Daily Pulse: Google Car Scorecard, Zappos Zaps 260 Employees, End the Powerball Madness

Proceed with caution: The human in a Google self-driving car had to urgently take control 272 times over a 14-month period. On 13 of those occasions not doing so would have resulted in “contacts,” to use Google’s gentle language. The good news: these occurrences are becoming rarer — from once every 785 miles in the first quarter to once every 5,318 in the most recent.

The not so good news: That would still extrapolate to 583 million takeovers (which Google never wants to be necessary), and 28 million “contacts” (versus 5.6 million crashes in 2013), according to US Department of Transportation stats. And if we are, as Elon Musk says, meant to allow our cars to drive unattended, the stats are even more troubling considering that a key rationale for eliminating pesky humans is to increase safety.

These Shoes Were Made for Walking: A total of 18% of Zappos employees took a buyout after the company told staff to love the company’s adoption of Holacracy — a radical management structure which basically eliminate managers — or leave it. The more telling number: as many as 80% of the 1,500 260 workers who left were ... managers. “The legacy managers who remain in play are the most technical,” Zappos COO Arun Rajan told Quartz’s Aimee Groth. (The number of employees who took the buyout was corrected on Jan. 15, 2016, when the Ms. Groth contacted the author to set him straight. The incorrect total was also changed in the headline). 

Fade To Black: Al Jazeera America, which launched in the US to great fanfare in 2013 and whose parent gained a global reputation for its 2011 reporting of the Arab Spring, is shutting down at the end of April. AJA never captured much of an audience in the hyper-competitive US cable news market. And became embroiled, as John Koblin of The New York Times recalls in painful detail, in a variety of internal controversies.

Curb Appeal: The Treasury Department now requires real estate brokers to disclose the actual buyer in high-end, all-cash purchases in New York and Miami-Dade county. These markets are havens for big buys made by shell companies — all perfectly legal. But the government suspects that some of these transactions conceal money laundering and that real estate is being used to park ill-gotten gains. The threshold for reporting is pretty low, considering: $3 million in NY and $1 in Miami. But that would still put thousands of transactions under the spotlight.

(Image by author, Manhattan liquor store)

Powerball Watch: If there is no winner of the $1.5 billion jackpot tonight, it rise to $2 billion for Saturday's drawing, CNBC reports. And, for the first time ever, you actually would be an instant billionaire: the all-cash option would rise to $1.24 billion (the headline number applies to the total of a 20-year annuity). Here’s a depressing chart about how much tax you’d pay state-by-state if you won the jackpot, which you won’t because I once again have the winning ticket. 

Cover Art: A self-driving car traverses a parking lot at Google's headquarters in Mountain View, California on January 8, 2015.

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