Category: Technology

Ring founder Jamie Siminoff returned to Amazon this week, coming back to the company just about two years after he left, Bloomberg reports. He’s now a vice president at the company, and he will be heading up the Ring, Blink, Amazon Key, and Sidewalk teams. 

Siminoff is replacing Liz Hamren, who had taken over following Siminoff’s initial departure. Hamren and the team “have done an awesome job driving the business, delivering strong results, and bringing a lot of delightful experiences to neighbors,” Siminoff says in an Amazon Q&A. He adds that the “AI transformation happening right now” is a “once-in-a-generation opportunity.”

In the Q&A, Siminoff also says that he and Panos Panay, Amazon’s SVP of devices and services, have talked “a lot” about “experiences we can create with devices that are awesome on their own, but even better together. I think you’ll continue to see a lot of that from us moving forward – helping customers stay safe, connected, and informed as part of a magical connected experience.”

The day after Siminoff originally left Amazon, Siminoff sold a new company, Honest Day’s Work, to Latch, which he helped rebrand to Door.com. The company announced …read more

Nice economy you have there, said President Donald Trump’s administration. It would be a shame if something happened to it.

The something, announced earlier this week, is a set of globally applied tariffs that make no sense on their face. No sane economist would endorse this. Through a combination of stupidity, incompetence and sheer gangsterism, the Trump administration has decided to levy a series of taxes that encourage blatant corruption, entirely fail to encourage American manufacturing growth, and leave people and companies poorer. That is, assuming that the taxes come into play at all.

The central, persistent thing Trump seems to misunderstand about tariffs is that they are paid in the US by people in the US. A reasonable person might also remember that he tried them a few years ago in a trade war, to negative effect. We have, as a nation, shot ourselves in the dick. But don’t take my word for it! Here are some actual experts:

• “This is the craziest of the crazy things we’ve seen thus far,” says Chris Barrett, professor of economics at Cornell University’s SC Johnson …read more
  

President Donald Trump’s additional 75 day delay to TikTok’s sale-or-ban deadline leaves service providers like Apple, Google, and Oracle on shaky ground, and, according to one influential Democrat, is straight-up “against the law.”

After Trump announced the extension on Friday, 12 Republican members of the House Select Committee on China, including Chair John Moolenaar (R-MI), released a joint statement in response. The statement did not address legal concerns with the second extension, but it said that “any resolution must ensure that U.S. law is followed, and that the Chinese Communist Party does not have access to American user data or the ability to manipulate the content consumed by Americans.” The letter says signatories “look forward to more details” on a proposed deal.

In a separate statement, three Republican members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, including Chair Brett Guthrie (R-KY) struck a similar note, saying that, “any deal must finally end China’s ability to surveil and potentially manipulate the American people through this app.”

Senate Intelligence Committee Vice Chair Mark Warner (D-VA) was more critical in a phone interview with The …read more