Tesla unveiled a next-generation Supercharger that it says will recharge its vehicles faster than ever.

The new V3 unit can charge at a maximum rate of 250kW, according to a press release posted on Tesla's website Wednesday night.

The V3 charger was designed with the Tesla Model 3 sedan in mind. Its newer battery composition can accommodate the newer charger right away, while Model S and Model X vehicles will remain limited to 120kW charging for the time being, The Verge reported. A planned software update will raise that cap to 145kW, Tesla said.

According to Tesla, the new V3 chargers can add up to 75 miles of range to a Model 3 Long Range sedan in just five minutes.

"Combined with other improvements we're announcing today, V3 Supercharging will ultimately cut the amount of time customers spend charging by an average of 50%, as modeled on our fleet data," Tesla said in its statement Wednesday night.

Read more: 2019 was supposed to be easy for Tesla, but now it's a circus

The electric-car company has been keenly focused on developing its charging infrastructure — an effort that's been kicked into high gear since the Model 3 sedan, its first mass-market vehicle, went on sale.

Echoing its previous remarks on the matter, the company said "charging needs to be even faster, and the number of vehicles able to charge at a location in a day needs to be significantly higher."

To that end, Tesla says its new V3 chargers will also be able to charge vehicles at optimal rates, even at Supercharger stations where multiple vehicles are charging at once.

"With thousands of new Superchargers coming online in 2019, the launch of V3, and other changes we're making to improve throughput, the Supercharger network will be able to serve more than 2x more vehicles per day at the end of 2019 compared with today," Tesla said.

Tax season is upon us with some people getting a break from the Republicans' new tax reforms, others paying more and corporations paying at a much lower base rate.

Former President Barack Obama says he knows how painful a big tax bill can be. But he's also learned to have appreciation for what his taxes do thanks to a career in politics and eight years as President No. 44. Lately he's been talking to companies trying to get them to understand this point of view on taxes. So he told a crowd of 11,000 people speaking at the Qualtrics tech conference in Salt Lake City, Utah on Wednesday.

Read: Obama warns that if the world isn't careful, democracy could be in danger: 'Democracy is a garden that has to be tended'

"I always used to laugh when people would say about my tax policies, oh, he just wants to tax you to death. First of all, I'm the guy who pays the max tax," Obama told the crowd.

That's because, since the early 1970's, presidents and presidential hopefuls have routinely released their tax returns for public scrutiny. (Donald Trump is an exception. He has not shared his tax returns.)

"Everybody's looking at my taxes so I could never take a deduction. I couldn't exercise any loopholes. Whatever the maximum rate is, I'm paying," he said.

Barack Obama (left) with Qualtrics CEO Ryan Smith Qualtrics Now that he's a private citizen again, he doesn't share his tax returns. But in 2015, the last year he released them, he paid over $81,000 in taxes on nearly 448,000 in income.

"I don't enjoy writing big checks to the Treasury Department any more than you do. But I have been so blessed by this country," he said.

"For me to be able to pay my fair share of sustaining this amazing nation so kids coming up behind me are going to have the same opportunities that I do, is something that I insist upon," he said.

He said his attitude toward paying taxes can be summed up from a quote by Olive Wendell Holmes, former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court in the early 1900's, who said, "Taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society."

Read: Bill Gates says he's paid $10 billion in taxes and he thinks rich people like himself should pay more

While everyone wants great government services, no one wants to pay for it, he lamented and this attitude has real-world impacts.

"Teachers are so grossly underpaid in this country," he said. "If you live in San Francisco on a teacher's salary, you literally have no place to live. And part of that is we don't want to pay enough taxes to make sure those teachers can support their families."

He'd particularly like to see businesses change their point of view. Thanks to the wide variety of tax breaks in the tax code, some of the richest corporations in the land pay the lowest effective tax rates. Amazon, for instance, is said to have paid little to no federal taxes for years.

Companies used to feel that being good to their communities was good for their business because everyone lived in the areas where they worked. But companies are global today and are under pressure from shareholders to exploit every loophole and to offshore their cash, Obama said.

"This is something we have to have a public conversation on," he said because everyone depends on taxes to pay for schools, mend our interstate roads and so on. And "I love to pay high taxes," said no one, ever, not even Obama when he pays his.

Former US President Barack Obama considers himself a diehard optimist but he couldn't help but vent some frustrations over the current political climate when he spoke to a crowd of 11,000 on Wednesday at a tech conference put on by Qualtrics, a software company in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Obama never mentioned the Trump Administration by name but he occasionally expressed his disapproval through quips and jokes.

"I like the rule of law, democracy, competency and facts. Those things aren't partisan but they also don't happen automatically," Obama warned in a rare moment of seriousness. "Democracy is a garden that has to be tended."

When asked by his interviewer, Qualtrics CEO Ryan Smith, about leadership during difficult times, Obama threw another gentle jab: "I'm old fashioned and believe in values like facts and reason and logic," which got a big cheer from the crowd.

He said there are several keys to good leadership and, doubling down on his theme of competency, he said one of the big ones was hiring.

When running a large and complicated organization, leaders need to surround themselves with people who are more knowledgeable than themselves, he said.

On top of that, good leaders then have to actually listen to those experts. "Have confidence that you can understand what they are saying and if not, you'll keep on asking questions until you do," he said.

Sometimes the people who rise to become the big boss "start feeling, 'I have every answer.' When in fact, most of the time you have not," he warned.

Barack Obama (left) with Qualtrics CEO Ryan Smith Qualtrics He told the story of what it was like for him during the Deep Water Horizon oil spill crises in the spring of 2010.

An oil drilling rig owned by British Petroleum and built by Halliburton exploded in such a way, and in such deep water, that engineers from those companies could not easily fix it. Oil flowed for 87 days, dumping massive amounts of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.

Obama described it on Wednesday as "the largest environmental crisis to happen in our lifetimes, in terms of an oil spill."

"Fortunately I had recruited as my Secretary of Energy Steven Chu, who was a Nobel Prize winning physicist," he said.

As the weeks went by, his daughters started asking him about it, concerned about the people and wildlife being harmed. They asked him, "Daddy when are you going to shut down the hole?" he said and then laughed. "Now I"m feeling bad because my daughters think I'm not handling this well."

About three weeks into the crises Chu came in with a sketch on a napkin. "It looked like a little hat. There were some numbers next to it." They sent it off to BP who fleshed out the idea and it worked. The engineers capped the oil spill with a literal cap.

"My role as the leader in the organization was not to come up with the little hat because I wouldn't have thought of that. I would have thought, 'that doesn't look complicated enough to stop this hole in the ground,'" he joked.

"My job was to have Steven Chu there, who has a Nobel Prize in physics and that's who should be in charge of the Department of Energy."

The audience gave Obama another big round of applause in response. (The current Secretary of Energy is former Texas governor Rick Perry.)

The upside for Obama as a leader who hired such experts is that it "gave me a lot of confidence. I had confidence in the talent I had around me."

He said it's not just about someone's resume either. Motivations also play a role.

"I was good at making sure the people working with me were there for the right reasons, that there was a core integrity to what they were doing," he said. He wanted people who believed in the mission of using government to support citizens and solve problems.

Everyone from his volunteers to staff members to campaign donors were clear on that, he said. "This is not about us, you or me, it's not about you getting an appointment or a contract or a position, it's about the mission," he said. "So by the time we got to the White House, we had weeded out the mercenaries."

That set up the culture and "it also means you don't have big scandals and indictments. That's a bonus," he joked to another round of applause. Although it was only a passing reference, he was clearing referring to the growing list of people involved in Donald Trump's presidential campaign to be indicted, charged or to have pleaded guilty of crimes.

There's Michael Dell, Adolph Coors, and Tim Apple.

Well, almost.

President Donald Trump seems to have gotten a bit confused about the name of Apple's CEO on Wednesday.

During a meeting with the Apple CEO and other members of his American Workforce Policy Advisory Board, Trump referred to Tim Cook as "Tim Apple" while praising him for investing in the US.

"We appreciate it very much, Tim Apple," Trump said.

You can watch the gaffe in the video clip embedded in this tweet:

Here's a longer version of Trump's remarks (emphasis added):

"We're going to open up the labor forces because we have to. We have so many companies coming in people like Tim, you're expanding all over and doing things that I really wanted you to right from the beginning.

"I used to say, 'Tim you've got to start doing it over here.' And you really have.

"I mean you've really put a big investment in our country, we appreciate it very much, Tim Apple. But we're opening it up. We have to bring people in. We want them to be people based on merit. And we want them to come in legally."

It's possible that the apparent gaffe could actually be a case of awkward phrasing. Under this interpretation, Trump may have intended the words "Tim" and "Apple" to be separated by a comma, such that his comments were meant to express gratitude to both Tim Cook and Apple, in sequence.

Still, this wouldn't be the first time Trump has gotten confused about an executive's name. Last March, he flubbed the name of Lockheed Martin CEO Marillyn Hewson, referring to her as "Marillyn Lockheed."

Read more: Trump flubbed the name of Lockheed Martin's CEO, calling her 'Marillyn Lockheed'

And of course, Trump is a longtime enthusiast of turning people's names into taunts, as he did in a January tweet referring to Amazon's Jeff Bezos as "Jeff Bozo."

Cook used his time at the meeting to tout the importance of learning how to code software and Apple's efforts to help train students and other people on how to do that.

"We believe strongly that it should be a requirement in the United States for every kid to have coding before they graduate from K-12 and become somewhat proficient at it," Cook said.

Cook has had a mixed relationship with the White House, participating in other meetings with Trump but also criticizing the president's immigration policies.

At age 87, Japanese architect Arata Isozaki has left an indelible imprint on the world's cities.

His recognizable designs include a 700-foot skyscraper in Milan, a contemporary art museum in Los Angeles, and an Olympic sports venue in Barcelona. The buildings span continents, genres, and time periods.

Now, that work has earned Isozaki the highest honor in his field: the 2019 Pritzker Architecture Prize.

Isozaki was awarded the prize on March 5 for buildings that, in the words of the jury, "are constantly evolving, and always fresh in their approach."

Read more: 30 architectural masterpieces everyone should see in their lifetime

Take a look at some of the most remarkable structures from his decades-long career.

Xiao Wang, the CEO of Pioneer Square Labs spin-out Boundless, pitching at TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2017

Pioneer Square Labs’ growing team of former operators, VCs, data scientists, engineers and more

Pioneer Square Labs’ network of entrepreneurs

A glimpse of Seattle’s Pioneer Square neighborhood where Pioneer Square Labs is headquartered

A new study from the Georgia Institute of Technology suggests autonomous driving systems may have more difficulty detecting pedestrians with dark skin than those with light skin.

The researchers responsible for the study had eight image-detection systems analyze images of pedestrians. The people in the photos were separated into two groups based on how their skin tones aligned with the Fitzpatrick skin type scale, which divides skin tones into six categories. One group consisted of pedestrians who fell into one of the three lightest categories on the Fitzpatrick scale, while the other group consisted of pedestrians who fell into one of the three darkest categories on the Fitzpatrick scale.

Read more: How dummy pedestrians help test car safety systems

The image-detection systems then attempted to identify all of the pedestrians in the images, and the researchers compared the systems' abilities to detect light-skinned pedestrians versus dark-skinned pedestrians. On average, the image-detection systems were 5% less accurate at detecting dark-skinned pedestrians, even when the researchers controlled for variables that may have been able to explain the disparity, like pedestrians who were partially blocked from view or the time of day the photo was taken.

The researchers suggested that the differences in pedestrian-detection accuracy could result from not having enough dark-skinned pedestrians in the images used to train the systems, as well as the systems' insufficient emphasis on learning from the smaller population of dark-skinned pedestrians.

While Vox notes that the study has not been peer-reviewed and did not use the same image-detection systems or image sets featured in current self-driving vehicles, the study suggests that companies developing autonomous-driving technology should be attentive to the methods they use to train vehicles to identify pedestrians.

On Tuesday, Mark Zuckerberg published a long Facebook post explaining his intentions to make the social network more "privacy-focused."

To do so, Zuckerberg said Facebook would begin by making messages encrypted by default, and automatically deleting them after a period of time. No definite timeline was provided, as the chief exec said these changes would come "over the next few years."

The announcement is a major change in direction for a company that's mission statement as recently as 2017 was to "make the world more open and connected." And given Facebook's history of security and privacy blunders — including, but not limited to, the Cambridge Analytica scandal — many people expressed their skepticism.

Here are some of the top reactions to Facebook's proposed new focus on privacy:

There was some praise for Zuckerberg's statement on Tuesday.

But given the company's history of security issues, Zuckerberg's comments were met with plenty of skepticism.

Some pointed to the difficulties that encryption introduces.

Others wondered how a more private social network would be feasible from a business perspective, given Facebook's revenues depend almost entirely on ads displayed in the News Feed.

Many were left to question the timing of it all.

Got a tip? Contact this reporter via Signal or WhatsApp at +1 (209) 730-3387 using a non-work phone, email atThis email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., Telegram at nickbastone, or Twitter DM at@nickbastone.

Mark Zuckerberg just announced in a blog post that Facebook would shift its focus from public posts to private, ephemeral communication on its messaging apps.

The 3,200-word post mainly talks about protecting people's privacy when they use Facebook properties, after the company has come under fire for permitting the misuse of users' data. But it also has potential big implications for its lifeblood, advertising, and the marketers that use the social network to reach its 2 billion users.

Read more: Instagram is already running out of room for ads, and that's a threat to Facebook as it looks for new avenues to keep revenue growing

The move could have an "enormous" impact on Facebook's advertising business, said Debra Aho Williamson, principal analyst at eMarketer. "Facebook so far has not gained much traction with advertising in Messenger, and advertising in WhatsApp still hasn't emerged. That creates huge unknowns about how Facebook will generate significant ad revenue while users are engaged in private communications."

Facebook's evolving to keep up with how people are using its products

Of particular note to marketers was Zuckerberg saying in the post that "We plan to build this the way we've developed WhatsApp: focus on the most fundamental and private use case — messaging — make it as secure as possible, and then build more ways for people to interact on top of that, including calls, video chats, groups, stories, businesses, payments, commerce, and ultimately a platform for many other kinds of private services."

Facebook's message shows that it's evolving to keep up with how people are using its products, shifting from the public feed to one-to-one communications, said Nick Cicero, VP of strategy for Conviva, an online video analytics company. He added that marketers should be thinking about how they can tailor their communications strategies accordingly.

"Right now, marketers can get up messenger bots, and what they should start doing today is think of the touchpoints of personalization that can occur after someone consumes some content on Instagram," he said.

Cicero said that questions for marketers to ask are: "How can we interact with customers in a more one-to-one or small-group way? How can they make it inspire more conversation instead of just consumption? How do we create content that sparks a dialogue?"

Facebook watchers see opportunity in Stories ads and chat bots

Two ways marketers have dipped a toe into messaging apps are with utility-based messaging bots and Stories, Facebook's two-year-old ad format that runs across its properties and which Facebook has been pushing hard as its news feed reaches its saturation point with ads.

"Stories ads have just started to blossom and you'll see more shift to that format. That's going to mean strategies will have to evolve," Cicero said.

Anita Walsh, VP, social strategy & marketplace buying at Horizon Media, said this is a good time for marketers to double down on Stories and messenger bots, which some brands have mastered for utility-based transactions like doing returns and making reservations.

"If people are moving to and get more used to using bots, it creates a way to move past utility and more into informational ones," she said. "It's not right for every brand; it costs to create and maintain a bot."

Walsh also took talk about making commerce and payments part of messenger apps as another positive for advertisers. It means that Facebook is trying to figure out how to make those apps stickier with, and trusted by, users, which in turn will make those apps good places for advertisers to reach potential customers.

The shift in focus could also create more data

As for whether advertisers should worry about the future of data targeting on Facebook, Facebook watchers weren't concerned. The social network is still spending heavily on features like its Watch video section to keep people using its public social feed, and that usage throws off a lot of user consumption data that advertisers depend on, Walsh said.

"Facebook is investing heavily in content partnerships so that level of consumption seems to be also on the roadmap and that will help with any concerns about rich targeting," she said.

In another possible plus for advertisers, Facebook's move towards encryption could open up new data opportunities for marketers in SMS data, said Rosenblatt Securities analyst Mark Zgutowicz. In theory, Facebook wants its messenger apps to integrate with SMS data from phone messages.

"The benefit of connecting all these messaging devices is more data linkage across devices," Zgutowicz said. "If you're able to connect WhatsApp as well as Messenger communication with somebody who's communicating with them on Instagram, you can potentially link what those two individuals have in common. As you connect more messaging together, you're theoretically creating a bigger data graph with information that you can then sell to advertisers."

To be sure, there are still plenty of unanswered questions raised by the post, which makes the advertising implications hard to evaluate.

The Media Kitchen CEO Barry Lowenthal wondered if Facebook would still collect data on people while they're using messaging apps and if that could be used for advertising purposes.

And as Facebook makes its messenger apps more utility-based, will it open up ways for it to make money from transactions, making advertising less important to its business?

In any case, it's clear Facebook had to make big changes to its business.

"They realize Facebook can't keep going down the same path with fake news and trust. Unless they're willing to blow up the business model to solve for that, they'll go away," Lowenthal said.

Lauren Johnson contributed to this story.

Mark Zuckerberg's vow to overhaul Facebook with new privacy rules is likely to spell the end of its years-long campaign to enter China.

Facebook's CEO said in a blog post on Wednesday that the social network will not build data centers in countries that have a record of violating privacy and freedom of expression.

That moral stance would likely make it impossible for Facebook to offer its service in China, where recent data localization laws require that internet service providers keep all personal data produced by its citizens — from emails to selfies — on computers within the country's borders.

"As we build our infrastructure around the world, we've chosen not to build data centers in countries that have a track record of violating human rights like privacy or freedom of expression," Zuckerberg wrote. Facebook decided not to build data centers in those countries because it can make it easier for governments to access people's sensitive data, he said.

To many observers, the implication was obvious.

"In other news, Zuck has clearly given up on entering China, as these changes makes that impossible. Good," Alex Stamos, adjunct professor at Stanford and Facebook's former chief security officer, tweeted after Zuckerberg published his comments.

A senior source inside Facebook told Buzzfeed News on Wednesday that the company "does not see a path forward in China" and has given up efforts to enter the world's largest internet market by users.

Read more:China has withdrawn approval for Facebook's new venture in the country, where it remains banned

Facebook's service is currently blocked in China, but the company has long said that entering the market is crucial to its mission of connecting the world. As Facebook's growth slows, China's 800 million internet users represent an attractive untapped market for Facebook, which generates almost all of its revenue by showing ads to users.

Facebook had previously confirmed that it had at least four data sharing partnerships with Chinese companies, including smartphone company Huawei, which is under scrutiny from the U.S. government. Facebook had said it would end those partnerships.

Facebook would almost certainly have run into compliance issues if it built a data center in China.

Chinese President Xi Jinping, left, talks with Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg Ted S. Warren-Pool/Getty Images For example, data that's collected in China must be stored in that country, and companies must comply with strict rules like undergoing a security assessment if they want to send or move the data outside of China. China also requires companies to assist authorities when they conduct security investigations.

Apple already has a data center in China to host the local version of its iCloud online services. It complies with Chinese regulations and is operated by a Chinese company, raising concerns among privacy advocates that the Chinese government will be able to more easily access this data.

Facebook may see its stance on China as an opportunity to claim a moral high ground in an escalating war of words with tech rival Apple over consumer privacy.

"People want to know their data is stored securely in places they trust," Zuckerberg wrote. "Looking at the future of the internet and privacy, I believe one of the most important decisions we'll make is where we'll build data centers and store people's sensitive data."

That said, Facebook has already built a data center in Singapore— the company's first in Asia. Compared to China, Singapore has a more relaxed stance on data storage, but Singapore's government has also put restrictions on freedom of speech and press.

How Facebook justifies its presence in some countries versus others, already a thorny issue freighted with politics, is likely to become even more controversial under the company's new policy.

Facebook declined to comment beyond the blog post.

Dozens of General Motors employees surrounded a white Chevy Cruze on Wednesday. The car, the last to be produced at GM's Lordstown, Ohio facility, was draped with an American flag as the employees posed for one final photo.

In their arms, signs read "GM: We invested in you. Now it's your turn to invest in us."

Dozens of emotional photos, Facebook posts, and tweets were shared Wednesday as the Lordstown plant got ready to sit idle after more than 50 years in action. The factory's 1,700 workers, meanwhile, will be left without jobs.

The 6.2 million square foot plant will be placed into a "state of readiness," GM spokesperson Dan Flores told the Associated Press, meaning it will be heated and fully maintained to allow for a resumption of operations. The facility's future awaits upcoming contract talks between GM and the United Auto Works Union, which are set to being this summer.

Still, the pain from the job losses is rippling through Northern Ohio. As protesters gathered outside, many residents — including politicians — shared photos online:

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I read Roger McNamee’s book Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe the day it came out. While likely uncomfortable for a lot of people, it was excellent, provocative, and challenging all at the same time.

I have not, nor have I ever been, an investor in Facebook. However, I benefited indirectly from, and indirectly contributed to, the rapid rise of Facebook as an early investor in Zynga. I remember being amazed at the pace of growth of both companies and, in an effort to understand it better, went deep on how each company’s product intersected with the psychology of humans.

If you hung around me during the 2007 – 2010 time period when I was on the Zynga board, you would have heard me talk with amazement at how easy it was to manipulate people into spending huge amounts of their time tending their virtual farm on FarmVille. I spoke with pride about the data that Zynga collected on every user, much of which came directly from Facebook and had nothing to do with what Zynga was doing, but was readily accessible to them via the Facebook API. Zynga endured endless Facebook TOS rewrites as they evolved their business model and tried to capture more of the revenue from companies like Zynga, including what I have come to refer to as the Facebook-Zynga Cuban Missile Crisis which ended in detante.

All of this happened a decade ago. I left the Zynga board just before they went public at the end of 2010 (as is my, and my partners’ at Foundry Group’s approach.) I continued to be a user of Facebook, but even that drifted away from me, as I never really felt that connected to it (I was more of a Twitter person.) I wasn’t surprised when the Facebook data privacy scandals started in 2017, but I was surprised at how timid the backlash was. I stopped using Facebook in 2018 and deleted my account in August.

McNamee has a deeper relationship with Facebook, as he was a mentor for Zuckerberg early in Facebook’s life and then an investor (first personally, then via his fund Elevation Partners) while Facebook was a private company. His experience has more emotion in it than mine (both good and bad), but his journey that led to this book started just before the 2016 US Presidential Election as McNamee was concerned that “bad actors” could be using Facebook to manipulate the election.

The book is riveting. McNamee moves between Facebook, his experience as an investor, his efforts to get through to the Facebook leadership team about his concerns, and his subsequent journey to make public his views about the negative impact Facebook is having on society and democracy in general. McNamee is not taking a cynical approach, but rather takes responsibility for his own lack of foresight into the potential problem, and explains his search for understanding and solutions.

I think this book is merely a preamble for what is coming in the next twenty years. As a species, we have little understanding of the complexity that we are creating through technology. This complexity cannot be solved, as complex adaptive systems don’t have a single solution – they adapt and evolve. Instead, we can only interact with them and, when they evolve at a rate much faster than we can understand and respond to, it’s can lead to an untenable situation.

We haven’t really begun to understand the implication of what we are creating. Regardless of the long-gone “Do No Evil” slogans of progressive technology companies, profit and power motives dominate behavior. And, with profit and power comes significant defenses, including denial about second order effects that result, and then the third order effects that result from the efforts to control the profit and power.

McNamee’s book is a taste of this. Read it and start to prepare your mind for what is to come.

Clari raises $35M for its AI-based sales platform, expands into marketing and supply chain management