Hasta La Gadget!

Dozens of Google Japan employees have organized under the Tokyo Managers’ Union. It’s the first labor union at Google Japan, according to Meiji University Assistant Professor Ken Yamazaki, who also posted a copy of the group’s statements from a press conference. Apparently, the employees chose to organize out of fear that they could be abruptly laid off, especially since some of them are in Japan on work visas. 

Their concerns stemmed from the tech giant’s announcement back in January that it’s cutting 12,000 jobs — that’s six percent of the company’s overall workforce — around the world. They said their counterparts in the US were terminated with just an email sent in the middle of the night, and that the Japanese office’s employees were left anxiously awaiting for the ax to fall over the past few weeks. The workers said they joined a labor union in response to that announcement and to news about the fate of the company’s employees in other countries. 

For a dismissal to be legal in Japan, a company has to prove that it has reasonable grounds to terminate an employee. However, some companies terminate employees without good reason by claiming to have problems with the worker. The group is hoping that joining a union would protect them from sudden termination. In the US, one of the divisions most affected by the job cuts was the company’s Area 120 in-house incubator, which works on experimental apps and products. The division used to develop 20 projects simultaneously, but that’s now down to three after most people in the team lost their jobs.

When Google announced it was going to let 12,000 workers go, Chief Executive Sundar Pichai said he was “deeply sorry” and that he takes “full responsibility for the decisions that led [the company] here.” He admitted that the tech giant went on a hiring spree over the last few years, but that Google “hired for a different economic reality than the one we face today.” According to the company’s latest earnings report, its revenue for the fourth quarter of 2022 grew one percent from the year before, but its quarterly net income was down 34 percent year-over-year. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/google-workers-in-japan-joined-labor-union-064417794.html?src=rss

Pick the right starting word and you’ll be able to solve Wordle #621 in no time. Need some hints? We have them, as well as the solution, too.

The Colorado Republican seems to have a problem with Alaska, Hawaii and more.

The International Olympics Committee has laid out more details for the upcoming Olympic Esports Series, which will take place in Singapore in June. The lineup features facsimiles of real-world competitive events rather than what many people may think of as traditional esports, such as real-time strategy titles, fighting games and first-person shooters.

The initial batch of nine games connect to disciplines overseen by international sports federations. They include Just Dance and online chess from Chess.com. Some titles that have appeared at previous IOC-sanctioned events are returning, including Gran Turismo and Zwift, which requires participants to physically pedal on a stationary bike. Archery, baseball, sailing, taekwondo and tennis games round out the list. Qualifiers for the various titles, which include mobile games like Tennis Clash, start today.

“The Olympic Movement brings people together in peaceful competition,” David Lappartient, chair of the IOC Esports Liaison Group, said. “The Olympic Esports Series 2023 is a continuation of that, with the ambition of creating more spaces to play for both players and fans of elite competition.”

The Esports Series follows on from the Olympic Virtual Series, which took place in 2021 in the lead up to the Olympic Games in Tokyo. That esports event featured baseball, cycling (on Zwift), rowing, sailing and motorsport. The IOC says the series drew in more than 250,000 participants from 100 countries.

Although the organization is still just warming up to the idea of bringing esports into the Olympic Games proper, the series is part of the IOC’s efforts to engage with younger people and perhaps provide a gateway for them into sport. A strategic plan (PDF) approved by the IOC in 2021 includes a recommendation to “encourage the development of virtual sports and further engage with video gaming communities.” Part of this involves an effort to “strengthen the roles and responsibilities of [international federations] in establishing virtual and simulated forms of sports as a discipline within their regulations and strategies.”

“The idea first is really to make the bridge between the sports and the gaming space,” Vincent Perieira, the IOC’s head of virtual sport and gaming, told the Evening Standard. “We’re not making [an] opposition between sports and gaming. The point is really… how we can encourage people to do both to keep a good balance.”

On one hand, it makes some sense to ground the Esports Series in virtual versions of traditional sporting disciplines. The basic rules of virtual cycling, chess and tennis should be generally easy for participants and viewers to understand.

However, the IOC may be missing a trick by opting not to feature the likes of League of Legends, Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, StarCraft II, Minecraft, Fortnite or Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. Those games (and many others) have significant built-in audiences that may not especially care about the Olympics otherwise. Perhaps one day we’ll see Stardew Valley,Tetris and GeoGuessr as medaled events at the Olympic Games, but not anytime soon.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/the-olympic-esports-series-will-feature-just-dance-gran-turismo-and-chess-172704742.html?src=rss

Havana syndrome, the bizarre malaise that has impacted over a thousand U.S. foreign service members all over the world, is still a total mystery. Indeed, even as the government has attempted to explain away some of the weirdness, it’s pretty obvious we still have no fucking idea what this thing is.

Read more…