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⏱The battle for privacy

Jan 18, 2021

Good morning everyone. There’s no better way to jumpstart your week than learning about the world in less than 90 Seconds :)

A former GitHub employee was offered his job back after he was deemed to have been incorrectly fired, and the head of HR for the company, Carrie Olesen, has been forced to resign. This controversy stemmed from when the (Jewish) employee in question sent, “stay safe homies nazis are about” in regards to the mob at the Capitol on January 6th, and was fired less than 48 hours later. As the firing went public, GitHub initially tried to keep the matters internal, but more than 200 employees published a public letter condemning the firing, and asking for clarification. Github also said in their statement that they are still investigating, and taking the matter “very seriously.”

In a time where privacy is under heavy scrutiny, the privacy focused search engine DuckDuckGo reached a major milestone, as they recorded more than 100M searches in a single day last Monday. In addition, their daily average for January is more than 20M higher than it was last September. The reason? Users are becoming more and more aware of the implications of sharing all of their data with companies like Google and Facebook, and are turning to an alternative that doesn’t collect any data at all.

Early yesterday, Goldman Sachs raised their growth estimates for the US economy for this year and beyond following the release of Joe Biden’s $1.9Tn stimulus deal. The group of economists behind this estimate suggested that the economy would expand at a 6.6% rate this year, up from 6.4%, and they also predicted that the unemployment rate at the end of 2021 would be 4.5%, down from the earlier estimate of 4.8%. Furthermore, they also provided an estimate that disposable income would be up by 4.5% this year, a number much higher than the earlier 3.8%.

More than four major asian nations cancelled 80% of their planned coal power projects following a sharp decline in the fossil fuel market during the last couple of months. Indonesia, Vietnam, Bangladesh, and the Philippines are now all exploring alternative renewable fuel sources instead.

Have a great rest of your day, and we’ll see you tomorrow bright and early!

-The 90 Second News Team

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