests remain in place. Nations with annual deforestation rates above 0.5% are ineligible for payouts. Indonesia, which has rapidly lost forests to palm-oil cultivation and mining, cannot participate. One-fifth of the payments are designated for forest communities. The World Bank is managing the fund.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Today, Samsung provided details about the next version of the HDR10 format, which introduces six new features. Among HDR10+ Advanced's most interesting features is HDR10+ Intelligent FRC (frame rate conversion), which is supposed to improve motion smoothing.

A TV using motion smoothing analyzes each video frame and tries to determine what additional frames would look like if the video were playing at a frame rate that matched the TV's refresh rate. The TV then inserts those frames into the video. A 60Hz TV with motion smoothing on, for example, would attempt to remove judder from a 24p film by inserting frames so that the video plays as if it were shot at 60p. For some, this appears normal and can make motion, especially camera panning or zooming, look smoother. However, others will report movies and shows that look more like soap operas, or as if they were shot on higher-speed video cameras instead of film cameras. Critics, including some big names in Hollywood, argue that motion smoothing looks unnatural and deviates from the creator's intended vision.

Intelligent FRC takes a more nuanced approach to motion smoothing by letting content creators dictate the level of motion smoothing used in each scene, Forbes reported. The feature is also designed to adjust the strength of motion interpolation based on ambient lighting.

Dick Cheney, who served four Republican presidents and became one of the most powerful and controversial vice presidents in American history as an architect of the post-9/11 war on terror, died at 84. His family said he died from complications of pneumonia and cardiac and vascular disease.

Cheney served as vice president under George W. Bush for two terms beginning in 2001 and relentlessly advocated for the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Many Americans came to view the war as a strategic and humanitarian disaster. The conflict had far-reaching policy and political consequences that helped turn the public against intervention and upheaved Republican politics. Cheney continued to defend the invasion long after leaving office in 2009.

He had heart disease for most of his life and underwent a transplant in 2012. That allowed him to live to see his daughter Liz Cheney follow in his political footsteps to become a House GOP leader. Before serving as vice president, Cheney was defense secretary under George H.W. Bush and chief of staff to Gerald Ford at age 34.

Amazon's data-center expansion turned Umatilla, Oregon into an unlikely nerve center for American infrastructure investment. The community of roughly 8,000 residents has seen home prices double and local government budgets surge from $7 million in 2011 to a hundred and $44 million in the past fiscal year. Yesenia Leon-Tejeda, a Realtor and daughter of Mexican-born farmhands who once worked 12-hour shifts at a distribution center, is now on pace to close 35 deals this year.

Federal data shows investment in software and information-processing equipment drove most of America's GDP growth in the first half of 2025. Goldman Sachs estimated that roughly 72% of all server-farm capacity sat in just 1% of counties as of July. The region's hydroelectric dams and cheap power attracted Amazon Web Services more than a decade ago. Growth has brought rising costs for housing and child care. Political tensions over spending erupted this year when Mayor Caden Sipe sued the city manager and council members.

Longtime Slashdot reader sinij shares a report from Car and Driver: Sales of electric vehicles surged in September as shoppers rushed to take advantage of the $7500 federal EV tax credit before it disappeared at the end of the month. With the government subsidies now gone, EV sales were expected to take a hit in October. While only a few automakers still report sales on a monthly basis, the results we do have do not paint a rosy picture for EVs in a post-tax credit world.

The Korean automakers were hit particularly hard by the loss of the tax credit. The Hyundai Ioniq 5, which was the fifth-best-selling EV through the third quarter of this year, experienced a 63 percent drop, moving 1642 units in October 2025, down from 4498 in 2024. Its platform-mates saw similar declines. The Kia EV6 moved just 508 units, down 71 percent versus the same month the year before, while the luxurious Genesis GV60 only found 93 buyers, a 54 percent slide year over year. Things were even worse at Honda. While the Acura ZDX was recently discontinued after just a single model year, the related Honda Prologue remains on sale but registered just 806 units, down 81 percent from 4130 sales in October 2024. [...]

Obviously, this isn't the full picture, as several major players -- including General Motors, Toyota, Nissan, and Volkswagen -- only release sales reports on a quarterly basis, and others, such as Tesla and Rivian, don't break out individual sales at all. But with four of the top 10 bestselling EVs through Q3 all showing noteworthy declines in October, it spells trouble for the EV market at large. The end-of-year sales figures will provide a much clearer picture of whether October was just a blip or the start of a much more widespread problem for EV sales.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: An Antarctic glacier shrunk by nearly 50% in just two months, the fastest retreat recorded in modern history, according to a new study -- and the way it retreated could have big implications for global sea level rise. The Hektoria Glacier, roughly the size of Philadelphia, is on the Antarctic Peninsula, a spindly chain of mountains sticking off the continent like a thumb pointing toward South America. It is one of the fastest warming regions on Earth.

Grounded glaciers like Hektoria, which rest on the seabed and don't float, generally retreat no more than a few hundred meters a year. But between November and December 2022, Hektoria retreated by 5 miles, according to the study published Monday in the journal Nature Geoscience. [...] Understanding more about why this happened is vital; if larger glaciers retreat at similar rates, it could have "catastrophic implications for sea level rise," the authors wrote in a statement accompanying the report. Antarctica holds enough ice to raise global sea level by around 190 feet. Models show that the latest time this kind of ice plain melting occurred was between about 15,000 and 19,000 years ago, "during a period of warming that ended the last Ice Age," notes the report.

"[W]e hadn't seen it play out live before, certainly not at this rate," said Naomi Ochwat, a study co-author and postdoctoral associate at the University of Colorado Boulder.

concertina226 shares a report from The Register: [A massive power outage in April left tens of millions across Spain, Portugal, and parts of France without electricity for hours due to cascading grid failures, exposing how fragile and interconnected Europe's energy infrastructure is. The incident, though not a cyberattack, reignited concerns about the vulnerability of aging, fragmented, and insecure operational technology systems that could be easily exploited in future cyber or ransomware attacks.] This headache is one the European Commission is focused on. It is funding several projects looking at making electric grids more resilient, such as the eFort framework being developed by cybersecurity researchers at the independent non-profit Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research (TNO) and the Delft University of Technology (TU Delft).

TNO's SOARCA tool is the first ever open source security orchestration, automation and response (SOAR) platform designed to protect power plants by automating the orchestration of the response to physical attacks, as well as cyberattacks, on substations and the network, and the first country to demo it will be the Ukraine this year. At the moment, SOAR systems only exist for dedicated IT environments. The researchers' design includes a SOAR system in each layer of the power station: the substation, the control room, the enterprise layer, the cloud, or the security operations centre (SOC), so that the SOC and the control room work together to detect anomalies in the network, whether it's an attacker exploiting a vulnerability, a malicious device being plugged into a substation, or a physical attack like a missile hitting a substation. The idea is to be able to isolate potential problems and prevent lateral movement from one device to another or privilege escalation, so an attacker cannot go through the network to the central IT management system of the electricity grid. [...]

The SOARCA tool is underpinned by CACAO Playbooks, an open source specification developed by the OASIS Open standards body and its members (which include lots of tech giants and US government agencies) to create standardized predefined, automated workflows that can detect intrusions and changes made by malicious actors, and then carry out a series of steps to protect the network and mitigate the attack. Experts largely agree the problem facing critical infrastructure is only worsening as years pass, and the more random Windows implementations that are added into the network, the wider the attack surface is. [...] TNO's Wolthuis said the energy industry is likely to be pushed soon to take action by regulators, particularly once the Network Code on Cybersecurity (NCCS), which lays out rules requiring cybersecurity risk assessments in the electricity sector, is formalized.

A long-simmering battle over who controls credit scoring in America has erupted into open warfare. Fair Isaac, whose FICO score is used in about 90% of consumer-lending decisions in the U.S., announced it will double the price of its mortgage credit score to $10 next year. The company also said it will bypass the three credit-reporting firms that have supplied the data feeding into its algorithm for decades.

Equifax, Experian and TransUnion created VantageScore in 2006 as an alternative to FICO and collectively own the scoring system. The move came months after Bill Pulte, head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, announced that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac would allow lenders to use VantageScore for mortgage approvals. The three credit-reporting firms responded by offering VantageScore free for many loans. Fair Isaac had charged a few cents per score for decades before chief executive Will Lansing began raising prices several years ago. Revenue from selling credit scores reached $920 million in fiscal 2024, nearly five times what it was a decade earlier.

Palantir launched a fellowship that recruited high school graduates directly into full-time work, bypassing college entirely. The company received more than 500 applications and selected 22 for the inaugural class. The four-month program began with seminars on Western civilization, U.S. history, and leaders including Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill. Fellows then embedded in client teams working on live projects for hospitals, insurance companies, defense contractors, and government agencies.

CEO Alex Karp, who studied at Haverford and Stanford, said in August that hiring university students now means hiring people engaged in "platitudes." The program wraps up in November. Palantir executives said they had a clear sense by the third or fourth week of which fellows were succeeding in the company environment. Fellows who perform well will receive offers for permanent positions without college degrees.

"Ubuntu's decision to switch to Rust-based coreutils in 25.10 hasn't been the smoothest ride," writes the blog OMG Ubuntu, "as the latest — albeit now resolved — bug underscores." [Coreutils] are used by a number of processes, apps and scripts, including Ubuntu's own unattended-upgrades process, which automatically checks for new software updates. Alas, the Rust-based version of date had a bug which meant Ubuntu 25.10 desktops, servers, cloud and container images were not able to automatically check for updates when configured. Unattended-upgrades hooks into the date utility to check the timestamp of a reference file of when an update check was last run and, past a certain date, checks again. But date was incorrectly showing the current date, always.

A fix has been issued so only Ubuntu 25.10 installs withrust-coreutils 0.2.2-0ubuntu2 (or earlier) are affected.

Slashdot reader BrianFagioli summarizes some news from Nerds.xyz: Creative Technology has launched Sound Blaster Re:Imagine, a modular, Linux-powered audio hub that reimagines the classic PC sound card for the modern age. The device acts as both a high-end digital-to-analog converter (DAC) and a customizable control deck that connects PCs, consoles, phones, and tablets in one setup.

Users can instantly switch inputs and outputs, while developers get full hardware access through an SDK for creating their own apps. It even supports AI-driven features like an on-device DJ, a revived "Dr. Sbaitso" speech synthesizer, and a built-in DOS emulator for retro gaming.

The Kickstarter campaign has already raised more than $150,000, far surpassing its initial goal of $15,000 with over 50 days remaining. Each unit ships with a modular "Horizon" base and swappable knobs, sliders, and buttons, while a larger "Vertex" version will unlock at a higher funding milestone.

Running an unspecified Linux build, Re:Imagine positions itself as both a nostalgic nod to Sound Blaster's roots and a new open platform for creators, gamers, and tinkerers.

"Amazon has deployed Rivian's electric delivery vans in Canada for the first time," reports CleanTechnica, with 50 now deployed in the Vancouver area.

Amazon's director of Global Fleet and Products says there's now over 35,000 electric vans deployed globally — and that they've delivered more than 1.5 billion packages.

More from the blog Teslarati: In December 2024, the companies announced they had successfully deployed 20,000 EDVs across the U.S. In the first half of this year, 10,000 additional vans were delivered, and Amazon's fleet had grown to 30,000 EDVs by mid-2025. Amazon's fleet of EDVs continues to grow rapidly and has expanded to over 100 cities in the United States... The EDV is a model that is exclusive to Amazon, but Rivian sells the RCV, or Rivian Commercial Van, openly. It detailed some of the pricing and trim options back in January when it confirmed it had secured orders from various companies, including AT&T.

Ubuntu "is adopting the memory-safe Rust language," reports ZDNet, citing remarks at this year's Ubuntu Summit from Jon Seager, Canonical's VP of engineering for Ubuntu: . Seager said the engineering team is focused on replacing key system components with Rust-based alternatives to enhance safety and resilience, starting with Ubuntu 25.10. He stressed that resilience and memory safety, not just performance, are the principal drivers: "It's the enhanced resilience and safety that is more easily achieved with Rust ports that are most attractive to me". This move is echoed in Ubuntu's adoption of sudo-rs, the Rust implementation of sudo, with fallback and opt-out mechanisms for users who want to use the old-school sudo command.

In addition to sudo-rs, Ubuntu 26.04 will use the Rust-based uutils/coreutils for Linux's default core utilities. This setup includes ls, cp, mv, and dozens of other basic Unix command-line tools. This Rust reimplementation aims for functional parity with GNU coreutils, with improved safety and maintainability.

On the desktop front, Ubuntu 26.04 will also bring seamless TPM-backed full disk encryption. If this approach reminds you of Windows BitLocker or MacOS FileVault, it should. That's the idea.
In other news, Canonical CEO Mark Shuttleworth said "I'm a believer in the potential of Linux to deliver a desktop that could have wider and universal appeal." (Although he also thinks "the open-source community needs to understand that building desktops for people who aren't engineers is different. We need to understand that the 'simple and just works' is also really important.")

Shuttleworth answered questions from Slashdot's readers in 2005 and 2012.

Longtime Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shares a report from the Financial Times: Solar power developers want to cover an area larger than Washington, DC, with silicon panels and batteries, converting sunlight into electricity that will power air conditioners in sweltering Las Vegas along with millions of other homes and businesses. But earlier this month, bureaucrats in charge of federal lands scrapped collective approval for the Esmeralda 7 projects, in what campaigners fear is part of an attack on renewable energy under President Donald Trump. "We will not approve wind or farmer destroying [sic] Solar," he posted on his Truth Social platform in August. Developers will need to reapply individually, slowing progress.

Thousands of miles away on the other side of the Pacific Ocean, it is a different story. China has laid solar panels across an area the size of Chicago high up on the Tibetan Plateau, where the thin air helps more sunlight get through. The Talatan Solar Park is part of China's push to double its solar and wind generation capacity over the coming decade. "Green and low-carbon transition is the trend of our time," President Xi Jinping told delegates at a UN summit in New York last month. China's vast production of solar panels and batteries has also pushed down the prices of renewables hardware for everyone else, meaning it has "become very difficult to make any other choice in some places," according to Heymi Bahar, senior analyst at the International Energy Agency. [...]

More broadly, the US's focus on fossil fuels and pullback of support for clean energy further cedes influence over the future global energy system to China. The US is trying to tie its trading partners into fossil fuels, pressing the EU to buy $750 billion of American oil, natural gas, and nuclear technologies during his presidency as part of a trade deal, scuppering an initiative to begin decarbonizing world shipping and pressuring others to reduce their reliance on Chinese technology. But the collapsing cost of solar panels in particular has spoken for itself in many parts of the world. Experts caution that the US's attacks on renewables could cause lasting damage to its competitiveness against China, even if an administration more favorable to renewables were to follow Trump's.

Disney's channels, including ESPN, ABC, FX, and NatGeo, have gone dark on YouTube TV after Google and Disney failed to renew their carriage agreement before the October 30 deadline, with each side blaming the other for using unfair negotiating tactics and price hikes. YouTube TV says it will issue a $20 credit to subscribers if the blackout continues while negotiations proceed. Engadget reports: "Last week Disney used the threat of a blackout on YouTube TV as a negotiating tactic to force deal terms that would raise prices on our customers," YouTube said in an announcement on its blog. "They're now following through on that threat, suspending their content on YouTube TV." YouTube added that Disney's decision harms its subscribers while benefiting its own live TV products, such as Hulu+Live TV and Fubo.

In a statement sent to the Los Angeles Times, however, Disney accused Google's YouTube TV of choosing to deny "subscribers the content they value most by refusing to pay fair rates for [its] channels, including ESPN and ABC." Disney also accused Google of using its market dominance to "eliminate competition and undercut the industry-standard terms" that other pay-TV distributors have agreed to pay for its content.