All posts tagged: Waste

Waste Of The Day: Mismanagement At SF Zoo

Waste Of The Day: Mismanagement At SF Zoo

Published by Jenni Sidey

Waste Of The Day: Mismanagement At SF Zoo Authored by Jeremy Portnoy via RealClearInvestigations, Topline: The taxpayer-funded San Francisco Zoo “does not have a healthy or stable financial condition,” according to a city audit released in May. The zoo has no written plans or budgets to guide its construction projects, and spent $12 million on them without city approval. Employees are also allegedly hiring their friends and relatives as contractors. Key facts: The zoo is required to get approval from San Francisco’s Recreation and Park Commission before paying more than $50,000 for a construction project. But employees never did so while spending millions on a new “Madagascar Center” and other huge projects, auditors found. There is also a “widespread view among staff that [the zoo] has a toxic workplace environment,” according to the audit. Employees were allegedly chosen for senior roles based on “discrimination and favoritism,” not “professional qualifications.” The zoo spends more than $4 million on contracted services like security and advertising every year, but there is no evidence that any of them went …

20 Things Men Waste Far Too Much Money On

20 Things Men Waste Far Too Much Money On

Published by Akaay

Most men like to think they’re fairly sensible with money. Sure, there might be the odd impulse purchase or questionable financial decision along the way, but generally speaking, we’d all like to believe we’re making smart choices. The reality is often a little different. The biggest drains on your bank balance aren’t always obvious. They’re rarely one-off disasters. Instead, they’re the purchases that quietly become habits. The subscriptions you forgot about. The gadgets you never use. The clothes you never wear. The things you buy because they represent who you’d like to be rather than who you actually are. The good news is that identifying where money disappears is often the first step towards keeping more of it. Here are the things men waste money on more than they’d care to admit. Clothes They Never Actually Wear Every man has them. The jacket that looked incredible under the shop lighting. The shirt bought for a specific occasion that never arrived. The trainers that seemed like a good idea at the time. If something spends more …

DOGE Alumni Launch AI Startup To Target Waste On Main Street – And Already Have Their First Target

DOGE Alumni Launch AI Startup To Target Waste On Main Street – And Already Have Their First Target

Published by Jenni Sidey

Two alumni of the Department of Government Efficiency are bringing their cost-cutting experience from Washington to the private sector, launching Special, a startup that aims to harness artificial intelligence to wring inefficiencies out of what it describes as America’s $10 trillion Main Street services economy. Nate Cavanaugh and Justin Fox spent much of 2025 at DOGE, where they spearheaded the Small Agencies team. Their government stint, under the high-profile effort led by SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, contributed to approximately $215 billion in estimated savings. The pair departed in September 2025. In the spirit of DOGE, Figure Health plans to open source all of its billing claims, allowing the public to have full visibility into our Medicare and Medicaid… – Nate Cavanaugh (@natecavanaugh) June 2, 2026 “Similar to the government, Main Street is massive, highly unoptimized, and provides essential services to Americans. One needs to look no further than childcare learning centers in Minnesota or hospice businesses in California to find immense waste at the state level from businesses that benefit from taxpayer dollars,” …

New low-temperature process extracts battery-grade lithium with far less waste and energy

New low-temperature process extracts battery-grade lithium with far less waste and energy

Published by Jenni Sidey

Lithium sits at the center of the battery economy. Yet getting it out of rock still looks surprisingly crude. Spodumene, the world’s most common lithium-bearing hard rock, is usually blasted with heat above 1,000 degrees Celsius. After that, acids and other chemicals pull out the metal. What remains is largely waste. That old route has helped China dominate lithium refining. Even though countries like the United States and Australia hold large lithium resources of their own, China still leads the industry. Additionally, it has made hard-rock lithium more expensive than lithium drawn from brines. Yet brine extraction can place environmental strain on water-stressed regions. A team led by researchers from MIT now says it has found a way around one of the industry’s central bottlenecks. Specifically, the challenge is how to crack open hard rock without the punishing heat, heavy waste, and long chain of cleanup steps that define conventional refining. In a paper published in Science, the group describes a low-temperature, closed-loop process that extracts battery-grade lithium salts from spodumene. It also recovers alumina …

You Can Usually Tell How Unintelligent Someone Is By These 4 Things They Waste Time & Money On

You Can Usually Tell How Unintelligent Someone Is By These 4 Things They Waste Time & Money On

Published by Jenni Sidey

Hey there, little squeaker! What would life be like if you could quit scrounging for scraps, broke as a mouse, always stressed you won’t get the kiddy mousies enough food for tomorrow’s breakfast?  Wouldn’t it be nice to bag you a big old piece of French cheese that lasted all month? Okay then, friend, buckle in. If you want to up your smarts (and your game … of life), stop wasting time and money on these things, and you’ll be the Rat King of Staten Island. You can usually tell how unintelligent someone is by these 4 things they waste time & money on: 1. Small thinking You can think like a King, even if you wear clothes with holes in them. Thinking bigger and asking bigger, followed by big, bold action, may take courage, but you’ll make your life, especially your financial life, far easier. Money scripts, according to clinical psychologist Dr. Brad Klontz, are unconscious beliefs that quietly run our financial lives. A money avoidance script keeps people stuck because money avoiders perceive …

Nike World Cup Uniforms Made of Recycled Textiles Won’t Solve Fashion Waste

Nike World Cup Uniforms Made of Recycled Textiles Won’t Solve Fashion Waste

Published by skeptic

The push to do so through chemical means is a response to the shortcomings of other strategies they’ve tried. Traditional mechanical recycling through shredding and grinding causes fibers to break down. The resulting fabric must be blended with 70 to 80 percent virgin material so that anything made with it doesn’t pill and tear. The much more prevalent strategy involves turning discarded plastic bottles into new polyester. Patagonia pioneered this approach in the early ’90s, and by the start of this decade virtually all recycled polyester was sourced from old bottles. Today, however, companies have increasingly faced lawsuits and regulatory scrutiny from those who would rather see bottles turned back into bottles. Chemical recycling is supposed to be the next best thing. The term refers to using solvents to dissolve fibers into their base chemical units—building blocks that can be spun into new fabrics. On its face, this is a truly “circular” solution, because it doesn’t depend on bottles, and proponents say it can turn your used polyester shirts or running shorts into new ones over …

Pope Leo meets families of youth lost to illegal toxic waste dumping in Italy’s ‘Land of Fires’

Pope Leo meets families of youth lost to illegal toxic waste dumping in Italy’s ‘Land of Fires’

Published by Sam Flores

ACERRA, Italy (AP) — Pope Leo XIV on Saturday greeted one by one families who lost loved ones to illegal toxic dumping in an area near Naples, tied to a multi-billion criminal racket run by the mafia. Many paused to share photographs and other mementos of children and young people who have died or are battling cancer because of the pollution. Leo’s visit to the so-called Terra dei Fuochi, or Land of Fires, came on the eve of the 11th anniversary of Pope Francis’ big ecological encyclical Laudato Si (Praised Be), and indicates Leo’s commitment to carry on his predecessor’s environmental agenda. “I have come first of all to gather the tears of those who have lost loved ones, killed by environmental pollution caused by unscrupulous people and organizations who for too long were able to act with impunity,” Leo said in remarks to family members and local clergy inside Acerra’s cathedral. The pontiff recalled that the area now dubbed the Land of Fires was once called “Campania felix,” Latin for blessed or fruitful countryside, …

‘We have no time to waste’: Germany launches €125M push to build Europe’s frontier AI

‘We have no time to waste’: Germany launches €125M push to build Europe’s frontier AI

Published by Sam Flores

Germany is launching a €125 million artificial intelligence (AI) competition to help Europe build its own frontier artificial intelligence labs amid a global race. The initiative by Germany’s federal innovation agency SPRIND, called “Next Frontier AI,” aims to fund companies that could eventually become Europe’s own OpenAI or DeepSeek. Next Frontier AI comes as governments across Europe are becoming more concerned about dependence on American and Chinese AI companies. “Germany is leading this because we have no time to waste in waiting for other actors to get in that space. A competition globally is not waiting. So we need to act now. And that’s why we do this in a European manner,” Jano Costard, SPRIND’s head of challenges, told Euronews Next. Most leading AI firms, including OpenAI and Anthropic, are based in the US and have raised billions of dollars in private investment. China is also moving quickly. DeepSeek released its V4 model in April, adding pressure on Europe to build stronger AI companies of its own. SPRIND’s initiative will run in three stages over …

The Altman-Musk Trial Was a Waste of Everyone’s Time

The Altman-Musk Trial Was a Waste of Everyone’s Time

Published by Sam Flores

Sam Altman did not seem to be having a good time. During the many days that he spent inside an Oakland courtroom, the normally cheery CEO of OpenAI—a guy who tends to be chipper even when declaring AI’s existential risks to humanity—appeared anxious, even distraught. When he listened to the proceedings in Elon Musk’s lawsuit against him, a weekslong trial that threatened to remove Altman from OpenAI’s board and functionally destroy the company, he frequently concealed his mouth with his palm, fidgeted with a water bottle, and leaned forward and stared at the floor. He kept looking back at the rows of reporters behind him. On the witness stand Tuesday, Altman repeatedly noted how Musk’s actions had “annoyed” him. Musk, who helped form OpenAI as a nonprofit in 2015, alleged that Altman and OpenAI had violated the organization’s founding principles by seeking profits. He was requesting, among other remedies, more than $150 billion in damages, which Musk said he would donate to the OpenAI nonprofit. This morning, a nine-person jury delivered a unanimous verdict after …

Tech Workers, Long Treated Like Aristocracy, Are Now Human Waste

Tech Workers, Long Treated Like Aristocracy, Are Now Human Waste

Published by José Betancourt

Sign up to see the future, today Can’t-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech Ten years ago if you had told a tech industry recruiter their days are numbered, you’d be laughed out of the job fair. Now in 2026, it’s conventional wisdom: a freshly-minted computer science degree is now anything but a sure road to gainful employment. Tech companies have spent the last few years culling thousands of high-paying jobs, course-correcting after major over-hiring in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. The rise of AI-washing hasn’t helped, with plenty of tech CEO’s slashing payroll budgets to show investors how eager they are to funnel capital toward the tech. And according to a recent report by Statista, first reported by SF Gate, things are about to get much worse. Per the analytics firm, over 100,000 tech jobs have already been lost over the first four months of the year, rivalling the bloodbath of early 2023. “The current trajectory suggests the sector may be entering another period of restructuring, with 2026 already on …