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Trump Bucks Republican Orthodoxy on Guns - Washington Wire - WSJ - 0 views

  • Photo: iStock/Getty Images By Joshua Jamerson Mar 1, 2018 7:18 am ET 0 COMMENTS Save Article Save Remove View Saved Articles <circ
  • He also dashed conservative hopes that he would support a move now for gun owners who legally carry concealed firearms in one state to carry them in the other 49 states, a long-sought goal of the National Rifle Association.
  • he bucked Republican orthodoxy by suggesting the swift removal of guns from people who are potentially mentally ill,
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  • he continued to seek a legislative response to the deaths of 17 people at a Parkland, Fla., high school two weeks ago
  • His comments came the same day&nbsp;Walmart and Dick’s Sporting Goods–two of the country’s biggest gun sellers–said they both would no longer sell guns to anyone under 21 years old.
  • with Democrats saying they doubted the president’s words would yield immediate results, and several key Republicans saying they remained opposed to the Manchin-Toomey legislation that the president said he favored.&nbsp;
  • Mr. Trump has staked out positions on controversial issues in the past, only to surprise some lawmakers with an apparent change of heart later.
  • &nbsp;For more than 20 years, federal law has effectively halted the government’s ability to research gun violence. Now,&nbsp; a bipartisan group of lawmakers&nbsp;is taking another look at the restrictions…C
  • Hope Hicks, the longtime Trump confidant and White House communications director, is resigning. Ms. Hicks, 29 years old, told the president in recent weeks that she wanted to leave the White House to explore outside opportunities, Rebecca Ballhaus and Peter Nicholas report.
  • The bipartisan legislation would relax dozens of rules for small to medium-size banks, shaking up the banking sector with policy changes that could encourage deal-making and make it easier for banks to exp
  • several banks for information about their relationships with Jared Kushner and his finances, Emily Glazer, Erica Orden a
  • News of federal inquiries concerning Kushner Cos. has emerged in recent months, including by prosecutors at the U.S. attorney’s office in Brooklyn and by the Securities and Exchange Commission report
  • The Pentagon is pushing to make the F-35 combat jet cheaper and will take over some repair work to prevent the world’s most expensive military program from becoming unaffordable.
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    Trump promised to restrict gun purchase but the reliability is still a question mark
runlai_jiang

Most Stressful Job on the Road: Not Driving an Autonomous Car - WSJ - 0 views

  • The fatal crash last week in Tempe, Ariz., involving an Uber autonomous vehicle is bringing new scrutiny to both the quality of Uber’s technology for avoiding collision and the efficacy of its backup system of so-called safety drivers.
  • The company said the second operator wasn’t officially responsible for maintaining car safety, but some drivers said the two people in the vehicle relied on each other since an accident or traffic violation could cost them their jobs.
  • One former Uber driver said he couldn’t imagine driving alone because it was “stressful enough” monitoring the road to ensure the car doesn’t perform in dangerous or unexpected ways. Being additionally responsible for logging unusual activity, which Uber drivers may type into a device in their cars, would only increase that, he said.
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  • Still, other drivers said the job wasn’t overly difficult. “It’s about being alert, if you can’t be alert for a few straight hours then you’re not a very good driver,” a former Waymo test operator said. Video taken from inside the Uber vehicle, released by Tempe police, appears to show the vehicle heading straight into the pedestrian without slo
  • It is the second time in a year that Uber has ​temporarily halted testing following an accident involving one of its autonomous cars.
  • Uber began making the transition to using single test operators nearly three years after embarking on self-driving vehicle development. General Motors Co.’s Cruise Automation self-driving unit, which was founded in 2013, still has two test drivers in every car. Waymo—which has logged more than five million testing miles, by far the most of any company—began using one safety operator in many of its cars in 2015, about six years after its program began. Waymo now runs most vehicles without humans behind the wheel in the Phoenix area and plans to launch a commercial robot service later this year.
  • d under stress. California, where a lot of testing occurs, requires companies to disclose such “disengagements” of the autonomous technology, and unnecessary disengagements can interfere with learning and improving the technology.
Javier E

GM, Volkswagen Say Goodbye to Hybrid Vehicles - WSJ - 0 views

  • General Motors Co. GM 0.39% and Volkswagen AG VOW 0.96% are concentrating their investment on fully electric cars, viewing hybrids—which save fuel by combining a gasoline engine with an electric motor—as only a bridge to meeting tougher tailpipe-emissions requirements, particularly in China and Europe.
  • GM plans to launch 20 fully electric vehicles world-wide in the next four years, including plug-in models in the U.S. for the Chevy and Cadillac brands
  • Volkswagen has committed billions to producing more battery-powered models, including introducing a small plug-in SUV in the U.S. next year and an electric version of its minibus around 2022.
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  • GM’s view contrasts with other auto-making giants, including Toyota Motor Corp. TM 0.93% and Ford Motor Co. F -0.32% , which are working on full electrics but also expanding their U.S. hybrid offerings
  • Last week, Continental AG, one of the world’s biggest car-parts makers, said it would cut investment in conventional engine parts because of a faster-than-expected fall in demand—yet another sign the industry is accelerating the shift to electric vehicles.
  • Today, auto companies generally lose money on each electric car they sell, mostly because of the high cost of lithium-ion batteries. Concerns about the battery range, along with a lack of places to plug in, also deter buyers from considering electric vehicles. Those factors make going straight to all-electric cars a risky strategy
  • Hybrids, which were popularized by Toyota’s Prius last decade as a social statement, accounted for about 3% of U.S. sales in 2018, according to research firm LMC Automotive. Sales of plug-in electric vehicles were around 1% of the total market—mostly thanks to the success of Tesla Inc.’s offerings.
  • pouring investment into both hybrids and electrics strains car-company finances, Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas said. “It’s time to pick a path and commit to it,”
  • VW and GM are focused on all-electric cars largely because of China, where new regulations require car companies to sell a minimum number of zero-emissions vehicles to avoid financial penalties.
  • VW plans to use its electric-car expansion in China to build scale and drive down prices faster in the U.S., said Scott Keogh, VW’s U.S. chief.
  • Auto companies are spending $225 billion to develop more than 200 new plug-in vehicles through 2023, a figure that doesn’t include hybrids
  • For now, both hybrids and electric cars are more expensive to produce than comparable gas-powered vehicles. A hybrid system can add roughly $2,000 to a vehicle’s cost, while a fully electric version costs an additional $6,000 to $10,000,
  • Toyota’s sales chief for North America, said that with U.S. electric-vehicle sales expected to lag behind Europe and China, the company needs a nearer-term remedy. “That’s why we feel so confident in hybrids
Javier E

Natural Gas, America's No. 1 Power Source, Already Has a New Challenger: Batteries - WSJ - 0 views

  • Vistra Corp. owns 36 natural-gas power plants, one of America’s largest fleets. It doesn’t plan to buy or build any more. Instead, Vistra intends to invest more than $1 billion in solar farms and battery storage units in Texas and California as it tries to transform its business to survive in an electricity industry being reshaped by new technology.
  • A decade ago, natural gas displaced coal as America’s top electric-power source, as fracking unlocked cheap quantities of the fuel. Now, in quick succession, natural gas finds itself threatened with the same kind of disruption, only this time from cost-effective batteries charged with wind and solar energy.
  • Natural-gas-fired electricity represented 38% of U.S. generation in 2019
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  • Wind and solar generators have gained substantial market share, and as battery costs fall, batteries paired with that green power are beginning to step into those roles by storing inexpensive green energy and discharging it after the sun falls or the wind dies.
  • President Biden is proposing to extend renewable-energy tax credits to stand-alone battery projects—installations that aren’t part of a generating facility—as part of his $2.3 trillion infrastructure plan, which could add fuel to an already booming market for energy storage.
  • renewables have become increasingly cost-competitive without subsidies in recent years, spurring more companies to voluntarily cut carbon emissions by investing in wind and solar power at the expense of that generated from fossil fuels.
  • the specter of more state and federal regulations to address climate change is accelerating the trend.
  • the combination of batteries and renewable energy is threatening to upend billions of dollars in natural-gas investments, raising concerns about whether power plants built in the past 10 years—financed with the expectation that they would run for decades—will become “stranded assets,” facilities that retire before they pay for themselves.
  • as batteries help wind and solar displace traditional power sources, some investors view the projects with caution, noting that they, too, could become victims of disruption in coming years, if still-other technological advances yield better ways to store energy.
  • most current batteries can deliver power only for several hours before needing to recharge. That makes them nearly useless during extended outages.
  • Duke Energy Corp. , a utility company based in Charlotte, N.C., that supplies electricity and natural gas in parts of seven states, is still looking to build additional gas-fired power plants. But it has started to rethink its financial calculus to reflect that the plants might need to pay for themselves sooner, because they might not be able to operate for as long.
  • To remedy that, Duke in public filings said it is considering shortening the plants’ expected lifespan from about 40 years to 25 years and recouping costs using accelerated depreciation, an accounting measure that would let the company write off more expenses&nbsp;earlier in the plants’ lives
  • It may also consider eventually converting the plants to run on hydrogen, which doesn’t result in carbon emissions when burned.
  • Much of the nation’s gas fleet, on the other hand, is relatively young, increasing the potential for stranded costs if widespread closures occur within the next two decades.
  • Gas plants that supply power throughout the day face the biggest risk of displacement. Such “baseload” plants typically need to run at 60% to 80% capacity to be economically viable, making them vulnerable as batteries help fill gaps in power supplied by solar and wind farms.
  • Today, such plants average 60% capacity in the U.S., according to IHS Markit, a data and analytics firm. By the end of the decade, the firm expects that average to fall to 50%, raising the prospect of bankruptcy and restructuring for the lowest performers.
  • “It’s just coal repeating itself.”
  • It took only a few years for inexpensive fracked gas to begin displacing coal used in power generation. Between 2011, shortly after the start of the fracking boom, and 2020, more than 100 coal plants with 95,000 megawatts of capacity were closed or converted to run on gas, according to the EIA. An additional 25,000 megawatts are slated to close by 2025.
  • Batteries are most often paired with solar farms, rather than wind farms, because of their power’s predictability and because it is easier to secure federal tax credits for that pairing.
  • Already, the cost of discharging a 100-megawatt battery with a two-hour power supply is roughly on par with the cost of generating electricity from the special power plants that operate during peak hours. Such batteries can discharge for as little as $140 a megawatt-hour, while the lowest-cost “peaker” plants—which fire up on demand when supplies are scarce—generate at $151 a megawatt-hour, according to investment bank Lazard.
  • Solar farms paired with batteries, meanwhile, are becoming competitive with gas plants that run all the time. Those types of projects can produce power for as little as $81 a megawatt-hour, according to Lazard, while the priciest of gas plants average $73 a megawatt-hour
  • Even in Texas, a state with a fiercely competitive power market and no emissions mandates, scarcely any gas plants are under construction, while solar farms and batteries are growing fast. Companies are considering nearly 88,900 megawatts of solar, 23,860 megawatts of wind and 30,300 megawatts of battery storage capacity in the state, according to the Electric Reliability Council of Texas. By comparison, only 7,900 megawatts of new gas-fired capacity is under consideration.
  • California last summer experienced the consequences of quickly reducing its reliance on gas plants. In August, during an intense heat wave that swept the West, the California grid operator resorted to rolling blackouts to ease a supply crunch when demand skyrocketed. In a postmortem published jointly with the California Public Utilities Commission and the California Energy Commission, the operator identified the rapid shift to solar and wind power as one of several contributing factors.
  • Mr. Morgan, who has closed a number of Vistra’s coal-fired and gas-fired plants since becoming CEO in 2016, said he anticipates most of the company’s remaining gas plants to operate for the next 20 years.
  • Quantum Energy Partners, a Houston-based private-equity firm, in the last several years sold a portfolio of six gas plants in Texas and three other states upon seeing just how competitive renewable energy was becoming. It is now working to develop more than 8,000 megawatts of wind, solar and battery projects in 10 states.
  • “We pivoted,” said Sean O’Donnell, a partner in the firm who helps oversee the firm’s power investments. “Everything that we had on the conventional power side, we decided to sell, given our outlook of increasing competition and diminishing returns.”
Javier E

Silicon Valley Powered American Tech Dominance-Now It Has a Challenger - WSJ - 0 views

  • Asian investors directed nearly as much money into startups last year as American investors did—40% of the record $154 billion in global venture financing versus 44%,
  • Asia’s share is up from less than 5% just 10 years ago.
  • That tidal wave of cash into promising young firms could herald a shift in who controls the world’s technological innovation and its economic fruits, from artificial intelligence to self-driving cars.
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  • The rise of China’s venture market “signifies a shift from a single-epicenter view of the world to a duopoly,” he says.
  • The surge also positions Asia’s investors to win stakes in markets that Western companies covet, or that have national security implications.
  • . “If you think that being the locus of invention gives you a boost to your GDP and so forth, that’s a deterioration of the U.S. competitive advantage.”
  • Although one of the biggest Asian investors is Japan’s SoftBank Group Corp. , which has tapped Middle Eastern money to create the world’s largest tech-investment fund, it is Chinese activity that is having the greatest impact.
  • China is creating unicorns—startups valued at a billion dollars or more—at much the same pace as the U.S., drawing on funding from internet giants like Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and Tencent Holdings Ltd. as well as more than a thousand domestic venture-capital firms that have raised billions of dollars a year for the past few year
  • Chinese-led venture funding is about 15 times its size in 2013, outpacing growth in U.S.-led financing, which roughly doubled in that time period
  • Most Chinese-led investment so far has gone to the country’s own firms, the Journal analysis found. Many of them, like the Yelp equivalent Meituan-Dianping, are household names with millions of customers in China, yet virtually unknown elsewhere.
  • Many Chinese tech companies are “at this critical size that the China market alone is not enough to support their business and valuation,
  • Madhur Deora, chief financial officer for Paytm, one of India’s biggest e-payments firms, says the company approached Alibaba affiliate Ant Financial instead of U.S. backers for funding in 2015 because Chinese mobile-internet innovations are “way far ahead of anything that’s happened in the U.S.
  • One reason China’s push into new technologies worries many in the U.S. is that, unlike the hunt for good returns that underpins most Western venture finance, a lot of Chinese investment is driven by strategic interests, some carrying the specter of state influence.
  • China is pushing hard into semiconductors, for which the government has provided billions of dollars in public funding, and artificial intelligence, where Beijing in July set a goal of global leadership by 2030
  • Mr. Lee, the venture investor, predicts that in the next five to 10 years Chinese tech companies will become pacesetters for tech-related development, vying with the likes of Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Facebook for dominance in markets outside the English-speaking world and Western Europe.
  • “All the rest of the world will basically be a land grab between the U.S. and China,
  • “The U.S. approach is: We’ll build a better product and just win over all the countries,” says Mr. Lee. The Chinese approach is “we’ll fund the local partner to beat off the American companies.”
  • Asia’s rise as a startup financier is even starker in the biggest venture investments—those of $100 million or more. These megadeals have become an increasingly important part of venture finance as valuations have ballooned, with their proportion of deal volume growing from around 8% in 2007 to around half of the total last year.
  • In Southeast Asia, a flood of Chinese money into local startups—such as the $1.1 billion Alibaba-led investment into Indonesian online marketplace PT Tokopedia last year—is drawing the region closer to China
  • Chinese money is also playing a big role in India, which, with a population of 1.2 billion, has been described as the next big internet market. Chinese and Japanese investors each led nearly $3 billion in venture finance in India last year, ahead of the nearly $2 billion in deals led by U.S. investors
  • “Think of strategic investments and M&amp;A as playing a game of go,” said Mr. Tsai, the Alibaba executive vice chairman, at the investor conference last year. “In a game of go the strategic objective is to put your pieces on the chessboard and surround your opponent.”
runlai_jiang

How Trump's Tariff Punch Hurt His Pro-Business Agenda - WSJ - 0 views

  • Markets fell after President Donald Trump announced planned tariffs on steel and aluminum imports, an effect that was exacerbated by what the move symbolizes fo
  • When a key economic input suddenly becomes scarce, &nbsp;it’s called a supply shock: It pushes costs up and economic activity down.
  • This helps explain why markets have responded so badly to President Donald Trump’s announcement of a 25% tariff on steel imports and 10% on aluminum. Like a geopolitical shock that reduces the supply of oil, it’s bad for both inflation and growth.
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  • exacerbated by what the tariffs symbolize for Mr. Trump’s agenda and the broader global economy.
  • By following his nationalist instincts Mr. Trump has broken with the pro-business factions in his administration and his party whose policy priorities have been critical to the upswing in business and investor sentiment since he was elected. By willingly hurting U.S. allies over a problem of overcapacity that is mainly China’s doing, he’s cast further uncertainty over the U.S. role as global leader.
  • With investors already on edge about Federal Reserve interest rate increases, the steel tariffs at the margin compound inflation pressure. That effect is so far too small to alter the Fed’s calculus, but a tit-for-tat cycle of retaliation could lead to even more inflation and rate increases than investors or the Fed have anticipated.
  • Protectionism shrinks markets, raises costs, and reduces how fast a country can grow without generating inflation. U.S. steel and aluminum companies can meet the demand previously filled by imports, but with unemployment at a 17-year low that may require hiring workers away from other industries, putting upward pressure on wages.
  • This is good news in the short run for workers, but bad news for any consumer who must now pay more for cars or beer cans.
  • nvestors speculated that the angry reaction of American allies, in particular the European Union, showed U.S. global leadership is fading and with it the dollar’s appeal as a reserve currency.
  • China may move more quickly to curb its overcapacity, the root of the import surge and price pressure that is hurting U.S. producers.&nbsp;Yet the decision has generated conflict within his own administration, his party and with key U.S. allies that, at least at the margin, counteracts the boost from the rest of his agenda.
runlai_jiang

Your Location Data Is Being Sold-Often Without Your Knowledge - WSJ - 0 views

  • like that Jack in the Box ad that appears whenever you get near one, in whichever app you have open at the time—and as popular apps harvest your lucrative location data, the potential for leaking or exploiting this data has never been higher.
  • Every time you say “yes” to an app that asks to know your location, you are also potentially authorizing that app to sell your data.
  • They aim to compile a complete record of where everyone in America spends their time, in order to chop those histories into market segments to sell to corporate advertisers.
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  • The data required to serve you any single ad may pass through many companies’ systems in milliseconds—from data broker to ad marketplace to an agency’s custom system.
  • Another way you can be tracked without your knowing it is through any open Wi-Fi hot spot you might pass. If your phone’s Wi-Fi is on, you’re constantly broadcasting a unique MAC address and a history of past Wi-Fi connections.
  • is that with most individual data vendors holding only parts of your data, your complete, identifiable profile is never all in one place. Giants like Google and Facebook , who do have all your data in one place, say they are diligent about throwing away or not gathering what they don’t need, and eliminating personally identifying information from the remainder.
  • There are plenty of ways to track you without getting your permission. Some of the most intrusive are the easiest to implement. Your telco knows where you are at all times, because it knows which cell towers your phone is near. In the U.S., how much data service-providers sell is up to them.
  • A map of the U.S., showing areas of unusually high visits to sites where location-based advertising firm Groundtruth pushes ads to mobile devices.
  • Retailers sometimes use these addresses to identify repeat customers, and they can also use them to track you as you go from one of their stores to another.
  • WeatherBug, one of the most popular weather apps for Android and iPhone, is owned by the location advertising company GroundTruth. It’s a natural fit: Weather apps need to know where you are and provide value in exchange for that information.
  • Every month GroundTruth tracks 70 million people in the U.S. as they go to work in the morning, come home at night, surge in and out of public events, take vacations, you name it.
  • Companies like Acxiom could be prime targets for hackers, said Chandler Givens, chief executive of TrackOff, which develops software to protect user identity and personal information
  • Nearly every year, a bill comes up in the Senate or House that would regulate our data privacy—the most recent was in the wake of the Equifax breach—but none has passed. In some respects, the U.S. appears to be moving backward on privacy protections.
leilamulveny

Election Voting Issues: What We're Watching - WSJ - 0 views

  • Voters face challenges including changing deadlines for mail-in ballots and concerns about long lines, demonstrations and potential intimidation at polling places.
  • Disabled voters will have limited access after the Supreme Court reinstated a ban on curbside voting, blocking a lower-court order that allowed county officials to use the accommodation.
  • A Superior Court judge ordered polls to remain open an additional two hours, until 9 p.m., in Spalding County after technical difficulties prevented people from voting in the county. Voters who vote in the extended time frame will cast provisional ballots.
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  • reports of robocalls spreading misinformation in the city of Flint that told voters that “due to long lines, they should vote tomorrow.” Attorney General Dana Nessel said that was false and called it an effort to suppress the vote.
  • An extension for receiving ballots in the mail by Nov. 10, as long as they were postmarked by Election Day, faces legal uncertainty after a federal appeals court ruling last week that the extended deadline is likely unconstitutional. The court ordered the state to segregate late-arriving ballots for possible disqualification.
  • Civil-rights groups said they filed a lawsuit in federal court late Monday against the Alamance County sheriff and chief of police in Graham, N.C., alleging the police disrupted a Saturday march to an early-voting location and intimidated and discouraged march participants from voting. The Graham Police Department said the demonstration blocked traffic and was deemed unsafe and unlawful. The department said it arrested eight people.
  • A Republican-backed lawsuit asked a federal judge to throw out at least 1,200 ballots in Montgomery County, outside Philadelphia, alleging local officials handled mail-in ballots illegally. The suit alleged the county Board of Elections was illegally sorting through and identifying potential problems with mail-in ballots received before Nov. 3. A county spokesperson said: “We believe our process is sound and permissible under the Election Code.”
  • The Supreme Court earlier let stand a ruling by Pennsylvania’s highest court that extended the deadline for accepting mail-in ballots by three days. The ruling also allows ballots with illegible postmarks to be counted if received by the deadline. The state’s top election official, a Democrat, extended the deadline to compensate for more voters turning to mail ballots. Republican plaintiffs asked the high court to reconsider the matter. In anticipation of possible postelection legal challenges, local election officials have been directed to separate ballots received after the original Election Day deadline.
  • The judge noted that state law requires voting on Election Day to take place inside buildings. To ensure compliance, the clerk for Harris said on Twitter that the county would operate one drive-through center on Election Day, at the Toyota Center, a large indoor arena.
  • The Supreme Court declined to allow pandemic-related changes to voting rules in Wisconsin, letting stand a federal appeals court’s ruling that mail-in ballots must be received by Election Day.
Javier E

Covid-19 Vaccine's Slow Rollout Could Portend More Problems - WSJ - 0 views

  • the federal government came nowhere close to vaccinating 20 million people by the end of 2020, as it had promised.
  • Three weeks into the most ambitious vaccination campaign in modern U.S. history, far fewer people than expected are being immunized against Covid-19, as the process moves slower than officials had projected and has been beset by confusion and disorganization in many states.
  • Of the more than 12 million doses of vaccines from Moderna Inc. and Pfizer Inc. with BioNTech SE that have been shipped, only 2.8 million have been administered, according to federal figures
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  • as the federal government has left it to states to determine what to do with the vaccines it ships to them, and with some states pushing decision-making to local health departments and hospitals, the process has gone far from smoothly.
  • “There may have been an expectation from Operation Warp Speed or others that we’d give everyone the vaccine overnight.…It was a logistics equation for them. If you’ve been in vaccines for a long time, you know that’s the easy part. Getting it into actual arms is the hard part.”
  • Sen. Mitt Romney (R., Utah) criticized the vaccine rollout, saying in a statement that the lack of a comprehensive federal plan to be shared with states “is as incomprehensible as it is inexcusable.”
  • Public health officials and states say uptake is lagging for several reasons, beginning with holiday seasons that have kept staff of hospitals and nursing homes away from work. They also note they are facing high percentages of people, including some health-care workers, who are skeptical of taking the shots.
  • Hospitals and other sites are staggering appointments to avoid pulling too many workers from caring for patients amid a nationwide surge in Covid-19 cases, officials say. Administration of the vaccines also takes more time than a typical flu shot, particularly since they are being done in a socially distant way and may be preceded by a Covid-19 test.
  • Different state policies have led to confusion and shipment delays for hospitals, said Michael Wascovich, vice president of field pharmacy services for Premier Inc., a group purchasing organization whose members include 4,100 hospitals, 80% of which received doses.
  • “Every state is doing what they want to do,” he said. “You could be in Philadelphia and it’s completely different across the river if you’re in Trenton or Camden.”
  • Many states are following CDC guidelines to start with front-line medical workers and people in long-term care facilities, but not all. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on Dec. 23 extended eligibility to people aged 65 and older. Because each county and hospital in the state implemented its own approach, many people didn’t know whether to call, log on or show up in person to secure a spot.
  • CVS has begun administering doses at nursing homes and facilities in 48 states and Washington, D.C., with most eligible residents agreeing to be vaccinated, said Chris Cox, a CVS executive who is overseeing the vaccination rollout for the pharmacy chain.
  • In some cases, residents haven’t been vaccinated because of active outbreaks at facilities, while other facilities have taken longer than others to schedule their vaccination clinics, a challenge exacerbated by the holiday season, Mr. Cox said.
Javier E

Elon Musk, Other AI Experts Call for Pause in Technology's Development - WSJ - 0 views

  • Calls for a pause clash with a broad desire among tech companies and startups to double down on so-called generative AI, a technology capable of generating original content to human prompts. Buzz around generative AI exploded last fall after OpenAI unveiled a chatbot with its ability to perform functions like providing lengthy answers and producing computer code with humanlike sophistication.&nbsp;
  • Microsoft has embraced the technology for its Bing search engine and other tools. Alphabet Inc.’s Google has deployed a rival system, and companies such as Adobe Inc., Zoom Video Communications Inc. and Salesforce Inc. have also introduced advanced AI tools.
  • “A race starts today,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said last month. “We’re going to move, and move fast.”
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  • “It is unfortunate to frame this as an arms race,” Mr. Tegmark said. “It is more of a suicide race. It doesn’t matter who is going to get there first. It just means that humanity as a whole could lose control of its own destiny.”&nbsp;
  • Messrs. Musk and Wozniak have both voiced concerns about AI technology. Mr. Musk on Wednesday tweeted that developers of the advanced AI technology “will not heed this warning, but at least it was said.”
  • Yann LeCun, chief AI scientist at Meta Platforms Inc., on Tuesday tweeted that he didn’t sign the letter because he disagreed with its premise.&nbsp;
  • Mr. Mostaque, Stability AI’s CEO, said in a tweet Wednesday that although he signed the letter, he didn’t agree with a six-month pause. “It has no force but will kick off an important discussion that will hopefully bring more transparency &amp; governance to an opaque area.”
  • Mr. Tegmark said many companies feel “crazy commercial pressures” to add advanced AI technology into their products. A six-month pause would allow the industry “breathing room,” without disadvantaging ones that opt to move carefully
  • The letter said a pause should be declared publicly and be verifiable and all key actors in the space should participate. “If such a pause cannot be enacted quickly, governments should step in and institute a moratorium,” it said
  • AI labs and experts can use this time to develop a set of shared safety rules for advanced AI design that should be audited and overseen by outside experts, the authors wrote.
  • “I don’t think we can afford to just go forward and break things,” said Mr. Bengio, who shared a 2018 Turing award for inventing the systems that modern AI is built on. “We do need to take time to think through this collectively.”
leilamulveny

Twitter Bans President Trump's Personal Account Permanently - WSJ - 0 views

  • citing the risk of further incitement of violence and closing off one of his main communication tools following the attack on the U.S. Capitol by a mob of his followers.
  • pressure on the platforms to do more to prevent additional violence.
  • Twitter had initially suspended Mr. Trump from posting on a temporary basis that Wednesday night, saying his tweets had violated its policies. The social-media company allowed him to resume posting on Thursday. Facebook Inc., FB -0.44% which temporarily suspended Mr. Trump’s account after the riot, said Thursday that it would extend that action indefinitely—and at least through the end of Mr. Trump’s term. Many critics of the president had called on Twitter to take more severe action as well.
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  • “Twitter employees have coordinated with the Democrats and the Radical Left in removing my account from their platform, to silence me — and YOU, the 75,000,000 great patriots who voted for me,” the posts said. They added: “We have been negotiating with various other sites, and will have a big announcement soon, while we also look at the possibilities of building out our own platform in the near future. We will not be SILENCED!”
  • Twitter removed those new tweets from the @POTUS account soon after they were posted, saying the move was consistent with its policy against using other accounts to try to evade a suspension. “For government accounts, such as @POTUS and @WhiteHouse, we will not suspend those accounts permanently but will take action to limit their use,” a Twitter representative said.
  • Twitter and Facebook’s actions to shut off two of the largest megaphones Mr. Trump has relied on for years to communicate with the public highlights the difficult position social-media platforms face in regulating controversial content on their platforms.
  • Mr. Trump had more than 88 million followers on Twitter and more than 35 million on Facebook.
  • Google said it acted because of “continued posting in the Parler app that seeks to incite ongoing violence in the U.S.,” which violated its requirements for sufficient moderation of egregious content for apps it distributes.
  • “In light of this ongoing and urgent public safety threat, we are suspending the app’s listings from the Play Store until it addresses these issues,” a Google representative said.
  • Mr. Trump had tweeted three times since regaining account access Thursday. In his first post, he tweeted a video condemning the violence at the Capitol and acknowledging that a new administration would be inaugurated Jan. 20, without specifically naming Mr. Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris.
  • They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!”
  • Mr. Trump won more than 74 million votes, seven million less than Joe Biden received.
  • “These two Tweets must be read in the context of broader events in the country and the ways in which the President’s statements can be mobilized by different audiences, including to incite violence, as well as in the context of the pattern of behavior from this account in recent weeks.”
  • Twitter earlier Friday shut off the accounts of Michael Flynn, Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser, and Sidney Powell, a lawyer who worked alongside Mr. Trump’s legal team. The company also said Friday that it suspended several accounts associated with the far-right conspiracy group QAnon for violating its policy on coordinated harmful activity.
  • “the world’s largest social media companies finally do the right thing and deplatform the inciter-in-chief before another person is killed or another cherished piece of our democracy is violated.”
Javier E

How South Korea Successfully Managed Coronavirus - WSJ - 0 views

  • South Korea appears to have cracked the code for managing the coronavirus. Its solution is straightforward, flexible and relatively easy to replicate.
  • The country has averaged about 77 new daily cases since early April and recently suppressed a spike in infections. Adjusting for population, that would be the equivalent of about 480 cases a day in the U.S., where new daily cases have averaged about 38,000 over the same period.
  • South Korea halted virus transmission better than any other wealthy country during the pandemic’s early months. It was about twice as effective as the U.S. and U.K. at preventing infected individuals from spreading the disease to other
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  • South Korea’s economy is expected to decline by just 0.8% this year, the best among the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s forecasts for member nations.
  • When the supply of face masks ran short early on in the crisis, the government seized production.
  • The nation fast-tracked approval of domestic testing kits as soon as cases began hitting
  • It tapped into its relative wealth and hyperconnectivity, blasting text alerts to citizens if infections occurred in their area
  • The key to South Korea’s success came from blending technology and testing like no other country, centralized control and communication—and a constant fear of failure.
  • “You don’t need or want to eradicate the virus. But you modify your behavior and get on with life.”
  • Nearly everyone in the country wears masks.
  • Every confirmed patient, even those with no or mild symptoms, gets isolated at hospitals or converted dormitories run by the government. Treatment is free.
  • As a result, South Korea never had to mandate a lockdown, so restaurants and business were able to stay open, cushioning the blow to the economy.
  • “No country has adapted to living with, and containing, the virus like South Korea,”
  • Some parts of its playbook wouldn’t work in most Western societies—and received backlash in South Korea as well
  • It detected the country’s first case 10 days later using a test that screened for all known coronavirus strains—the same tactic practiced during the December simulation.
  • Health officials have unfettered access to individuals’ private mobile data, and early on used government websites to share the whereabouts of confirmed patients, plucked from smartphone GPS history
  • The government now offers anonymous testing and leaves out identifying information and specific names of places visited in contact-tracing disclosures.
  • After a major cluster linked to a megachurch in the city of Daegu emerged on Feb. 18, the government made a flurry of moves
  • Cases peaked in 11 days.
  • The day after cases reached a five-month high of 441 on Aug. 27, South Korea’s top public-health official gave a grim forecast: “We could see 800 to 2,000 infections next week
  • South Koreans took the advice and adjusted. Population mobility, as measured by local telecom operators, soon fell by one-quarter. Most schools closed and diners had to leave restaurants by 9 p.m. Aug. 27 turned out to be the peak.
  • After two weeks of aggressive social distancing, South Koreans could again head back to schools, gyms and sports stadiums.
  • In total, South Korea, with a population of 52 million, has reported 23,455 cases and 395 deaths.
  • One reason South Korea was prepared: It learned painful lessons in 2015 from an outbreak of Middle East respiratory syndrome
  • “The only way to make the government prepared is to actually have an outbreak,”
  • After MERS, the government started twice-a-year training sessions simulating a rapid spread of viral disease
  • “Oddly enough, last December’s ‘war game’ was a novel coronavirus,”
  • At twice-a-day briefings, health officials express worry when they can only trace the origins of three-quarters of confirmed cases.
  • One firm, Kogene Biotech Co., demonstrated a successful test and got the regulatory green light within four days. A second manufacturer would be added by Feb. 12. The tests all used the same methodology and could be sent to any of the country’s roughly 120 laboratories that promised turnaround times of between six to 24 hours.
  • Cases, which had been slowly rising, suddenly doubled in a day, to over 100. Experts predicted it would soon surge to levels seen nowhere else but China.
  • That triggered a Feb. 20 late-night message in a group chat with eight South Korean infectious-disease experts: “We need to quickly devise a way to conduct mass testing,”
  • an answer: drive-through clinics.
  • Dr. Kim sent a PowerPoint presentation to the group within hours, at 3:53 a.m., outlining how tests would take just 10 minutes and saved much-needed protective gear since outdoor workers didn’t have to change gowns after each patient
  • Two days later, cars rumbled through the country’s first drive-through clinic. Testing capacity multiplied 100 times, giving South Korea a critical early edge.
  • As South Korea’s coronavirus problems mounted, Mr. Moon intentionally kept his profile low. “His stance is that it’s more objective for an expert to hold the briefings, and that is the way to gain the trust of the people,”
  • Even with the swift response, a lack of hospital beds became a major issue. In just 11 days, South Korea’s case count had gone from 31 to 3,150. Thousands were waiting to be hospitalized. A handful died while waiting.
  • South Korea’s infectious-disease experts had a proposal. Confirmed patients should be divided into four categories, based on the risk profile and severity of symptoms, with only the most serious cases hospitalized. Those with mild or no symptoms should be isolated at makeshift treatment facilities.
  • Dr. Peck set up a meeting with senior officials from the Samsung conglomerate, asking that an empty facility near Daegu be lent to the South Korean government. By first having a company volunteer a venue, Dr. Peck recalled thinking, it would pressure South Korea’s health ministry to act.
  • About 80% of South Korea’s coronavirus patients have been hospitalized in the community treatment centers. Those who are asymptomatic or have mild symptoms are still sent there.
  • That changed in August. Unlike February’s outbreak, the new wave of infections fanned out across South Korea to all 15 of the country’s major cities and provinces. The country’s national testing capacity had by then expanded to 50,000 a day with test results notified within 24 hours, up from 20,000 in February
  • The U.S. conducted about 900,000 tests a day over the past week through Thursday, according to data from the Covid Tracking Project. But South Korea performs six times as many tests per confirmed Covid-19 case than the U.S. doe
  • South Korea’s three-tier system created in June for social distancing went off script. With health experts split on whether to adopt the maximum levels last month, a government advisory committee landed at a “level 2.5” social-distancing for the Seoul area that closed schools and banned church services and gatherings of more than 10 people.
  • On Tuesday, South Korea reported its lowest one-day infections in over a month, with just 61 cases.
runlai_jiang

New Barriers to Replace Aging Border Wall in California - WSJ - 0 views

  • The structure was one of the first new pieces of a border wall put in place since the start of a lengthy construction project in February just west of the border crossing in downtown Calexico, a small, mostly Hispanic farming town.
  • Mr. Kim said the roughly $18 million project was funded by Congress last year. He said the project happens to be getting under way in the midst of Mr. Trump’s continuing effort to build a wall along the Mexican border. “We want to make sure everyone knows what it is and what it isn’t,” Mr. Kim said.
  • California has become a flashpoint in the debate over the president’s immigration policies, including his proposal to build a wall. The state has sued the administration multiple times challenging its immigration policies.
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  • Mr. Kim said the new barriers in Calexico are replacing solid metal panels that sat as high as 18 feet in some areas. But smugglers and border crossers have cut holes in them thousands of times in recent years, requiring near-constant repairs.
  • The new bollard-style barriers are likely to be harder to breach and will offer agents more security, because they will be able to see what and who is on the other side. The Border Patrol has established a “First Amendment zone” for potential protesters, Mr. Kim said, but so far the area at the western edge of the project hasn’t been used.
woodlu

Hong Kong Activists Detained on Speedboat Are Tried in China - WSJ - 0 views

  • The families of a group of Hong Kong activists who were detained fleeing the city in a speedboat in August called on Chinese authorities to issue verdicts soon after they were tried in a mainland court.
  • Shenzhen said the trials of 10 of the activists had ended and the verdicts would be announced at another time.
  • has drawn international attention and become a central issue for pro-democracy activists in Hong Kong.
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  • The 10 charged are accused of illegal border crossing, which carries a one-year sentence. Two of the 10 are also accused of organizing the attempted escape and are potentially facing longer prison terms.
  • A group of foreign diplomats attempted to attend the hearing but weren’t allowed inside.
  • he U.S. State Department called on China to release them immediately and allow them to leave the country. “Their so-called crime was to flee tyranny,” the State Department said.
  • they haven’t been allowed to meet with the attorneys hired by their families. The families say they haven’t been able to meet with their relatives since they were taken from the boat
  • Beatrice Li, his sister, said she believed her brother was coerced into writing the letter.
  • “The officially assigned lawyers dodged my questions,” said Chan Lok-yin, mother of another defendant, Li Tsz-yin. “How much longer do I need to wait until&nbsp;I could see him?”
  • some of the detained activists sent handwritten letters to their families saying they had been treated well.
  • they called the trial secretive and politically motivated.
  • The Hong Kong police said the 12 activists each paid tens of thousands of Hong Kong dollars to be smuggled out.
  • Families said they were notified about the trial three days ago, making it impossible for them to attend under the current coronavirus restrictions, which would require them to be quarantined for two weeks after entering the mainland.
  • “None of the families know what happened at the Yantian court,”
  • “A public hearing is one that the outside world knows about.”
mariedhorne

Law-Firm Clients Demand More Black Attorneys - WSJ - 0 views

  • Companies including Microsoft Corp. MSFT -1.10% , U.S. Bancorp, Uber Technologies Inc. UBER -1.91% and Intel Corp. INTC 0.39% are asking the law firms they hire to detail how many diverse lawyers they employ and whether those lawyers are assigned meaningful work.
  • When his Chicago-based company set out this spring to buy for-profit online educator Walden University in a $1.5 billion acquisition, Mr. Patterson recruited experienced Black law partners in the three specialty areas he needed: mergers and acquisitions, finance and regulatory law.
  • About 2% of partners at U.S. law firms and less than 5% of attorneys in the lower ranks are Black, figures that have barely budged for decades, according to the National Association for Law Placement, or NALP.
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  • “You’ll see the same associate staffed on all the great cases and think, ‘Why am I not getting those same opportunities?’ ” said Duvol Thompson, a partner at Holland &amp; Knight LLP. He recently helped compile a survey of 60 Black male lawyers that concluded: “The consistent challenge is attempting to rise through the ranks based on knowledge, experience and ability rather than being minimized, diminished or judged based on the color of our skin.”
  • “What gets done is what gets rewarded,” said Shannon Klinger, chief legal officer of pharmaceutical company Novartis AG , which withholds 15% of legal fees if diversity benchmarks aren’t met.
  • In any given year, a handful of the nation’s largest law firms have no Black partners. Elite law firm Cravath, Swaine &amp; Moore LLP, which has 500 lawyers, has had one Black partner in its centurylong history.
  • Attrition rates for minority associates were 22%, compared with 17% for white associates, according to a study this year by the NALP Foundation, an industry research group, and legal recruiting firm Major, Lindsey &amp; Africa.
  • “For a profession that’s supposed to be all about equality, opportunity and justice,” he said, “we should be first, not last.”
leilamulveny

How Joe Biden's Tax Plan Could Affect You - WSJ - 0 views

  • Counting both tax increases and tax cuts, the Biden plan would raise between $2 trillion and $3 trillion over a decade, according to recent estimates by the Tax Policy Center and the American Enterprise Institute.
  • It would send revenue as a share of the economy to near the levels it reached in the late 1990s.
  • For corporations, he would raise the tax rate to 28% from 21%, impose a new minimum tax and raise taxes on foreign income. For individuals, he would raise the top rate to 39.6% from 37%, create new limits on deductions and impose the 12.4% Social Security payroll tax on wages above $400,000. High-income owners of pass-through businesses that don’t pay the corporate tax would lose a break they got in 2017.
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  • Also, the Biden plan—or some version of it—is likely to advance in Congress only if Democrats keep a majority in the House and take control of the Senate
  • they only want to repeal parts of the law and that they would focus those changes on corporations and households making more than $400,000.
  • the top 1% of households would see their after-tax income drop by 16% in 2022. That’s an average tax increase of $265,640.
  • The middle 20% of households would get a tax cut worth 1% of after-tax income, or an average of $620.
  • But there are two main ways in which middle-income families could pay more. One is through Mr. Biden’s proposed reinstatement of the individual mandate to buy health insurance. The campaign, citing Trump administration language, describes that as a fee, not a tax. The payments are required by the tax code, and the Supreme Court has ruled that the penalty for failing to purchase health insurance is a tax.
  • So anyone owning stocks could be affected and eventually, companies may raise wages less than they otherwise would.
  • He would temporarily expand the child tax credit to $3,000 from $2,000 and add another $600 for children under age 6
Javier E

Electric Cars Were Already Having Issues. Then Things Got Political. - WSJ - 0 views

  • , anti-“woke” backlash and high-profile politics are increasingly making the suggestion of owning an EV a political cudgel. Or, as Ford Motor Chief Executive Officer Jim Farley recently lamented: “They have become a political football.”&nbsp;
  • President Biden’s support of the transition, through subsidizing manufacturing, extending tax credits for EVs and giving money for charging stations, has come under attack from Republican rivals seeking to challenge him for the White House next year.&nbsp;
  • “I don’t get why Ford and GM, why these carmakers, aren’t fighting…to make cars that are going to sell, to make cars that are going to be able to go on long distances,” Trump said at a rally during which he predicted the EV policies would lead to “hundreds of thousands of American jobs” being lost.&nbsp;
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  • The tensions have risen as Ford and other global automakers have spent billions of dollars designing and building EVs, a move that looked especially smart a year ago when they were caught off guard by the strong demand for their new offerings.&nbsp;
  • This past week, General Motors said it would delay opening a large EV truck factory in Michigan by a year, citing a need “to better manage capital investments while aligning with evolving EV demand.”&nbsp;The move followed an earlier announcement by Ford pushing back to late 2024 a target of building 600,000 EVs annually. The company has also temporarily cut one of the production shifts for its electric pickup and paused construction of a $3.5 billion battery plant in Michigan.&nbsp;
  • In the U.S., for every five Democrats owning an EV there are two Republicans, said Alexander Edwards, president of Strategic Vision, which surveys new-vehicle buyers.&nbsp;
  • His data finds that Democrats give priority to “environmentally friendly” when buying their cars while Republicans have other things they are looking for, such as performance and prestige.
  • On the campaign trail, however, EVs don’t always sound so cool. The GOP presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy, who is against subsidies, has drawn laughs as he suggests that EV buyers are motivated by “a psychological insecurity,” while former Vice President Mike Pence said during the second Republican presidential primary debate that Biden’s efforts “are driving American gasoline, automotive manufacturing, into the graveyard.”&nbsp;&nbsp;
  • As the Democrat talks about trying to protect automotive jobs and help the environment with green technology, they raise concerns about losing work and question whether the governments should subsidize them or mandate future zero-emission vehicle sales, as California has done.&nbsp;&nbsp;
  • “The real question is whether we’ll lead or we’ll fall behind in the race to the future; or whether we’ll build these vehicles and the batteries that go in them here in the United States or rely on other countries,” Biden said while visiting a Ford factory early in his administration.&nbsp;
  • Underpinning the politics of EVs is an economic divide, made more stark by the rise of interest rates. Most EVs are more expensive than the average new vehicle—which sold for about $46,000 in September.
  • As new cars and trucks become more costly, the practical effect on buyers shows up in Strategic Vision’s survey: The median family household income of new-car buyers has risen to $122,000. That is a significant increase from around $90,000, where it had been at for a couple of decades until just recently. EV buyers are even better off, with a median household income of $186,000.
  • In some ways, the green car tensions are a return to the 2012 political season, when GM’s Chevrolet Volt became the embodiment of the Obama administration’s rescue of the Detroit auto industry in 2009 and efforts to promote electrified vehicles.
  • Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who unsuccessfully sought the Republican presidential nomination, said the problem with the “Obama car” was that one couldn’t put a gun rack in the plug-in hybrid vehicle.
  • Sales of the Volt disappointed, and Dan Akerson, then CEO of GM, was left fuming that the company hadn’t designed the sedan to become “a political punching bag.”
  • GM later killed off the Volt.
Javier E

Binance Guilty Plea Shows What Crypto's Really About - WSJ - 0 views

  • So it turns out that of the two largest crypto exchanges, one was a fraud and the other was a money launderer. Whoever could have guessed?
  • Skeptics of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have had their prejudices reinforced. The two main use cases—fraud and crime—have been exposed to the public in dramatic fashion, so now all we have to do is sit back and wait for the inevitable collapse in value.
  • There must be something underpinning this value, so what is it? Here are the options:
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  • Digital art: The latest fad in crypto is a bitcoin “ordinal,” digital art—or anything else—virtually inscribed on a fraction of a bitcoin in the digital ledger known as the blockchain.
  • The sudden demand supports bitcoin’s value, in the same way that shopping in bitcoin would. I don’t understand why anyone would pay a cent, let alone real money, to inscribe art in the bitcoin blockchain, but hey, whatever floats your boat.&nbsp;
  • The rise in small bitcoin transactions also shows just how useless it is as a currency, and why it’s nonsensical to think bitcoin could ever be used as real money. The median fee leapt to more than $5 over the past week, even as transaction sizes plunged, an insane cost to pay for something invented as a payment method.
  • Crime: I was tempted a few years ago by the idea that the value of crypto could be underpinned by genuine transactions that need to avoid the financial system: buying illegal drugs; money laundering; avoiding sanctions; anonymous (but legal) pornography purchases; terrorist finance; and ransomware.&nbsp;
  • Bitcoin’s moves over the past three years have been much closer to the S&amp;P 500 than to gold or inflation. But stocks are an investment in real assets that pay dividends, while bitcoin produces nothing.
  • There was a time when savers in countries with dodgy currencies and bad governments would buy bitcoin or other crypto to escape devaluation and avoid capital controls. But the rise of stablecoins allows these savers to buy digital dollars without the pain of trying to open offshore bank accounts, so they have no need for other cryptocurrencies
  • Gambling: Crypto offers a store of volatility more than a store of value. Its volatility makes it an excellent way to bet, and the pretense that it is an investment asset gives speculators cover; it sounds much better to say you are a crypto trader than that you just bet $100,000 at the track.
  • Basing the value of an asset on speculation is risky, because the value depends on everyone else betting that it has value. But so long as the merry-go-round continues, it looks like it has value, and decentralized finance, or DeFi, provides the infrastructure for speculation in the language of Wall Street.
  • Digital gold: When it became clear that bitcoin was useless as a currency, its backers switched to claiming that it is a store of value, with its maximum issuance offering protection against the money-printing tendencies of the Federal Reserve. The argument was tested to destruction over the past two years. Inflation was last below the Fed’s 2% target in February 2021, when one bitcoin cost close to $50,000. By the time inflation peaked in June last year the price had collapsed to $20,000, the opposite of what it should have done.
  • Lots of that was going on, and Binance has paid the price for helping. Bitcoin isn’t a particularly good way to hide from the cops, anyway, as repeated police busts have demonstrated. Crypto has to clean up its act, so basing its value on illegal transactions no longer makes sense.
  • Bitcoin has failed to live up to its original promise of being cheap online cash, but crypto keeps on reinventing itself. It’s so technically satisfying that it must be the solution to something, but quite what remains a mystery.
Javier E

Elon Musk's Latest Dust-Up: What Does 'Science' Even Mean? - WSJ - 0 views

  • Elon Musk is racing to a sci-fi future while the AI chief at Meta Platforms is arguing for one rooted in the traditional scientific approach.
  • Meta’s top AI scientist, Yann LeCun, criticized the rival company and Musk himself.&nbsp;
  • Musk turned to a favorite rebuttal—a veiled suggestion that the executive, who is also a high-profile professor, wasn’t accomplishing much: “What ‘science’ have you done in the past 5 years?”
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  • “Over 80 technical papers published since January 2022,” LeCun responded. “What about you?”
  • To which Musk posted: “That’s nothing, you’re going soft. Try harder!
  • At stake are the hearts and minds of AI experts—academic and otherwise—needed to usher in the technology
  • “Join xAI,” LeCun wrote, “if you can stand a boss who:– claims that what you are working on will be solved next year (no pressure).– claims that what you are working on will kill everyone and must be stopped or paused (yay, vacation for 6 months!).– claims to want a ‘maximally rigorous pursuit of the truth’ but spews crazy-ass conspiracy theories on his own social platform.”
  • Some read Musk’s “science” dig as dismissing the role research has played for a generation of AI experts. For years, the Metas and Googles of the world have hired the top minds in AI from universities, indulging their desires to keep a foot in both worlds by allowing them to release their research publicly, while also trying to deploy products.&nbsp;
  • For an academic such as LeCun, published research, whether peer-reviewed or not, allowed ideas to flourish and reputations to be built, which in turn helped build stars in the system.
  • LeCun has been at Meta since 2013 while serving as an NYU professor since 2003. His tweets suggest he subscribes to the philosophy that one’s work needs to be published—put through the rigors of being shown to be correct and reproducible—to really be considered science.&nbsp;
  • “If you do research and don’t publish, it’s not Science,” he posted in a lengthy tweet Tuesday rebutting Musk. “If you never published your research but somehow developed it into a product, you might die rich,” he concluded. “But you’ll still be a bit bitter and largely forgotten.”&nbsp;
  • After pushback, he later clarified in another post: “What I *AM* saying is that science progresses through the collision of ideas, verification, analysis, reproduction, and improvements. If you don’t publish your research *in some way* your research will likely have no impact.”
  • The spat inspired debate throughout the scientific community. “What is science?” Nature, a scientific journal, asked in a headline about the dust-up.
  • Others, such as Palmer Luckey, a former Facebook executive and founder of Anduril Industries, a defense startup, took issue with LeCun’s definition of science. “The extreme arrogance and elitism is what people have a problem with,” he tweeted.
  • For Musk, who prides himself on his physics-based viewpoint and likes to tout how he once aspired to work at a particle accelerator in pursuit of the universe’s big questions, LeCun’s definition of science might sound too ivory-tower.&nbsp;
  • Musk has blamed universities for helping promote what he sees as overly liberal thinking and other symptoms of what he calls the Woke Mind Virus.&nbsp;
  • Over the years, an appeal of working for Musk has been the impression that his companies move quickly, filled with engineers attracted to tackling hard problems and seeing their ideas put into practice.
  • “I’ve teamed up with Elon to see if we can actually apply these new technologies to really make a dent in our understanding of the universe,” Igor Babuschkin, an AI expert who worked at OpenAI and Google’s DeepMind, said last year as part of announcing xAI’s mission.&nbsp;
  • The creation of xAI quickly sent ripples through the AI labor market, with one rival complaining it was hard to compete for potential candidates attracted to Musk and his reputation for creating value
  • that was before xAI’s latest round raised billions of dollars, putting its valuation at $24 billion, kicking off a new recruiting drive.&nbsp;
  • It was already a seller’s market for AI talent, with estimates that there might be only a couple hundred people out there qualified to deal with certain pressing challenges in the industry and that top candidates can easily earn compensation packages worth $1 million or more
  • Since the launch, Musk has been quick to criticize competitors for what he perceived as liberal biases in rival AI chatbots. His pitch of xAI being the anti-woke bastion seems to have worked to attract some like-minded engineers.
  • As for Musk’s final response to LeCun’s defense of research, he posted a meme featuring Pepé Le Pew that read: “my honest reaction.”
ethanmoser

ISIS Hotbed Looms as Risk in Mosul Fight - WSJ - 0 views

  • ISIS Hotbed Looms as Risk in Mosul Fight
  • Iraqi forces closing in on Islamic State-held Mosul are bypassing pockets controlled by militants such as the strategic town of Hawija, leaving the extremists free to launch counterattacks elsewhere in Iraq.
  • But just days into the Mosul offensive, Islamic State mounted a massive coordinated attack on oil-rich Kirkuk,
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  • the fighters were all originally from the Kirkuk area and Hawija.
  • Islamic State has been pushed in recent months out of places closer to Baghdad, such as Ramadi, Fallujah and Beiji.
  • Instead, Iraqi forces went straight for the high-profile prize of Mosul.
  • There is tension between Baghdad and the Kurdistan regional government over the future of the province and whether it will become part of the semiautonomous Kurdistan region.
  • Sunni Arabs are the majority in Hawija, as well, though it is unclear whether the local population will back the Sunni extremists of Islamic State, who failed to rally residents of Kirkuk to their side in the recent attack.
  • Hawija is now one of Islamic State’s last remaining hubs for assembling car bombs and roadside explosive devices that have devastated cities and towns throughout Iraq and proved to be the militants’ deadliest weapon against allied Iraqi forces pushing into Mosul, according to Iraqi and U.S. officials.
  • “It’s like a knife sticking in the side of northern Iraq,”
  • “We believe the government hurried up to liberate Mosul before Hawija for political reasons,”
  • “Military plans are being made now about how to liberate Hawija and where the operation will start.”
  • Gen. Qadr shared photos he said were taken from a dead militant’s tablet computer after the recent Kirkuk assault that showed a GPS-marked trail he took to get to Kirkuk from Mosul. It included a stop in Hawija.
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