Markets Remain Cautious, Despite Strong Jobs Report
In a less turbulent moment, an upbeat report from the U.S. Department of Labor would have probably energized markets. But these are turbulent and uncertain times.
“Job growth accelerated in February, posting its biggest monthly gain since July as the employment picture got closer to its pre-pandemic self. Nonfarm payrolls for the month grew by 678,000 and the unemployment rate was 3.8%, the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday,” writes Jeff Cox of CNBC. “That compared to estimates of 440,000 for payrolls and 3.9% for the jobless rate.”
The good news wasn’t enough to push markets in a positive direction.
“Stock futures fell early Friday as worrisome developments in Ukraine weighed on sentiment … Futures tied to the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 334 points, or 1%. Those for the S&P 500 also declined nearly 1%, while Nasdaq 100 futures moved down 0.9%,” writes Jesse Pound of CNBC. “The decline in futures followed reports that smoke was visible from a nuclear power plant in Ukraine — the largest in Europe — after Russian troops attacked. Reports Friday morning indicated that Russian forces had seized the plant in Zaporizhzhia.”
Google Will End Voluntary Work-from-Home Option
Google has announced that it will ends its voluntary work-from-home option for employees.
“Google is giving its employees one more month of being fully remote before requiring them back in the office at least three days a week. The tech giant will ‘end the voluntary WFH period’ on April 4 that it gave its employees at the start of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, it said Wednesday,” writes Rishi Iyengar of CNN Business. “Workers can request an extension to work from home beyond April 4, apply to be permanently remote, or change their main office location. Google said it has granted around 85% of those applications — from nearly 14,000 employees worldwide — since last June.”
State Attorneys General Launch Probe of TikTok
TikTok will be investigated by a coalition of state attorneys looking for links between social media and mental health issues.
“A bipartisan group of state attorneys general announced on Wednesday that it had opened an investigation into TikTok and potential harms that the popular social media app may pose to younger users,” writes Cecilia Kang of The New York Times. “At least eight states are investigating if the design and promotion of TikTok contribute to physical and mental health harms for teenagers and young adults and if the company has violated state consumer protection laws. The examination of TikTok, which is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, is similar to an investigation into Facebook that the coalition of attorneys general began in November.”
Linux Kernel Moving to Modern C
The legendary creator and main developer of the Linux kernel is stepping in make an update. Linux is widely used in embedded and mobile operating systems, most notably Android.
“We all know Linux is written in C. What you may not know is that it’s written in a long-outdated C dialect: The 1989 version of the C language standard, C89. This is also known as ANSI X3.159-1989, or ANSI C. Linus Torvalds has decided that enough is enough and will move Linux’s official C to 2011’s C11 standard,” writes Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols in ZDNet. “The situation came to Torvald’s attention when, in order to patch a potential security problem with the kernel’s linked-list primitive speculative-execution functions, another problem was revealed in the patch. While fixing this, Torvalds realized that in C99 the iterator passed to the list-traversal macros must be declared in a scope outside of the loop itself.”
Vaughan-Nichols doesn’t expect the transition to create serious problems because “C89 still has almost universal support.”
