Month: December 2022

Enlarge (credit: The Burtons)

The business sector has had a fraught relationship with conservation. While many companies are now pushing to make their products and operations less damaging to the environment, the private sector, broadly speaking, has made life harder for the world’s complex ecosystems and the organisms in them.

For those companies looking to understand their environmental impacts better, NatureMetrics, a UK-based company, recently launched a service that can potentially inform conservation efforts in the private sector. The company is in the early stages of launching a subscription service that lets corporations regularly check their sites for biodiversity and keep an eye on any changes—good or bad—their activities have.

“You need to be doing monitoring over time in a structured way with enough samples to give you statistical significance,” Katie Critchlow, NatureMetrics’ CEO, told Ars.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Elle Cayabyab Gitlin | Getty Images)

As 2022 draws to a conclusion and we anxiously await to see how much weirder things get in 2023, it's natural to reflect on the year past. In addition to compiling a list of the 10 best cars, trucks, and SUVs we drove in 2022, I decided to also put together a roundup of our most-read automotive articles, plus a few of my particular favorites you might have missed.

1. Ford lays down the law with dealerships

The car buying process in the US is often an awful one, even more so since the pandemic and supply chain disruption resulted in reduced manufacturing capacity and exorbitant markups. It's particularly acute if you're looking for a new electric vehicle, many of which are far beyond affordability for many, especially after the loss of the $7,500 federal tax credit.

At least one automaker has had enough of indifferent dealerships and their bad behavior, and it was our most-read car story this year. In September, the Ford Motor Company told its dealers community that they had eight weeks to agree to new rules; the alternative being no more EVs to sell. Ford has restructured itself into new divisions—Ford Blue, which will make and sell fossil-powered vehicles, and Ford Model e, which is responsible for the battery powered stuff (there's also Ford Pro, for commercial vehicles, some of which are EVs).

Enlarge / A Falcon 9 rocket launches the OneWeb-1 mission to orbit on Dec. 8, 2022. (credit: Trevor Mahlmann)

A decade ago, only a handful of launch companies existed in the US; United Launch Alliance was the big dog, with SpaceX starting to nip at its heels. Since then, however, a multiplicity of new launch startups have arrived in the United States, many of which developed their own rocket engines. As a result, we are now in the golden age of rocketry, with many different startups and approaches to pushing payloads into space.

In my weekly Rocket Report newsletter, I pay attention to launch companies and state-owned enterprises around the world. But it can be difficult to measure Europe-based Arianespace against SpaceX against China's vast state-owned launch providers. Therefore, for this list, we're going to focus solely on commercial launch companies in the United States.

Please note this is a subjective list, although hard metrics such as total launches, tonnage to orbit, success rate, and more were all important factors in the decision. Also, the focus is on what each company accomplished in 2022, not what they might do in the future.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Smith Collection/Gado )

Internet service provider horror stories have been a longtime staple at Ars Technica, and over the past 12 months we detailed some of the most horrific broadband customer experiences we've ever heard of.

Comcast, the largest home Internet provider in the US, figured prominently in these stories as usual. Let's take a look back at the biggest ISP horror stories we covered in 2022.

Comcast wanted man to pay $19,000 after falsely advertising service on his street

This article from April 6 detailed the plight of Jonathan Rowny after he and his wife and child moved from Virginia to Washington state. Rowny was victimized by a common problem in the broadband industry—ISPs falsely telling customers that service is available.