Wall Street Journal (May 26)
“Phoenix built an empire of cubicle jobs.” By population, Phoenix “is currently the nation’s fifth-largest city” and, at least for now, “the country’s call-center capital.” But Artificial Intelligence is currently “piling on offshoring losses, decimating careers that were once a sure path to the middle class.” In 2021, the city’s “customer-service workforce” peaked at 92,970. By 2025, it had tumbled to 68,930 and the precipitous drop looks likely to continue, though typically not through mass layoffs. “Instead, companies have taken advantage of the industry’s high churn, cutting head count by not replacing workers who quit or were fired.”
Tags: AI, Call-center capital, Careers, Churn, Cubicle jobs, Customer service, Decimating, Largest, Losses, Mass layoffs, Offshoring, Peaked, Phoenix, Population, Precipitous, Tumbled, Workforce
Washington Post (January 29)
“Self-driving cars appear to be safer than those with human drivers.” We should welcome their introduction. For example, “Waymo robotaxis have logged 33 million miles, mostly ferrying passengers in San Francisco and Phoenix.” In those two cities, “compared with cars driven by humans, Waymo vehicles have been involved in 62 percent fewer police-reported crashes, 78 percent fewer crashes that resulted in injury and 81 percent fewer crashes severe enough to deploy the air bags.” Moreover, the reality is probably even better as some of these accidents were caused by other drivers.
Tags: Accidents, Air bags, Crashes, Human drivers, Injury, Passengers, Phoenix, Police, Robotaxis, Safer, San Francisco, Self-driving cars, Waymo
USA Today (June 12)
“A historic heat wave in the West was forecast to roll eastward this week after Phoenix, Las Vegas and Denver joined a plethora of cities and towns posting record temperatures and more than 50 million Americans sweltered under heat advisories.” Across a large swathe of the country, temperatures are “ranging from 10 to 30 degrees above normal for this time of year.”
Tags: 50 million, Denver, Heat advisories, Heat wave, Historic, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Record, Temperatures, U.S.
