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Javier E

A Nation On Hold Wants to Speak With a Manager - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...mer-service-pandemic-rage.html

culture crisis civility rudeness aggressive

shared by Javier E on 01 Jan 22 - No Cached
  • when people have to meet each other in transactional settings — in stores, on airplanes, over the phone on customer-service calls — they are, in the words of Ms. Luna, “devolving into children.”
  • “People are just — I hate to say it because there are a lot of really nice people — but when they’re mean, they’re a heck of a lot meaner,”
  • “It’s like, instead of saying, ‘This really inconvenienced me,’ they say, ‘What the hell is wrong with you?’ It’s a different scale of mean.”
  • ...18 more annotations...
  • The meanness of the public has forced many public-facing industries to rethink what used to be an article of faith: that the customer is always right. If employees are now having to take on many unexpected roles — therapist, cop, conflict-resolution negotiator — then workplace managers are acting as security guards and bouncers to protect their employees.
  • It’s not just your imagination; behavior really is worse. In a study of 1,000 American adults during the pandemic, 48 percent of adults and 55 percent of workers said that in November 2020, they had expected that civility in America would improve after the election.
  • By August, the expectations of improvement had fallen to 30 percent overall and 37 percent among workers. Overall, only 39 percent of the respondents said they believed that America’s tone was civil.
  • The study also found that people who didn’t have to work with customers were happier than those who did.
  • “It’s mentally exhausting to have to police adults over this matter,” wrote Adam Mosley, a 51-year-old flight attendant, responding to a request by The New York Times to describe conditions in the service industry at this odd juncture.
  • In part, the problem is the disconnect between expectation and reality
  • Before the pandemic, she said, consumers had been seduced into the idea of the “frictionless economy” — the notion that you could get whatever you wanted, the moment you wanted it.
  • “There’s a lack of outlets for people’s anger,” Ms. Swift said. “That waiter, that flight attendant — they become a stand-in for everything coming between what we experience and what we think we are entitled to.”
  • Customer Care Measurement and Consulting, has been conducting studies of consumer anger. The next iteration is set to come out this spring. He almost can’t believe what he has seen during the pandemic.
  • “When we founded the study, I never thought that the environment would be like it was today,” he said. “I would never in my wildest dreams have imagined that we would be seeing people fighting on planes and beating each other up.”
  • “There’s a growing delta between office workers and those that are interacting with consumers,”
  • “There is definitely a subset of people that don’t seem to think that any of the rules apply to them,”
  • most of the bad consumer behavior is low-grade — a persistent hum of incivility rather than an explosion of violence.
  • “Customers have been superaggressive and impatient lately,”
  • Such interactions used to make her weep. “But I’ve been calloused by it,” she said. “Now, instead of crying, I’m just really pessimistic and judgmental against the people around me.”
  • From across the country, workers responded with similar stories: of customers flying off the handle when the products they wanted were unavailable; of customers blaming the store, rather than supply-chain disruptions, for delays; of customers demanding refunds on nonrefundable items; of customers so wound up with worry and anxiety that the smallest thing sends them into a tailspin of hysteria.
  • The worst, she said, is the political commentary. Once a customer went into a diatribe against Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, saying she had it on good authority that he was about to be jailed for his “crimes.” Others have called Ms. Ashburn a “sheep” and a “fraidy-cat” for wearing a mask.Her go-to response — looking noncommittal and murmuring “hmm” — seems to make matters worse. “I am very discouraged at the polarization and at the unkind way that people treat each other,” she said.
  • Ms. Miller, from the Wisconsin trade association, said the pressures of the pandemic and the deterioration of elected officials’ behavior — the shouting, the threats, the hatred — had given normal people license to act out, too.
katherineharron

Georgia's new law suppressing the vote is a victory for Trump - CNNPolitics - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

georgia

shared by katherineharron on 26 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Former President Donald Trump's campaign of lies about a stolen election just delivered a huge victory with a new Georgia law that could suppress the votes of many of the citizens who helped eject him from the White House.
  • The move confirms the Peach State as the epicenter of the fight for American democracy that raged through Trump's presidency and during the insurrection he incited against the US Capitol -- and now threatens to taint future elections as Republicans in multiple states pursue new laws to limit voting.
  • "What I'm worried about is how un-American this whole initiative is. It's sick. It's sick," President Joe Biden said at the first news conference of his presidency that afternoon. The Georgia law raises the question of whether election safeguards that prevented Trump's energetic efforts to rig the 2020 White House race after the fact in the state will stand firm in future elections amid false claims of electoral fraud by a president.
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  • GOP leaders justify the voter suppression measures by arguing that they are needed to crack down on fraud and to restore the public's faith that US elections are fair. But multiple courts and Trump's own Justice Department found there was no widespread electoral fraud in 2020.
  • The Georgia bill is only one example of GOP efforts in multiple states -- including many crucial electoral battlegrounds -- to hold back a diverse demographic tide in cities that favor Democrats, which critics see as an attempt to cement minority rule in the United States.
  • Georgia Republicans also lost two US Senate seats that handed Democrats control of the 50-50 chamber on the basis of huge Black turnout in runoff elections in January.close dialogSign up for CNN's CNN's Chris Cillizza cuts through the political spin and tells you what you need to know. Sign Me UpNo ThanksBy subscribing, you agree to ourprivacy policy.Sign up for CNN's CNN's Chris Cillizza cuts through the political spin and tells you what you need to know. Please enter above Sign Me UpNo ThanksBy subscribing, you agree to ourprivacy policy.You're on the list for CNN'sCNN's Chris Cillizza cuts through the political spin and tells you what you need to know. close dialog/* effects for .bx-campaign-1245919 *//* custom css .bx-campaign-1245919 *//* custom css from creative 47804 */@-ms-keyframes bx-anim-1245919-spin { from {
  • "This should be marked as Exhibit A in making the case that discriminatory voter suppression is alive and well, and makes clear why we need federal voting rights legislation to stop these laws in their tracks," Hewitt said. "We stand ready to take action and protect the fundamental right to vote through the courts."
  • as a remnant of the Jim Crow era that institutionalized racism and hinted that he could ultimately back abolishing the Senate filibuster to get the Democrats' House-passed bill through the chamber. But Biden declined to reveal his strategy for getting the voting rights bill into law.
  • Georgia's action threw a political grenade into the debate over a Washington campaign by many Democrats to abolish Senate supermajority rules that Republicans could use to block their sweeping election bill, known as the For the People Act.
  • In a statement to CNN, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican who defied Trump's pleas in a telephone call to find votes to overturn Biden's victory, said he would still stand up for voter freedoms but did not criticize the law."In implementing this law, I will ensure that no eligible Georgia voter is hindered in exercising their right to vote, and I will continue to further secure our elections so that every Georgian can have confidence in the results of our elections," Raffensperger said
  • "As the FBI continue to round up seditionists who spilled blood to defend a lie about our elections, Republican state leaders willfully undermine democracy by giving themselves authority to overturn results they do not like," Abrams said in a statement. "Now, more than ever, Americans must demand federal action to protect voting rights as we continue to fight against these blatantly unconstitutional efforts that are nothing less than Jim Crow 2.0."
  • Black voters hampered by the restrictions of voting in urban areas have often found themselves lining up for hours to vote in inclement weather. The clear targeting of African American voters in Georgia and elsewhere recalls some of the ugliest racial episodes of America's past, and is fueling claims of open Republican racism.
  • Former President Donald Trump's campaign of lies about a stolen election just delivered a huge victory with a new Georgia law that could suppress the votes of many of the citizens who helped eject him from the White House.
  • Republican state lawmakers rushed through a broad law Thursday making it harder to vote that disproportionately targets Democratic and Black voters
  • The move confirms the Peach State as the epicenter of the fight for American democracy
  • The Georgia law raises the question of whether election safeguards that prevented Trump's energetic efforts to rig the 2020 White House race after the fact in the state will stand firm in future elections amid false claims of electoral fraud by a president.
  • "What I'm worried about is how un-American this whole initiative is. It's sick. It's sick," President Joe Biden
  • Republicans in multiple states pursue new laws to limit voting.
  • Georgia Republicans also lost two US Senate seats that handed Democrats control of the 50-50 chamber on the basis of huge Black turnout in runoff elections in January.close dialogSign up for CNN What Matters NewsletterEvery day we summarize What Matters and deliver it straight to your inbox.Sign me upNo thanksBy subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.By subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.Sign up for CNN What Matters NewsletterEvery day we summarize What Matters and deliver it straight to your inbox.Please enter aboveSign me upNo thanksBy subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.By subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.Sign up for CNN What Matters NewsletterEvery day we summarize What Matters and deliver it straight to your inbox.//assets.bounceexchang
  • After leaving office, Trump demanded that Republican state legislatures pass laws to ban mail-in voting and to prevent courts from weighing in on electoral disputes.
  • the former President has made the acceptance of his false conspiracy theories about voter fraud in 2020 a litmus test for Republican candidates
  • Iowa has already passed a measure to limit absentee balloting and voting hours. Texas is taking steps to cut voting hours and absentee balloting in big Democratic cities like Houston. New voting laws are being pushed by Republicans in another swing state Trump lost, Arizona.
  • GOP leaders justify the voter suppression measures by arguing that they are needed to crack down on fraud and to restore the public's faith that US elections are fair. But multiple courts and Trump's own Justice Department found there was no widespread electoral fraud in 2020.
  • voter mistrust was largely fueled by Trump's blatantly false claims
  • Georgia's action threw a political grenade into the debate over a Washington campaign by many Democrats to abolish Senate supermajority rules that Republicans could use to block their sweeping election bill, known as the For the People Act.
  • The drama in the Georgia Legislature unfolded as Biden condemned restrictive state legislation as a remnant of the Jim Crow era that institutionalized racism and hinted that he could ultimately back abolishing the Senate filibuster to get the Democrats' House-passed bill through the chamber.
  • The law allows any Georgian to make unlimited challenges to voter registrations, and, incredibly, makes it a misdemeanor crime for anyone to offer food and water to voters stuck in long lines to cast ballots.
  • The clear targeting of African American voters in Georgia and elsewhere recalls some of the ugliest racial episodes of America's past, and is fueling claims of open Republican racism.
  • The Georgia law was quickly signed by Republican Gov. Brian Kemp, who incurred the wrath of Trump last year for refusing to play along with his attempt to override Biden's victory by 12,000 votes in the state, which was confirmed by several audits.
  • "In implementing this law, I will ensure that no eligible Georgia voter is hindered in exercising their right to vote, and I will continue to further secure our elections so that every Georgian can have confidence in the results of our elections," Raffensperger said.
  • Kemp is up for reelection in 2022 and could face Democrat Stacey Abrams, a former state lawmaker and prominent voting rights advocate
  • "As the FBI continue to round up seditionists who spilled blood to defend a lie about our elections, Republican state leaders willfully undermine democracy by giving themselves authority to overturn results they do not like," Abrams said in a statement. "Now, more than ever, Americans must demand federal action to protect voting rights as we continue to fight against these blatantly unconstitutional efforts that are nothing less than Jim Crow 2.0."
  • the measure directly targeted voters of color who took part in record numbers in the 2020 election.
  • The For the People Act awaiting action in the Senate would create automatic voter registration nationwide and restore portions of the Voting Rights Act that were gutted by the Supreme Court. It would also strengthen mail-in voting and permit early voting across the country, while taking steps to cut wait times at the polls.
Javier E

The Antitrust Case Against Facebook, Google and Amazon - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...le-amazon-and-apple-1516121561

antitrust tech fb amazon apple microsoft network monopoly

shared by Javier E on 17 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • A growing number of critics think these tech giants need to be broken up or regulated as Standard Oil and AT&T once were.
  • antitrust regulators have a narrow test: Does their size leave consumers worse off?
  • By that standard, there isn’t a clear case for going after big tech—at least for now. They are driving down prices and rolling out new and often improved products and services every week.
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  • That may not be true in the future: If market dominance means fewer competitors and less innovation, consumers will be worse off than if those companies had been restrained. “The impact on innovation can be the most important competitive effect” in an antitrust case
  • Yet Google’s monopoly means some features and prices that competitors offered never made it in front of customers. Yelp Inc., which in 2004 began aggregating detailed information and user reviews of local services, such as restaurants and stores, claims Google altered its search results to hurt Yelp and help its own competing service. While Yelp survived, it has retreated from Europe, and several similar local search services have faded.
  • In a 2005 paper, Mr. Scherer found that Standard Oil was indeed a prolific generator of patents in its early years, but that slowed once it achieved dominance.
  • Standard Oil and AT&T used trusts, regulations and patents to keep out or co-opt competitors. They were respected but unloved.
  • By contrast, Google and Facebook give away their main product, while Amazon undercuts traditional retailers so aggressively it may be holding down inflation. None enjoys a government-sanctioned monopoly; all invest prodigiously in new products.
  • All are among the public’s most loved brands, according to polls by Morning Consult.
  • Yet there are also important parallels. The monopolies of old and of today were built on proprietary technology and physical networks that drove down costs while locking in customers, erecting formidable barriers to entry.
  • . If they’re imposing a cost, it may not be what customers pay but the products they never see.
  • When the federal government sued to break up Standard Oil, the Supreme Court acknowledged business acumen was important to the company’s early success, but concluded that was eventually supplanted by a single-minded determination to drive others out of the market.
  • Amazon hasn’t yet reached the same market share as Google or Facebook but its position is arguably even more impregnable because it enjoys both physical and technological barriers to entry. Its roughly 75 fulfillment centers and state-of-the art logistics (including robots) put it closer, in time and space, to customers than any other online retailer.
  • “Just like people joined Facebook because everyone else was on Facebook, the biggest competitive advantage AT&T had was that it was interconnected,”
  • Early in the 20th century, AT&T began buying up local competitors and refusing to connect independent exchanges to its long-distance lines, arousing antitrust complaints. By the 1920s, it was allowed to become a monopoly in exchange for universal service in the communities it served. By 1939, the company carried more than 90% of calls.
  • After AT&T was broken up into separate local and long-distance companies in 1982, telecommunication innovation blossomed, spreading to digital switching, fiber optics, cellphones—and the internet.
  • “There should be hundreds of Yelps. There’s not. No one is pitching investors to build a service that relies on discovery through Facebook or Google to grow, because venture capitalists think it’s a poor bet.”
  • At that same hearing Jeffrey Katz, then the chief executive of Nextag, responded, “That is like saying move to Panama if you don’t like the tax rate in America. It’s a fake choice because no one has Google’s scope or capabilities and consumers won’t, don’t, and in fact can’t jump.”
  • In 2013 the U.S. Federal Trade Commission concluded that even if Google had hurt competitors, it was to serve consumers better, and declined to bring a case. Since then, comparison sites such as Nextag have largely faded.
  • The different outcomes hinge in part on different approaches. European regulators are more likely to see a shrinking pool of competitors as inherently bad for both competition and consumers. American regulators are more open to the possibility that it could be natural and benign.
  • Internet platforms have high fixed and minimal operating costs, which favors consolidation into a few deep-pocketed competitors. And the more customers a platform has, the more useful it is to each individual customer—the “network effect.”
  • But a platform that confers monopoly in one market can be leveraged to dominate another. Facebook’s existing user base enabled it to become the world’s largest photo-sharing site through its purchase of Instagram in 2012 and the largest instant-messaging provider through its purchase of WhatsApp in 2014. It is also muscling into virtual reality through its acquisition of Oculus VR in 2014 and anonymous polling with its purchase of TBH last year.
  • Once a company like Google or Facebook has critical mass, “the venture capital looks elsewhere,” says Roger McNamee of Elevation Partners, a technology-focused private-equity firm. “There’s no point taking on someone with a three or four years head start.”
  • when Google launched its own comparison business, Google Shopping, those sites found themselves dropping deeper into Google’s search results. They accused Google of changing its algorithm to favor its own results. The company responded that its algorithm was designed to give customers the results they want.
  • As the dominant platform for third-party online sales, Amazon also has access to data it can use to decide what products to sell itself. In 2016 Capitol Forum, a news service that investigates anticompetitive behavior, reported that when a shopper views an Amazon private-label clothing brand, the accompanying list of items labeled “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought,” is also dominated by Amazon’s private-label brands. This, it says, restricts competing sellers’ access to a prime marketing space
  • In the face of such accusations, the probability of regulatory action—for now—looks low, largely because U.S. regulators have a relatively high bar to clear: Do consumers suffer?
  • “We think consumer welfare is the right standard,” Bruce Hoffman, the FTC’s acting director of the bureau of competition, recently told a panel on antitrust law and innovation. “We have tried other standards. They were dismal failures.”
  • What would remedies look like? Since Big Tech owes its network effects to data, one often-proposed fix is to give users ownership of their own data: the “social graph” of connections on Facebook, or their search history on Google and Amazon. They could then take it to a competitor.
  • A more drastic remedy would be to block acquisitions of companies that might one day be a competing platform. British regulators let Facebook buy Instagram in part because Instagram didn’t sell ads, which they argued made them different businesses. In fact, Facebook used Instagram to engage users longer and thus sell more ads
  • Ben Thompson, wrote in his technology newsletter Stratechery. Building a network is “extremely difficult, but, once built, nearly impregnable. The only possible antidote is another network that draws away the one scarce resource: attention.” Thus, maintaining competition on the internet requires keeping “social networks in separate competitive companies.”
  • How sound are these premises? Google’s and Facebook’s access to that data and network effects might seem like an impregnable barrier, but the same appeared to be true of America Online’s membership, Yahoo ’s search engine and Apple’s iTunes store, note two economists, David Evans and Richard Schmalensee, in a recent paper. All saw their dominance recede in the face of disruptive competition.
  • It’s possible Microsoft might have become the dominant company in search and mobile without the scrutiny the federal antitrust case brought. Throughout history, entrepreneurs have often needed the government’s help to dislodge a monopolist—and may one day need it again.
katherineharron

Barack Obama calls for stricter gun laws following Colorado shooting to prevent more 'r... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

obama

shared by katherineharron on 23 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Former President Barack Obama on Tuesday called for stricter gun laws following the mass shooting in Colorado, bemoaning what he called a national tolerance for "these kinds of random, senseless acts."
  • they "are also feeling a deep, familiar outrage" for these types of tragedies.
  • "It is long past time for those with the power to fight this epidemic of gun violence to do so. It will take time to root out the disaffection, racism and misogyny that fuels so many of these senseless acts of violence," Obama said. "But we can make it harder for those with hate in their hearts to buy weapons of war."
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  • The statement by the former president came shortly before President Joe Biden publicly commented on the shooting
  • The attack, which came days after another shooting rampage in Georgia that left eight dead, has renewed calls from lawmakers for federal gun control reform. close dialogSign up for CNN What Matters NewsletterEvery day we summarize What Matters and deliver it straight to your inbox.Sign me upNo thanksBy subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.By subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.Sign up for CNN What Matters NewsletterEvery day we summarize What Matters and deliver it straight to your inbox.Please enter aboveSign me upNo thanksBy subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.By subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.Sign up for CNN What Matters NewsletterEvery day we summarize What Matters and deliver it straight to your inbox.bx-row bx-row-image bx-row-image-d
  • During his time in the White House, Obama urged Congress to take up gun control legislation following several mass shootings around the country, though no significant congressional action was ever taken.
  • Vice President Kamala Harris on Tuesday called the shooting "absolutely tragic," but ignored a question about the future of gun control during a swearing-in ceremony for William Burns as CIA director.
  • Earlier this month, the House passed H.R. 8 that would expand background checks on all commercial gun sales and H.R. 1146 to try and close what's known as the "Charleston Loophole," which allows some firearms to be transferred by licensed gun dealers before the required background checks are completed.
katherineharron

Russia-Ukraine: US considering sending warships to Black Sea amid tensions - CNNPolitics - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

russia

shared by katherineharron on 12 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • The United States is considering sending warships into the Black Sea in the next few weeks in a show of support for Ukraine amid Russia's increased military presence on Ukraine's eastern border
  • The US Navy routinely operates in the Black Sea, but a deployment of warships now would send a specific message to Moscow
  • The US is required to give 14 days notice of its intention to enter the Black Sea under a 1936 treaty giving Turkey control of the straits to enter the sea.
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  • On Wednesday, two US B-1 bombers conducted missions over the Aegean Sea.Read More
  • Although the US does not see the amassing of Russian forces as posturing for an offensive action, the official told CNN that "if something changes we will be ready to respond."
  • On Thursday White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Russia's actions are "deeply concerning."close dialogSign up for CNN What Matters NewsletterEvery day we summarize What Matters and deliver it straight to your inbox.Sign me upNo thanksBy subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.By subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.Sign up for CNN What Matters NewsletterEvery day we summarize What Matters and deliver it straight to your inbox.Please enter aboveSign me upNo thanksBy subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.By subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.Sign up for CNN What Matters NewsletterEvery day we summarize What Matters and deliver it straight to your inbox.//assets.bounceexchange.com/assets/uploads/clients/340/creatives/ac22162ccde0493f3e08745fedbf
  • The Biden administration and the international community have expressed concerns about mounting tensions between Ukraine and Russia
  • "The United States is increasingly concerned by recently escalating Russian aggressions in eastern Ukraine, including Russia's movements on Ukraine's border. Russia now has more troops on the border of Ukraine than any time since 2014. Five Ukrainian soldiers have been killed this week alone. These are all deeply concerning signs," Psaki said.
  • "We are concerned by recent escalating Russian aggressions in eastern Ukraine, including the credible reports that have been emanating about Russian troop movements on Ukraine's borders and occupied Crimea," State Department spokesperson Ned Price said this week.
  • Pentagon spokesperson John Kirby said this week that it was important "for all sides to comply with the Minsk Agreement" and "for the territorial integrity and the sovereignty of Ukraine to be respected by Russia."
carolinehayter

Pentagon watchdog finds National Guard's use of helicopters to fly over DC protestors "... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

politics trump us

shared by carolinehayter on 28 May 21 - No Cached
  • The Pentagon's watchdog found that the DC National Guard's use of low-flying helicopters in response to protests in DC on June 1, 2020, over the death of George Floyd was "reasonable," but the mission was mired in confusion.
  • The report from the Department of Defense's Inspector General, released Thursday, concluded the deployment of helicopters was justifiable based on the needs of the emergency, as well as the direction from President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Mark Esper to "flood the zone" and "use everything available" to protect "federal property and symbols."
  • A lack of clear guidance on the helicopters' mission compounded the confusion, because Ryan "did not provide clear and consistent direction and mission guidance" and "did not provide his clear and consistent commander's intent to include key tasks and parameters for the operation."Enter your email to sign up for CNN's "What Matters" Newsletter. "close dialog"Sign up for CNN What Matters NewsletterEvery day we summarize What Matters and deliver it straight to your inbox.Sign me upNo thanksBy subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.By subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.Sign up for CNN What Matters NewsletterEvery day we summarize What Matters and deliver it straight to your inbox.Please enter aboveSign me upNo thanksBy subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.By subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.Sign up for CNN What Matters Newsletter<di
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  • "No specific training, policies, or procedures were in place for using helicopters to support requests for assistance from civilian authorities in civil disturbances," the report's authors wrote. "Prior to the night of June 1st, 2020, the DC [National Guard] did not have a prepared plan to maintain command and control of aviation assets used to support civil disturbances."Read More
  • Well after the curfew, protesters were still out on the streets, and video captured by CNN showed a military helicopter hovering over a group of them, kicking up strong wind and debris with its downwash. The tactic is a show of force and commonly used by the military in overseas combat zones to drive away targets from a specific area.
  • The Defense Department Inspector General largely agreed with an earlier report from an Army investigation that found the use of helicopters was not against federal laws or policies, though there was a "lack of understanding" about their mission.But the new report contradicted the Army investigation's finding that MEDEVAC helicopters were used against regulations and that the helicopters were used without approval from the chain of command.
anonymous

Your Amazon Echo Will Share Your Wireless Network With Neighbors, Unless You Opt Out : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...h-neighbors-unless-you-opt-out

shared by anonymous on 06 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • Amazon is building a wireless network – using your internet bandwidth.It's called Amazon Sidewalk, and the company touts it as a way to help its devices work better, by extending the range of low-bandwidth devices to help them stay online.It does that by pooling neighbors' bandwidth to help connectivity for devices that are out of range.
  • Here's how it works.Let's say you and your next-door neighbors both have devices that Amazon has added to its Sidewalk scheme, and neither of you have opted out
  • Your neighbors decide to put a Ring security camera on their garage, but the device is too far from their Wi-Fi router to get a good signal. Perhaps your router is closer, or you pay for better connectivity. Their camera will be able to send small amounts of data using your Internet bandwidth. Amazon says the maximum bandwidth of a device on the Sidewalk server is 80 kilobits per second, or about 1/40th of the bandwidth used to stream a typical high-definition video. The total monthly data used by Sidewalk-enabled devices, per customer, is capped at 500 megabytes, which Amazon says is equivalent to streaming about 10 minutes of high-definition video.
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  • Amazon says that customers' privacy and security are "foundational" to how it has built Amazon Sidewalk. The network has three layers of encryption and has protections to keep customers from viewing data from others' Sidewalk-enabled devices. Amazon also put together a white paper outlining Sidewalk's privacy and security measures.
  • Instead of trying to sell device owners on the merits of joining the program, Amazon adds devices to the shared network unless owners go through the steps to opt out.
  • The company says it's all in the customer's interest.An Amazon spokesperson says the company "believe[s] Sidewalk will provide value for every customer and we want to make it is easy for them to take advantage of benefits such as more reliable connections, extended working range for their devices, easier troubleshooting and no additional connectivity costs to customers."
  • And customers can decide to opt out at any time, the spokesperson says. If you opt out, your connection won't be pooled, and you can't draw from the pool, either.
katherineharron

The 15 most notable lies of Donald Trump's presidency - CNNPolitics - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

trump

shared by katherineharron on 17 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • I fact checked every word uttered by this President from his inauguration day in January 2017 until September 2020 -- when the daily number of lies got so unmanageably high that I had to start taking a pass on some of his remarks to preserve my health.
  • Trump got even worse after November 3. Since then, he has spent the final months of what has been a wildly dishonest presidency on a relentless and dangerous lying spree about the election he lost.
  • The most telling lie: It didn't rain on his inaugurationclose dialogSign up for CNN What Matters NewsletterEvery day we summarize What Matters and deliver it straight to your inbox.Sign me upNo thanksBy subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.By subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.Sign up for CNN What Matters NewsletterEvery day we summarize What Matters and deliver it straight to your inbox.Please enter aboveSign me upNo thanksBy subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.By subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.Sign up for CNN What Matters NewsletterEvery day we summarize What Matters and deliver it straight to your inbox.bx-group bx-group-default bx-group-1245864-3DW
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  • It rained during Trump's inaugural address. Then, at a celebratory ball later that day, Trump told the crowd that the rain "just never came" until he finished talking and went inside, at which point "it poured."
  • The President would say things that we could see with our own eyes were not true. And he would often do this brazen lying for no apparent strategic reason.
  • The most dangerous lie: The coronavirus was under control
  • This was more like a family of lies than a single lie. But each one -- the lie that the virus was equivalent to the flu; the lie that the situation was "totally under control"; the lie that the virus was "disappearing" -- suggested to Americans that they didn't have to change much about their usual behavior.
  • more than 386,000 Americans have died from the virus.
  • The most alarming lie saga: Sharpiegate
  • Trump tweeted in 2019 that Alabama was one of the states at greater risk from Hurricane Dorian than had been initially forecast. The federal weather office in Birmingham then tweeted that, actually, Alabama would be unaffected by the storm
  • Trump, however, is so congenitally unwilling to admit error that he embarked on an increasingly farcical campaign to prove that his incorrect Alabama tweet was actually correct, eventually showcasing a hurricane map that was crudely altered with a Sharpie.
  • The most ridiculous subject of a lie: The Boy Scouts
  • When I emailed the Boy Scouts of America in 2017 about Trump's claim that "the head of the Boy Scouts" had called him to say that his bizarrely political address to the Scouts' National Jamboree was "the greatest speech that was ever made to them," I didn't expect a reply. One of the hardest things about fact checking Trump was that a lot of people he lied about did not think it was in their interest to be quoted publicly contradicting a vengeful president.
  • A senior Scouts source -- a phrase I never expected to have to type as a political reporter in Washington, DC -- confirmed to me that no call ever happened.
  • The ugliest smear lie: Rep. Ilhan Omar supports al Qaeda
  • The most boring serial lie: The trade deficit with China used to be $500 billion
  • It was a problem for the country that the President was not only a conspiracy theorist himself but immersed in conspiracy culture, regularly stumbling upon ludicrous claims and then sharing them as fact.
  • So he said well over 100 times that, before his presidency, the US for years had a $500 billion annual trade deficit with China -- though the actual pre-Trump deficit never even reached $400 billion.
  • The most entertaining lie shtick: The burly crying men who had never cried before
  • according to the President, they kept walking up to him crying tears of gratitude -- even though they had almost always not previously cried for years.
  • The most traditional big lie: Trump didn't know about the payment to Stormy Daniels
  • he also lied when he needed to. When he told reporters on Air Force One in 2018 that he did not know about a $130,000 payment to porn performer Stormy Daniels and that he did not know where his then-attorney Michael Cohen got the money for the payment, it was both audacious -- Trump knew, because he had personally reimbursed Cohen -- and kind of conventional: the President was lying to try to get himself out of a tawdry scandal.
  • The biggest lie by omission: Trump ended family separation
  • ere's what he told NBC's Chuck Todd in 2019 about his widely controversial policy of separating migrant parents from their children at the border: "You know, under President Obama you had separation. I was the one that ended it." Yes, Trump signed a 2018 order to end the family separation policy.
  • The most shameless campaign lie: Biden will destroy protections for pre-existing conditions
  • When Trump claimed in September that Biden would destroy protections for people with pre-existing health conditions -- though the Obama-Biden administration created the protections, though the protections were overwhelmingly popular, though Biden was running on preserving them,
  • Trump himself had tried repeatedly to weaken them
  • The lie he fled: He got Veterans Choice
  • Trump could have told a perfectly good factual story about the Veterans Choice health care program Obama signed into law in 2014: it wasn't good enough, so he replaced it with a more expansive program he signed into law in 2018.
  • That's not the story he did tell -- whether out of policy ignorance, a desire to erase Obama's legacy, or simply because he is a liar. Instead, he claimed over and over -- more than 160 times before I lost count -- that he is the one who got the Veterans Choice program passed after other presidents tried and failed for years.
  • The Crazy Uncle lie award: Windmill noise causes cancer
  • At a White House event in 2019, Trump grossly distorted a 2013 quote from Rep. Ilhan Omar to try to get his supporters to believe that the Minnesota Democrat had expressed support for the terrorist group al Qaeda.
  • his 2019 declaration that "they say" the noise from windmills "causes cancer."
  • The most hucksterish lie: That plan was coming in two weeks
  • Trump's big health care plan was eternally coming in "two weeks."
  • My personal favorite lie: Trump was once named Michigan's Man of the Year
  • Trump has never lived in Michigan. Why would he have been named Michigan's Man of the Year years before his presidency?He wouldn't have been. He wasn't.
  • The most depressing lie: Trump won the election
  • Trump's long White House campaign against verifiable reality has culminated with his lie that he is the true winner of the 2020 presidential election he clearly, certifiably and fairly lost.
katherineharron

US coronavirus: America is at a crossroads in this pandemic as Covid-19 deaths near 500... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

covid

shared by katherineharron on 22 Feb 21 - No Cached
  • On the brink of a devastating milestone -- 500,000 US Covid-19 deaths -- the US is at a crossroads in the course of this pandemic.
  • And while vaccinations slowly increase, some Americans say they won't get a Covid-19 vaccine -- hurting the chances of herd immunity and hindering a return to normal life.
  • More than 43.6 million Americans have received at least one dose of their two-dose vaccines, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. close dialogCovid-19Your local resource.Set your location and log in to find local resources and information on Covid-19 in your area.Please enter aboveSet Locationclose dialog/* effects for .bx-campaign-1191325 *//* custom css .bx-campaign-1191325 *//* custom css from creative 50769 */.bx-custom.bx-campaign-1191325 .bx-row-validation .bx-input {border-color: white !important;border-width: 1px !important;background-color: white !important;box-shadow: 0px 2px 8px 1px rgba(0,0,0,0.12) !important;}.bx-custom.bx-campaign-1191325 .bx-row-validation .bx-vtext { color: #e53841 !important; font-size: 11px !important; position: absolute !important; bottom: -1.8em !important;} @media screen and (max-width:736px) { .bx-custom.bx-campaign-1191325 .bx-row-validation .bx-vtext {font-size: 10px !important; }}.bx-custom.bx-campaign-1191325 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  • ...15 more annotations...
  • About 18.8 million have been fully vaccinated. That's about 5.7% of the US population -- far less than the estimated 70% to 85% of Americans who would need to be immune to reach herd immunity.
  • To speed up vaccinations, some experts have suggested delaying second vaccine doses to get more first doses into people's arms.
  • Both vaccines on the US market -- developed by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna -- require two doses, the second of which are intended to be administered 21 days and 28 days after the first, respectively.
  • Nationwide, the rates of new Covid-19 cases, hospitalizations and deaths are declining.The number of patients hospitalized with Covid-19 has fallen for the 40th day in a row, according to the COVID Tracking Project.
  • Fauci hopes that doesn't happen, he said, adding it's "possible" people may be wearing masks in 2022.
  • And daily new cases have dropped 23% over the same time period, according to Johns Hopkins. (But testing is also down by 17%, according to the COVID Tracking Project.)
  • Daily deaths have declined 24% this past week compared to the previous week
  • Experts with the University of Washington's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation said over the weekend that while the B.1.1.7 strain likely accounts for less than 20% of current infections in the US, that number will likely soar to 80% by late April.
  • "Managing the epidemic in the next four months depends critically on scaling up vaccination, trying to increase the fraction of adults willing to be vaccinated above three-quarters, and strongly encouraging continued mask use and avoiding situations where transmission is likely, such as indoor dining, going to bars, or indoor gatherings with individuals outside the household," the team wrote.
  • "With new, more contagious variants of the virus circulating throughout the U.S., now is not the time to let your guard down and scale back on the measures that we know will work to prevent further illness and deaths -- wearing masks, practicing physical distancing, and washing hands," a joint statement said.
  • About 1,700 cases of variant strains first spotted in the UK, South Africa and Brazil have been reported in the US, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
  • "I do think we're looking at some new normals. I think the handshake, for example, is probably going away," she said."I do think masks in the cough/cold/flu season in the winter months would make a lot of sense. That clearly, really insulated the Southeast Asian countries from some of the worst of this, understanding the importance of wearing masks."
  • "It's estimated that about 70% of Americans must be vaccinated before we get to herd immunity through vaccination," CNN medical analyst Dr. Leana Wen said. "That's the point where enough people have the immune protection that the virus won't spread anymore."
  • "The evidence was pretty compelling by last March or April that uniform wearing of masks would reduce transmission of this disease," National Institutes of Health Director Dr. Francis Collins told Axios on HBO on Sunday.
  • "A mask is nothing more than a life-saving medical device, and yet it got categorized in all sorts of other ways that were not factual, not scientific and frankly, dangerous," he added. "And I think you can make a case that tens of thousands of people died as a result."
Javier E

Pandemic Shoppers Are a Nightmare to Service Workers - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...619650

service workers shoppers culture crisis policy

shared by Javier E on 04 Aug 21 - No Cached
  • For generations, American shoppers have been trained to be nightmares. The pandemic has shown just how desperately the consumer class clings to the feeling of being served.
  • The most immediate culprit is decades of cost-cutting; by increasing surveillance and pressure on workers during shifts, reducing their hours and benefits, and not replacing those who quit, executives can shine up a business’s balance sheet in a hurry.
  • Wages and resources dwindle, and more expensive and experienced workers get replaced with fewer and more poorly trained new hires. When customers can’t find anyone to help them or have to wait too long in line, they take it out on whichever overburdened employee they eventually hunt down.
  • ...26 more annotations...
  • as the production of food and material goods centralized and rapidly expanded, commerce reached a scale that the country’s existing stores were ill-equipped to handle, according to the historian Susan Strasser, the author of Satisfaction Guaranteed: The Making of the American Mass Market. Manufacturers needed ways to distribute their newly enormous outputs and educate the public on the wonder of all their novel options. Americans, in short, had to be taught how to shop.
  • In 2019, one in five American workers was employed in retail, food service, or hospitality; even more are now engaged in service work of some kind.
  • This dynamic is exacerbated by the fact that the United States has more service workers than ever before, doing more types of labor, spread thin across the economy
  • Retailers won over this growing middle class by convincing its members that they were separate from—and opposed to—industrial workers and their distrust of corporate power,
  • With these goals in mind, Leach writes, customer service was born. For retailers’ tactics to be successful, consumers—or guests, as department stores of the era took to calling them—needed to feel appreciated and rewarded
  • From 1870 to 1910, the number of service workers in the United States quintupled. It’s from this morass that “The customer is always right” emerged as the essential precept of American consumerism—service workers weren’t there just to ring up orders
  • they were there to fuss and fawn, to bolster egos, to reassure wavering buyers, to make dreams come true.
  • they were also quite intentionally building something far grander: class consciousness. Leach writes that the introduction of shopping was fundamental to forming middle-class identity at a particularly crucial moment, as the technological advances of the Gilded Age helped create the American office worker as we now know it.
  • Customers might not have been able to afford a household staff to do their bidding like the era’s truly wealthy, but corporate stores offered them a little taste of what that would be like. The middle class began to see itself as the small-time beneficiaries of industrialization’s barons.
  • For many of these workers, the difficulty of finding non-service employment enables companies to pay low wages and keep their prices artificially low, which consumers generally like as long as they don’t have to think about what makes it possible. In theory, these conditions are supposed to encourage better performance on the part of the worker; in practice, they also encourage cruelty on the part of the consumer.
  • Previously confined to a few lavish European-owned hotels in America, tipping “aristocratized consumption,
  • Tipping ratcheted up the level of control that members of the middle class could exercise over the service workers beneath them: Consumers could deny payment—effectively, deny workers their wages—for anything less than complete submission.
  • In the 150 years that American consumerism has existed, it has metastasized into almost every way that Americans construct their identities. Today’s brands insert themselves into current events, align themselves with causes, associate patronage of their businesses with virtue and discernment and success.
  • Most Americans now expect corporations to take a stand on contentious social and political issues; in return, corporations have even co-opted some of the language of actual politics, encouraging consumers to “vote with their dollars” for the companies that market themselves on the values closest to their own.
  • For Americans in a socially isolating culture, living under an all but broken political system, the consumer realm is the place where many people can most consistently feel as though they are asserting their agency.
  • Being corrected by a salesperson, forgotten by a bartender, or brushed off by a flight attendant isn’t just an annoyance—for many people, it is an existential threat to their self-understanding.
  • “The notion that at the restaurant, you’re better than the waiters, it becomes part of the restaurant experience,” and also part of how some patrons understand their place in the world. Compounding this sense of superiority is the fact that so many service workers are from historically marginalized groups—the workforce is disproportionately nonwhite and female.
  • Because consumer identities are constructed by external forces, Strasser said, they are uniquely vulnerable, and the people who hold them are uniquely insecure
  • If your self-perception is predicated on how you spend your money, then you have to keep spending it, especially if your overall class status has become precarious, as it has for millions of middle-class people in the past few decades
  • Although underpaid, poorly treated service workers certainly exist around the world, American expectations on their behavior are particularly extreme and widespread, according to Nancy Wong, a consumer psychologist and the chair of the consumer-science department at the University of Wisconsin. “Business is at fault here,” Wong told me. “This whole industry has profited from exploitation of a class of workers that clearly should not be sustainable.”
  • Department-store magnates alleviated these concerns by linking department stores to the public good. Retailers started inserting themselves into these communities as much as possible, Leach writes, turning their enormous stores into domains of urban civic life. They hosted free concerts and theatrical performances, offered free child care, displayed fine art, and housed restaurants, tearooms, Turkish baths, medical and dental services, banks, and post offices. They made splashy contributions to local charities and put on holiday parades and fireworks shows. This created the impression that patronizing their stores wouldn’t just be a practical transaction or an individual pleasure, but an act of benevolence toward the orderly society those stores supported.
  • Modern businesses have invented novel ways to exacerbate conflicts between their customers and their workers.
  • A big problem at airlines and hotels in particular, Wong said, is what’s called the “customer relationship management” model. CRM programs, the first and most famous of which are frequent-flyer miles, are fabulously profitable; awarding points or miles or bucks encourages people not only to increase the size and frequency of their purchases, but also to confine their spending to one airline or hotel chain or big-box store.
  • Higher-spending customers access varying levels of luxury and prestige, often in full view of everyone else. Exposure to these consumer inequalities has been found to spark antisocial behavior in those who don’t get to enjoy their perks, the classic example of which is air rage
  • Workers must do what the sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild, in her 1983 book, The Managed Heart, identified as “emotional labor.”
  • Workers must stifle their natural emotional reactions to, in the case of those in the service industry, placate members of the consumer class. These workers are alienated from their own emotional well-being, which can have far-reaching psychological consequences—over the years, research has associated this kind of work with elevated levels of stress hormones, burnout, depression, and increased alcohol consumption.
Javier E

Opinion | America, China and a Crisis of Trust - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...hina-america-relationship.html

china america crisis rivalry culture politics history

shared by Javier E on 16 Apr 23 - No Cached
  • some eye-popping new realities about what’s really eating away at U.S.-China relations.
  • The new, new thing has a lot to do with the increasingly important role that trust, and its absence, plays in international relations, now that so many goods and services that the United States and China sell to one another are digital, and therefore dual use — meaning they can be both a weapon and a tool.
  • In the last 23 years America has built exactly one sort-of-high-speed rail line, the Acela, serving 15 stops between Washington, D.C., and Boston. Think about that: 900 to 15.
  • ...53 more annotations...
  • it is easy to forget how much we have in common as people. I can’t think of any major nation after the United States with more of a Protestant work ethic and naturally capitalist population than China.
  • These days, it is extremely difficult for a visiting columnist to get anyone — a senior official or a Starbucks barista — to speak on the record. It was not that way a decade ago.
  • The Communist Party’s hold is also a product of all the hard work and savings of the Chinese people, which have enabled the party and the state to build world-class infrastructure and public goods that make life for China’s middle and lower classes steadily better.
  • Beijing and Shanghai, in particular, have become very livable cities, with the air pollution largely erased and lots of new, walkable green spaces.
  • some 900 cities and towns in China are now served by high-speed rail, which makes travel to even remote communities incredibly cheap, easy and comfortable
  • Just when trust has become more important than ever between the U.S. and China, it also has become scarcer than ever. Bad trend.
  • China’s stability is a product of both an increasingly pervasive police state and a government that has steadily raised standards of living. It’s a regime that takes both absolute control and relentless nation-building seriously.
  • For an American to fly from New York’s Kennedy Airport into Beijing Capital International Airport today is to fly from an overcrowded bus terminal to a Disney-like Tomorrowland.
  • China got an early jump on A.I. in two realms — facial recognition technology and health records — because there are virtually no privacy restrictions on the government’s ability to build huge data sets for machine learning algorithms to find patterns.
  • “ChatGPT is prompting some people to ask if the U.S. is rising again, like in the 1990s,”
  • “I understand your feeling: You have been in the first place for a century, and now China is rising, and we have the potential to become the first — and that is not easy for you,” Hu said to me. But “you should not try to stop China’s development. You can’t contain China in the end. We are quite smart. And very diligent. We work very hard. And we have 1.4 billion people.”
  • Before the Trump presidency, he added: “We never thought China-U.S. relations would ever become so bad. Now we gradually accept the situation, and most Chinese people think there is no hope for better relations. We think the relationship will be worse and worse and hope that war will not break out between our two countries.”
  • A lot of people hesitated when I asked. Indeed, many would answer with some version of “I’m not sure, I just know that it’s THEIR fault.”
  • t was repeated conversations like these that got me started asking American, Chinese and Taiwanese investors, analysts and officials a question that has been nagging at me for a while: What exactly are America and China fighting about?
  • the real answer is so much deeper and more complex than just the usual one-word response — “Taiwan” — or the usual three-word response — “autocracy versus democracy.”
  • Let me try to peel back the layers. The erosion in U.S.-China relations is a result of something old and obvious — a traditional great-power rivalry between an incumbent power (us) and a rising power (China) — but with lots of new twists
  • One of the twists, though, is that this standard-issue great-power rivalry is occurring between nations that have become as economically intertwined as the strands of a DNA molecule. As a result, neither China nor America has ever had a rival quite like the other.
  • in modern times, China, like America, has never had to deal with a true economic and military peer with which it was also totally intertwined through trade and investment.
  • Another new twist, and a reason it’s hard to define exactly what we’re fighting about, has a lot to do with how this elusive issue of trust and the absence of it have suddenly assumed much greater importance in international affairs.
  • This is a byproduct of our new technological ecosystem in which more and more devices and services that we both use and trade are driven by microchips and software, and connected through data centers in the cloud and high-speed internet
  • so many more things became “dual use.” That is, technologies that can easily be converted from civilian tools to military weapons, or vice versa.
  • no one country or company can own the whole supply chain. You need the best from everywhere, and that supply chain is so tightly intertwined that each company has to trust the others intimately.
  • when we install the ability to sense, digitize, connect, process, learn, share and act into more and more things — from your GPS-enabled phone to your car to your toaster to your favorite app — they all become dual use, either weapons or tools depending on who controls the software running them and who owns the data that they spin off.
  • As long as most of what China sold us was shallow goods, we did not care as&nbsp;much about its political system — doubly so because it seemed for a while as if China was slowly but steadily becoming more and more integrated with the world and slightly more open and transparent every year. So, it was both easy and convenient to set aside some of our worries about the dark sides of its political system.
  • when you want to sell us ‘deep goods’ — goods that are dual use and will go deep into our homes, bedrooms, industries, chatbots and urban infrastructure — we don’t have enough trust to buy them. So, we are going to ban Huawei and instead pay more to buy our 5G telecom systems from Scandinavian companies we do trust: Ericsson and Nokia.”
  • as we’ve seen in Ukraine, a smartphone can be used by Grandma to call the grandkids or to call a Ukrainian rocket-launching unit and give it the GPS coordinates of a Russian tank in her backyard.
  • So today, the country or countries that can make the fastest, most powerful and most energy efficient microchips can make the biggest A.I. computers and dominate in economics and military affairs.
  • As more and more products and services became digitized and electrified, the microchips that powered everything became the new oil. What crude oil was to powering 19th- and 20th-century economies, microchips are for powering 21st-century economies.
  • When you ask them what is the secret that enables TSMC to make 90 percent of the world’s most advanced logic chips — while China, which speaks the same language and shares the same recent cultural history, makes zero — their answer is simple: “trust.”
  • TSMC is a semiconductor foundry, meaning it takes the designs of the most advanced computer companies in the world — Apple, Qualcomm, Nvidia, AMD and others — and turns the designs into chips that perform different processing functions
  • TSMC makes two solemn oaths to its customers: TSMC will never compete against them by designing its own chips and it will never share the designs of one of its customers with another.
  • “Our business is to serve multiple competitive clients,” Kevin Zhang, senior vice president for business development at TSMC, explained to me. “We are committed not to compete with any of them, and internally our people who serve customer A will never leak their information to customer C.”
  • But by working with so many trusted partners, TSMC leverages the&nbsp;partners’ steadily more complex designs to make itself better — and the better it gets, the more advanced designs it can master for its customers. This not only requires incredibly tight collaboration between TSMC and its customers, but also between TSMC and its roughly 1,000 critical local and global suppliers.
  • As the physics of chip making gets more and more extreme, “the investment from customers is getting bigger and bigger, so they have to work with us more closely to make sure they harvest as much [computing power] as they can. They have to trust you.”
  • China also has a foundry, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation, which is partly state-owned. But guess what? Because no global chip designers trust SMIC with their most&nbsp;advanced designs, it is at least a decade behind TSMC.
  • It’s for these reasons that the erosion in U.S.-China relations goes beyond our increasingly sharp disagreements over Taiwan. It is rooted in the fact that just when trust, and its absence, became much bigger factors in international affairs and commerce, China changed its trajectory. It made itself a less trusted partner right when the most important technology for the 21st century — semiconductors — required unprecedented degrees of trust to manufacture and more and more devices and services became deep and dual use.
  • when American trade officials said: “Hey, you need to live up to your W.T.O. commitments to restrict state-funding of industries,” China basically said: “Why should we live by your interpretation of the rules? We are now big enough to make&nbsp;our own interpretations. We’re too big; you’re too late.”
  • Combined with China’s failure to come clean on what it knew about the origins of Covid-19, its crackdown on democratic freedoms in Hong Kong and on the Uyghur Muslim minority in Xinjiang, its aggressive moves to lay claim to the South China Sea, its increasing saber rattling toward Taiwan, its cozying up to Vladimir Putin (despite his savaging of Ukraine), Xi’s moves toward making himself president for life, his kneecapping of China’s own tech entrepreneurs, his tighter restrictions on speech and the occasional abduction of a leading Chinese businessman — all of these added up to one very big thing: Whatever trust that China had built up with the West since the late 1970s evaporated at the exact moment in history when trust, and shared values, became more important than ever in a world of deep, dual-use products driven by software, connectivity and microchips.
  • it started to matter a lot more to Western nations generally and the United States in particular that this rising power — which we were now selling&nbsp;to&nbsp;or buying from all sorts of dual-use digital devices or apps — was authoritarian.
  • eijing, for its part, argues that as China became a stronger global competitor to America — in deep goods like Huawei 5G — the United States simply could not handle it and decided to use its control over advanced semiconductor manufacturing and other high-tech exports from America, as well as from our allies, to ensure China always remained in our rearview mirror
  • Beijing came up with a new strategy, called “dual circulation.” It said: We will use state-led investments to make everything we possibly can at home, to become independent of the world. And we will use our manufacturing prowess to make the world dependent on our exports.
  • Chinese officials also argue that a lot of American politicians — led by Trump but echoed by many in Congress — suddenly seemed to find it very convenient to put the blame for economic troubles&nbsp;in the U.S.’s middle class not on any educational deficiencies, or a poor work ethic, or automation&nbsp;or the 2008 looting by financial elites, and the crisis that followed, but on China’s exports to the United States.
  • As Beijing sees it, China not only became America’s go-to boogeyman, but in their frenzy to blame Beijing for everything, members of Congress started to more recklessly promote Taiwan’s independence.
  • Xi told President Biden at their summit in Bali in November, in essence: I will not be the president of China who loses Taiwan. If you force my hand, there will be war. You don’t understand how important this is to the Chinese people. You’re playing with fire.
  • at some level Chinese officials now understand that, as a result of their own aggressive actions in recent years on all the fronts I’ve listed, they have frightened both the world and their own innovators at precisely the wrong time.
  • I don’t buy the argument that we are destined for war. I believe that we are doomed to compete with each other, doomed to cooperate with each other and doomed to find some way to balance the two. Otherwise we are both going to have a very bad 21st century.
  • I have to say, though, Americans and Chinese remind me of Israelis and Palestinians in one respect: They are both expert at aggravating the other’s deepest insecurities.
  • China’s Communist Party is now convinced that America wants to bring it down, which some U.S. politicians are actually no longer shy about suggesting. So, Beijing is ready to crawl into bed with Putin, a war criminal, if that is what it takes to keep the Americans at bay.
  • Americans are now worried that Communist China, which got rich by taking advantage of a global market shaped by American rules, will use its newfound market power to unilaterally change those rules entirely to its advantage. So we’ve decided to focus our waning strength vis-à-vis Beijing on ensuring the Chinese will always be a decade behind us on microchips.
  • I don’t know what is sufficient to reverse these trends, but I think I know what is necessary.
  • If it is not the goal of U.S. foreign policy to topple the Communist regime in China, the United States needs to make that crystal clear, because I found a lot more people than ever before in Beijing think otherwise.
  • As for China, it can tell itself all it wants that it has not taken a U-turn in recent years. But no one is buying it. China will never realize its full potential — in a hyper-connected, digitized, deep, dual-use, semiconductor-powered world — unless it understands that establishing and maintaining trust is now the single most important competitive advantage any country or company can have. And Beijing is failing in that endeavor.
  • In his splendid biography of the great American statesman George Shultz, Philip Taubman quotes one of Shultz’s cardinal rules of diplomacy and life: “Trust is the coin of the realm.”
katyshannon

Wells Fargo will pay $190 million to settle customer fraud case | Reuters - 0 views

www.reuters.com/...fargo-settlement-idUSKCN11E2CJ

wells fargo pay million customer fraud case crisis economics

shared by katyshannon on 09 Sep 16 - No Cached
  • Wells Fargo has long been the envy of the banking industry for its ability to sell multiple products to the same customer, but regulators on Thursday said those practices went too far in some instances.
  • The largest U.S. bank by market capitalization will pay $185 million in penalties and $5 million to customers that regulators say were pushed into fee-generating accounts they never requested.
  • The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau will receive $100 million of the total penalties - the largest fine ever levied by the federal agency.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • In a complaint filed in May 2015, California prosecutors alleged that Wells Fargo pushed customers into costly financial products that they did not need or even request. Bank employees were told that the average customer tapped six financial tools but that they should push households to use eight products, according to the complaint.The bank opened more than 2 million deposit and credit card accounts that may not have been authorized, the CFPB said Thursday.
  • Wells Fargo spokeswoman Mary Eshet said the bank fired 5,300 employees over "inappropriate sales conduct." The firings took place over a five-year period, Eshet said, adding that the bank has 100,000 employees in its branches.
mattrenz16

Opinion: Naomi Osaka's courageous choice - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by mattrenz16 on 02 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • Twenty-three-year-old tennis player and four-time Grand Slam singles champion Naomi Osaka stunned the tennis community this week by dropping out of the in-progress French Open, one of the year's major tournaments, announcing on social media that she will "take some time away from the court."
  • That is why forcing her to choose between her mental health and a few media sound bites was entirely unnecessary. We don't need to hear from her to appreciate her skill on the court. We do not need to drive her out of her career in order to punish her for failing to perform.
  • Her decision was surprising, but not entirely out of the blue. Earlier, Osaka had announced that she would be opting out of the tournament's "mandatory" media interviews, citing mental health concerns, including a history of depression.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • But Open organizers didn't stop there, issuing a news release threatening to expel her from the tournament if she kept it up.
  • And so, she quit. Read More
  • In attempting to force her hand, they essentially forced her out. Enter email to sign up for the CNN Opinion newsletter. "close dialog"Get CNN Opinion's newsletter for the latest thoughts and analysis on today's news.Please enter aboveSign me upBy subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.Thanks for Subscribing!Continue ReadingBy subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy."close dialog"/* effects for .bx-campaign-1376914 *//* custom css .bx-campaign-1376914 *//* custom css from creative 52220 */.bxc.bx-custom.bx-campaign-1376914 .bx-row-image-logo img { height: 42px;}@media screen and (max-width:736px) { .bxc.bx-custom.bx-campaign-1376914 .bx-row-image-logo img { height: 35px;}}/*Validation border*/.bxc.bx-custom.bx-campaign-1376914 .bx-row-validation .bx-input { border-color: #B50000; /*Specify border color*/ border-width: 1px; box-shadow: none; background-color: transparent; color: #B50000; /*Specify text color*/}/* rendered styles .bx-campaign-1376914 */.bxc.bx-campaign-1376914.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative:before {min-height: 220px;}.bxc.bx-campaign-1376914.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative {border-color: #c1c1c1;border-style: solid;background-size: contain;background-color: white;border-width: 1px 0;border-radius: 0;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1376914.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative:before {min-height: 200px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1376914.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative> *:first-child {width: 780px;vertical-align: middle;padding: 10px;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1376914.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative> *:first-child {width: 340px;padding: 20px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1376914.bx-active-step-1 .bx-close {stroke: rgb(193, 193, 193);stroke-width: 2px;width: 24px;height: 24px;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1376914.bx-active-step-1 .bx-close {width: 30px;height: 30px;padding: 0 0 10px 10px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1376914 .bx-group-1376914-y4M7jyO {width: 660px;text-align: left;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1376914 .bx-group-1376914-y4M7jyO {text-align: center;width: 315px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1376914 .bx-element-1376914-tVcUlRZ {padding: 0;width: auto;}.bxc.bx-campaign-1376914 .bx-element-1376914-tVcUlRZ> *:first-child {background-color: transparent;background-size: contain;}.bxc.bx-campaign-1376914 .bx-group-1376914-BpRQ7DR {width: 660px;text-align: left;padding: 25px 0 15px;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1376914 .bx-group-1376914-BpRQ7DR {width: 310px;padding: 15px 0 15px;text-align: center;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1376914 .bx-element-1376914-oUX5Jvf {width: 100%;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1376914 .bx-element-1376914-oUX5Jvf {width: auto;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1376914 .bx-element-1376914-oUX5Jvf> *:first-child {font-family: CNN Business,CNN,Helvetica Neue,Helvetica,Arial,Utkal,sans-serif;font-weight: 400;font-size: 24px;line-height: 1.1em;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1376914 .bx-element-1376914-oUX5Jvf> *:first-child {font-size: 16px;padding: 6px 0 0;line-height: 1.2;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1376914 .bx-group-1376914-PZ8dLrW {width: 660px;padding: 0;min-width: 550px;text-align: left;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campa
  • Osaka first came into the spotlight at the 2018 US Open when her historic win against Serena Williams received boos from a crowd convinced that Williams was unfairly targeted by the umpire. What should have been an extraordinarily joyous occasion, her first major victory and the event that catapulted her into public recognition, was instead one that made her cry, both immediately following the match and when she went to collect her trophy. ESPN declared that "Naomi Osaka was denied her magic moment."
  • Simply put, it's because the world has unrealistic expectations of celebrities and athletes. We believe the public nature of their fame entitles us access to their private lives. In several recent interviews, such as one with podcaster Dax Shepard, Prince Harry has talked openly of his own mental health struggles and of the pressures he and his wife, Meghan Markle, have felt as objects of media fascination, pressures so severe that Markle thought of suicide.
  • Many of her fellow athletes agreed with her decision. Steph Curry tweeted, "you shouldn't ever have to make a decision like this -- but so damn impressive taking the high road when the powers that be don't protect their own. major respect @naomiosaka." Martina Navratilova tweeted her support of Osaka, noting that "as athletes we are taught to take care of our body, and perhaps the mental &amp; emotional aspect gets short shrift. This is about more than doing or not doing a press conference." Serena Williams offered her support, too.
  • Some tennis players, of course -- including Rafael Nadal and Sofia Kenin -- have come out to say that speaking to reporters is part of the job. But just because something has been part of the job needn't mean it should be, or that it should be for everyone. Osaka didn't just decide she didn't feel like giving interviews. She was forced to make a choice, and she chose herself. That takes courage, courage that is a shame she had to muster at all. Because in the end, the tennis world has lost a great, at least for now -- a point that deserves much more attention.
aidenborst

Opinion: Michael Flynn is playing with fire - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

US politics Trump history crisis Culture policy GOP Michael-Flynn coup

shared by aidenborst on 03 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • It's hard to get a grip on what's happened to one-time war hero, retired lieutenant general Michael Flynn.
  • Flynn, a former national security adviser to President Donald Trump, shockingly appeared to support a military coup in the United States during a Sunday keynote address to a Dallas conference organized by supporters of QAnon conspiracy theories.
  • An audience member at the Dallas event asked Flynn: "I want to know why what happened in Minamar (sic) can't happen here?" The audience raucously cheered this question. Flynn replied, "No reason. I mean, it should happen here. No reason. That's right." Again, the audience cheered heartily. Enter email to sign up for the CNN Opinion newsletter. "close dialog"Healing a divided country starts with listening. Sign up for refreshing takes from every perspective. Please enter aboveSign me upBy subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.Thanks for Subscribing!Continue ReadingBy subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy."close dialog"/* effects for .bx-campaign-1376913 *//* custom css .bx-campaign-1376913 *//* custom css from creative 52220 */.bxc.bx-custom.bx-campaign-1376913 .bx-row-image-logo img { height: 42px;}@media screen and (max-width:736px) { .bxc.bx-custom.bx-campaign-1376913 .bx-row-image-logo img { height: 35px;}}/*Validation border*/.bxc.bx-custom.bx-campaign-1376913 .bx-row-validation .bx-input { border-color: #B50000; /*Specify border color*/ border-width: 1px; box-shadow: none; background-color: transparent; color: #B50000; /*Specify text color*/}/* rendered styles .bx-campaign-1376913 */.bxc.bx-campaign-1376913.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative:before {min-height: 220px;}.bxc.bx-campaign-1376913.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative {border-color: #c1c1c1;border-style: solid;background-size: contain;background-color: white;border-width: 1px 0;border-radius: 0;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1376913.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative:before {min-height: 200px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1376913.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative> *:first-child {width: 780px;vertical-align: middle;padding: 10px;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1376913.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative> *:first-child {width: 340px;padding: 20px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1376913.bx-active-step-1 .bx-close {stroke: rgb(193, 193, 193);stroke-width: 2px;width: 24px;height: 24px;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1376913.bx-active-step-1 .bx-close {width: 30px;height: 30px;padding: 0 0 10px 10px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1376913 .bx-group-1376913-y4M7jyO {width: 660px;text-align: left;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1376913 .bx-group-1376913-y4M7jyO {text-align: center;width: 315px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1376913 .bx-element-1376913-tVcUlRZ {padding: 0;width: au
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • On Monday, Flynn seemed to be trying to dial back, saying on social media that he doesn't support a military coup. Yet Flynn's comments in Dallas Sunday were made on video, which can be seen here by anyone who wants to judge Flynn's response for themselves.
  • Flynn's recent musings about coups, martial law and overturning legitimate presidential elections are all a very long way from the period after 9/11, when he served in the elite Joint Special Operations Command as a highly regarded intelligence officer in Afghanistan and Iraq.
  • Flynn was so well thought of that he was eventually promoted to lieutenant general and to run the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), but Flynn's overseers in the Obama administration thought he was an ineffective manager of DIA, a large agency with 17,000 employees, and in 2014 he was pushed out of his post.
  • After Trump won the presidency in 2016, he appointed Flynn his national security adviser, a post in which he served for the record briefest amount of time; only 24 days.
  • Flynn was fired for lying to Vice President Mike Pence about the content of conversations he had had with the Russian ambassador to the United States during the presidential transition. Flynn later pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about the same issue.
  • Trump pardoned Flynn, but the eradication of his conviction doesn't seem to have impacted Flynn's continuing lack of good judgment: Calling for the overturning of a legitimate presidential election; floating the imposition of martial law and appearing to approve of a coup in the United States.
katherineharron

Opinion: The danger of a giant Covid belly flop - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

covid

shared by katherineharron on 09 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • As more and more vaccinations are administered in the US, the Covid-19 story, which once was nothing more than a tale of enormous tragedy, now has a new plotline: how best to return to normal.
  • transmission of a virus depends on a non-immune person bumping into an actively infected person. With more and more vaccination, the likelihood that a non-immune person will come in contact with an infected person is progressively reduced until -- poof -- the risk of catching the infection is almost gone (though never zero).
  • The issue in 1918, when the first article describing herd immunity was published, was the threat of epidemic miscarriage due to a bacterium among pregnant cows in Kansas.
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • Consider a calculation to determine the threshold for herd immunity: Vc=(1− 1/R0)/E. "Vc" is the proportion of people who must be vaccinated to protect the rest of the herd, "R0," pronounced R-naught, is an estimate of the number of secondary cases from the original infected person and "E" represents effectiveness of a given vaccine against transmission. And this, which resembles a brutal SAT math section entry, is the dumbed-down version.
  • This is not a fund-raiser with a fixed universal goal we all are striving to reach. The above equation evaluates the nation as a homogenized entity, but people live in communities
  • In other words, susceptible cows should be culled to lessen the risk of new infections
  • Though, of course, the fix -- culling -- is not an option for human disease, the benefit of an immune herd is self evident.
  • Fast forward to the 21st century world of vaccines. Pandemics and health care are decidedly more complex, which has led all to wonder: what is the magic number of people we need to vaccinate so we can all forget these disastrous last 14 months?close dialogOur free Provoke/Persuade newsletter compiles the week’s most thought-provoking pieces and delivers them straight to your inbox. Please enter aboveSign me upBy subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.Thanks for Subscribing!Continue ReadingBy subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.close dialog/* effects for .bx-campaign-1295603 *//* custom css .bx-campaign-1295603 *//* custom css from creative 52220 */.bxc.bx-custom.bx-campaign-1295603 .bx-row-image-logo img { height: 42px;}@media screen and (max-width:736px) { .bxc.bx-custom.bx-campaign-1295603 .bx-row-image-logo img { height: 35px;}}/*Validation border*/.bxc.bx-custom.bx-campaign-1295603 .bx-row-validation .bx-input { border-color: #B50000; /*Specify border color*/ border-width: 1px; box-shadow: none; background-color: transparent; color: #B50000; /*Specify text color*/}/* rendered styles .bx-campaign-1295603 */.bxc.bx-campaign-1295603.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative:before {min-height: 220px;}.bxc.bx-campaign-1295603.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative {border-color: #c1c1c1;border-style: solid;background-size: contain;background-color: white;border-width: 1px 0;border-radius: 0;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1295603.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative:before {min-height: 200px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1295603.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative> *:first-child {width: 780px;vertical-align: middle;padding: 10px;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1295603.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative> *:first-child {width: 340px;padding: 20px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1295603.bx-active-step-1 .bx-close {stroke: rgb(193, 193, 193);stroke-width: 2px;width: 24px;height: 24px;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1295603.bx-active-step-1 .bx-close {width: 30px;height: 30px;padding: 0 0 10px 10px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1295603 .bx-group-1295603-y4M7jyO {width: 660px;text-align: left;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1295603 .bx-group-1295603-y4M7jyO {text-align: center;width: 315px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1295603 .bx-element-1295603-tVcUlRZ {padding: 0;width: auto;}.bxc.bx-campaign-1295603 .bx-element-1295603-tVcUlRZ> *:first-child {background-color: transparent;background-size: contain;}.bxc.bx-campaign-1295603 .bx-group-1295603-BpRQ7DR {width: 660px;text-align: left;padding: 25px 0 15px;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1295603 .bx-group-1295603-BpRQ7DR {width: 310px;padding: 15px 0 15px;text-align: center;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1295603 .bx-element-1295603-oUX5Jvf {width: 100%;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1295603 .bx-element-1295603-oUX5Jvf {width: auto;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1295603 .bx-element-1295603-oUX5Jvf> *:first-child {font-family: CNN Business,CNN,Helvetica Neue,Helvetica,Arial,Utkal,sans-serif;font-weight: 400;font-size: 24px;line-height: 1.1em;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1295603 .bx-element-1295603-oUX5Jvf> *:first-child {font-size: 16px;padding: 6px 0 0;line-height: 1.2;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1295603 .bx-group-1295603-PZ8dLrW {width: 660px;padding: 0;min-width: 550px;text-align: left;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1295603 .bx-group-1295603-PZ8dLrW {min-width: auto;width: 310px;padding: 0;}}@media all and (min-wi
  • Lessening the threat of fetal loss therefore was straightforward: farmers should "retain" immune cattle -- those who had already had a spontaneous abortion -- and not waste "material, time, and energy ... on animals of doubtful value." Rather, they advised to butcher the non-immune cows and concentrate on the immune, "profitable" ones.
  • A famous mumps outbreak in adolescent boys from the Orthodox Jewish community is thought to have been exacerbated by the school practice of promoting close, sustained (15 hours a day) contact with a study partner ("chavrusa") including "animated" face-to-face discussion resulting in transmission despite the fact that most had been vaccinated years before.
  • Stated more simply, the herd likely is protected at a very different percent of vaccinated people in an Orthodox Jewish community in San Diego where people live near the school and walk to most activities compared to a gated community in a Minneapolis suburb where many prefer to keep to themselves.
  • We have received a master class in viral variants in recent months, witnessing day by day the alarming uptick in new cases as the B.1.1.7. variant has been introduced to new communities. But a single R-naught cannot fit all variants of Covid-19; a community with higher rates of B.1.1.7. and, therefore, a higher R-naught will require, among other things, a higher level of vaccination to designate the herd as sufficiently immune.
  • There is not one magic number to signal to the entire country that we have finally made it;
  • This is extremely important to keep in mind in the weeks and months ahead as we continue to vaccinate and wait and vaccinate and wait, chasing a number that is fundamentally misleading.
  • The heterogeneity of human behavior, geography and the virus itself explains the vagueness of the pronouncements of Dr. Anthony Fauci, the chief medical adviser to President Joe Biden, and other experts as they seek to evade specifying just how many more people need vaccination before we officially can claim victory.
  • As we have seen in the US during the 15-month arc of the pandemic, trust in science and scientists has been the key to progress. Masks work. Vaccines work. Certain medications work.
aidenborst

Stocks week ahead: Saying goodbye to a wild 2020 - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

Politics US history crisis economics stocks stock-market rebuild

shared by aidenborst on 04 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • The Dow and the S&amp;P 500 ended the year at record highs and the Nasdaq Composite logged its best performance since 2009 with a whopping 43.6% jump. Overall, the indexes registered gains for the second year in a row.
  • Nobody could have predicted the market mayhem of 2020. Stocks hit record highs at the start of the year, before worries about the coronavirus pandemic — first abroad and then closer to home — pushed US markets into a spiral in February and March. The Dow routinely set new records for worst one-day point drops in history, and the New York Stocks Exchange had to suspend trading in the S&amp;P 500 multiple times as the selloff triggered circuit breakers.
  • But in the months that followed, the market recovered — and faster than many had expected.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Some of the year's biggest winners are investors who closed their eyes and muffled their ears during the pandemic selloff and held onto their stocks. By the end of the year, their portfolio balances were looking pretty good
  • "This year was a year with a lot of reminders for investors: number one, don't overreact," Leo Grohowski, chief investment officer at BNY Wealth Management, told CNN Business.close dialogBefore Markets OpenStart your day smartGet essential news and analysis on global markets with CNN Business’ daily newsletter. Sign me upNo thanksBy subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.By subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.Before Markets OpenStart your day smartGet essential news and analysis on global markets with CNN Business’ daily newsletter. Please enter aboveSign me upNo thanksBy subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.By subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.Before Markets Open
  • The disconnect between Wall Street and Main Street will likely be a topic that follows us into the New Year.
  • The US economy is operating at 82% of where it was in early March, according to the Back-to-Normal Index from Moody's Analytics and CNN Business.
Javier E

The Best and Worst Places to Grow Up: How Your Area Compares - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...up-how-your-area-compares.html

income location mobility research statistics policy

shared by Javier E on 08 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • Location matters –&nbsp;enormously. If you’re poor and live in the Philadelphia area, it’s better to be in Bucks County than in Cumberland County or Atlantic County. Not only that, the younger you are when you move to Bucks, the better you will do on average. Children who move at earlier ages are less likely to become single parents, more likely to go to college and more likely to earn more.
  • esearchers are no longer confined to talking about which counties merely correlate well with income mobility; new data suggests some places actually cause it.
  • Across the country, the researchers found five factors associated with strong upward mobility: less segregation by income and race, lower levels of income inequality, better schools, lower rates of violent crime, and a larger share of two-parent households. In general, the effects of place are sharper for boys than for girls, and for lower-income children than for rich.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • “The broader lesson of our analysis,” Mr. Chetty and Mr. Hendren write, “is that social mobility should be tackled at a local level.”
  • the new estimates of mobility conflict with earlier estimates. For example, previous estimates suggested that New York City was a good place for lower-income children to grow up: Children raised in lower-income families in New York had above-average outcomes in adulthood.
  • better or worse is measured by the household incomes of children in early adulthood. This makes New York look worse than it would if individual incomes were used, because it, along with Northern California, has some of the lowest marriage rates in the country. Manhattan is actually better than most of the country at raising the individual incomes of poor girls. Marriage rates, too, are strongly affected by where children grow up.
  • Mr. Chetty and Mr. Hendren based the latest estimates on the incomes of more than five million children who moved between areas when they were growing up in the 1980s and 1990s. These estimates are causal: They suggest moving a given child to a new area would in fact cause him or her to do better or worse.
  • In the new estimates, Manhattan ranks among the worst counties in the country for girls from lower-income families.
  • But New York appeared above average in part because it has a large number of immigrants, who have good rates of upward mobility no matter where they live: Nothing about New York in particular caused these children to do better.
  • in poor families. It is better than only about 7 percent of counties.
Javier E

The Aldi effect: how one discount supermarket transformed the way Britain shops | Busin... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...arket-changed-britain-shopping

discount supermarket uk

shared by Javier E on 06 Mar 19 - No Cached
  • For Aldi, the panic and rush is an integral part of the shopping experience for two reasons. The first is the happy realisation once you have left the store, and your heartbeat has settled, that you have spent less time shopping than you would have in a typical supermarket. The second, and most important, is what Aldi managers describe, straight-faced, as “the thrill at the till”: your trolley full of goods has cost less than you thought it would. The rushed, no-frills experience isn’t something you merely endure for the sake of saving money; the awareness of your savings makes that experience a pleasure in itself.
  • Aldi is still relatively low-tech: without a loyalty programme, it knows little about individual customer preferences and you can’t buy its groceries online. What it has done is disrupt a mindset: the settled wisdom about how we think of ourselves as shoppers, and the basis by which we identify with a particular supermarket. Aldi’s victory was to show that there was no shame – and in fact there was satisfaction – in shopping at a discount supermarket
  • “Aldi’s customer profile is now classless,” said Hyman. “The supermarket is as strong with affluent people as it is with people on low incomes.”
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  • Paying well obviously helps attract and retain staff, who might otherwise go to chains where the pace of work is slower. But it also serves to drive up wages across the industry, which, because of Aldi’s lower overall employee costs, hurts its competitors more.
  • Lacking capital, they stocked only a tight range of staples, such as pasta and soap, planning to widen the offering later. But they soon realised that offering a limited selection of cheap, fast-selling goods kept their costs down and the cash flowing, which they could use to invest in new stores. As the former Aldi executive Dieter Brandes and his son Nils wrote in “Bare Essentials”, their book about the company: “Basically, a completely new business model was created along the lines of a discovery in the natural sciences: by accident.”
  • in 1961, when they had 300 stores, they chose to split Aldi, short for Albrecht Discount, into two parts. The “Aldi equator” ran through Essen, with Theo taking the part of Germany to the north, and Karl the south. Aldi North and Aldi South shared all information, except profits, and conducted some supplier negotiations jointly, but were otherwise run separately, with their stores carrying different product ranges and featuring differently coloured floors – one yellow and one grey.
  • Theo continued to put in long hours at the office, managing even the smallest details in his quest to save money. He wore pencils down to the nubs and turned off the light when entering an office if he judged that his staff could see well enough without it. He once told his board to look at the thickness of the paper used for photocopies. Outside consultants and media interviews were banned, considered unnecessary expenditures or distractions. Asceticism was a virtue in life and business, he believed. “People live more on what they do not eat,” he once said. He wanted Aldi to be a place where “people who don’t hate their money can safely go shopping”
  • In their book “Bare Essentials”, Dieter and Nils Brandes argued that Aldi’s embrace of kaizen, its lean management structure and just-in-time approach to inventory – taking delivery of stock only when needed, to cut holding costs – made it the “most Japanese” company in Germany.
  • 1976, Aldi South, Karl’s company, opened the first Aldi store on the east coast of the US. Three years later, in 1979, Theo’s Aldi North purchased Trader Joe’s, a California chain that sells cheap gourmet foods and enjoys a cult-like following. (The US is still the only foreign market where both Aldis operate.)
  • Second, the main chains – the big four as well as the leading “soft” discounter Kwik Save (which stocked a larger range than Aldi) – were listed on the stock exchange. The best way to fight Aldi early on is to slash prices, but few bosses of public companies are happy to accept lower profits, and thus lower bonuses, by pursuing long-term strategies
  • Fourth, and most importantly, the UK is, by global standards, a high-wage economy. This means that labour costs make up a big part of a supermarket’s operating expenses. Here, discounters have a major competitive advantage, because their business model – stocking a small range of products, eschewing delicatessens and promotions, and so on – allows them to operate with fewer, more productive, staff. (The most important performance measure in any Aldi branch is revenue divided by employee hours.)
  • arl Albrecht, who was famously secretive, only spoke publicly about Aldi’s business model on one occasion – in 1953. Its fundamental principles, he said, were “narrow product range and low price, [which] cannot be separated
  • As a private company, with no shareholders other than Karl Albrecht’s family to answer to, it could afford to be patient. “Aldi is very attuned to going into a country, making the investment, and building slowly and steadily,” said Richard Hyman, the retail expert. “Most other companies don’t have a 30-year view – or even a five-year view.”
  • By the time the supermarkets awoke to the structural shift that had occurred in the industry, the damage was done. “The big four bosses were not just sleeping at the wheel,” said Black. “They were comatose.”
  • “Ten years ago we had 900 lines, now we have 1,800,” said Neale. “That’s not because we are trying to become a big-four retailer, it’s because consumer tastes have evolved. We are managing the equilibrium between what customers want and costs.”
  • As the large supermarkets have realised, it is very hard to make money from internet sales because the profit margin on groceries is small and the delivery costs are so high – but now they can’t reverse course without losing customers. Andy Clarke, the former boss of Asda, told the Sunday Times last year that if the big four supermarkets had their time again “they wouldn’t have offered home deliveries, full stop”. “Online groceries are a cost drain,” Neale said. “Why should 90% of customers subsidise the 10% who get free home delivery?”
  • All supermarkets have their own private labels: made not by them, but for them, by manufacturers who agree to put their merchandise in a bag or box with the grocer’s logo on it. But Aldi takes this to extremes: more than 90% of the products it sells, from shaving cream to dark chocolate and frozen pizza, are private labels
  • Stocking mostly own-label goods allows the company to order huge quantities of a single item, to its own specifications, at a low unit cost.
  • Aldi’s entire ketchup order comes from one manufacturer that can operate the same, unchanging product run, all the time, and has no marketing costs to build into the price. “For many SKUs we are the biggest buyer by a country mile,” Neale said.
  • Among UK suppliers, who have often been treated badly by the big supermarkets, with their pressure for back margin fees and slow payment terms, Aldi has a good reputation
  • in 2010, following the death of Theo, which it said brought to an end “the story of the most eccentric, secretive and mysterious pair of siblings in Germany’s post-war economic history”. Karl died four years later, the richest man in Germany with a net worth of $25bn. (Second on the list was Dieter Schwarz, the Lidl owner, followed by Theo’s heirs.)
  • In 2017, Aldi South’s revenues reached €52bn, with about 20% of that from the UK and Ireland. In Ireland, Aldi has 12% of the market, and in Australia 13%, behind Woolworths and Coles. Its share in the US is only 2% – but Aldi plans to raise its number of outlets from 1,800 to 2,500 by 2022, which would make it the third-biggest chain in the US by store count, after Walmart and Kroger
  • In the UK there is still plenty of room to grow. Aldi hopes to have 1,000 shops in three years, up from just over 800 today. Dave McCarthy, a retail analyst at HSBC, said that given Aldi and Lidl’s expansion plans, their share of the market could peak at more than 20%.
katherineharron

Cuomo, Newsom and Trump's early pandemic praise vanished - CNNPolitics - 0 views

edition.cnn.com/...index.html

covid

shared by katherineharron on 13 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Nearly a year ago, New York Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced that all nonessential workers in the state would have to stay home. The announcement was one of many that marked the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic.
  • But, just as history has shown us time and time again, a year turned out to be a lifetime in their political careers
  • Cuomo, Newsom and Trump all experienced classic examples of a rally-around-the-flag event. When a crisis hits, constituents give their leading politicians bumps in the polls. These bumps rarely ever last -- a lesson all three of these politicians have now learned. Cuomo was probably seen as the biggest hero of the early days of the pandemic. He gave daily news conferences that became must-see television for many. He even wrote a book about leadership.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Cuomo's favorable rating jumped to 77%. Just two months earlier, his favorable rating had been 44% -- a paltry figure for a Democrat from a blue state. close dialogThe world is watching as the Biden administration takes office.Get updates on US politics delivered to your inbox daily. Sign Me UpNo ThanksBy subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.The world is watching as the Biden administration takes office.Get updates on US politics delivered to your inbox daily. Please enter aboveSign Me UpBy subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.Success! See you in your inbox.</
  • California was one of the earliest states hit in the pandemic, and most voters applauded Newsom's response. His approval rating among likely voters in Public Policy Institute of California polling topped out at 64% in May 2020. That was up from 52% in February 2020 and 49% in January 2020. Newsom, though, has been criticized for how he handled lockdowns and business and school reopenings during the last year
  • His favorable rating is down to 44% and a mere 36% of voters want him to run for reelection, according to a March Quinnipiac University poll. The one piece of good news for Cuomo is that most Democrats (60%) have a favorable view of the governor, a slim majority (50%) want him to run again in 2022 and just 21% want him to resign.
  • More prominently, Cuomo is dealing with multiple allegations of inappropriate behavior toward women. The attorney general's office is investigating the claims, and the state Assembly speaker has allowed an impeachment investigation to begin. Many state and federal officials are calling on Cuomo to resign.
  • Still, the fact that Newsom is facing a recall and that his approval rating is averaging only about 50% right now is not a great position for a Democrat in California. Of course, both Cuomo and Newsom are in better political shape than Trump. While Trump ended up losing the election, at least in part to his response to the pandemic, voters actually had rallied around him early.
  • By the summer, Trump's overall approval rating dropped into the low 40s. He consistently low on who would better handle the pandemic compared with Democrat Joe Biden, who's now president. Indeed, Trump may very well have won the election without the pandemic. His approval rating on the economy was better than that of any of the incumbents who had lost in the last 45 years before him.
katherineharron

Biden White House would welcome Trump's help in promoting vaccine - CNNPolitics - 0 views

edition.cnn.com/...index.html

covid

shared by katherineharron on 15 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • The White House said it would welcome former President Donald Trump's help in promoting the coronavirus vaccine to his supporters but says there are other ways to convince conservatives to get the shot.
  • "I discussed it with my team and they say the thing that has more impact than anything Trump would say to the MAGA folks is what the local doctors, what the local preachers, what the local people in the community say," Biden said at the White House on Monday.
  • Earlier, the White House laid out how it was reaching conservatives with vaccine messaging, even as officials acknowledged a Democratic president did not carry the same weight among that population as other public figures.Read More"If former President Trump woke up tomorrow and wanted to be more vocal about the safety and efficacy of the vaccine certainly we'd support that," press secretary Jen Psaki said at a Monday's White House briefing.close dialogThe world is watching as the Biden administration takes office.Get updates on US politics delivered to your inbox daily. Sign Me UpNo ThanksBy subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.The world is watching as the Biden administration takes office.Get updates on US politics delivered to your inbox daily. Please enter aboveSign Me UpBy subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.Success! See you in your inbox.//assets.b
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Health officials, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, have said Trump's voice in promoting the vaccine would go far in convincing Republicans to get it.
  • Trump has made small efforts to promote the vaccine, including in a speech at this year's Conservative Political Action Conference, but he did not appear in a public service announcement featuring former presidents that was released last week.Psaki noted those presidents -- Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter -- "did not need an engraved invitation" to promote the vaccine.
  • "The President's goal is to vaccine all Americans, not just those who voted for him," she said. "We know we need to meet everyone where they are, and that includes conservatives."
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