Bitcoin Drops After Elon Musk Triggered Tumble

The price of bitcoin plunged Wednesday after Tesla Inc. founder and Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk said the electric car maker will no longer accept the cryptocurrency as a payment option. The backflip was two months in the making after Telsa announced it had invested $1.5 billion in bitcoin in February and that it would start accepting bitcoin as a payment option. The announcement, made by Musk (pictured) today on Twitter, cited environmental concerns for the decision to drop bitcoin support. “We are concerned about rapidly increasing use of fossil fuels for Bitcoin mining and transactions, especially coal, which has the worst emissions of any fuel,” Musk wrote. “Cryptocurrency is a good idea on many levels and we believe it has a promising future, but this cannot come at great cost to the environment.” Musk noted that Tesla would not be selling its bitcoin holdings and that the company intends to use it for transactions as soon as mining transitions to more suitable energy.

He also added that Telsa would be looking at other cryptocurrencies “that use 1% of Bitcoin’s energy/transaction.” Musk didn’t detail any specific reason why he has made the decision now, but there has been significant media coverage of a power plant in New York that has been purchased to mine bitcoin. The Greenridge Power Plant, a former coal-fired power plant in Torrey, New York, is currently in the process of expanding and switching to gas to power an extensive bitcoin mining operation. The company that owns the plant plans to have 18,000 dedicated bitcoin miners onsite by the end of the year with plans to add 10,500 more, according to Ars Technica. The plans have also caught the attention of legislators. A bill in the New York state legislature seeks to place a three-year moratorium on all cryptocurrency mining in the state pending an environmental review. After single-handedly causing a massive drop in the price of dogecoin after appearing on Saturday Night Live last week, Musk’s decision has had a similar albeit not as large effect on the price of bitcoin as well. Bitcoin was down about 12% a little before 9 p.m. EDT, to $50,432, after trading as low as $47,720 earlier in the day. The cryptocurrency had traded in a band between $55,000 and $60,000 over the previous week.

NBC Will Not Air 2022 Anual Golden Globes Awards

NBC announced Monday that it would not broadcast the 2022 Golden Globes, an abrupt blow to the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, the organization that puts on the film and television awards show. The association relies on the money the network pays for the rights to broadcast the ceremony, and NBC’s move throws the future of the show into doubt. The group of roughly 86 journalists came under intense scrutiny as investigations uncovered, among other things, its lack of diversity and its system of compensating members for their work on committees.

Last week the association approved changes that included increasing its membership by 50 percent over the next year and a half and hiring diversity consultants. But NBCUniversal said in a statement: “We continue to believe that the H.F.P.A. is committed to meaningful reform. However, change of this magnitude takes time and work, and we feel strongly that the H.F.P.A. needs time to do it right. As such, NBC will not air the 2022 Golden Globes. Assuming the organization executes on its plan, we are hopeful we will be in a position to air the show in January 2023.” The statement was the most significant in a series of positions taken by movie and television studios and networks over the past several days. On Sunday, WarnerMedia, home to Warner Bros. and HBO, sent a letter to the president of the press association expressing disappointment at the limited nature of the reforms the H.F.P.A. had pledged to undertake. As a result, WarnerMedia executives said they would “continue to refrain from direct engagement with the H.F.P.A., including sanctioned press conferences and invitations to cover other industry events with talent” until changes are implemented.

Joker Sequel Reportedly Still in Development

A sequel to Todd Phillips and Joaquin Phoenix‘s Joker is reportedly still in the works. Although the film’s release date and other details were not revealed, MangaSpurs stated that almost all of DC’s forthcoming films and TV shows “will take place in the same universe.” The report specified The Flash movie with Ezra Miller, the HBO Max spinoff Gotham PD and “Joker and its planned sequel,” also noting that the projects not included is Matt Reeves and Robert Pattinson‘s The Batman and the upcoming Superman reboot.

Rumors of a Joker sequel have gone quiet since the release of the film in 2019, and although neither Phillips nor Phoenix officially confirmed their involvement in the possible project, the director stated in early 2020 that he was willing to sign on alongside the actor. “When a movie does $1 billion and cost $60 million to make, of course it comes up,” he laughed. “But Joaquin and I haven’t really decided on it. We’re open. I mean, I’d love to work with him on anything, quite frankly. So who knows? But it would have to have a real thematic resonance the way this one did, ultimately being about childhood trauma and the lack of love, and the loss of empathy. All those things are really what made this movie work for us, so we’d have to have something that had an equal thematic resonance.” In related news, Warner Bros. and DC are reportedly “committed” to hiring a Black director for its Black Superman film.

Riot Will Record Valorant Voice Chat To Fight Toxicity

Games is going to start recording in-game voice communication in Valorant, with the intention of evaluating and moderating toxic behavior in its first-person shooter. The League of Legends developer announced the new policy Friday in a letter to players. Valorant is the only game in which Riot will record and review voice chat right now, despite the policy applying to all Riot games, including Teamfight Tactics and League of Legends. Riot said it will listen to and review voice logs only if a player is reported. Players who don’t want their voice chat recorded will have the option to turn off voice chat entirely; otherwise, by using chat functionality on Valorant, your communication will be recorded and moderated. The new policy is a step in Riot’s attempts to make Valorant a game that’s “safe and inclusive for everyone,” the company said. This problem isn’t unique to Valorant, nor is it the first time Riot has tried to moderate toxic behavior in its game communities; League of Legends is notorious for this. And so it was no surprise when players and Riot developers reported sexism, racism, and harassment in Valorant.

Soon after, Riot made a promise to players that it would work to combat this sort of behavior in the game. The company started the Social and Player Dynamics team, led by producer Sara Dadafshar, to work on all social features in Valorant. “Our goal our full-on endeavor is not just to reduce toxicity, but to bring players together as well,” Dadafshar told Polygon. Dadafshar and the Social and Player Dynamics team have already begun implementing some changes to Valorant that players may have noticed, like detection systems for AFK players and new reporting tools. Voice-chat moderation beginning with recording player chat is the next step in moderating toxic Valorant players. In 2020, Sony was criticized for implementing an unannounced feature that gave the company the ability to record voice chat audio for “moderation review.” The problem wasn’t necessarily that Sony was recording voice chat, but rather that the system wasn’t clearly explained. Players raised privacy concerns, with some worried that Sony was actively monitoring voice chat at all times. Later, Sony clarified that voice chat recordings would only be used to review complaints. Riot appears to be anticipating similar concerns and is addressing that directly; after all, the company has already been dealing with players questioning Vanguard, the Valorant anti-cheat system. “Ultimately, it makes sense that we’re doing this,” Dadafshar said. “I hope that players will see that and understand we can’t moderate without moderating. I hope [players] see the bigger picture of it all.” As part of its announcement, Riot addressed data privacy, too: We believe we should collect the absolute minimum data to effectively run our games and continuously improve your experience. When we collect data, we’ll be transparent, we’ll keep it for only as long as necessary, and we’ll protect it as if it were our own. We know collecting voice data is a concern for many of you, but be assured that we would never ship anything if we weren’t comfortable having our own data treated the same way. And if you prefer to not have your voice chat captured, you may turn off voice chat. Riot also clarified to Polygon that it’s not monitoring all voice activity coming into the computer just voice communications using Valorant’s official channels. Voice chat evaluations won’t start to happen immediately, Riot said. The new behavior system tools are still in development; players won’t notice much happening right away. According to Dadafshar, the tool in development will work “kind of like Amazon Alexa,” in that it “responds and reacts” to player chat using “contextual clues of natural language” to “moderate in real time.” “But the end road for this is to actually moderate what is being said,” Dadafshar said. “When someone starts to say something bad, we can be like, ‘no, you can’t do that.’ Obviously we’re a little bit away from that, but this is definitely the first step. That sort of catch is happening right now with text we just launched that. Now, the next step is to not only make text [moderation] better, but voice as well.” Riot will continue to update Valorant with new features, including ones that address player behavior. Dadafshar pointed to features like player reputation and honor tools, like in League of Legends. But Riot also wants to create tools to bring like-minded players together, like a search feature for people looking for groups to play with. “We have a long journey ahead of us,” Dadafshar said. “And I want to fix that for not only just the players, but for myself.”

SpaceX to launch astronauts to the International Space Station

The two Americans, one French and one Japanese astronaut climbed into Teslas for the ride to their rocket, all courtesy of Elon Musk's companies. SpaceX is aiming for a split-second liftoff at 5:49 a.m., an hour before sunrise. Good weather is forecast. Four astronauts from three countries will embark on the third-ever crewed flight for Elon Musk's company, and the first from SpaceX to make use of a previously flown rocket booster and spacecraft. The astronauts were supposed to fly to the International Space Station on Thursday. But liftoff was delayed because of poor weather offshore. SpaceX's Dragon capsule requires calm waves and winds in case an emergency splashdown is needed on the climb to orbit. Friday's SpaceX launch will make use of the same rocket booster that powered the 2020 Demo-2 mission, as well as the same spacecraft, dubbed "Endeavour." SpaceX has long made reusability a cornerstone of its business plan, hoping that recovering and refurbishing hardware will drive down the cost of spaceflight.

Though the company has re-flown boosters and spacecraft dozens of times on satellite and cargo launches over the past several years, this will mark the first time the company will reuse hardware for a crewed mission. NASA astronauts Shane Kimbrough and Megan McArthur will be joined by French astronaut Thomas Pesquet of the European Space Agency, and Akihiko Hoshide from Japan. They'll spend six months aboard the International Space Station after their Crew Dragon capsule docks early Saturday morning. The astronauts' Crew Dragon will separate from the rocket shortly after reaching Earth's orbit traveling at speeds topping 17,000 miles per hour and the crew will spend nearly a full day aboard the spacecraft as it slowly maneuvers toward the 21-year-old International Space Station, which orbits about 250 miles above ground. Kimbrough, McArthur, Pesquet, and Hoshide will join seven astronauts already on board the station, four of whom arrived on a different SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule in November. That'll put the space station's total staff at 11 one of the largest crews the ISS has ever hosted. But that number will quickly drop back down to seven when four other astronauts hitch a ride home from the station on April 28. NASA has spent more than a decade working to boost staffing aboard the 21-year-old space station after the retirement of its Space Shuttle program in 2011 left Russia's Soyuz spacecraft as the only option for getting astronauts to and from the ISS. The United States had been paying Russia as much as $90 million per seat for those trips. For years, SpaceX worked under a $2.6 billion fixed-price contract to develop its Crew Dragon spacecraft under NASA's Commercial Crew program, which for the first time in space agency history handed over the task of building and testing a crew-worthy spacecraft to the private sector. SpaceX made history last May with the first crewed launch of a Crew Dragon on a mission called Demo-2, which carried NASA astronauts Douglas Hurley and Robert Behnken to the ISS for a four-month stay. A second crewed SpaceX mission took off in November. (Boeing is working under a similar contract to develop its own capsule for the program, called Starliner, though it is still in the testing phase.) A prime focus of the astronauts' mission will be to study "tissue chips," or "small models of human organs containing multiple cell types that behave much the same as they do in the body" and that NASA hopes will advance the development of drugs and vaccines, according to the space agency. That work will build on years of studying biological and other scientific phenomena aboard the ISS, where the microgravity environment can give scientists a better fundamental understanding of how something works. McArthur is a Space Shuttle veteran and is married to Behnken, who co-piloted SpaceX's historic Demo-2 mission last May. McArthur told reporters over the weekend that she was able to get "years of experience" with the Crew Dragon vehicle as Behnken worked alongside SpaceX during the Crew Dragon development process. "I had several years, really, of learning from him along the way," McArthur, who will pilot the Crew-2 mission and holds a doctorate in oceanography, said. McArthur will be joined by NASA's Kimbrough, a retired Army colonel and a veteran of two previous ISS missions. Their crewmates, Japan's Hoshide and France's Pesquet, both have prior spaceflight experience as well. Pesquet said he appreciated the chance to fly aboard the refurbished rocket booster that helps lift the capsule into the void. The weathered hardware still covered in soot from their prior flights, allowed him and his crewmates to to "draw our initials" on the side of the vehicle. "I don't know if [the writing] is gonna stick, but I've found it really cool," he said.