In California, the National Guard, as of Thursday, still had soldiers deployed to food banks across 16 counties, down from a high of in April , according to Lt. Jonathan M. Shiroma, a California National Guard spokesperson.
But the National Guard is gradually trying to cut those numbers back and deploy these workers to other missions. In addition to help from the National Guard, Sjostrom has hired more full-time staff. Demand for food from Second Harvest has doubled compared to before the pandemic, jumping from around , people per month to over half a million, Bacho said.
Now, she says, that number has fallen slightly to around , people. But consequently, she had to expand her paid staff from workers to workers. The new hires include over 30 drivers. In order to store all of the food that their clients need, she has had to contract for four refrigerated trucks that act as giant stationary coolers — and they remain there to this day. The impacts are going to take longer for some people to rebound from.
Tanis Crosby, the head of the San Francisco Marin Food Bank, said that it too consistently needed to serve nearly double the number of people it served before the pandemic.
The food bank's research also showed that they are reaching many families that did not previously have a relationship with the organization. In some ways, food banks across the San Francisco Bay Area are experiencing a microcosm of what is playing out at food banks nationwide. A recent report from the U. Department of Agriculture found that in , families with children were hit harder with food insecurity and experienced an increase in hunger.
But the recovery is not occurring equally across cities, regions and communities, according to Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach , an economics professor and poverty expert at Northwestern University, who also serves on the board of the Greater Chicago Food Depository. Feeding America, the umbrella organization to the largest food banks nationwide, provided 6.
She said she recently hired a child nutrition specialist and a worker in the finance department, but they never showed up.
This demand for staff is extending beyond food banks in the Bay Area to homeless shelters and domestic violence programs as well. HomeFirst, a homeless services agency that serves Santa Clara County, at the heart of Silicon Valley, has doubled staff and its budget through the pandemic. It also opened four additional shelters and a bridge housing site, and tripled the size of its outreach program.
All of its shelters have now been converted for the first time to operating 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. She said that as children return to in-person school, there is more opportunity to report such abuse to authority figures and other school leaders.
YWCA Golden Gate Silicon Valley, which has offices in San Jose and San Rafael, north of San Francisco, and provides child care, therapy and even crisis intervention in situations including domestic violence and sexual assault, has also seen a drastic increase in demand. Her organization, she said, has never been so stressed for resources. She noted that as the largest rape crisis center in Santa Clara County before the pandemic, her group would see two to three cases a weekend for forensic exams.
She said that on one recent weekend her staff handled nine cases. The material girl was really feeling herself in her latest photoshoot. None of this has been lost on corporate America, which has mentioned the chip shortage 3, times in corporate earnings calls, presentations and filings so far this year, compared with seven times in and almost never in years prior, according to data from corporate research platform Sentieo. Semiconductor manufacturing is an incredibly complex and expensive business, and it can take years to adjust to big changes in demand.
Executives make production decisions months in advance, especially to secure the most advanced manufacturing capabilities needed to make chips that power iPhones and supercomputers. Expanding that manufacturing capacity requires tens of billions of dollars, thousands of skilled workers and months or years to construct the facilities.
And there are only two companies that can make the most advanced chips for third parties right now: TSMC and Samsung Electronics. Because of the enormous cost of building new plants, companies are loath to build manufacturing capacity that executives think will ever sit idle. The market conditions ahead of the COVID pandemic weren't particularly favorable for the chip industry, either. Toward the end of , some companies forecast that demand for chips was going to drop slightly in , according to Intel's Greg Bryant, vice president of the client computing group.
The coronavirus threw those plans into the blender. The shortage issues caused by the soft forecast for worsened as the coronavirus spread around the world. Government-ordered lockdowns designed to slow the virus' spread hurt manufacturing and triggered a big shift in how people spent their money. Instead of going to restaurants or to the movies — because they couldn't — people decided to buy lots of other physical goods they could use while stuck at home.
Companies that had tried to forecast how many chips they needed to manufacture with a fixed amount of old equipment began to have problems as people bought more goods, Bryant told Protocol. A lot of those goods turned out to be gadgets: laptops, desktops, video game systems and other electronics that people normally think of as having computer chips.
Laptop and desktop sales were powerful through the first year, though they have slowed in recent months. But even many of the latest run-of-the-mill home appliances use chips that are made at fabrication sites designed around older process technology. Older chips aren't as powerful as the CPUs or GPUs in expensive video game consoles and personal computers, but are great for things such as controlling automatic windows on cars or inside noise-canceling headphones.
To Bryant's point, one of those technologies is a year-old chip called a microcontroller. Microcontrollers are simple computers in a single package used in autos to control things such as automatic windows, but they can also be found in thousands of other products such as power tools, embedded medical devices and fire detectors.
According to Bajarin, the current lead time for microcontrollers is roughly 25 weeks. Typically one of the most advanced processors in a new Apple computer needs about 12 weeks to manufacture.
Bryant described the groups of components needed to finish a part or a product as a "match set," and his teams are focused on trying to ensure clients have complete sets. Without every chip needed to complete the manufacturing process, products such as autos and video game consoles sit unfinished until the right combination of those chips are available to a manufacturer. You have to have all the components from all the suppliers in the right place, at the right time, in the right system to create the product and get it into the market for people to buy," he said.
The big strain on chip demand is having unintended consequences, potentially worsening the shortage. Manufacturers unable to get sufficient supply have started to hoard the chips they can find. The stockpiling behavior will likely have unintended consequences at some point in the future too. Penfield said that companies worried they won't have enough chips tend to try to order more, which then leads to even more ordering — for chips, certainly, but also for goods more generally.
It's not that shelves will be entirely bare this holiday season — they won't, at least at first. Big retail companies have placed orders and ensured there will be some consumer products available early in the increasingly lengthy shopping season. According to Lopez, big-box stores predicted what they thought people were going to buy during the holidays roughly nine months ago, or as long as a year ago for some smaller retailers.
But because of the supply-chain issues around the country, the replenishment orders that would normally serve to restock gadgets, toys and other goods people typically buy during the holidays are likely to get stuck in ports. As the former Theranos CEO testified in her defense, her lawyers played up partnerships and technical breakthroughs that had once seemed promising.
That was the essence of the former Theranos CEO's legal strategy as she began her first full day of testimony. In her testimony, Holmes went over the extensive partnerships Theranos clinched, or tried to clinch, with various organizations, including Merck, Stanford University, and the Department of Defense.
Painstakingly going through several contracts, studies and potential partnerships, Holmes appears to be trying to persuade the jury that she and others had reasons to believe in the promises that the company made. Holmes described a research project with the U. Theranos never executed the final contract with the Department of Defense.
Questioned by lawyer Kevin Downey, she also discussed a sepsis and cancer study with Stanford and partnership discussions with pharmaceutical companies such as Merck, AstraZeneca and Bristol Myers Squibb.
Several times, Holmes said results of different studies were "excellent" and that Theranos' systems "performed well. Toward the end of her testimony, Holmes said Ian Gibbons, the company's late chief scientist, had told her in that Theranos' technology had the potential to run 15 lab tests from a one blood sample.
Holmes' testimony appeared to leave several opportunities for the prosecution to poke holes. Downey did not ask her about claims she had made to investors that Theranos had a successful partnership with the Department of Defense, despite the absence of a final contract for the TATRC study. And the lawyer did not seek an explanation for incidents in which Theranos used a pharmaceutical company's logo without its authorization in reports shared with investors. Downey said cross-examination might begin in seven days, at which point the prosecution will get a chance to scrutinize Holmes' claims.
Holmes' trial drew a crowd at the courthouse starting as early as 2 a. More than people had gathered by the time security started letting people in. Her testimony is expected to resume Tuesday. To give you the best possible experience, this site uses cookies.
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Tech shuttles are idling in the garage. To do what, you might ask? Well, sit in her house, mostly. Protocol Enterprise Controversial driver-monitoring AI companies just got a boost from DC "If you're absolutely upset, well, the car can know that," said one maker of driver-monitoring AI, which could get a boost from the new law.
November 23, Kate Kaye is an award-winning multimedia reporter digging deep and telling print, digital and audio stories. She covers AI and data for Protocol. Kate is the creator of RedTailMedia. Keep Reading Show less.
November 22, He previously led the redesign of Google's flagship Maps product, and before that was a product manager for Android. Michelle Ma himichellema is a reporter at Protocol, where she writes about management, leadership and workplace issues in tech. Previously, she was a news editor of live journalism and special coverage for The Wall Street Journal. Prior to that, she worked as a staff writer at Wirecutter.
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By the time you read this, it's probably too late. Elizabeth Holmes said she believed in Theranos' potential. They graduated from Syracuse University with a degree in newspaper and online journalism in May Prior to joining the team, they worked at the Los Angeles Business Journal as a technology and aerospace reporter.
See more. Most Popular. Can Twitter warnings actually curb hate speech? Failure, her lawyers have argued , is not a crime. And indeed, it is true that failure — without intentional misrepresentations — is not fraud. Nor is optimism and tenacity. Many startups fail and no one suggests a crime has been committed. But when an individual tells material falsehoods to potential investors to obtain their money, or to patients to induce them to purchase their product, they have crossed the line.
This distinction is crucial. It is likely that it is common practice for Silicon Valley entrepreneurs in the tech startup space to convey to potential investors their best-case scenario projections for where their company could be headed in the future, coupled with information about its status grounded in verifiable fact.
But in a criminal fraud case, investor due diligence is immaterial: Fraud is committed if a defendant tells lies with intent to deceive, even if the effort is not successful.
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