Employee benefits are in the spotlight this week, and that’s because of three recent stories about US companies cutting back on non-wage compensations for workers.

A Texas tech consulting firm with a forgettable name—TTEC—suddenly became a lot more memorable when it suspended its discretionary 401(k) match program for 16,000 employees through at least the end of 2026. According to Business Insider, which viewed an internal TTEC memo, the company plans to invest in AI certifications, AI tools and training, and automation, among other things.

The auditing and consulting giant Deloitte is also reportedly slashing benefits for some workers starting next year. This includes reducing PTO, halving parental leave, and eliminating a $50,000 reimbursement for family planning services such as adoption, surrogacy, and IVF. San Francisco-based Zoom, meanwhile, has made a smaller-scale change and reduced its parental leave for employees from 22 weeks to 18 weeks for birthing parents.

So what’s the driving force behind this? And are there more cuts to come? The latter is impossible to answer, and the former is unfortunately more complicated than “corporate ghouls go AI.”

First off, “what Deloitte did is completely unconscionable,’” says Joan C. Williams, a professor at UC Law San Francisco, the author of several books on work culture and class dynamics, and an oft-cited scholar on these topics. The consulting firm is cutting the benefits of a specific class of internal workers—in admin, IT support, and finance—while leaving intact benefits for people in client-facing roles. An affected worker will see their parental leave cut from 16 weeks to just eight weeks.

“It treats people differently based on the type of job they’re in, and cutting any mother down to eight weeks of paid leave is just outlandish,” Williams says. “When labor is tight, employers are more generous. But once the power shifts, the benefits contract.”

AI certainly is a convenient excuse these days for any corporate decision that harms workers. But the impetus here is also the cost of the benefits themselves. Earlier this year subsidies from the Affordable Care Act lapsed, and people began dropping out of health care plans entirely. Insurers have cited this as one reason they’ve raised premiums.

Sarahjane Sacchetti, a former top executive at benefits administration companies Cleo and Collective Health, who is working on a new health care initiative, told me that the costs of employer-sponsored health plans have increased significantly over the past five years. A survey last year of over 1,700 US employers by the Mercer health care consulting group found that the health care cost per worker was expected to rise on average 6.5 percent in 2026, the highest since 2010. And this was after factoring in cost-reduction measures; otherwise, the cost of a plan would go up by nearly 9 percent.

“This just starts to eat into how you think about total compensation as an employer,” Sacchetti says. That doesn’t mean the corporation is the ‘good guy,’ she says, but the poor state of American health care policy and lack of safety net are responsible for a lot of the stress that plagues undercompensated or laid-off workers.

Williams points out that the US is one of the few countries that doesn’t offer a federal paid maternal leave—putting it in league with Papua New Guinea and Suriname. “This just shows how crazy it is to provide employee basics like pension and paid parental leave through private employers rather than how other industrialized countries do it,” Williams says. Her proposed solution? “The US needs to join the rest of the universe.”

The irony, of course, is that the US government professes to be obsessed with women having more babies. If women in the US are—as celebrity doctor Mehmet Oz put it this week in the Oval Office—“underbabied,” a comprehensive paid federal leave policy would be the obvious place to start. (Oz also said that “making babies” is “the most creative thing the universe knows.” Don’t tell the AI CEOs.)

Gantri, a San Francisco-based company known for making soft, stylized 3D-printed lamps, is going wireless. That’s thanks to a new partnership with the design firm Ammunition.

Gantri 3D-prints its lamps using plastics made from corn-based polylactic acid (PLA) in its Bay Area facilities. The result is a collection of carefully designed light fixtures with gentle curves that aim to make luxury-style lighting feel somewhat affordable. (Prices range from $200 to $500.)

Last year, the company introduced a program called Gantri Made, which allows shoppers to customize their lights and gives third-party designers the ability to build their own designs using Gantri’s foundational pieces.

Gantri first partnered with Ammunition in 2020, developing a line of stylish lamps aiming to highlight what premium light pieces could look like. You’ve almost certainly seen something built with Ammunition’s flair. The firm designed Beats by Dre headphones, the Square point-of-sale tablets you see in shops everywhere, and many other projects, from robot coffee machines to Jay-Z’s failed weed vape cartridges.

This Gantri new collab is a range of lamps that include floor lamps, table lamps, and ones small enough to hold in your hand. (Those are rectangular, with designs inspired by piers around San Francisco.) All the lights are wireless and can be removed from charging ports to run for what Gantri says is 10 or more hours of battery life. Gantri is also developing an app to control the lights. They will work with Matter, the connectivity standard that aims to make smart home tech from different companies work together, but that compatibility isn’t expected until next year.

Gantri CEO Ian Yang points out that for most of human history, light sources were something people carried with them—torches, candles, lanterns. Lights staying in fixed places has become the norm, but he wants these wireless lamps to show there’s another way.

“I really think this product is going to change the way that people think about lighting, but also think about the power of digital manufacturing, about this new material that’s plant-based,” Yang says.

The lamps have a custom charging port, which allows them to stand upright and face any direction while still receiving a charge. They also require a custom charger and cannot be charged via USB-C or another cord in a different room. That may inhibit the mobility the lamp promises, as you won’t be able to move them from room to room and plug them in with any USB-C cord lying around—you’d have to bring that proprietary cable with you. But Yang says this was a deliberate choice, even though it was much more difficult than finding a spot for a USB-C connection. He wanted the lamps to feel portable while also having a place for them to become a fixture in a home.

The “Golden Age of Radio” supposedly ended in the ’50s, with the advent of television. But guess what? TV shows were broadcast with radio signals. And today? Radio is everywhere. You have a radio in your car, but maybe you prefer to stream music on your phone. Well, how does the music gets to you? Via radio waves from cell towers, is how. Your GPS runs on radio too. For that matter, so does your home Wi-Fi.

Radio waves are a kind of electromagnetic radiation, just like visible light. But they’re at the bottom end of the spectrum, which makes them harmless to humans, because low frequency means low energy. (High-frequency, high-energy radiation like x-rays or gamma rays are another story.) That’s part of the reason radio waves are ideal for wireless communication. They can also travel vast distances and pass through obstacles like walls.

So radio is as relevant as ever. But did you know you can easily build your own radio transmitter and receiver at home with some simple supplies? I’m going to show you how. It’s a fun project and a good excuse to explore some cool physics.

What Is an Electromagnetic Wave?

For that matter, what is a wave? Imagine you have a long string with one end tied to a door handle. You’re standing across the room, holding the other end. Now, if you shake your hand up and down, you’ll create a disturbance on the string, and that disturbance will move along the length of the string. That’s a wave. Basically, waves transfer energy without transferring matter.

What if you take away the string? In that case, you’d look like a sad human shaking hands with an imaginary friend. Without the string, there’s no wave. Waves need something to “wave” in—they need a medium. You can’t have ocean waves without water. You can’t have sound waves in space, since there’s no air for them to ripple through.

But what if, instead of string, you shook an electric charge (like an electron) up and down? Electric charges create electric fields, so this moving charge will create an oscillating electric field, and that makes an electric wave. And here’s where it gets weird: It turns out that a changing electric field also creates a changing magnetic field. And vice versa: A changing magnetic field creates a changing electric field. We know this from Maxwell’s equations.

This means we have electric and magnetic oscillations traveling together, and each is the medium of the other. The combination is called electromagnetic radiation, also known as “light.” Yes, radio waves are just light, and light can self-propagate through empty space—at the speed of light, as a matter of fact.

A Piezoelectric Radio Station

OK, let’s make a radio wave! For a transmitter, all you need is a grill lighter—you know, the kind with the long tube. When you hold down the trigger, gas is released through the end of the tube and is ignited with a small spark. Here’s one I cut in half: