Shipping experts say the big winter storm across a wide swath of the country should be business as usual--if their safeguards hold. Up to two-thirds of the US is facing down the threat of serious snow, cold, and ice this weekend, with the potential to snarl roads (and the businesses that depend on them) from Texas up to New York City . At this point, grocery stores, logistics experts, warehouse operators, and trucking companies have been prepping for days. Still, the effects on the supply chain--and the retail store shelves that depend on them--are yet to be determined. On one hand, this is winter business as usual.

The AI boom is driving an unprecedented wave of data center construction, but there aren't enough skilled tradespeople in the US to keep up. AI companies like Meta and OpenAI have been offering multimillion-dollar pay packages to top talent, hoping to lure the best researchers and engineers away from their competitors. But there's another dimension of the AI talent wars that has garnered far less attention: the massive shortage of electricians, plumbers, and heating and cooling technicians in the US who can build the physical data centers that power AI. The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that between 2024 and 2034, there will be a shortage of roughly 81,000 electricians on average each year in the US, measured in terms of unfilled jobs. The BLS projects the number of employed electricians to grow 9 percent over the next decade, "much faster than the average for all occupations."

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. At the same time, IDC predicts that the PC market could also shrink by 8.9 per cent during the year. Research firm IDC predicts that the average price of computers could rise by up to 8% in 2026 due to a global shortage of memory chips (RAM and NAND). The background is the sharp increase in demand for HBM memory for AI data centers, which is prioritized over the production of consumer memory, which is less profitable for manufacturers. Meanwhile, IDC predicts that the PC market could also shrink by between 2.4 and 8.9 percent in 2026 as a result of the shortage.

Why is AI making computers and games consoles more expensive? The latest commodity coveted by the AI industry is computer memory, and the sector is signing deals directly with manufacturers for billions of dollars worth of chips - the very same chips that consumers use in smartphones, laptops and games consoles. At best, this is driving up prices, and at worst, it is causing shortages that limit production. Why does AI need so much memory? AI models are very, very big.

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. AI is causing a DRAM apocalypse and it's affecting the whole PC market this holiday season. This year, Black Friday tech shoppers should heed one important message: Don't wait, buy now. Because certain components are skyrocketing in price--and it's expected to get even worse. DRAM prices, for example, have doubled in little more than a month. AI hyperscalers have snapped up whatever they can buy.

Drug shortages pose critical risks to patient care and healthcare systems worldwide, yet the effectiveness of regulatory interventions remains poorly understood due to information asymmetries in pharmaceutical supply chains. We propose \textbf{ShortageSim}, addresses this challenge by providing the first simulation framework that evaluates the impact of regulatory interventions on competition dynamics under information asymmetry. Using Large Language Model (LLM)-based agents, the framework models the strategic decisions of drug manufacturers and institutional buyers, in response to shortage alerts given by the regulatory agency. Unlike traditional game theory models that assume perfect rationality and complete information, ShortageSim simulates heterogeneous interpretations on regulatory announcements and the resulting decisions. Experiments on self-processed dataset of historical shortage events show that ShortageSim reduces the resolution lag for production disruption cases by up to 84\%, achieving closer alignment to real-world trajectories than the zero-shot baseline. Our framework confirms the effect of regulatory alert in addressing shortages and introduces a new method for understanding competition in multi-stage environments under uncertainty. We open-source ShortageSim and a dataset of 2,925 FDA shortage events, providing a novel framework for future research on policy design and testing in supply chains under information asymmetry.

Only four bottles of Asahi Super Dry beer are left on the shelves of Ben Thai, a cosy restaurant in the Tokyo suburb of Sengawacho. Its owner, Sakaolath Sugizaki, expects to get a few more soon, but she says her supplier is keeping the bulk of its stock for bigger customers. That's because Asahi, the maker of Japan's best-selling beer, was forced to halt production at most of its 30 factories in the country at the end of last month after being hit by a cyber-attack. While all of its facilities in Japan - including six breweries - have now partially reopened, its computer systems are still down. That means it has to process orders and shipments manually - using pen, paper and fax machines - resulting in much fewer shipments than before the attack.

Things to Do in L.A. Tap to enable a layout that focuses on the article. How bad is California's housing shortage? It depends on who's doing the counting This is read by an automated voice. Please report any issues or inconsistencies here . Imagine you've finally taken your car to the mechanic to investigate that mysterious warning light that's been flashing on your dashboard for the past week and a half.

Abstract-- This paper investigates a passivity-based approach to output consensus analysis in heterogeneous networks com - posed of non-identical agents coupled via nonlinear intera ctions, in the presence of measurement and/or communication noise. Focusing on agents that are input-feedforward passive (IFP), we first examine whether a shortage of passivity in some agents can be compensated by a passivity surplus in others, in the sense of preserving the passivity of the transformed open-l oop system defined by the agent dynamics and network topology. We show that such compensation is only feasible when at most one agent lacks passivity, and we characterise how this defic it can be offset using the excess passivity within the group of agents. For general networks, we then investigate passivit y compensation within the feedback interconnection by lever aging the passivity surplus in the coupling links to locally compe nsate for the lack of passivity in the adjacent agents. In particul ar, a distributed condition, expressed in terms of passivity in dices and coupling gains, is derived to ensure output consensus of the interconnected network.

Tran* sat across from me, phone in hand, scrolling. "I just wanted to make sure I didn't say the wrong thing," he explained, referring to a disagreement with his partner. "So I asked ChatGPT what I should say." He read the chatbot-generated message aloud. It was articulate, logical and composed – too composed.