California is becoming a poster child for the risks utilities face from climate change, from power lines starting wildfires to heat waves forcing increasingly renewable-powered grids to the brink of system collapse. But utilities around the world are facing similar risks as they seek to decarbonize their generation fleets and make their grids more resilient to extreme weather events that are becoming more extreme and more common. While the costs of mitigating those risks are hard to quantify, they're likely much smaller than the costs of doing nothing and facing the alternatives. We're seeing this calculation reflected in many ways, from massive asset manager BlackRock's decision to move away from investments in coal and other global-warming-causing industries, to the maintenance and planning failures that led to the power-line-sparked wildfires that forced Pacific Gas & Electric into bankruptcy last year. Data -- the lifeblood of investors, insurers and other professional calculators of risk -- can help utilities better identify these climate-change challenges and optimize their methods to mitigate them.

It has become clear, in these last decades of decadence, decline, towering institutional violence, and rampant bad taste, that American life is stuck somewhere inside the Paul Verhoeven cinematic universe. In the bloody, satirical sci-fi films that made his name with American audiences, Verhoeven dealt in a singularly unappealing vision of the future, one both luridly inventive and careful about where not to be imaginative. "RoboCop," from 1987, set in a futuristic Detroit, is a gleeful exaggeration of the anxieties of Reagan-era urban life: the office towers are even more isolated, and their boardrooms more brazenly sociopathic; the popular culture is a tick or two more savage and leering; the police are more overmatched and the streets more ungovernable. "Total Recall," released in 1990 and adapted from a short story by Philip K. Dick, does feature humans living on Mars, a private company that implants bespoke memories in its clients, and a brassy three-breasted space prostitute, but its vision of 2084 is in other respects familiar. Mars is dirty, violent, and unequal, and the colony is overseen by the private security force of a capitalist who has staked out a monopoly on oxygen itself.

BREAKING: Uber and Google's Waymo reached a surprise settlement in a lawsuit over self-driving technology. Uber will give Waymo a small stake in the ride-sharing company in the settlement that was reached on the fifth day of a high-profile lawsuit between the two companies. Uber's CEO in a letter expressed regret for how the company acquired technology at the heart of the lawsuit. After their first day in court, there is, it would seem, only one thing both sides of the Waymo-Uber trial agree on: The company that controls the autonomous vehicle market controls the future of transportation. In history's eyes, coming in second is the same as losing.

Lawyers for self-driving car company Waymo play clip from Wall Street in court, as Travis Kalanick is accused of stealing rival's ideas Wed 7 Feb 2018 16.23 EST Last modified on Wed 7 Feb 2018 17.42 EST A scene from the 1987 movie Wall Street became a flashpoint in the trial in which Google's driverless car spinoff Waymo accuses the ride-hailing company Uber of stealing trade secrets. "The point is, ladies and gentlemen, that greed, for lack of a better word, is good," said the lead character, Gordon Gekko, played by Michael Douglas, in a grainy YouTube video shown on Wednesday to a packed room in San Francisco's federal court. The former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick watched from the stand, shifting in his seat. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms – greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge – has marked the upward surge of mankind."

During opening remarks in front of a 10-person jury sitting less than a mile from Uber headquarters, Waymo's lawyers portrayed Uber's former chief executive, Travis Kalanick, as a cheater who would do anything to catch up to his competitor. Uber's attorneys pushed back in their defense, calling Waymo's portrayal "quite a story" while denying the allegations that Uber swiped trade secrets and knowingly used them to develop autonomous vehicles. An Uber attorney, Bill Carmody of Susman Godfrey LLP, said there was no conspiracy or cheating. The high-stakes showdown pits an offshoot of Google against a highflying startup in Uber, two companies estimated to be worth tens of billions of dollars and among the leaders in autonomous-vehicle development. The case could test intellectual property law in Silicon Valley, where top engineers with technical chops are constantly being poached by rival companies.

Waymo, Alphabet's self-driving car company, filed its trade secrets theft lawsuit against Uber almost one year ago. If the case had immediately gone to trial, it might have looked a bit different. By now, though, tales of Uber's broken culture have been splashed across front webpages, new CEO Dara Khosrowshahi is a public contrition pro, and former CEO Travis Kalanick, the guy who allegedly drove the whole "win at all costs" ethos from the top, is, well, former. That makes Kalanick a very useful device for Waymo's legal team. On Monday, the first day of the blockbuster trial over autonomous vehicle lasers between Uber and Waymo, the Waymo lawyers made it clear: Kalanick will play the bad guy here.

SAN FRANCISCO – Uber was either a cheating competitor willing to break the law to win the race to develop self-driving cars, or the victim of an unproven conspiracy theory stitched together by its main rival, Waymo, jurors heard in opening statements of a trade secrets trial on Monday. The first salvos were delivered to a 10-person jury in San Francisco federal court in a civil lawsuit that could help determine who emerges in the forefront of the autonomous car business nearly a year after Alphabet Inc.'s self-driving car unit Waymo sued rival Uber Technologies Inc. The case hinges on whether Uber used apparent trade secrets to advance its autonomous vehicle program. Waymo's allegation is that its former engineer, Anthony Levandowski, downloaded more than 14,000 confidential files in December 2015 containing designs for autonomous vehicles before going to work for Uber and leading its self-driving car unit in 2016. "Waymo wants you to believe that Anthony Levandowski got together with Uber as part of some grand conspiracy to cheat and take trade secrets," Uber attorney Bill Carmody said in his opening statement to the jury.

Two tech giants racing for a lead in autonomous driving clashed Monday in court as former Google car unit Waymo's lawyer argued that Uber's boss deliberately chose'to cheat' to get a leg up on competitors. The accusations flew in the opening day of a trial in which Google parent Alphabet's Waymo division is seeking at least $1 billion over the theft of trade secrets from its self-driving car program. In opening remarks before the jury in San Francisco federal court, Waymo lawyer Charles Verhoeven maintained that Uber's founder and former chief executive Travis Kalanick made the decision to use stolen trade secrets to enable the global ridesharing giant to move into autonomous driving. Google parent Alphabet's Waymo division is seeking at least $1 billion over the theft of trade secrets from its self-driving car program. 'He made a decision and the decision was to cheat,' Verhoeven said.

Google is one step closer to making self-driving cars a reality. In this Dec. 13, 2016, file photo, Anthony Levandowski, head of Uber's self-driving program, speaks about their driverless car in San Francisco. SAN FRANCISCO -- Uber and Waymo's industry-critical battle over self-driving car technology now includes allegations of cover ups, clandestine meetings and big stock payouts. In arguments before U.S. District Judge William Alsup, attorneys for both parties laid out their case related to Waymo's request for a temporary injunction against Uber that would force the ride-hailing company to stop testing its autonomous cars. The day ended without a decision from Alsup.

The movie's opening may as well arrive with an on-screen statement. Loud shrieking lends the impression a couple is having sex, but the first sight is a close-up of a cat. Then the camera cuts to the source of the shrieks, and it turns out what sounded like love was actually an assault. Needling, absurd, sexual, kinetic -- all those adjectives apply to Verhoeven. The Dutch-born director has followed one of the more improbable career arcs in modern cinema -- from European obscurity to Hollywood heights to industry punch-line ("Showgirls," anyone?), back to European acclaim.