Jack

Minor Planet Center/International Astronomical Union

• An asteroid the size of a car flew within about 1,830 miles of Earth this weekend — closer than any known space rock has ever come without crashing into the planet.
• A NASA-funded program detected the asteroid, called 2020 QG, six hours after its close approach.
• If the asteroid had hit Earth, it probably would have exploded in the atmosphere in an airburst too high up to do any damage on the ground.
• But the near miss highlights a major blind spot in Earth's programs to search for dangerous asteroids.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

A car-sized asteroid flew within about 1,830 miles (2,950 kilometers) of Earth on Sunday.

That's a remarkably close shave — the closest ever recorded, in fact, according to asteroid trackers and a catalog compiled by Sormano Astronomical Observatory in Italy. See the rest of the story at Business Insider

NOW WATCH: NASA's 5-step plan for when it discovers a giant, killer asteroid headed straight for Earth

See Also:

• A broken cable smashed a hole 100 feet wide in the Arecibo Observatory, which searches for aliens and tracks dangerous asteroids
• The Perseid meteor shower, which NASA says is the best of the year, peaks Tuesday night. Here's how to catch it.
• Here's what you're actually seeing when you spot a meteor shower

SEE ALSO: 16 plutonium-powered space missions shaping our understanding of space — including the NASA rover that will search for alien life on Mars

DON'T MISS: NASA added 6 HD video cameras to its next Mars rover so we can all watch the first footage of a spacecraft landing on another planet

Last Friday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit invalidated two conditions that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) had imposed on the Charter Communications merger with Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks in 2016. Interestingly enough, the FCC did not seek to defend the conditions on the merits, arguing that consumers lacked Article III standing to challenge conditions agreed upon by the merging companies. In Competitive Enterprise Institute v. FCC, the D.C. Circuit split on the standing question, ultimately concluding consumers could challenge two of the four contested conditions, and striking them down.

The case is significant because it portends judicial review of FCC merger review. The Communications Act does not expressly authorize FCC review of mergers. It does, however, give the FCC authority to regulate the transfer of broadcast licenses. The FCC has used this authority to regulate mergers by conditioning the necessary license transfers on conditions that the FCC might not have been able to impose directly. This approach gives the FCC tremendous leverage to hold up mergers by refusing to authorize the license transfers unless the merging companies agree to conditions that the FCC believes are in the public interest.

The FCC  has seen fit to use this power act as a telecommunications antitrust regulator and impose broad conditions on industry mergers. In this case, the FCC forced the merged company, New Charter, to agree to various conditions on its business practices, including a commitment to not charge content providers for access to broadband subscribers and a commitment to discount broadband service to "needy subscribers." New Carter agreed to these terms, as there was no way for the companies to merge without satisfying the FCC.

CEI and several New Charter subscribers challenged the FCC's authority to impose these conditions. The FCC's response was that New Charter's customers lacked standing to raise such concerns. It did not otherwise seek to defend its authority to impose merger-related conditions on the necessary license transfers.

The D.C. Circuit split on the Article III standing question. Judge Katasas, joined by Judge Henderson, agreed that at least some of the challenged conditions would increase prices for New Charter customers, and that this was sufficient to satisfy Article III's requirements. Judge Sentelle disagreed, on the grounds that the redressability of any such injury was too speculative. This is a close and difficult standing question, and it's particularly important as the FCC sought to use standing as a means of precluding judicial review of its efforts to leverage its authority over licenses to reach matters otherwise beyond the FCC's reach.

After concluding the plaintiffs had standing to challenge two of the FCC-imposed conditions, the majority made quick work of the underlying merits. From Judge Katsas's opinion for the court:

On the merits, the appellants raise several troubling objections. For one thing, the governing statutes focus on individual licenses, not entire mergers: Section 214(a) authorizes the FCC to consider whether the "construction" or "operation" of a specific communications line is in the public interest at the time of an acquisition, while section 310(d) authorizes it to consider whether a proposed transferee meets the specific criteria for holding a station license under section 308. Moreover, after broadening its focus to the entire merger, the FCC imposed conditions sweeping even beyond that. For example, the agency readily acknowledged that providing
discounted service to needy consumers "is not a transaction specific benefit," but it nonetheless required New Charter to do so as a condition of approving the merger. New Charter Order, 31 FCC Rcd. at 6529. The Supreme Court has described such
non-germane conditions as "an out-and-out plan of extortion." Nollan v. Cal. Coastal Comm'n, 483 U.S. 825, 837 (1987) (quotation marks omitted). Commissioner O'Rielly made the same point in dissent: "Once delinked from the transaction itself, such conditions reside somewhere in the space between absurdity and corruption." 31 FCC Rcd. at 6674. The conditions target the provision of broadband Internet service, which is not covered by Title II, much less by section 214(a), under the FCC's current interpretation of the Communications Act. And to insinuate itself into that cable market, the FCC imposed conditions on the transfer of all licenses held by the appellants, including wireless licenses with no conceivable relevance to it.

We need not resolve these questions, however, for there is a simpler ground of decision. The lawfulness of the interconnection and discounted-services conditions are
properly before us, yet the FCC declined to defend them on the merits. The agency's only explanation for doing so was its view that we cannot reach the merits. Having lost on that question, the FCC has no further line of defense. "Because the Commission chose not to argue the merits in the alternative, we have no choice but to vacate the challenged portions of the order." Time Warner, 144 F.3d at 82.

This case is significant for many reasons. Not only does it discipline an agency intent on asserting regulatory authority beyond that authorized by Congress. It also illustrates how agencies sometimes seek to use Article III standing's requirements to insulate their actions from judicial review, potentially allowing them to engage in unlawful activity without consequence.

Another prominent example of an agency hiding behind Article III in this way was the Environmental Protection Agency's "Timing and Tailoring" rules for greenhouse gas emissions, that were structured so as make it more difficult for regulated firms to demonstrate standing. This effort was initially successful, as the D.C. Circuit accepted the EPA's standing defense. The Supreme Court, on the other hand, found the EPA's standing argument wanting, and brushed it aside without much discussion at all in UARG v. EPA. While I did not think much of the EPA's standing arguments in that case, the standing arguments made by the FCC here (and embraced by Judge Sentelle) are more serious and substantial.

Flyers to Rochester, New York, will get a free lesson on the abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass before or after their flights.

The Monroe County legislature renamed the airport “Frederick Douglass – Greater Rochester International Airport” (ROC) at a vote on Aug. 11. The renaming includes the addition of educational material on the life and legacy of Douglass in the terminal, according to county documents.

“Each time residents and visitors arrive to our airport, they will be reminded of Douglass’s life and legacy of fighting oppression,” local legislators Vince Felder and Karla Boyce told the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle. “Our remembrance through the airport renaming serves as recognition of our past and a promise of the work our community will do to make Monroe County a welcoming place for all.”

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Douglass, who was born into slavery in Maryland in 1818 and escaped to freedom in 1838, settled in Rochester in 1847. There, he published abolitionist literature and became a leader in the movement. He is buried in the Mount Hope Cemetery in Rochester.

The move comes amid widespread recognition of the struggles — and contributions — of Black Americans through the Black Lives Matter movement.

The airport renaming comes the same week as Washington, D.C., completed the arches on a new Frederick Douglass Memorial Bridge that will span the Anacostia River in the city that is due to open in 2021.

Rochester is served by Allegiant Air, American Airlines, Delta Air Lines — the largest by passenger numbers in 2019 — JetBlue Airways, Southwest Airlines and United Airlines.

Related: Here are 5 airports designed by Black architects that you should know

Featured image by Michael Robinson Chavez/The Washington Post via Getty Images.

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I know that people will insist that it’s always been this bad, but it hasn’t. Here are two examples from the left and two from the right.

1. The snowflakes, er, I mean the students in Amherst, Massachusetts are outraged that a local mayor had sex with some consenting adults who are college students. That’s it. That’s the “scandal“. Apparently ideological witch hunts are not enough; we will now experience a wave of sexual witch hunts conducted by fragile Massachusetts puritans who are horrified by “power imbalances”, i.e., by reality.

2. Tulane students got their university to ban a speaker promoting his highly acclaimed anti-racist book because they were confused by the title and thought it was a pro-racist book. And the university went along with the ban, even after the issue was explained. The left are devouring their own.

3. Here’s USA Today:

White House trade adviser Peter Navarro on Sunday defended President Donald Trump’s decision to use executive orders to provide relief to people impacted economically by the coronavirus pandemic, arguing his hand had been forced by congressional inaction. 

“The Lord and the Founding Fathers created executive orders because of partisan bickering and divided government. That’s what we have here,” Navarro said on NBC News’ “Meet the Press.”

Jesus also wants Trump to issue an executive order stopping all those refugees and asylum seekers from coming into the country, as Jesus believed that charity begins at home. Didn’t he? 

4. Larry Kudlow was asked to explain the president’s recent executive order, and made one laughable mistake after another. Here is just a small portion of the interview:

“You keep saying $1,200 per person, are you talking about in addition to the unemployment that they’re already getting?” Ms Bash asked Mr Kudlow.

“No, that’s the payroll — no, I’m sorry, I beg your pardon, the $1,200 will come from the payroll tax deferral, on top of this — yeah, I’m sorry,” Mr Kudlow responded.

He then once again asserted that unemployment benefits would amount to “$800 bucks,” leaving the anchor appearing confused.

“$800 or $400?” she asked.

“No, it should be four — it should be $800,” Mr Kudlow said. “If the states step up, we’re prepared to match, that should come out $400 federal, $400 states.”

What difference does it make? Nothing the administration says has any correspondence with reality. You Americans should just wait patiently at home and be happy with whatever amount of money Trump sends you. Just sit tight. As Trump says, it is what it is.

A federal judge this week gave a blistering rebuke of qualified immunity, the legal doctrine that makes it difficult to sue police officers in federal court when they violate your civil rights.

"The Constitution says everyone is entitled to equal protection of the law—even at the hands of law enforcement," wrote Judge Carlton W. Reeves of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Mississippi in a majority decision released yesterday. "Over the decades, however, judges have invented a legal doctrine to protect law enforcement officers from having to face any consequences for wrongdoing. The doctrine is called 'qualified immunity.' In real life it operates like absolute immunity."

But there's a catch: Reeves bemoaned the doctrine of qualified immunity in an opinion granting it to a police officer.

The case involves Richland Police Department Officer Nick McClendon who pulled over Clarence Jamison in Pelahatchie, Mississippi, to conduct a drug search that turned up no contraband but damaged Jamison's car in the process. McClendon allegedly sought consent for the search five times and lied to Jamison about why he needed to do so, telling the man he'd received a "phone call [about] 10 kilos of cocaine" in Jamison's vehicle. McClendon had received no such call, and he found no drugs. But he did deploy a canine and upended Jamison's Mercedes during the search, which lasted an hour and 50 minutes. When Jamison asked why he'd been stopped in the first place, McClendon replied that it was because his temporary cardboard license plate on his newly purchased vehicle, issued by the dealer, was "folded up," likely due to wind. The vehicle damages were appraised at $4,000.

Jamison brought three claims against McClendon: a Fourth Amendment claim for "falsely stopping him, searching his car, and detaining him"; a 14th Amendment claim for using "race as a motivating factor in the decision to stop him, search his car, and detain him"; and another Fourth Amendment claim for "recklessly and deliberately causing significant damage to Mr. Jamison's car by conducting an unlawful search of the car in an objectively unreasonable manner amounting to an unlawful seizure of his property."

But to overcome qualified immunity, a plaintiff must show that the defendant's misconduct had been "clearly established" by existing case law—the standard pulled out of thin air by the Supreme Court in Harlow v. Fitzgerald (1982). In practice, this criterion requires that plaintiffs show a public official's misbehavior is prohibited almost verbatim by a previous ruling from the same federal circuit or from the Supreme Court. That requirement is nearly impossible to meet. "This Court is required to apply the law as stated by the Supreme Court," Reeves writes. "Under that law, the officer who transformed a short traffic stop into an almost two-hour, life-altering ordeal is entitled to qualified immunity. The officer's motion seeking as much is therefore granted."

It is not unheard of for a federal judge to show disdain for his own ruling. They are required to enforce precedents established by the Supreme Court, even when doing so defies common sense. (Federal judges can also be seen decrying the mandatory minimum sentences they are required by Congress to impose on defendants who meet statutory criteria.)

A review of current qualified immunity decisions is instructive. The legal doctrine has protected two cops who allegedly stole $225,000 while executing a search warrant; a sheriff's deputy who shot a 10-year-old boy while aiming at the child's non-threatening dog; a prison guard who forced a naked inmate to sleep in cells filled with raw sewage and "massive amounts" of human feces; two cops who assaulted and arrested a man for the crime of standing outside of his own house; two officers who sicced a police dog on a surrendered suspect. That list is not exhaustive.

In its opinion granting qualified immunity to Michael Gutierrez, the Los Angeles Police Department officer who shot a 15-year-old boy who was on his way to school, the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit wrote that "a rational finder of fact" could determine that Gutierrez's excessive force "shocked the conscience and was unconstitutional under the Fourteenth Amendment." He still received qualified immunity: "The panel held that because no analogous case existed at the time of the shooting, the district court erred by denying Gutierrez qualified immunity for this claim," the 9th Circuit concluded.

The same court offered a similar explanation when it denied plaintiffs in Fresno, California, the right to sue two police officers who took $225,000 from them. The police officers "ought to have recognized that the alleged theft was morally wrong," the 9th Circuit wrote, but they "did not have clear notice that it violated the Fourth Amendment."

Reeves does not appear convinced by the pretzel logic of qualified immunity. The doctrine's sordid history "makes clear that the Court has dispensed with any pretense of balancing competing values," he wrote. Rogue civil servants who have little regard for the rights of those they swear to protect and serve are bound to come out on top except in the rare circumstances where their malfeasance perfectly mirrors a precedent. 

There have been several proposals to reform qualified immunity over the last couple of months, though it appears the theatre that is congressional politics will render them dead on arrival. Rep. Justin Amash (L–Mich.) introduced a bill to abolish it completely; it was co-sponsored by Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D–Mass.) with several other Democrats and one Republican. Though the GOP has been resistant to any changes to qualified immunity, Sen. Mike Braun (R–IN) introduced legislation that has similarly gone nowhere.

The Supreme Court has declined to hear a slew of qualified immunity cases and instead volleyed responsibility back to Congress. While such decisions should arguably be made by Congress, the Supreme Court created the very problem it now wants no part in solving.  

"I do not envy the task before the Supreme Court. Overturning qualified immunity will undoubtedly impact our society," Reeves writes. "Yet, the status quo is extraordinary and unsustainable. Just as the Supreme Court swept away the mistaken doctrine of 'separate but equal,' so too should it eliminate the doctrine of qualified immunity."

Three months shy of the 2020 presidential election, Iowa Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds signed an executive order today restoring voting rights to tens of thousands of Iowans with felony records.

Iowa was the last state in the U.S. with a lifetime voting ban for anyone with a felony record.

"Quite simply, when someone serves their sentence and pays the price our justice system has set for their crimes, they should have their right to vote restored, automatically, plain and simple," Reynolds said.

A 2016 report by the Sentencing Project found that there were roughly 52,000 Iowans barred for life from voting because of a felony record. At the time of the report, Iowa was one of four states with lifetime felony disenfranchisement. However, last December Kentucky restored voting rights to an estimated 140,000 residents. The last two Virginia governors have issued executive orders similar to Reynolds', and Florida voters passed a constitutional amendment in 2018 restoring voting rights to those with felony records who completed the terms of their sentences.

"Disenfranchising people with criminal convictions is a vestige of Jim Crow laws," said Eliza Sweren-Becker, counsel with the Voting Rights and Elections Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, in a statement. "As of today, this shameful policy has no place in the United States."

Civil liberties groups have been whittling away at felony disenfranchisement laws for decades, but there's been an added urgency to those efforts as the 2020 election draws closer. A number of civil liberties groups are currently fighting a protracted legal battle with the state of Florida over felon voting rights that could impact an estimated 775,000 residents in the crucial swing state.

The language of Florida's constitutional amendment didn't specify whether felony offenders had to pay off their court fines and fees to regain voting eligibility. Florida Republicans passed legislation making the restoration of voting rights contingent on paying off fines and fees. However, Democrats and civil liberties groups say that amounts to a poll tax.

A federal judge ruled in May agreed with them, in part, and ruled that Florida's law was unconstitutionally discriminatory because it blocked those who couldn't afford to pay their fines from voting. However, that ruling is temporarily stayed pending a hearing before the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals later this month.

Notably, Reynolds' order does not make paying fines and fees a requirement for regaining voting eligibility. It does, however, exclude those convicted of homicide and manslaughter offenses, as well as those still completing probation or parole.

Civil liberties groups and local activists have been pressing Reynolds on the issue for months. Their ultimate goal is an amendment to the state constitution to keep a future governor from reversing the order.

That's exactly what happened the last time Iowa governor restored the right to vote. In 2005, Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack issued an executive order re-enfranchising all state residents who had completed their sentences. His successor, Gov Terry Branstad, reversed that executive order in 2011.

"While we're delighted that immediately so many Iowans are eligible to register and vote, it's important that we continue to pursue a more permanent fix to the problem of felony disenfranchisement in our state," the Iowa chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union said in a statement.

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Nearly 30 years ago, the PBS program Firing Line convened a debate about the War on Drugs, which has contributed more than any other criminal-justice policy to deadly street violence in Black neighborhoods and the police harassment, arrest, and mass incarceration of Black Americans. Revisiting the debate helps clarify what it will take to end that ongoing policy mistake.

Congressman Charlie Rangel led one side in the 1991 clash. Born in 1930, Rangel served in the Korean War, provided legal assistance to 1960s civil-rights activists, participated in the Selma-to-Montgomery marches, and represented Harlem for 46 years as a Democrat in the House. He was once arrested while participating in an anti-apartheid rally. Opposing him was William F. Buckley Jr., the conservative intellectual who founded National Review in 1955 and took the wrong side in some of the most significant racial-justice controversies of his day. In an infamous 1957 editorial, Buckley justified the imposition of white-supremacist racial segregation in the American South. He opposed federal civil-rights legislation in the 1960s. And he was an apologist for South Africa’s apartheid regime in the 1980s.

[Ta-Nehisi Coates: Bring me the head of Charlie Rangel]

Rangel was Black. Buckley was white. Rangel had demonstrated a lifelong commitment to the full equality of Black people. Buckley had repeatedly stood athwart civil-rights advances, yelling “Stop!” Yet on debate night in 1991, the Democratic representative was the one arguing that the arrest and mass incarceration of Americans caught possessing or selling drugs should continue. And the Reaganite conservative was the one insisting that the human costs of a “law and order” approach were too steep to bear, citing roughly 800,000 Americans arrested that year.

“Let’s do what we can for those who are afflicted short of sending them to jail,” Buckley said. “I want to hear from you whether you want a society based on, say, the Malaysian or the Singapore model in which––and I’m not exaggerating––people get publicly flogged and they get hanged and they get their fingers chopped off. Is this what you want to do in order to accomplish your aims?” he asked Rangel. “If not, what is it that you want to do that we’re not doing already?”

Rangel acknowledged that the criminal-justice system “has not worked and has not been a deterrent to drug abuse in this country.” He added, “I still believe that it should be there, because in order to fight this war, you need all of these factors working together. We should not allow people to be able to distribute this poison without fear that maybe they might be arrested and put in jail.” In fact, Rangel clarified, if somebody wants to sell drugs to a child, they should fear “that they will be arrested and go to jail for the rest of their natural life. That’s what I’m talking about when I say fear.” Then he suggested that America should tap the generals who won the Gulf War to intensify the War on Drugs. “What we’re missing: to find a take-charge general like Norman Schwarzkopf, like Colin Powell, to coordinate some type of strategy so that America, who has never run away from a battle, will not be running away from this battle,” he said. “Let’s win this war against drugs the same way we won it in the Middle East.”

What insights can today’s War on Drugs abolitionists take from this story?

First, that in politics and policy making, neither all good nor all bad things go together. A person might care deeply about racial equality, as Rangel did, yet support a policy that fuels racial disparities. A rival might reject anti-racist politics, even siding with white supremacists on some issues, as Buckley did, while fighting to abandon a ruinous policy that has disproportionately harmed generations of Black people. “It is outrageous to live in a society whose laws tolerate sending young people to life in prison because they grew, or distributed, a dozen ounces of marijuana,” Buckley wrote to the New York Bar Association in 1995 as part of his ongoing advocacy. “I would hope that the good offices of your vital profession would mobilize at least to protest such excesses of wartime zeal, the legal equivalent of a My Lai massacre. And perhaps proceed to recommend the legalization of the sale of most drugs, except to minors.” In 1996, National Review joined him, editorializing “that the war on drugs has failed, that it is diverting intelligent energy away from how to deal with the problem of addiction, that it is wasting our resources, and that it is encouraging civil, judicial, and penal procedures associated with police states.”

[Conor Friedersdorf: Why the war on cocaine isn’t working]

Had the drug war ended back in the early 1990s, younger Millennials would have been spared a policy that empowered gangs, fueled bloody wars for drug territory in American cities, ravaged Latin America, enriched narco cartels, propelled the AIDS epidemic, triggered police militarization, and contributed more than any other policy to racial disparities in national and local incarceration.

Instead, the War on Drugs continues as a bipartisan enterprise even today. And that brings us to a second insight: As in 1991, when Buckley argued on the same side as the ACLU, unexpected alliances are possible. Some proponents of decriminalizing drugs and cutting the DEA budget, such as Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, are in broad alignment with the left-identitarian approach to anti-racism. Other War on Drugs opponents, on the left and the right, reject that approach. For example, my colleague John McWhorter, who has argued that the drug war is “destroying black America,” believes that what he calls “third-wave anti-racism” is a quasi-religious dead end too prone to Manichaean perspectives.

What if all drug-war opponents joined forces, much as Christian conservatives, progressives, and libertarians have united in efforts to reform sentencing rules and reduce mass incarceration?

A majority may want to end the drug war. According to a 2019 Cato Institute poll, 69 percent of Democrats, 54 percent of independents, and 40 percent of Republicans support decriminalizing drugs. But it may take an alliance among people with different motivations, including anti-racism; a mistrust of the state; a principled love of liberty; a desire to do cocaine at parties; a quasi-religious interest in the mind-expanding possibilities of psychedelics; the experience of losing a loved one to impure drugs; and many others. Forging a right-left coalition may be the only way to finally succeed in ending the decades-long debacle.

[Read: How the War on Drugs kept black men out of college]

Finally, that decades-old debate shows that cooperation among different kinds of drug-war opponents should be easier now than it was in 1991. Conservatives and libertarians today reject white supremacy and racism in ways Buckley and his fellow War on Drugs abolitionist Ron Paul did not. In practice, however, interacting with people on the other side of the culture wars may be more difficult today. Public support for politicians who compromise has fallen as negative polarization has increased. And social media makes it easier to rally people who seek to punish sin and enforce purity. If Buckley were still alive today, could a university get away with platforming him in a debate? The populist-right website The Daily Caller has advocated against the War on Drugs. Would its Trump-loving readers tolerate an alliance with Ocasio-Cortez?

But impure alliances are the path to success. Coalitions drawing from the whole political spectrum can’t coalesce and succeed if, say, drug-war critics on the left won’t work with anyone who flies a Gadsden flag, or drug-war abolitionists on the right won’t work with a member of Congress who says “Black Lives Matter” but won’t say “Blue Lives Matter.” Without progress, innocents such as Breonna Taylor, who was killed in a botched no-knock drug raid in Louisville, Kentucky, will keep dying.

Roughly 450,000 people in the United States are currently incarcerated for drug offenses. “Black Americans are nearly six times more likely to be incarcerated for drug-related offenses than their white counterparts, despite equal substance usage rates,” the Center for American Progress found in 2018. “Almost 80 percent of people serving time for a federal drug offense are black or Latino. In state prisons, people of color make up 60 percent of those serving time for drug charges.” If the War on Drugs ended today, racial disparities in raids, arrests, sentencing, and incarceration would likely shrink, as would adversarial interactions between the police and civilians, and much violence that U.S. drug policy fuels in Mexico, Colombia, and beyond. Cooperating to end the drug war is a moral imperative for the left and the right.

Jeff Bezos has spent the past five years trying to become a fixture in Washington — hiring President Barack Obama’s press chief, flooding the town with lobbying cash, buying The Washington Post, and even choosing a spot along the Potomac River for Amazon’s second headquarters.

But all that money isn’t likely to buy Bezos a break on Wednesday.

Bezos is due to take his place — virtually — alongside Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Apple’s Tim Cook and Google’s Sundar Pichai as four of the tech industry’s most powerful chief executives face a grilling from lawmakers. And Bezos’ Everything Store, the $1.5 trillion corporation that he started in his garage as an online bookstore 25 years ago, may have the most to lose as he makes his first-ever appearance before a skeptical Congress.

All four companies face serious problems: Google’s dominance over markets like search and online advertising has brought it more than $9 billion in fines worldwide and an expected antitrust suit from the U.S. Justice Department. Apple faces two EU probes for the way it wields its App Store and mobile payments service against rivals, and Facebook is the subject of antitrust probes and a worldwide corporate advertising boycott over its approach to regulating hate speech and political deception.

Amazon, though, has steadily attracted ire from both the right and left in recent years for its uncommon influence over the way much of America lives.

It wasn’t always this way. Amazon has spent years watching — or even prodding — from the sidelines as regulators in the U.S. and Europe went after America’s other powerful tech companies.

When the Obama administration sued Apple over allegations that the iPad-maker had conspired to fix the price of ebooks, Amazon executives were among the key witnesses for the government. In the U.S., prominent advocates for antitrust suits against Google and Facebook have included a Yale economist who also works as a paid Amazon consultant. Over the past decade, as fines and other penalties piled up for the three fellow tech giants, Amazon stood apart, portraying itself as a champion of consumers and low prices.

But now, critics are targeting Amazon over its ability to avoid sales taxes or federal income taxes, its treatment of warehouse workers amid the pandemic, and the availability of counterfeit goods and harmful products on its retail platform. President Donald Trump has accused it of ripping off the U.S. Postal Service and driving brick-and-mortar retailers out of business, while liberals like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) have complained about the state and local economic incentives Amazon sought while soliciting proposals for its new second headquarters.

Bezos’ separate ownership of The Washington Post has added to Trump’s ire, while his status as the world’s richest person — and owner of D.C.'s largest private residence — has made him a foil for critics of America’s economic inequality.

Even more than the other businesses in Wednesday's spotlight, Bezos’ companies influence what and where people buy food and other essentials; the news, books and websites they read; the television and movies they watch; the advertising they see online. Amazon is the United States' second-largest private employer with 590,000 workers, and a leader in cloud computing and next-generation technologies including artificial intelligence, drones and self-driving cars.

None of this is an accident, said Matt Stoller, an anti-monopoly researcher and one of the most vocal detractors of the big tech companies. Stoller, director of research at the American Economic Liberties Project, co-wrote a report last week that seeks to chronicle ways in which Amazon has used loopholes in the law — from tax to product liability to antitrust to the company’s relationship with the Postal Service — to benefit its business.

“Bezos didn’t luck into this,” said Stoller, whose recent book “Goliath” explores how monopolies have influenced American politics and democracy. “He was deliberate in taking advantage of legal gaps.”

Still, even some of Amazon's biggest critics acknowledge that its enormous wealth and power point to a problem that is bigger than just the company.

"With all his billions, Jeff is [a] rounding error in the big picture. He’s not the problem; the legal/regulatory power structures that enable him and his peers is,” Tim Bray, a former vice president for Amazon, said in a blog post on Monday. Bray, an executive with Amazon’s cloud computing service, publicly quit the company in May over the company's treatment of warehouse workers.

Amazon declined to offer responses to its critics' arguments or comment on how it plans to address them at the hearing. In his prepared testimony, Bezos acknowledges the company's size merits Congress' inquiry.

"I believe Amazon should be scrutinized," Bezos said in his prepared remarks. "We should scrutinize all large institutions, whether they’re companies, government agencies, or non-profits. Our responsibility is to make sure we pass such scrutiny with flying colors."

‘Who is the sovereign?'

The worldwide scrutiny for Amazon has accelerated in the past year.

Last summer, antitrust authorities in the U.S. and EU began investigating Amazon over allegations it abuses its dominance in online retail by using data collected from sellers on its marketplace to favor its own products. State attorneys general in California and Washington, where Amazon is located, have also opened probes. Last week, Italy’s competition authority raided Amazon’s offices in the country while investigating an agreement between the e-commerce giant and Apple over the sale of Beats headphones and other products.

At Wednesday’s hearing, members of the House Judiciary antitrust subcommittee are expected to delve into many of those allegations, as well as whether an Amazon executive misled the panel last summer in his testimony about whether the company uses the data it obtains from third-party sellers. Rep. Pramila Jayapal, a Democrat whose Seattle district is home to Amazon’s headquarters, said she plans to ask about the discrepancy — but also about the broader issue of the company’s role as both owner of the marketplace and a seller within it.

“Amazon has achieved such enormous dominance in the marketplace,” said Jayapal, expressing concern that Congress is lagging behind European policymakers in understanding competition in tech markets. “We desperately need to catch up in terms of our regulation, in terms of our enforcement, and even just in terms of the conversation around what the implications are for a consumer of monopolistic antitrust behavior.”

Earlier this year, the European Commission outlined plans for a new regulatory approach to digital "gatekeepers" — the large tech platforms like Amazon that control how businesses interact with consumers. The bloc opened a public comment period in June, with the hopes of adopting regulations by the end of the year.

Shaoul Sussman, a lawyer who has researched the company for anti-monopoly group the Institute for Local Self-Reliance — an Amazon critic — said he expects that most questions to Bezos will involve specifics of Amazon’s marketplace. But Sussman said he hopes lawmakers will focus on the larger picture of Amazon’s business strategy and whether the U.S. should rethink how technology markets are regulated.

“There’s a general question here about who is ruling who. Who is the sovereign and who dictates the rules of the game?” said Sussman, who represented an Amazon seller who offered evidence in the congressional probe. “Will Congress reassert itself over these corporations or will these corporations dictate the rules of the game to Congress?”

Amazon lobbies up

Although the company has existed since 1995, Amazon’s entrance to Washington was much more recent. In 2015, Amazon hired former White House press secretary Jay Carney as vice president for corporate affairs. That year, the company’s lobbying expenditures also skyrocketed to $9.4 million, up from $4.9 million in 2014. The money Amazon has spent on lobbying has risen every year since.

More recently, Amazon has focused on staffing up on antitrust. Nate Sutton, the executive who testified before the House Judiciary panel last summer, joined the company at the end of 2016 after almost a decade in the Justice Department’s antitrust division. Two years later, the company added Bryson Bachman, a senior DOJ antitrust official at the beginning of the Trump administration who also formerly worked for Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), chairman of the Senate Judiciary antitrust subcommittee.

This year alone, the company has added three attorneys to its legal team from the Federal Trade Commission — which is also investigating the company for antitrust violations, though none of the lawyers were directly involved in the probe — and another veteran of the DOJ’s antitrust division.

Another prominent antitrust figure supporting Amazon is Fiona Scott Morton, a top antitrust economist for the Obama-era DOJ, who began consulting for the company on antitrust economics last year. She has recently faced criticism for not clearly disclosing her ties to Amazon and Apple while publicly advocating for antitrust suits against Google and Facebook.

On Thursday, Institute for Local Self-Reliance co-founder Stacy Mitchell resigned an unpaid fellowship from Yale's Thurman Arnold Project, a research initiative on antitrust in tech where Scott Morton is the director, because of the economist’s work for Amazon.

Scott Morton said she has done economics consulting work on antitrust for Amazon and others "when I am comfortable there is not a law being violated." That work helps inform her research and views that the U.S. needs more regulation in digital markets and to revamp the antitrust laws, she said. Scott Morton has recused from research into Apple or Amazon for the Thurman Arnold Project, letting others at Yale oversee that work, to avoid perceived conflicts of interest.

Can low prices harm consumers?

Specifically, Amazon notes that its share of the global retail market is small; it closed down most operations in China last year because of stiff competition from Alibaba. The research firm Emarketer, though, estimates that Amazon commands about 37 percent of U.S. online retail sales. The next closest competitor is Walmart, which has an estimated 5 percent share.

A group of unions, which earlier this year urged the FTC to probe Amazon’s impact on American workers, merchants and consumers, argued in a letter last week that the e-commerce giant controls even more of the market in specific product categories, such as consumer electronics, where it has a 45 percent share of U.S. online sales. That trend may only increase as consumers move more of their shopping online because of the coronavirus, the unions said.

A large part of the reason Amazon has escaped the antitrust scrutiny of its peers relates to the company’s customer-centric model. In his first letter to shareholders in 1997, Bezos pledged to “continue to focus relentlessly on our customers.”

That approach meshes with decades of the United States’ prevailing approach to antitrust law, which since the late 1970s has looked at tangible effects like high prices as evidence that corporate conduct or mergers are harming competition. That lens, critics argue, has led antitrust enforcers and courts to pay too little attention to less tangible values like quality or innovation.

Lina Khan — a key staffer on the House antitrust probe who will join Columbia University Law School as a professor this fall — argued in a novel 2017 legal article that Amazon has benefited from that overemphasis on low price.

“The potential harms to competition posed by Amazon’s dominance are not cognizable if we assess competition primarily through price and output,” she wrote. “Focusing on these metrics instead blinds us to the potential hazards.”

Amazon’s Bezos has always admitted he is playing a long game, Khan argued, and once the company has become dominant in an industry, it can raise prices.

Sellers who use Amazon’s platform say the company has already started to do that.

In a study released Tuesday, the Institute for Local Self-Reliance found that Amazon keeps 30 percent of each sale made by third parties who use its marketplace, up from the 19 percent it kept five years ago. Fees charged to third-party sellers brought the company about $60 billion in 2019 — about 21 percent of Amazon’s total revenue.

While the company’s legendary levels of customer service may benefit consumers, those benefits don’t extend to third-party sellers who make use of Amazon’s marketplace, said Douglas Mrdeza, the CEO of Top Shelf Brands in Lansing, Mich. Mrdeza began selling on Amazon in 2014 after inadvertently ordering too much product for his barbershop. The company quickly grew by offering to help other companies — like Tootsie Roll, Bedhead hair products and Hatchimals toys — sell on Amazon. Over time, though, the amount the company charged for advertising and other fees began to grow, he said.

Amazon was “very promising in the beginning. But they’ve got this whole system designed where they get sellers in door, but as time goes on they squeeze every dollar you could be making out of you,” said Mrdeza, who said Top Shelf ranked among the top 50 U.S. sellers on Amazon. “We don’t see a future selling on Amazon.”

Mrdeza, who participated in a call hosted by the Institute for Local Self-Reliance with other small companies critical of Amazon, said he hoped speaking out might help other sellers on the platform.

“Sellers are the most profitable aspect of your business,” Mrdeza said. “When we have our own complaints, why aren’t the same levels of customer service being offered to us as to consumers? That’s the biggest disconnect between their public statements and what the reality is.”

OK, maybe they are a bit less bad than the GOP, but this is truly inexcusable in the era of Black Lives Matter:

It’s 2020 and the leadership of the Democratic Party still cannot get it together on marijuana legalization, which two-thirds of Americans support. . . .

Marijuana Moment reports that on Monday the Democratic National Committee rejected an amendment to put a plank supporting marijuana legalization into the party’s platform. The final vote against, 50-106, is almost a perfect inversion of the two-thirds of the public who want legalization.

This issue is like a thousand times more important than Confederate statues.

On the state and local level, marijuana offenses still account for 40 percent of drug-related arrests. And the vast majority of those arrests (more than 90 percent) are for possession, not manufacture or sale.

Biden stands with the 32% of Americans with especially stupid and mean-spirited views.

What a disgrace. Let’s see how progressives react to this news. Can delegates vote to overrule the Platform Committee? Would they even wish to?

ljw1004 writes: Helmand Province in Afghanistan produces two thirds of the world's opium. Its opium production has more than doubled in the past eight years, due mostly to solar power. "Solar is by far the most significant technological change" in the region for decades, says Dr. Mansfield, author of the report (PDF). The first solar panels were introduced there in 2013. More recently, solar panel installations have doubled every year, and now stand at 67,000. In Lashkargah, the capital of Helmand Province, solar panels are stacked in the market in great piles three stories high. For an up-front cost of $5,000, farmers can buy panels and a pump to irrigate their fields, and then there are virtually no running costs. "All this water is making the desert bloom," says Richard Brittan, a former British soldier whose company, Alcis, specializes in satellite analysis of what he calls "complex environments." $5,000 is a lot of money -- the average dowry is $7,000 -- but the panels pay for themselves within two years. Farmers used to rely on diesel, which was more costly, unreliable and adulterated, which led to frequent machinery breakdowns. This "is perhaps the purest example of capitalism on the planet. There are no subsidies here. Nobody is thinking about climate change -- or any other ethical consideration, for that matter. This is about small-scale entrepreneurs trying to make a profit. It is the story of how Afghan opium growers have switched to solar power, and significantly increased the world supply of heroin. What does this tell us about solar power? That is simple. The story of the revolution in Afghan heroin production shows us just how transformative solar power can be. Don't imagine this is some kind of benign 'green' technology. "Solar is getting so cheap that it is capable of changing the way we do things in fundamental ways and with consequences that can affect the entire world," reports the BBC. (Those consequences: far more opium in the world; water table dropping by 3m a year; and a major crisis brewing in 10-15 years when the water runs out, the land returns to desert, and 1.5 million people are forced to migrate.)

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

• A new hybrid-electric vertical take-off and land aircraft, or eVTOL, was announced in May with backing from the US Air Force and NASA.
• The Rhaegal from Sabrewing Aircraft Company promises to revolutionize regional air freight with a carrying capacity of up to 10,000 pounds and the ability to access remote locations. 
• Customers have already placed 65 orders totaling $265 million with the Air Force taking 30 for itself. 
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

The coronavirus pandemic has not deterred America's desire for the next generation of air mobility, namely vertical take-off and land aircraft, or VTOLs. 

While the country was focused on stopping the spread of COVID-19, the US Air Force launched a new program at the end of April aimed at facilitating the development of VTOLs for commercial use. Agility Prime seeks to unite the industry with the hopes of spurring and speeding up the development of "advanced air mobility vehicles." 

During the launch event for the Air Force's program, one California-based start-up, Sabrewing Aircraft Company, debuted its hybrid-electric VTOL, or eVTOLs, to the public with an entry to service planned for 2022. Unlike many high-profile eVTOLs eyed for use by Uber and others, the Rhaegal-A eVTOL will fly cargo and aims to revolutionize delivery services. 

The Air Force is backing the program to the tune of $3.3 million and 30 orders while offering the use of Edwards Air Force Base in California for testing while NASA also granted the firm a contract for nearly $500,000 for wind tunnel testing. If its development and certification schedule proceeds on schedule, the craft could be delivering packages as early as 2022, with 65 pre-orders totaling $65 million. 

Take a closer look at the Rhaegal.

Rhaegal was unveiled to the public on May 1, three years after the launch of Sabrewing Aircraft Company.

Sabrewing Aircraft Company

Source: Aviation Today

The windowless craft will be tasked with flying cargo, not passengers, hence it's compact design. Packages don't need a view when they fly and don't mind occupying tight spaces, unlike passengers.

Sabrewing Aircraft Company

Source: Sabrewing Aircraft Company

Fully loaded, the eVTOL can carry a payload of 5,400 pounds when taking off vertically, which is expected at remote locations. Standard Amazon packages, for example, weigh less than 20 pounds allowing the Rhaegal to hold around 300 of them.

Sabrewing Aircraft Company

Source: Air Force Magazine and Amazon

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

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While countries are busy debating over opening themselves to tourists, there’s a growing trend of opening to remote workers who could stay for a longer period of time.

After Barbados amended its immigration rules to allow foreigners to live there and work remotely for a year, Bermuda and Georgia decided to follow suit.

Want more insider travel tips like this? Be sure to sign up for our daily newsletter.

Bermuda’s government is offering a year-long residency certificate for any digital nomads and students seeking to either work or study remotely in Bermuda starting Aug. 1.

Related: The best credit cards for digital nomads and long-term travelers

An applicant has to pay a $263 fee and meet the following criteria:

• Be over the age of 18
• Demonstrate good character and not have conviction for an indictable offense
• Possess valid health insurance
• If a remote worker, demonstrate employment with a company or own firm registered and operating overseas (should not operate in Bermuda)
• If a student, provide evidence of enrollment in a post-secondary education program
• Demonstrate sufficient means and/or continuous source of income

As part of the changes, Bermuda is also extending its tourist visa stay from 90 days to 180 days.

Related: How Amex is saving me money on a trip to Bermuda

While Georgia has not fully developed its plans, it too is planning to offer its own residency programs for foreigners hoping to conduct remote work there. The project, according to the government’s news site, is specifically targeting freelancers and self-employed foreigners.

While the application has not been released, foreigners hoping to apply can expect to provide personal information, a certificate of employment, proof of travel insurance (valid for six months) and acknowledgement of a 14-day quarantine at their own expense.

Travelers must submit the application and obtain relevant confirmation documents prior to arriving in Georgia. It is expected to show on the Ministry of Economy website once the application goes live.

The country’s new policy comes as it hopes to reopen to tourists by July 31, as reported by Travel Off Path.

Related: 5 things to love about Tbilisi, Georgia

Traveling while doing your day job, referred to as destination coworking, isn’t such a remote concept. But in this day and age of border restrictions and quarantine requirements even for domestic traveling, stepping outside the front door can be a daunting task.

As a way to encourage tourism while protecting public health, countries are using these long-term residency programs as a way to support their tourism industries. The idea is to bring much-needed economic activity by offering foreigners the chance to leave their current surroundings without having to sacrifice any short-term public health measures such as quarantines.

However, not all workers may want to tinker with the idea for reasons like technological issues. In that case, some countries are still opening up for short-term visitors with many conditions attached — which TPG has been covering since the onset of the outbreak.

Related: Country-by-country reopening guide

Featured photo by TheVisualsYouNeed/Shutterstock

 

I thought this was quite perceptive:

In short, we see a profound institutional transformation of the nature of the Union, with the main aim of kicking the can down the road. It is profoundly paradoxical that Italians are so happy about that. Italians have evidence in the South of their country that showering a territory with aid won’t do much for economic development. And yet they seem determined to become, for the whole of Europe, what the Mezzogiorno is for Italy.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The anecdotes are alarming. A woman in Los Angeles seemed to recover from Covid-19, but weeks later took a turn for the worse and tested positive again. A New Jersey doctor claimed several patients healed from one bout only to become reinfected with the coronavirus. And another doctor said a second round of illness was a reality for some people, and was much more severe. These recent accounts tap into people's deepest anxieties that they are destined to succumb to Covid-19 over and over, feeling progressively sicker, and will never emerge from this nightmarish pandemic. And these stories fuel fears that we won't be able to reach herd immunity -- the ultimate destination where the virus can no longer find enough victims to pose a deadly threat. But the anecdotes are just that -- stories without evidence of reinfections, according to nearly a dozen experts who study viruses. "I haven't heard of a case where it's been truly unambiguously demonstrated," said Marc Lipsitch, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Other experts were even more reassuring. While little is definitively known about the coronavirus, just seven months into the pandemic, the new virus is behaving like most others, they said, lending credence to the belief that herd immunity can be achieved with a vaccine. It may be possible for the coronavirus to strike the same person twice, but it's highly unlikely that it would do so in such a short window or to make people sicker the second time, they said. What's more likely is that some people have a drawn-out course of infection, with the virus taking a slow toll weeks to months after their initial exposure. People infected with the coronavirus typically produce immune molecules called antibodies. Several teams have recently reported that the levels of these antibodies decline in two to three months, causing some consternation. But a drop in antibodies is perfectly normal after an acute infection subsides, said Dr. Michael Mina, an immunologist at Harvard University.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Yahoo has replaced the comments section under its articles with a survey. Now, there's a message that reads: "Our goal is to create a safe and engaging place for users to connect over interests and passions. In order to improve our community experience, we are temporarily suspending article commenting. In the meantime, we welcome your feedback to help us enhance the experience." Many readers who frequently comment on Yahoo News articles are quite upset. Some feel as though they're being censored and that Yahoo has made a huge mistake. "Yahoo News nuked all of their comment sections! Guess they were tired of people pushing back against their narratives," one person wrote. "Yahoo just block[ed] their comment section as well. When you read thru them it was 90% conservative veiws [sic]. Guess they can't allow that type of 'free speech,'" said another. Others were thrilled to see Yahoo finally do away with a comment section that often contained messages of hate and vitriol. "Kudos to Yahoo for finally doing something about the comment threads on their articles," one person wrote. "I support the removal of comments. Share articles as is and people can share/comment on their preferred platform," another said. Do you agree with Yahoo's decision to temporarily disable comments?

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This article in the FT caught my eye:

Outside investigations have suggested Uighurs are being forcibly sterilised and children are being separated from their communities. Leaked documents, revealed by the Financial Times, show that the most common reason for detention in the camps was a violation of family planning policies; the second most common reason was being a practising Muslim.

A few years back, China changed it’s birth control policy from “one child” to two. At the time, I wondered why they maintained any limit at all. After all, China’s birthrate is far below 2 per family and China’s population is set to fall dramatically during the 21st century. (India’s population will exceed China’s later in this decade.)

This FT story provides one rationale. China is a very authoritarian society, but not completely lawless. The real problem is that their laws are too repressive. Having this law on the books provides a legal pretext, a sort of fig leaf, for the crackdown on Uighurs.

Many commentators like to call China “communist”, or “Marxist”. This is nonsense. I’ve been there, and I can assure you that there is absolutely nothing communist about modern China. Instead, China has basically become a fascist nation:

1. Authoritarian
2. Nationalistic
3. Bullying
4. Han-supremacist
5. Mixed economy
6. Intolerant
7. Misogynist
8. Teaches a fake history that ignores the CCP’s crimes while emphasizing how China was victimized by others.

That’s almost a textbook definition of fascism.

In recent months, the new national security law in Hong Kong has garnered a lot of criticism, and deservedly so. But it’s important not to lose sight of the fact that even today Hong Kong remains much freer than the rest of China (except Taiwan), while Xinjiang is far less free than the rest of China.

Did I mention that America’s president encouraged Xi Jinping to put the Uighurs into concentration camps? Perhaps I need to, as you won’t hear that fact from GOP Congressmen demanding that America get tough with China.

PS. Sad to see that political correctness has come to Taiwan. They plan to rename their national airline, which is currently called “China Airlines”:

“The ministry should make China Airlines more identifiable internationally with Taiwanese images to protect Taiwan’s national interests,” said legislative president Yu Shyi-kun of the independence-leaning party DPP. “Overseas it is mistaken for a Chinese airline.”

Gee, I wonder what would make outsiders assume that an airline that was specifically named “China Airlines” is a . . . you know . . . a Chinese airline. Names can be so confusing.

PS. Here’s a very good article on conservative cancel culture.

The post Brazil fact of the day appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

• Former VP Joe Biden falsely said at an event on Wednesday that President Trump is the first "racist" to serve as president, the Washington Post reported. 
• "No Republican president has done this. No Democratic president. We've had racists, and they've existed, they've tried to get elected president. He's the first one that has."
• A total of 12 former US presidents owned enslaved people, including eight who did so while in office, as the History Channel noted in 2017.
• Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, openly racist presidents who instituted discriminatory and sometimes deadly policies, like Andrew Jackson and Woodrow Wilson, also served in the office. 
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Former Vice President and 2020 Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden misleadingly and incorrectly suggested that President Donald Trump is the first "racist" to serve as president of the United States, the Washington Post reported on Wednesday. 

The Post reported that Biden made the remarks at a virtual event for the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) in the context of Trump referring to the novel coronavirus as "the Wuhan virus" or "the China virus," terms many advocates say unfairly stigmatize Asians and Asian-Americans. See the rest of the story at Business Insider

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Getty Images

• Tesla will build its newest factory in Austin, Texas, the company said Wednesday. 
• Tulsa, Austin, and other cities had fiercely competed in recent months to win the $1 billion investment. 
• Eventually, the plant will make Tesla's Cybertruck and hire up to 5,000 workers, the company said. 
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

It's official — Tesla's fourth car factory, its second in the United States, will be in Austin, Texas.

CEO Elon Musk made the announcement on Tesla's second-quarter earnings conference call Wednesday following a fierce bidding process that also involved Tulsa, Oklahoma and others. In the end, however, Travis County and a local school district's deal for more than $65 million in tax rebates over ten years won over the electric car maker.See the rest of the story at Business Insider

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• Researchers have created a machine-learning technique that can identify disinformation campaigns on social media.
• The algorithm finds patterns of suspicious posts and accounts, which could help companies shut down these campaigns early on.
• The method works on various social media platforms, which could enable companies to coordinate their efforts.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Election season now brings an expected threat: foreign meddling via online disinformation campaigns.

To combat this interference, a team of researchers have developed a machine-learning algorithm that spots and flags internet trolls as they pop up. The technique, the programmers say, could help social-media companies quickly shut down coordinated efforts to meddle in US elections.See the rest of the story at Business Insider

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• Turks and Caicos closed its borders in March to stop the spread of the coronavirus, stranding tourists who were visiting the islands.
• The territory ended its lockdown on Wednesday, allowing tourists James Ohliger and Romane Recalde to return home to New York City after five months.
• The Turks and Caicos economy is almost entirely dependent on US tourism, and the lockdown is estimated to have cost the territory $22 million a month.
• View more episodes of Business Insider Today on Facebook.

James Ohliger and Romane Recalde traveled to the Turks and Caicos Islands in March for a five-day vacation.

But when the local government decided to close its borders until July in order to curb the spread of the coronavirus, the couple's five-day trip turned into a five-month quarantine.

During this time, many Turks and Caicos businesses that rely on tourism have suffered.See the rest of the story at Business Insider

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• We don't yet know how long coronavirus antibodies last.
• Recent research from Spain suggests they may disappear in some patients in a matter of weeks.
• Other studies suggest antibody levels decline after a few months. 
• Here's what we do know so far about the life span of coronavirus antibodies and what that means for immunity and potential vaccines.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Among the many lingering questions about the coronavirus, one of the most crucial is: How long do antibodies last?

With some diseases, like measles and hepatitis A, infection is a one-and-done deal. Once you get sick and recover, you're immune for life.See the rest of the story at Business Insider

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Back in April, I saw some people making the argument that social distancing is a bad idea. They claimed that it would only delay the inevitable, and that herd immunity was the only plausible endgame. One fewer Covid-19 death today would mean one more death in the future.

We still don’t know many things about Covid-19, but one thing we now know for sure is that this argument is wrong.

Tyler Cowen has a new article pointing to the discovery that progress is being made on treatment:

First, a cheap steroid known as dexamethasone was the first drug shown to reduce death in Covid-19 patients, and the trials proving its effectiveness came from the U.K., with Oxford University playing a prominent role. In one sample, the drug reduced deaths among a vulnerable group by one-third (it is less effective for milder cases). Dexamethasone is now a part of treatment regimens around the world, and even poor countries can afford it.

The WSJ reports:

This month Gilead released more data showing that severely ill patients treated with remdesivir were 62% less likely to die than patients with similar characteristics and disease severity. A separate analysis found that 74.4% of severely ill patients treated with remdesivir recovered within 14 days compared with 59% of a control group.

We have a better idea of how to use ventilators. We know to keep patients on their stomachs. We know better how to protect nursing homes, meaning that relatively more of the infected are young. We are closer to a vaccine; indeed many promising vaccines are making rapid progress.

As a result, the infection fatality rate seems to be falling fast. To be sure, we don’t have precise estimates, mostly due to changes in testing rates. But a great deal of evidence suggests that the death rates actually are much lower than back in April. In a few months, they will be lower still. Social distancing and masks don’t just delay Covid-19 deaths; they also buy enough time to prevent them.

This does not necessarily imply that social distancing is a good idea—perhaps the costs exceed the benefits. But the argument that precautions were doing nothing more than simply delaying deaths has now been proved wrong. That’s one fewer theory that we need to worry about.

PS. This is interesting:

From Argentina to South Africa to New Zealand, countries in the Southern Hemisphere are reporting far lower numbers of influenza and other seasonal respiratory viral infections this year. In some countries, the flu seems to have all but disappeared, a surprise silver lining that health experts attribute to measures to corral the coronavirus, like mask use and restrictions on air travel.

PPS. Trump does really bad things almost every single day. So if I fail to comment on a specific example—say the stunt he’s pulling in Portland—you should not take that as evidence of a lack of outrage.

PPPS. This tweet got me thinking. What if you put 250 woke people into an auditorium and forced them to watch 5 straight hours of old Monty Python episodes. How many would survive the ordeal?