The Future Of Driving, In One Provocative Chart

In the future, only rich people will own cars and only robots will drive them.

That’s the takeaway from a new research note from Morgan Stanley auto analyst Adam Jonas. Like Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk, he predicts that improvements in self-driving technology will eventually lead to bans on human driving on most roads.

Ride-hailing services such as Uber and Lyft, which have already been widely adopted in major urban centers, have paved the way for cities, and eventually suburbs, to adopt mega-fleets of public vehicles that will taxi passengers around. This will dramatically lower the cost per ride to about 25 cents per mile, which is roughly one-tenth of what a traditional taxi costs, Jonas said. He provides no clear timeline for when this might occur.

By contrast, wealthy people -- at least in the near-term -- will own self-driving vehicles, a fact on which Mercedes-Benz and Tesla seem to be banking.

Again, Jonas provides no clear timeline. But an increasing number of luxury carmakers are already adding autonomous features to their vehicles. In October, Tesla's Musk estimated that fully driverless cars will be on the road by 2023.

Here’s how the chart breaks down:

• Quadrant 1: Today, most drivers own or lease their own vehicles, which they drive themselves. Autonomous driving technology is only beginning to emerge.
• Quadrant 2: Over the past few years, ride-hailing services such as Uber, Lyft and Sidecar have alleviated the need to own a car in many major cities, making a driver much more accessible. Jonas said this is a logical step toward the so-called mega-fleets of public, autonomous cars.
• Quadrant 3: Over the next decade, rich people will likely swap out the cars they drive for cars that drive themselves. Already, Tesla is planning to roll out a version of its Model S sedan that has limited autopilot features sometime this summer. The latest version of the car, announced on Wednesday, starts at $67,500 after a Federal Tax Credit.
• Quadrant 4: This is the final evolution in the car industry and there is no clear date for when this will come to fruition. But with few exceptions, most people will be driven by cars that are either a public utility or part of a privately-owned fleet that users subscribe to use. At this point, laws will likely restrict human driving to select roads, Jonas wrote. Other forms of public transportation, such as subway systems, may become obsolete.

The CEO Who Took On Indiana's Anti-LGBT Law -- And Won

For Marc Benioff, the fight against Indiana's widely criticized "religious freedom" law was personal.

The Salesforce CEO was a leading voice in the national outcry against Indiana's Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which Gov. Mike Pence (R) signed last month. Critics argued that the original version of the RFRA would have permitted businesses to discriminate against LGBT people.

Benioff said his advocacy was an effort to help his employees and customers whom the law might have affected, something he describes as being key to his personal philosophy.

“I’m all for a healthy mind and a healthy body, but I’m also about having a healthy planet and a healthy country and taking care of others that don’t have as much,” Benioff, a habitual meditator, told The Huffington Post on Monday from his vacation home in Hawaii. “That’s my spirituality.”

On March 25, a day before Pence first signed Indiana's RFRA, Benioff became the first major business leader to speak out against the law by threatening to scale back his company's investment in the state. After the governor approved the measure, Benioff swung back even harder, posting what he called the "tweet heard 'round the world," in which he announced plans to cancel all Salesforce programs that would require customers or employees to travel to Indiana. Indeed, it was retweeted nearly 9,800 times and favorited more than 8,300 times and became part part of the national conversation.

The following week, he stepped up his campaign again, promising relocation packages to Salesforce employees in Indiana who wanted to transfer elsewhere.

“CEOs are very much the advocates of their customers and employees, as well as of the environment and local communities,” Benioff said. “The most successful CEOs today are advocates for their stakeholders, not just their shareholders.”

After a week of backlash, Pence approved a revised version of the measure, this time explicitly banning businesses from refusing service because of a person's sexual orientation or gender identity.

Benioff may have been the first major CEO to express his opposition to the legislation, but he was soon joined by others. Corporate giants and organizations from Apple to NASCAR rallied behind LGBT rights groups in Indiana to fight the law.

Still, the Salesforce chief may have been uniquely positioned to champion the cause in Indiana. For starters, San Francisco-based Salesforce became the state's largest tech employer when it acquired the marketing software firm ExactTarget in 2013.

And, Benioff has a lot of powerful friends.

The day after the law passed, he said, he emailed the people he regularly meets and dines with in San Francisco, many of whom are top tech industry executives. Among them was Max Levchin, one of the co-founders of PayPal and the chief executive of financial management site Affirm. Four days after Benioff sent the email, when he flicked on CNBC as he started his morning workout at the gym, he saw Levchin railing against Indiana’s law.

“I was completely blown away,” Benioff said, noting that Levchin went on to organize more than 70 top executives to sign a joint statement condemning the law last week. “This is really the first time that we have started something, and the reason it got started -- the reason it was successful -- is because it was so many different CEOs banding together.”

Benioff has long practiced the "stakeholder theory," a philosophy advocated by World Economic Forum founder and chairman Klaus Schwab, among others. The ideology views shareholders as second to employees, customers, suppliers, communities, trade unions and others who are affected by a company’s commerce. Imbued with a strong sense of corporate responsibility and connected with its community, a firm that's guided by these principles might, the philosophy suggests, earn greater profits over time, translating into higher returns for investors. It’s the corporate equivalent of building good karma.

In the two weeks since Benioff began his campaign, emails have poured in from workers thanking him for stepping up. He said he's never received so much positive employee feedback in his 16-year tenure at Salesforce.

“When the economic hammer came down, that’s when things really started to change,” he said. “There’s one word that was continually used by everyone in Indiana, which was ‘historic.’ That’s something that we in San Francisco, or those of us who don’t live in Indiana, don’t have the perspective to understand, but for them this was historic.”

Benioff pledged to continue the fight by urging the Indiana legislature to add the LGBT community as a protected class under local civil rights laws in its next session.

“The conversation happened the right way,” he said. “It opens the door for another change and another change, probably in the next legislature.”

The CEO admits that not every step in this push to change the law has been graceful. He became the target of some criticism after a CNN interview last Wednesday, in which he said, "One thing that you're seeing is that there is a third [political] party emerging in this country, which is the party of CEOs." The comment provoked pushback from those who already fear the influx of money in politics. Benioff said he misspoke as a result of his excitement over the business community’s rapid response to the situation in Indiana.

Benioff hopes business leaders can continue to push for important legislation that affects their stakeholders, and cites patent and immigration reform as specific examples.

Asked whether Indiana just happened to provide the right place and time for business leaders to unite behind a particular political cause, or whether the momentum would continue to grow, Benioff said he was unsure.

"This was so spontaneous, it happened so quickly," he said. "But CEOs do have a lot of power, like it or not, so they need to bring on a stakeholder philosophy."

Why We Should All Stop Trying To Multitask Right Now

People of all attention-span lengths understand how easily a text message, phone call or email notification can distract them from an important task. No one is fully capable of addressing them while staying focused on their current project -- at least not successfully. Yet, for some reason, many of us attempt it anyway.

Janice Marturano from the Institute for Mindful Leadership joined HuffPost Live host Caroline Modarressy-Tehrani to explain how the brain is physically incapable of multitasking and why it's not worth trying to juggle several tasks simultaneously.

"What we understand from our study of the brain at this point is that we cannot multitask -- we're simply not capable of doing it," said Marturano. "What we do is we flip back and forth very quickly... There's a huge productivity loss, because when I move from this iPad to this tweet to this email to this project I'm studying, I can't pick it up where I left it off. I have to take a few steps back and ramp back into it, and that's a huge productivity loss."

Watch the full HuffPost Live clip above to hear more about how the brain is incapable of multitasking.

Microsoft Launches Pilot Program To Hire People With Autism

Microsoft is making big strides in creating an inclusive workplace.

The company said it will launch a pilot program to hire people with autism for full-time positions at its headquarters in Redmond, Washington.

“Microsoft is stronger when we expand opportunity and we have a diverse workforce that represents our customers,” Mary Ellen Smith, Microsoft's corporate vice president of worldwide operations, wrote in a company blog post on April 3. “People with autism bring strengths that we need at Microsoft, each individual is different, some have amazing ability [sic] to retain information, think at a level of detail and depth or excel in math or code.”

Smith, whose 19-year-old son was diagnosed with autism at age 4, went on to write: "At Microsoft, we encourage all employees to realize their full potential. This belief and the inspiration I get from my son is what drives me personally and why I was honored to speak."

The program is part of a larger movement among companies to bring more individuals with autism into the workforce. It is a collaboration with Specialisterne, a Danish firm that trains and finds employment for people with autism.

Specialisterne worked with German software giant SAP last year to introduce a similar initiative to several of SAP’s North American offices after a successful pilot program in India, Germany and Ireland, the Wall Street Journal reports. SAP hopes to hire around 650 people with autism by 2020, which would represent 1 percent of its total staff, per WSJ.

Microsoft did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The company has been active lately in aiming to create higher labor standards. This new move comes less than two weeks after Microsoft announced it would require its major U.S. contractors to offer employees 15 days of paid leave, an issue that even the White House has been reluctant to pick up.

March's Weak Jobs Report Is More Evidence The Fed Should Be Careful

The March jobs report, released today by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, was not good. After months of very strong jobs reports, though, it was a specific kind of not good: not outright negative, and nowhere near apocalyptic, just confusingly bad.

As unclear as this month's jobs report was in terms of telling an obvious story about the U.S. economy, when it comes to raising interest rates, it will suit the Federal Reserve just fine. At its last meeting, the Fed tied its decisions on interest rates more closely to economic data, and yet also indicated it would be loathe to raise rates too early and snuff out economic growth. This jobs report lets it be true to both commitments.

The U.S. economy added 126,00 jobs in March, far less than the 247,000 economists, on average, had expected. What's worse, January and February job numbers were revised down by a total of 69,000, making this report even weaker. The unemployment rate was unchanged at 5.5 percent.

In the first few months of 2015, job growth seems to have slowed down from a breakneck pace in 2014. The job market has grown by a very solid 261,000 new jobs per month over the past six months, the New York Times' Neil Irwin noted. But, as Slate's Jordan Weissmann retorted, in the past three month's we've averaged just 197,000 new jobs per month.

It's still too early to say what these numbers are telling us. Has the U.S. job market finally turned the corner and left the disfigurement of the recession behind? Or is it still scarred and somewhat limping? It could be either.

Wages are also sending mixed signals. Wage growth has been remarkably and depressingly steady at a pace of about 2 percent per year for five years. It stayed remarkably and depressingly steady in March, rising 2.1 percent from a year ago.

But if you look at the past three months, annualized wage growth is an impressive 4 percent, the Peterson Institute's Justin Wolfers pointed out. And other indicators, like employer compensation costs and the number of companies that say they plan to give raises, seem to indicate wage growth is finally picking up.

So, amid all this "on the one hand, on the other hand" data, what is the Federal Reserve supposed to think about the health of the economy -- let alone the wisdom of raising interest rates, as it is widely expected to do at some point in the near future?

As University of Oregon professor Tim Duy pointed out in his excellent analysis of the Fed's most recent meeting, by removing the word "patient" from its description of how it thinks about interest-rate hikes, the Fed is saying it will let data dictate its decision. And the data from the jobs market, even before this bad jobs report, Duy noted, was saying "don't raise rates" anytime soon.

In other words, Duy says that Fed Chair Janet Yellen "[moved] the Fed both closer to and further from the first rate hike of this cycle." That's not as inscrutable as it sounds: The Fed's "closer" to the data, which could potentially improve quickly, and "further" because the data, as it is now, says don't raise rates.

And the March jobs report reinforces that stance: a data-dependent rate hike is still a ways off.

Why Corporate America Is Finally Raising Wages

Some of the country’s biggest employers are finally raising wages amid mounting pressure from protesters and a hardier job market.

McDonald’s on Wednesday became the latest major company to give workers -- albeit a fraction of its total workforce -- a pay bump that will lift average hourly pay to $9.90 from $9.01. The move, which will go into effect on July 1, follows a similar change made in February by Walmart, the nation’s largest private employer.

What, after years of stagnant wage growth for low-paid workers, is causing corporations to shell out more to their staff?

For some companies, the pay raise has been compelled by a sense of ethical leadership.

Aetna Chairman and CEO Mark Bertolini raised the minimum wage at the health insurance company to $16 per hour after reading French economist Thomas Piketty’s bestseller Capital In The Twenty-First Century, which warns of the increasingly wide gap between rich and poor.

Other firms have been motivated by the desire to maintain market share.

“We’ve known for a really long time that if you look like a good corporate citizen, that’s good for sales,” Bob Keener, spokesman for the nonprofit Business for a Fair Minimum Wage, told The Huffington Post. “If you make a big public announcement about how you’re going to raise wages, you look like a good corporate citizen, and that’s going to increase your sales.”

Competition is also driving wages up. Call it a wage-hike domino effect. As the U.S. economy continues to add jobs, even retailers who claim to keep prices low in part by minimizing payroll expenses must increase how much they pay their workers to avoid losing them.

Since apparel giant Gap Inc. raised its minimum wage to $9 per hour last year, the company has seen a major influx in applicants, The Washington Post reported.

“When other large, low-wage employers boost their wages, McDonald’s has to be concerned about its employees moving to another employer where they can get another buck per hour,” said Christine Owens, executive director of the nonprofit National Employment Law Project. “There is undoubtedly some tightening in the labor market at the low end that is having an effect on wages.”

Plus, higher wages are good for business. Sales at McDonald’s and Walmart have languished over the past year, and boosting wages could actually be part of a strategy to help turn things around.

For every extra $1 a company spends each month in payroll, it could get back anywhere from $4 to $28 in monthly sales, according to a 2007 study by professors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and elsewhere.

Companies are also facing intense pressure from protesters to pay a living wage. Workers united under such groups as the "Fight for 15," which advocates for a $15 minimum wage, have led rallies in cities across the world, including a major gathering outside McDonald’s headquarters in Oak Brook, Illinois, last May. Fight for 15 is also planning a series of strikes for later this month.

Protests for higher pay are gaining steam. This week, Seattle began the process of raising its minimum wage to $15 per hour. Los Angeles is considering bumping the minimum wage for the city’s hotel workers to $15.37 -- making it the highest in the country.

While both McDonald’s and Walmart aim for a $10 average wage by next year, that is still $5 below the wage that protesters are demanding. Critics worry that these incremental pay boosts could be an attempt to undercut a movement that is gaining serious clout.

“This is a PR and a political move meant to knock the wind out of this growing and increasingly militant movement,” Peter Dreier, a professor of urban policy at Occidental College, told HuffPost. “The companies are now competing with each other not to look like they’re the worst employer in the world.”

McDonald's Is Raising Wages For Some Workers

McDonald's is finally giving some of its workers a raise.

The fast-food giant on Wednesday announced plans to give employees a 10-percent pay bump and some extra benefits.

The raise will affect about 90,000 workers at a small fraction of McDonald’s stores. Employees at franchises, which make up the majority of the burger chain's locations, won't be affected.

The increase will lift the average hourly wage at McDonald’s to $9.90, and to more than $10 by the end of next year. The rate currently sits at $9.01, according to the Wall Street Journal.

McDonald's will also let workers at non-franchised locations who have been with the company for more than a year earn up to five days of paid time off each year. Additionally, the company will pay for workers to earn a high school diploma and offer some college tuition assistance. Franchise workers will have access to the educational perks, but not the paid time off.

“We’ve been working on a comprehensive benefits package for our employees -- the people who bring our brand to life for customers every day in our U.S. restaurants,” CEO Steve Easterbrook said in a statement. “We’ve listened to our employees and learned that -- in addition to increased wages -- paid personal leave and financial assistance for completing their education would make a real different in their careers and lives.”

McDonald's did not immediately respond to a request for further comment.

The move comes two weeks ahead of a planned international strike organized by the movement Fight for $15, which urges fast-food employers to pay workers a minimum wage of $15 per hour.

The group condemned McDonald’s announcement as a “weak move for a company that made $5.6 billion in profits last year.”

“This is too little to make a real difference, and only covers a fraction of workers,” Kwanza Brooks, a McDonald’s employee earning $7.25 per hour in Charlotte, North Carolina, said in a statement. “We’re going to keep fighting until we win $15 and union rights for all fast-food workers and our families.”

McDonald's joins a growing list of low-wage employers, including Walmart and Target, that have raised wages in recent months. Labor advocates point out that wages of $9 or $10 an hour, though well above the national minimum wage of $7.25, are still not enough to pull many families out of poverty.

The raise also marks the latest step by McDonald’s to revitalize its ailing brand amid slumping sales. The company kicked off an aggressive campaign last October to present its food as authentic, going as far as to tout the fact that its meals can, in fact, rot. In January, McDonald's said it would cut more items from its menu as it tries to slim down options. Last month, the chain said it would eliminate human antibiotics from its chicken supply.