Kickslowed

Like many businesses, Kickstarter isn’t in good shape these days:

Crowdfunding platform Kickstarter is the latest company to resort to layoffs during the economic downturn caused by the coronavirus pandemic. The company filed a regulatory notice in New York last week revealing it had laid off 25 employees, or about 18 percent of its workforce. But Kickstarter tells The Verge its workforce reduction is more than twice that, as 30 employees decided to take voluntary buyouts as negotiated between the company’s management and Kickstarter’s employee union.

“The filing is correct, however, it does not reflect an international employee that was affected, nor does it take into account further staff reduction via the voluntary buyouts offered to staff. In total, we’ll see a 39 percent reduction in staff,” a Kickstarter spokesperson tells The Verge. “The majority of those leaving chose voluntary separation packages, and everyone affected is staying on through this week through the transition.”

On the positive side, it’s cool to see interesting wearables projects that have launched in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

I hope Kickstarter doesn’t go away. From a quick scan through the site, there looks to still be a lot of interesting projects launching on their platform.

Earth Day 2020

Today is Earth Day. Whatever the fuck that means.

Over at The Verge, Barbara Krasnoff shares with us some ways to celebrate Earth Day online while were in the middle of COVID-19 sheltering-in-place.

I’m skipping Krasnoff’s recommendations. Instead I’d like to celebrate how much less damage we’re doing to the Earth and how much less we’re depleting it’s resources right now. Oil production has dropped, manufacturing has slowed, and many fewer cars are pumping out exhaust (what website is this again?).

At LA Magazine, Jason McGahan reports L.A.’s Air Quality Is Better Than It’s Been in Decades:

The March 2020 air quality index compiled by the Environmental Protection Agency confirms what millions of Angelenos can see just by looking out the window: ‪the brownish haze that customarily settles atop the city on weekday afternoons has lifted and visibility has cleared for miles in every direction since the “safer at home” order was imposed.

‪Last month, Los Angeles experienced the longest stretch of days of “good” air since at least 1980. The federal agency’s online data goes back no further, but one expert suspects that L.A.’s air hasn’t been this clean since around the time the United States entered the Second World War. Cody Hill, an energy company executive based in the Bay Area, posted a graphic of the EPA data to his Twitter account and wrote that, in terms of air quality, March may well have been “one of the best months at least since the 1940s, when there was huge migration as we ramped up aircraft production in the L.A. basin to fight WW2.”

So I say, Happy Earth Day, Earth! Enjoy this brief reprieve. We’ll be back soon, unfortunately.