A Meta employee was laid off after relocating across the country, just two days before starting his job, Jeff Bezos is looking to donate the majority of his net worth, and a layoff is happening at Amazon.
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That’s all the tech news that’s trending right now, welcome to Hashtag Trending. It’s Tuesday, November 15, and I’m your host, Tom Li.
A Meta employee says he was laid off from the company just two days after moving from India to Canada for work. The software engineer from India, wrote in a LinkedIn post last week that he was one of many employees impacted by Meta’s mass layoffs, leaving him stranded without employment. This is not the first time Meta has fired someone following relocation, another software engineer who moved from India to Canada was fired two days before starting. The mass layoffs at Meta’s Canada office come eight months after the company announced plans to open a Toronto-based engineering hub that would create over 2,000 jobs.
Source: Business Insider
Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, plans to give away the majority of his $124 billion net worth during his lifetime. In an interview with CNN, he said he plans to devote the bulk of his wealth to fighting climate change and supporting people who can help close the deep social and political divisions. This is the first time Bezos has announced plans to give away most of his money. Bezos has committed $10 billion over 10 years, or about 8 per cent of his current net worth, to the Bezos Earth Fund. Some of its priorities include reducing the carbon footprint of construction-grade cement and steel, pushing financial regulators to consider climate-related risks, and building natural, plant-based carbon sinks.
Source: CNN
On the topic of Amazon, the company’s employees have been relatively shielded from the mass layoffs happening in big tech. But a new report by the Wall Street Journal hints that the company is poised to join the likes of Meta and cut staff. The report alleged that Amazon is planning to cut around 10,000 employees in corporate and technology roles starting this week. This isn’t a surprise as Amazon posted a disappointing third-quarter financial report. Currently, the company employs around 800,000 across all of its businesses.
Source: Wall Street Journal
Believe it or not, a science team has found a way to make chips and batteries using mushroom skin. This new material is looking to replace the plastic polymers used to make the substrates the chips sit on. According to an article from New Scientist, scientists at Johannes Kepler University in Linz, Austria, have tried using skin from a mushroom to act as a biodegradable electronic substrate. When the researchers extracted and dried out the skin, they found it is flexible, a good insulator, and can withstand temperatures of more than 200°C. If kept away from moisture and UV light, the skin could last for hundreds of years, indicating that it could survive the lifetime of an electronic device. More importantly, it can also decompose in soil in around two weeks, making it easily recyclable.
Source: New Scientists
That’s all the tech news that’s trending right now. Hashtag Trending is a part of the ITWC Podcast network. Add us to your Alexa Flash briefings or your Google Home daily briefing. Make sure to sign up for our Daily IT Wire newsletter to get all the news that matters directly in your inbox every day. Also, catch the next episode of Hashtag Tendances, our weekly Hashtag Trending episode in French, which drops every Thursday morning. If you have a suggestion or a tip, drop us a line in the comments or via email. Thank you for listening, I’m Tom Li.