Business

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An empty commercial airplane—is that kind of like a private jet?

Chris O’Leary, media strategist and editor of a New York-based beer blog, would be the person to ask. O’Leary had booked a New York-bound Delta flight from Cleveland that was delayed for several hours on Monday. When the beer enthusiast stepped on the plane, he found out he was the only passenger.

“It was definitely the most memorable flight I’ve been on in recent memory if only for the sheer lack of passengers to become bothersome,” O’Leary told ABC News. “There were no screaming babies, no one listening to loud lyrics or reclining their seats or taking their shoes.”

O’Leary got a private safety briefing and one-on-one briefing from the captain about the flight.

Shortly before takeoff, the plane returned to the gate and picked up one more passenger, for a grand total of two fliers on the 76-seat plane.

[ABC News]

All the major oil producers may increase output this year

When the world gives you too much oil, drill for more.

That seems to be the motto of some of the most prolific oil producers today. Iraq, Russia, Latin America, West Africa, the United States, Canada – all may increase production this year, and by more than just balancing out the reduced production in war-torn Libya. On top of this, expect even more oil on the market if Iran comes to terms with the West over its nuclear program and is freed of the constraints of sanctions.

All this new oil is flooding a market already awash because OPEC has refused to cut its production cap below 30 million barrels a day – and is even exceeding that level – and the United States is pumping oil, mostly from shale, faster than it has in 30 years. This has caused the average price of oil to plunge more than 50 percent, from about $115 in June 2014 to just over $50 today.

This is creating an unmitigated bear market for oil, according to Morgan Stanley. “With the global oil market just passing peak runs and Libyan supply already at low levels, it’s hard to see much improvement in oil fundamentals near term,” its report said. “A number of worrying signs have already emerged, lifting the probability of our ‘bear’ case.”

One more sign is that Iraq’s production is at its highest level in more than three decades, now that Baghdad has finally reached agreement with Kurdistan to allow it to export oil through Turkey. And just before the New Year there were reports that Russian oil output has hit post-Soviet records without any sign of abating.

“We already have an ample supply of oil, and on top of that we see this increase from Iraq and Russia,” Michael Hewson, analyst at CMC Markets, a British financial derivatives dealer, told The Wall Street Journal. “The momentum clearly continues to be bearish for oil.”

But wait, there’s more, according to the Morgan Stanley analysis. It says to expect increased production at several oil fields in Brazil, Canada, the United States and in West Africa. And, according to Hewson, there’s no sign of increased demand, according to reports of anemic economies in China and Europe.

And then there’s the environment. The governments of many countries – including the world’s two hungriest fossil fuel consumers, China and the United States – are striving to meet various targets for lower greenhouse gas emissions. This new green approach is responsible for “anemic global growth” in demand for oil and an “upsurge in competing supply,” said David Hufton, the CEO of the broker PVM.

“[It] is very plain for all to see that oil supply growth exceeds oil demand growth and from a producer point of view, this imbalance has to be rectified,” Hufton told the Financial Times.

Carsten Fritsch, a senior oil and commodities analyst at Commerzbank in Frankfurt, agreed. “The easiest path for oil is down,” he told Reuters. “Almost all market news and the fundamental backdrop are negative, and it is difficult to see much upside at the moment.”

This post originally appeared on OilPrice.com.

Read more from Oilprice.com:

• One Region That Could Benefit Most From Low Oil Prices
• Could ISIS Attack Saudi Oil?
• US Sees Huge Energy Opportunity In Europe

Like, wow.

Ford Motors was not short on confidence this week.

After a nine-year hiatus, the iconic American automobile manufacturer unveiled the latest installation of the prized GT to ecstatic car aficionados at the 2015 North American International Auto Show in Detroit on Monday.

The new GT packs a 3.5-liter twin-turbocharged EcoBoost V6 engine capable of blasting out more than 600 horsepower. The car is set to hit production lines next year.

During a press conference on Monday, Ford’s executive chairman audibly scoffed after a reporter questioned the vehicle’s fuel efficiency, according to Bloomberg.

“You don’t buy this car for fuel economy,” said Bill Ford. “There’s a lot of fuel-saving technology in here, but I’d be lying if I said this was about fuel efficiency.”

On Monday, Ford also revealed the next-generation 2017 F-150 Raptor off-road pickup and the street-legal Shelby GT350R Mustang. The marque is reportedly coming off its biggest sales year since 2006.

[Bloomberg]

"Qatar Airways will, I hope, be the first airliner to introduce this in all our planes”

Qatar Airways wants to be the first airline to stream flight data from black boxes to operations centers on the ground in real-time, so that rescue crews won’t miss a beat in the event of a disturbance during flight.

Qatar Airways CEO Akbar Al Baker said a new flight tracking system was currently being tested in preparation for a fleet-wide deployment, Bloomberg reports.

The push for the new system comes in the wake of disappearances last year of Malaysia Airlines and AirAsia flights, which prompted frenzied searches for black box data, which can record vital clues about the plane’s location and flight conditions before it went down. Indonesian divers retrieved black boxes from missing Air Asia Flight QZ8501 Sunday, after the plane with 162 passengers crashed into the Java Sea.

“Once this has been proven and all the bugs have been cleared then Qatar Airways will, I hope, be the first airliner to introduce this in all our planes,” Baker said.

Read more at Bloomberg.

A new brand of female-friendly condoms hopes to make contraception cute

Condoms present the ultimate catch-22: we all need them in order to stay STD-free, but buying them, carrying them, and presenting them can feel dirty.

Tiffany Gaines, 24, is out to change that. She’s in the process of raising money to expand the inventory of her new line of condoms, Lovability. They’re condoms specifically designed for female comfort, and not just in bed. “Lovability condoms were inspired by my realization that I didn’t feel comfortable acquiring condoms, and I didn’t even feel comfortable carrying them, and I didn’t feel comfortable producing them in the moment,” Gaines says. “For years, condoms have been marketed as a masculine, dominant, hyper-sexual product.”

And that’s a problem, since male condoms are approximately 82% effective at preventing pregnancy with average use, and (along with female condoms) they’re the only contraceptive that also prevents STDs. State and municipal health authorities are so sure that condoms are good for public health that they even distribute them for free in some places (like NYC and Philadelphia). Yet only 19% of single women say they regularly use condoms every time. Gaines found that most women she spoke to hated the experience of buying condoms, felt ashamed to carry them, and were anxious about using them, even though 6.2 million women rely on male condoms to prevent pregnancy.

And it’s no wonder, because the condom experience is totally creepy. First, you have to find the condoms in the drugstore next to the pregnancy tests and the yeast-infection treatments (not sexy), and in some stores you have to slide open the noisy plastic theft guards (which make you feel like a criminal), then you have to wait in line to purchase them so everybody sees what you’re buying (and gives you side-eye).

Carrying condoms is equally embarrassing– just look how Reese Witherspoon’s character in Wild was judged when fellow hikers found her stash. And after all that, Gaines says that many women worry that tearing open the slippery packages can cause condoms to rip, or that condoms get put on inside-out in the heat of the moment.

Lovability isn’t the only condom company that’s pushing to appeal to female consumers. Sustain makes eco-friendly condoms marketed to women with tasteful cardboard packaging decorated with shells or bamboo. L Condoms also has female-focused branding, plus they donate a condom to Africa for each condom sold (and offer one-hour delivery in some places). But Lovability condoms are unique in that they don’t look like condoms: they come in a cute little tin that looks more like lip balm or mints than anything else. “You’re first drawn to it in the store because of the way it looks,” Gaines said. “It’s absolutely discrete. It looks like a cosmetic product.”

The tins are designed so women can carry them in their purses without being embarrassed if they’re found, which means spontaneous encounters don’t have to be unprotected ones. The design also eliminates the anxiety that the condom might rip when the package is opened; Lovability condoms come in a special buttercup packaging, so there’s no confusion about which side of the condom is the top. “In a regular foil wrapper, you have no idea, you’re just tearing it and hoping for the best,” Gaines says. “It was really important for us to not only create a condom that was more accessible and more beautiful, but also more functional in the bedroom.” (And each individual condom package comes with a motivational quote inside.)

Lovability is a very young startup: the two-person company started out with less than $10,000 in funding, and even though she’s the president of the company, Gaines spends hours assembling the tins herself. But the condoms were so popular that they sold out in NYC lingerie stores, which is why Gaines and Claire Courtney, Lovability’s outreach director, are raising money to make more. They’ve got their eye on big outlets like Sephora, Anthropologie, and Urban Outfitters, but also want to sell condoms in other places women feel comfortable, like salons, gyms, or spas. Basically, they only want to sell their condoms where no other condoms are sold. Or, as Gaines puts it, “Why shouldn’t you discover your favorite condom brand while enjoying a spa day with the girls?

Gaines says Lovability’s aesthetic appeal is all in the service of public health and sexual empowerment– she wants more women to have condoms with them at all times to prevent the spread of STDs. “You can be safer if it’s a shared responsibility. And a lot of time guys aren’t prepared,” Gaines says. “This is a great opportunity to capitalize on the judgement of women. ” Plus, Gaines adds, some women like to provide the condoms, since “they know it hasn’t been in the guy’s wallet for the last three years.

But the startup hopes to do more than keep women safe. Gaines also wants the condoms to spark discussions about contraception. “Our mission is to bring condoms out of the back room and into the spotlight, and get conversations going about it,” she says. “Modern women are ready to take control of their sexual health, and be proud of it.”

Embarrassing, sure. But classified info apparently secure

Live by the tweet, die by the tweet.

The latest cyberwar skirmish involves an embarrassing—but apparently nothing more—breach of U.S. Central Command’s social-media accounts by alleged Islamist hackers. Nonetheless, it’s a black eye for the Pentagon, with its multi-billion-dollar preoccupation with cybersecurity.

Centcom is the regional Pentagon command that oversees U.S. military action in 20 nations stretching from Egypt to Pakistan, including the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Centcom, which is based at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Fla., began displaying messages allegedly from the Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria starting about 12:30 p.m. EST on its Twitter account. At least two ISIS YouTube posts also showed up in Centcom’s account on the video site.

“AMERICAN SOLDIERS, WE ARE COMING, WATCH YOUR BACK. ISIS.” the first apparently non-official Twitter message said (ISIS doesn’t refer to itself as “ISIS,” which immediately led to speculation in the Pentagon and elsewhere that the hackers might not be who they claim to be).

It was followed in quick succession by others. “ISIS is already here, were are in your PCs, in each military base,” a second tweet said. “We know everything about you, your wives and children.”

But a quick review of documents posted suggested they are unclassified. At most, they appear to fall into the category of documents the Pentagon often labels “for official use only,” which are routinely posted on the Internet by the Pentagon itself. Reporters located posted documents involving U.S. military acquisition and strategy on public Pentagon websites.

Twitter suspended Central Command’s account shortly after 1 p.m., with all the prior posts—both legitimate and otherwise—inaccessible.

About 5 p.m. Monday, Centcom issued a statement saying the breaches didn’t affect “operational military networks” and that apparently no classified data was jeopardized. “We are viewing this purely as a case of cybervandalism,” Centcom said. The social-media accounts, it added, “reside on commercial, non-Defense Department servers.”

In an interview broadcast Sunday, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff warned that while the Pentagon has an edge when it comes to firepower, it’s merely tied with prospective foes when it comes to cyber warfare. “We don’t have an advantage,” Army General Martin Dempsey told Fox News. “It’s a level playing field, and that makes this chairman very uncomfortable.”

Shortly before the hack began, President Obama was speaking at the Federal Trade Commission on computer security. “This extraordinary interconnection creates enormous opportunities but also creates enormous vulnerabilities for us as a nation and for our economy and for individual families,” he said. “If we are going to be connected, then we need to be protected.”

The White House said that a Twitter hack isn’t the same thing as a major data breach, like Sony recently experienced. “This is something that we’re obviously looking into and something that we take seriously,” White House spokesman Josh Earnest said.

As the Centcom attack unfolded, the Government Accountability Office was issuing a report warning of the soft underbelly of the U.S. government’s dependence on networked computer systems. “To further highlight the importance of the threat, on October 11, 2012, the Secretary of Defense stated that the collective result of attacks on our nation’s critical infrastructure could be ‘a cyber Pearl Harbor, an attack that would cause physical destruction and the loss of life,’” the GAO said.

Thankfully, except for a few outfits, social media doesn’t yet constitute “critical infrastructure.”

– With reporting by Zeke Miller

Emily Hughes may not have placed first at the Olympics like her big sis Sarah, but she’s quickly on the rise in Silicon Valley

Nine years ago, Emily Hughes was at the 2006 Olympic games in Turin, Italy, skating before millions of TV viewers. Today, Hughes is in the trenches at Google working on Google Fiber, the company’s ambitious ultra-high-speed Internet initiative.

This 25-year-old former Olympian joined Google as a business analyst in November, and it was her love of competition – and an extraordinary tolerance for risk-taking and failure – that helped her land the job.

“I think in sports in general, there’s a lot of transferable skills that you can bring to the workplace,” says Hughes, who moved from Great Neck, N.Y., to San Francisco to begin her new gig at Google’s Mountain View offices. “In skating, every day, you fall and you have to get up. And falling is a pretty obvious failure. I’ve definitely learned from everything I’ve failed at.”

As you may recall from the 2002 Winter Olympics, Emily Hughes is the younger sister of Sarah Hughes, the world champion skater who copped the Gold in 2002.

“I remember, I was 12 or 13 when Sarah won,” Emily says. “Every day, I saw her go to the rink, I saw her train and I thought, ‘I think I could do that too.’”

But the road to fame was a lot harder for Emily than it was for her older sister. In 2001, at age 12, she competed in the U.S. Figure Skating Championship, but then a couple of years later, Emily failed to make the U.S. team. In 2006, she was the first alternate to the Winter Olympics, and after Michelle Kwan withdrew due to a groin injury, she was named to the team. But she finished seventh overall.

Amidst injuries and illnesses, her ambition never waned. Hughes went on to Harvard, and in her junior year, she decided to take a semester off to train for the 2010 Olympics. She failed to qualify.

“When I didn’t make the Olympic team, yes, that was a failure in a sense, but there were so many other things that I’ve accomplished because of it,” she says. For example, she had more time to join organizations such as Harvard’s “Women in Business” club and take on leadership positions on campus.

Her setbacks, she admits, also forced her to think to herself: “What is the bigger picture?”

After Harvard, Hughes worked at Deloitte Consulting and the International Olympic Committee, but she never found her true calling. Then last year, a friend who worked at Google told her about life at the Internet giant, and Hughes was intrigued. Google Fiber delivers broadband service at 100 times what Internet users are accustomed to. The service first launched in Kansas City, Mo., in 2012 and now operates in Austin, Texas, and Provo, Utah, as well.

“Every time I talked to her, she just raved about Google’s culture and her work,” Emily says, referring to her friend. “Before that, I hadn’t really thought about working at Google. I used Google every day, but it wasn’t something that I ever thought, ‘Oh I could go work there.’”

Her friend passed on some information about Google Fiber, and she applied. Clearing a first-round interview, Hughes went through six hours of on-site back-to-back interviews, with only a lunch break– not unlike the times she used to scramble to find time for lunch in a jam-packed training day.

Certainly, Hughes possesses the most critical quality that Google seeks in its employees. “The No. 1 thing that you look for is passion,” says Jonathan Rosenberg, who wrote the best-selling How Google Works with Google chairman Eric Schmidt. “You want the kind of person who is constantly learning.” Google’s career website notes that the company looks for people who can show they’ve “flexed different muscles in different situations in order to mobilize a team.”

Flexing different muscles — well, Hughes is a pro at that. “With skating, constantly being corrected and told how to do something differently has helped me take constructive feedback better,” she says.

Hughes is simply the latest in a lineup of former Olympians working at Google. The company claims to employ at least 10. Athletes, in general, appeal to the Googlers who do the hiring because a sports background teaches you to handle criticism and adapt.

Game Theory Group CEO Vincent McCaffrey, who helps companies recruit student-athletes, doesn’t know the Hughes sisters, but he theorizes: “I would imagine Emily and Sarah have probably received a ton of feedback in their life — some of it very direct and even harsh. Employers want to hire young people who are able to take constructive criticism well.”

Global services firm EY has studied the link between sports and leadership in the C-suite. In a 2014 global survey of 400 female executives, EY found that 52% played sports at the university level. Those women, like Emily and Sarah Hughes, honed their time management skills while juggling schoolwork and training — an excellent path to consistent overachievement.

Indeed, growing up in Great Neck, Emily and her five siblings (Rebecca, David, Matthew, Sarah and the youngest girl, Taylor) were all overachievers. All six participated in figure skating or ice hockey.

Emily and Sarah credit their father for getting them into skating. John Hughes is a Toronto-born lawyer who played hockey for Cornell University and was drafted by the Toronto Maple Leafs.

Emily recalls her mom, Amy, lining up all six kids in age order (Emily is second-youngest) and tying their skates at the community ice rink. Emily and Sarah, who started skating when they were about three years old, are different in personality — Sarah is gregarious with a big presence, while Emily is reserved and quietly personable — but as children, they were both “competitive in our own way,” as Emily puts it.

When 12-year-old Emily stood in the stands and cheered on her big sister for a Gold medal in Salt Lake City, she knew she wanted her own shot to skate on Olympic ice. “After that, I was like, ‘I want to be an Olympian too,” she recalls, adding, “A little bit easier said than done.”

Randy Appell, her chemistry and biology teacher at Great Neck High School, recalls teenage Emily dealing with her high-stress position. “The fact that her older sister had already won the Olympic Gold must’ve put an extreme amount of pressure on her. She may have felt it, but she never let it show.”

Sarah’s Olympic stardom landed her on the cover of TIME Magazine, and when Emily was heading to Turin four years later, she was cast as America’s great hope —another Hughes champion-in-the-making.

Her seventh-place finish at the Olympics that year was disappointing, but it was not the thing that would define Emily Hughes. She had other assets — her brain and her passion to succeed — to fall back on. She remembers her dad always emphasizing that she is a “student-athlete” and that “student” always comes first. Her parents never gave her or Sarah breaks on studying, even when they were training five hours a day. And given the choice to enroll in the regular chemistry class or an honors course, Appell recalls, Emily insisted she take the advanced class.

“I always brought my books everywhere,” she says. “I was going to every competition lugging this backpack around, or you know, doing homework in the car on the way to the rink. It was always important to keep my grades up.”

As for Sarah, who is now 29, she found a new path from the Olympics too. She’s executive vice president of business development at the Kingsbridge Ice Center, a $350 million project to build the world’s largest ice skating complex in the Bronx.

Both sisters refuse to have one-dimensional careers.“I was always impressed by how tough Emily was when we were younger,” Sarah says. “She would kill herself working, working, working, but somehow, she always found some time to have fun.”

“To accomplish big meaningful things,” Sarah adds, “you need to be focused but allow enough distractions to make it a fun and worthwhile journey.”

This article originally appeared on Fortune.com

A seawater desalination plant under construction near San Diego will be the nation’s largest when complete

After three years of drought, California’s reservoirs are filled with more mud than water. Many farmers can’t irrigate their fields and have no choice but to leave them fallow.

As insurance against future droughts, San Diego is turning to a vast and largely untapped body of water for help: the Pacific Ocean. A huge desalination plant is under construction just outside the city that is expected to provide 7% of the arid region’s water needs.

“Desalination isn’t dependent on rainfall or snowpack,” says Peter MacLaggan, a senior vice president with Poseidon Resources, the company that is developing the plant in Carlsbad, Calif. “Traditional sources have been cheap and plentiful, and that’s not necessarily the case anymore.”

Desalinization is an old technology used widely in the Middle East that is getting new attention in the United States because of innovation and lower costs. With growing populations and increasingly scarce water, more than 15 California coastal cities are considering the ocean as an alternative to fickle Mother Nature.

But desalination is still far more expensive than damming rivers and pumping ground water. Furthermore, critics worry about the environmental consequences and argue that water conservation is a much cheaper option.

When complete, the $1 billion Carlsbad desalination plant will be the largest in the Western Hemisphere, providing up to 50 million gallons of water daily to San Diego County and its more than 3 million residents. Seawater sucked up from an offshore pipe will be blasted through a series of membranes that have microscopic holes to help filter out the salt, sand and algae.

Construction, delayed for years by lawsuits, is expected to be completed by late 2015 or early 2016. Ultimately, the water produced by the plant will be “bottled water quality,” MacLaggan says.

Over the years, desalination plants have had a mixed track record. A number of cities that tapped seawater during droughts later closed the plants after the rains returned, because of the high costs.

Just up the coast, Santa Barbara, Calif. built a $34 million desalination plant in early 1990s amid a water shortage, but then closed it a few years later. With the latest drought, city officials are considering paying millions of dollars more for refurbishments so they can restart the plant.

Meanwhile, several Australian cities spent billions of dollars over the past decade for seawater treatment plants. However, many of them were put on idle to save money after the droughts ended.

“We end up spending a lot of money and getting very little water,” says Conner Everts, executive director of the Southern California Watershed Alliance, who opposes desalination plants because of their cost and their potential impact on the environment. “Don’t think of the ocean as an endless reservoir, but a fragile ecosystem.”

In particular, Everts complains about desalination plants discharging briny waste into the sea that he says could kill marine life. San Diego’s plant, for example, will suck up two gallons of seawater for every gallon of potable water it produces. The excess, which is 20% more salty that typical seawater after being diluted, will be pumped back out into the surf. The plant’s operators insist the discharge will be safe for sea life.

Opponents filed more than a dozen lawsuits to block the plant’s construction based on environmental and other concerns. But the plant’s supporters ultimately prevailed in court.

San Diego officials pushed for the desalination plant following a serious drought across much of the West. With few rivers and an average of only 10 inches of rain annually, the San Diego region is particular vulnerable to water shortages.

Officials agreed to a 30-year deal to buy desalinated water from the plant’s developers for $2,014 to $2,257 per acre foot, about the equivalent of what a family of five uses in a year. The cost is nearly double traditional sources. County residents will ending up paying an extra $4 to $7 in their monthly water bills, on average.

Over time, improvements in technology are supposed to drive down costs of desalination. Pumps, membranes used in the plants are becoming increasingly efficient and durable, for example. Whether the costs will ever fall in line with traditional water sources is a subject of much debate. For his part, MacLaggan predicted that the costs will reach parity by 2025.

But Everts says water conservation and recycling waste water are much cheaper alternatives that should get a lot more attention. Encouraging home owners to rip out their water-guzzling lawns and install more efficient toilets are just some of the options.

“Desalination is a sexy technology that sounds like a great idea,” Everts says. “But it distracts us from putting resources to other things that could help us right now.”

In any case, Mother Nature may be coming to the rescue. California’s rainy season has got off to a good start with a series of strong storms. But the Sierra Nevada snowpack, the most important barometer, is still low. Moreover, a few wet months alone can’t offset years of drought.

MacLaggan, with the Carlsbad plant’s developer, agrees that more conservation is necessary along with other strategies like treating wastewater so that it is clean enough to drink. “We need to do all these things,” he says, adding that desalination should be part of the solution because conservation won’t be enough to offset the growing population and the region’s lack of rain. “This is a drought-proof supply.”

This article originally appeared on Fortune.com