Open Philanthropy Launches $120 Million Fund To Support YIMBY Reforms
The San Francisco grantmaking foundation Open Philanthropy is launching a new three-year, $120 million fund to support policies and reforms associated with the so-called abundance movement, bringing the Yes-in-My-Backyard cause further under the umbrella of effective altruism.
With support from the philanthropic foundation Good Ventures, Stripe CEO and founder Patrick Collison and other donors, this new Abundance and Growth Fund will drive advocacy, research and policies to reduce burdensome regulatory barriers to infrastructure and housing construction, among other subjects. The foundation is hiring a new program lead to direct the fund.
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Business Insider
7 minutes ago
- Business Insider
A YouTuber created a $75 grill scrubber to experience the challenges of making stuff in the US — and it sold out
A really nice grill brush will cost you about $25 at your local big box store, but YouTuber Dustin Sandlin is betting he can get customers to shell out three times that amount for a Made-in-America version. Sandlin traces his passion for US manufacturing to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, when he was bothered by the lack of American-made essential goods. "Everybody wanted N95 masks and face shields, and they couldn't get it," he said in a recent YouTube video. "This revealed to me how anemic our manufacturing capacity in America has become, because I was waiting on some billionaire to come save us, and it didn't happen." So began a yearslong deep dive into the challenges of making products in the US, which Sandlin documented for his series on YouTube called "Smarter Every Day." After working with John Youngblood, the owner of a local specialty grill accessories company, Sandlin got excited about the idea of developing a better scrubber. Sandlin and Youngblood wanted to produce it in the US with as many domestically sourced components as possible, and sell it at a retail price. In a video that went live Sunday and has since amassed more than 2 million views, Sandlin shares why he decided to get serious about US manufacturing, explains how he navigated the design process, and makes a sales pitch for viewers to buy it for themselves. On Tuesday, Youngblood told Business Insider the $75 scrubber has sold through its initial production run of several thousand units within a day, and his company is now taking pre-orders. "We're going to have a backlog for a while," Youngblood said. Most grill brushes are meant to be thrown away. This one isn't. Many lower-cost grill brushes aren't typically designed to last more than a year of use — grill-maker Weber recommends changing them after each grilling season. Another problem is that the bristles have been known to come off and can end up in grilled food. Sandlin and Youngblood found that welded chain mail — like the material of a medieval knight's armor — was highly effective at cleaning grill grates without breaking. There was one problem: "We could only find it in China." After a few tries, the team managed to find a US supplier who could make about 2,000 units a month and a supplier in India to augment the rest. Attaching the chain mail to a handle proved to be another adventure. Sandlin said the average one-inch industrial bolt costs around 9 cents when imported, but that jumps to 38 cents for versions made in the US. "Most machine shops I talked to directly, they said, 'Yeah, we can't even get the material for the price of the finished bolts that you're getting from a foreign supplier,'" Sandlin said. Then there was the process of making injection-molded parts to provide support and flexibility, which required machining custom tools and dies (the metal forms that shape a material) for shops to use in production. "This is the moment where this whole experiment came into focus for me," Sandlin said. "I realized at that moment we're screwed." American manufacturing has exported the smart part of making stuff The reason for Sandlin's pessimism is that many of the shops he spoke with send tool and die design files to China to be made and imported for use in US production lines. "I don't want my intellectual property in China, I want to make it here," he said. "And they said, 'Good luck.'" The problem illuminated by this episode goes far beyond a seemingly simple grilling accessory. "We're screwed as a nation if we can't do the intelligent work of tool and die: making the tools that make the things," Sandlin said. "We have flipped it. We are now to the point where the smart stuff is done somewhere else." Sandlin and Youngblood eventually found US suppliers for all of their custom components. They're working to get every piece sourced here. The video shows two instances where Sandlin was surprised by the apparent country of origin being different from what he says he was led to believe: The first batch of knobs arrived in packaging stating they were made in Costa Rica rather than the US. Several boxes of chain mail (ostensibly from India) had markings that suggested they were instead from China. "I'm shocked," Sandlin said. "It's pretty weird to set out to try to make a thing completely in America and to find out towards the end of the process that you made something in China anyways." Sandlin says he's not interested in having America be the dominant world player — he wants more opportunities for people here to have good jobs that allow them to take care of their communities. "If you are ever, ever in a position to make a decision about where your thing is manufactured, take a second and consider making a little less profit, maybe in order to invest in your local community," he said.
Bloomberg
15 hours ago
- Bloomberg
How Fintech Founder Rejected Stripe Buyout Before Building $775 Million Fortune
Seven years ago, Airwallex co-founder Jack Zhang walked away from what looked like the deal of a lifetime. Stripe Inc. was offering to buy his firm for $1.2 billion and legendary Sequoia investor Michael Moritz was urging him to accept. After weeks hashing out the details and sale price with Stripe's billionaire co-founder Patrick Collison, Zhang was close to agreeing. Then doubts crept in. He called a vote with his three co-founders and over a WhatsApp call they decided to turn the offer down.
Yahoo
20 hours ago
- Yahoo
All civil servants in England and Wales to get AI training
All civil servants in England and Wales will get practical training in how to use artificial intelligence to speed up their work from this autumn, the Guardian has learned. More than 400,000 civil servants will be informed of the training on Monday afternoon, which is part of a drive by the chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster, Pat McFadden, to overhaul the civil service and improve its productivity. At the same time, the size of the civil service is being reduced by tens of thousands of roles through voluntary redundancy and not replacing leavers. The government said officials would be tasked with figuring how they could use AI technology to streamline their own work wherever possible. Officials are already piloting a package of AI tools called Humphrey – named after the senior civil servant Sir Humphrey Appleby from the 1980s TV sitcom Yes, Minister. Related: Revealed: bias found in AI system used to detect UK benefits fraud In March, it was announced that officials would be told to abide by a mantra that says: 'No person's substantive time should be spent on a task where digital or AI can do it better, quicker and to the same high quality and standard.' The practical training, set to roll out this autumn, will give all civil servants a working-level knowledge of AI and show how it is already being used to cut the time spent on everyday tasks. A recent pilot of AI by the Scottish government used a Humphrey tool to sift consultation responses about regulating cosmetic surgery such as lip filler procedures and found its results were similar to those produced by humans but it was quicker. No decision has yet been taken on its wider rollout but the government said across 500 annual consultations the tool could help spare officials from as much as 75,000 days of analysis every year, which costs the government £20m in staffing costs. The Department for Work and Pensions is also using AI to understand high volumes of correspondence, which used to take weeks. This allows benefits or pensions recipients to be identified as potentially vulnerable and in need of urgent support. In a message to all staff, Sir Chris Wormald, the cabinet secretary, said he was 'proud' of the civil service's 'ability to continuously adapt to new challenges' as he urged them to consider how it 'needs to evolve and reform'. He said: 'The prime minister has set us an important task in building a productive and agile state, which will involve us preserving and championing everything that is great about the civil service while changing to meet the challenges of an uncertain world.' He added: 'We need to seize the opportunities of artificial intelligence and other technological developments to continually modernise everything that we do.' The training will be provided through the One Big Thing project, which focuses on a different key skill each year. While the government is rapidly embracing AI in Whitehall, some are sounding the alarm about its potential to introduce or reinforce errors and bias without adequate human oversight. The Guardian revealed in December that an artificial intelligence system used by the UK government to detect welfare fraud had been showing bias according to people's age, disability, marital status and nationality.
