Silicon Valley has always been focused on who can build the most popular and powerful applications in the shortest amount of the time. But as the industry has matured, the engineers writing the code are starting to ask more questions about the long term ramifications of what they're building. From Kate Conger and Cade Metz in the NYT: Tech Workers Now Want to Know: What Are We Building This For? "Across the technology industry, rank-and-file employees are demanding greater insight into how their companies are deploying the technology that they built. At Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Salesforce, as well as at tech start-ups, engineers and technologists are increasingly asking whether the products they are working on are being used for surveillance in places like China or for military projects in the United States or elsewhere." As engineers work to layer their wares with a code of ethics, it's worth noting the we haven't done a great job of predicting the impact of our tools. The tech community didn't set out to destroy privacy, empower dictators, or enable that person you barely knew in junior high to comment on every photo you post. And yet, here we are.

+ Bloomberg: Google Drops Out of Pentagon's $10 Billion Cloud Competition.

"Basically, stopping warming at 1.5C would involve an immediate, coordinated crash program of re-industrialization, involving every major country in the world. It would be like the US mobilizing for WWII, only across the globe, sustained for the rest of the century. Nothing like that has ever happened. Nothing even remotely similar has ever happened. There are currently no indications that any such effort is getting underway, and indeed the US is vigorously moving the other direction." In order to stave off the existential threat of climate change, we just have to do some things we've never done before, even though we're basically doing the opposite of that right now. Vox: 4 big takeaways from the UN's alarming climate change report.

+ PBS Newshour: The world needs to make near-revolutionary change to avoid imminent climate disaster. Is there hope?

+ Thought experiment: After a major storm, it might make sense to rebuild somewhere that's not in the path of major storms. "With local officials often incentivized to replicate the past, experts in disaster relief say changes in federal law and regulations may be needed to reorient the system to reflect climate realities." NYT: As Storms Keep Coming, FEMA Spends Billions in Cycle of Damage and Repair.

In a move few saw coming (at least ahead of the midterms), Nikki Haley announced her plans to resign as Trump's U.N. ambassador by the end of the year. Haley indicated she has no plans to run for president in 2020 and praised Ivanka and Jared: "I can't say enough good things about Jared and Ivanka. Jared is such a hidden genius that no one understands ... And Ivanka has been just a great friend, and they do a lot of things behind the scenes that I wish more people knew about, because we're a better country because they're in this administration."

"Mr Khashoggi was last seen visiting the consulate last week and Turkey says he may have been murdered there." In the lastest twist in the mystery of what happened to missing Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, Turkish officials are planning to search the Saudi consulate. (It gives you some idea of how bad things are when Turkey is a journalist's best hope...)

+ "Trump and others have called journalists 'enemies of the people,' and reporters have also been labeled as terrorists in some places and forced to comply with opaque and secret legal proceedings." WaPo: 2018 has been a brutal year for journalists, and it keeps getting worse.

"Federal officials insist they are reuniting families and will continue to do so. But an Associated Press investigation drawing on hundreds of court documents, immigration records and interviews in the U.S. and Central America identified holes in the system that allow state court judges to grant custody of migrant children to American families — without notifying their parents." AP: Deported parents may lose kids to adoption.

+ "The Trump administration's determination to discourage immigrants from trying to cross the border; the continuing flow of children journeying by themselves from Central America; the lingering effects of last summer's family-separation crisis at the border; and a new government policy that has made it much more difficult for relatives to claim children from federal custody." Those are some of the forces that led us to this NYT headline: A 2-Year-Old's Day in Immigration Court. (Feel safer?)

"Yes, Amazon is increasing wages, which will benefit most employees. But it will no longer give out new stock grants and monthly bonuses. Some workers believe that means their total compensation will shrink." NYT: Why Some Amazon Workers Are Fuming About Their Raise.

+ CityLab: A Higher Minimum Wage Could Lower Recidivism.

"We are up to 65,000 registrations in a single 24-hour period since T. Swift's post." We've long lamented the low turnout among young people on election day. Did Taylor Swift just put a dent in that problem? From Buzzfeed: Taylor Swift's Instagram Post Has Caused A Massive Spike In Voter Registration.

+ The Daily Beast: Taylor Swift Finally Got Political. Why Now? (Everything is political. Everything.)

+ Bad Blood? Interestingly, shortly after Taylor got political, Kanye West got a lunch date at the White House, setting up an inevitable clash between Western Civilization and West Civilization.

From The Verge: "It seems to be smart display season: Amazon just updated the Echo Show, Facebook showed off its new Portal system yesterday, and now Google has just announced that it's getting in on the game with the Google Assistant-powered Home Hub." (I won't even let one stranger into my house. The big tech players want me to let every stranger in...)

+ Just the good stuff from today's Google event.

Wired on The Insane Physics Of Airbags. "How about we add an explosive in the steering wheel? Brilliant. That's exactly what we will do. We will put a bomb in the car and it will save lives." (It beats blowing them up manually...)

Mel Magazine takes you Inside the Guts of the World's Strongest Men. "For most spectators, seeing a huge dude like former World's Strongest Man Eddie Hall waddle onstage, bend down and deadlift 1,102 pounds is enough. The size of this competitor, shaped like a beer barrel during his competitive days, probably occupies whatever thoughts you aren't giving to the enormity of the feat he's about to perform. The last things you're likely thinking about are the strongman's knuckle-sized hemorrhoids, his chronic irritable bowel syndrome or the fact that he might be wearing an adult diaper along with anal tampons to prevent the leakage of blood and feces. It's all, though, the competitors are thinking about." (That's basically the stuff me and my friends over fifty talk about, and most of us don't even work out...)

+ Even if LaCroix does contain insecticide ingredients, that doesn't mean its bad for you.

+ The Guardian: How self-love got out of control. (I was about to say, "Guilty as charged," before I realized this was an article about social media.)