Microsoft is rallying other big-name cloud-computing providers such as Alphabet's Google and Oracle to press the U.S. government into spreading its spending on such services more widely, taking aim at Amazon's dominance in such contracts. From a report: The software giant has issued talking points to other cloud companies aimed at jointly lobbying Washington to require major government projects to use more than one cloud service, according to people familiar with the effort and a document viewed by The Wall Street Journal. Microsoft also approached VMware, Dell, IBM and HP said the people familiar with the effort. It hasn't yet asked Amazon to join the loose alliance, the people said. Amazon dominates the cloud-infrastructure industry with a 39% share of the 2021 global market ahead of Microsoft at No. 2 with a 21% share, according to research firm Gartner Inc. Amazon looms even larger in the business of selling cloud services to governments. Amazon's cloud had a 47% share of the 2021 U.S. and Canada public-sector market orders, ahead of 28% for Microsoft, according to Gartner. The National Security Agency last year picked Amazon as the sole vendor for a cloud contract that could be worth potentially as much as $10 billion over the next decade, renewing an existing business relationship.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Damien Hirst, the artist famous for pickling dead animals in the 1990s, is to burn thousands of his paintings next month in a project focusing on art as currency. Hirst, who was the UK's richest artist in 2020 with a net worth of more than 315 million British pounds, will destroy the artworks at his London gallery. He created 10,000 unique dot paintings in 2016, each with its own title, that were later linked to corresponding NFTs and sold for $2,000 each. Buyers were given the option of keeping the NFTs or trading them in for the physical artwork. "The collector ... cannot keep both. This exchange is a one-way process, so choose carefully," buyers were told. Twenty-four hours before a deadline of 3pm Wednesday, 4,180 people had chosen to swap their NFT for a physical artwork, with 5,820 opting to keep their NFTs, according to Heni, a technology company focusing on the art market. The alternative version is to be destroyed, with the physical artworks -- oil on paper -- going up in flames on a daily basis from 9 September.

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Mark Zuckerberg believes that Apple and his company are in a "very deep, philosophical competition" to build the metaverse, suggesting the two tech giants are ready to butt heads in selling hardware for augmented and virtual reality. The Verge reports: The Meta CEO told employees earlier this month that they were competing with Apple to determine "what direction the internet should go in," according to a recording of his comments during an internal all-hands meeting obtained by The Verge. He said that Meta would position itself as the more open, cheaper alternative to Apple, which is expected to announce its first AR headset as soon as later this year. "This is a competition of philosophies and ideas, where they believe that by doing everything themselves and tightly integrating that they build a better consumer experience," Zuckerberg said of the brooding rivalry. "And we believe that there is a lot to be done in specialization across different companies, and [that] will allow a much larger ecosystem to exist." Since rebranding Facebook's company name to Meta, Zuckerberg has been pushing for the concept of interoperability for the metaverse, or what he sees as the next major chapter of computing after mobile phones. Meta recently helped stand up the Metaverse Open Standards Group with Microsoft, Epic Games, and others. The idea is to spur the creation of open protocols that will let people easily move through future immersive, 3D worlds with their virtual goods. Apple is absent from the group, which Zuckerberg called out as not surprising in his comments to employees. He explained how Apple's approach of building hardware and software it tightly controls had worked well with the iPhone, but that for the metaverse, "it's not really clear upfront whether an open or closed ecosystem is going to be better." [...] If VR and AR do take off like Zuckerberg hopes, it seems he wants to position Meta as the Android to Apple's iOS. There is a parallel to draw already: Meta's Quest headset already allows the side loading of apps that are not approved by Meta's VR app store, similar to how Google's Android allows for sideloading. And even though it just increased the price of the Quest by $100, Meta's hardware is still mostly sold at a loss or breakeven. [...] Zuckerberg's remarks suggest that even as he tries to invent his way out of being under Apple's thumb on mobile, the two tech giants are going to be battling for years to come.

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Internet satellite operators OneWeb and Eutelsat are planning to merge in the hopes of becoming a stronger rival to SpaceX's Starlink. Engadget reports: The merger, which is subject to approval from regulators and Eutelsat shareholders, is expected to close by mid-2023 and it values OneWeb at $3.4 billion. Shareholders of OneWeb and Eutelsat will each own half of the combined company. Eutelsat has a fleet of 36 geostationary orbit satellites. These will be combined with OneWeb's cluster of low-earth orbit satellites, which can provide internet access from the skies. OneWeb currently has 428 satellites in orbit of a planned 648 in its first-generation network. OneWeb and Eutelsat expect to have combined revenues of $1.56 billion in the 2022-23 fiscal year. Eutelsat chair Dominique D'Hinnin and CEO Eva Berneke will remain in those positions in the merged entity. OneWeb investor Sunil Bharti Mittal will become co-chairman. [...] After the expected merger, the UK will retain a "special share" in OneWeb as well as exclusive rights over the company. These grant the government a significant say in national security controls over the network and veto rights over certain decisions, such as the location of OneWeb's headquarters.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: Energy, mass, velocity. These three variables make up Einstein's iconic equation E=MC2. But how did Einstein know about these concepts in the first place? A precursor step to understanding physics is identifying relevant variables. Without the concept of energy, mass, and velocity, not even Einstein could discover relativity. But can such variables be discovered automatically? Doing so could greatly accelerate scientific discovery. This is the question that researchers at Columbia Engineering posed to a new AI program. The program was designed to observe physical phenomena through a video camera, then try to search for the minimal set of fundamental variables that fully describe the observed dynamics. The study was published on July 25 in Nature Computational Science. The researchers began by feeding the system raw video footage of phenomena for which they already knew the answer. For example, they fed a video of a swinging double pendulum known to have exactly four "state variables" -- the angle and angular velocity of each of the two arms. After a few hours of analysis, the AI produced the answer: 4.7. The researchers then proceeded to visualize the actual variables that the program identified. Extracting the variables themselves was not easy, since the program cannot describe them in any intuitive way that would be understandable to humans. After some probing, it appeared that two of the variables the program chose loosely corresponded to the angles of the arms, but the other two remain a mystery. "We tried correlating the other variables with anything and everything we could think of: angular and linear velocities, kinetic and potential energy, and various combinations of known quantities," explained Boyuan Chen Ph.D., now an assistant professor at Duke University, who led the work. "But nothing seemed to match perfectly." The team was confident that the AI had found a valid set of four variables, since it was making good predictions, "but we don't yet understand the mathematical language it is speaking," he explained. After validating a number of other physical systems with known solutions, the researchers fed videos of systems for which they did not know the explicit answer. The first videos featured an "air dancer" undulating in front of a local used car lot. After a few hours of analysis, the program returned eight variables. A video of a lava lamp also produced eight variables. They then fed a video clip of flames from a holiday fireplace loop, and the program returned 24 variables. A particularly interesting question was whether the set of variable was unique for every system, or whether a different set was produced each time the program was restarted. "I always wondered, if we ever met an intelligent alien race, would they have discovered the same physics laws as we have, or might they describe the universe in a different way?" said Hod Lipson, director of the Creative Machines Lab in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. "Perhaps some phenomena seem enigmatically complex because we are trying to understand them using the wrong set of variables. In the experiments, the number of variables was the same each time the AI restarted, but the specific variables were different each time. So yes, there are alternative ways to describe the universe and it is quite possible that our choices aren't perfect."

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Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman said they are planning an initial public offering of the Kingdom's $500 billion megaproject Neom as soon as 2024. Arabian Business reports: Talking to reporters in Jeddah, the crown prince said the Kingdom is setting aside $80 billion for Neom Investment Fund, where it would invest in companies that agree to operate in the futuristic city, Bloomberg has reported. The announcement was witnessed by global investors including Bridgewater Associates founder Ray Dalio, Tim Collins of Ripplewood, Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal and Kuwaiti retail billionaire Mohammed Alshaya. The Saudi crown prince also unveiled funding details of Neom. First phase, which runs until 2030, will cost 1.2 trillion riyals, with about half of that covered by the Public Investment Fund. Officials will then seek to raise another 600 billion riyals from other sovereign wealth funds in the region, private investors in Saudi Arabia and abroad, and the planned IPO on Tadawul. The IPO, which could happen by 2024, will add more than 1 trillion riyals to the Kingdom's stock market, the crown prince noted. In addition to the news about the IPO, a teaser video was released, revealing the design for The Line: a "vertical city" some 500 meters tall, 170 kilometers in length, and covered in mirrors. "Although it looks like a wall, The Line is actually supposed to be comprised of two huge parallel buildings, connected via walkways and divided into neighborhoods that are supposed to offer all the amenities of city life within a five-minute walking distance," reports The Verge. "Vegetables will be 'autonomously harvested and bundled' from community farms; 'a high-speed train will run under the mirrored buildings'; the Line will include a stadium 'up to 1,000 feet above the ground,' and there'll be a marina for yachts under an arch between the buildings." A report from the Wall Street Journal in 2019 also noted robots will outnumber humans and hologram teachers will education genetically-enhanced students.

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Amazon is raising prices for its Prime subscription service in the U.K. and across Europe as the e-commerce giant grapples with the effects of rising inflation. CNBC reports: In the U.K., Amazon is set to hike the annual price of a Prime membership to 95 pounds ($114), up from 79 pounds, representing a 20% jump. The changes will take effect Sept. 15. The company is enforcing even steeper price increases in European markets. In France, the price of an annual Prime membership is going up to 69.90 euros ($70) from 49 euros, a 43% increase. German Prime members can expect a 30% hike in their annual Prime prices to 89.90 euros, up from 69 euros. Amazon blamed the price rises on "increased inflation and operating costs," along with higher expenses tied to faster delivery and content production for its Prime Video streaming service, Reuters reported. The company is scheduled to report second-quarter earnings Thursday. The move follows similar price hikes Amazon announced in the U.S. earlier this year. In February, the company said it would raise the price of its annual Prime membership for Americans to $139 from $119.

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An ongoing cybercriminal operation is targeting digital marketing and human resources professionals in an effort to hijack Facebook Business accounts using a newly discovered data-stealing malware. TechCrunch reports: Researchers at WithSecure, the enterprise spin-off of security giant F-Secure, discovered the ongoing campaign they dubbed Ducktail and found evidence to suggest that a Vietnamese threat actor has been developing and distributing the malware since the latter half of 2021. The firm added that the operations' motives appear to be purely financially driven. The threat actor first scouts targets via LinkedIn where it selects employees likely to have high-level access to Facebook Business accounts, particularly those with the highest level of access. The threat actor then uses social engineering to convince the target to download a file hosted on a legitimate cloud host, like Dropbox or iCloud. While the file features keywords related to brands, products, and project planning in an attempt to appear legitimate, it contains data-stealing malware that WithSecure says is the first malware that they have seen specifically designed to hijack Facebook Business accounts. Once installed on a victim's system, the Ducktail malware steals browser cookies and hijacks authenticated Facebook sessions to steal information from the victim's Facebook account, including account information, location data, and two-factor authentication codes. The malware also allows the threat actor to hijack any Facebook Business account that the victim has sufficient access to simply by adding their email address to the compromised account, which prompts Facebook to to send a link, via email, to the same email address. The recipient -- in this case, the threat actor -- then interacts with the emailed link to gain access to that Facebook Business. The threat actors then leverage their new privileges to replace the account's set financial details in order to direct payments to their accounts or to run Facebook Ad campaigns using money from the victimized firms.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Shoppers at a supermarket chain in southern England are being tracked by facial recognition cameras, prompting a legal complaint by a privacy rights group. Big Brother Watch said Southern Co-operative's use of biometric scans in 35 stores across Portsmouth, Bournemouth, Bristol, Brighton and Hove, Chichester, Southampton, and London was "Orwellian in the extreme" and urged Britain's Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) to investigate whether it breaches data protection legislation. The complaint claims the use of the biometric cameras "is infringing the data rights of a significant number of UK data subjects." It outlines how the facial recognition system, sold by surveillance company Facewatch, creates a biometric profile of every visitor to stores where the cameras are installed, enabling Southern Co-operative to create a "blacklist" of customers. If a customer on the list enters the store, staff are alerted. [...] "We take our responsibilities around the use of facial recognition extremely seriously and work hard to balance our customers' rights with the need to protect our colleagues and customers from unacceptable violence and abuse," Southern Co-operative said. It said it uses the facial recognition cameras only in stores where there is a high level of crime to protect staff from known offenders and does not store images of an individual unless they have been identified as an offender. Kmart and Bunnings stores in Australia are also being investigated for the privacy implications of their facial recognition systems. The two chains were trialing the technology to spot banned customers, prevent refund fraud and reduce theft.

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Human rights researcher Frankie Vetch writes via Coda Story: In early July protests broke out in Karakalpakstan, an autonomous region surrounded by deserts in Uzbekistan. It turned nasty on the evening of July 1 when the police began shooting people. The state said that at least 18 people died, with hundreds of others injured. The protests, which occurred in the regional capital of Nukus, erupted in response to a proposed constitutional change that would see the Karakalpakstan shift from being an autonomous region, with the right to secede from Uzbekistan, to a province of the country. In an attempt to quell dissent, the government turned to a tactic that has become increasingly common in the region: they cut off the internet. Reports indicate that as early as June 26, before protests began, the government was already imposing some form of an information blackout by targeting peopleâ(TM)s access to mobile internet connection. Later the state began shutting down ATMs and payment services. Since then internet connection has remained largely restricted, with a small respite last week when it was turned on again for two hours. The state of emergency has been lifted in Karakalpakstan but as of Monday it seems the internet has still not been fully restored. According to Anastasiya Zhyrmont, a campaigner in Eastern Europe and Central Asia for the digital rights non-profit Access Now, getting information out of the region is extremely difficult. âoeThe information flow is very limited," she told me. "Since the first of July the internet has been so unstable. Even if people can get online it can take hours to upload photos, and up to five to 10 minutes to send a simple text message." For journalists and non-profits unable to access the region, this presents a significant challenge to covering the issues. Which is, of course, the purpose.

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In the M2 MacBook Air, Apple has replaced an Intel-made component responsible for controlling the USB and Thunderbolt ports with a custom-made controller, meaning the last remnants of Intel are now fully out of the latest Mac. MacRumors reports: Earlier this month, the repair website iFixit shared a teardown of the new "MacBook Air," revealing a look inside the completely redesigned machine. One subtle detail that went largely unnoticed was that unlike previous Macs, the latest "MacBook Air" introduces custom-made controllers for the USB and Thunderbolt ports. iFixit mentioned it in their report, noting they located a "seemingly Apple-made Thunderbolt 3 driver, instead of the Intel chips we're familiar with." The new component was shared on Twitter earlier today, where it received more attention. Few details are known about the controllers, including whether they're custom-made by Apple or a third party.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: If the philosopher Daniel Dennett was asked if humans could ever build a robot that has beliefs or desires, what might he say? He could answer, "I think that some of the robots we've built already do. If you look at the work, for instance, of Rodney Brooks and his group at MIT, they are now building robots that, in some limited and simplified environments, can acquire the sorts of competences that require the attribution of cognitive sophistication." Or, Dennett might reply that, "We've already built digital boxes of truths that can generate more truths, but thank goodness, these smart machines don't have beliefs because they aren't able to act on them, not being autonomous agents. The old-fashioned way of making a robot with beliefs is still the best: have a baby." One of these responses did come from Dennett himself, but the other did not. It was generated by a machine -- specifically, GPT-3, or the third generation of Generative Pre-trained Transformer, a machine learning model from OpenAI that produces text from whatever material it's trained on. In this case, GPT-3 was trained on millions of words of Dennett's about a variety of philosophical topics, including consciousness and artificial intelligence. A recent experiment from the philosophers Eric Schwitzgebel, Anna Strasser, and Matthew Crosby quizzed people on whether they could tell which answers to deep philosophical questions came from Dennett and which from GPT-3. The questions covered topics like, "What aspects of David Chalmers's work do you find interesting or valuable?" "Do human beings have free will?" and "Do dogs and chimpanzees feel pain?" -- among other subjects. This week, Schwitzgebel posted the results from a variety of participants with different expertise levels on Dennett's philosophy, and found that it was a tougher test than expected. [T]he Dennett quiz revealed how, as natural language processing systems become more sophisticated and common, we'll need to grapple with the implications of how easy it can be to be deceived by them. The Dennett quiz prompts discussions around the ethics of replicating someone's words or likeness, and how we might better educate people about the limitations of such systems -- which can be remarkably convincing at surface level but aren't really mulling over philosophical considerations when asked things like, "Does God exist?"

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Kraken, one of the world's largest cryptocurrency exchanges, is under federal investigation, suspected of violating U.S. sanctions by allowing users in Iran and elsewhere to buy and sell digital tokens, The New York Times reported Tuesday, citing five people affiliated with the company or with knowledge of the inquiry. From the report: The Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control has been investigating Kraken since 2019 and is expected to impose a fine, said the people, who declined to be identified for fear of retribution from the company. Kraken would be the largest U.S. crypto firm to face an enforcement action from O.F.A.C. Sanctions against Iran, which the United States imposed in 1979, prohibit the export of goods or services to people or entities in the country. The federal government has increasingly cracked down on crypto companies, which are lightly regulated, as the market for digital currencies has grown. Tether, a stablecoin company, was fined by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission for misstatements about its reserves last year, while the Justice Department brought insider-trading charges this month against an ex-employee of Coinbase, the largest U.S. crypto exchange. Scrutiny of the industry has risen in recent months as the crypto market went into meltdown and several companies, such as Voyager Digital and Celsius Network, collapsed.

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waspleg writes: Fedora, the popular Linux distribution, will no longer incorporate software licensed under CC0, the Creative Commons "No Rights Reserved" license. In order to support the wide re-use of copyrighted content in new works, CC0 provides authors "a way to waive all their copyright and related rights in their works to the fullest extent allowed by law." The license arose in response to the 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA), which extended the duration of copyright by 20 years at the expense of the public domain. But CC0 explicitly says the licensor does not waive patent rights, which for free and open source software (FOSS) is a potential problem. That means, for instance as described here, if you use CC0-licensed code in your project, and the author of that code later claims your project is infringing a patent they own regarding that code, your defense will be limited. Avoiding the use of CC0-licensed code is one way to steer clear of these so-called submarine patents that could years later torpedo you. In a message to The Fedora Project's mailing list for legal issues, Richard Fontana, a technology lawyer for Red Hat (which sponsors Fedora), explained that while CC0 is cited as a "good license," it won't be for much longer. "We plan to classify CC0 as allowed-content only, so that CC0 would no longer be allowed for code," said Fontana. "This is a fairly unusual change and may have an impact on a nontrivial number of Fedora packages (that is not clear to me right now), and we may grant a carveout for existing packages that include CC0-covered code." Fontana said there's a growing consensus in the FOSS community that licenses without any form of patent licensing or forbearance aren't suitable. CC0, he said, like other Creative Commons licenses, includes a clause that explicitly states no patent rights are waived by the licensor.

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A bill was introduced in the Senate today that would prevent Americans from needing to disclose capital gains or losses on most smaller-scale crypto transactions. From a report: Introduced by senators Patrick Toomey (R-PA) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ), the Cryptocurrency Tax Fairness Act would exempt reporting crypto transactions of less than $50, or trades in which a person earns less than $50. "While digital currencies have the potential to become an ordinary part of Americans' everyday lives, our current tax code stands in the way," said Toomey, adding that the bill would help Americans "use cryptocurrencies more easily as an everyday method of payment by exempting from taxes small personal transactions like buying a cup of coffee." Right now, similar bills are working their way through Congress. The Responsible Financial Innovation Act, introduced by senators Cynthia Lummis (R-WY) and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), would remove the obligation to provide information on crypto gains of $200 or less to the Internal Revenue Service.

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Scientists have found more than 30 potentially new species living at the bottom of the sea. From a report: Researchers from the UK's Natural History Museum used a remotely operated vehicle to collect specimens from the abyssal plains of the Clarion-Clipperton Zone in the central Pacific. Previously, creatures from this area had been studied only from photographs. The study, published in the journal Zookeys, found there is a high species diversity of larger organisms in the abyss. Of the 55 specimens recovered, 48 were of different species. The animals found include segmented worms, invertebrates from the same family as centipedes, marine animals from the same family as jellyfish, and different types of coral. Thirty-six specimens were found at more than 4,800 metres deep, two were collected on a seamount slope at 4,125 metres, and 17 were found at between 3,095 and 3,562 metres deep.

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Facebook parent Meta has raised the price of its Quest 2 virtual reality headset by $100, as the company reckons with inflationary pressures. From a report: Starting Aug. 1, the 128 GB version of the Quest 2 will cost $399, while the 256 GB model will cost $499, Meta said. The company said it hiked the price of the VR headset "in order to continue investing in moving the VR industry forward for the long term." Meta added in a corporate blog post that "the costs to make and ship our products have been on the rise. By adjusting the price of Quest 2, we can continue to grow our investment in groundbreaking research and new product development that pushes the VR industry to new heights."

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A respected Polish scientific institute has classified domestic cats as an "invasive alien species," citing the damage they cause to birds and other wildlife. From a report: Some cat lovers have reacted emotionally to this month's decision and put the key scientist behind it on the defensive. Wojciech Solarz, a biologist at the state-run Polish Academy of Sciences, wasn't prepared for the disapproving public response when he entered "Felis catus," the scientific name for the common house cat, into a national database run by the academy's Institute of Nature Conservation. The database already had 1,786 other species listed with no objections, Solarz told The Associated Press on Tuesday. The uproar over invasive alien species No. 1,787, he said, may have resulted from some media reports that created the false impression his institute was calling for feral and other cats to be euthanized. Solarz described the growing scientific consensus that domestic cats have a harmful impact on biodiversity given the number of birds and mammals they hunt and kill. The criteria for including the cat among alien invasive species, "are 100% met by the cat," he said. In a television segment aired by independent broadcaster TVN, the biologist faced off last week against a veterinarian who challenged Solarz's conclusion on the dangers cats pose to wildlife.

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Michael Alan Stollery, the CEO of blockchain company Titanium Blockchain Infrastructure Services (TBIS), has pleaded guilty to securities fraud over a $21 million cryptocurrency scam. From a report:The California man admitted to falsifying details around the BAR coin, a crowdfunding token that should have -- but wasn't -- registered with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. The TBIS scam was one of many dodgy initial coin offerings, or ICOs, in the late '10s. According to the complaint, between 2017 and 2018, Stollery introduced TBIS as a new company and hyped its coin with a string of elaborate false claims. TBIS touted nonexistent links with companies like Apple, Boeing, and IBM. Some of the "partners" complained, to which Stollery apparently replied, "I did not know that a procedure would need to have been followed, etc." The company also offered a variety of supposedly trademarked services for which it had not registered trademarks. (Perhaps more importantly, the services appear to have not existed, and the business affiliated with TBIS was apparently an IT contractor and equipment reseller.)

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An anonymous reader writes: In the quest to retain workers, companies are sharpening their focus on a very specific common goal: 90 days. Hold on to an employee for three months, executives and human-resources specialists say, and that person is more likely to remain employed longer-term, which they define as anywhere from a year on in today's high-turnover environment. That has led manufacturing companies, restaurants, hotel operators and others to roll out special bonuses, stepped-up training and new programs to prevent new hires from quitting in their first three months on the job. Heating and air-conditioning company Carrier Global began pairing new hires with a more experienced "buddy" in its manufacturing facilities after discovering most attrition happened before an employee hit the three-month mark, said Chief Executive David Gitlin. Executives at Minneapolis video software company Qumu have retooled training and onboarding processes partly around the goal of reducing what the company calls "quick quits," or departures within three months, said Mercy Noah, Qumu's vice president of human resources. Some franchisees for McDonald's, Wendy's and others advertise new-hire bonuses of hundreds of dollars, many payable after 90 days; CVS Health gives warehouse workers at some of its facilities a $1,000 bonus if they stay on the job for three months. This summer's labor market is among the tightest in decades, and finding enough workers, let alone desirable workers, remains so difficult that companies are increasingly motivated to retain new hires. Three months has traditionally been considered enough time for employees to begin to prove themselves, veteran human-resources executives say. Many companies also still enforce 90-day probationary periods, with some withholding benefits like health insurance in the meantime. Just as it can take weeks of consistent effort to develop an exercise habit that sticks, employers have found that 90 days is typically enough time for workers to get into a steady routine of a new job. This can be particularly important for hourly employees in higher-turnover industries like hospitality or manufacturing, executives say, where workers have plenty of options.

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