Month: March 2020

Enlarge / Elon Musk. (credit: Patrick T. Fallon/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Since Monday, Tesla has been under pressure from officials in Alameda County to shut down operations of its car factory in Fremont, California, to fight the spread of the coronavirus. On Thursday, Tesla finally announced it would halt vehicle manufacturing in Fremont.

"We have decided to temporarily suspend production at our factory in Fremont, from end of day March 23, which will allow an orderly shutdown," Tesla said in a post on its website.

March 23 is next Monday—a full week after officials in seven Bay Area counties ordered non-essential businesses to close down. To make sure there was no confusion about Tesla's status, Alameda County tweeted on Tuesday that Tesla was not an essential business.

Enlarge / The new design does at least include a dark mode. I generally prefer bright layouts, but if you have a bad habit of Facebooking in bed late at night, this is less likely to prevent sleepiness. (credit: Jim Salter)

Sometime last night, Facebook's new design layout rolled out to my personal account. It assured me that I could switch back if I didn't like it, so I immediately tried it out. I just as immediately switched it off and never looked back. At least, I never looked back until this afternoon, when the powers that be at Ars said—and I quote—"feel free to hate review it, if you want."

I am a professional if nothing else, so this is not a hate review. But I must admit it's a "visceral dislike" review, and perhaps some readers will appreciate—or at least not mind—the things that turn me off so strongly about the new layout.

If you like landscape browsing on a smartphone, you’ll like the new Facebook

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  This is the current "old" Facebook design, which has been in place largely unchanged for a few years now. It's reasonably information-dense and—apart from the giant Story header—usually fits several posts per page. Personally identifying information (and the odd profanity) are blurred out. [credit: Jim Salter ]

I do the majority of my Facebook browsing on a desktop PC—a serious desktop PC, for serious people, with dual 24" monitors in 1080P. I strongly dislike layouts that present me with less information and waste a ton of real estate, and Facebook's new layout does exactly that, in spades.

Enlarge (credit: Thomas Trutschel | Getty Images)

Charter employees are angry at the cable company for refusing requests to work from home during the coronavirus pandemic and have been reaching out to Ars this week to complain about their employer.

One Charter employee who works in a 24-hour call center in a suburb of Orlando, Florida, said the facility has anywhere between 400 and 700 employees working in one large room at any given time. The call center has 1,200 agents in total, the employee told us yesterday. Instead of letting call-center agents work from home, Charter is advising employees to work at every other desk, leaving a buffer of one empty desk between employees. But there isn't enough space or enough desks to do that, the employee said.

"This is the rough part: we sit at a different desk every day," the employee said. "We don't have our own desks. It's an absolute nightmare breeding ground for germs on a normal basis." The employee shared this graphic from an email that was sent to the call-center workers:

Enlarge / Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY). (credit: Win McNamee/Getty Images)

Two senior senators—Republican Rob Portman of Ohio and Democrat Dick Durbin of Illinois—are introducing legislation to allow Senate votes to be held remotely.

"In times of extraordinary national crisis, the Senate must be able to convene and act expeditiously even if we can't be together in person," Portman said in a press statement.

Some members in the House of Representatives have also been pushing to allow remote voting in the House. A bipartisan group of lawmakers wrote a letter to Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) on Wednesday urging her to allow remote voting.