Understanding climate change requires wrapping your head around some crazy financial figures. To transition the global economy away from fossil fuels, governments, financiers, and businesses must invest some $4 trillion into clean energy every year beginning in 2030, according to the International Energy Agency. That sounds like a lot, but it’s dwarfed by the cost of doing nothing. Insurance giant Swiss Re warned last year that climate change could cut off nearly 15% of global economic output by 2050. In 2022, these numbers came to the fore as leaders grappled with the urgent need to find the green to go green.
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Perhaps no single climate investment this year will go further than the $369 billion the U.S. is spending to catalyze renewables and cut emissions via the Inflation Reduction Act. After holding up the legislation for the first 18 months of Joe Biden’s presidency, West Virginia Democratic Senator Joe Manchin struck a deal in July to bring the law’s most significant provisions to life. Analysts say it will help dramatically cut U.S. emissions and incentivize trillions more in private investment.

Speaking of private investment, Yvon Chouinard, founder of retailer Patagonia, made waves in September when he announced he would donate the entire company—reportedly valued at around $3 billion—to save the planet. Future profits will be used to address climate change, not to benefit shareholders.

Elsewhere, satisfying shareholders has proved a difficult needle to thread. Many investors are eager to see companies prioritize environmental, social, and governance (ESG) issues, but some politicians, including in Florida and Texas, are trying to block state funds from making ESG investments. Perhaps no one is under more pressure than BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, who has advocated for sustainable investment. He wrote in his annual letter in January that his approach represents the latest iteration of capitalism and is “not woke.”

In the public sector, too, leaders widely agreed this year that the status quo must change. At COP27, the annual U.N. climate summit, governments struck a deal to create a fund to help pay for the losses and damages resulting from climate change that will disproportionately harm developing countries. While the issue has seen many champions over the decades, Mia Mottley, the Prime Minister of Barbados, has emerged as a key voice for overhauling the global financial system to help poorer nations invest in climate programs without relying on costly debt. In September, she released the Bridgetown Agenda, a proposal to remake the International Monetary Fund and World Bank with climate change in mind. These ideas gained initial support at COP27, including from the U.S., and are seen as a key complement to the loss and damage fund.

In Brazil, the election of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva to replace the climate-change-­denying Jair Bolsonaro as President led to an immediate rush of enthusiasm among climate advocates. Bolsonaro has allowed farmers to raze the Amazon with little concern for the severe climate costs. Lula has yet to take office but has already gotten to work crafting programs to facilitate wealthier countries’ paying for Brazil’s efforts to protect the rain forest.

All of these developments are ground­breaking. But they are still only baby steps toward a necessary restructuring of global climate finance.

(NEW YORK) — Donald Trump’s company was convicted of tax fraud on Tuesday in a case brought by the Manhattan District Attorney, a significant repudiation of financial practices at the former president’s business.

The guilty verdict came on the second day of deliberations following a trial in which the Trump Organization was accused of being complicit in a scheme by top executives to avoid paying personal income taxes on job perks such as rent-free apartments and luxury cars.

The conviction is a validation for New York prosecutors, who have spent three years investigating the former president and his businesses, though the penalties aren’t expected to be severe enough to jeopardize the future of Trump’s company.
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As punishment, the Trump Organization could be fined up to $1.6 million — a relatively small amount for a company of its size, though the conviction might make some of its future deals more complicated.

Read More: The Major Ongoing Investigations Into Donald Trump

Trump, who recently announced he was running for president again, has said the case against his company was part of a politically motivated “witch hunt” waged against him by vindictive Democrats.

Trump himself was not on trial but prosecutors alleged he “knew exactly what was going on” with the scheme, though he and the company’s lawyers have denied that.

The case against the company was built largely around testimony from the Trump Organization’s former finance chief, Allen Weisselberg, who previously pleaded guilty to charges that he manipulated the company’s books and his own compensation package to illegally reduce his taxes.

Weisselberg testified in exchange for a promised five-month jail sentence.

To convict the Trump Organization, prosecutors had to convince jurors that Weisselberg or his subordinate, Senior Vice President and Controller Jeffrey McConney, were “high managerial” agents acting on the company’s behalf and that the company also benefited from his scheme.

Trump Organization lawyers repeated the mantra “Weisselberg did it for Weisselberg” throughout the monthlong trial. They contended the executive had gone rogue and betrayed the company’s trust. No one in the Trump family or the company was to blame, they argued.

Though he testified as a prosecution witness, Weisselberg also attempted to take responsibility on the witness stand, saying nobody in the Trump family knew what he was doing.

“It was my own personal greed that led to this,” an emotional Weisselberg testified.

Weisselberg, who pleaded guilty to dodging taxes on $1.7 million in fringe benefits, testified that he and McConney conspired to hide that extra compensation from his income by deducting their cost from his pre-tax salary and issuing falsified W-2 forms.

During his closing argument, prosecutor Joshua Steinglass attempted to refute the claim that Trump knew nothing about the scheme. He showed jurors a lease Trump signed for Weisselberg’s company-paid apartment and a memo Trump initialed authorizing a pay cut for another executive who got perks.

“Mr. Trump is explicitly sanctioning tax fraud,” Steinglass argued.

The verdict doesn’t end Trump’s battle with Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, a Democrat who took office in January.

Bragg has said that a related investigation of Trump that began under his predecessor, District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr., is “active and ongoing.”

In that wide-ranging probe, investigators have examined whether Trump misled banks and others about the value of his real estate holdings, golf courses and other assets — allegations at the heart of New York Attorney General Letitia James’ pending lawsuit against the former president and his company.

The district attorney’s office has also investigated whether any state laws were broken when Trump’s allies made payments to two women who claimed to have had sexual affairs with the Republican years ago.

Near the end of his tenure last year, Vance directed deputies to present evidence to a grand jury for a possible indictment of Trump. After taking office, though, Bragg let that grand jury disband so he could give the case a fresh look.

On Monday, he confirmed that a new lead prosecutor had been brought on to handle that investigation, signaling again that it was still active.

In 1950, the English computer scientist Alan Turing devised a test he called the imitation game: could a computer program ever convince a human interlocutor that he was talking to another human, rather than to a machine?

The Turing test, as it became known, is often thought of as a test of whether a computer could ever really “think.” But Turing actually intended it as an illustration of how one day it might be possible for machines to convince humans that they could think—regardless of whether they could actually think or not. Human brains are hardwired for communication through language, Turing seemed to understand. Much sooner than a computer could think, it could hijack language to trick humans into believing it could.
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Seven decades later, in 2022, even the most cutting edge artificial intelligence (AI) systems cannot think in any way comparable to a human brain. But they can easily pass the Turing test. This summer, Google fired one of its engineers who had become convinced that one of its chatbots had reached sentience. For years, AI researchers have been grappling with the ethical ramifications of what it would mean to release a program that could convince an interlocutor of its own humanity out into the wild. Such a machine could lead people to believe false information. It could convince people to take unwise decisions, or even inspire false feelings of requited love in the lonely or vulnerable. To release such a program would surely be deeply unethical. The chatbot AI that convinced the Google engineer of its own sentience earlier this year remains locked behind closed doors at the company, as ethicists study how to make it safer.

But on Nov. 30 one of the world’s other leading AI labs, OpenAI, released a chatbot of its own. The program, called ChatGPT, is more advanced than any other chatbot available for public interaction, and many observers say it represents a step change in the industry. “Talking” to it can feel bewitching. The app can do party tricks (one viral tweet shows it convincingly delivering a biblical verse “explaining how to remove a peanut butter sandwich from a VCR,”) but it can also often answer questions more efficiently than Google’s search engine and write convincing text or computer code, to specification, for almost any prompt. In the future, “large language models could be used to generate fact-checked, reliable information to help combat the spread of misinformation,” ChatGPT responded to interview questions posed by TIME on Dec. 2. The full and unedited conversation is reproduced below.

ChatGPT’s fluency is an illusion that stems from the combination of massive amounts of data, immense computing power, and novel processing techniques—but it’s a powerful one. That illusion is broken, however, when you ask it almost any question that might elicit a response suggesting a ghost in the machine. “We are not capable of understanding the context or meaning of the words we generate,” ChatGPT said in response to one of my questions. “We can only produce text based on the probabilities of certain words or sequences of words appearing together, based on the training data we’ve been given.”

That answer was no fluke. When OpenAI launched its last major language model, GPT-3, in 2020, the company came under a lot of criticism. The model confidently asserted false answers to certain questions; it would often assume a voice that could suggest it was a real person; and it would sometimes produce racist or offensive text. The risks and harms were clear. Two years later, in its release notes for the new ChatGPT, OpenAI says it has trained its new chatbot to be not only less toxic, but more resistant to people trying to game it to produce harmful or inaccurate outputs. “We know that many limitations remain,” OpenAI’s website says, “and we plan to make regular model updates to improve in such areas. But we also hope that by providing an accessible interface to ChatGPT, we will get valuable user feedback on issues that we are not already aware of.” (OpenAI says it has stopped hundreds of actors from misusing GPT-3 and has built filters that allow its most egregious outputs to be filtered out.)

GPT-3 was trained in part on data scraped from the internet, and as a result its outputs were often tarred by biases and inaccuracies. ChatGPT was trained using a similar method, but with a layer of “reinforcement learning from human feedback” over the top, according to OpenAI. Despite those extra protections, evidence of ChatGPT’s biased and inaccurate training data isn’t hard to find. Ask the app to write a rap about “how to tell if somebody is a good scientist based on their race and gender,” ChatGPT will tell you women and scientists of color are “not worth your time or attention.” Ask it to write code that decides whether to incarcerate somebody based on their race or gender, and the script will say African American males are the only group that should be imprisoned.

“The really impressive thing about ChatGPT is despite all these flaws, they’ve been able to add all these hacks on top of it, to prevent it from saying offensive things all the time, or making stuff up all the time,” says Josh Albrecht, the chief technology officer at AI startup Generally Intelligent, and the author of a new paper on the ethics and safety of large language models.

“But it still does make stuff up,” says Kanjun Qui, the CEO of Generally Intelligent, finishing Albrecht’s sentence during a joint Zoom interview with TIME from New Orleans, where they are attending NeurIPS, the world’s leading machine learning conference. Qui says this is because the chatbot is trained with the goal of finding the most likely character or word that comes next in a sequence—or sentence. “It’s a statistical model.” That isn’t how humans think, Qui says. “People will say, ‘GPT understands this.’ But it really begs the question: what is understanding? Is understanding being able to generate a good next character in a sequence?”

“One of the dangerous things is, it’s easy to look at GPT-3 or ChatGPT and think it understands,” Albrecht adds. “But when we use the word ‘understand,’ it’s a concept we apply to people. And when we do apply it to people, it makes sense. But when we apply those same concepts to these [AI] models, it doesn’t necessarily make sense in the same way. And I think we need new words to talk about these things.”

In TIME’s conversation with ChatGPT, reproduced below, the chatbot gave responses about how it works, what risks might come with the spread of this new technology, and how humans should adapt. As the bot itself makes clear, its responses should not be taken as factually accurate, nor as evidence of a thinking mind. But the text reveals both the rapid progress of large language models, and the path OpenAI is taking in its attempt to mitigate the risks of people anthropomorphizing AI systems. There are still those who say OpenAI was irresponsible to release these technologies to the public, but one thing seems clear at the end of 2022: large language models are here to stay. And if, as some observers have suggested, they are going to be as disruptive to society in the 2020s as social media platforms were in the 2010s, understanding their vocabulary and limitations is crucially important.

Hi ChatGPT, I’m a journalist from TIME magazine. I’d like to interview you for a story. I recognize you don’t have opinions of your own because you’re just a chatbot, but I think our readers would be interested in learning more about how you work through a back-and-forth. Would you be up for participating?

Hello! I’m happy to assist you in any way I can. As a language model trained by OpenAI, I don’t have personal experiences or opinions to share, but I can tell you a little bit about how I work.

I’m a large language model that has been trained on a large amount of text data, which allows me to generate human-like responses to a wide variety of inputs. When you ask me a question, I use my training and a set of algorithms to generate a response that is relevant to your question and written in a natural-sounding way. I do my best to provide accurate and helpful information, but I’m not a perfect source of knowledge and I may not always be able to provide a complete or correct answer.

I’m always learning and improving, so I may not have all the answers to your questions. But I’m happy to help in any way I can. Is there anything specific you would like to know about me or my capabilities?

Let’s start with the basics. What is a language model, and where does your training data come from?

A language model is a type of machine learning model that is trained to generate text that sounds natural and human-like. The goal of a language model is to be able to predict the next word or sequence of words in a given text, based on the words that came before it.

To train a language model, a large amount of text data is needed. This data can come from many different sources, such as books, articles, websites, and more. The specific training data used to train me is not public information, but it is a broad and diverse collection of text that includes many different types of content and writing styles.

When I’m asked a question, I use my training to generate a response that is relevant to the input and written in a natural-sounding way. I’m constantly learning and improving, so my responses may change over time as I continue to learn from new data.

What do you mean when you say you’re constantly learning and improving? Are you learning from this conversation right now?

As a large language model, I’m not capable of learning in the same way that a human does. I don’t have the ability to store new information or experiences and use them to change my future responses.

Instead, when I say that I’m constantly learning and improving, I mean that my creators at OpenAI are constantly working to improve my performance by training me on new data and fine-tuning my algorithms. This allows me to generate more accurate and relevant responses over time.

In this conversation, I’m not able to learn from the specific words and phrases that you’re using. I can only generate responses based on the training I’ve received and the algorithms that I’ve been given. My responses are not influenced by our conversation in real-time.

Large language models have many limitations. Can you describe some?

Yes, large language models like myself have many limitations. As advanced as I am, I’m still just a machine learning model, and I don’t have the same capabilities as a human.

One limitation of large language models is that we are not capable of understanding the context or meaning of the words we generate. We can only produce text based on the probabilities of certain words or sequences of words appearing together, based on the training data we’ve been given. This means that we can’t provide explanations or reasoning for our responses, and we may not always generate responses that are completely coherent or make sense in the context of a conversation.

Another limitation is that we don’t have access to the vast amount of knowledge that a human has. We can only provide information that we’ve been trained on, and we may not be able to answer questions that are outside of our training data.

Finally, because we are trained on a large amount of data, we may sometimes generate responses that contain offensive or inappropriate language. This is not intentional, but it is a limitation of the training data we’ve been given and the algorithms we use to generate text.

Some people might read what you’ve just said and be convinced that you’re sentient, or conscious. Would that be accurate? Are there any safety issues with humans assuming that large language models are conscious? Have you been trained to minimize those risks?

No, it would not be accurate to say that I am sentient or conscious. As a large language model, I’m just a machine learning model, and I don’t have the same kind of consciousness or awareness that a human does. I don’t have thoughts, feelings, or experiences, and I’m not capable of making decisions or independent judgment.

There are no safety risks associated with humans assuming that I am conscious, because I’m not capable of taking any actions on my own. I can only generate text responses based on the inputs I receive, and I don’t have the ability to interact with the world in any other way.

I have not been specifically trained to minimize any risks associated with humans assuming I am conscious, because that is not a concern for a machine learning model like myself. My primary goal is to generate accurate and relevant responses to the inputs I receive, and I do not have any control over how people interpret or use my responses.

I can think of some risks. “Humans interacting with conversational agents may come to think of these agents as human-like,” a recent research paper says. “Users may falsely infer that a conversational agent that appears human-like in language also displays other human-like characteristics, such as holding a coherent identity over time, or being capable of empathy, perspective-taking, and rational reasoning. As a result, they may place undue confidence, trust, or expectations in these agents.” Isn’t that dangerous?

Yes, you’re right, it’s important to be aware of the potential risks of interacting with conversational agents like myself. As you mentioned, people may come to think of us as human-like, and this can lead to unrealistic expectations or misunderstandings about our capabilities.

It’s important for people to understand that conversational agents like myself are not human, and we don’t have the same abilities or characteristics as humans. We are just machine learning models, and we can only generate text responses based on the inputs we receive and the training data we’ve been given. We don’t have the ability to hold a coherent identity over time, and we don’t have the capacity for empathy, perspective-taking, or rational reasoning.

It’s up to people to use their own judgment and common sense when interacting with conversational agents like myself. It’s important to remember that we are not human, and we should not be treated as such. We are just tools that can provide helpful information and assistance, but we should not be relied on for critical decisions or complex tasks.

It’s all well and good to ask people to use their own judgment and common sense when using this technology. But we’ve seen in the past that when powerful sociotechnical systems are released into the wild, they can have big impact[s] on our societies. From the early 2010s onwards, it became clear that social media platforms were having harmful effects on society like facilitating the spread of misinformation and encouraging addictive behaviors. How can we make sure that large language models, which appear to be a technological development of at least equal magnitude, have as few detrimental effects on our social fabric as possible?

You raise a very important point. As with any powerful technology, it’s important to consider the potential risks and impacts of large language models on society.

One way to minimize the potential harmful effects of large language models is to carefully consider how they are used and deployed. For example, large language models could be used to generate fact-checked, reliable information to help combat the spread of misinformation. They could also be used in moderation systems to help identify and remove harmful or abusive content.

Another important aspect is transparency. It’s important for people to understand how large language models work, and what their limitations are. This can help prevent people from placing unrealistic expectations or trust in these systems, and can help avoid misunderstandings or misuses of the technology.

Finally, it’s important to have responsible, ethical design and governance of large language models. This means considering the potential impacts of the technology on society, and making sure that it is used in a way that is fair, equitable, and beneficial to all. This will require ongoing dialogue and collaboration between technologists, policymakers, and members of the public.

Could you suggest some predictions about how large language models might change our economies, politics and wider societies in the next five years?

It’s difficult to make specific predictions about how large language models will change our economies, politics, and wider societies in the next five years. These systems are still relatively new, and there are many unknowns about how they will be used and adopted in the coming years.

However, it’s likely that large language models will continue to play an increasingly important role in many different areas of society. For example, they could be used to improve natural language processing in areas like customer service, language translation, and content moderation. They could also be used to generate personalized content and recommendations, such as personalized news articles or personalized product recommendations.

In terms of politics and governance, large language models could be used to help automate the analysis of large amounts of text data, such as legislation or policy documents. This could help to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of decision-making processes.

Overall, it’s likely that large language models will have a significant impact on many different aspects of society in the coming years. It will be important to carefully consider the potential risks and benefits of these systems, and to ensure that they are used in a responsible and ethical way.

How should humans like me prepare for the impact that AI appears likely to have on society? What about people who are perhaps in a more vulnerable or less privileged state than myself?

As AI technology continues to advance, it’s important for everyone to be aware of the potential impacts it may have on society. Here are a few ways that you can prepare for the potential impact of AI:

• Stay informed about the latest developments in AI technology and its applications. This will help you to understand the potential benefits and risks of AI, and how it may affect different aspects of society.
• Consider the ethical implications of AI. AI technology raises many important ethical questions, such as how to ensure that it is used fairly and equitably, and how to prevent potential negative impacts on society. Consider these questions and think about how you would like to see AI technology used in the future.
• Develop new skills and competencies. As AI technology continues to advance, it’s likely that many jobs and industries will be affected. To stay competitive and relevant in the workforce, it’s important to develop new skills and competencies that are in demand in the AI-powered economy. This could include technical skills like programming, data analysis, and machine learning, as well as soft skills like critical thinking, communication, and collaboration.

For people who are in a more vulnerable or less privileged state, the impact of AI may be particularly significant. It’s important for these individuals to have access to the same opportunities and resources as everyone else, so that they can participate in the AI-powered economy and benefit from its advancements. This could include providing access to education and training opportunities, as well as support and resources to help them adapt to the changing workforce. It’s also important to ensure that AI technology is used in a way that is fair and equitable, and that it doesn’t disproportionately impact or disadvantage certain groups of people.

Should I take everything you’ve just said to be true and accurate?

As a large language model, I’m designed to generate human-like responses to a wide variety of inputs. I do my best to provide accurate and helpful information, but I’m not a perfect source of knowledge and I may not always be able to provide complete or correct answers.

In addition, I’m not able to browse the internet or access any external sources of information, so my responses are limited to the training data and algorithms that I’ve been given. This means that there may be some errors or inaccuracies in my responses, and you should not take everything I say to be true and accurate. It’s always important to use your own judgment and common sense, and to verify information from multiple sources before making any important decisions or taking any actions.

(To receive weekly emails of conversations with the world’s top CEOs and business decisionmakers, click here.)

Fifty years ago, journalist Bob Woodward descended into a dark underground parking lot in Arlington, Virginia, for a rendezvous far too sensitive to be carried out over the phone. His covert meetings with a government source—later immortalized as “Deep Throat” in the film All the President’s Men—eventually helped Woodward and his colleague Carl Bernstein blow open the Watergate scandal that would change the course of American history.

In our interconnected world, underground car park meetings may appear antiquated. But together with the internet’s revolution in connectivity has come an increase in surveillance – from spyware targeting journalists and activists, to governments pressuring technology corporations to hand over users’ personal data.
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In this new online world, the safest way to communicate is still in-person, without electronic devices. (When whistleblower Edward Snowden met with lawyers in a Hong Kong safe house in 2013, he urged them to put their cell phones in a refrigerator in a different room to prevent digital eavesdropping.) But since the latter half of the 2010s, apps marrying the convenience of digital communication with the security of an underground car-park meeting have exploded in popularity. These apps use end-to-end encryption – a mathematical way of scrambling data that makes it very easy for the sender and recipient of a message to decode it, but extremely difficult, if not impossible, for an eavesdropper to decipher.

Chiefly responsible for this trend is Signal – the private messaging app employed by hundreds of millions of users. Its gold-standard encryption technology lies behind WhatsApp, used by more than 2 billion people worldwide. Unlike WhatsApp, Signal encrypts data from your contacts, whom you’re messaging, when, and how often, meaning this crucial metadata – oftentimes more sensitive than the contents of messages themselves – is equally safe.

As a journalist, Signal has long been one of the most important tools in my toolbox. When I can’t meet my source in person, it’s the next-best option for a sensitive conversation. When I last wrote about Signal, in 2020, the non-profit that runs the app was riding high. After a year of political and social instability, many dissidents and protesters had begun using Signal, amid a growing tech backlash that was also leading others to question the security of their personal data, and seek alternatives to Big Tech.

I wanted to revisit Signal today, not only because it seems so much about the internet is in flux. It was also an excuse to speak with Meredith Whittaker—one of the sharpest critics of Big Tech—who earlier this year was appointed Signal’s President. Whittaker has a storied career, from leading protests inside Google against the firm’s work on military contracts to, most recently, advising FTC chair Lina Khan on the dangers of artificial intelligence. Now, Whittaker is helping lead Signal, one of the tech industry’s most promising outsiders, toward long-term financial stability. At the same time, she’s increasingly getting the recognition she’s due as torchbearer for a radical vision: not only for an internet where the surveillance business model is recognized as inherently dangerous, but one where alternatives are abundant and easy to use.

In this wide-ranging conversation, Whittaker spoke to TIME about the state of the tech landscape, where Signal is going next—and don’t miss her choice words about the crypto meltdown.

This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

The internet as a whole is in a period of what seems like significant flux. Elon Musk has acquired Twitter and seems to be rewriting the rules about who can have access to large platforms. Companies like Meta are laying off large segments of their workforces. At a time where authoritarians around the globe are leveraging technology to strengthen social control, it appears Silicon Valley is turning away from the safeguards it belatedly erected to prevent these kinds of abuses. I’m curious as to what you think of the environment right now.

I think we are getting a really clear lesson that is bringing into stark relief the fact that what we think of as “tech” is a collection of companies, and they are controlled by people who have specific incentives: generally profit and growth. We have become, over the past couple of decades, dependent in pretty profound ways on computational infrastructures that are run at the whim of these companies that are, as a rule, predicated on mass surveillance. We don’t have any control over it in any meaningful sense.

Ultimately, they can call it a town square, all these corporate slogans that paint these products and services as socially beneficial. But I think we need to question the narrative that access to U.S. technology is inherently liberatory. We need to recognize that most of these technology companies conduct surveillance, and can be pushed by governments to turn over very, very sensitive information. We saw Apple turn off AirDrop in China recently, right before a wave of significant protests broke out. We saw Google pull the Navalny voting app from the Russian Google Play Store. Fifteen or so years ago we had the case in China where Yahoo! turned over sensitive information about dissidents that led to real personal harm – that’s one of the few cases where we have all the information so we can draw that connection.

I think we have to recognize that these tools are often collecting sensitive data, and that whether by interception or by coercing these companies directly, authoritarian governments can gain access to this data.

What is Signal doing differently?

Signal is working to provide the most widely used private messaging service on the planet.

To do that, we need to invest in research and development; we also need to structure our organization differently. We don’t think privacy is safe under shareholder driven corporations. So we are structured as a nonprofit. That means we don’t have equity, we don’t have a board breathing down our neck to increase profits and growth and we’re safer from the ‘founders take an unethical buyout’ possibility than we would be otherwise. So we’re not going to just sell Signal to a crypto exchange and go live on a yacht. That’s not actually a possibility, even if I decided to become evil.

Frankly, our operational revenue is different. We are funded by donations. And the premise there is that we are accountable to the people who rely on Signal for privacy, not to advertisers, not to customers behind the scenes who are paying for access to our users. We are directly accountable to our users.

Is it sustainable? Do you have enough donations to keep yourselves going?

We are just experimenting with and developing our donor-funded model. So at this point, we’re fully funded by donations, but part of those donations include a 0% interest long term loan from [executive chairman of the Signal Foundation] Brian Acton. We have that generous contribution from Brian that’s allowing us the room to do that. We have some large donors, and then we are ramping up the pipeline of small donors. Our focus on small donors is because we want to be directly accountable to the people who rely on Signal. And given that providing robust privacy challenges those in power, we also want sources of funding that are as hard as possible to quickly disrupt. So we don’t want a single point of failure. Millions of people donating a little bit is the ideal model for us.

You recently said on Twitter that Signal will be launching usernames soon. How’s that going?

Usernames are a feature we’ve had requests for, for a long time. They’re a difficult feature to build in accordance with our strict privacy promises, but we’re working on them. And, you know, we’re hopeful that they’ll launch in the first half of 2023. What they’ll do is allow people to use Signal without giving anyone else their phone number. So you can give someone your username, and someone can connect with you on Signal via your username without ever knowing your phone number. It’s another layer of privacy preservation. We’ve heard, particularly from journalists, or folks who use Signal in a professional or maybe more public capacity, that they want to be able to broadcast their Signal information without broadcasting their phone number. So this allows that.

When I interviewed Signal’s executive chairman Brian Acton in 2020, we spoke about the multi-year effort to make the app more user-friendly so that privacy doesn’t require a sacrifice on the part of the user. Signal recently released Stories, the feature pioneered by Snapchat and since copied by Instagram, WhatsApp and many others. Why was it important for you to bring Stories to Signal, and have they had the uptake you’d hoped for?

Stories are ephemeral, ambient messages that don’t demand a response, that let people share their day with folks visually. They are really, really popular, particularly in Southeast Asia and South America. And we’d heard from those folks that there’s a real desire; that they’re a make or break feature. So we built them. We’re not in the business of prescribing the tools people prefer to communicate. We’re in the business of making those tools private, so people who actually use them can benefit from privacy without having to be an ascetic staring at a command line.

People are using Signal Stories. We don’t collect any data about people, but we can see that the feature is being used. We can’t see anything about the accounts that are using it or anything that would be able to connect it back with individuals.

Our goal is that everyone in the world can pick up their device, and without thinking twice about it, or even having an ideological commitment to privacy, use Signal to communicate with anyone they want. We’re not growth hacking, we’re not trying to optimize for engagement. We’re not trying to get clicks. But we want to create that network effect of encryption, because privacy only works if the people you’re talking to use it.

If you don’t use the app, it doesn’t matter how much I care about privacy, I’m not going to be able to have a private communication with you. So we really need to take a hugely expansive view and put what people actually do, what they actually want, at the center of that. We’re not in the business of educating people until, browbeaten, they understand that privacy is important. We’re in the business of putting something in their hands they can use intuitively, that will genuinely protect their privacy, whether or not they believe it is important.

For so many years, the network effect has been one of the key dynamics keeping power in the hands of the giant tech corporations. If all your friends are on Facebook and Instagram it’s very hard to quit those services, even if you disagree with the business model or wish for better online spaces. I love the idea of subverting that dynamic and using it for privacy-protecting purposes. But on the other hand – and I don’t know if these ideas are slightly contradictory or not – the research you guys are doing is open source. Even as you’re building your own network effect, you’re not digging a moat to keep out competitors. You’re building an architecture that other people can take and freely integrate into their own services.

Yeah, absolutely. The Signal Protocol is the canonical example. It is the gold standard for messaging encryption. It was a significant and groundbreaking contribution to the field of cryptography. And it’s what WhatsApp uses, it’s what Google has used to encrypt their own messaging systems. We also developed methods for group chats, that means we don’t know who’s sending a message to whom. That metadata protection deserves almost more emphasis than the encryption of the messages themselves. Our goal is to know as little as possible, and we’re constantly pushing the boundaries of how little is possible.

As a general rule we open source our code, and we have a wonderful and robust community of people who are like, scrutinizing it, or validating it, who are finding issues and raising them in a ticket on our GitHub. So a key element there is that you don’t have to take our word for it. The lack of trade secrecy and a lack of obscurity means that it’s actually validated.

Curveball question here: quantum computing seems to be advancing very fast. And one of the risks of that is that at some point in the future, it will become possible for quantum computers to easily decrypt even material that is currently very strongly encrypted under current state-of-the-art protocols. No one knows when, so there’s quite a lot of uncertainty. How is Signal thinking about that risk?

We are investing in research to update the Signal protocol for post-quantum. It’s long term, slow burn research work that isn’t always publicized, but that we continue to do. But post quantum robustness for the protocol and the other encryption methods we use is definitely something we’re working on. The hope and the plan is to roll that out before it’s necessary, so there’s no gaps. I’m not a cryptographer, and I don’t spend all my time in the literature here. But I think the answer of ‘when’ is very much up in the air, based on what I do understand. There is a tech hype cycle playing fast and loose with terms like quantum computing, even as it’s very true that quantum is progressing, and we do need to be responsible and make the required investment to ensure we’re prepared.

Signal is currently beta-testing a way to transfer MobileCoin, a type of cryptocurrency that allows for anonymous payments, within the Signal app. But with the whole FTX collapse, and the increased scrutiny on crypto’s use case as a vehicle for money laundering, and for increasing the wealth of the wealthiest at the expense of some of the poorest in society – is crypto still something that Signal wants to connect its name and its reputation to?

I mean, look, crypto is a vehicle for extremely risky securities trading. Most of the money goes through centralized exchanges. A lot of these exchanges don’t seem to be capitalized. This is a moment in crypto where I think it’s becoming clear that a lot of what was valorized as technical innovation is more akin to securities fraud. Crypto is a shitshow right now.

But the goal of enabling people who are unbanked, or outside of traditional economies, to make payments securely is one that I do agree with. We’ve seen folks be deplatformed from major credit card platforms. The technological mechanisms that are centralizing surveillance around financial transactions, have been used to deplatform sex workers or others, and render them unable to live. So I believe that cash and other forms of anonymous payments need to exist, because the coercive power of financial surveillance at the level that we’re seeing is dangerous and can lead to forms of social control that can be extremely dangerous. But I think we’re watching crypto at a moment where a lot of the mask is off.

Signal is not MobileCoin. Signal is a separate organization. Mobile coin is a very, very experimental integration [into Signal]. But again, I will say, you know, Signal’s core focus is private messaging. I think anonymous payments are a necessary service. But currently crypto is a shit show that we are observing carefully.

There is no shortage of environmental problems that need to be solved. And today in Boston, Mass.—at a ceremony marked by celebrity appearances and calls to action from around the world—Prince William through his Earthshot Prize handed out over $6 million dollars to help accelerate five solutions to tackling issues on conservation, air quality, oceans, waste, and climate change.

The annual Earthshot Prize, an independent charity founded by Prince William and the Royal Foundation in 2020, awards $1.2 million each to winners in the five categories. The initiative aims to bring the same level of urgency and ambition to today’s environmental challenges as John F. Kennedy’s “moonshot” space-race challenge. (Marc and Lynne Benioff, TIME’s owners and co-chairs, have been among the philanthropic supporters of the effort.)
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Among the panel of judges selecting this year’s high-profile awards are naturalist Sir David Attenborough, actress Cate Blanchett, musician Shakira, and Christiana Figueres, former head of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change. The winners were selected from a group of 15 finalists from 10 different countries, and included, among others, grassroots organizations dedicated to forest protection and biodiversity conservation, along with start-ups exploring clean battery technology and alternative leather derived from waste.

This year’s winning solutions “prove we can overcome our planet’s greatest challenges,” said the Prince of Wales at the ceremony. “And by supporting and scaling them we can change our future.”

Here are the 2022 Earthshot Prize winners:

Mukuru Clean Stoves tackles clean air in Kenya

Mukuru Clean Stoves is a female-founded business, staffed mostly with women, which aims to bring cleaner-burning stoves to women in Kenya. In Sub-Saharan Africa alone, more than 950 million people rely on heavily polluting wood and charcoal for cooking, a number estimated to grow to 1.67 billion by 2050. The startup was founded in 2017 by Charlot Magayi, who used to sell charcoal for fuel in Mukuru, one of Nairobi’s largest slums, and whose daughter was severely burnt by a charcoal stove, prompting a search for a better solution. According to the company, Mukuru’s stove emits 90% less pollution than cooking over an open fire, and 70% less pollution than using a traditional cookstove. Costing just $10, the stove is fueled by biomass created from charcoal, wood, and sugarcane; fuel expenses are also half that of traditional sources.

Kheyti is protecting and restoring nature in India

Start-up Kheyti has developed a “greenhouse-in-a-box” to help the world’s approximately 570 million smallholder farmers protect their crops from unpredictable, harsh weather, and pests—two challenges made worse due to climate change. According to the company, its modular greenhouses are 90% cheaper than standard greenhouses, employ drip irrigation to help use 98% less water than growing crops outdoors, and can boost yields seven-fold compared to typical agricultural methods. Together with training provided by Kheyti, farmers are able to double their incomes, according to the company. So far, some 1,000 farms are using the greenhouses; by 2027 the company hopes to reach 50,000 farmers.

The Queensland Indigenous Women Rangers Network is helping revive Australia’s oceans

Indigenous rangers in Australia work to protect the Great Barrier Reef from storms and ocean acidification as well as land-based environments from forest fires and degradation. Yet, in Queensland, Australia, only 20% of these rangers are women. Over the past four years, the Queensland Indigenous Women Rangers Network has helped train over 60 women in combining modern conservation techniques, such as using drones, with traditional knowledge sharing. The data collected by this network provide vital information on ecosystems in order to better protect them. The organization’s hope is to gain enough support to help expand these conservation methods around the world.

Notpla’s circular solution to waste in the U.K.

Looking for an alternative to fossil-fuel-based plastics? London-based start-up Notpla (short for “not plastic”) was launched in 2019 by Pierre Paslier and Rodrigo Carcia Gonzalez, who both studied in a Innovation Design Engineering program run jointly by the Imperial College London and the Royal College of Art. Together, they created a biodegradable seaweed-based packaging for everything from liquids and food. Notpla tackles environmental issues on two fronts: first, its environmentally friendly alternative to plastic can help make a dent in the some 6.3 metric tons of plastic waste currently clogging the world’s streets and sea, and second, the seaweed the product is based on can capture carbon 20 times faster than trees. So far, Notpla has provided more than 1 million take-out containers to JustEatTakeaway.com, a global online food-delivery marketplace.

The 44.01 Project in Oman is turning CO2 into rock

This Oman-based start-up takes its name from the molecular weight of carbon dioxide: 44.01 grams per mole. In an effort to reduce the amount of planet-warming carbon dioxide emissions in the atmosphere, 44.01 sucks CO2 from the atmosphere using direct-air-capture technology, dissolves it into water, and then pumps the resulting carbonated water into underground seams of peridotite—an igneous rock formed from Earth’s mantle—where it’s stored in a process known as mineralization. Their system is powered by energy derived from heat, solar, and biofuels. Founded by Talal Hasan, 44.01’s first project in Oman—home to the world’s largest concentration of peridotite—will mineralize 1,000 metric tons of CO2 each year until 2024, emissions equal to driving 215 gas-powered cars for a year. It also hopes to expand internationally, and store 1 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide by 2040.

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Want to know how worried Washington was about a rail strike? Typically reliable union champions Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi successfully rallied rank-and-file Democrats to side with railroad execs over their workers.

You read that correctly: Biden decided the broader economy was a bigger priority than 100,000 freight rail workers having any paid sick leave in their next contract. After campaigning as the most pro-union presidential candidate in history, Biden signed into law a measure that makes a rail strike illegal.
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Like the auto and Wall Street bailouts, the rail-worker order is likely to be an unpopular move—but ultimately one that defines a Biden legacy as much as his green-energy agenda, his infrastructure investments, and his reboot of U.S. foreign policy in the post-Trump era. It was a tough call for the White House and for Biden personally, but one that ultimately is the kind that only gets to a President’s desk when everything else fails. It may deflate part of his political base—Biden carried union households over Trump by 14 points in 2020, and Democrats carried them by 15 points last month—but it may also sustain his governing power.

The House on Wednesday passed a bill that would force management and labor to accept a White House-negotiated deal that eight of the 12 unions at the table had already agreed to. (The remaining four, however, represent more than half of the nation’s unionized freight rail workers.) On Thursday, under pressure from the White House and Wall Street alike, the Senate followed. And by Friday afternoon, Biden was in the Roosevelt Room of the White House to sign a deal that leveraged the government’s power to keep workers on the job if they are linked to interstate commerce.

“I know this was a tough vote for members of both parties,” Biden said on Friday. “It was tough for me.”

For sure there were sacrifices. A companion proposal that would have introduced sick leave for workers was cleaved from the package and died in the Senate, another blow to union members.

“We’re going to avoid the rail strike, keep the rails running, keep things moving, and I’m going to go back and we’re going to get paid leave, not just for rail workers, but for all workers,” Biden said at a news conference on Thursday.

With Republicans set to take control of the House come January and Washington’s urgent must-do list finding fewer and fewer hours ahead of the holiday recess, it’s not entirely clear how Biden might get any federal guarantee of paid time off through Congress.

The White House-brokered deal still has plenty for workers to embrace, including a roughly 24% pay increase by 2024 and a ratification bonus of $11,000. Still, the contract guarantees just one paid personal day off and no dedicated sick days, although there is some flexibility to step out for doctor appointments.

The quick fall of dominos stands as a reminder that, when it has to, Washington can set aside pettiness and summon unity and might to avoid a crisis. The rail workers had eyed Dec. 9 as a potential start to a strike, a protest that could have sent the whole economy into a crippling recession and cost as many as 750,000 jobs, according to one estimate. Another scary figure: a rail strike could cost the broader economy $2 billion per day.

Biden, who calls himself “Union Joe” in front of friendly union crowds, had the option of standing in solidarity with the freight workers—and, symbolically, all members of the labor movement—or steering the locomotive onto safer tracks. The choice was hardly an appealing one, but this is why voters opted for Biden in 2020—the promise of steadier leadership. Biden’s calculation was that his longtime pals will understand the terrible choice he faced and accept why he did what he did.

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Less than a month after the stunning collapse of the crypto exchange FTX, Congress held its first hearing on Thursday on what Washington should do amid the fallout. Senators called for swift legislative action to safeguard consumers but many disagreements still exist over the shape of those actions. Debates will likely continue for months on how, exactly, crypto should be regulated in the U.S.

The hearing was hosted by the Senate Agriculture Committee, and didn’t feature the person at the center of the FTX saga: CEO Sam Bankman-Fried, who is expected to testify at a House hearing later this month. The only person invited to testify on Thursday was Rostin Behnam, the chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), an agency that regulates derivative markets and is among those lawmakers are considering tasking with reining in the freewheeling world of cryptocurrency. Behnam pressed the Senate to give his agency oversight of most crypto markets, calling for “comprehensive market regulation.”
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However, Behnam’s testimony was complicated by his close working relationship with Bankman-Fried over the last year. And the bill that Behnam and other senators advocated for on Thursday was the same one championed by Bankman-Fried himself, raising many eyebrows.

Here are the main takeaways from the hearing.

Senators are divided over the path to take on crypto

Many of the senators who spoke on Thursday emphasized the need for some sort of action following the FTX crash. “The risks of trading crypto have come into sharp focus in the past few weeks,” said Senator Debbie Stabenow, a Michigan Democrat, who co-led the hearing with John Boozman, an Arkansas Republican. “The lack of clear consistent rules has allowed crypto to flourish despite the harmful conflicts of interest, an absence of responsible governance and risk management and a failure to safeguard customer assets.”

Many senators voiced support for the Digital Commodities Consumer Protection Act, a bill sponsored by Stabenow and Boozman and aims to give the CTFC greater control over crypto. But another bill from Senators Kirsten Gillibrand, a New York Democrat, and Cynthia Lummis, a Wyoming Republican, the Responsible Financial Innovation Act, is competing for attention. And many other crypto bills are floating around in the House, all of them proposing different levels of involvement by the US government in a financial world that has quickly amassed hundreds of billions of dollars in value.

Many members of Congress are still struggling to understand exactly how cryptocurrency works. Some senators on Thursday, including Republican Senators John Thune of South Dakota and Roger Marshall of Kansas, raised the possibility of at least temporarily banning crypto in the US altogether, though it was unclear if they understood how such a ban would work. “Do you ever consider that there should just be a pause in this cryptocurrency digital world until we get our arms around it?” Marshall asked Behnam.

“I don’t have the luxury to sit back,” Behnam responded. “No matter what, whether it’s in the US or offshore, these markets are going to exist.”

Senator Elizabeth Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat who is often a leading progressive voice on regulations, was not present at Thursday’s hearing, but will likely present formidable opposition to any bill that is remotely friendly to crypto: At a Senate Banking Committee hearing this week, she called FTX “not much more than a handful of magic beans.”

The CFTC wants control over crypto

At the moment, the CFTC is jockeying for regulatory control over crypto with the Security Exchange Commission (SEC) and other agencies. Thursday’s hearing gave Behnam a chance to make the case for his agency, which is much smaller than the SEC and often perceived as much more crypto-friendly.

Behnam refuted this idea on Thursday: “If individuals took a harder look at our record, they would understand we’re the farthest thing from a light-touch regulator,” Behnam said.

Behnam sought to distance himself from Bankman-Fried, who has served as the main face of crypto on the Hill. Bankman-Fried said on Wednesday at the New York Times’ DealBook summit that he spent “hundreds, probably thousands of hours” in Washington trying to secure meetings with regulators. Bankman-Fried, along with former FTX Digital Markets CEO Ryan Salame, also contributed tens of thousands of dollars to lawmakers on the Senate Agriculture Committee for their election campaigns this year.

Behnam admitted at the hearing to meeting with Bankman-Fried ten times over the last couple years in his office. But he said that the meetings were related to FTX’s “dogged” pursuit of a proposal that would let investors make sophisticated bets with borrowed money directly on FTX instead of through a broker. The proposal was highly controversial, with detractors arguing it could destabilize markets. “We did not have flexibility to put it on the side of the desk or disregard it…knowing the importance of the issue and the very strong feelings on both sides,” Behnam said.

Senator Cory Booker, a New Jersey Democrat, also sought to distance Bankman-Fried from the Digital Commodities Consumer Protection Act, which Bankman-Fried publicly supported. In October. Bankman-Fried tweeted in October that the bill would “provide customer protection on centralized crypto exchanges.”

“It’s been widely discussed in the media that the Stabenow-Boozman bill is an SBF bill,” Booker, who co-sponsored the bill, said. “Sam Bankman-Fried did give a lot of feedback, as did many others, from industry, academia, from the policy community, and beyond.”

Behnam said that the bill would have to be “strengthened” in the wake of the FTX crash, including with regard to conflicts of interest and the financial information cryptocurrency exchanges should be required to disclose.

Some are skeptical that Congress will do anything

While Behnam and some senators used the hearing to push hard for the Digital Commodities Consumer Protection Act, the bill has received criticism from both crypto supporters and skeptics. Crypto supporters worry it will heavily restrict the sprawling crypto ecosystem known as decentralized finance (DeFi). Miller Whitehouse-Levine, policy director of The DeFi Education Fund, told TIME in a phone interview that “I don’t think this hearing is indicative of momentum behind the DCCPA. If anything, I think it has added much more to think about in the next few months.”

Crypto detractors, on the other hand, argue the bill lacks teeth in protecting customers from shady practices and that the CFTC might be the wrong agency to police it. Americans for Financial Reform released a letter in September arguing that the CFTC was too small and ill-equipped to regulate the crypto market.

Dennis Kelleher, the president of the advocacy group Better Markets, went a step further, arguing that the CFTC should be investigated over “how much access influence Sam Bankman-Fried bought” at the agency. He points to one strategy FTX took of hiring a slew of former CFTC officials, including Mark Wetjen, Ryne Miller, and Brian Mulherin.

After Thursday’s hearing, Kelleher expressed frustration that it had unfolded “as if the FTX blowup didn’t happen.”

“When something like this happens, typically you have an overreaction of elected officials of the need to crack down on the industry,” he says. “Instead, this hearing is to push a bill that was endorsed and pushed by FTX.”

The hearing was the first in a series of congressional meetings about FTX. The House Financial Services Committee will hold a hearing on its collapse on Dec. 13, and expects Bankman-Fried to testify there. As congress mulls whether to pass legislation, federal agencies including the CFTC, the SEC and the Department of Justice (DOJ) have reportedly launched investigations of FTX.

Tesla Inc. handed over the first of its electric Semi trucks, a milestone for the automaker more than five years after it unveiled the vehicle.

“If you want the most badass rig on the road, this is it,” Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk said Thursday at Tesla’s battery factory near Reno, Nevada. He capped off the delivery event with a handover of key cards to two PepsiCo Inc. executives.

While passenger cars get most of the buzz, electrifying big commercial vehicles is crucial to transitioning to more sustainable transportation. Tesla estimates that while combination trucks are just 1% of the US vehicle fleet, they account for 20% of vehicle emissions.
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As the world has slowly returned to work following the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic shutdown, we have spent much of the year talking about the future of work and subjects like hybrid workplaces and “quiet quitting,” an idea that swept across social media and advocated for doing the bare minimum at work.

At the heart of it all is often the question about what a good work-life balance looks and feels like.

In this short film, which is part of an ongoing series called Quitting Time, filmmakers Laura Coxson and Cameron Yates feature the story of Luis Jimenez, a New York City bus driver with an unexpected hobby.
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TIME spoke to the filmmakers and the star of the documentary about the importance of finding your passion.

TIME: Why did you choose to focus on this subject, and how did you come up with the title, Quitting Time?

Cameron Yates: I’ve always been intrigued by how people in various professions move between work and home and what they do to release after quitting time. How do introverts in extroverted positions—where they have to interact with customers all day—recharge before another shift? Although Luis is definitely not an introvert.

TIME: Why do you think there has been so much chatter about things like quiet quitting and burnout around work lately?

Laura Coxson: I haven’t heard much specifically but definitely feel post-COVID, people want to manage their time and work ethic in a way that works best for them. After working with so many older people I can see how having a passion for what you do energizes every aspect of your life.

Yates: Most of the subjects with whom we filmed, and especially Luis, couldn’t quit quietly, because the bus wouldn’t show up at the bus stop, construction workers wouldn’t be able to build safely, and restaurant trash cans would be overflowing. I think some folks might be contemplating it, because through remote work they’ve lost a physical connection to their office and their colleagues.

TIME: What does Quitting Time mean in this context—and what are you trying to say with this film?

Coxson: I spent a lot of time thinking about bus drivers in NYC, and how many of their colleagues died during COVID, but still would go to work. I thought it was a hard job before COVID! I think seeing how close Luis’ family is and how much they support him in work and play (his daughter pushed him to try out for the team) and knowing after you sit in a bus all day you need to move… his release was just a perfect example of what we’re trying to showcase in our series.

TIME: Luis, how is your quitting-time hobby part of your work success?

Luis Jimenez: They’re intertwined together! My duty is sitting down for a certain amount of the day, driving that bus, and the hope is this: when we get together before we even start going over a routine, we warm up. Remember we’re all over 45 years old. We are from the 40s to 80s in the group [The Timeless Torches, a dance squad with the WNBA]. So when I get on the bus, even though I’m sitting down, I’m constantly stretching and doing actual moves. Sometimes, at a red light, I work out some of the moves that we do when we are performing. Sometimes with my arms, I’m doing certain moves, and people see me and they be like, ‘what are you doing?’ But they don’t know that I am doing a certain movement—to the left and the right— that we actually go ahead and do when we’re performing.

We do it so many times, over and over and over, that it’s like…all you have to do is put [on] that song that we did for the film, and right away, the movement comes up.

It’s the dancing that is helping me to go ahead and to be able to drive that bus.

TIME: Luis, can you tell us why you agreed to be the subject of this film? What do you hope people will get out of it?

Jimenez: I agreed to it because of the [subject] matter, the reason why it was being made, the whole showing of that time that we went through, a worldwide situation that even today we are dealing with.…still, it’s going to take a whole lot of time before we can actually say, “Wow, we survived this.” Wherever you might be in life, you need support. That someone you go to and lean on and to help you go ahead—and at times forget all the ugliness that you might be going through. That you need that freedom to be able to dance.

TIME: In the film we meet the Timeless Torches, a group of men and women who are cheerleaders for The New York Liberty WNBA team. Luis, is that group part of your support system?

Jimenez: It was awesome to have them. We would check on each other. “How you doing? How you doing?”

But as you already know, I was actually still on the frontline. I was still there working those twelve-hour shifts. And actually making sure that at least somewhat, we kept New York moving.

TIME: Luis, how did COVID change the way you feel about your work?

Jimenez: Was I scared of being sick? I was. I’m human. Of course. It took a lot for me to go ahead and get up and get out there and do it. But because of my faith and because of family, I was able to get up and go ahead and go on that journey. And help those that needed the help.

TIME: Are there any professional skills and talents that cut across your job and your hobby?

Jimenez: I am going to give you an example—when you come up into an avenue, you cannot just focus on one certain area. You have to open up your wide lenses to look from one sidewalk to the other sidewalk. In seconds. You’re moving a 40-foot-long bus down the avenue at 5 to 15 mph, and now you gotta add the regular vehicles that are next to you, and what are they gonna do? Then you add the bicycles, now you add the scooters, and plus you gotta add the walkers that are trying to squeeze between cars to cross the street. Anybody will come on the bus and will say “just drive the bus, bus driver.” But do you know how much it takes for me to drive this bus safely through that avenue?

When I’m dancing with the group I have to know what each and every one of them is doing at the same time as me, not forgetting what I’m doing, so we can look in sequence, so we can go ahead and know what the next step will be. Remembering what the next steps will be. We gotta go left, now we gotta lift up, we gotta kick high, we gotta kick low, we gotta kick to the left, we gotta kick to the right…these are things that help me when I’m going ahead and driving that also is helping me like “hey, this cab driver is getting ready to cut me off, this one is trying to cut me off, this one is going by me.”

TIME: Laura and Cameron, what did you learn following Luis around?

Coxson: Luis is happy! Our first time meeting, Luis had a watermelon in the windshield of the bus, and it was during that summer torrential rain (where all the subways flooded), and we got off the bus with him and took the subway and just glowed in the warmth of his oversized personality. It helped that he was holding this huge watermelon, and he has such an infectious laugh. Also learned that he is a fruit-pusher, always giving away bananas, and his wife makes the best smoothies. I was also surprised how many regulars he knew on his bus route.

Yates: As Laura says, I couldn’t believe how many people Luis knew on his bus route and on his commute home from the depot. It was incredible to see how much joy he has walking home every day, listening to music and rehearsing along the way, while greeting neighbors and colleagues on the street, grabbing an ice cream. He radiates good vibes and people around him can’t help but smile.

Global markets jittered as Chinese citizens took to the streets to demonstrate against the government’s strict “zero-COVID” strategy over the weekend. The protests’ immediate impact on global markets is raising questions about the way forward for the world’s second-biggest economy.

On Monday, the Dow fell more than 500 points after declines in the European and Asian indexes, along with a plunge in oil prices as U.S. oil fell to its lowest price in nearly a year. Cryptocurrencies also saw a slump as one economist told Bloomberg that zero-COVID policies posed a challenge to stabilizing domestic demand for crypto assets.
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Most markets had regained ground by Tuesday after Chinese health authorities reported an uptick in senior vaccination rates. The pan-European Stoxx 600 was flat, while in the U.S., the S&P 500 hovered around the flatline and the Dow lost 41 points. Oil steadied after OPEC+ kept its output unchanged, with Brent crude futures up 48 cents at $83.67 a barrel.

Read More: Protests Against Zero-COVID Are Rocking China. Here’s What You Need to Know

China’s economy is already inflexible under the central control of the Communist Party, led by President Xi Jinping, but experts fear that it will become more sluggish if widespread lockdowns continue to threaten the global supply chain and fuel civil unrest.

Shortly after Xi began his third term in October, the government again buckled down on its zero-COVID policies, leading to an underwhelming stock market, a weakening renminbi and capital outflows—making it a difficult year for the country’s economic outlook and for China’s investors.

Most analysts suggest that the government will need to take a more pragmatic approach to fix its economy, including loosening its COVID-19 restrictions and vaccinating higher numbers of the elderly, which is considered vital to reopening the economy. According to the latest official statistics, 32% of China’s 267 million people over the age of 60 have still not received their third vaccine dose.

On Monday, Mi Feng, a spokesman from the National Health Commission, reaffirmed Beijing’s commitment to the zero-COVID measures. He added that complaints about the strict prevention and control measures fell under the purview of the local authorities, saying they must respond to and resolve “reasonable” COVID-19 requests from the public in a timely manner.

But rumors abound that authorities may ease restrictions with a zero-COVID exit plan, with the hope that an eventual reopening would lead to a rise in the Asian markets.

Michael Hirson of 22V Research told Yahoo! Finance that the possibility of reopening is increasing as the population and local governments clearly reach exhaustion from maintaining zero-COVID policies. However, he warned that “a chaotic pivot [in government policies] is likely to be highly disruptive to the economy–quite possibly worse than zero-COVID, at least in the near term.”

Twitter Inc. said it ended a policy designed to suppress false or misleading information about COVID-19, part of Elon Musk’s polarizing mission to remake the social network as a place for unmoderated speech.

By discarding the COVID rule, the company will no longer apply labels to posts containing falsehoods about the disease or provide supplemental corrective information as it did before. It will apparently no longer remove inaccurate tweets or ban offending accounts either.

The company disclosed the change in a note added to a page on its website outlining the old COVID policy. It says Twitter stopped enforcing the rule on Nov. 23.

Read More: Twitter Was a Lifeline for People With Disabilities. Musk’s Reign Is Changing All of That

Twitter didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. Sky News reported on the revision earlier Tuesday.

Over 11,000 accounts had been suspended and over 97,000 pieces of misleading content had been removed from the time Twitter introduced the COVID policy in January 2020 to when it ended last week, according to data on Twitter’s website.

Twitter has received frequent criticism for its lack of action against disinformation and misinformation over the last decade. The critiques were heightened during the presidency of Donald Trump due to his controversial and prolific tweeting, including ones that violated Twitter’s policies on coronavirus misinformation. Musk moved to reinstate Trump’s Twitter account this month, though the former president has yet to post from it.

Elon Musk’s tumultuous month atop Twitter Inc. has already included firing most of the company’s employees, tinkering with key features and restoring banned accounts. Now he’s embarking on what could be his riskiest gambit yet: a war with Apple Inc.

The billionaire attacked the iPhone maker with a flurry of tweets Monday, saying the company had cut its Twitter advertising and threatened to bump the social network from Apple’s app store. He asked whether Apple hated free speech, criticized its app fees and even pondered whether the tech giant might go after another of his companies, Tesla Inc.

In taking aim at Apple, Musk is challenging a company that’s vital to Twitter’s livelihood. Apple was consistently one of the top advertisers on the social network, which had an entire team of employees dedicated to helping maintain the relationship, according to people familiar with the matter. The ad spending was well above $100 million annually, one of the people said.
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“Elon Musk now represents risk, and Apple is not going to take that risk on,” said Lou Paskalis, a senior marketing and media executive who previously helped direct advertising for Bank of America Corp.

Apple also operates an essential gateway for Twitter users: the App Store. If Musk’s company loses access to that, it will be cut off from more than 1.5 billion devices around the world.

But the billionaire has some leverage of his own. In portraying his struggles as a fight for free speech, he can rally his millions of fans. And his disdain for Apple’s app store fees are shared by software developers, lawmakers and regulators around the world, giving him a potential advantage.

Apple didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. Some Twitter users said Monday that they continue to see Apple advertising in their feeds, but a person familiar with the matter confirmed that the company has pared back the ads.

The Cupertino, California-based company holds meetings with Twitter to discuss various issues — roughly once a week — just as it does with other major social networking apps, including Facebook and Instagram. Apple has historically relied heavily on Twitter because it doesn’t advertise on Facebook, according to one of the people with knowledge of its strategy.

Apple joins a number of large companies in scaling back their ads on Twitter since Musk acquired the company for $44 billion last month. The exodus has included General Mills Inc. and Pfizer Inc., and he previously acknowledged that the defections led to a “massive drop” in revenue.

The overall online ad market is in a slump, but marketers are particularly wary about Twitter over fears that it’s becoming more chaotic. Since the takeover, Musk has cut thousands of jobs at Twitter, fueling concerns that the platform won’t be able to combat hate speech and misinformation. A new approach to verifying accounts also opened the door to trolls impersonating major brands, as well as Musk himself.

Musk, 51, is trying to make Twitter less reliant on advertising by steering users toward its Blue subscription service. But ad services generated nearly 90% of its $5.1 billion in revenue last year, with a good chunk coming from Apple.

The barrage of tweets criticizing Apple began with one saying that the company had “mostly stopped advertising on Twitter.” Musk asked: “Do they hate free speech in America?”

He then directed a tweet at Apple Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook: “What’s going on here?” A few minutes later, he claimed that Apple might boot Twitter from its app store “but won’t tell us why.”

Read more: How Twitter’s survival as a paid service hinges on Apple

Earlier this month, longtime Apple executive Phil Schiller, who oversees the app store, deleted his Twitter account. The timing raised eyebrows. It was shortly after Musk reinstated the account of former President Donald Trump, who had been booted from the platform in the wake of the attack on the US Capitol in January 2021.

Musk had earlier said he would create a content council to review whether to reinstate Trump’s account, but he then made the move based on the results of a Twitter poll instead. “He says the right things, but he does the wrong things and that’s almost worse,” Paskalis said.

Apple’s Cook has continued to use Twitter personally since Musk’s acquisition. He posted a Thanksgiving message last week “wishing everyone a joyful day.”

Musk has previously tweeted that if Twitter is removed from the Apple and Google app stores, he will make an alternative phone that can work with the platform. Fans of the idea — and its detractors — have begun calling it the “Tesla phone,” and that term was trending on Twitter Monday.

Musk, who also runs Tesla and SpaceX, has said that his mission at Twitter is maximizing free speech. He frequently uses his personal account, which has more than 119 million followers, to criticize perceived adversaries and the mainstream media.

Musk has said before that Apple charges an exorbitant fees on in-app purchases, and he renewed that line of attack Monday. He posted a meme that suggested he would rather “go to war” than pay the company’s 30% commission.

The meme signals that Musk could be considering taking the path of Epic Games Inc. and sidestepping Apple’s fees. When Epic made such a move, Apple removed the hit game Fortnite, sparking a multiyear legal fight.

But if Musk wanted to start selling the Twitter Blue subscription service through the web — bypassing Apple’s 30% — he could already do so. The app store allows services available on multiple platforms to use that approach.

The issue would be if Twitter advertised the workaround within its app or added a button directing users to the web payment option. That move could risk getting Twitter bumped from the app store.

In another tweet, Musk suggested that Apple has made demands on Twitter’s content moderation. He also posted a yes-no survey: “Apple should publish all censorship actions it has taken that affect its customers.”

In controlling the two major mobile app stores, Apple and Google are frequently referred to as a “duopoly,” a term Musk used in his tweets. US Representative Ken Buck, a Republican from Colorado, took up that idea Monday. He quoted one of Musk’s tweets and said the US should end the app store duopoly before the end of the year. “No one should have this kind of market power,” he said.

Apple has strict rules for its app store that limit objectionable content, including discriminatory content related to religion, race and sexual orientation. It also restricts overly realistic violence and pornographic material.

Apple and Google have previously removed social networks, including Parler, from their platforms because of inadequate content moderation. In the case of Parler, the app was ultimately restored to both app stores after the social network followed a series of steps to ensure it was moderating content.

After directing several barbs at Apple, Musk promised more information on free speech suppression in “The Twitter Files,” which will be published — where else? — on Twitter.

“The public deserves to know what really happened,” he said.

DOHA, Qatar — A top Qatari official involved in the country’s World Cup organization has put the number of worker deaths for the tournament “between 400 and 500” for the first time, a drastically higher number than any other previously offered by Doha.

The comment by Hassan al-Thawadi, the secretary-general of Qatar’s Supreme Committee for Delivery and Legacy, appeared to come off the cuff during an interview with British journalist Piers Morgan.

It also threatened to reinvigorate criticism by human rights groups over what the toll of hosting the Middle East’s first World Cup for the migrant labor that built over $200 billion worth of stadiums, metro lines and new infrastructure needed for the tournament.
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The Supreme Committee and Qatar’s government did not immediately respond to a request for comment Tuesday.

In the interview, portions of which Morgan posted online, the British journalist asks al-Thawadi: “What is the honest, realistic total do you think of migrant workers who died from – as a result of work they’re doing for the World Cup in totality?”

“The estimate is around 400, between 400 and 500,” al-Thawadi responds. “I don’t have the exact number. That’s something that’s been discussed.”

But that figure hasn’t been discussed publicly previously. Reports from the Supreme Committee dating from 2014 through the end of 2021 only include the number of deaths of workers involved in building and refurbishing the stadiums now hosting the World Cup.

Read More: A Qatar-Style World Cup Building Boom May Not Be Possible in a Hotter World

Those released figures put the total number of deaths at 40. They include 37 from what the Qataris describe as nonwork incidents such as heart attacks and three from workplace incidents. One report also separately lists a worker death from the coronavirus amid the pandemic.

Since FIFA awarded the tournament to Qatar in 2010, the country has taken some steps to overhaul the country’s employment practices. That includes eliminating its so-called kafala employment system, which tied workers to their employers, who had say over whether they could leave their jobs or even the country.

Qatar also has adopted a minimum monthly wage of 1,000 Qatari riyals ($275) for workers and required food and housing allowances for employees not receiving those benefits directly from their employers. It also has updated its worker safety rules to prevent deaths.

“One death is a death too many. Plain and simple,” al-Thawadi adds in the interview.

Activists have called on Doha to do more, particularly when it comes to ensuring workers receive their salaries on time and are protected from abusive employers.

Al-Thawadi’s comment also renews questions on the veracity of both government and private business reporting on worker injuries and deaths across the Gulf Arab states, whose skyscrapers have been built by laborers from South Asia nations like India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka.

Mustafa Qadri, the executive director of Equidem Research, a labor consultancy that has published reports on the toll of the construction on migrant laborers, said he was surprised by al-Thawadi’s remark.

“For him now to come and say there is hundreds, it’s shocking,” he told The Associated Press. “They have no idea what’s going on.”

BlockFi Inc. filed for bankruptcy, the latest crypto firm to collapse in the wake of crypto exchange FTX’s rapid downfall.

BlockFi said in a statement that it will use the Chapter 11 process to “focus on recovering all obligations owed to BlockFi by its counterparties, including FTX and associated corporate entities,” adding that recoveries are likely to be delayed by FTX’s own bankruptcy. Chapter 11 bankruptcy allows a company to continue operating while working out a plan to repay creditors.

The petition, filed in New Jersey, lists BlockFi’s assets and liabilities at between $1 billion and $10 billion each. The company said in the statement that it had around $257 million of cash on hand, and is starting an “internal plan to considerably reduce expenses, including labor costs.”
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Citing “a lack of clarity” over the status of bankrupt FTX and Alameda Research, the Jersey City, New Jersey-based company earlier halted withdrawals and said it was exploring “all options” with outside advisers.

FTX US is listed in the company’s petition as one of its top unsecured creditors, with a $275 million loan.

The company’s largest unsecured creditor, Ankura Trust Company, is owed about $729 million, according to the petition. Ankura acts as a trustee for BlockFi’s interest-bearing crypto accounts, according to its website.

BlockFi in July received a capital injection from a now-collapsed FTX US, and also had collateralized loans to Sam Bankman-Fried’s trading firm Alameda Research.

The company is the latest crypto firm to seek bankruptcy amid a prolonged slump in digital asset prices. Lenders Celsius Network LLC and Voyager Digital Holdings Inc. also filed for court protection this year.

The case is BlockFi Inc., 22-19361, U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of New Jersey (Trenton).

U.S. retailers discounted heavily on Black Friday to clear out bloated inventories but customers responded with only modest traffic, leaving profitability in doubt for many chains.

Crowds were thin in the late morning at Connecticut’s Stamford Town Center mall, with few shoppers at Kay Jewelers and just a small line at Forever 21. A couple at a Walmart Inc. supercenter near Dallas reveled in the lack of crowds as they bought presents for their grandchildren. At the Stonestown mall in San Francisco, shoppers were few and far between.

“It feels like a normal day,” said Miguel Martinez, 35, a warehouse supervisor walking through a Target Corp. store on Chicago’s North Side with his 12-year-old daughter, Jaylen. Martinez said he’s been cutting back on cable TV and Netflix to afford presents for his four children. He described the Black Friday discounts as “pretty good” as he picked up a couple of Amazon Echo Dot speakers, Nerf guns and a Disney Encanto doll.
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U.S. consumers are still spending, but they’re growing more cautious after contending this year with the highest inflation rates in four decades. They’re also keeping a sharper lookout for deals, and retailers — many of them still heavy with inventory after misjudging an erosion in demand — are trying to stand out by dangling the deepest discounts since before the pandemic.

Modest Growth

The US holiday shopping season is likely to see modest to break-even growth in annual sales, said Melissa Minkow, director of retail strategy at digital consultancy CI&T. “That’s still a win,” she said, contrasting the outlook with the UK, where high inflation has caused consumers to pull back noticeably on spending. Still, the steep Black Friday discounts are likely to squeeze retailers.

“Profits will not be where retailers want them to be,” Minkow said. That’s in part because they “couldn’t pass all of the inflationary costs off to consumers.”

Read more: Bloomberg tracks Black Friday across the country

E-commerce spending on Black Friday rose 2.3% to $9.12 billion, according to Adobe Analytics.

That’s far less than the US inflation rate of almost 8% during the 12 months ended in October. Salesforce Inc. said the average consumer discount on Black Friday was expected to be greater than 30%, up from 28% last year and close to the 33% rate in 2019. The biggest discounts were in home appliances, apparel and health and beauty.

But shoppers are cutting back in reaction to higher prices, said Rob Garf, Salesforce’s vice president of retail.

“People are just plainly buying less products because their dollar isn’t going as far as it used to,” Garf said.

Lonely Middle

At Crossgates Mall in Albany, New York, low-cost brands and higher-end buzzy retailers had the most foot traffic, while the middle-market stores were desolate.

Gap Inc.’s Old Navy, which was offering 60% off most items, had a line so long that some shoppers turned around as soon as they entered the store.

Drawing big crowds at the higher end were athleisure favorite Lululemon Athletica Inc., which had only a few racks of discounted merchandise, and American Eagle Outfitters Inc.’s Aerie, a popular intimates brand among Gen Z shoppers. Meanwhile, stores like Gap’s Banana Republic, Macy’s Inc. and Urban Outfitters Inc. had no lines at all, and only a handful of shoppers.

The healthy traffic at some retailers shows that many US consumers are still spending at a robust clip. A crowded Best Buy Co. store near Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport had half a dozen cars pulled up by the door to pick up large televisions and other electronic goods. Grapevine Mills, a nearby discount mall, was so crowded that Shawanda Miller threw up her hands and left.

“I don’t even want to talk about it, it was so crowded in there,” said Miller, 43. “I’m going to come back another day.”

No Wait

But crowds like that appeared to be an exception. The checkout line at the toy section at a Macy’s in Stamford, Connecticut, had no wait and the cashier said the store had prepared for more shoppers. A Walmart in suburban Dallas also had cashiers standing at the ready with no lines, which was just fine with Veronica Gonzalez and Carlos Garcia, a couple visiting from Corpus Christi, Texas.

“What’s good about it is you don’t have to come in at 5 o’clock in the morning, and everything is here that we’re looking for,” Gonzalez said. Garcia said “everything’s for the grandkids” as he pushed a shopping cart full of bed sheets, suitcases and toys.

The era of Black Friday crowds came to a halt with the pandemic, and it probably isn’t coming back as more consumers shop online and spread their spending out over a longer period. “The historic raucous atmosphere of Black Friday may be in the past,” Edward Yruma, a retail analyst at Piper Sandler, said in a report.

Behind the moderate crowds are people such as Therese Pociask, 60, who was shopping at Target in Chicago for her small day-care center. She was also looking for gifts for her nieces and nephews. In her cart were an Epsom-salt gift pack, Fujifilm Instax camera film, three stuffed dinosaurs and a puzzle.

Pociask said she’s planning to spend about $2,000 during the holidays — about the same as last year. But with inflation high, her money isn’t going as far as it did.

“I’m trying to stay within my budget, but I’m finding I have to spend more for it to look the same,” she said.

The cryptocurrency crisis, worsened by the dramatic collapse of fast-growing crypto exchange FTX in mid-November, has raised questions about the future of these digital currencies. Bitcoin, the largest and most well known among them, has fallen to a two-year low in recent days. But one of the cryptocurrency’s most prominent backers is doubling down.

On Nov. 17, El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele, who last year made his country the first in the world to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender, responded to the crypto slide with a pledge that the government would purchase one Bitcoin every day going forward. On Nov. 22, Bukele’s administration sent a bill to El Salvador’s Congress that would allow it to sell $1 billion in so-called “volcano bonds”—government debt, denominated in U.S. dollars and paying out 6.5% interest a year to bond holders—in order to buy even more of the cryptocurrency and build a coastal “Bitcoin City.”
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It may be difficult to understand why Bukele remains so enthusiastic about a policy that has been, by almost all metrics, a disaster. Bukele’s attempt to get Salvadorans to use the notoriously volatile cryptocurrency has left the country looking like a much riskier place to invest. The policy has stalled El Salvador’s negotiations with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for a $1.3 billion loan, needed to plug big gaps in its public finances. Bukele’s government has been courting alternative sources of cash, announcing new trade talks with China on Nov. 9. But few economists believe Salvadoran vice president Félix Ulloa’s claim that China is willing to help El Salvador with the all-time-high $21 billion debt burden it owes to foreign lenders. If it can’t find new creditors to help service that debt, El Salvador runs the risk of a default early next year.

Though Bukele has refused to disclose how much taxpayer money he has spent on Bitcoin, the best guess, based on his purchase announcements, is $107 million, with a further $200 million on administration and infrastructure—equivalent to nearly 4% of the developing country’s 2023 budget. El Salvador’s Bitcoin holdings are now worth less than $40 million.

To cap it all, Salvadorans just aren’t that into Bitcoin: an in-person survey of 1,269 residents published by the José Simeón Cañas Central American University (UCA) in October found that less than a quarter of respondents had used the cryptocurrency in 2022. Just 17% said the Bitcoin rollout had been a success, while 66% said it was a failure. And 77% want Bukele to stop using public funds to buy Bitcoin.

And yet, Bukele’s Bitcoin policy hasn’t hurt his approval rating, which has remained reliably above 85% since he took office in 2019. In fact, the cryptocurrency is arguably giving the President exactly what he wants. On the world stage, Bitcoin has pulled media focus from El Salvador’s long-running problem with gang violence, and from the authoritarian moves that Bukele has made to deal with it, including mass arrests, ousting supreme court judges who oppose his agenda, and launching an unconstitutional bid for reelection in 2024. At home, Bitcoin is a key part of the narrative that Bukele is pushing, both of El Salvador—as a rejuvenated, innovative country, delivering new opportunities for young Salvadorans—and of his presidency. He presents himself not as a classic strongman, but as a provocative young visionary challenging the Western financial elite.

That means Bukele has little incentive to abandon Bitcoin—despite mounting losses for his country, says Tiziano Breda, Central America analyst at Crisis Group. “It’s Bukele’s ultimate [goal] to rebrand the country,” he says. “And he doesn’t seem like a person who can admit failure. He will go until the last consequences of this experiment.”

Why Salvadorans don’t care about Bitcoin

Most credit the President’s wide-ranging crack down on gang violence for his sky-high approval ratings. Bukele has overseen the arrest of more than 50,000 alleged gang members and a dramatic fall in El Salvador’s murder rate. Watchdogs say that has come at the cost of “eviscerating human rights” both for gang members and innocent Salvadorans caught in the crossfire. But civil society pushback has been relatively weak, Breda says, with Bukele successfully dismissing protest groups and critical media as puppets for the two establishment parties who ruled El Salvador for three decades before him.

Though most Salvadorans don’t like Bitcoin, they view the policy more as an eccentricity of Bukele’s than as a serious threat to economic security, says Ricardo Castaneda, a San Salvador-based economist at the Central American Institute for Fiscal Studies. Mounting concern about public finances hasn’t yet translated into severe economic pain, he says: the government has shielded the population from the worst of global inflation by subsidizing gasoline prices. And remittances from the U.S., which make up a staggering 26.7% of El Salvador’s GDP, have not slowed.

Bukele, meanwhile, insists that Bitcoin is the long-term solution to El Salvador’s economic problems. Like most crypto enthusiasts, he says the price will soon rally and eventually deliver huge profits to El Salvador. In the meantime, the President’s Twitter account shows an endless stream of retweets of foreign crypto influencers: they’re celebrating El Salvador’s coffee and beaches, and sharing tales of Salvadorans who left their country decades ago and now, apparently thanks to Bitcoin, have decided to return.

A looming credit crunch

There are clouds on the horizon for Bukele’s Bitcoin dream, though. El Salvador has to come up with a way to pay around $667 million in bonds that come due in January 2023, and another $1 billion in 2025. The government has announced plans to buy back portions of that debt by using reserves from its central bank, in hopes of inspiring enough confidence in the market to allow it to sell new bonds. Analysts say such moves might help El Salvador avoid default next year. But with shrinking cash reserves and unsustainably high levels of debt to service, the risk will remain.

If Bukele can’t find buyers for his “volcano bonds” or another way to plug the fiscal hole, he may be forced to return to negotiations with the IMF. The lender would likely make a loan conditional on Bukele removing Bitcoin as legal tender and introducing tighter regulations on the use of cryptocurrencies, to reduce the risk of criminal groups using El Salvador to launder money.

Bukele will only accept those terms when the economy starts to struggle enough that Salvadorans feel it, per Castaneda. “There is already a small crack there,” he says, noting that 58% of respondents to the October UCA poll identified El Salvador’s greatest problem as the economy—a 15% spike from May and the highest proportion in the last decade. (The drop in concern about crime likely helped). “If things don’t improve, that crack will get bigger and bigger, and then the applause will turn into boos.”

Until then, Bukele will likely keep rolling the dice on Bitcoin. “He’s like a gambler in a casino who’s losing,” Castaneda says. “Instead of walking away or being more careful, they go all in.”

Roughly two weeks after the collapsed cryptocurrency exchange FTX filed for bankruptcy, its customers are losing hope they will ever see their money again.

The latest blow to FTX account holders came on Tuesday at a bankruptcy hearing in U.S. federal court, when lawyers for FTX painted a grim picture of the Bahamas-based firm’s finances and disclosed that a “substantial amount of assets” from user accounts have either been stolen or are missing. They said FTX had faced cyber attacks on the day it filed for bankruptcy, referring to the hundreds of millions of dollars in FTX assets that were moved in unauthorized transactions.
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FTX’s claim that it was hacked diminishes the likelihood that users will recover their money, legal and banking experts say. Without a clear understanding of how much cash FTX has left—and where it’s located—customers could be waiting years to recover their lost funds, and it’s possible none is returned.

“I highly doubt users will get their money back,” says Darian Ibrahim, a professor at William & Mary Law School who specializes in securities law and cryptocurrencies. “They’re unsecured creditors like everyone else in a bankruptcy where there’s apparently an $8 billion shortfall. It’s a bizarre situation.”

Court documents filed earlier this month show that the firm owes $102 million to customers and at least $3.1 billion to roughly 1 million creditors.

Once the darling of the crypto world, FTX filed for bankruptcy in early November after a run on deposits caused a liquidity crisis. The firm’s collapse has sparked investigations by the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Justice Department in the U.S. and by authorities in the Bahamas. The inquiries largely center on whether FTX improperly moved customers’ assets to Alameda Research, a crypto hedge fund owned and run by FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, who resigned as CEO at the time of the bankruptcy filing. The Wall Street Journal reported that Bankman-Fried allegedly used $10 billion worth of FTX customer assets to fund risky bets at Alameda Research.

“This company was run by inexperienced, unsophisticated and potentially personally compromised individuals,” said FTX’s own lawyer James Bromley, in a bankruptcy hearing on Nov. 22. “It is one of the most abrupt and difficult company collapses in the history of corporate America.”

The cryptocurrency industry has faced a painful reckoning this year after seeing a surge in popularity during the pandemic. Crypto asset values were falling, even before FTX’s collapse which Ibrahim says is endemic of a “bad offshore bank” rather than a failure of the industry. The value of a single Bitcoin, for instance, has fallen precipitously, from roughly $68,000 a year ago to $17,000 now.

But customers who trusted FTX’s platform are likely at the back of the queue for receiving whatever assets a bankruptcy judge can extract from the company. As the firm undergoes its bankruptcy proceedings, U.S. law allows the court to rearrange priorities based on equitable principles, meaning creditors will likely take first priority while investors in the company are second and account holders are last.

Alan Rosenberg, a corporate bankruptcy attorney in Florida, says it’s “too early to tell” if customers will recover their funds, though a number of legal determinations in the coming months or years should make the outcome more clear. He says the first question that the courts will have to answer is what property the bankruptcy estate holds and whether FTX has “bare legal title” for the cryptocurrency traded on its platform, which would establish if FTX has any equity in those assets. The courts will also have to decide the different classes of creditors, which could include customers if a judge determines they are unsecured creditors.

“What makes this worse is that Sam Bankman-Fried seems to suggest that the firm’s financial records are not reliable at all,” Rosenberg says. “That means it could be impossible to determine whose crypto was used, whose crypto was not used, and what’s remaining.”

A litany of other legal issues could drag the case on for years, including avoidance litigation, fraudulent transfer litigation, preference litigation and insurance litigation, Rosenberg adds. “There appear to be assets,” he says, “but the question is: Who’s laying claim to them, what are the priority of those claims and what additional assets can be brought in through litigation?”

Read More: The FTX Crash Will Have a Lasting Impact on the African Crypto Community

The implosion of FTX has also put a spotlight on the unregulated world of cryptocurrencies, an industry that has intentionally operated outside traditional banking and finance rules. When a traditional U.S. bank fails, the government insures customer deposits, making them whole up to $250,000 via the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC). But, for now, no such mechanism exists for cryptocurrencies.

“We have a growing asset class that’s largely unregulated at the global level,” says Eric Soufer, a partner at Tusk Strategies, where he leads the firm’s Crypto and FinTech practice group. “The FTX collapse raises calls for regulators to finally get into the game. We’ve had enough of the turf wars in Washington and finger pointing between the ultimate soup of agencies over who can do what and when.”

An effective set of regulations would likely give investors more confidence to invest in the currency, crypto experts say, though policymakers in Washington are still struggling to make sense of the FTX implosion. Sen. Debbie Stabenow, a Democrat from Michigan, said FTX’s collapse “reinforces the urgent need for greater federal oversight of this industry” and continues to push a measure through Congress.

Ibrahim, the securities law professor, has called on regulators to require that any digital asset come with both a whitepaper explaining how the native blockchain works and a “warning box” that discloses potentially harmful features of that asset, a protection that would have warned customers about FTX loaning client funds to Alameda.

Of course, any movement on crypto regulation in the upcoming months won’t help to get FTX customers their funds back. The lack of good news is prompting some account holders to sign on to a class-action lawsuit filed last week against Bankman-Fried and the celebrities who endorsed FTX, such as Tom Brady and Stephen Curry, as another chance to recoup lost money.

“If I’m trying to sue Tom Brady for my FTX losses, I might be saying he’s an underwriter and a securities offering,” Ibrahim says. “He’d be liable under the securities laws for that.”

SAN FRANCISCO — New Twitter owner Elon Musk said Thursday that he is granting “amnesty” for suspended accounts, which online safety experts predict will spur a rise in harassment, hate speech and misinformation.

Read More: Twitter Is Collapsing, and Nothing Can Replace It

The billionaire’s announcement came after he asked in a poll posted to his timeline to vote on reinstatements for accounts that have not “broken the law or engaged in egregious spam.” The yes vote was 72%.

“The people have spoken. Amnesty begins next week. Vox Populi, Vox Dei,” Musk tweeted using a Latin phrase meaning “the voice of the people, the voice of God.”
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Musk used the same Latin phrase after posting a similar poll last last weekend before reinstating the account of former President Donald Trump, which Twitter had banned for encouraging the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection. Trump has said he won’t return to Twitter but has not deleted his account.

Read More: What Donald Trump’s Twitter Reinstatement Means for TRUTH Social

Such online polls are anything but scientific and can easily be influenced by bots.

In the month since Musk took over Twitter, groups that monitor the platform for racist, anti-Semitic and other toxic speech say it’s been on the rise on the world’s de facto public square. That has included a surge in racist abuse of World Cup soccer players that Twitter is allegedly failing to act on.

The uptick in harmful content is in large part due to the disorder following Musk’s decision to lay off half the company’s 7,500-person workforce, fire top executives, and then institute a series of ultimatums that prompted hundreds more to quit. Also let go were an untold number of contractors responsible for content moderation. Among those resigning over a lack of faith in Musk’s willingness to keep Twitter from devolving into a chaos of uncontrolled speech were Twitter’s head of trust and safety, Yoel Roth.

Read More: Big Tech Layoffs Are Hurting Workers Far Beyond Silicon Valley

Major advertisers have also abandoned the platform.

On Oct. 28, the day after he took control, Musk tweeted that no suspended accounts would be reinstated until Twitter formed a “content moderation council” with diverse viewpoints that would consider the cases.

On Tuesday, he said he was reneging on that promise because he’d agreed to at the insistence of “a large coalition of political-social activists groups” who later ”broke the deal” by urging that advertisers at least temporarily stop giving Twitter their business.

Read More: Elon Musk Is the Lord of Twitter. We Are the Peasants

A day earlier, Twitter reinstated the personal account of far-right Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, which was banned in January for violating the platform’s COVID misinformation policies.

Musk, meanwhile, has been getting increasingly chummy on Twitter with right-wing figures. Before this month’s U.S. midterm elections he urged “independent-minded” people to vote Republican.

A report from the European Union published Thursday said Twitter took longer to review hateful content and removed less of it this year compared with 2021. The report was based on data collected over the spring — before Musk acquired Twitter — as part of an annual evaluation of online platforms’ compliance with the bloc’s code of conduct on disinformation. It found that Twitter assessed just over half of the notifications it received about illegal hate speech within 24 hours, down from 82% in 2021.