San Francisco Chronicle Business & Technology News - Spoken Edition

Free shipping for all Amazon says it will offer customers free shipping on orders delivered through Christmas, regardless of whether they are members of the Prime membership program. Rival Target recently announced its holiday offer of free two-day shipping, saying it will ship hundreds of thousands of items free, with no minimum order size, from Nov. 1 to Dec. 22.

Lime grows Lime has hired Joe Kraus, a general partner at GV, Alphabet’s investment arm, as its first chief operating officer. Kraus is on Lime’s board of directors and helped lead GV’s share in a $335 million investment in the electric scooter company this year. The San Francisco startup is worth an estimated $1.1 billion. Kraus was a co-founder of internet portal Excite during the first dot-com boom.

A temporary hotel worker at San Francisco’s Marriott Marquis said she was fired after speaking to The Chronicle about her claim of unpaid wages. Maria Calles, a Salinas resident, said she was fired Thursday by Marriott contractor Environmental Service Partners, which hired temporary cleaners to replace striking hotel workers. The Marriott strike has spread to eight U.S. cities and is in its fifth week in San Francisco, with workers demanding higher pay and safer working conditions.

The crime: The spaghetti sauce did it in the dining room. The victim: Your favorite suit. And you need to wear it next week. You need a dry cleaner that will restore your threads, on time, and without fleecing you. Bay Area Consumers’ Checkbook and Checkbook.org collected consumer ratings and compared prices at 241 dry cleaners and found major differences in quality ratings and price. The good news: You don’t have to pay more to get great results.

Thanks to inflation, workers will be able to save an additional $500 in their tax-sheltered 401(k) and Individual Retirement Accounts next year, the Internal Revenue Service announced Thursday. Employees who participate in 401(k), 403(b), most 457 plans, and the federal government’s Thrift Savings Plan can contribute a maximum of $19,000 in 2019, up from $18,500 this year. Before that, it was stuck at $18,000 for three years.

Welcome back to Tech Chronicle. If you don’t already subscribe to the newsletter, move fast and sign up. Move slowly and fix things Whatever happened to “move fast and break things”? In Facebook’s third-quarter earnings call with analysts Tuesday, Mark Zuckerberg made one thing clear: Fixing Facebook is going to take time. Cue George Harrison. As the earnings revealed, Zuckerberg has money, a whole lot of spending money.

Waymo is the first company in California allowed to test robot cars on public roads with no human driver behind the steering wheel, it said Tuesday. The California Department of Motor Vehicles has given Waymo a permit for up to 40 fully autonomous cars to drive both day and night on city streets, rural highways and highways with posted speeds up to 65 mph. The company did not say how soon the vehicles might roll.

October is living up to its reputation as the scariest month for the stock market. After a week of wild swings, the Dow Jones industrial average and S&P 500 index are down for the year if you exclude dividends, or up a fraction of a percent if you include them. Despite losing almost 11 percent this month, the tech-heavy Nasdaq composite is still up nearly 4 percent in 2018. Fortunately, October is almost over.

Lutron Smart Lighting Cnet rating: 4.5 stars out of 5 The good: Lutron’s in-wall smart switches are reliable performers that work with Alexa, Nest, IFTTT, Apple HomeKit and Google Assistant, to name a few. The app is easy to use, and such helpful features as geofencing, scene management and a security mode that will help make it look like you’re home when you’re not.

As a strike by 2,500 Marriott hotel workers in San Francisco approaches its fourth week and the giant Oracle OpenWorld conference begins, the bills are adding up for businesses. The day before the 1,000-person ComNet 2018 conference earlier this month in San Francisco, the organizers scrapped months of planning and changed venues. The strike posed a moral challenge for the event’s organizer.

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As a strike by 2,500 Marriott hotel workers in San Francisco approaches its fourth week and the giant Oracle Openworld conference begins, the bills are adding up for businesses. The day before the 1,000-person ComNet 2018 conference in San Francisco was set to open this month, the organizers scrapped months of planning and changed venues. The strike posed a moral challenge for the event’s organizer, whose stated mission is providing a voice for good causes.

Number of the day $2 billion That’s how much more Netflix expects to borrow to help pay for programming. The Los Gatos company’s announcement Monday, which wasn’t a surprise, comes because it is spending far more than its business generates — it’s expected to burn through $3 billion this year. The new bond offering will be added to its existing debt of $11.8 billion.

Jack Dorsey, the head of Square and Twitter, unleashed a tweetstorm critical of a San Francisco ballot measure aimed at slashing homelessness — and expressed concern about Square’s future in the city if the initiative passes. Proposition C would tax the biggest businesses in San Francisco to raise as much as $300 million for homeless programs. It would about double what the city already spends to assist homeless people and keep them housed.

In the global race to build artificial intelligence, it was a missed opportunity. Jeff Hawkins, a Silicon Valley veteran who spent the past decade exploring the mysteries of the human brain, arranged a meeting with DeepMind, the world’s leading AI lab. Scientists at DeepMind, which is owned by Google’s parent company, Alphabet, want to build machines that can do anything the brain can do.