Month: December 2020

Enlarge / An oil refinery in Alberta. (credit: Kurt Bauschardt)

In 2018, Canada passed a federal carbon pricing law in an effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The Greenhouse Gas Pollution Pricing Act was designed to not interfere with any provinces that had independently put a price on carbon, so long as a province’s system met the requirements of the federal law. In provinces that hadn't acted, the federal scheme would kick in instead.

That scheme involved a tax on fuels starting at CAD$20 per ton of CO₂, rising to CAD$50 by 2022.

On Friday, the government announced its plan for the program through 2030. Although the price was increasing by CAD$10 each year through 2022, it will now go up by CA$15 each year afterward. That means it would reach CAD$170 per ton of CO₂ in 2030—notably higher than current prices around the world. For this reason, the announcement also notes that the government will “explore the potential of border carbon adjustments”—a type of import tax meant to protect domestic industry from goods produced in countries without similar carbon taxes.

Enlarge / People are complaining about situations like this in Cyberpunk 2077, but I'm not sure I see the problem. (credit: CDPR / Twitter)

Amid widespread reports of major technical and gameplay problems in the PS4 and Xbox One versions of Cyberpunk 2077, CD Projekt Red is acknowledging that it took "the wrong approach" in development leading up to the release.

"After three delays, we as the Management Board were too focused on releasing the game," CDPR joint-CEO Adam Kiciński said during a recent conference call addressing the issues with the PS4 and Xbox One versions of the game. "We underestimated the scale and complexity of the issues, we ignored the signals about the need for additional time to refine the game on the base last-gen consoles... This caused the loss of gamers’ trust and the reputation that we’ve been building through a big part of our lives."

How did such a marquee title end up released in such a state? A large part of the problem was "us looking... at the PC and next-gen performance rather than current-gen [consoles]," CDPR board member Michał Nowakowski said during the call. "We definitely did not spend enough time looking at that." The COVID-19 pandemic also impacted the usual testing plans for the title, CDPR said. "External testers working for external companies were not able to test the game from homes—they have test centers and if they’re not there, they’re not able to work," Kiciński said.

Enlarge / A Pinterest logo seen displayed on a smartphone. (credit: Mateusz Slodkowski | SOPA Images | LightRocket | Getty Images)

Pinterest has reached a major settlement with a former executive who filed a lawsuit alleging rampant gender discrimination after she was pushed out of her role at the firm, the company disclosed Monday afternoon.

Françoise Brougher served as Pinterest's chief operating officer from March 2018 until the company fired her in April of this year. In August, she filed a lawsuit against the company, alleging her dismissal had nothing to do with her performance and instead was an act of retaliation against her for complaining about discrimination she encountered inside the company.

While preparing Pinterest for its 2019 IPO, Brougher discovered that she had been deliberately misled about executive compensation at the firm and was being significantly underpaid compared to her male C-suite colleagues, her suit alleged. After she brought the discrepancy to the attention of Pinterest CEO Ben Silbermann, she was systematically squeezed out of executive and board meetings and communications and as a result of that retaliation became unable to perform her job, she said.

• 

  The Google Home Mini, the original Google Home, and the Google Home Max. [credit: Google ]

Google's biggest smart speaker, the Google Home Max, is dead. The speaker is listed as "sold out" on store.google.com, and the company told Android Police, "We’ve sold out of Google Home Max and will no longer be manufacturing the device." If you've been wanting Google's 12-pound mega speaker, now is probably your last chance to scrounge around on the Internet looking for the last bits of stock. At the time of writing, Verizon still has some.

The Google Home Max was released in 2017 alongside the Google Home Mini. The Max was a whopping $400, and besides the bigger, better sound, it was the only Google speaker with a 3.5mm aux input. It also had a mysterious USB-C port on the back, which, as far as I can tell, could only ever be used for a wired Ethernet dongle instead of connecting through Wi-Fi. (If that was always the intent, why not just give it an Ethernet port instead of USB?) The original Google Home and the Google Home Mini both got sequels in the past 14 months—the Nest Audio and Nest Mini, respectively—but the Google Home Max is just getting killed. I'd guess that Google just never sold that many of them.

The death of the Max represents Google's exit from the bigger smart speaker market, where it was the most expensive entry by a mile. Its main assistant competition, the $300 Apple HomePod and $200 Amazon Echo Studio, will now be left to fight among themselves. It sounds like even Apple has had a tough time in the premium smart speaker market, with the HomePod getting a permanent price drop from its introductory $350 price.