Microsoft does not want to move jobs out of the United States but certain decisions out of Washington could potentially force its hands, the company’s President and Chief Legal Officer Brad Smith warned. From a report: The Trump Administration’s tough stance on immigration has attracted a lot of criticism from big technology firms, which rely heavily on skilled foreign workers from around the world. Smith previously spoke out against efforts to stop the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program — an Obama-era policy that provides legal protection for young immigrants brought to the U.S. illegally as children. Microsoft has advocated the protection of DACA and more broadly supported immigration as a way to make sure U.S. companies are hiring talented people. “We do worry about a couple of the very specific immigration questions that people appear to be debating in Washington,” Smith told CNBC’s Akiko Fujita in an interview on Wednesday. […] “We don’t want to move jobs out of the United States and we hope that we don’t see decision making in Washington that would force us to do that,” he said, adding that Microsoft has been openly speaking to people in Congress, at the White House and even the Canadian government to safeguard the interest of its employees. Microsoft has a development center in Vancouver, which Smith described as a “bit of a safety valve.” “We’re not going to cut people loose. We’re going to stand behind them,” he added.

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Source: Slashdot – Microsoft Could Move Some Jobs Abroad Because of US Immigration Policies, Top Exec Says

Geoff Boeing, a postdoc in the Urban Analytics Lab at the University California, Berkeley, has published a blog post that offers a fascinating look at the street orientation of major cities in the USA and around the world. What is interesting in his findings is how cities from different historical periods form different patterns, and also just how uniformly grid-structured most American cities are. From his post: In 1960, Kevin Lynch published The Image of the City, his treatise on the legibility of urban patterns. How coherent is a city’s spatial organization? How do these patterns help or hinder urban navigation? I recently wrote about visualizing street orientations with Python and OSMnx. That is, how is a city’s street network oriented in terms of the streets’ compass bearings? How well does it adhere to a straightforward north-south-east-west layout? I wanted to revisit this by comparing 25 major US cities’ orientations. Each of the cities is represented by a polar histogram (aka rose diagram) depicting how its streets orient. Each bar’s direction represents the compass bearings of the streets (in that histogram bin) and its length represents the relative frequency of streets with those bearings. […] Most cities’ polar histograms similarly tend to cluster in at least a rough, approximate way. But then there are Boston and Charlotte. Unlike most American cities that have one or two primary street grids organizing city circulation, their streets are more evenly distributed in every direction. Boeing published a follow-up to the post to include to compare world cities.

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Source: Slashdot – A Look at Street Network Orientation in Major US Cities