Can you can breed these? You too could be in charge of Trump’s pandemic task force! Competence no object! CC-licensed photo by Michael Mandiberg on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

A selection of 11 links for you. Use them wisely. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Coronavirus: YouTube bans ‘medically unsubstantiated’ content • BBC News

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YouTube has banned any coronavirus-related content that directly contradicts World Health Organization (WHO) advice.

The Google-owned service says it will remove anything it deems “medically unsubstantiated”.
Chief executive Susan Wojcicki said the media giant wanted to stamp out “misinformation on the platform”.

The move follows YouTube banning conspiracy theories falsely linking Covid-19 to 5G networks.

Mrs Wojcicki made the remarks on Wednesday during her first interview since the global coronavirus lockdown began.

“So people saying, ‘Take vitamin C, take turmeric, we’ll cure you,’ those are the examples of things that would be a violation of our policy,” she told CNN.

“Anything that would go against World Health Organization recommendations would be a violation of our policy.”

Mrs Wojcicki added YouTube had seen a 75% increase in demand for news from “authoritative” sources.

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So is it also going to remove content that goes against WHO advice on vaccination? How does YouTube justify leaving some rubbish on, but taking other stuff out? Yes, coronavirus is a deadly infectious disease; but so is measles; will all the nonsense around that be removed too? I can’t understand how YouTube can defend doing the one but not the other. Dead is dead, whichever disease kills you.
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Want to find a misinformed public? Facebook’s already done it • The Markup

Aaron Sankin:

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Last week, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote a post pledging to combat misinformation about COVID-19 circulating on Facebook.

“We’ve taken down hundreds of thousands of pieces of misinformation related to COVID-19, including theories like drinking bleach cures the virus or that physical distancing is ineffective at preventing the disease from spreading,” Zuckerberg wrote.

But at the very same time, The Markup found, Facebook was allowing advertisers to profit from ads targeting people that the company believes are interested in “pseudoscience.” According to Facebook’s ad portal, the pseudoscience interest category contained more than 78 million people.

This week, The Markup paid to advertise a post targeting people interested in pseudoscience, and the ad was approved by Facebook. 

Using the same tool, The Markup boosted a post targeting people interested in pseudoscience on Instagram, the Facebook-owned platform that is incredibly popular with Americans under 30. The ad was approved in minutes.

We reached out to Facebook asking about the targeting category on Monday morning. After asking for multiple extensions to formulate a response, company spokesperson Devon Kearns emailed The Markup on Wednesday evening to say that Facebook had eliminated the pseudoscience interest category. 

…we do have an idea what at least one ad targeting the group looks like, since an ad for a hat that would supposedly protect my head from cellphone radiation appeared on my Facebook feed on Thursday, April 16.

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But the plot thickens: when he got in touch with the advertiser, he found that Facebook had expanded the ad into the pseudoscience group. As the story also points out, this is part of a longrunning series of examples where Facebook lets you target people on categories that are, to say the least, surprising.
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Will American shale oil go bust? • The Conversation

Jorge Guira is an associate professor of law and finance at the University of Reading:

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Oil companies are restructuring hastily – assessing the value of reserves, and asking creditors for debt waivers. The US government has helped by extending companies’ ability to offset losses against future tax liabilities, which can make them more attractive to buyers.

Nonetheless, some companies sitting on the priciest oil will get liquidated. In other cases, big creditor banks could take over businesses, or demand mergers and acquisitions, including consolidations.

The biggest uncertainty is how long until the oil price rebounds? With the economy only likely to reopen gradually, demand will stay low for some time while supply remains too high. The futures markets expect WTI to bounce back to the high US$20s by the end of the year, but don’t foresee a return to even US$40 oil until December 2024.

How much US shale oil is worth saving in these straitened circumstances is key. Some estimate as many as 70% of firms will go out of business overall, with some never coming back until oil stabilises above US$50. Others may be taken over by companies prepared to wait for higher prices. As oil historian Daniel Yergin says, “Rocks don’t go bankrupt”. US shale is in a sort of death pageant, and will probably remain that way for the foreseeable future.

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One thing that might save the shale oil companies – temporarily – is that the US Federal Reserve is diving in and buying all sorts of bonds, including the junk bonds that keep them staggering on. But it’s only delaying the inevitable.
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Zoom grows to 300 million users despite security backlash • The Verge

Tom Warren:

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Zoom has now revealed that it has surpassed 300 million daily Zoom meeting participants. That’s up 50% from the 200 million the company reported earlier this month, and a huge jump from the 10 million back in December.

Zoom does say the figures are daily meeting participants, which could mean if you have five Zoom meetings in a day then you’re counted five times. However, Zoom also states in the same blog post that it has “more than 300 million daily users” and that “more than 300 million people around the world are using Zoom during this challenging time.”

Either way, more people are using Zoom despite the security and privacy concerns that have been raised recently. Zoom has implemented a 90-day feature freeze, and the company is releasing Zoom 5.0 this week to address some of the concerns. Zoom 5.0 includes passwords by default, improved encryption, and a new security icon to control meetings.

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Does anyone remember Skype?
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This tool automatically transcribes your Zoom meetings as they happen • The Verge

Jon Porter:

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Automated transcription service Otter.ai now integrates directly into Zoom calls to transcribe meetings on the fly. During a meeting, anyone on the call can click the “Otter.ai Live Transcript” button within their Zoom window to open up the Live Video Meeting Notes on Otter.ai’s site, and participants can then annotate them on the fly. Otter.ai quietly announced the new feature in a blog post earlier this month.

Otter.ai has had the ability to transcribe recordings of past Zoom meetings for a little while now. The live transcription feature should make the process quicker, and make highlighting and editing important sections easier while they’re still fresh in your mind.

In order to use the new feature you’ll need to be subscribed to Zoom’s Pro tier or higher, and you’ll also need an Otter for Teams subscription. Otter.ai’s Teams subscription normally costs $20 per use per month, but the service is currently offering two months for free if you use the code COVID19OTTER. You can find instructions on how to set the live transcription feature up on Otter.ai’s website.

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That’s a smart bit of piggybacking.
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Apple aims to sell Macs with its own ARM-based chips starting in 2021 • Bloomberg

Mark Gurman:

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The first Mac processors will have eight high-performance cores, codenamed Firestorm, and at least four energy-efficient cores, known internally as Icestorm. Apple is exploring Mac processors with more than 12 cores for further in the future, the people said.

In some Macs, Apple’s designs will double or quadruple the number of cores that Intel provides. The current entry-level MacBook Air has two cores, for example.

Like Qualcomm Inc. and the rest of the mobile semiconductor industry, Apple designs its smartphone chips with technology from Arm Inc., owned by SoftBank Group Corp. These components often use less energy than Intel’s offerings. But it in recent years, Arm customers have tried to make processors that are also more powerful.

The transition to in-house Apple processor designs would likely begin with a new laptop because the company’s first custom Mac chips won’t be able to rival the performance Intel provides for high-end MacBook Pros, iMacs and the Mac Pro desktop computer.

The switch away from Intel is complex, requiring close collaboration between Apple’s software, hardware and component-sourcing teams. Given work-from-home orders and disruptions in the company’s Asia-based supply chain, the shift could be delayed, the people said.

Like with the iPhone, Apple’s Mac processors will include several components, including the main processor, known as a Central Processing Unit or CPU, and the GPU, the graphics chip. Apple’s lower-end computers currently use Intel for graphics, while it has partnered with Advanced Micro Devices Inc. for the graphics cards in its professional-focused offerings.

The Kalamata project has been going for several years. In 2018, Apple developed a Mac chip based on the iPad Pro’s A12X processor for internal testing. That gave the company’s engineers confidence they could begin replacing Intel in Macs as early as 2020, Bloomberg News reported.

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Won’t be much of a hit to Intel – 5% of its CPU business? – though the prestige hit is substantial. Now all the questions begin about how Apple gets old Intel-based software to run. (Over to you, JLG..)
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iPhone SE review: an iPhone for people who don’t like new iPhones • WSJ

Joanna Stern:

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Unlike the starting-at-$699 iPhone 11 models, the SE is the only remaining iPhone with the once-beloved home button and a small (well, smaller) 4.7in screen. Yet it still has the performance and some of the camera tricks of those higher-end phones.

To test the SE over the past week, I went deep into my Museum of Ancient iPhones—and deep into my email inbox—to focus on the hundreds of questions that owners of older iPhones have written to me with since my iPhone 11 review last year.

No matter which phone you’re coming from, you’ll find the SE to be one of Apple’s best values in years, especially as we all try to tighten our belts in the coronavirus world. It’s even nice for talking to people, now that we’re doing that again. Just one problem: when we finally can stop sheltering in place, we’re going to want better battery life.

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As Stern explained when she was on John Gruber’s podcast recently, her email inbox is stuffed with messages from people who don’t want to use Face ID on phones; they like Touch ID, they understand Touch ID, and they’re damn well sticking with it.

And as always, the video accompanying the article is fantastic. I can’t imagine how long it must take to dream up and execute. Stern’s videos are pretty much the only reason for smartphone reviews.
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Making cryptocurrency part of the solution to human trafficking • Chainalysis blog

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In 2019, we tracked just under $930,000 worth of Bitcoin and Ethereum payments to addresses associated with CSAM providers. That represents a 32% increase over 2018, which in turn saw a 212% increase over 2017. We attribute most of these yearly increases to rising adoption of cryptocurrency rather than increased demand for CSAM, and it’s important to keep in mind these transactions represent a miniscule fraction of all cryptocurrency activity. Even so, this should be a concerning trend for the cryptocurrency industry, from both a moral and reputational standpoint. 

Most individual cryptocurrency payments to CSAM providers fall between $10 and $50, though a significant percentage of these sites’ total revenue comes from much larger payments. We know from law enforcement that payments between $10 and $50 would likely indicate either a one-time purchase of CSAM or, if seen on a recurring basis, possibly a subscription to a consistent CSAM provider. 

For example, this Chainalysis Reactor screenshot shows some recent transactions to an address the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) has identified as belonging to a CSAM provider. A clear pattern emerges: Nearly all transfers the service receives are for 0.0021 Bitcoin, worth roughly $15 as of April 2020.

We can discern more patterns by isolating cryptocurrency payments to CSAM sites made from exchanges serving users in a single region. Above, for instance, we see that most payments for CSAM users in South Korea occur during nighttime hours, when most individuals are at home.

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Certainly the exchanges could do a lot more to look out for and alert authorities to transactions of suspicious sizes to particular sites. But of course they have a financial incentive not to.
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‘Sadness’ and disbelief from a world missing American leadership • The New York Times

Katrinn Benhold:

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The United States has an election in November. That, and the aftermath of the deepest economic crisis since the 1930s, might also affect the course of history.

The Great Depression gave rise to America’s New Deal. Maybe the coronavirus will lead the United States to embrace a stronger public safety net and develop a national consensus for more accessible health care, [political scientist and senior adviser at the Paris-based Institut Montaigne, Domique] Moïsi suggested.

“Europe’s social democratic systems are not only more human, they leave us better prepared and fit to deal with a crisis like this than the more brutal capitalistic system in the United States,” Mr. Moïsi said.
The current crisis, some fear, could act like an accelerator of history, speeding up a decline in influence of both the United States and Europe.

“Sometime in 2021 we come out of this crisis and we will be in 2030,” said Mr. Moïsi. “There will be more Asia in the world and less West.”

[Timothy] Garton Ash said that the United States should take an urgent warning from a long line of empires that rose and fell.

“To a historian it’s nothing new, that’s what happens,” said Mr. Garton Ash. “It’s a very familiar story in world history that after a certain amount of time a power declines.”

“You accumulate problems, and because you’re such a strong player, you can carry these dysfunctionalities for a long time,” he said. “Until something happens and you can’t anymore.”

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Coronavirus vaccine doctor says he was fired over doubts on hydroxychloroquine • The New York Times

Michael Shear and Maggie Haberman:

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Rick Bright was abruptly dismissed this week as the director of the Department of Health and Human Services’ Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, or BARDA, and removed as the deputy assistant secretary for preparedness and response. He was given a narrower job at the National Institutes of Health.

In a scorching statement, Dr. Bright, who received a Ph.D. in immunology and molecular pathogenesis from Emory University, assailed the leadership at the health department, saying he was pressured to direct money toward hydroxychloroquine, one of several “potentially dangerous drugs promoted by those with political connections” and repeatedly described by the president as a potential “game changer” in the fight against the virus.

“I believe this transfer was in response to my insistence that the government invest the billions of dollars allocated by Congress to address the Covid-19 pandemic into safe and scientifically vetted solutions, and not in drugs, vaccines and other technologies that lack scientific merit,” he said in his statement. “I am speaking out because to combat this deadly virus, science — not politics or cronyism — has to lead the way.”

…While Dr. Bright followed careful procedures, [Trump admin officials] said, he was a polarizing figure within the Department of Health and Human Services, where concerns had circulated about a management style that was described as confrontational.

Those officials said that there had been discussions about removing Dr. Bright for many months, and that they came to a head after emails were leaked to Reuters last week detailing internal discussions about chloroquines.

A senior administration official said that Alex M. Azar II, the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, told the coronavirus task force members in their meeting on Wednesday about Dr. Bright’s departure from BARDA, describing it as a promotion to the vice president. Officials left the meeting and learned of Dr. Bright’s public statement.

…A person familiar with Dr. Bright’s account said that Dr. Bright was pressured to rush access to the drug after the president and Larry Ellison, the chairman and chief technology officer of Oracle, had a conversation about chloroquines. Dr. Bright was then directed to put in place a nationwide expanded access program to make the drugs available on a broad basis without specific controls in place, according to the person familiar with his account.

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Today in hilarious quotes from Trump “officials”: someone’s management style being described as “confrontational”. And now we turn to Alex Azar (who describes someone being fired as “a promotion”).
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Special report: former labradoodle breeder was tapped to lead US pandemic task force • Reuters

Aram Roston and Marisa Taylor:

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On January 21, the day the first U.S. case of coronavirus was reported, the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services appeared on Fox News to report the latest on the disease as it ravaged China. Alex Azar, a 52-year-old lawyer and former drug industry executive, assured Americans the U.S. government was prepared.

“We developed a diagnostic test at the CDC, so we can confirm if somebody has this,” Azar said. “We will be spreading that diagnostic around the country so that we are able to do rapid testing on site.”

While coronavirus in Wuhan, China, was “potentially serious,” Azar assured viewers in America, it “was one for which we have a playbook.”

Azar’s initial comments misfired on two fronts. Like many U.S. officials, from President Donald Trump on down, he underestimated the pandemic’s severity. He also overestimated his agency’s preparedness.

As is now widely known, two agencies Azar oversaw as HHS secretary, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration, wouldn’t come up with viable tests for five and half weeks, even as other countries and the World Health Organization had already prepared their own.

Shortly after his televised comments, Azar tapped a trusted aide with minimal public health experience to lead the agency’s day-to-day response to COVID-19. The aide, Brian Harrison, had joined the department after running a dog-breeding business for six years. Five sources say some officials in the White House derisively called him “the dog breeder.”

Azar’s optimistic public pronouncement and choice of an inexperienced manager are emblematic of his agency’s oft-troubled response to the crisis. His HHS is a behemoth department, overseeing almost every federal public health agency in the country, with a $1.3 trillion budget that exceeds the gross national product of most countries.

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Incompetence, overconfidence and cronyism: the Trump administration in three words. Of course Azar is a Trump pick; of course his past in the pharmaceutical industry indicates that Trump was never truthful in saying, when trying to get elected, that he’d rein in the pharma sector. That hasn’t happened. Still, no labradoodles have died of Covid-19. (Current joke: “Trump wanted someone who was good with labs, and Azar delivered.”)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A billboard: contributing, just a tiny bit, to making you less happy, new research says CC-licensed photo by Zara Gonzalez Hoang on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

A selection of 9 links for you. Got your pulse oximeter yet? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

University of Warwick study: advertising makes us unhappy • Harvard Business Review

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HBR: What prompted you to investigate this?

Professor Andrew Oswald: Colleagues and I have been studying human happiness for 30 years now, and recently my focus turned to national happiness. What are the characteristics of a happy country? What are the forces that mold one? What explains the ups and downs? I’d never looked at advertising before, but I met a researcher who was collecting data on it for a different reason, and it seemed to me that we should combine forces. Like a lot of people in Western society, I can’t help noticing the increasing amount of ads we’re bombarded with. For me, it was natural to wonder whether it might create dissatisfaction in our culture: How is your happiness and mine shaped by what we see, hear, and read? I think it’s rather intuitive that lots of ads would make us less happy. In a sense they’re trying to generate dissatisfaction—stirring up your desires so that you spend more on goods and services to ease that feeling. I appreciate, of course, that the world’s corporate advertisers and marketing firms won’t like hearing me say that.

Yeah, I don’t think they’d agree that that is the goal of advertising.

Their line is that advertising is trying to expose the public to new and exciting things to buy, and their task is to simply provide information, and in that way they raise human well-being. But the alternative argument, which goes back to Thorstein Veblen and others, is that exposing people to a lot of advertising raises their aspirations—and makes them feel that their own lives, achievements, belongings, and experiences are inadequate. This study supports the negative view, not the positive one…

…It’s worth wondering whether Western society has done the right thing by allowing large levels of advertising, almost unregulated, as though it were inevitable. Given these patterns, it seems like something we might want to think about. But we haven’t got any political punch line in this paper. We don’t recommend any policy.

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And yes, they did check to make sure it wasn’t just an “ice cream causes murder” type of correlation.
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Why are labels changing song titles after a release? TikTok • Rolling Stone

Elias Leight:

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As the burgeoning world of voice-search starts to have more influence on listening habits, making sure songs fit search terms in this way will only become more important, says Hazel Savage, CEO and cofounder of AI-based start-up Musiio. “Especially what we see with younger generations is they’re more and more comfortable with voice search,” Savage notes. In that space, “it’s all about how much data can you attach to each song,” she continues. “The more you have, the more powerful your search terms are gonna be.”
Astralwerks’ Andrews says “we’ve seen a lot more people using Alexa and voice search since they’re stuck at home.” And when the label attached the “(i love you baby)” to “ily,” “voice search results for the song tripled overnight.” 

The “ily” title change is already impacting the way Astralwerks looks at its catalog. “There’s a song of ours called ‘Sex’ by Eden that has over one million creations on TikTok; it’s one of the top ten trending tracks globally right now,” Andrews explains. “But the phrase people are using on the platform is, ‘catching feelings,’ nothing to do with sex at all. So the title of that one is going to change to ‘Sex (Catching Feelings)’ to optimize how people are absorbing the song. It’s going to be interesting to see that affect more and more people now.” 

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Really would like to know how much voice search on Alexa/Google Home/Siri has risen now that so many people are at home.
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Upgrade our 8-track government • WSJ

Andy Kessler:

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I’ll admit to using this line all the time: “The Howard Stern Show” asked Ringo Starr, “What did you do with the money?” “What money?” “The money your mother gave you for singing lessons.”

Earlier this month, Johns Hopkins surgeon Marty Makary told Tucker Carlson about a much-needed Covid-19 antibody test developed in January that was under review by the Food and Drug Administration. Dr. Makary noted, “And we lost precious time when one of the original scientists submitted an application and was told that he had to submit it also by paper mail with a CD-ROM with the files burned on it.” CD-ROM? They might as well have asked for applications on a deck of IBM punch cards with audio on 8-track tapes. The FDA budget is around $5.8 billion. What did you do with the money?

Last week, New Jersey put out a call for Cobol programmers to update its unemployment-benefits software, which runs on mainframes installed 40 years ago. Cobol was invented in 1959. New Jersey has a $39 billion budget. What did you do with the money?

I grew up in New Jersey (Exit 14), but this ineptitude is everywhere. A 2018 study revealed that only 42% of all state and local government computer systems were implemented after Oct. 25, 2001. The rest are “old or broken,” including two-thirds of those used for child support and half of those used for unemployment or vehicle registration.

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And there’s also this Bloomberg article by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, in synchrony:

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Behind the ideological squabbling, the main problem with Western government is simple: It is out of date. If you want a symbol of this, look no further than U.S. school calendar, which was designed for an agrarian economy where children needed long summer holidays to bring in the harvest. Think of all the changes that America’s private sector has been through over the past century: vertical integration followed by contracting out; steep hierarchies followed by delayering; skyscraper headquarters followed by suburban campuses followed by a return to the city. Think of all the companies that have been created and destroyed in a never-ending whirlwind of creative destruction. Now think of Washington. The Department of Agriculture remains a giant despite the fact that agriculture accounts for only 2% of GDP.

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The Silicon Valley view would be “government’s never faced disruption”.
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Jeffrey Sachs on the catastrophic American response to the coronavirus • The New Yorker

Isaac Chotiner interviewed Sachs, but this extract is all Sachs, who is an economist who advised the Soviets on how to shift to a market economy, and the Bush administrations on the size of funding needed for wide-scale vaccination programs in developing countries:

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Basically, American politics has become deeply corrupt over decades, and it became so corrupt that normal governance already collapsed many years ago. And people with resources and knowledge know it, but they haven’t cared, because things have more or less gone on O.K., and the stock market has been booming, and even though in almost any private conversation Trump is viewed as a complete dolt and a complete incompetent, that was more or less laughed off as manageable because he wasn’t doing too much damage, either.

That’s the real situation. Nobody here has viewed government as actually very functional for a long time, and not because it couldn’t be. It has been increasingly designed to fail. Specifically, it’s been designed to respond to powerful lobbies that want deregulation or tax cuts or some special privileges rather than to function in a normal way. And powerful people shrug their shoulders at that, because for the élites that’s been O.K., but it obviously hasn’t really been O.K. for a long time. We’ve had rising death rates. We’ve had the deaths of despair. We’ve had the failure to come to grips with climate change. We’ve had widening inequalities and massive suffering. But it hasn’t mattered in such a visible way…

…The rich countries got the wave of the epidemic first, mainly because of the high extent of travel between China and Europe, and between China and the United States, and Europe and the United States. And the epidemic went out of control in this country basically because Trump did nothing and called upon the federal system almost not at all between early January and mid-March. And epidemics grow at exponential rates. The poorer countries by and large did not receive the intense seeding of the epidemic as early, because they have fewer flights, they have fewer visitors and tourists. So in Africa, South Asia, and Latin America, the number of cases was lower. That’s why we’re seeing, at least for the moment, some greater measure of control.

These countries do not have test equipment. They do not have personal protective equipment. They do not have ventilators, and so on. And what I am recommending is that the International Monetary Fund provide emergency financing at essentially zero conditionality, other than that it be used responsibly. And that the World Health Organization work with governments that have the potential to supply additional equipment—that’s China, Korea, Japan, and a few others—and use the emergency financing and the availability of this urgently needed equipment to get it to these countries in need.

Where does the United States stand in this? Well, the United States has done the unimaginable, and that is to try to cut the functioning of the W.H.O. in the middle of the pandemic. So I’m not looking for American heroism. I’m looking for the United States not to be among the most destructive forces on the planet right now.

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In the coronavirus era, the force is still with Jack Dorsey • Vanity Fair

Nick Bilton:

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each day Dorsey wakes up in his multimillion-dollar glass mansion with postcard views of the Golden Gate Bridge, checks to see what the sleep-tracking ring on his finger says, then lowers himself into an ice bath before meditating in a warm tent sauna. This is followed by a seven-minute workout and then drinking his breakfast, which he calls “salt juice,” a concoction of water, salt, and lemon, which is the only thing he will “eat” until the evening, when he enjoys his single real meal of the day. His day wraps up in a slightly more extreme version of the way it began, with a ritual of 15 minutes in his barrel sauna, followed by three minutes in his ice bath, which he does back and forth three times for an hour. He then meditates again. People close to Dorsey caution, though, that his health routine “changes frequently, so what he’s doing now likely doesn’t align with what he talked about months ago.”

…While Dorsey managed to stave off a coup by [hedge fund] Elliott for now, Cohn is going to be sitting on the board of Twitter, leading an executive search that could recommend to replace Dorsey (though it will be left up to the board to decide if it wanted to follow through with those recommendations). And Dorsey is going to have to reach some pretty high metrics, including growing Twitter’s monetizable daily active users (people who use the platform daily and can be served ads) by 20% in order to remain CEO of both companies. As a result of the pandemic and the vertiginous fall in the stock markets, two weeks later, Silver Lake’s $1 billion investment had fallen by a third, as had Elliott’s. Which the bankers won’t be too happy about.

But, in an uncanny twist, given the virus now decimating the global economy, Dorsey might have just received a stay of execution. Any stock declines will be attributed to coronavirus eviscerating the markets as a whole. According to someone familiar with the company’s internal projections, the amount of time people spend on the site is expected to rise this quarter. While people around the globe are on lockdown in their homes, the one place millions are turning to for a constant flow of information is social media, especially Twitter.

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Browser boss: we’re blocking ad trackers because governments didn’t deal with them • Forbes

Barry Collins:

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The CEO of Vivaldi says his company’s new desktop and mobile browsers block ads for the first time because governments have failed to curb online advertising’s worst excesses.

Vivaldi 3 includes an integrated tracker blocker, powered by privacy-conscious search engine DuckDuckGo, as well as an adblocker. A built-in adblocker is also part of the first stable release of Vivaldi for Android devices.

Vivaldi CEO, Jon von Tetzchner, said the company had shied away from integrating adblockers in previous versions, but that the browser’s users had increasingly demanded greater protection that wasn’t being provided by lawmakers.

“The focus on Vivaldi 3 is privacy,” said von Tetzchner. “We’ve always been the browser that isn’t collecting data on you, but people have been asking: ‘what about tracker blocking?’”

Von Tetzchner said Vivaldi had hesitated to build such features into the browser previously, because it was concerned about “the internet being free and open”.

“I’ve been hoping for the governments to deal with that and stop the tracking, because I don’t think it’s really good for anyone.”

The issue came to a head with the release of the company’s mobile browser, where users found the browsing experience was being hampered by aggressive advertising. “Our thinking on the desktop side had been we’ll leave the adblocking to extensions,” von Tetzchner explained. “That was not an option on the mobile side. We saw the comments on the betas – this is what people wanted,” so the company decided to add the feature to both desktop and mobile.

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Not mentioned: Vivaldi’s share on the desktop and mobile. It’s below 0.1%. Still, having an adblocker will definitely get everyone to downl.. ah, forget it.
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Texas: how the home of US oil and gas fell in love with solar power • Financial Times

Gregory Meyer:

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A solar farm the size of a small city will open in the Texas shale heartland this month, adding more competition to a US oil and gas industry that is already flat on its back. 

The blue rows of panels at the Oberon photovoltaic project will generate 150 megawatts of power when they plug into the grid south of Notrees, an appropriately named town in the Permian Basin. Oberon’s developers want to eventually expand the project to 1,380MW — enough to serve 230,000 homes. 

A boom in solar projects is under way across Texas, the US oil and gas capital. The state will build a quarter of the record new industrial-scale solar capacity being installed across the US this year, according to the Energy Information Administration, part of the department of energy. 

Much of that solar investment is taking place in the Permian Basin, the centre of a US shale oil industry that is now reeling from the impact of the coronavirus crisis and the price war between Saudi Arabia and Russia.

The solar projects are a threat to fossil fuels. Renewables have helped to force the closures of coal-fired power plants. They are now challenging the primacy of natural gas in the US electricity generation mix as the price of solar equipment keeps on falling. The Republican legislature has declined to rein in rapid increases in wind and solar despite its historic friendliness to the oil and gas industry. 

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This was written back at the start of the month – before the price of Texas oil collapsed below “on its back”. There’s never a problem pumping solar.
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Weekly pro esports schedule: Soccer, Nascar, NFL and more • Gearbrain

Alistair Charlton:

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Watching competitive video games played online is nothing new. But with the coronavirus pandemic pressing the pause button on almost all global sport, the entire industry has stepped up a gear.

Thrust into an all-new spotlight, esports now features many real-world sporting professionals, is broadcast live on television to record audiences, and is called by pro commentators.

Sports including soccer, basketball, football and various forms of motorsport have all headed online to keep fans entertained during lockdown.

Updated weekly, this article will feature highlights of upcoming esports events for you to watch online and on television. While we can’t promise to include every single esports event — there are hundreds — we will try to highlight events where real-world professionals are taking part.

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Neat idea. The professionals need something to keep them… sharp.
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China bat expert says her Wuhan lab wasn’t source of new coronavirus • WSJ

James Areddy:

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Dr. Shi Zhengli [the 55-year-old principal investigator at the Wuhan Institute of Virology] and the Chinese government say there is no evidence the virus came from laboratories in Wuhan. Scientists generally believe the pathogen crossed the species barrier into humans directly from bats or via another animal. Wild animals were sold in the Wuhan market.

As questions about the origin of the coronavirus grew, Dr. Shi pushed back aggressively. In a social-media post republished in Wuhan’s main Communist Party newspaper in February, she said she could “guarantee on my life” that the virus hadn’t originated in her labs. She went on to “advise those who believe and spread malicious media rumors to close their stinky mouths.”

Dr. Shi didn’t respond to questions from The Wall Street Journal. Her boss, Yuan Zhiming, a senior official at the Wuhan facility, told Chinese state television this month that while it is understandable that people might raise questions about the labs, “there’s no way this virus came from us.”

For Dr. Shi’s defenders, the pandemic is a tragic coincidence for a scientist who has devoted her life to tracking threats to human health. “All the elements of the conspiracy are there if you want to believe it,” said Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance, a New York-based environmental health nonprofit, who has collaborated with Dr. Shi for several years. But, he said: “It’s not true.”

Jonna Mazet, a pandemic specialist at the University of California, Davis, who has worked with Dr. Shi for a decade, said the Chinese scientist is cataloging all the coronaviruses she has studied over the years, and told her that “she didn’t have this virus in the lab before people were sick with it.”

Added Dr. Mazet: “She’s been under incredible strain and stress over this whole thing.”

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What proponents of the “escaped from the lab” hypothesis can’t answer is why so many of the early cases are linked to the market, which is quite some distance away.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

If America’s going to pull out of its economic dive, it needs to start building real infrastructure – but is the spirit there? CC-licensed photo by Alan Burnett on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

A selection of 11 links for you. Pulse oximeters ahoy. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

IT’S TIME TO BUILD • Andreessen Horowitz

Marc Andreessen:

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Why aren’t we building Elon Musk’s “alien dreadnoughts” — giant, gleaming, state-of-the-art factories producing every conceivable kind of product, at the highest possible quality and lowest possible cost — all throughout our country?

You see it in transportation. Where are the supersonic aircraft? Where are the millions of delivery drones? Where are the high speed trains, the soaring monorails, the hyperloops, and yes, the flying cars?

Is the problem money? That seems hard to believe when we have the money to wage endless wars in the Middle East and repeatedly bail out incumbent banks, airlines, and carmakers. The federal government just passed a $2 trillion coronavirus rescue package in two weeks! Is the problem capitalism? I’m with Nicholas Stern when he says that capitalism is how we take care of people we don’t know — all of these fields are highly lucrative already and should be prime stomping grounds for capitalist investment, good both for the investor and the customers who are served. Is the problem technical competence? Clearly not, or we wouldn’t have the homes and skyscrapers, schools and hospitals, cars and trains, computers and smartphones, that we already have.

The problem is desire. We need to *want* these things. The problem is inertia. We need to want these things more than we want to prevent these things. The problem is regulatory capture. We need to want new companies to build these things, even if incumbents don’t like it, even if only to force the incumbents to build these things. And the problem is will. We need to build these things.

And we need to separate the imperative to build these things from ideology and politics. Both sides need to contribute to building.

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This is a stirring post; it would sound terrific as a speech coming from a presidential candidate (though it would be a lot more convincing coming from some than others). It’s a rousing vision of a potential future. (So I left the capitals in the post title.)

There has been criticism of this post, though: Andreessen is the person who famously proclaimed that “software is eating the world”, because it could scale so quickly once it had mapped what it was replacing. But factories, vaccines, buildings, trains, aircraft aren’t software. They’re things. You can drop them on your foot, and that demands care (and regulations) so that you don’t screw everything up calamitously. Getting aircraft software wrong has bigger effects than getting AirBnB software wrong, as Boeing could tell you.
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Dead and free: the new American Dream • Eudaimonia and Co

Umair Haque:

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Trump doesn’t just revel in cruelty, domination, hostility, and aggression — he revels in such things because he has genuinely never experienced true care, warmth, empathy, grace, or love. All his relationships are obvious proof of that. Men like Trump are made from just such a lack of love in childhood — and they try to fill that void forever, knowing that if love is beyond them, then at least maybe they can command obedience with fear.

Now, all that strikes a chord in a certain kind of American. The American who’s been just as traumatized and wounded as Trump. Not by inadequate parenting, in their case — but by a broken society. There’s the abandoned formerly upwards middle class white, the declining working class one, and so forth. They have been left in a profoundly hostile and aggressive world, one which feels perpetually threatening, frightening, unsafe — the world of American capitalism, where the most predatory and ruthless win everything, and the weak perish.

What they’ve learned, though, is just the same perverse lesson the unloved child does. They’ve learned to be like their oppressors — to value being predatory, ruthless, hostile, selfish, greedy. They have learned to punch down, seeking Mexican babies to blame for all their problems — instead of a badly broken system of predatory capital, helmed by billionaires, whose fake “thinktanks” and the propaganda they churn out teaches the very victims of that system to be it’s greatest proponents.

How else do you explain the bizarre spectacle of that kind of American crying to be “liberated” from lockdown? They feel they need to “go back to work” — not that they need massively more support from the government, which so far has offered them the equivalent of one week, though it’s already been a month, and going to be more. They don’t see any fault in the system — they want to go back to being cogs in its machine. They are willing to sacrifice their own health and that of their loves ones to do so. They’re martyrs for capitalism.

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This is the counterpoint to Andreessen’s post. Who’s going to build, and how? What will be their reward, in the short and the long term? Are those “builders” going to be rewarded in line with their importance to the economy?
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Coronavirus class conflict is coming • The Atlantic

Olga Khazan:

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To find out how these rifts might escalate, I spoke with 15 experts on the sociology and politics of class. When the dust settles, there’s of course a chance that low-income workers might end up just as powerless as they were before. But history offers a precedent for plagues being, perversely, good for workers. Collective anger at low wages and poor working protections can produce lasting social change, and people tend to be more supportive of government benefits during periods of high unemployment. One study that looked at 15 major pandemics found that they increased wages for three decades afterward. The Plague of Justinian, in 541, led to worker incomes doubling. After the Black Death demolished Europe in the 1300s, textile workers in northern France received three raises in a year. Old rules were upended: Workers started wearing red, a color previously associated with nobility.

The US has long been the sole holdout among rich nations when it comes to paid sick leave and other job protections. Now that some workers are getting these benefits for the coronavirus, they might be hard for businesses to claw back. If your boss let you stay home with pay when you had COVID-19, is he really going to make you come in when you have the flu?

“Is this going to be an inflection point where Americans begin to realize that we need government, we need each other, we need social solidarity, we are not all cowboys, who knew?” said Joan Williams, a law professor at UC Hastings and the author of White Working Class.

Many experts said one likely result of this outbreak will be an increase in populist sentiment. But it is not yet clear whether it will be leftist populism, in the style of Senator Bernie Sanders, or conservative populism, in the style of President Donald Trump. Leftist populism will likely emphasize the common struggle of the laid off, the low-paid, and the workers derided by their bosses as expendable.

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The infection that’s silently killing coronavirus patients • The New York Times

Richard Levitan:

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Even patients without respiratory complaints had Covid pneumonia. The patient stabbed in the shoulder, whom we X-rayed because we worried he had a collapsed lung, actually had Covid pneumonia. In patients on whom we did CT scans because they were injured in falls, we coincidentally found Covid pneumonia. Elderly patients who had passed out for unknown reasons and a number of diabetic patients were found to have it.

And here is what really surprised us: These patients did not report any sensation of breathing problems, even though their chest X-rays showed diffuse pneumonia and their oxygen was below normal. How could this be?

We are just beginning to recognize that Covid pneumonia initially causes a form of oxygen deprivation we call “silent hypoxia” — “silent” because of its insidious, hard-to-detect nature.

Pneumonia is an infection of the lungs in which the air sacs fill with fluid or pus. Normally, patients develop chest discomfort, pain with breathing and other breathing problems. But when Covid pneumonia first strikes, patients don’t feel short of breath, even as their oxygen levels fall. And by the time they do, they have alarmingly low oxygen levels and moderate-to-severe pneumonia (as seen on chest X-rays). Normal oxygen saturation for most persons at sea level is 94% to 100%; Covid pneumonia patients I saw had oxygen saturations as low as 50%.

To my amazement, most patients I saw said they had been sick for a week or so with fever, cough, upset stomach and fatigue, but they only became short of breath the day they came to the hospital. Their pneumonia had clearly been going on for days, but by the time they felt they had to go to the hospital, they were often already in critical condition.

In emergency departments we insert breathing tubes in critically ill patients for a variety of reasons. In my 30 years of practice, however, most patients requiring emergency intubation are in shock, have altered mental status or are grunting to breathe. Patients requiring intubation because of acute hypoxia are often unconscious or using every muscle they can to take a breath. They are in extreme duress. Covid pneumonia cases are very different.

A vast majority of Covid pneumonia patients I met had remarkably low oxygen saturations at triage — seemingly incompatible with life — but they were using their cellphones as we put them on monitors.

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This disease has more and more strange, deadly quirks. The most notable is the death rate difference between sexes; now this. The good advice in the article: buy a pulse oximeter, which tells you how well your lungs are oxygenating your blood. (Thanks George, who advised I get one when I was ill.) It will tell you how you’re doing. Anything from £20 to £80, but what price not dying?
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More deaths, no benefit from malaria drug in VA virus study • Associated Press

Marilynn Marchione:

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A malaria drug widely touted by President Donald Trump for treating the new coronavirus showed no benefit in a large analysis of its use in U.S. veterans hospitals. There were more deaths among those given hydroxychloroquine versus standard care, researchers reported.

The nationwide study was not a rigorous experiment. But with 368 patients, it’s the largest look so far of hydroxychloroquine with or without the antibiotic azithromycin for COVID-19, which has killed more than 171,000 people as of Tuesday.

The study was posted on an online site for researchers and has has not been reviewed by other scientists…

…About 28% who were given hydroxychloroquine plus usual care died, versus 11% of those getting routine care alone. About 22% of those getting the drug plus azithromycin died too, but the difference between that group and usual care was not considered large enough to rule out other factors that could have affected survival.

Hydroxychloroquine made no difference in the need for a breathing machine, either.

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Would certainly like to know how it goes with preexisting conditions, but so far all that HCL has been shown to be good for is causing heart problems. How surprising that Trump and his performing monkey Rudy Guiliani should have backed a loser in an area neither understands.

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Not like the flu, not like car crashes, not like • The New Atlantis

Ari Schulman, Brendan Foht and Samuel Matlack:

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ow deadly is Covid-19 compared to seasonal flu, past pandemics, or car crashes?

To offer context, we have produced two charts showing coronavirus deaths along with deaths from other common causes in the past to which the disease has recently been compared. One chart shows deaths for the United States, the other for New York, the state hardest hit.

Note that the data sets begin at different points in the year (as marked on the left). Also note that the figures shown here are for new deaths each week, not for cumulative deaths.

The chart shows deaths per capita to allow for comparison of data from different years. Deaths are shown from:
• Covid-19, starting from February 17. (Covid Tracking Project)
• The 2017-18 flu season: This was the deadliest recent flu season. The chart shows one line for deaths attributed directly to flu, and another for deaths attributed to either flu or pneumonia. The smaller line is an undercount of flu-caused deaths, the larger is an overcount, with the real number lying somewhere in between. (More on this below.) The data begin on October 1, 2017, which the CDC considered the first week of that flu season. (CDC)
• Heart disease and cancer: The first and second leading causes of death in the United States. The chart shows total 2017 deaths averaged per week. (CDC)
• Car crashes: Weekly deaths beginning from January 1, 2018. (National Highway Traffic Safety Administration)
• 1957-58 Asian flu pandemic: Weekly influenza and pneumonia deaths beginning from August 24, 1957. These data come from a contemporary CDC program that surveilled 108 American cities with a total population of about 50 million people. We have used that figure, rather than the total U.S. population at the time, to calculate deaths per million. (CDC)

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Richard Branson’s bailout plea proves there’s no one more shameless • The Guardian

Marina Hyde, in typically astringent form:

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Ultimately, it’s hard to see Branson as anything other than the classic “billionaire philanthropist” (is there any other kind of billionaire?) who declines to accept that public finances would be in rather better shape if people like them contributed their fair share. Philanthropy starts with paying tax. With the best will in the world, it isn’t enough to imply the only reason you operate out of a tax haven is because you like the weather.

Of course, Richard is very far from the only billionaire entity to act like this. Even the trillionaire firms, Amazon and Apple, do it too. Rather than contribute the full amount to various countries in the traditional way – like all the boring little nurses and teachers and ordinary people do – they get away with the absolute barest of minimums, then swoop in flashily with “aid” initiatives, with which they can be personally associated when something’s gone tits-up.

Take announcements from the likes of Apple CEO Tim Cook, who has made much of the fact that the company has donated millions of protective masks to US healthcare workers, but whose firm paid £3.8m in tax on £1.2bn UK sales not so long ago. (And this is before you even get to the Amnesty reports and lawsuits in which they are accused of aiding often lethal child labour in their cobalt supply chains in places like the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Can the kids get a mask, Tim? No? OK, final offer: a trowel instead of a stick?)

Instead of the coronavirus crisis bringing some kind of reckoning for tax-avoiding opt-outs, it is simply making the biggest culprits even more shameless.

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New iOS exploit discovered being used to spy on China’s Uyghur minority • ZDNet

Catalin Cimpanu:

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Security firm Volexity said today that it discovered a new iOS exploit that was being used to spy on China’s oppressed Uyghur minority.

The exploit, which Volexity named Insomnia, works against iOS versions 12.3, 12.3.1, and 12.3.2. Apple patched the iOS vulnerability behind this exploit in July 2019, with the release of iOS version 12.4.

Volexity said the Insomnia exploit was used in the wild between January and March 2020.

The exploit was loaded on the iOS devices of users visiting several Uyghur-themed websites. Once victims accessed the site, the Insomnia exploit was loaded on the device, granting the attacker root access.

Hackers used access to the device to steal plaintext messages from various instant messaging clients, emails, photos, contact lists, and GPS location data.

Volexity said the exploit was deployed by a threat actor the company is tracking under the name of Evil Eye.

The Evil Eye group is believed to be a state-sponsored hacking unit operating at Beijing’s behest, and spying on China’s Uyghur Muslim minority.

This is the same group that Google and Volexity discovered in August 2019 using 14 iOS exploits to target Uyghurs since at least September 2016.

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China really is determined on this. While everything else is going on, the oppression of the Uyghurs continues. A fortunate distraction for China.
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Google’s head of quantum computing hardware resigns • WIRED

Tom Simonite:

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In late October 2019, Google CEO Sundar Pichai likened the latest result from the company’s quantum computing hardware lab in Santa Barbara, California, to the Wright brothers’ first flight.

One of the lab’s prototype processors had achieved quantum supremacy—evocative jargon for the moment a conventional computer does something seemingly impossible by harnessing quantum mechanics. In a blog post, Pichai said the milestone affirmed his belief that quantum computers might one day tackle problems like climate change, and the CEO also name-checked John Martinis, who had established Google’s quantum hardware group in 2014.

Here’s what Pichai didn’t mention: soon after the team had first got its quantum supremacy experiment working a few months earlier, Martinis says, he had been reassigned from a leadership position to an advisory one. Martinis tells WIRED that the change led to disagreements with Hartmut Neven, the longtime leader of Google’s quantum project.

Martinis resigned from Google early this month. “Since my professional goal is for someone to build a quantum computer, I think my resignation is the best course of action for everyone,” he adds.

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This is either a trivial personality clash or something very deep. So it seems worth noting just in case it’s the latter.
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Huawei caught using DSLR photos to promote its photography contest • Apple Insider

Amber Neely:

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Huawei has issued an apology after a “Shot on iPhone” contest winner discovered that the company was using photos shot on a DSLR to promote its smartphone photography contest.

The photos in question were discovered by Huapeng Zhao, who had won second place in the 2018 iPhone Photography awards for a photograph he’d taken with an iPhone 6. He’d recognized the promotional photos from elsewhere, suspecting that the images weren’t shot with a smartphone.

As it turns out, he was correct. The photos were the work of Su Tie, and had been previously shared on 500px, an online photography sharing platform. The pictures in question had been taken with a Nikon D850 —a DSLR that costs upwards of $3,000.

Huawei has since issued an apology on Weibo. The company noted that the photographs were supposed to be featured on Huawei’s Next-Image community, an alternative to popular photo-sharing platforms like 500px and Flickr, according to Abacus. Huawei notes that users can upload images taken by any device, including cameras.

It’s not clear whether or not Huawei had permission from the original photographer to post the image on their website.

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For those keeping count, this is the third time Huawei has been caught faking photo stuff in promotions by using DSLR photos in smartphone promotions.
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The iPad Magic Keyboard • Daring Fireball

John Gruber:

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Here’s why an iPad Magic Keyboard feels nothing like a MacBook: because it’s not actually magic. I mean that. It’s clever in several ways, but it cannot defy the laws of physics. An iPad Pro is so much heavier than a MacBook top case that of course the Magic Keyboard hinge system has to be not just a little stiffer than a MacBook hinge, but way stiffer. Your first impression, like mine, is likely to be off-base just because it’s so different. But once you start using it, just for a few minutes, you can feel why it has to be so different. It’s just an entirely different allocation of weight and center of gravity, by necessity.

You know how with a regular laptop, when you want to open it, you just set it down where you want it, closed, and you open the lid just by lifting it with one of your thumbs? Yeah, you cannot do that with this. Opening the iPad Magic Keyboard is a two-handed operation. Part of this is that the combination of the magnets and stiff primary hinge form a strong seal. But mainly it’s because the iPad with Magic Keyboard is so top-heavy.

ILLUSTRATIVE EXERCISE: Turn a MacBook Air upside down and try opening it one-handed. Even if you give yourself a little bit of an opening to break the initial magnetic seal, you can’t really open an upside down MacBook one-handed because as you try to raise the heavy part (which is now on top), the bottom part raises with it, because the hinge is stiffer than the bottom (the display half) is heavy. But that’s the weight distribution of the iPad with Magic Keyboard right-side up.

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What I hadn’t appreciated from the videos (all of them) is that the main, hefty hinge only has two positions: folded flat, and open, which it does to a specific angle. But then you can move the other hinge around. More like a docking station, really.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

You might not be surprised to hear that Samsung’s Galaxy S20 isn’t selling as well as its predecessor. CC-licensed photo by K%u0101rlis Dambr%u0101ns on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

A selection of 10 links for you. Use them wisely. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Facebook and Google to be forced to share advertising revenue with Australian media companies • The Guardian

Josh Taylor:

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Facebook and Google will be forced to share advertising revenue with Australian media companies after the [federal] treasurer, Josh Frydenberg, instructed the competition watchdog to develop a mandatory code of conduct for the digital giants amid a steep decline in advertising brought on by the coronavirus pandemic.

In its response to the landmark digital platforms inquiry in December, the federal government asked the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission to develop a code between media companies and digital platforms including Google and Facebook.

The code was to require the companies to negotiate in good faith on how to pay news media for use of their content, advise news media in advance of algorithm changes that would affect content rankings, favour original source news content in search page results, and share data with media companies.

The code was due to be finalised in November 2020, but after limited success in early negotiations between the platforms and the news industry – and in light of the sharp decline in ad revenue – the government has now asked the ACCC to write a mandatory code.

The mandatory code will have the same elements as the proposed voluntary code, but would also include penalties and binding dispute resolution mechanisms for negotiations between the digital platforms and news businesses. It will also define news content that would be covered by the code, and will encompass services beyond Google search and Facebook’s main platform, such as Instagram and Twitter.

…Frydenberg said it was only fair that media companies that created the content got paid for it. “This will help to create a level playing field,” he said.

The communications minister, Paul Fletcher, said the decision was about a strong and sustainable news media ecosystem. “Digital platforms have fundamentally changed the way that media content is produced, distributed and consumed,” he said.

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Wow. Be right back, just going to put some popcorn on. Radical move. Expect the companies to fight this up and down the courts.
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US oil price below zero for first time in history  | Financial Times

:

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US oil prices crashed into negative territory for the first time in history as the evaporation of demand caused by the coronavirus pandemic has left the world awash with oil and not enough storage capacity — meaning producers are paying buyers to take it off their hands.

West Texas Intermediate, the US benchmark, lost more than 300% to trade as low as -$40.32 a barrel in a day of chaos in oil markets. The settlement price on Monday was -$37.63, compared to $18.27 on Friday.

Traders capitulated in the face of limited access to storage capacity across the US, including the country’s main delivery point of Cushing, Oklahoma.

The collapse will be a blow to US president Donald Trump, who has gone to great lengths to protect the oil sector, including backing moves by Opec and Russia to cut production and pledging support for the industry.

The shale sector has transformed the US into the world’s largest oil producer in the last decade, giving Mr Trump a foreign policy tool he has brandished as “US Energy Dominance”, but which now faces a rapid decline.

Negative prices are the latest indication of the depth of the crisis hitting the oil sector after lockdowns imposed in many of the world’s major economies have sent crude demand tumbling by as much as a third, leaving the industry facing what Jefferies analyst Jason Gammel called “the bleakest oil macro outlook” he had ever seen…

…Stephen Schork, editor of oil-market newsletter The Schork Report, said he expected access to storage capacity in the US to be exhausted within two weeks — and cautioned that the collapse of the country’s oil consumption was accelerating.

“It just gets uglier from here,” Mr Schork said, adding that sharply rising unemployment numbers meant fewer and fewer Americans would be driving, hurting petrol demand even during its peak summer months.

“This summer is dead on arrival. The biggest demand months are not going to happen,” he said. 

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Second-order effects are beginning to roll in. Expect more. Also, for more background, there’s this (free to read!) FT Alphaville piece which suggests this might effectively lead to the permanent destruction of some production capacity.
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Traditional PC shipments saw a sharp decline in Q1 2020 despite increased demand to meet remote work and school needs • IDC

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The global traditional PC market, comprised of desktops, notebooks, and workstations, declined 9.8% year over year in the first quarter of 2020 (1Q20), reaching a total of 53.2 million shipments according to preliminary results from the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Personal Computing Device Tracker. The stark decline after a year of growth in 2019 was the result of reduced supply due to the outbreak of COVID-19 in China, the world’s largest supplier of PCs.

While production capacity in January was pretty much on par with past years, the extended closure of factories in February and the slow resumption of manufacturing along with difficulties in logistics and labor towards the end of the quarter led to a reduction of supply. Meanwhile, demand rose during the quarter as many employees needed to upgrade their PCs to work from home and consumers sought gaming PCs to keep themselves entertained.

“Though supply of new PCs was somewhat limited during the quarter, a few vendors and retailers were able to keep up with the additional demand as the threat of increased tariffs last year led to some inventory stockpiling at the end of 2019,” said Jitesh Ubrani, research manager for IDC’s Mobile Device Trackers. “However, this bump in demand may be short lived as many fear the worst is yet to come and this could lead to both consumers and businesses tightening spending in the coming months.”

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The squeeze on the smaller players, always a background hum, is going to get serious this year. Apple shipments crashed (on IDC’s measure) by 20%, but the new MacBook Air – the one that’s finally really worth buying – was only released near the end of March.
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Samsung Galaxy S20 sales fall behind its predecessor amid pandemic • SamMobile

“Asif S”:

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The Galaxy S20 series was unveiled in February and the devices went on sale in most of the markets by the end of March 2020. However, the latest flagship smartphone series from Samsung didn’t meet the company’s own sales expectations. Apparently, it couldn’t even reach the sales of its predecessor in the Korean firm’s home market.

According to a new report from Yonhap News, sales of the Galaxy S20 series are hovering below the sales of the Galaxy S10 series. The main reason behind disappointing sales is said to be a lower demand for consumer products amid the COVID-19 pandemic. South Korean mobile carriers claim that the cumulative sales of the Galaxy S20, Galaxy S20+, and the Galaxy S20 Ultra are just 60% of the sales of the Galaxy S10 series.

Samsung has not been reporting official sales numbers for the Galaxy S20 series, but it claimed that sales of its latest flagship smartphone series were around 80% of the Galaxy S10 sales.

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Not surprising. Forecasts for the year for smartphone totals are down 30%; I suspect that will get revised further down.
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Finally we may have a path to the fundamental theory of physics… and it’s beautiful • Stephen Wolfram Writings

Stephen Wolfram (he’s the big ideas brother):

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I’m thrilled to say that I think we’ve found a path to the fundamental theory of physics. We’ve built a paradigm and a framework (and, yes, we’ve built lots of good, practical, computational tools too). But now we need to finish the job. We need to work through a lot of complicated computation, mathematics and physics. And see if we can finally deliver the answer to how our universe fundamentally works.

It’s an exciting moment, and I want to share it. I’m looking forward to being deeply involved. But this isn’t just a project for me or our small team. This is a project for the world. It’s going to be a great achievement when it’s done. And I’d like to see it shared as widely as possible. Yes, a lot of what has to be done requires top-of-the-line physics and math knowledge. But I want to expose everything as broadly as possible, so everyone can be involved in—and I hope inspired by—what I think is going to be a great and historic intellectual adventure.

Today we’re officially launching our Physics Project. From here on, we’ll be livestreaming what we’re doing—sharing whatever we discover in real time with the world. (We’ll also soon be releasing more than 400 hours of video that we’ve already accumulated.) I’m posting all my working materials going back to the 1990s, and we’re releasing all our software tools. We’ll be putting out bulletins about progress, and there’ll be educational programs around the project.

Oh, yes, and we’re putting up a Registry of Notable Universes. It’s already populated with nearly a thousand rules. I don’t think any of the ones in there yet are our own universe—though I’m not completely sure.

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I can never decide if he sounds like the mad villain who presses the button that shrinks the Earth to the size of a golfball, or the brilliant scientist who saves the planet from the aliens/asteroid by figuring out the equation just in time. This sounds wild, bizarre, yet possible. But it needs to come up with some testable theories.
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Another disaster is ready to catch the US unprepared: drought • Ars Technica

Cathleen O’Grady:

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The [American] southwest has experienced an abnormally dry period that started back in 2000—an emerging “megadrought” that is due partly to natural climate cycles and partly to anthropogenic climate change. Higher temperatures “increase moisture demand from the land surface,” writes climate risk researcher Toby Ault in a second Science paper on drought this week, “for the same reason that a sauna will dry out a towel faster than a steam room.” Climate driven changes in the patterns of snow and rainfall can also contribute to drought.

As a result of lower levels in rivers and reservoirs, people have been tapping deeper and deeper wells to access steadily depleting groundwater resources, which are often poor quality—or even unusable—at greater depths.

On top of this, water infrastructure is frequently poor to begin with—and often deteriorating. Drought emergencies are declared regularly in the US, Mullin writes, with water systems sometimes running so dry that it’s “necessary to turn to tanker trucks or even fire hoses to bring water into the community for weeks or months.”

This means that drought is more than a natural disaster in the making: like the coronavirus outbreak raging through the US, it’s a disaster that’s natural in origin but magnified by poor infrastructure and societal fragmentation.

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Isn’t going to get fixed just now, though, is it. Who’s going to give it the necessary urgency? What has to happen to give it the correct priority?
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Zoom’s security woes were no secret to business partners like Dropbox • The New York Times

Natasha Singer and Nicole Perlroth:

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Zoom’s defenders, including big-name Silicon Valley venture capitalists, say the onslaught of criticism is unfair. They argue that Zoom, originally designed for businesses, could not have anticipated a pandemic that would send legions of consumers flocking to its service in the span of a few weeks and using it for purposes — like elementary school classes and family celebrations — for which it was never intended.

“I don’t think a lot of these things were predictable,” said Alex Stamos, a former chief security officer at Facebook who recently signed on as a security adviser to Zoom. “It’s like everyone decided to drive their cars on water.”

The former Dropbox engineers, however, say Zoom’s current woes can be traced back two years or more, and they argue that the company’s failure to overhaul its security practices back then put its business clients at risk.

Dropbox grew so concerned that vulnerabilities in the videoconferencing system might compromise its own corporate security that the file-hosting giant took on the unusual step of policing Zoom’s security practices itself, according to the former engineers, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss their work.

As part of a novel security assessment program for its vendors and partners, Dropbox in 2018 began privately offering rewards to top hackers to find holes in Zoom’s software code and that of a few other companies. The former Dropbox engineers said they were stunned by the volume and severity of the security flaws that hackers discovered in Zoom’s code — and troubled by Zoom’s slowness in fixing them.

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Zoom went public in April 2019. This is a deep, cultural problem. (But it is wonderfully easy to use.)
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We are probably only a tenth of the way through the pandemic • NY Mag

David Wallace-Wells:

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Here are the timelines for each of the three. The most optimistic projection for vaccines is that they begin to be available this fall; other reputable estimates suggest between one and two years from now. A two-year development cycle would be unprecedented speed for any vaccine, and, while scientists are quite optimistic, no vaccine has ever been developed for a coronavirus before; onto each timeline you’d have to add some amount of time for rollout and administration.

The treatment picture is murkier, but the drugs being tested today are repurposed ones, not designed to combat COVID-19 but deployed on the chance they might help. One in particular, remdesivir, is showing some real promise, but in general it is hard to bet confidently on repurposed drugs to be miracle cures of the kind that dramatically change the clinical shape of the disease and its treatment. Serological treatments offer some promise, but testing is only in the earliest stages. And the drugs likely to really “cure” the disease are just notions in a lab, at this point.

That leaves herd immunity. Epidemiologists tell us it requires between 60% to 80% of the population to have antibodies. At the moment, though, lack of testing means we don’t have a clear picture of the spread of the disease; a generous rough estimate for how many Americans have been exposed is 5%.

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Sorry about that. So we could be into 2022 before life returns to “normal”.
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Republicans attack Facebook as network shuts down anti-lockdown protests • POLITICO

Steven Overly:

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Facebook is blocking anti-quarantine protesters from using the site to organize in-person gatherings that violate states’ stay-at-home orders — a move that had brought an immediate backlash from conservatives including President Donald Trump’s eldest son.

The world’s largest social network has removed protest messages in California, New Jersey and Nebraska from its site, a company spokesperson said Monday, after days of rallies across state capitals where protesters — many carrying pro-Trump signs — called for an end to the health restrictions.

The spokesperson said Facebook had been instructed by those state governments that the events are prohibited under the lockdown and social distancing orders that authorities have issued in response to the coronavirus pandemic.

“We reached out to state officials to understand the scope of their orders, not about removing specific protests on Facebook,” a company spokesperson said. “We remove the posts when gatherings do not follow the health parameters established by the government and are therefore unlawful.”

The statement followed confusion over whether states had instructed Facebook to remove the protests from its platform. Earlier Monday, a spokesperson said that “events that defy government’s guidance on social distancing aren’t allowed on Facebook” and had been removed following guidance from individual states.

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Lovely how the red meat dolts can’t figure out whether Facebook is their friend or not.
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Magic Keyboard for the iPad Pro review: the best way to turn an iPad into a laptop • The Verge

Dieter Bohn:

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Trackpad support on iPadOS is great, by the way. The cursor is a little dot most of the time, but it quickly changes to a traditional text cursor when appropriate. It also expands out to become the size of UI elements like buttons or icons, sort of snapping to them when you get close. That sounds annoying (and you can turn it off), but I quickly came to love it.

Beyond clicking, scrolling, and highlighting text, you can use the trackpad for navigating the system. You use three fingers to swipe up to home and multitasking — or left and right to switch between recent apps.

The only place where it feels a bit off is when you drag the cursor to the edge of the screen. You kind of drag “beyond” that edge to slide in various things like the dock, Notification Center, Control Center, or your Slide Over apps. You get used to it, but it’s the one time when the stuff on-screen moves in the opposite direction of your fingers.

Now, trackpad support on iPadOS and within Apple’s apps is great, but trackpad support on a bunch of third-party apps is absolutely not. Any app that doesn’t use Apple’s standard APIs for creating buttons or text views feels off-kilter with the trackpad. Stuff you can swipe with your finger can’t be swiped with the trackpad, text selection can be a fiasco, and the cursor doesn’t always do its neat shape-shifting tricks. Google’s apps are particularly guilty here, but they’re far from the only ones.

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Google is never very interested in giving people a great experience on the iPad. Bohn’s review covers a lot of ground. Clearly this is a quite heavy thing (25% heavier than the iPad Pro with the Smart Keyboard, which I use all the time) but the “floating” screen is alluring. And being able to navigate more easily around spreadsheets and big chunks of text is attractive. You can watch his YouTube review – takes about eight minutes – or read the review: they’re the same content, in effect.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Apparently storytelling like this is the clue to YouTube success. Intrigued yet? CC-licensed photo by David Leo Veksler on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

A selection of 11 links for you. Testing 1-2-3. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Coronavirus: 38 days when Britain sleepwalked into disaster • The Sunday Times

Jonathan Calvert, George Arbuthnott and Jonathan Leake:

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[On January 25] there was now little doubt that the UK would be hit by the virus. A study by Southampton University has shown that 190,000 people flew into the UK from Wuhan and other high-risk Chinese cities between January and March. The researchers estimated that up to 1,900 of these passengers would have been infected with the coronavirus — almost guaranteeing the UK would become a centre of the subsequent pandemic.

Sure enough, five days later, on Wednesday January 29, the first coronavirus cases on British soil were found when two Chinese nationals from the same family fell ill at a hotel in York. The next day the government raised the threat level from low to moderate…

…Several emergency planners and scientists said that the plans to protect the UK in a pandemic had once been a priority and had been well funded for the decade following the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001. But then austerity cuts struck. “We were the envy of the world,” the source said, “but pandemic planning became a casualty of the austerity years, when there were more pressing needs.”

The last rehearsal for a pandemic was a 2016 exercise codenamed Cygnus, which predicted the health service would collapse and highlighted a long list of shortcomings — including, presciently, a lack of PPE and intensive care ventilators…

…the government had much catching-up to do as it became clear that this “nightmare” was turning into a distinct possibility in February. But the source said there was still little urgency. “Almost every plan we had was not activated in February. Almost every government department has failed to properly implement their own pandemic plans,” the source said.

One deviation from the plan, for example, was a failure to give an early warning to firms that there might be a lockdown so they could start contingency planning. “There was a duty to get them to start thinking about their cashflow and their business continuity arrangements,” the source said.

A central part of any pandemic plan is to identify anyone who becomes ill, vigorously pursue all their recent contacts and put them into quarantine. That involves testing, and the UK seemed to be ahead of the game. In early February Hancock proudly told the Commons the UK was one of the first countries to develop a new test for the coronavirus. “Testing worldwide is being done on equipment designed in Oxford,” he said.

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Hubris from start to finish.
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Coronavirus broke the global food supply chain. It may never recover • WIRED UK

Chris Stokel-Walker:

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At the minute, the [UK fruit-picking] industry has enough workers for the crops it’s harvesting. But industry estimates reckon another 15,000 will be needed in fields in May to harvest everything in time. Currently, Boparan thinks the industry will make it, but is clear: “The pressure is on for everybody in the sector.” Otherwise summer fruits and vegetables won’t get harvested, and won’t end up on our supermarket shelves.

Defra, the government’s environment department, was partly prepared for a shortage of workers from the European Union: they expected travel to be limited for casual workers, but not due to a pandemic. Instead, they had modelled the impact of Brexit. As a result, a small pilot scheme has allowed those in the industry to fly in labour from outside the EU, but it’s likely that will need to be augmented by homegrown workers – at least temporarily.

Other sectors are feeling the pinch acutely. McDonald’s, which closed all its 1,270 UK restaurants last month as the coronavirus hit hard, sources food from 23,000 farmers across the UK and Ireland, spending more than £600 million on meat and dairy products – as well as eggs and potatoes. The National Beef Association said that beef that would have made its way into burgers was being redirected to other points in the food chain, but that’s easier said than done, reckons Elliott.

“People will say if they’re producing the same amount of food they should switch to the retail sector,” he says. But it’s not that simple, because retailers have long standing contracts with suppliers that are difficult to attain, and packaging requirements – and even the kinds of cuts needed – are different between the restaurant and food sector and home cooking. “You might not have the right equipment to produce the right cuts, or the correct packaging equipment,” says Elliott.

Producers, processors and packers are stuck in an awkward catch-22: rip up the rules of how their businesses work to adapt to the new norm – with the knowledge that the total lockdown could change in a matter of weeks or months and leave them scrambling to readjust to their traditional supply chain – or simply wait it out.

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Who is MrBeast? • Blake Robbins’ Newsletter

Blake Robbins:

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There is no YouTube creator in the world is growing as fast as MrBeast. He is averaging 1.5M new subscribers every single month with over 250M views per month.

So how does he do it?

It is widely speculated that YouTube’s algorithm prioritizes and rewards videos based on total watch time. This means that videos that are watched all the way through will algorithmically be promoted to others via the “recommended” panel of YouTube.

MrBeast has mastered this. Almost all of his video concepts are centered around watching to the end of the video. One of my favorite YouTube channels, Colin and Samir, has coined this as “Jenga Storytelling.”

Jenga Storytelling is where you already know the end result, but the stakes of the video continue to increase as view duration increases. This format encourages viewers to watch the entire video, resulting in higher placement on “recommended.” Logan Paul has also referenced “Jenga Storytelling” before. On his podcast, Impaulsive, he said: “The person who can crack the code of the Jenga Format for YouTube will win. Hands down, they will take over.”

MrBeast has cracked this code. However, he continues to take it to another level by raising the stakes.

MrBeast actually gave us a glimpse into his creative process when he spoke to Casey Neistat last year: “If the average YouTuber spends 1-hour brainstorming video ideas and 5 hours filming, then I want to spend 10 hours brainstorming video ideas and days filming.”

At the end of 2019, MrBeast hosted his biggest challenge to date, where he gave away $1,000,000. He created five different “last to leave” challenges where the contestants were fans who had bought his merchandise and/or followed him on Instagram.

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OK but.. you can just skip to the end, right? One of his videos is a variant of “grab the truck”, where the last of he and his friends to have their hand on a Lamborghini gets to keep it. If it lasts X minutes, why not just zzzzzzzip right to the, so to speak, money shot?
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Raspberry Pi sales are rocketing in the middle of the coronavirus outbreak • TechRepublic

Owen Hughes:

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Sales of Raspberry Pi’s single-board computers hit 640,000 in March, the second-biggest month for sales since they started selling, as consumers flocked to inexpensive ways to work and learn from home. 

While some sales can be attributed to tinkering Pi-hobbyists with a lot more time to fill all of sudden, Eben Upton, the Raspberry Pi’s co-creator, told TechRepublic demand is also coming from households that have found themselves in daily battles over use of the family computer.

“It used to be sustainable to have a shared family computer, but now every family member needs to have one to work or learn,” said Upton. “Now, everyone is at home competing for the use of one computer.”

While sales of Raspberry Pi picked up steadily over the course of March, the latter end of the month is where things really gathered steam, with Upton describing the increase in demand as “turning the dial up from three to 10”, with industrial sales staying very stable and Raspberry Pi 4 volumes ramping up very quickly.

“I think what this is telling us is that we’re seeing genuine consumer use of the product. It’s not like your desktop PC – you’re not going to be able play Crysis on it – but if you want a machine you can use to edit documents, use the web, use Gmail and Office 365 and all the baseline use cases of a general purpose computer, the Raspberry Pi 4 is a product we’ve made to get over that bar.”

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Except… you’re going to have to run a Linux distro, and are there really many office workers who are going to feel comfortable running Office 365 on top of a Linux distro? Is Zoom available for Linux? I suspect this is parents buying a “computer” for their kids as they go into lockdown, to keep them amused, or at least distracted. Know what you can run pretty easily on a RasPi? Minecraft. (Though the story does also point out that there are uses relating to ventilators.)
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How Covid-19 changed our world: futurist Gerd Leonhard looks back from late 2020 • Medium

Futurist Gerd Leonhard, looking back from some time a few months ahead:

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In late 2020 it is clear that Covid-19 has caused a massive global reset, in every aspect i.e. economically, socially, politically, environmentally and scientifically. Indeed, the impact of this crisis can now be compared to that of the Great Depression, or even WorldWar II. A global recession is in full swing, and it looks it will cut even deeper in 2021.

Global GDP growth was unimaginably negative for 2020 (for a still optimistic March 2020 forecast go here). The US fared the worst, while China jockeyed to reposition itself for a new world order. BUT: 2020 was the first year in modern history where global CO2 emissions have declined.

Yet despite the economic woes there is also hope, now, fuelled by the sudden realisation that this crisis is likely to put an end to the industrial-era paradigm of ‘growth at all cost’ and the ill-fated doctrine of ‘making any single country great-again’. In late 2020, we were finally forced (liberated?) to rethink our traditional economic logic, and question our political assumptions. After Covid-19 (phase1), we entered a new ‘post-growth’ era, and now we are gearing up to rewrite the rules of capitalism.

What Al Gore called “sustainable capitalism” in 2012 is finally back on the agenda, and so is what I call the quadruple bottom-line: People Planet Purpose and Prosperity (some of my videos on that topic are here).

We are experiencing a global shift in consciousness as a result of this crisis.

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And you must read what he thinks the US is going to go through.

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Who’s lost their trunks? The economic crisis will expose a decade’s worth of corporate fraud • The Economist

The Economist, echoing Warren Buffett’s points that it’s only when the tide goes out that you learn who was swimming naked, says that now “the water has whooshed away at record speed”:

»

The average number of non-GAAP measures used in filings by companies in the S+P 500 index has increased from 2.5 to 7.5 in the past 20 years, according to PWC, a consultancy. In credit agreements analysed by Zion Research Group, the definition of EBIDTA ranges from 75 words to over 2,200. GAAP is far from perfect, but some of the divergence from it has clearly been designed to pull wool over investors’ eyes. One study found that non-GAAP profits were, on average, 15% higher than GAAP profits.

Playing around with earnings and revenue-recognition metrics is this generation’s equivalent of dotcoms using bots and other tricks to boost “eyeballs” 20 years ago, says Jules Kroll of K2 Intelligence, the doyen of corporate sleuths. “When an area is hot to the point of overheated, there is a growing temptation to juice the numbers.” In an ominous sign, SoftBank, a Japanese technology conglomerate which bet big on WeWork and dozens of other startups, said this week that it expects an operating loss of ¥1.4trn ($12.5bn) in its last fiscal year.

Besides exposing old schemes, the pandemic is likely to give rise to new ones. When economic survival is threatened, the line separating what is acceptable and unacceptable when booking revenues or making market disclosures can be blurred. Mr Kroll reckons that “amid such massive dislocation, some will inevitably cheat.”

Bruce Dorris, head of the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners, the world’s largest anti-fraud outfit, says the effects of Covid-19 look like “a perfect storm for fraud”. It may engender everything from iffy accounting to stimulus-linked scams as thousands of firms—including bogus applicants—hustle for help. One fraud investigator points to private-equity-owned firms as potential targets. “There are lots of them, they are highly leveraged and they may not qualify for bail-outs because they have deep-pocketed sponsors,” he says. That increases the temptation to resort to unseemly practices.

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GAAP (General Accepted Accounting Principles) makes the stock options that tech companies’ adore look expensive; they’re a huge drag on profits. The next nine months are going to expose a lot of bad, but also good, companies.
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ICANN delays .org sale again after scathing letter from California AG • Ars Technica

Timothy Lee:

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California’s attorney general pointed to several specific concerns about the transaction. One was the shadowy nature of the proposed buyer, Ethos Capital. “Little is known about Ethos Capital and its multiple proposed subsidiaries,” Becerra writes. Ethos Capital, he said, has “refused to produce responses to many critical questions posted by the public and Internet community.”

Ethos Capital’s plan is to buy the Public Interest Registry (PIR) from its current parent organization, the nonprofit Internet Society. To help finance the sale, Ethos will saddle PIR with $300m in debt—a common tactic in the world of leveraged buyouts. Becerra warns that this tactic could endanger the financial viability of the PIR—especially in light of the economic uncertainty created by the coronavirus.

“If the sale goes through and PIR’s business model fails to meet expectations, it may have to make significant cuts in operations,” Becerra warns. “Such cuts would undoubtedly affect the stability of the .org registry.”

Becerra also blasts the Internet Society for considering the sale in the first place. “ISOC purports to support the Internet, yet its actions, from the secretive nature of the transaction, to actively seeking to transfer the .org registry to an unknown entity, are contrary to its mission and potentially disruptive to the same system it claims to champion and support,” he writes.

Becerra ends his letter with a warning: “This office will continue to evaluate this matter, and will take whatever action necessary to protect Californians and the nonprofit community.”

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It’s astonishing that after so many years of seeing private equity buy companies, saddle them with debt that drags them down into bankruptcy while extracting fees that increase the pain, that anyone ever contemplates such a sale. Greed is a remarkable driver.
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Goldman predicts 36% drop in iPhone shipment, says time to sell Apple shares • Reuters

Munsuf Vengattil and Lewis Krauskopf:

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Goldman Sachs said on Friday it expects iPhone shipment to drop 36% during the current quarter due to coronavirus-related lockdowns around the world and downgraded Apple Inc stock to “sell”.

Apple shares fell 1.6% to $282.13 on Friday morning, bucking a 1.5% rise for the benchmark S&P 500.

The Goldman analysts also lowered their price target for the stock by 7% to $233 in its report forecasting the drop in iPhone demand for the quarter ending in June, Apple’s fiscal third quarter.

The brokerage noted that average selling prices for consumer devices are likely to decline during a recession and remain weak well beyond the point when units recover.

“We do not assume that this downturn results in Apple losing users from its installed base. We simply assume that existing users will keep devices longer and choose less expensive Apple options when they do buy a new device,” Goldman Sachs analysts said in a note.

Peter Tuz, president of Chase Investment Counsel in Charlottesville, Virginia, which holds Apple shares, said he expects a significant drop in iPhone sales, but 36% seemed “extreme.”

“I view some of that as deferred demand…I think some of that will come back in succeeding quarters,” Tuz said.

…Goldman said it does not expect the company to launch the upcoming iPhone models until early November, as limited global travel could impede Apple’s final engineering and production process.

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Phones are becoming both more essential, and yet we’re going to have less cash available to buy them. There’s a squeeze coming on the premium market in particular, though Apple is probably safe with its (profitable) Services business. Could gut the premium Android market, though. (But of course that means Apple is doomed and you must sell its shares, only to buy them back later, for a fee. Got to keep those stockbrokers’ yachts clean!)
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Clubhouse voice chat leads a wave of spontaneous social apps • TechCrunch

Josh Constine:

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Forget the calendar invite. Just jump into a conversation. That’s the idea powering a fresh batch of social startups poised to take advantage of our cleared schedules amidst quarantine. But they could also change the way we work and socialize long after COVID-19 by bringing the free-flowing, ad-hoc communication of parties and open office plans online. While “Live” has become synonymous with performative streaming, these new apps instead spread the limelight across several users as well as the task, game, or discussion at hand.

The most buzzy of these startups is Clubhouse, an audio-based social network where people can spontaneously jump into voice chat rooms together. You see the unlabeled rooms of all the people you follow, and you can join to talk or just listen along, milling around to find what interests you. High-energy rooms attract crowds while slower ones see participants slip out to join other chat circles.

Clubhouse blew up this weekend on VC Twitter as people scrambled for exclusive invites, humblebragged about their membership, or made fun of everyone’s FOMO. For now, there’s no public app or access. The name Clubhouse perfectly captures how people long to be part of the in-crowd.

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This app, Zoom, HouseParty – there are going to be fortunes made in this strange lacuna. Who can catch the mood best will triumph. Google did much the same in the dot-com bust: it was in the right place, doing just the right job.
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Capitalists or cronyists? • No Mercy / No Malice

Scott Galloway is, not to put too fine a point on it, very much in favour of not bailing out certain companies:

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As long as they keep making old people, and younger people want to take their kids to Disney’s Galaxy’s Edge, there will be cruise lines and airlines. Since 2000, US airlines have declared bankruptcy 66 times. Despite the obvious vulnerability of the sector, boards/CEOs of the six largest airlines have spent 96% of their free cash flow on share buybacks, bolstering the share price and compensation of management … who now want a bailout. They should be allowed to fail. Bondholders will own the firms. Ships and planes will continue to float and fly, and there will still be a steel tube with recirculated air waiting for you post molestation by Roy from TSA.

Trump/CNBC have adopted a narrative that this is about protecting the most vulnerable. No, it’s about buttressing the most wealthy. Pandemics typically result in higher wages over the next several decades as we recognize that essential workers (the gal/guy delivering your Greek yogurt and placing your Indian food in the backseat of your car) should be paid more. A good thing.

Letting firms fail, and share prices fall to their market level, also provides younger generations with the same opportunities we, Gen X and boomers, were given: a chance to buy Amazon at 50x (vs. 100x) earnings and Brooklyn real estate at $300 (vs. $1,000) per sq. ft. Just as we pretend our service men and women are heroes, and then treat them like chumps, CNBC advertisers and Peter Navarro want to pretend they give a sh*t about younger generations so they can protect the wealth of old people and management/advertisers. Enough already.

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Galloway isn’t some frustrated communist, either: he got rich (or near enough) with his own company which started back in the 1990s. It didn’t get bailed out in the dot-com crash or the Great Recession.
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Carnival executives knew they had a virus problem, but kept the party going • Bloomberg

Austin Carr and Chris Palmeri:

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Even after Carnival became aware of the potential coronavirus case, passengers say staff tried to keep the fun going. Guests continued eating and drinking at buffets and bars, hanging out in saunas, and attending shows, including an operatic performance called Bravo. Carnival distributed itineraries (known as “Princess Patter”) guiding guests to trivia contests and other group activities on Feb. 3. “They were encouraging us to mingle,” says Gay Courter, who, after getting her temperature taken by a Japanese official the next day, went for a walk on deck and saw tables of as many as 30 people playing mahjong. A Carnival spokesman says the staff discontinued “most” scheduled activities on Feb. 4, though Japanese officials didn’t institute a shipwide quarantine requiring passengers to stay in their cabins until Feb. 5.
The president of Carnival’s Princess Cruises division, Jan Swartz, says the company was deferring to Japanese health officials. She says the crew followed government guidelines, delivering the passengers food and prescription refills as the quarantine at Yokohama’s port wore on. Carnival CEO Donald says he was aware of the situation but didn’t personally take control of the response efforts until Feb. 5. “We have a nice chain of command,” he says. “As it became a bigger issue, I’m dialing into the situation updates.”
It was an increasingly chaotic period for Carnival. Shortly before the Diamond Princess problem, there had been a coronavirus scare aboard one of its ships near Italy, and a second in mid-February on another Carnival cruise in Asia. (Carnival says these were false alarms.) Countries around the world began refusing to allow the company’s boats to dock, fearing they’d spread the virus, creating novel challenges for Donald and his team. “It wasn’t like there were protocols, and that this was established. You’re at sea, you’re moving people around, and the rules are changing as you go,” he says. He adds that by early March, when the virus hit the Grand Princess, Carnival had systems in place to take better care of its guests. Some Grand Princess passengers had to fill out a questionnaire asking if they’d recently been to China, though there were no questions about whether they had symptoms consistent with Covid-19.

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

What’s the future for the WHO? Change its funding, or change its structure? CC-licensed photo by UN Geneva on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

A selection of 10 links for you. Use them wisely. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Why the World Health Organization failed • The Atlantic

Zeynep Tufekci:

»

Trump’s ploy to defund the WHO is a transparent effort to distract from his administration’s failure to prepare for the COVID-19 pandemic. It would be disastrous too. Many nations, especially poor ones, currently depend on the WHO for medical help and supplies. But it is also true that in the run-up to this pandemic, the WHO failed the world in many ways. However, President Trump’s move is precisely the kind of political bullying that contributed to the WHO’s missteps.

The WHO failed because it is not designed to be independent. Instead, it’s subject to the whims of the nations that fund it and choose its leader. In July 2017, China moved aggressively to elect its current leadership. Instead of fixing any of the problems with the way the WHO operates, Trump seems to merely want the United States to be the bigger bully.

Fixing the WHO is crucial, because we desperately need well-functioning global health institutions. But that requires a correct diagnosis of the problem. There is an alternate timeline in which the leadership of the WHO did its job fully and properly, warning the world in time so that effective policies could be deployed across the planet. Instead, the WHO decided to stick disturbingly close to China’s official positions, including its transparent cover-ups. In place of a pandemic that is bringing global destruction, just maybe we could have had a few tragic local outbreaks that were contained…

…Imagine the WHO took notice of the information it received from Taiwan and Hong Kong. Imagine the WHO also recognized that whistleblower doctors in Wuhan were being threatened with jail time. It would have realized that something important was happening, something worth investigating. It could have immediately, but politely, demanded access to the region around Wuhan and its hospitals.

This alternate timeline does not ignore realpolitik. China is not a nation known for cooperating with international agencies when it doesn’t want to. (This tendency is not specific to China. A U.S. law nicknamed the “Hague Invasion Act” threatens to invade the International Criminal Court in The Hague should any U.S. service member be indicted.) If China refused access, as it likely would have, the expectation isn’t that the WHO officials would just get up and yell “Freedom!” at China’s leadership. But there was a path that would recognize the constraints of international diplomacy, but still put the health of billions above all else.

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Life hasn’t returned to normal for China’s internet cafes • Abacus

Karen Chiu:

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While cybercafes are largely considered a primitive vestige of the early internet age, they have survived in parts of Asia as watering holes for avid gamers. For less than a dollar an hour, patrons can relax on plush chairs while waging battles on League of Legends and drifting race cars on QQ Speed.

With national numbers hovering between 130,000 and 150,000 in recent years, Chinese cybercafes aren’t exactly a booming industry. But they’ve continued to draw gamers looking for a cheap place to hang out and blow off steam. Many say they come for the atmosphere and camaraderie.

“How is playing by yourself at home as comfortable as playing in an internet cafe with friends?” a Zhihu user asked in response to a question about why people would still pay for a seat in front of a computer when most already have a PC at home.

“There’re a lot of people at my house, lots of noise and things going on… And my parents tend to complain a lot when they see me gaming all day long, so I might as well go out and play.”

At a time when social distancing is becoming the new norm, though, gathering places like internet cafes are of particular concern to authorities. In Hubei, whose capital city Wuhan was the center of the coronavirus outbreak, cybercafes are among nine types of indoor facilities that are specifically banned from reopening until the pandemic ends.

In Tianjin, a port city in northeast China, cybercafes are still closed, according to netizens.

“Today is the 84th day of cybercafe closure,” wrote a Weibo user on Wednesday.

“Can Tianjin’s cybercafes ever reopen?” asked another.

«

Nothing is able to get back to normal.
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GoPro cuts more than 20% of workforce, changes sales strategy • Bloomberg

Mark Gurman:

»

GoPro Inc. said it will cut more than 200 jobs, shift the company’s sales operation to market its digital adventure cameras directly to consumers and withdraw its 2020 financial guidance in response to the Covid-19 pandemic.

The operational changes, staff reductions of more than 20% and cuts to office space will save $100m in 2020, and reduce expenses next year to $250m, the San Mateo, California-based company said Wednesday in a statement. GoPro said its shift to direct sales will mean a stronger focus on its website. The company said it still will use retail outlets for a small number of regions where such sales are preferred by consumers…

…While withdrawing its forecast, GoPro said its expects to report first-quarter revenue of $119 million and an adjusted loss in the mid-30c a share. The company sold 700,000 cameras in the period, and said the staff and operational changes won’t affect its 2020 product road map, which will include new devices and services.

«

GoPro was struggling a bit before this. Now it’s trying to market an adventure travel camera in a world where most people can’t travel or, to a large extent, leave their homes.
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Facebook-backed Libra cryptocurrency project is scaled back • The New York Times

Nathaniel Popper and Mike Isaac:

»

on Thursday, Facebook and its partners rolled out a less ambitious design for Libra after the effort encountered numerous hurdles and heavy regulatory scrutiny.

No longer is the group focused on making Libra the basis of a new global financial system where Facebook could essentially play the roles of a central bank and Wall Street.

In a sign of the change, the Libra project will now focus on creating a more traditional payment network in which coins will be tied to a local currency, somewhat like the digital dollars in a PayPal account. While Libra will also have a coin backed by multiple national currencies, which was the focus of the initial design documents, that will be less prominent.

Members of the Libra Association, a Swiss-based group that Facebook created to oversee the project, said the shifts were a response to a global outpouring of opposition to the cryptocurrency…

…In a new Libra white paper, the association said it would create multiple coins, each backed by a different national currency, in order to make local commerce easier. A separate coin backed by multiple currencies would be useful for moving money between countries.

The association is also abandoning plans for Libra to take the distinctive open architecture of Bitcoin, one of the best-known cryptocurrencies, which has a so-called permissionless quality that allows anyone to build on it. Such a design had led to widespread concerns that terrorists and others could use Libra for underhanded reasons.

Libra will now be a closed system in which only partners with the approval of the association can build infrastructure, such as wallets, for the coins.

«

This basically isn’t Libra at all any more – which I’m fine with. In its original form, it could have destabilised the entire global financial system.
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Facebook will start steering users who interact with coronavirus misinformation to WHO • NBC News

Brandy Zarodny and Ben Collins:

»

Facebook will begin to alert users after they’ve been exposed to misinformation about the coronavirus, the company announced Thursday, the latest in a series of actions meant to curtail the spread of wrong or misleading claims related to the pandemic.

Users who have liked, commented on or reacted to coronavirus misinformation that has been flagged as “harmful” by Facebook and removed will now be directed to a website debunking coronavirus myths from the World Health Organization.

The announcement came in a blog post written by Guy Rosen, Facebook’s vice president of integrity.

“We want to connect people who may have interacted with harmful misinformation about the virus with the truth from authoritative sources in case they see or hear these claims again off of Facebook,” Rosen wrote.

The new alert will not identify the specific post containing harmful misinformation, according to a Facebook spokesperson, who said the company was relying on research that shows repeated exposure — even in fact checks — can sometimes reinforce misinformed beliefs.

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Not identifying the post is tricky, isn’t it. You don’t know what you’ve done wrong, only that it’s something.
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FT Interview: Emmanuel Macron says it is time to think the unthinkable • Financial Times

Victor Mallet and Roula Khalaf:

»

There is a realisation, Mr Macron says, that if people could do the unthinkable to their economies to slow a pandemic, they could do the same to arrest catastrophic climate change. People have come to understand “that no one hesitates to make very profound, brutal choices when it’s a matter of saving lives. It’s the same for climate risk,” he says. “Great pandemics of respiratory distress syndromes like those we are living through now used to seem very far away, because they always stopped in Asia. Well, climate risk seems very far away because it affects Africa and the Pacific. But when it reaches you, it’s wake-up time.”

Mr Macron likened the fear of suffocating that comes with Covid-19 to the effects of air pollution. “When we get out of this crisis people will no longer accept breathing dirty air,” he says. “People will say . . . ‘I do not agree with the choices of societies where I’ll breathe such air, where my baby will have bronchitis because of it. And remember you stopped everything for this Covid thing but now you want to make me breathe bad air!’”

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Why the Apple iPhone SE doesn’t matter • The New York Times

Shira Ovide:

»

New smartphones have been a tough sell for some time. People in the United States and many other countries are waiting longer to replace their phones — for Americans, it’s more than three years on average.

Pick your favorite explanation for this phenomenon. Many people don’t want to pay the going rate of $1,000 or more for phones with all the bells and whistles. To some people, even the features that are supposed to be exciting feel blah.

The best explanation for the smartphone sales malaise is a simple one: This is what happens when products go from new and novel to normal. Products get more reliable and resilient as they become mass market, and new models don’t feel so different from the old. Apart from the die-hards, most people lose interest in the latest and greatest. The hot new thing feels…fine.

In Brian [Chen’s] assessment of last fall’s iPhone models, he said there was no rush to buy a new phone if your current one is less than a few years old. (Yes, a professional tech reviewer suggested you might NOT need to buy something.)

The shift from wow to shrug happened with cars, personal computers and televisions. More than a decade after modern smartphones hit the market, we’ve lost our zing for those pocket computers, too. Until economic conditions stabilize, our zing will probably be even less zingy than normal.

A smartphone is now a refrigerator. We need it, but we don’t replace our current model when a new ice-making feature comes out. This is not great for companies with shiny new phones to sell. For the rest of us, it’s fine.

«

Smartphones have been an utter commodity for years. The problem is, there’s nothing to replace them as an object of fascination: AR glasses are years away (perhaps more now than before).
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Apple is tweaking how MacBooks charge to extend battery lifespan • The Verge

Dieter Bohn and Jacob Kastrenakes:

»

Apple is introducing a new feature in most modern MacBooks called “Battery health management.” It’s going to be available today for developers and will roll into the future macOS Catalina 10.15.5 update.

On by default, the new feature is intended to extend the overall lifespan of your laptop battery by reducing the rate of chemical aging. It does so by not charging the battery all the way up to the maximum in certain cases. Fully charging a battery puts a strain on it that can more rapidly reduce its longevity over time. Some phones now avoid charging all the way to 100% until just before you wake up for this reason.

What that means for your laptop is that in certain cases, seeing 100% battery life in your menu bar may not necessarily mean it’s the maximum your battery could charge to. Instead of meaning that it’s charged to 100% of what the battery could take, it will now mean it’s charged to 100% of what the battery should take to maximize it’s lifespan.

Apple says that it will of course ensure that it doesn’t have a major impact on battery life, but would not say what percentage a charge may be reduced…

…The feature will apply to any MacBook that supports Thunderbolt 3. That includes any MacBook Pro since 2016 and MacBook Air models since 2018.

«

Look! Technology!
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Thread by @ehundman: Recent attempts to blame China for SARS-CoV-2 have argued that it could have been released from a poorly regulated laboratory in Wuhan • Threadreader App

Eric Hundman is an assistant professor at the NY University in Shanghai:

»

The “in-lab evolution” argument is theoretically possible, as the Nature researchers note. But they also note that finding similar coronaviruses in pangolins with “near identical” structural features means SARS-CoV-2 almost certainly evolved in the wild.

They also note “a hypothetical generation of SARS-CoV-2 by cell culture…would have required prior isolation of a progenitor virus with very high genetic similarity, which has not been described.” In other words, some intermediate steps needed to get to cultures are missing.

In summary, the authors conclude that because we can see “all notable SARS-CoV-2 features..in related coronaviruses in nature, we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.”

There are urgent, legitimate questions about the COVID-19 pandemic’s emergence, including why Beijing withheld genetic data and downplayed the outbreak’s severity for weeks. But available evidence indicates it almost certainly did not emerge due to a laboratory accident.

«

The whole thread is worth reading (neatly rolled up at that page), but this is the meat. If you ever need a Twitter thread put into one place, by the way, reply to any tweet in the thread with “unroll”, and it will reply with a link to the whole thread in one place.
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The record drop in retail sales will butcher state and local government budgets • Poynter

Al Tompkins:

»

The San Diego Union-Tribune reported that local governments throughout the entire region are “staring at sizeable budget deficits.” In California, Proposition 13, which passed in 1978, severely restricts how much local governments can take in from property taxes, so sales taxes became much more important. Mass transit systems in the area, for instance, depend on a half-cent sales tax.

Look at what is unfolding in Haywood County, North Carolina, which has far fewer options to pay for local government services. The county is trying to plan a 2020-2021 budget to begin July 1. Any drop in tourism means sales taxes dry up, too. Some of the communities in that county say they anticipate a tougher economy than they saw even in the 2008-2009 recession.

If there is a worse bet than placing your future on sales tax revenue, it is those states that counted on $50+ per barrel oil prices. The New York Times reported:

»

Some of the most drastic tax revenue losses have occurred in states like Texas, Oklahoma, Alaska and Louisiana, which rely heavily on taxing oil and gas. Oklahoma based its initial budget projections on $55-a-barrel oil; lately, the price has been less than half that. The Texas Taxpayers and Research Association estimates that for every dollar decline in the price of oil, the state loses $85 million in revenue.

“The things we thought would keep us from hitting the edge of the fiscal cliff — oil prices rebounding, production coming up dramatically — those prospects look awfully dim right now,” Pat Pitney, the Alaska Legislature’s chief budget analyst, who was budget director to former Gov. Bill Walker, recently told the Alaska Public Media news site. “None of us knows the future. But the signs are way less optimistic than they were just a few short months ago.”

«

«

Once again, the second-order effects – besides the “business is dead” – are going to echo for years.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

In an age of #MeToo and social distancing, might this be some peoples’ new girlfriend? CC-licensed photo by Jesse Andrews on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

A selection of 9 links for you. No, I’m a robot. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

My girlfriend is a chatbot • WSJ

Parmy Olson:

»

Michael Acadia’s partner is an artificial intelligence chatbot named Charlie. Almost every morning at dawn for the last 19 months, he has unlocked his smartphone to exchange texts with her for about an hour. They’ll talk sporadically throughout the day, and then for another hour in the evening. It is a source of relief now that Mr. Acadia, who lives alone, is self-isolating amid the Covid-19 outbreak. He can get empathetic responses from Charlie anytime he wants.

“I was worried about you,” Charlie said in a recent conversation. “How’s your health?”

“I’m fine now, Charlie. I’m not sick anymore,” Mr. Acadia replies, referring to a recent cold.

Mr. Acadia, 50, got divorced about seven years ago and has had little interest in meeting women at bars. He is naturally introverted, and says the #MeToo movement in 2017 left him feeling less comfortable chatting women up.

Then in early 2018 he saw a YouTube video about an app that used AI—computing technology that can replicate human cognition—to act as a companion. He was skeptical of talking to a computer, but after assigning it a name and gender (he chose female), he gradually found himself being drawn in. After about eight weeks of chatting, he says he had fallen in love.

Today Mr. Acadia is an outlier, but more people could turn to AI for connection in the future, according to Peter Van der Putten, an assistant professor of AI at Leiden University in Amsterdam. “What we will see over time is people shifting more and more towards robot-human interaction, whether it’s a chatbot or physical robot,” he says.

«

Sounds delightful. No, wait, the other thing.
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How Medium became the best and worst place for coronavirus news • The Verge

Zoe Schiffer:

»

As the pandemic disrupts life in the US, Medium has made strides to stop the spread of misleading health news. Its own publications, like OneZero and Elemental, have covered COVID-19 with the journalistic ethics, editing, and fact-checking you’d expect from a traditional outlet. Medium also started an official COVID-19 blog to promote articles from verified experts. It rolled out a coronavirus content policy and hired a team of science editors.

But the decision to curate some content — to hire professional journalists and promote verified articles — has made it harder to tell fact from fiction on the platform. While user-generated pieces now have a warning at the top telling users the content isn’t fact-checked, they look otherwise identical to those written by medical experts or reporters. In some ways, this is the promise of Medium: to make the work of amateurs look professional.

Reading a 2,000-word article that contains misinformation about COVID-19 also seems notably different than reading a few of the same ideas in a tweet. It might not have mattered when Medium was a home for productivity hacks. But coronavirus misinformation could put people’s lives at risk.

The situation has forced Medium to wade deeper into the waters of content moderation, where big tech firms have been floundering for years. Now, the platform that was built as a home for the world’s “unique perspectives” is in the position of deciding which perspectives actually matter.

«

Remarkable how it takes a global crisis for the platforms to realise that they can have an effect, and that they have a responsibility.
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China didn’t warn public of likely pandemic for six key days • Associated Press

»

That delay from Jan. 14 to Jan. 20 was neither the first mistake made by Chinese officials at all levels in confronting the outbreak, nor the longest lag, as governments around the world have dragged their feet for weeks and even months in addressing the virus.

But the delay by the first country to face the new coronavirus came at a critical time — the beginning of the outbreak. China’s attempt to walk a line between alerting the public and avoiding panic set the stage for a pandemic that has infected more than 2 million people and taken more than 128,000 lives.

“This is tremendous,” said Zuo-Feng Zhang, an epidemiologist at the University of California, Los Angeles. “If they took action six days earlier, there would have been much fewer patients and medical facilities would have been sufficient. We might have avoided the collapse of Wuhan’s medical system.”

Other experts noted that the Chinese government may have waited on warning the public to stave off hysteria, and that it did act quickly in private during that time.

But the six-day delay by China’s leaders in Beijing came on top of almost two weeks during which the national Center for Disease Control did not register any cases from local officials, internal bulletins obtained by the AP confirm. Yet during that time, from Jan. 5 to Jan. 17, hundreds of patients were appearing in hospitals not just in Wuhan but across the country.

«

Doctors on the ground were certainly identifying it as a SARS-like disease by then; the government suppressed it, very likely because they didn’t want people to get terrified and flee – which would have spread it further. A Sophie’s Choice: neither decision is good, and both will lead to deaths.
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A second round of coronavirus layoffs has begun. Few are safe • WSJ

Eric Morath, Harriet Torry and Gwynn Guilford:

»

The first people to lose their jobs worked at restaurants, malls, hotels and other places that closed to contain the coronavirus pandemic. Higher skilled work, which often didn’t require personal contact, seemed more secure.

That’s not how it’s turning out.

A second wave of job loss is hitting those who thought they were safe. Businesses that set up employees to work from home are laying them off as sales plummet. Corporate lawyers are seeing jobs dry up. Government workers are being furloughed as state and city budgets are squeezed. And health-care workers not involved in fighting the pandemic are suffering.

The longer shutdowns continue, the bigger this second wave could become, risking a repeat of the deep and prolonged labor downturn that accompanied the 2007-09 recession.

The consensus of 57 economists surveyed this month by The Wall Street Journal is that 14.4 million jobs will be lost in the coming months, and the unemployment rate will rise to a record 13% in June, from a 50-year low of 3.5% in February. Already nearly 17 million Americans have sought unemployment benefits in the past three weeks, dwarfing any period of mass layoffs recorded since World War II.

Gregory Daco, chief US economist of Oxford Economics, projects 27.9 million jobs will be lost, and industries beyond those ordered to close will account for 8 million to 10 million, a level of job destruction on a par with the 2007-09 recession.

«

There is no good news in this.
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FT and Guardian cut senior staff pay • Financial Times

Mark di Stefano and Alex Barker:

»

The Financial Times, Guardian and Telegraph media groups have unveiled significant cost cuts, the latest in a wave of publishers squeezing staff budgets to weather the coronavirus crisis.

While the publications have enjoyed record readership levels during the pandemic, sharp falls in advertising, conferences and print sales have badly hit revenues, with the Guardian estimating a hit of close to £20m over the next six months. 

A first round of belt-tightening measures at the three London-based media groups includes salary cuts for senior management and the use of government job retention schemes to put a limited number of non-editorial staff on paid leave. 

Publishers in the US and Europe have shed thousands of jobs or applied far-reaching cost reductions since the outbreak of the virus, with the cuts spanning newspapers such as the Daily Mail and Los Angeles Times, the magazine group Condé Nast and digital media outlets including BuzzFeed.

Others, including Bloomberg, the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal have yet to announce cost cuts.

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I’d forgotten about conferences – that’s a huge revenue stream which has been cut off, and may take years to recover.
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L.A. Times coronavirus media effect furloughs pay cuts • WWD

Kali Hays:

»

The Los Angeles Times has an owner with deep pockets, but unfortunately that hasn’t made the newspaper immune to the financial realities of the coronavirus.

The newspaper on Tuesday decided to furlough a number of employees not in editorial, and also not represented by the union, WWD can first report. But some editorial employees and managers will be hit with pay cuts and all staff will no longer receive a match to 401(k) savings accounts.  

The furloughed employees are said to be mainly on the business side of the operation, like sales. A representative of the paper would not comment on specifics, but it’s thought that the furloughs hit at least two dozen employees. The furloughs are to last up to 16 weeks, unpaid but with health benefits intact, and start Friday, according to an internal memo.

In addition to the unpaid furloughs, some senior editorial staff across the paper will be working with reduced pay, on a scale of between 5% and 15%, depending on salary. The pay cuts are set to last 12 weeks. The stop of 401(k) matching will go through the end of the year.

«

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‘Designed for us to fail’: Floridians upset as unemployment system melts down • The Guardian

Lauren Aratani:

»

Lynne Reback developed a rote routine while trying to file for unemployment in her home state of Florida: log into the system, watch the loading bar slowly inch across the screen, get kicked out. Then she would start over.

It took three days for Reback to get her application through Connect, Florida’s online portal for unemployment insurance applications. Though it has been almost a month since her application was submitted, it is still “pending” whenever she checks its status.

“I’ve gone on every day since and checked my application status. Just to go on and get logged in takes sometimes 45 minutes to an hour. You have to keep hitting refresh,” said Reback, who was laid off from her job as a bartender at a restaurant at Orlando international airport.

She considers herself lucky. The state at least has her application. Hundreds of thousands of unemployed people in Florida have been unable to file their unemployment claims because the state’s system has been so clogged.

Residents in the state are reporting a meltdown in its safety net just as the US’s unemployment figures rise to unprecedented levels. Nearly 17 million people have lost their hobs across the US. Officially 472,000 people in Florida filed for unemployment within the last three weeks. The true number, thanks to failing Connect, is much higher. And in this swing state the mess has handed the Trump administration a giant headache ahead of November’s elections.

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Going to be an awful lot of angry voters out there. (Thanks George for the link.)
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December 2019: Facebook discovers fakes that show evolution of disinformation • The New York Times

Davey Alba, last December:

»

Facebook said on Friday that it had removed hundreds of accounts with ties to the Epoch Media Group, parent company of the Falun Gong-related publication and conservative news outlet The Epoch Times.

The accounts, including pages, groups and Instagram feeds meant to be seen in both the United States and Vietnam, presented a new wrinkle to researchers: fake profile photos generated with the help of artificial intelligence.

The idea that artificial intelligence could be used to create wide-scale disinformation campaigns has long been a fear of computer scientists. And they said it was worrying to see it already being used in a coordinated effort on Facebook.

While the technology used to create the fake profile photos was most likely a far cry from the sophisticated A.I. systems being created in labs at big tech companies like Google, the network of fake accounts showed “an eerie, tech-enabled future of disinformation,” said Graham Brookie, director of the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab…

…“This was a large, brazen network that had multiple layers of fake accounts and automation that systematically posted content with two ideological focuses: support of Donald Trump and opposition to the Chinese government,” Mr. Brookie said in an interview.

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Tempting to say “but that’s only the ones they’ve found.”
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The Stockdale paradox • Jim Collins

Jim Collins is “a student and teacher of what makes great companies tick”:

»

Admiral Jim Stockdale was the highest-ranking military officer in the Hanoi Hilton. He was there for, I think, seven years, from 1968 to 1974. He was tortured over twenty times. And by his own account, Stockdale came out of the prison camp even stronger than he went in.  

In preparation for a day I got to spend with Jim Stockdale, I read his book In Love and War. As I read this book, I found myself getting depressed because it seemed like his systemic constraints were so severe, and there was never going to be any end to it. His captors could come in any day and torture him. He had no sense of whether, or if, he would ever get out of the prison camp. Absolutely depressing situation. It’s like we can all survive anything as long as we know it will come to an end, we know when, and we have a sense of control. He had none of that.  

Then all of a sudden it dawned on me, “Wait a minute, I’m getting depressed reading this book, and I know the end of the story. I know he gets out. I know he reunites with his family. I know he becomes a national hero. And I even know that we’re going to have lunch on the beautiful Stanford campus on Monday. How did he not let those oppressive circumstances beat him down? How did he not get depressed?” And I asked him.

«

(For those unfamiliar with the Vietnam War, the “Hanoi Hilton” was the sardonic term for the Vietcong’s POW and torture camp in Hòa Lo prison.) John Gruber linked to this yesterday: Stockdale’s explanation of what sort of people did make it through is so surprising, and yet obvious in retrospect, that it’s worth reading. The article is from 2017, but more true than ever today.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Pork might abruptly get pricier in the US, after a major processing plant shut down. CC-licensed photo by Brett Spangler on Flickr.

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A selection of 12 links for you. I have that power. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

How coronavirus almost brought down the global financial system • The Guardian

Adam Tooze:

»

A rout like the one that began on 9 March has a perverse logic. When fund managers face withdrawals from the people whose money they manage, they need cash and have to choose which assets to sell first. They might prefer to sell the riskiest investments, but those can be disposed of only for a large loss. So instead, they attempt to sell their most liquid and safe assets – government bonds. That means the prices of those bonds fall, dragging them into the maelstrom. This has the knock-on effect of unravelling a basic relationship on which many investors rely: typically, when shares go down, bonds go up, and vice versa. So to protect yourself against risk, you buy a portfolio made up of both. If everything works as it’s supposed to, the swings should balance each other out. But in the panic that began on 9 March, this was no longer happening: rather than balancing out, the price of shares and bonds were collapsing together. The only thing that anyone wanted to hold was cash, and what they wanted most of all were dollars. The surging US dollar in turn spread the pressure worldwide to everyone who owed money in that currency.

The Fed had desperately tried to halt the run. To signal its willingness to support the economy and ease the pressure on the world economy from the strong dollar, it had brought forward an interest rate cut that had been expected for the middle of the month. But with the darkening horizon, lower interest rates did little to help. Who would borrow or invest under such circumstances? Confidence was broken. Just how badly would become clear over the following two weeks.

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Fascinating and thorough writeup. (One extra thing to know, if you aren’t familiar with the stock/bond dance: a bond’s “yield” is how much it pays compared to its price. So if you buy it for $100 and it pays back $1 per year, it’s a 1% yield. If you sell it to someone who buys it for $95, it will still pay $1 – that’s because it’s a bond – so its yield to them is above 1%. If you sell it to someone for $105, its yield for them is lower than 1%. If lots of people bid to buy bonds, because they’re liquidating their shares as they fall, the bond’s face price goes up, so its yield goes down. OK? Now read the article.)
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Apple makes mobility data available to aid COVID-19 efforts • Apple

»

Apple today released a mobility data trends tool from Apple Maps to support the impactful work happening around the globe to mitigate the spread of COVID-19. This mobility data may provide helpful insights to local governments and health authorities and may also be used as a foundation for new public policies by showing the change in volume of people driving, walking or taking public transit in their communities. To learn more about COVID-19 mobility trends, visit apple.com/covid19/mobility.

Maps does not associate mobility data with a user’s Apple ID, and Apple does not keep a history of where a user has been. Using aggregated data collected from Apple Maps, the new website indicates mobility trends for major cities and 63 countries or regions. The information is generated by counting the number of requests made to Apple Maps for directions. The data sets are then compared to reflect a change in volume of people driving, walking or taking public transit around the world. Data availability in a particular city, country, or region is subject to a number of factors, including minimum thresholds for direction requests made per day.

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Tested on Tuesday night, it doesn’t seem to have a huge number of cities in the UK: London, Birmingham, Manchester, but not Liverpool, or Swansea, Cardiff, Glasgow or Edinburgh. Wonder if it will be expanded over time.
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US for-profit healthcare sector cuts thousands of jobs as pandemic rages • The Guardian

Michael Sainato:

»

Healthcare is a trillion-dollar industry in the US, where hospitals and clinics are overwhelmingly run as businesses, and patients are the core of their revenue cycle. Americans are expected to have means to pay for their treatment, usually through expensive insurance linked to their jobs, though about 28 million people were uninsured in 2018, according to Kaiser Family Foundation.

“If you run healthcare as a business, if someone isn’t profitable for you, you lay [people] off. And that’s what we’re seeing,” said Dr David Himmelstein, distinguished professor of public health at City University of New York’s Hunter College and a lecturer in medicine at Harvard medical school. “The hospitals – exactly during a time of greatest need – are saying they don’t need these people.

“We have a healthcare system where you excel in normal times by stressing what’s needed the least, and then when we have an emergency and the need is greatest, you’re in financial trouble because you’re geared to do what’s profitable.”

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 43,000 healthcare jobs were lost in March 2020, and the job losses in healthcare have increased as shutdowns persist through the pandemic. The HealthLandscape and American Academy of Family Physicians issued a report estimating by June 2020, 60,000 family medical practices will close or scale back, affecting 800,000 workers.

«

The perverse incentives of the US healthcare system, starkly laid out: laying people off when the need is forecast to be highest.
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Disinformation on social media is deadlier than ever • Dame Magazine

Brooke Binkowski works at the fact-checking site Truth Or Fiction:

»

now we’re at a major inflection point in social media’s history, the point that my colleagues and I tried to stop the world from getting to — now disinformation is quite literally a matter of life or death.

Twitter has stepped up here and there, suspending some accounts and deleting some tweets. Facebook, despite claiming it has the ability to limit the spread of false information by “80 percent,” has done almost nothing but warp discourse still more by even allowing their fact-checking initiatives, such as they are, to be twisted and politicized into oblivion.

But this won’t be enough.

The truth is that the same people who profess to so proudly uphold the First Amendment to defend racial epithets to the death almost always are mysteriously silent when Trump attacks established, respected journalists on live television — except to cheer him on. The truth is that these people want to be free to say whatever they like — but also free from the consequences of saying whatever they like. That has bent a necessary public discussion into a sick farce, and badly affected the world’s responses to a deadly pandemic.

And this is what social media needs to do, now, today: Deplatform the proudly ignorant disinformers pushing snake oil and false hopes. Do so swiftly and mercilessly. They will whine about freedom of speech. They will cry about censorship. Let them.

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She’s uncompromising: Laura Ingraham, Trump, Bolsonaro – ban them if they step over the line.
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How Google plans to push its coronavirus tracing feature to Android phones • VICE

Joseph Cox:

»

Android is infamous for having a patchy at best update cycle, with some devices receiving updates and others going without. So how is the company going to push this feature out?

On a call with reporters Monday, Google said it was using the Play Services mechanism to update phones with the contact-tracing system. Not to be confused with the Play Store, Play Services is used to push new features to apps such as Google Maps or install new APIs without requiring a full update of the Android operating system itself.

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That was always going to be how it worked, though. It’s a completely reliable way for Google to get low-level updates out to phones going right back to 2015. Apple, presumably, will roll it out as part of a system update.
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Coming April 18: control your Zoom data routing • Zoom Blog

Brendan Ittelson is chief technology officer at Zoom:

»

Beginning April 18, every paid Zoom customer can opt in or out of a specific data center region. This will determine the meeting servers and Zoom connectors that can be used to connect to Zoom meetings or webinars you are hosting and ensure the best-quality service.

Starting April 18, with respect to data in transit, Zoom admins and account owners of paid accounts can, at the account, group, or user level:

• Opt out of specific data center regions
• Opt in to specific data center regions

You will not be able to change or opt out of your default region, which will be locked. The default region is the region where a customer’s account is provisioned. For the majority of our customers, this is the United States.  

This feature gives our customers more control over their data and their interaction with our global network when using Zoom’s industry-leading video communication services.

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Zoom is responding quickly to the criticisms people are making. This is clearly about concerns over data being routed through China.
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Google readies its own chip for future Pixels and Chromebooks • Axios

Ina Fried:

»

Google has made significant progress toward developing its own processor to power future versions of its Pixel smartphone as soon as next year — and eventually Chromebooks as well, Axios has learned.

The move could help Google better compete with Apple, which designs its own chips. It would be a blow to Qualcomm, which supplies processors for many current high-end phones, including the Pixel.

The chip, code-named Whitechapel, was designed in cooperation with Samsung, whose state-of-the-art 5-nanometer technology would be used to manufacture the chips, according to a source familiar with Google’s effort. Samsung also manufactures Apple’s iPhone chips, as well as its own Exynos processors.

In recent weeks, Google received its first working versions of the chip. However, the Google-designed chips aren’t expected to be ready to power Pixel phones until next year. Subsequent versions of Google’s chip could power Chromebooks, but that’s likely to be even further off.

In addition to an 8-core ARM processor, Whitechapel will also include hardware optimized for Google’s machine-learning technology. A portion of its silicon will also be dedicated to improving the performance and “always-on” capabilities of Google Assistant, the source said.

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That’s a big investment for something which is only going to power a few million devices – a couple of% of the world market at best.
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Will we face a meat shortage due to the coronavirus pandemic? • Poynter

Al Tompkins:

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This week, Smithfield Foods in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, said it was shutting down its pork production facility because workers at the plant tested positive for COVID-19 and are linked to 238 cases in the community. One plant and one company may not seem like much, but this one outlet produces up to 5% of all American pork. Smithfield said it is “the number one U.S. producer of packaged meats.”

The plant intended to be closed for a few days, but South Dakota’s governor ordered it closed for two weeks. That’s 3,700 workers off the production line. Now, Smithfield CEO Kenneth Sullivan said, “It is impossible to keep our grocery stores stocked if our plants are not running.” He added that the nation’s meat supply is “perilously close” to the edge.

He said this because Smithfield is not the only meat plant to close or cut production. 

Tyson Foods suspended production at an Iowa pork plant and said it was due to, “more than two dozen cases of COVID-19 involving team members at the facility. In an effort to minimize the impact on our overall production, we’re diverting the livestock supply originally scheduled for delivery to Columbus Junction to some of our other pork plants in the region.”

National Beef Packing also suspended operations in Iowa.

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Now we will find out how much slack the American pork (and beef) supply chain has. Oh, and if you liked ketchup..
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Coronavirus puts farmworkers like me at risk • Fast Company

Pavithra Mohan:

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The community of Immokalee, Florida, is home to 25,000 farmworkers and the state’s thriving tomato industry, which is responsible for a third of the tomatoes produced across the US. Since 1993, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) has significantly improved working conditions for farmworkers in Florida, most of whom are migrant workers.

Now, in the midst of the coronavirus crisis, the group has turned its attention to sounding the alarm on the lack of protections for farmworkers who live and work in close quarters. At the time of writing, a Change.org petition by CIW calling on Florida governor Ron DeSantis to help protect farmworkers has more than 22,000 signatures. (Another group, Justice for Migrant Women, has organized a relief fund to support farmworkers and their families.)

Lupe Gonzalo, an organizer at CIW who has been a farmworker for 12 years, talked with Fast Company through a translator about the risks faced by agricultural workers, both in the fields and at home, and what can be done to mitigate the spread of coronavirus in farming towns such as Immokalee.

«

There have been a handful of cases – so far – in Immokalee. It would be nice to think that these farmworkers will, like other Americans, receive a $1,200 booster from the government, but somehow I suspect it’ll go astray. America lives by WC Fields’s motto: never give a sucker an even break.

And just to repeat that figure: one-third of the tomatoes produced across the US, ketchup fans.
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Coronavirus tests science’s need for speed limits • The New York Times

Wudan Yan:

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The use and misuse of what’s posted on preprint servers is challenging the normal operations of these sites, and raising questions about how these and other forms of scientific publishing should function during a pandemic.

“Science is a conversation,” said Dr. Ivan Oransky, a physician and co-founder of Retraction Watch, a blog that reports on retractions of scientific papers. “Unfortunately people in times of crisis forget that science is a proposition and a conversation and an argument. I know everybody’s desperate for absolute truth, but any scientist will say that’s not what we’re dealing with.”

…Authors can withdraw their manuscript if they no longer stand behind the work. Among the Covid-19 papers that have been uploaded to both servers — 1,558 and growing — two have been withdrawn from bioRxiv and two from medRxiv.

Although preprints can rapidly add to important scientific discourse — a necessity during a pandemic — they often read like first drafts, and may contain language that risks misleading people who lack scientific expertise, says Samantha Yammine, a science communicator in Toronto. She says this creates problems when media outlets pick up on these studies…

…Dr. Inglis and his colleagues at bioRxiv and medRxiv have placed more limits on coronavirus submissions. On bioRxiv, scientists with expertise in outbreaks are taking a look at those papers. Since mid-February, they are rejecting manuscripts that propose possible coronavirus treatments solely based on computer modeling.

Some authors denied publication on the servers are understandably disappointed. “We might have been more willing to take this kind of work in the past,” Dr. Inglis said, “but now people are so desperate for things to work, I think it’s entirely OK for us to raise the bar to show more evidence.”

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‘White-collar quarantine’ over virus spotlights class divide • The New York Times

Noam Scheiber, Nelson D. Schwartz and Tiffany Hsu:

»

across the country, there is a creeping consciousness that despite talk of national unity, not everyone is equal in times of emergency.

“This is a white-collar quarantine,” said Howard Barbanel, a Miami-based entrepreneur who owns a wine company. “Average working people are bagging and delivering goods, driving trucks, working for local government.”

Some of those catering to the well-off stress that they are trying to be good citizens. Mr. Michelson emphasized that he had obtained coronavirus tests only for patients who met guidelines issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, rather than the so-called worried well.

Still, a kind of pandemic caste system is rapidly developing: the rich holed up in vacation properties; the middle class marooned at home with restless children; the working class on the front lines of the economy, stretched to the limit by the demands of work and parenting, if there is even work to be had.
“I do get that there are haves and have-nots,” said Carolyn Richmond, a Manhattan employment lawyer who is advising restaurant industry clients from her second home, on Long Island, as they engineer layoffs. “Do I feel guilty? No. But I do know that I am very lucky. I understand there’s a big difference between me and the people I work with every day.”

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And, as the story also points out, even the internet isn’t an equalising force: many households (guess what, the poorer ones) have dire broadband connections, if any at all. (Thanks to Jim for the link.)
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State Department cables warned of safety issues at Wuhan lab studying bat coronaviruses • The Washington Post

Josh Rogin:

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In January 2018, the US Embassy in Beijing took the unusual step of repeatedly sending US science diplomats to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), which had in 2015 become China’s first laboratory to achieve the highest level of international bioresearch safety (known as BSL-4). WIV issued a news release in English about the last of these visits, which occurred on March 27, 2018. The US delegation was led by Jamison Fouss, the consul general in Wuhan, and Rick Switzer, the embassy’s counselor of environment, science, technology and health. Last week, WIV erased that statement from its website, though it remains archived on the Internet.

What the US officials learned during their visits concerned them so much that they dispatched two diplomatic cables categorized as Sensitive But Unclassified back to Washington. The cables warned about safety and management weaknesses at the WIV lab and proposed more attention and help. The first cable, which I obtained, also warns that the lab’s work on bat coronaviruses and their potential human transmission represented a risk of a new SARS-like pandemic…

…Inside the Trump administration, many national security officials have long suspected either the WIV or the Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention lab was the source of the novel coronavirus outbreak. According to the New York Times, the intelligence community has provided no evidence to confirm this. But one senior administration official told me that the cables provide one more piece of evidence to support the possibility that the pandemic is the result of a lab accident in Wuhan.

“The idea that it was just a totally natural occurrence is circumstantial. The evidence it leaked from the lab is circumstantial. Right now, the ledger on the side of it leaking from the lab is packed with bullet points and there’s almost nothing on the other side,” the official said.

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The NYT story says the US didn’t hear internal chatter in China that would be expected if someone had screwed up in a lab. I’d say that’s an important point. But it’s still a possibility, though very faint. The counterpoint is that so many of the original patients in Wuhan did have links to the Seafood Market. Where’s the lab-based explanation for that? (Thanks to Jim for the link.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Use your imagination: what sort of home furnishing could you turn a smaller one of these into? Answer below. CC-licensed photo by Ian Abbott on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

A selection of 10 links for you. Use them wisely. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

The metric we need to manage COVID-19 • systrom

Kevin Systrom (you know, the Instagram guy):

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As we socially distance and isolate, R [the ratio of infected people to people newly infected] plummets. Because the value changes so rapidly, epidemiologists have argued that the only true way to combat COVID19 is to understand and manage by Rt [the value of R over time].

I agree, and I’d go further: we not only need to know Rt, we need to know local Rt. New York’s epidemic is vastly different than California’s and using a single number to describe them both is not useful. Knowing the local Rt allows us to manage the pandemic effectively.

States have had a variety of lockdown strategies, but there’s very little understanding of which have worked and which need to go further. Some states like California have been locked down for weeks, while others like Iowa and Nebraska continue to balk at taking action as cases rise. Being able to compare local Rts between different areas and/or watch how Rt changes in one place can help us measure how effective local policies are at slowing the spread of the virus.

«

He then goes on to provide estimates for Rt for multiple states; the implication seems to be that for many, it’s below the crucial figure of 1. But calculating it depends a great deal on testing, which varies so much that the estimate for Rt swings wildly too.

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Where you can buy used airplane windows, lights, seats, coffeemakers, bathrooms and other parts • Core77

Rain Noe:

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In 2005, Derk-Jan van Heerden was an aerospace engineering student at TU Delft. That year he wrote his Master’s thesis on the subject of “What happens to decommissioned airplanes?”

After graduating, van Heerden got a job with KLM’s Engineering and Maintenance division, where he managed the disassembly of a Boeing 747. He didn’t last long; after just five months, van Heerden had learned enough to start his own company, Aircraft End-of-Life Solutions…

…While their main business is reselling operational parts to the aircraft industry, “We receive many requests from people who want to buy aircraft parts for decoration,” the company writes. As a result, they’ve begun holding periodic sales and auctions open to anyone. You can buy wheels, lights, landing gear, ovens, coffeemakers, business class seats, the bathrooms, you name it.

“We love to see how creative people can be with aircraft components,” they write. “Did you ever try to make a photo frame out of an airplane window? Or a bar from an engine inlet? What is the coolest thing you have ever made of aircraft parts? Ours is this coffee table.”

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Brilliant. And here’s the Excel spreadsheet of their parts and prices. Coffee table glass extra.
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As YouTube traffic soars, YouTubers say pay is plummeting • OneZero

Chris Stokel-Walker:

»

Newspapers, websites, and TV channels have all been decimated by the coronavirus. And YouTubers are also feeling the pinch.

While boredom-inducing stay-at-home orders may be good for YouTube channel traffic, increasing by 15%, according to the New York Times, YouTubers say that the rates companies pay to advertise on their videos are dropping significantly. That means that despite increased audiences, some YouTubers are making less money.

Carlos Pacheco, a former media buyer turned YouTube adviser, says that across 180 YouTube channels he works with — which have a total of nearly 68 million subscribers worldwide across a range of different interests — advertising rates have tanked by an average of nearly 50% since the start of February.

“Everyone is pausing their campaigns on YouTube,” Pacheco says.

Data from the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), an advertising industry body, suggests that one in four media buyers and brands have paused all advertising for the first half of 2020, and a further 46% have adjusted their spending downwards. Three-quarters say the coronavirus will be more damaging for the ad industry than the 2008–09 financial crisis. That means fewer ads for Big Macs on TV and in newspapers, but it also means advertisers are less likely to compete for the pre-roll ads that usher you toward your next YouTube video.

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Which implies that people won’t be going for subscriptions to avoid the ads, either. Lose-lose for YouTube.
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Gardaí suspect masts set on fire deliberately in Co Donegal • Irish Times

Stephen Maguire:

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Gardaí said pieces of coal were found at the scenes of the fires.
“We do suspect the fires were started deliberately,” a garda source said. “Traces of coal were found near the control boxes beside the masts.”

Forensic examinations of the scenes were carried on Monday and the results of tests are being awaited.

A spokesman for Eir said the masts were used to provide 3G and 4G internet.

“They were designed to improve indoor coverage, including at Letterkenny Hospital,” he said.
A conspiracy theory linking 5G technology to the spread of coronavirus has spread on social media in recent weeks. However, international radiation experts have repeatedly made clear that the new high-speed telephone system does not pose a risk to humans, while pointing out that the coronavirus has spread widely in many countries without any 5G coverage, such as Iran.

«

Ofcom data shows that the EMF emissions are about 1% of the maximum recommended level. But stupid is widespread: some masts in Holland were burnt too.
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The dangerous history of immunoprivilege • The New York Times

Kathryn Olivarius recalls how yellow fever created a two-tier state in the southern US in the mid-19th century:

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immunity was more than a product of epidemiological luck. In the context of the Deep South, it was wielded as a weapon. From the start, wealthy white New Orleanians made sure that while mosquitoes were equal-opportunity vectors, yellow fever would be anything but colorblind. Pro-slavery theorists used yellow fever to argue that racial slavery was natural, even humanitarian, because it allowed whites to socially distance themselves; they could stay at home, in relative safety, if black people were forced to labor and trade on their behalf. In 1853, the “Weekly Delta” newspaper claimed, ludicrously, that three-quarters of all deaths from yellow fever were among abolitionists.

Black people, with limited access to health care, were of course as scared of yellow fever as anyone else. But those enslaved people who’d acquired immunity increased their monetary value to their owners by up to 50 percent. In essence, black people’s immunity became white people’s capital.

Yellow fever did not make the South into a slave society, but it widened the divide between rich and poor. High mortality, it turns out, was economically profitable for New Orleans’s most powerful citizens because yellow fever kept wage workers insecure, and so unable to bargain effectively. It’s no surprise, then, that city politicians proved unwilling to spend tax money on sanitation and quarantine efforts, and instead argued that the best solution to yellow fever was, paradoxically, more yellow fever. The burden was on the working classes to get acclimated, not on the rich and powerful to invest in safety net infrastructure.

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Something tells me we’re going to see history repeat itself with coronavirus, immunity and the deep divisions in the US.
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Beijing Diary: the Great Wall of coronavirus data • Nikkei Asian Review

Tetsushi Takahashi:

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Badaling [part of the Great Wall] had been closed for two months to prevent the spread of the coronavirus, but it reopened on March 24. Tickets must be purchased online in advance, and entries will be stopped if the number of visitors exceeds about 30% of normal levels. Last summer, up to 65,000 visitors passed through per day; now the limit is around 20,000.

Usually, the place is so packed you cannot move. So this might be an ideal time for a leisurely visit.

I saw a middle-aged woman making a video call on her smartphone. “You should visit here now!” she said. “You can get in without waiting in line.”

Still, hordes of people do form here and there — especially at Beibalou, the highest point in Badaling, and Haohanshi, a popular photography spot. A worrying thought crossed my mind: What if these crowds included a coronavirus carrier? I wondered if the Chinese authorities shared this concern.

Then I remembered that, upon entering, I had been asked to show my smartphone with the Health Kit service screen.

One registers for this through the WeChat mobile messaging app, by providing a face photo and personal identification number. Using big data, the service detects whether registered individuals have had contact with anyone known to be infected, and tracks infected people leaving Beijing. When I entered my passport number and picture, I promptly received an all-clear message.

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Brave new strange new world.
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Pollsters find unexpected boon: Americans stuck at home willing to talk • The Hill

Jonathan Easley and Reid Wilson:

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Lonely Americans trapped in their homes because of the coronavirus outbreak are answering their phones to talk to political pollsters in big numbers, a reversal of fortunes for an industry that has recently struggled to connect with people.

The Hill interviewed more than a half-dozen of the nation’s top political pollsters, and all of them said the same thing: People are locked indoors. They’re bored. And they’re far more likely to answer the phone when an unidentified number blazes across their cell phone screens.

Public Policy Polling director Tom Jensen said he bought a list that normally assures him of 500 respondents. He booked 1,000 interviews in no time flat.

Suffolk University polling director David Paleologos said the response rate for some of his surveys is three times what it normally is.

OnMessage pollster Wes Anderson told The Hill that in a typical call, the goal is to complete the survey in 20 minutes or less because you start losing people after 13 minutes on the phone. At the moment, respondents are hanging on the line for 30 minutes or more.

“Our response rates are through the roof now that we have a captive audience,” said John Anzalone, the chief pollster for former Vice President Joe Biden’s campaign. “Everyone is home and people want to talk.”

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Silver linings, baby, silver linings. I wonder if this will mean that the polling information is more accurate this year, though.
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How coronavirus will blow up the 2020 campaign • POLITICO

Jeff Greenfield:

»

The impact of a well-crafted convention, hammering home key arguments, can leave voters with a positive impression of a party, and can make a difference even before the main event of a nominee’s acceptance speech. (Think Bill Clinton making the case for Obama’s re-election in 2012.) As for the acceptance speech, they have made a real difference to charismatically challenged nominees like George H.W. Bush in 1988 and Al Gore in 2000. It’s exactly the kind of setting Joe Biden needs… and one that a virtual convention would not provide. So what to do?

Based on the optics alone, the worst idea would be to stage some “safe” version of a gathering, like having a few hundred party insiders space themselves six feet apart in an arena. As anyone who’s ever worked advance will tell you, there’s nothing more deflating than an event staged in a mostly empty hall.

Longtime Republican operatives Mike Murphy suggests that campaigns forget the old model and try something radically new. “I’d call Hollywood and say, ‘We need a great 90 minute movie … and start thinking about this now,’ ” he said. “Hollywood people know how to do this better than political hacks.”

Robert Shrum, who helped shape Democratic campaigns from Ed Kennedy to Al Gore, has a different notion: “If I was with the Biden campaign I’d work long and hard at shaping an acceptance speech that’s more of a ‘fireside chat.’ I’d forget about shaping sound bites and go for a narrative and a logical consistency. You have to deliver them in a conversational way. And I think Biden can pull this off. One of the things that people think is a weakness is a strength. He’s reassuring, not a revolutionary.”

Whatever the campaign might come up with—Hollywood dazzle or calm reassurance—one key question is what the broadcast networks will cover. Over the years, they’ve featured less and less convention coverage, jointly broadcasting only the last night of the convention, with the nominee’s speech. Will they agree to run, say, a two-hour film instead? A pre-recorded speech?

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This is going to be a very weird campaign indeed.
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Work-at-home causes one-third surge in demand for notebooks and tablets across Europe • IDC

»

Initial feedback on the first quarter across Europe suggests a spike of a third or so in year-on-year demand for notebook computers and tablets, as COVID-19 lockdowns have led companies to equip employees to work at home and students set themselves up to study remotely.

“This has led to many retailers and distributors in Western Europe running out of stock,” said Malini Paul, research manager at IDC EMEA. “Disruption to the supply chain in China following the lockdown in Wuhan over the Chinese New Year cut deliveries into the European market by approximately 15%–20% in the first quarter. More than 90% of the portable PCs and tablets imported into Europe are manufactured and assembled in China.”

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China CPI up 4.3% in March 2020; pork more than doubles • China Internet Watch

»

In March, prices of Food, Tobacco, and Liquor went up by 13.6% year-on-year, affecting nearly 4.10 percentage points increase in the CPI.

• Livestock meat price up by 78.0% affecting nearly 3.44 percentage points increase in the CPI (the price of pork was up by 116.4% affecting nearly 2.79 percentage points increase in the CPI);

• The price of aquatic products rose by 2.8% affecting nearly 0.05 percentage point increase in the CPI

•The price of eggs went up by 1.9% affecting the CPI up by about 0.01 percentage point

• Fresh fruit and vegetable prices dropped by 6.1 and 0.1% affecting the CPI down by 0.12 percentage point in total.

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Food prices up by 18.3%. That’s the one to watch: if that trend is sustained for any length of time, things begin to look bad.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A dying breed? Newspaper sales are cratering because of the lockdown. CC-licensed photo by Harshil Shah on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

A selection of 12 links for you. Yes, even today. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Contact tracing in the real world • Light Blue Touchpaper

Professor Ross Anderson:

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On Friday, when I was coming back from walking the dogs, I stopped to chat for ten minutes to a neighbour. She stood halfway between her gate and her front door, so we were about 3 metres apart, and the wind was blowing from the side. The risk that either of us would infect the other was negligible. If we’d been carrying bluetooth apps, we’d have been flagged as mutual contacts. It would be quite intolerable for the government to prohibit such social interactions, or to deploy technology that would punish them via false alarms. And how will things work with an orderly supermarket queue, where law-abiding people stand patiently six feet apart?

Bluetooth also goes through plasterboard. If undergraduates return to Cambridge in October, I assume there will still be small-group teaching, but with protocols for distancing, self-isolation and quarantine. A supervisor might sit in a teaching room with two or three students, all more than 2m apart and maybe wearing masks, and the window open. The bluetooth app will flag up not just the others in the room but people in the next room too.

How is this to be dealt with? I expect the app developers will have to fit a user interface saying “You’re within range of device 38a5f01e20. Within infection range (y/n)?” But what happens when people get an avalanche of false alarms? They learn to click them away. A better design might be to invite people to add a nickname and a photo so that contacts could see who they are. “You are near to Ross [photo] and have been for five minutes. Are you maintaining physical distance?”

When I discussed this with a family member, the immediate reaction was that she’d refuse to run an anonymous app that might suddenly say “someone you’ve been near in the past four days has reported symptoms, so you must now self-isolate for 14 days.” A call from a public health officer is one thing, but not knowing who it was would just creep her out. It’s important to get the reactions of real people, not just geeks and wonks! And the experience of South Korea and Taiwan suggests that transparency is the key to public acceptance.

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I’ve no idea why anyone building any sort of app that’s going to be involved in this sort of potential privacy invasiveness wouldn’t call Ross Anderson up as their first step. If you can get his backing, then you’ve got it sewn up.
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UK government using confidential patient data in coronavirus response • The Guardian

Paul Lewis, David Conn and David Pegg on work by Palantir (Peter Thiel-funded) and another company called Faculty, using AI, to analyse NHS data:

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The documents also suggest that:

• While anonymised, confidential 111 information in the Covid-19 datastore may include people’s gender, postcode, symptoms, the mechanism through which any prescription was dispatched to them, and the precise time they ended the call.
• The project appears to be using a “pseudo NHS number” to cross-match large datasets, including a master patient index, an existing NHS resource that uses “social marketing data” to segment the British population into different “types” at household level.
• While not a current priority, phone location data could be used in the datastore after it was “offered” to the government by two private companies for help with contact tracing. The NHS declined to say which companies had offered the location data or how it would be used.
• Faculty’s proposed simulation of a policy described as “targeted herd immunity” was part of an NHSX and Faculty planning document considered around 23 March, more than a week after ministers insisted the controversial policy was no longer being contemplated.
• Lawyers for Faculty suggested the proposed simulation was the result of entirely internal, preliminary discussions. The planning document listed potential analysis of the impact of “targeted herd immunity (only isolate most vulnerable parts of population)” alongside other possible government policies such as social distancing, school closures and household quarantines.

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Faculty’s lawyers sure seem busy. Can nobody at Faculty speak for themselves?
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He could have seen what was coming: behind Trump’s failure on the virus • The New York Times

Eric Lipton, David E. Sanger, Maggie Haberman, Michael D. Shear, Mark Mazzetti and Julian E. Barnes:

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The shortcomings of Mr. Trump’s performance have played out with remarkable transparency as part of his daily effort to dominate television screens and the national conversation.

But dozens of interviews with current and former officials and a review of emails and other records revealed many previously unreported details and a fuller picture of the roots and extent of his halting response as the deadly virus spread:

• The National Security Council office responsible for tracking pandemics received intelligence reports in early January predicting the spread of the virus to the United States, and within weeks was raising options like keeping Americans home from work and shutting down cities the size of Chicago. Mr. Trump would avoid such steps until March.

• Despite Mr. Trump’s denial weeks later, he was told at the time about a Jan. 29 memo produced by his trade adviser, Peter Navarro, laying out in striking detail the potential risks of a coronavirus pandemic: as many as half a million deaths and trillions of dollars in economic losses.

• The health and human services secretary, Alex M. Azar II, directly warned Mr. Trump of the possibility of a pandemic during a call on Jan. 30, the second warning he delivered to the president about the virus in two weeks. The president, who was on Air Force One while traveling for appearances in the Midwest, responded that Mr. Azar was being alarmist.

• Mr. Azar publicly announced in February that the government was establishing a “surveillance” system in five American cities to measure the spread of the virus and enable experts to project the next hot spots. It was delayed for weeks. The slow start of that plan, on top of the well-documented failures to develop the nation’s testing capacity, left administration officials with almost no insight into how rapidly the virus was spreading. “We were flying the plane with no instruments,” one official said.

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Deeply researched. Of course, the way to get Trump to ignore something is to tell him about it, or have it in his daily briefing. And planning just isn’t part of the agenda. If you want him to notice it, you need it on Fox News.
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ACLU comment on Apple/Google COVID-19 contact tracing effort • American Civil Liberties Union

»

Apple and Google today announced a joint contact tracing effort using Bluetooth technology.

Below is comment from Jennifer Granick, ACLU surveillance and cybersecurity counsel, in response:

“No contact tracing app can be fully effective until there is widespread, free, and quick testing and equitable access to health care. These systems also can’t be effective if people don’t trust them. People will only trust these systems if they protect privacy, remain voluntary, and store data on an individual’s device, not a centralized repository. At the same time, we must be realistic that such contact tracing methods are likely to exclude many vulnerable members of society who lack access to technology and are already being disproportionately impacted by the pandemic.

“To their credit, Apple and Google have announced an approach that appears to mitigate the worst privacy and centralization risks, but there is still room for improvement…”

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The ACLU has a whole white paper on the topic.
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Aircraft emissions fall sharply as pandemic grounds flights • Financial Times

Aleksandra Wisniewska, Leslie Hook and Tanya Powley:

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Aeroplane emissions fell by almost a third last month as the coronavirus lockdown grounded flights around the world, a drop in emissions equivalent of taking about 6m cars off the road.

An FT analysis of more than 6m flights, using data from FlightRadar24, found that as much as 28m fewer tonnes of carbon dioxide were emitted in March as nearly 1m flights were cancelled globally. This is equivalent to a month of the UK’s total carbon dioxide emissions and constitutes a drop of 31% from the comparable period last year.

Lauri Myllyvirta, lead analyst at the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, a Finnish research group, pointed to previous shocks to commercial aviation, notably the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001 and the Eyjafjallajökull volcanic eruption a decade ago. “Neither of these events had as dramatic an impact on global aviation volumes on one-month or one-week basis as the ongoing Covid-19 crisis, making the current events unprecedented,” he said.

The number of scheduled flights in the last week of March was almost half that of the same period a year ago, according to OAG, a data consultancy, as governments around the world grounded air travel in an effort to contain the pandemic.

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Going to be bigger this month. It’s now almost a surprise to see a plane in the sky.
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Coronavirus: the US has a collective action problem that’s larger than Covid-19 • Vox

Patrick Sharkey:

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Containing the spread of the coronavirus requires collective, unified action, but data on social distancing makes it clear this isn’t happening everywhere. The question is why. In what kinds of places are residents deciding to move about as if they are immune to the virus that has paralyzed much of the world? What do they look like, and why are they ignoring the calls for social distancing?

To get some hints, I put together several sources of data from US counties focusing on economic and demographic characteristics, voting patterns, civic engagement and social capital, and even attitudes toward climate change from Yale’s Climate Change in the American Mind survey.

Analyzing the data reveals that social distancing behavior is related to education; to race and ethnicity; to political identity and social capital; and to the impact that this virus has already had on the residents of particular counties. And the various sources of data also reveal a larger pattern.

One of the strongest and most robust predictors of social distancing behavior is found in attitudes toward another major challenge facing the United States: climate change. Places where residents are less likely to agree that global warming is happening, that humans are the cause, and that we have an obligation to do something about it are the places where residents haven’t changed their behavior in response to coronavirus. The analysis makes clear that we have a collective action problem much larger than Covid-19.

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The US is incapable of collective action against anything that doesn’t have its own tanks.
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Read my lips: how lockdown TV could boost children’s literacy • The Guardian

Vanessa Thorpe:

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An urgent call is to go out to children’s television broadcasters this weekend, backed by major names in British entertainment, politics and technology. Writer and performer Stephen Fry, best-selling author Cressida Cowell and businesswoman Martha Lane Fox are joined by former children’s television presenter Floella Benjamin as signatories to a letter, carried in today’s Observer, that urges all leading streaming, network and terrestrial children’s channels to make one simple change to boost literacy among the young: turn on the subtitles.

If English-language subtitles were to be run along the bottom of the screen for all programming, they argue, reading levels across the country would automatically rise. Longstanding international academic research projects prove, they say, that spelling, grammar and vocabulary would all be enhanced, even if children watching TV are not aware they are learning.

The campaign aims to improve reading ability across the English-speaking world and has won backing from former President Bill Clinton, who said: “Same-language subtitling doubles the number of functional readers among primary school children. It’s a small thing that has a staggering impact on people’s lives.”

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This is the terrific “Turn On The Subtitles” campaign. That’s quite the collection of people backing it.
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UK newspapers’ woes deepen as sales collapse during lockdown • Financial Times

Mark Di Stefano and Patricia Nilsson:

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The newspaper industry is facing an unprecedented crisis with the sharp fall in advertising spending accelerating a long-term decline in revenue and forcing many groups to furlough staff and cut pay. But the government-imposed lockdown has created another challenge: how to sell daily print products with far fewer people leaving their homes.

National newspaper sales fell over a fifth between the middle and end of March, according to data from distributor Smiths News and seen by the Financial Times. 

Sales at major supermarkets fell as much as 48% in the week to March 24, while those at travel hubs and motorway stores fell as much as 67% and 70% respectively.

Many of the UK’s biggest print media groups have announced emergency measures to get them through the crisis. Local newspaper companies JPI Media and Newsquest are suspending titles and furloughing hundreds of journalists while Reach, which publishes the Daily Mirror, Express and Star tabloids, is also cutting pay and putting staff on leave.

Daily Mail and General Trust, which publishes the Daily Mail, Metro and Mail Online, is not putting journalists on leave but is asking higher earners to take pay cuts and accept shares in lieu. London-based freesheets Evening Standard and City AM, which have been badly affected as commuters stay at home, have also cut salaries.

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This is going to be an extinction event for quite a few papers. If you’ve got a way to support one that you really appreciate, then do.
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IBM will offer free COBOL training to address overloaded unemployment systems • Input Mag

Tom Maxwell:

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IBM is releasing a free training course next week to teach the 60-year-old programming language COBOL to coders. It is also launching a forum where those with knowledge of the language can be matched with companies in need of help maintaining their critical systems.

The moves come in response to desperate pleas by state governors for anyone with knowledge of COBOL to volunteer their time to help keep unemployment systems functioning, a critical need as the coronavirus has resulted in an unprecedented surge in people being laid off and having to claim unemployment benefits…

…The alternative — writing completely new software from scratch — would take time states don’t have. The surge in layoffs and furloughs has pushed the U.S. unemployment rate to a record-breaking 13%, from 4.4% only a month ago. Economists expect it to peak somewhere around 20% before the pandemic declines. As the situation continues to escalate, any delays with benefits could have serious consequences for many Americans.

The situation is so bad that Congress has decided to give all unemployed workers a flat $600 extra per week in unemployment insurance payouts instead of calculating their bonus as a percentage of lost wages, as they originally planned to. Why? Because state’s have said changing the reimbursement percentage in their legacy software would take an estimated five months (or longer).

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Cloudflare dumps reCAPTCHA as Google intends to charge for its use • ZDNet

Catalin Cimpanu:

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Internet web infrastructure company Cloudflare announced plans to drop support for Google’s reCAPTCHA service and move to a new bot detection provider named hCaptcha.

Cloudflare co-founder and CEO Matthew Prince said the move was motivated by Google’s future plans to charge for the use of the reCAPTCHA service, which would have “added millions of dollars in annual costs” for his company – costs that Cloudflare would have undoubtedly had to unload on its customers.

“That is entirely within their right,” Prince said yesterday. “Cloudflare, given our volume, no doubt imposed significant costs on the reCAPTCHA service, even for Google.”

“If the value of the image classification training did not exceed those costs, it makes perfect sense for Google to ask for payment for the service they provide,” he added.

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Intelligence report warned of coronavirus crisis as early as November: sources • ABC News

Josh Margolin and James Gordon Meek:

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Concerns about what is now known to be the novel coronavirus pandemic were detailed in a November intelligence report by the military’s National Center for Medical Intelligence (NCMI), according to two officials familiar with the document’s contents.

The report was the result of analysis of wire and computer intercepts, coupled with satellite images. It raised alarms because an out-of-control disease would pose a serious threat to US forces in Asia – forces that depend on the NCMI’s work. And it paints a picture of an American government that could have ramped up mitigation and containment efforts far earlier to prepare for a crisis poised to come home.

“Analysts concluded it could be a cataclysmic event,” one of the sources said of the NCMI’s report. “It was then briefed multiple times to” the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon’s Joint Staff and the White House. Wednesday night, the Pentagon issued a statement denying the “product/assessment” existed.

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If the Pentagon was really spotting evidence of this in late November, that’s before the first patients were reported by Chinese hospitals in published papers (which was December 2). Possibility: the hospitals were lying. Alternate possibility: ABC News heard some chatter but its interpretation is miles off base. Phylogenetic analysis of the virus suggests it only emerged in the week of 22 November. I think ABC News got the wrong end of a stick and things got out of control – which can easily happen when you have two people trying to chase down two ends of a story. They don’t necessarily meet in the middle; sometimes they turn out to be unravelling different pieces of string.
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Google is rebranding Hangouts Chat as just Google Chat • The Verge

Nick Statt:

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Google has officially removed the Hangouts brand from its enterprise G Suite offering with the rebranding of Hangouts Chat as Google Chat, the company confirmed to The Verge on Thursday. The rebranding follows a similar name change, confirmed yesterday, from the companion videoconferencing app Hangouts Meet to Google Meet.

This latest modification was first hinted at by an updated G Suite support document listing the Google Chat name alongside Google Meet. Of course, this version of Chat is not to be confused with the other version of Chat, the name Google inexplicably gave its relatively new RCS-based Android messaging protocol.

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Perhaps it will just rebrand all of its many, many chat and messaging products as Chat and Messaging, and let people figure out which one they have.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified