fortune--2020-07-28--One of the year’s most buzzed-about graphic designers had a secret: He was a machine

The case of the unmasked airline passenger contracting COVID adds fuel to a growing debate

This is the web version of Business By Design, a weekly newsletter exploring design’s transformative influence on industry and enterprise. Sign up to get it delivered free to your inbox.
My favorite design story this month involves the rise of Nikolay Ironov, the graphic design phenom who has wowed clients of Art.Lebedev, Russia’s largest design studio, with a string of edgy, eye-catching logo designs that stand out from the work of his peers.
Until a year ago, no one had ever heard of Nikolay. But since signing with Art.Lebedev, he has worked on more than 20 commercial projects creating, according to this report in The Next Web, “everything from beer bottle labels to startup logos.”
His designs were offered via the studio’s “express design” program. Clients—among them restaurants, cafes, craft beer pubs, public relations agencies, and YouTube bloggers—registered online, answered a series of text-based queries about their business and brand aspirations and agreed to fork over a fixed fee of 100,000 rubles (about $1,500) for logo designs. Design decisions were final; there were no redesigns or further discussions.
Nikolay’s designs were different, daring—and often downright daft. A few clients complained. But for the most part, the buzz was good.
And then this month the buzz got even better. Art.Lebedev revealed that Nikolay wasn’t a person, but a machine—created in secret by the studio, powered by artificial intelligence and trained on hand-drawn vector images. Even Nikolay’s profile photo on the studio website was a computer-generated amalgam of photos of all the studio’s designers. There were glowing reviews on Medium and Fast Company.
By all accounts, clients aren’t complaining about being duped by the studio. Instead, most are basking in the glory of what appears to be a brilliant publicity stunt.
But two questions linger: Are ‘Nikolay’s’ designs any good? And does A.I. pose a real threat to the job security of human designers?
You can answer that first question for yourself by having a look at Nikolay’s portfolio here. (Personally, I love the orange craft beer logos but find the rest of his work pretty meh.)
As for the second question, Art.Lebedev head developer Roman Kosovichev declares Nikolay a resounding success. Clients were happy. The studio got paid.
“Ironov can effectively undertake real, commercial tasks,” Kosovichev exults on the studio website. “He’s available 24/7, doesn’t get sick, or get ‘writer’s block,’ while continually evolving and solving creative problems in a matter of seconds. And, most importantly, he offers absolutely unique takes on design solutions.”
I remain deeply suspicious of that last assertion. Yes, Nikolay’s work is quirky. But is it truly unique? Is it genuinely creative? Did the machine approximate empathy?
As I’ve argued often in this space, the problem with most A.I. is that it reinforces human biases rather than resists them. That’s the reason, for example, that I hate Spotify, whose fancy algorithms can’t figure me out at all. Ages ago, I used to count on classmates, snobby record store clerks, or crazy college DJs to badger me into listening to new music. But now I have Spotify, which serves up the same old bland comfort food, time after time, occasionally slipping in a few minor variations. Facebook, Google, Amazon are much the same.
A.I. may be able to generate interesting logos. It is getting better at composing music and has significantly improved in its ability to generate facsimiles of human faces, fake videos, and special effects. And yet algorithms remain hopeless at painting, writing fiction, and many corporate tasks like recruiting.
For future designers, the challenge will be to learn to work with A.I. without being imprisoned by it.
More design news below.
Clay Chandler
-clay.chandler@fortune.com
NEWS BY DESIGN
Like
Facebook has created task groups teams to study the effect of racial bias in its Instagram and Facebook algorithms. Last year, the company blocked employees from investigating such bias without approval from senior managers so the new "equity and inclusion" teams are something of a reversal.
2 Big 2 Fail
On Wednesday, the CEOs of America’s biggest tech players—Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple—will face questioning by the House Judiciary Antitrust Subcommittee. The hearings are billed as “part six” in the subcommittee’s investigation into “online platforms and market power,” which began last year. The hearing, held over webcam, will be streamed on Google-owned YouTube.
Flat tire
Last week, Toyota redesigned its print logo as a 2D icon, making it the latest auto-manufacturer to ditch skeuomorphic designs adopted in the 80s and 90s. Dezeen has a round-up of seven auto firms that have done so. Ironically, the push to ensure “longevity in a digital world” comes weeks after Apple unveiled a return to more realistic rendering in its OS design.
Work hard, play hard
Office furniture designer Herman Miller teamed up with Logitech to design a chair for gamers that costs $1,500. The padded Embody Gaming Chair has a cooling system and was designed with the input of 30 physicians, to help users maintain posture while sitting in one place for extended periods. With a lot of the world now working at home, the chair could easily find dual use.
Terminated
Days after announcing production delays to its latest chip design, Intel fired its Chief Engineering Officer Venkata “Murthy” Renduchintala and split up its technology group into several divisions, all now reporting to CEO Bob Swan. The shake-up is supposed to “accelerate product leadership and improve focus and accountability in process technology execution.”
EVENTS BY DESIGN
August
Web design conference Beyond Tellerrand has rescheduled its August event in Berlin to September next year. However, organizers hope their event in Düsseldorf will continue as re-scheduled in November
Copenhagen’s NordDesign festival, with its focus on industrial and product design, will be online this year, August 12-24
The 6th International Conference on Design Creativity will continue as scheduled August 26-28, but will be online rather than in Finland, as initially planned.
September
London Design Festival has decided to go ahead September 12-20, with a stripped-down offline program that will target Londoners much more than international visitors. Other events will be online. The organizers are still figuring out how exactly to proceed.
Design Matters in Copenhagen appears to be carrying on, too, September 23-24, although it is now selling tickets to view a livestream of the event.
QUOTED BY DESIGN
“If that kind of participatory mechanism design eventually becomes the norm then you will see a sea change, and people will start to think about how to collaborate with different people, rather than to cast them as others.”
In a fascinating profile from Wired, Taiwan’s digital minister Audrey Tang discusses how she encouraged the government to open up National Health Insurance (NHI) data to the public so that citizens could easily find surgical masks during the pandemic. The NHI keeps stock of products available in pharmacies, through which masks were being distributed. Making the official data available not only kept citizens informed, but allowed local programmers to create new tools with the data—such as adding audio assistance for the visually impaired.
This week’s edition of BxD was curated by Eamon Barrett. Email him tips and ideas at eamon.barrett@fortune.com


fortune--2020-07-28--The case of the unmasked airline passenger contracting COVID adds fuel to a growing debate

One of the year ’ s most buzzed-about graphic designers had a secret : He was a machine

The 44-year-old man was chatting with his wife and son on a flight from Singapore to China earlier this year when he let his guard down, allowing his face mask to slip below his nose.
That lapse appears to have been how he became infected with Covid-19.
The case, cited in a recently published study of an outbreak among passengers on a January flight, is one of the first to document a probable transmission on an airliner and is reviving calls for government rules requiring masks. It comes as safety concerns raise questions about whether passengers will return in sufficient numbers to keep airline companies from collapsing.
Lawmakers and airline unions—which have sought more rigorous standards for months as infections surge across the nation and reports circulate of passengers skirting existing rules—said the study adds new weight to their demands.
“This report seems to confirm the tragic consequences of the Trump administration’s abject failure to protect passengers by mandating masks,” said Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat. “Wearing masks, like requiring seat belts or banning smoking, is absolutely fundamental to protecting passengers and crew during these unprecedented times.”
Subscribe to How To Reopen, our weekly newsletter on what it takes to reboot business in the midst of a pandemic.
The head of a union representing flight attendants—the workers most exposed to passengers and who are called on to enforce airline mask directives—called the lack of action “inexcusable.”
“This new study underscores the urgent need for a single national policy that would mandate that masks be worn, and worn properly, on all commercial flights,” said Julie Hedrick, president of the Association of Professional Flight Attendants at American Airlines Group Inc.
All major U.S. airlines now require passengers to cover their faces, but advocates for a federal mask requirement say it would make enforcement easier, potentially making violations a crime. It would also set a more uniform standard, they say. The Department of Transportation earlier this month released a 44-page set of guidelines for airlines and airports that urges mask usage, but officials have repeatedly said they don’t favor legal requirements.
The airline industry is facing a crisis as passenger counts, which plummeted to about 5% of pre-pandemic levels in April, started coming back but stalled in recent weeks at about 25%, according to Transportation Security Administration data. Companies have warned of possibly tens of thousands of layoffs once restrictions tied to initial federal aid expire on Sept. 30.
Trump Mask
President Donald Trump has rarely worn a mask and some of his allies bitterly oppose mandatory orders for them, though he declared his support for face coverings in briefings last week.
“The Department of Transportation and FAA have been clear that passengers should wear face coverings while traveling by air, for their own protection and the protection of those around them,” the Federal Aviation Administration said in a statement.
The trade group for large carriers, Airlines for America, said: “U.S. airlines are continuing to take extraordinary measures as part of a multilayered approach to help protect the health and well-being of the traveling public and employees.”
Air travel presents unique risks for contracting the virus because conditions are so crowded. Research has shown airborne diseases such as Covid-19 can be transmitted on planes, but risks aren’t well quantified.
Most Documented
The Jan. 24 flight from Singapore to Hangzhou, China is the most thoroughly documented case of a likely passenger-to-passenger infection of Covid-19 to date.
About 100 of the 335 passengers had recently traveled to Wuhan, China, where the disease erupted originally, and a handful exhibited symptoms. As a result, everyone was quarantined for at least two weeks. They were questioned in detail by infectious disease experts. The peer-reviewed results of the study were published online July 6 by the journal Travel Medicine and Infectious Disease.
The team in China concluded that one man most likely became infected by fellow passengers after ruling out other possible contacts and noting the timing of when he became ill.
For an hour of the flight, he went to talk with his wife and son, who were in a different row.
“While he talked, he reported that he did not wear his mask tightly, and his nose was outside of mask,” the authors wrote.
Two people adjacent to him in the same row and two more across the aisle in the row directly behind tested positive for Covid-19, including one was already showing symptoms, the study found.
Wuhan Infections
Ashok Srinivasan, a computer science professor at the University of West Florida who specializes in modeling disease transmission and has studied airline travel, said the paper highlights the importance of masks in preventing the spread of the coronavirus in crowded environments.
“I think it is important to wear the mask all the time,” Srinivasan said.
The study’s authors said the 15 other passengers who got Covid-19 were infected while in Wuhan or by close contacts with family members or others.
The aircraft, a Boeing Co. 787-9, is equipped with filters that remove the virus from recirculated air and that may have lowered the chances that others became infected, the authors said. All modern jetliners have such filters.
U.S. Lawmakers
The study acknowledged the researchers couldn’t completely rule out whether the man had been infected elsewhere, but said the evidence suggests “he probably acquired SARS-CoV-2 infection during the flight.”.
The leaders of two House committees overseeing transportation policy have inserted language requiring the government to adopt strict mask standards into separate bills. The bills have yet to be taken up by the Senate.
Representative Peter DeFazio, the chairman of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, called the study “intriguing,” but said enough doubt remains that the FAA should conduct its own research.
“That’s why I’ve repeatedly pressed the FAA to not only commission its own study to better understand how the virus travels within the airplane cabin, but also to mandate masks,” DeFazio, an Oregon Democrat, said in a statement.
Representative David Price, the North Carolina Democrat who heads the Appropriations Committee panel overseeing transportation spending, said in an interview that a federally mandated mask rule is needed to set “an example for the entire country.”


fortune--2020-07-28--Lysol sales surge as the condom business goes limp under lockdown, consumer goods giant reports

Reckitt Benckiser Group Plc said Covid-19 has prompted consumers and companies to make lasting improvements in their cleaning routines, boosting prospects for future sales of its disinfectants and sanitizers.
Lysol sales surged about 70% in the first half in North America, and professional demand has been so strong that the U.K. consumer-goods maker set up a business to meet demand from new clients including Hilton, Avis and Delta.
A new era of cleanliness has begun, according to the company. Once a consumer adopts new behaviors such as consistent and thorough hand washing for more than two months, the habits stick.
“Covid-19 is likely to be with us for the foreseeable future and, as a society, we are embedding new hygiene practices to protect our way of life,” Chief Executive Officer Laxman Narasimhan said.
Reckitt said Tuesday it expects the boom in its cleaning brands, which also include Sagrotan handgel, will help ensure high-single-digit sales growth in 2020. The disinfectant maker is having its strongest start to the year in recent memory as shoppers stock up on disinfectants. The company also has been extending brands, adding products such as Lysol laundry sanitizers.
The shares fell as much as 1.8% in morning trading after the company damped enthusiasm by saying margins will narrow in the second half due to investment. The company is spending 100 million pounds to boost production capacity as demand for such products in May was equivalent to the full year 2019.
Chief Financial Officer Jeff Carr said such measures also include price cuts on several brands, a boost to marketing and hiring more people in its research and regulatory teams. Reckitt has risen 24% this year, outperforming all but six stocks in the FTSE-100 Index.
Second-quarter sales rose 10.5%, more than the 6.8% gain analysts expected.
Not all of Reckitt’s businesses have benefited from the pandemic. One product that had weaker sales growth was Durex, as lockdowns inhibited dating and social interactions.
The company also said its cold-and-flu medication business may suffer this year as consumers become more vigilant against catching viruses in general. Most of the measures that the public can take to avoid the novel coronavirus also help prevent other viral illnesses.


fortune--2020-07-28--Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan on how business can measure stakeholder capitalism

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Business has been measuring shareholder returns via earnings reports and changes in stock price for what seems like forever. But now that stakeholder capitalism is in vogue, corporations need new metrics.
Enter Brian Moynihan, Bank of America’s CEO of 10 years and the latest guest on Fortune podcast “Leadership Next.” As chair of the International Business Council (IBC), he is working to figure out a set of common metrics the business community can use to measure the stakeholder capitalism that the Business Roundtable endorsed last year. And despite the pandemic, the group is getting closer to determining that final list of metrics and sub-metrics.
“You’ve had a pandemic and an economic crisis around that pandemic, but at the same time, we have more people signing onto the metrics, we have more dialogues, and the green part of this has gotten completely embedded into the recovery question,” Moynihan said of interest in stakeholder capitalism despite the recession.
To ensure that interest translates into widespread use of the metrics, the IBC has been focusing on finding “the best-of-the-best metrics” that allow for results that companies can easily calculate and disclose. Moynihan said that the consistency and accountability these disclosed results provide will be key, because society’s problems can’t be solved without private industry.
“Private money has to drive it,” he said.
In the remainder of the interview, host Alan Murray asks Moynihan about his stance on ever-increasing CEO pay, purpose-driven leadership at Bank of America, and the bank’s enormous commitment of $300 billion over the next decade to environmentally friendly business.


fortune--2020-07-28--Gold hits an all-time high as investors weigh the costs of fresh stimulus measures

This is the web version of the Bull Sheet, Fortune’s no-BS daily newsletter on the markets. Sign up to receive it in your inbox here.
Good morning, Bull Sheeters. Stocks are mostly higher in Asia and Europe, but the U.S. futures have dipped into the red. It’s the volatile trade in gold, however, that’s getting most of the attention. Gold futures hit a new all-time high in Asian trade before selling off some. A reminder: a run on gold is the equivalent to a big thumb’s-down on the economic outlook.
Let’s check in on the action.
Markets update
Asia
The major Asia indexes were gaining in afternoon trade. The Shanghai Composite is the best of the bunch, up 0.7% .
were gaining in afternoon trade. The Shanghai Composite is the best of the bunch, up . Malaysia ‘s former PM Najib Razak was found guilty of a slew of charges connected to the massive 1MDB fraud case involving the state’s investment fund. You may recall that Goldman Sachs agreed last week to pay the Malaysian government $2.5 billion for its role in the matter, and agreed to track down an additional $1.4 billion that’s gone missing from the fund.
‘s former PM Najib Razak was found guilty of a slew of charges connected to the massive involving the state’s investment fund. You may recall that Goldman Sachs agreed last week to pay the Malaysian government for its role in the matter, and agreed to track down an additional that’s gone missing from the fund. Taiwan’s Taiex benchmark index hit a 30-year high on Tuesday, thanks in no small part to TSMC’s bull run. The contract chipmaker has cracked the top 10 most valuable companies, supplanting Intel.
Europe
The European bourses are a touch higher at the open with Germany’s DAX up 0.4% .
are a touch higher at the open with Germany’s DAX up . The EU continues to tinker with its COVID travel restrictions . Under a new plan, it would extend by another two weeks its ban on overseas travelers, including those from the U.S. Meanwhile, internal European travel is also getting messier, throwing the sacred summer holiday into disarray.
continues to tinker with its . Under a new plan, it would its ban on overseas travelers, including those from the U.S. Meanwhile, internal European travel is also getting messier, throwing the sacred summer holiday into disarray. Bad news for shareholders of European banks… The ECB is asking that European lenders hold off on paying dividends until next year.
U.S.
U.S. futures are trading lower ahead of a big batch of corporate earnings reports. Visa, Pfizer and McDonald’s are all scheduled to report today.
are trading lower ahead of a big batch of corporate earnings reports. Visa, Pfizer and McDonald’s are all scheduled to report today. Ok, Democrats, it’s your turn. Senate Republicans yesterday unveiled their $1 trillion coronavirus relief plan . It includes stingier unemployment benefits, but involves a second round of direct payments to families and liability protections for companies. The fight over unemployment insurance will likely be the sticking point.
yesterday unveiled their . It includes stingier unemployment benefits, but involves a second round of direct payments to families and liability protections for companies. The will likely be the sticking point. Google parent Alphabet has extended (again) to July, 2021 its work-from-home policy, a full-year out. Look for other companies to follow suit.
Elsewhere
Gold continues to hit new records, with futures touching $2,000 an ounce in Asian trade.
continues to hit new records, with futures touching an ounce in Asian trade. The dollar is up, slightly.
is up, slightly. Crude too is in the green.
***
Golden age
Gold is having a run for the ages. The shiny yellow stuff is up 35% since mid-March, hitting a slew of new records.
In the past two days, UBS and Bank of America both put out investor notes saying the price of gold will appreciate further. UBS predicts a $2,000 an ounce price by September. The way it’s trading, we could hit that milestone by the end of the week. Here’s the Bloomberg chart from this morning.
Gold, the ultimate safe haven, is gaining even as the major indexes are rallying. That may be a bit puzzling to veteran market observers—that is, until you zoom down and see the S&P’s gains are fueled mainly by tech stocks, which, like gold, are viewed as safe plays for your money during a pandemic.
There are other reasons gold is soaring. The gold trade is a hedge against negative yielding assets. As long as nominal U.S. interest rates hover around zero—thank you, Federal Reserve Bank—you’ll see investors piling into gold. As Bank of America bullet-points: “massive easing of monetary conditions and expansion of central bank balance sheets is bullish gold.”
Stimulus measures should also act as rocket fuel for gold. The combination of the Fed’s ever-expanding balance sheet, rock-bottom interest rates and accommodative monetary policy amounts to bad news for the dollar and good news for gold.
None of this changes the fact that a run on gold means investors are deeply pessimistic about the future of the U.S. economy. If you’re buying gold at these prices you’re fairly certain that trade tensions with China will worsen, that the labor market will deteriorate further and that Congress and the Fed will have to unveil further stimulus measures to help out American families and American businesses.
It’s a rally with big social costs.
***
Postscript
Thank you for all the Homer-inspired emails yesterday. As I’d suspected, there are a number of classicists in the Bull Sheet community.
***
Have a nice day, everyone. I’ll see you here tomorrow.
Bernhard Warner
@BernhardWarner
Bernhard.Warner@Fortune.com
As always, you can write to bullsheet@fortune.com or reply to this email with suggestions and feedback.
Today's reads
Crypto bulls. Gold isn't the only safe haven that's soaring. Bitcoin hovered around $11,000 on Monday, a big milestone for the volatile asset. Fortune's Jeff John Roberts talks to the pros to get their take on whether this rally is sustainable.
Spare a buck. The almighty dollar is tanking (and it's expected to fall further). That has big implications for multinationals. Goldman predicts which stocks should make out like bandits from the greenback's plunge.
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Market candy
276%
The grocer Albertsons crushed it last quarter, with digital sales up 276%. Investors though were unimpressed. They punished the company, sending shares down 5% on Monday, the Wall Street Journal notes. Rival Kroger fared little better, despite knockout results. The supermarket business is tough.


fortune--2020-07-28--A $2.1 billion buyout offer could see another Chinese company delist from the U.S.

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Chinese tech titan Tencent Holdings is offering to acquire Beijing-based web search company Sogou Inc. for $2.1 billion in a deal that would see Sogou delist from the New York Stock Exchange.
Sogou’s parent company, Sohu Inc., announced Tencent’s proposal on Monday and said Sohu’s board of directors has not yet reviewed it or made a decision.
Sogou went public on the New York Stock Exchange in 2017 and raised $585 million. The delisting would occur because the sale would make Sogou a private and indirect wholly owned subsidiary of Tencent. Tencent is already a major investor in Sogou, holding around 39% of Sogou’s total issued and outstanding shares.
Tencent, the world’s largest gaming company and owner of social messaging platform WeChat, has itself been listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange since 2004. Its shares rose 4.6% in intraday trading on Tuesday; Sogou’s shares surged a record 48% on Monday.
If Sohu approves the sale, Sogou would join a growing number of Chinese companies delisting from the U.S. or considering doing so as tensions between the two countries escalate and the U.S. increases scrutiny of U.S.-listed Chinese companies. Reuters reported on Tuesday that Nasdaq-listed Ctrip, China’s biggest online travel firm, is discussing a potential delisting in response to U.S.-China tensions and the pandemic-induced hit to its business. China’s online classifieds platform 58.com said in June it was delisting from the NYSE to go private in an $8.7 billion deal. Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation, China’s biggest chipmaker, delisted from the NYSE in June, blaming low trading volumes and the high cost of complying with U.S. reporting requirements and laws. SMIC listed on Shanghai’s Star market board on July 16 to become the biggest listing on China’s exchanges in a decade.
The trend of Chinese companies delisting from U.S. exchanges could cost U.S. investors, who would no longer have access to shares of those companies that collectively trade around $8 billion per day in the U.S., according to a China Renaissance report. The delistings may also discourage Chinese startups from going public on U.S. exchanges.


fortune--2020-07-28--BoA CEO Brian Moynihan: Measuring social-goal commitments is ‘the right thing to do’

This is the web version of CEO Daily. To get it delivered to your inbox, sign up here.
Good morning.
Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan is our guest this week on Leadership Next, Fortune’s podcast about the changing rules of business leadership. I invited Moynihan to do the podcast back in February, after running into him at the World Economic Forum in Davos, where he was chairing a group working on metrics for measuring companies’ commitments to social goals. That the CEO of one of the world’s largest banks thought this was a good use of his time struck me as notable.
Why was he doing it? “Because it’s the right thing to do,” Moynihan said. That’s a standard he’s come back to repeatedly at Bank of America, where he’s raised the minimum wage to $20 an hour, committed hundreds of millions of dollars to the environment, announced a billion dollar commitment to communities of color, and taken strong stands on controversial issues like guns and transgender rights.
A striking example came in 2015, when the state legislature of North Carolina, where Bank of America is based, passed a law limiting transgender access to public bathrooms. That’s the sort of controversial social issue most business leaders would have run from in the past. But Moynihan took a public stand against the law. “We believe in diversity and inclusion in our company. We believe it’s the way to get the best people to be their best selves at work,” he said. “We happened to have our global diversity and inclusion awards ceremony in Charlotte that year, and people said they wouldn’t come. When something affects your teammates, you have to go in a make sure they are comfortable.”
Worth noting that Moynihan took over as CEO in 2010, when Bank of America’s finances and reputation had been badly battered by the financial crisis. He orchestrated an amazing turnaround, documented by Fortune’s Shawn Tully here, even as he worked to boost the bank’s benefits to society. Moynihan says the pandemic has only increased corporate interest in his effort to develop metrics for stakeholder capitalism. The recession has obviously had a more complicated effect on the bank’s finances. Tully masterfully dissects the bank’s latest earnings report here.
More news below.
Alan Murray
@alansmurray
alan.murray@fortune.com
TOP NEWS
TSMC surge
Intel's decline has been good for rival Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp, whose stock surged 9.5% on news of Intel manufacturing delays. The jump made TSMC one of the world's ten most valuable companies, with Johnson & Johnson being booted out of that top tier as a result. Fortune
1MDB verdict
Former Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak has been found guilty of corruption for his role in the theft of billions of dollars from the 1MDB sovereign wealth fund. Najib, the first Malaysian premier to be convicted of graft, now faces decades behind bars, along with fines–if it weren't for the fact that he is 67-years-old, he would be whipped, too. Further cases related to the scandal still loom, but Goldman Sachs last week reached a $3.9 billion settlement with the government over its role. Al Jazeera
Tencent and Sogou
Tencent has offered to buy out the U.S.-listed Chinese search engine and A.I. player Sogou for $2.1 billion. The move, if it goes ahead, would likely be a precursor to a listing in Hong Kong or Shanghai. Chinese tech firms are increasingly looking to delist from the U.S. due to a proposed bill there that would impose stricter disclosure requirements. Fortune
Garmin ransom
The smartwatch maker Garmin has reportedly obtained the decryption key needed to recover files from a ransomware attack last week, and expects its systems to return to normal operation in the coming days. If Garmin paid the ransom to the attackers, suspected to be Russia's Evil Corp group, then the American firm could fall foul of the fact that the U.S. has sanctioned Evil Corp, forbidding transactions between it and "U.S. persons." Sky News's sources say there was no direct payment to the hackers. Sky News
AROUND THE WATER COOLER
Wirecard fines
Visa and Mastercard heavily fined the now-collapsed Wirecard more than a decade ago because the German payments processor miscoded gambling transactions and had high levels of stolen card purchases and reversed transactions. The card networks also asked Wirecard to ditch some dodgy merchants it was servicing, though its high-risk clients–in areas such as pornography and unregulated "neutraceuticals"–were highly lucrative for the firm. Wall Street Journal
Junk food
The U.K.'s splashy ban on junk-food advertising before 9 p.m., announced yesterday as part of a strategy to help people lose weight and become less susceptible to nasty bouts of COVID-19, already looks set to be watered down following industry anger. The government now says the measure could take as much as two years to introduce in order to give food producers time to make their products healthier. Times
Online tax
Another new idea from the British government is facing pushback from the business sector. This time, it's an online sales tax aimed at protecting retail-sector jobs and combating store closures. The British Retail Consortium says such a move would raise prices for consumers. BRC regulatory chief Tom Ironside: "Throughout the pandemic, many of us have been relying on retailers to ramp up their online services to ensure we can all get the goods we need. The government should not harm these efforts by further taxing the businesses providing these services, and the people they serve." BBC
Bitcoin boost
Bitcoin is surging again–it touched the $11,000 mark again yesterday–and there doesn't seem to be one clear cause. Fortune's Jeff John Roberts runs through the possible factors, which include: traders reaping gains from obscure digital currencies and putting them into the well-known Bitcoin and Ethereum assets; regulators allowing banks to hold Bitcoin on behalf of customers; and general fear and uncertainty. Fortune
This edition of CEO Daily was edited by David Meyer.


fortune--2020-07-28--Intel’s decline makes rival chipmaker TSMC the world’s tenth most valuable company

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The world’s 10 most valuable companies gained a new entrant early Tuesday after Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp.’s stock surged 9.5%, knocking the likes of Johnson & Johnson out of the top tier. TSMC is now valued at $410 billion, bringing Taiwan’s Taiex benchmark index up to a 30-year high.
But TSMC ducked back out of the top 10 by end-of-day trading in Taiwan Tuesday, closing 2.47% up with a market cap of around $390 billion. That’s still a 39% gain in the month of July so far.
TSMC is the world’s largest and most advanced contract chip manufacturer, assembling semiconductors for Apple, Qualcomm, Nvidia, and over 400 other companies. Roughly half of all the world’s outsourced chip manufacturing is processed by TSMC. The 30-year-old company first listed on the Taiwan stock exchange in 1994 and now constitutes roughly a third of the local benchmark index.
TSMC’s rally—rising by the daily limit of 10% Monday and a further 10% Tuesday—was precipitated by the decline of rival Intel, which has had a bruising couple of months. In June, Apple announced it would ditch Intel as semiconductor supplier for its Mac computers and switch to TSMC. In July, Nvidia surpassed Intel to become the most valuable U.S.-based semiconductor company for the first time. And last week, Intel revealed delays in the development of its latest chip.
But Intel’s slow decline began in 2018, when TSMC’s manufacturing process first overtook its California-based rival’s. Semiconductors are chips of silicon roughly the size of a U.S. quarter that contain billions of transistors. The sophistication of a chip is often correlated to the width in between each transistor, measured in nanometers (nm). The tighter the gap, the more transistors can fit on each chip, thus the stronger its computing power is.
In 2018, TSMC was manufacturing 7nm chipsets while Intel was yet to output a 10nm process. Now manufacturing at 10nm, Intel is due to produce 7nm chips next year while TSMC has sped ahead to 4nm. Then, last Thursday, Intel CEO Bob Swan said the company’s 7nm process had fallen six months behind schedule.
Intel’s shares dropped 18% the next day. In response to production delays, Intel on Monday fired chief engineering officer Murthy Renduchintala and split up his division to “accelerate product leadership.” Renduchintala joined Intel four years ago and will leave on August 3.
Meanwhile, TSMC’s stock climbed. The Taiwanese company appears to have gone from strength to strength this year as investors shrug off the impact of a U.S. embargo that forced TSMC to cut Huawei as a client in May. Analysts had estimated that Huawei accounted for 10% of TSMC’s revenue, but chairman Mark Liu has dismissed concerns about the loss, claiming other clients would “fill any gap” left by Huawei.
Liu might be right. A report on Monday claimed Intel would outsource more production to TSMC to make up for delays in its own schedule.
This article was updated with TSMC’s closing share price on Tuesday, July 28.


fortune--2020-07-28--Goldman Sachs CEO deejayed, Winklevosses attended—now this Hamptons concert is under public health r

Goldman Sachs CEO deejayed, Winklevosses attended—now this Hamptons concert is under public health review

New York health authorities will investigate a Hamptons charity concert opened by Goldman Sachs chief David Solomon and headlined by the Chainsmokers after footage showed crowds of partiers, according to Governor Andrew Cuomo.
Cuomo said he was appalled by “egregious social distancing violations” seen in videos of the Saturday night event in Southampton. “We have no tolerance for the illegal & reckless endangerment of public health,” Cuomo said, noting the Department of Health will lead the inquiry.
The event was held on a field Saturday night and billed as the “Safe & Sound drive-in concert” with attendees expected to enjoy the music by their cars and in designated spots. About 2,000 people turned up for the performance with an opening set by Goldman’s chief executive officer, who moonlights as DJ D-Sol, and the Chainsmokers as the main act.
Videos from a concert held in Southampton on Saturday show egregious social distancing violations. I am appalled.
The Department of Health will conduct an investigation.
We have no tolerance for the illegal & reckless endangerment of public health.pic.twitter.com/gf9kggdo8w — Andrew Cuomo (@NYGovCuomo) July 28, 2020
Videos shared by revelers appeared to show groups gathering near the stage. Some concert-goers without masks congregated outside cars to party with friends. Southampton Town Supervisor Jay Schneiderman was also one of the performers at the event, and Southampton Village Mayor Jesse Warren was emcee.
A representative for the organizers declined to comment, and a spokesman for Goldman declined to comment on Solomon’s behalf.
Subscribe to The Capsule , a weekly brief monitoring advances in health care and biopharma, delivered free to your inbox.
New York was once the epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic in the U.S. before it eased there and spread to other regions. Officials have been cautiously reopening the state.
The organizers, In the Know Experiences, had pledged to abide by local and state health standards. They set up temperature checks, arranged for crews to clean portable toilets every 10 minutes and made frequent announcements about wearing masks when moving around the venue.
About 500 cars were parked in spots that cost as much as $25,000, with the top tier including an air-conditioned RV and private bathroom. Masks were encouraged, but not required, next to vehicles, according to an email sent to ticketholders.
Trial Run
The rare chance to party drew socialites, financial professionals and other notables, such as the Winklevoss twins. Altogether, a couple of thousand people flocked to the event, dancing on the grass and the tops of vehicles.
“Standing up there and watching the sunset, looking out over this huge field of cars and people on their cars, it was absolutely beautiful,” Solomon said Monday in an interview before Cuomo’s announcement. “The group that put this together did an incredible job in a difficult environment. If we work together and are thoughtful, we can do things that feel more normal and allow us to live with this virus safely.”
Seth Kaplan, co-founder of In the Know Experiences, had said it was a trial run for concerts his firm will produce in Miami and other locales. Any profits from the Hamptons event will be donated to No Kid Hungry, Southampton Fresh Air Home and Children’s Medical Fund of New York.


fortune--2020-07-27--U.K. to restrict junk food advertising and promotions as COVID-19 has Boris Johnson changing tune on

U.K. to restrict junk food advertising and promotions as COVID-19 has Boris Johnson changing tune on obesity

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Boris Johnson, the U.K.’s rumpled Prime Minister, never used to be keen on governments poking their noses into people’s weight issues.
“The more the state tries to take responsibility for the problem, the less soluble the problem will become,” he wrote in 2004, back when he was just a member of Parliament, rebutting calls for the government of the day to combat obesity. “The more the state prescribes the diet of children, the more it takes away responsibility from parents.” A couple of years later, he targeted celebrity chef Jamie Oliver for campaigning to ban junk food from school meals, quipping: “If I was in charge I would get rid of Jamie Oliver and tell people to eat what they like.”
How times change. Now in charge—and having narrowly survived an April bout of COVID-19 that put him in intensive care—Johnson wants people in England to slim down, in order to ward off the novel coronavirus.
Junk food ads will be banned before 9 p.m.—both on TV and online—and there will also be a ban on buy-one-get-one-free deals for sugary and fatty foods, under measures unveiled Monday. Stores will no longer be able to place candy by the checkout.
Large restaurant chains will have to start labeling calorie counts on their menus, and the government will consult on mandating the same for alcoholic drinks.
Public Health England is also launching a campaign that it hopes will persuade people to get more exercise, lose weight, and reduce their risk of contracting COVID-19 or other diseases associated with being overweight or obese.
Losing weight is hard but with some small changes we can all feel fitter and healthier.
If we all do our bit, we can reduce our health risks and protect ourselves against coronavirus – as well as taking pressure off the NHS.
Our Better Health Strategy https://t.co/WdazXhuhRN pic.twitter.com/KZhW8p17FJ — Boris Johnson #StayAlert (@BorisJohnson) July 27, 2020
“I’ve wanted to lose weight for ages, and like many people I struggle with my weight. I go up and down, but during the whole coronavirus epidemic and when I got it too, I realized how important it is not to be overweight,” Johnson wrote Sunday in the Daily Express.
“The facts are simple: Extra weight puts extra pressure on our organs and makes it harder to treat heart disease, cancer, and—as we have found—coronavirus. This was true in my case, and it’s true in many thousands of others. It was a wake-up call for me, and I want it to be a wake-up call for the whole country.”
As far as the food and drink sector is concerned, the government’s new crusade may be more of a rude awakening.
“As the economy struggles to recover, new restrictions on promoting and advertising everyday food and drink will increase the price of food, reduce consumer choice, and threaten jobs across the U.K.,” said Tim Rycroft, chief operating officer of the Food and Drink Federation, in a statement. “It is extraordinary that the government is proposing a ban on promotions of food and drink in retail at such a precarious economic time.”
The sector has been hit hard by the lockdown’s effect on the hospitality industry, which is projected to lose almost half of its $170 billion in annual sales this year.
Extraordinarily, the U.K. government will try to help restaurants and pubs in August by subsidizing people’s meals under the so-called Eat Out to Help Out scheme. According to Rycroft, the juxtaposition of this and the new healthier-food drive means the “government is pulling in different directions.”
The Incorporated Society of British Advertisers is also livid, with director general Phil Smith calling the drive “a slap in the face for food and drink manufacturers, the advertising sector, and small business.
“This announcement cuts the legs out from the Eat Out to Help Out scheme, will cost families more at the checkout, denies small businesses the targeted local online advertising on which they now rely, and risks jobs at a time when government has elsewhere shown them support,” Smith said in a statement that claimed the strategy was “driven by the health lobby.”
However, there is evidence that the public will support the government’s crackdown on junk food promotions.
The U.K.’s Obesity Health Alliance conducted a poll in May that showed three-quarters of adults favored a pre–9 p.m. ban on junk food ads, and almost as many approved of a prospective checkout-candy ban. More than 60% agreed with the idea of banning supermarkets’ buy-one-get-one-free offers for unhealthy foods.
“We are delighted the government has recognized the role that the relentless marketing and promotion of unhealthy food plays in driving ill-health,” said the alliance’s chief, Caroline Cerny, in a Monday statement. “Restricting the advertising of unhealthy products before 9 p.m. is a landmark move and shows real commitment from the government to making it easier for everyone to be healthier.
“The pandemic has thrown the need to improve our health sharply into focus. We look forward to seeing more detail on the government’s proposals, and urge further action to build a healthier, stronger population.”


fortune--2020-07-29--Google, Amazon, Apple, and Facebook likely to face heavy ‘tech bashing’ at congressional hearing

HSBC tried to defend itself in China .
Internet censors erased the post

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Google, Amazon, Apple, and Facebook CEOs are expected to face a heated line of questions from members of the House Judiciary Antitrust Subcommittee on Wednesday.
The virtual hearing, which was postponed by a couple of days for Congress members to pay their respects to Rep. John Lewis, will include testimony from Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Apple’s Tim Cook, and Sundar Pichai of Alphabet, which owns Google, and aims to explore the dominance of tech giants. Antitrust experts expect to witness two things during the hearing: critical statements and questions from Congress members across party lines, and defenses from the tech CEOs about why their services and practices do more good than bad.
“You’ll see a lot of tech bashing from both sides,” said Douglas Melamed, Stanford Law School professor who previously served as acting assistant attorney general for the U.S. Department of Justice’s antitrust division. But the “heavy lifting will be in [public relations], not in economic analysis.”
The virtual hearing is the first time the CEOs of four of the largest tech companies will provide testimony to Congress at the same time. It also comes as the Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission are investigating whether the companies have violated any antitrust laws. Meanwhile, the companies continue to face rising public and government scrutiny over privacy concerns, the dissemination of hate speech and violence, and their aggressive competitive practices.
The hearing is expected to highlight three schools of thought, according to experts: Democrats will argue that Big Tech has become too big and powerful and thus needs to be reined in. Republicans will also speak to the harms of Big Tech but with a slight nuance in favor of creating new regulation specifically for the tech companies rather than changing overarching antitrust laws. A third group will push the message that these are great American businesses that provide needed services at low costs to consumers.
Melamed expects the hearing to give the public a better idea of how inclined Congress is to pass new regulation. It also could give viewers an idea of what future legislative proposals may look like. “You’ll learn that by the nature of their questions,” he said.
Previous congressional hearings with Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Alphabet’s CEO Sundar Pichai revealed Congress members’ lack of knowledge about how these big tech companies work. And while experts say there will likely be more of that in Wednesday’s hearing, there will also be direct questions related to specific purchases, growth strategies, and monetization efforts.
Tim Wu, professor at Columbia Law School and former senior adviser to the FTC, said Zuckerberg likely will be grilled, in a cross-examination form of questioning, about statements he made in internal emails about the purchase of Instagram, for example. “The big challenge for them is whether they have a Bill Gates moment,” he said, referring to Gates’ congressional hearing in 1998. “He didn’t say anything crazy, but he became incredibly hostile and antagonized. He started behaving like a kid.”
Google and Facebook will likely get the worst criticism, while Congress members will be a little less condemning of Amazon and Apple, Wu said. “If it goes the way the subcommittee wants, I think it’ll invoke some squirming and embarrassment, especially on the part of Facebook and Google,” he said.
Though the hearing is slated to focus on antitrust, other topics including misinformation, privacy concerns, censoring speech, and hate speech will likely arise, as well. Wu said Congress will probably try to tie those issues to antitrust concerns. They’ll attempt to show that the companies’ size and power have led to an environment in which hateful content and misinformation are able to thrive. Because the tech companies are so big, Congress may point out that actions such as a $5 billion fine from the FTC and a temporary ad boycott have had relatively little impact on their businesses. “I want to see whether they’re able…to convince the public that monopoly is a harm in terms that matter to people,” Wu said.
Dipayan Ghosh, fellow at the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, said he expects Congress to examine the new business models, which rely on a combination of attention and personal data, these companies created. Congress members may try to show that these new models, which are largely unregulated, have some of the largest profit margins, Ghosh said. “Yet what we’ve seen is these very practices and business models are exploitative of individuals and promote harms,” he said.
Congress may also look at whether Big Tech should be treated like utilities, which are allowed to remain monopolies but under heavy regulation from state, federal, and local authorities, Ghosh said. If that were the case, Facebook, for example, may be deemed a “natural monopoly,” or the sole provider because of its dominance of the market.
But Wu and Melamed expect companies like TikTok, which has become a viral social media phenomenon among teens, and other search engines serve as a rebuttal to that argument. Meanwhile, Walmart still outpaces Amazon in terms of revenue, and the giant retailer is also planning an e-commerce service that would rival Jeff Bezos’s creation. “As long as you have credible active threats, you’re not really in the classic public utility, natural monopoly setting,” Melamed said.
Though the CEOs will likely face some tough questions, their testimony will be given from the comfort of their own spaces because of the coronavirus pandemic. The virtual setup is probably why the CEOs all agreed to the testimony, said Wu: “How stressed out can you get when you’re probably still wearing pajama bottoms?”


fortune--2020-07-28--America needs a major infrastructure overhaul—and it must be green

COVID-19 has sickened everything it touches as it rampages across the world. But as we hurry to fix our current emergency by rebuilding and restoring our economies, we must not be blinded to the increasingly urgent need to protect ourselves against the next emergency: climate change.
America desperately needs an overhaul of its infrastructure. President Trump’s announcement in March of a vast $2 trillion stimulus package was a step in the right direction, one that drew bipartisan support. But his refusal to acknowledge the critical importance of rebuilding for greater climate resilience risks wasting this once-in-a-lifetime sum. The disastrous effects of rising temperatures on our planet could not be more evident. In the past few months in the U.S. alone, storms and tornadoes in the south, wildfires in California after a historically dry winter and accelerating sea-level rises all foretell an impending calamity. This catastrophe is happening right in front of the president’s eyes. By scrapping environmental reviews of infrastructure projects President Trump is squandering America’s future.
This is not only cataclysmically short-sighted, but also leaves America increasingly alone on the world stage. Many nations and institutions are now moving on to a low-carbon, climate resilient path. Europe’s Green Deal is a roadmap to a more sustainable economy. China is funding low-carbon transport, energy and technology initiatives such as high-speed rail and 5G networks. The World Bank and the IMF, meanwhile, are promoting an inclusive and resilient recovery.
More visionary thinking is even evident elsewhere in America, from Democrats who have proposed an action plan that would slash emissions and pour billions into public transport to Republicans such as the Mayor of Miami who pioneered the Miami Forever bond, which aims to make Miami the most resilient city in the world through innovative infrastructure investments. Across the world, building back better has been identified as an important part of the pandemic recovery. If America stumbles here, it risks falling badly behind for generations.
Infrastructure shapes a nation: Transportation systems, water supplies, the electrical grid, roads, bridges and tunnels are the foundations of a country. A major part of President Trump’s plan involves pouring money into traditional structures such as roads and bridges. But unless these are designed to stand firm in the face of rising temperatures and ever-more powerful storms, we will soon watch them crumble again. A plan fit for tomorrow is needed, not just one for today.
Some bright spots of adaptation do exist across America, even as the consequences of failing to anticipate climate change in previous infrastructure design are increasingly evident. When Hurricane Sandy struck the eastern seaboard in 2012, for example, it caused catastrophic damage to the New York subway, flooding nine stations and two tunnels. Repairs in preparation for the next Sandy have included new flex gates designed to hold back up to 14 feet of rising water.
But it is vastly better and easier to build in climate resilience as a core consideration at the outset, rather than fit it retrospectively. It is more cost-effective, too. A recent report by the Global Commission on Adaptation, with which we’re affiliated, found that investing $1.8 trillion globally in climate-resilience adaptation by 2030—in early warning systems, climate-resilient infrastructure, improved dryland agriculture crop production, global mangrove protection, and making water resources more resilient—could yield $7.1 trillion in net benefits.
A healthy society needs a healthy infrastructure, and among many issues brutally highlighted by the pandemic is how many elements of America’s healthcare infrastructure are simply not fit for purpose in our changing environment.
Recently, for example, the Norwood Hospital in Massachusetts flooded after a violent storm hit the area. In contrast, architects at Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital on the Boston riverfront, fewer than 20 miles away, revised their initial plans to raise the ground floor by several feet, introducing landscaped berms designed to protect the hospital from rising seas and storm surges. When Hurricane Sandy swept through during construction, the building stayed dry. In Houston, meanwhile, a hospital hit by repeated flooding has raised underground generators and switching gear as well as installing submarine doors—steel barriers with rubber seals – to protect buildings. Seizing on and scaling up lighthouse projects such as these would provide solid foundations for climate-proofing communities across the nation.
America doesn’t need a sticking plaster for the nation’s infrastructure; it needs a plan to build back stronger to cope with the extreme weather events—heatwaves, floods, fires, hurricanes—that will pound the U.S. with greater frequency. Innovation and the vision to take a different path are crucial. At the moment, for example, if a house is flooded or a road washed away, Americans simply rebuild. According to analysis of insurance data by the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC), one home in Batchelor, La., has flooded 40 times over the past four decades, receiving $428,379 in insurance payouts. A different approach is needed where the US acts to escape this rut.
The need for this stimulus package and new infrastructure is a rare subject of bipartisan support, and there is much common ground between Democrats and Republicans on which to build. This must not be thrown away. President Trump wants to make America great again, but the smart way of doing this is to plan and prosper rather than delay and pay.
Our response to coronavirus is inextricably linked to our response to climate change and building a greener and better future for all addresses both. A $2 trillion windfall doesn’t materialize every day. It should not be wasted in trying to rebuild the past when a better future is within reach.
Ban Ki-moon is the former secretary-general of the United Nations and chair of the Global Center on Adaptation, an organization that works with the public and private sectors to collaborate on a climate-resilient future. Patrick Verkooijen is CEO of the Global Center on Adaptation.


fortune--2020-07-28--HSBC tried to defend itself in China. Internet censors erased the post

Sierra Club ’ s John Muir apology shows that racism in the outdoors was built by design

On Friday, China’s largest state-run newspaper, the People’s Daily, accused HSBC, the London-based bank, of conspiring with U.S. authorities to build a case against Huawei, the Chinese telecom equipment giant.
On Saturday, HSBC defended itself against the allegations via the company’s public account on WeChat, a ubiquitous Chinese messaging platform. By Monday, however, censors had deleted the post, replacing it with a notice that it had violated China’s Internet regulations.
HSBC has long enjoyed deep ties to China, yet the recent allegations from pro-Beijing press and the run-in with Internet censors support a growing body of evidence that the bank is finding it increasingly difficult to operate there.
Under pressure
The People’s Daily accusation against HSBC is related to Huawei and the case of Meng Wanzhou, Huawei’s chief financial officer and daughter of Huawei CEO Ren Zhengfei.
In December 2018, Canadian authorities arrested Meng in Vancouver at the request of the U.S. Department of Justice for allegedly helping Huawei secretly conduct business in Iran and violating U.S. sanctions. Huawei and Meng have denied the allegations, and Meng remains under house arrest in Canada while fighting extradition charges to the U.S.
In an article published on Friday, the tabloid claimed that new evidence in court hearings showed that HSBC had “maliciously framed” Meng and “fabricated evidence” that led to her arrest in Canada.
Without directly citing the People’s Daily article, HSBC on Saturday posted a statement on its WeChat account in China denying the allegations that it had conspired with the U.S. government to set up Meng.
The bank said that while it had cooperated with the DOJ and handed over information about its dealings with Huawei, the bank simply presented “objective facts” to abide by American laws.
“HSBC does not have any hostility towards Huawei and did not ‘frame’ Huawei,” the post said. “HSBC did not ‘fabricate’ evidence or ‘hide’ facts. And HSBC would never distort the facts or seek to harm any of our clients for our own gain.”
“Violating” the rules
Censors appear to have removed HSBC’s statement. The link for the post now takes users to a page that says that the post “violated regulations” and cannot be viewed. The redirect does not specify which regulation the post violated, but it links to the Cyberspace Administration of China’s rules for public accounts in China.
Included in the 18 provisions are the stipulations that WeChat accounts must promote “core socialist values,” reflect “correct public opinion orientation,” and safeguard national interests.
HSBC did not respond to a request for comment. A representative for WeChat said the company had “no comment” on the matter.
China’s online censors monitor mainland social media—which the government uses to shape public opinion—and expunge dissenting or otherwise objectionable posts. China has the most sophisticated Internet controls in the world, with an apparatus to block foreign websites like Facebook, Google, and Twitter, as well as tools to monitor and control online discussions and behaviors on Chinese platforms.
Posts by multinational corporations usually are mundane and seldom catch censors’ attention, says King-wa Fu, a media studies professor at the University of Hong Kong who runs a project called WeChatScope that tracks censorship of public WeChat accounts. Such firms “practice strict self-censorship on WeChat to avoid drawing the ire of the Chinese authorities,” said Charlie Smith, who oversees censorship tracking platform Greatfire.com and goes by a pseudonym.
HSBC’s post, meanwhile, pushed the boundaries of corporate WeChat decorum by directly challenging the official Chinese narrative on a touchy subject—and the censors responded in kind.
Chinese authorities see Meng’s arrest as a direct affront to the central government, with Chinese media often depicting her as a heroic victim of American bullying.
In 2018, Fu’s WeChatscope tracked 4,000 public WeChat accounts that disseminated daily news posts. Of the 1.04 million posts by such accounts that year, censors blocked roughly 11,000. The story of Meng’s arrest in Canada was one of the most-scrubbed topics.
The recent escalations in Meng’s case, as well as the rising tensions between the U.S. and China, likely caused censors to erase HSBC’s post, Fu said, though the ambiguous language of the censorship notice makes it difficult to discern a motive. Government censors, an Internet service provider, and WeChat itself all have the capability to remove content, he said.
Trouble in Hong Kong
HSBC’s Huawei post is not the first bank missive on WeChat to stir controversy, though earlier posts didn’t attract censors.
On June 3, HSBC shared a photo on WeChat of HSBC Asia-Pacific chief executive Peter Wong signing a petition in support of Beijing’s new national security law in Hong Kong. At the time of the post, pro-Beijing officials were pressing businesses in Hong Kong to back the law, even as foreign governments criticized it for eroding freedoms in Hong Kong.
Despite Wong’s pledge of allegiance, his support for the law failed to quell nationalistic critics in China. Days after Wong signed the petition, the state-run tabloid the Global Times said HSBC still had a “lingering ambiguous attitude” toward the law and remained vulnerable to Chinese government “reprisals.” On June 9, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo decried Wong’s “show of fealty” to Beijing, adding China’s central government was engaged in “coercive bullying tactics” to line up support from firms like HSBC.
In addition to complying with the national security law, HSBC is now one of many banks in Hong Kong grappling with potential sanctions from the U.S. government. On July 14, U.S. President Donald Trump signed the Hong Kong Autonomy Act, which targets individuals involved in the erosion of Hong Kong’s autonomy and the financial institutions that serve them. For HSBC, complying with the sanctions in Hong Kong may also mean violating the new national security law.
The London-based bank has longstanding ties to Hong Kong and sees itself as an East-West conduit. But rather than bridging the chasm, HSBC appears to be flailing in the middle, unable to please either side.


fortune--2020-07-28--Americans remain politically divided on wearing a mask

Good afternoon, readers.
Wearing masks has become a political flashpoint during the coronavirus pandemic. It’s mystified and dismayed public health experts I’ve spoken with, especially as cases continue to surge across the country, but that’s where we are.
A new NBC/SurveyMonkey poll shows that Republicans and Democrats are heavily divided on mandatory mask requirements by local governments or even private facilities. And that’s despite the fact that more than 40% of some 45,000 people surveyed in the poll are “very worried” the coronavirus will have a negative impact on their household finances and 37% are very worried that someone in their own family will be exposed to the coronavirus.
“97 percent of Democrats and those who lean Democratic say they wear masks at least most of the time when they leave their homes and might be in contact with others,” according to NBC. That number falls to 70 percent of Republicans or those who say they lean Republican in the poll.
It’s encouraging that a large majority of both parties are still being cautious about wearing masks, which public health officials and medical experts have stressed time and time again is one of the most effective ways of containing this virus’ spread. But that’s still a major gap that, unfortunately, appears to stem from mixed messaging and partisan politics.
I spoke with one leading expert from the Cleveland Clinic just this morning about how a refusal to wear masks is only exacerbating other problems down the COVID-19 supply chain. A pandemic is an especially unfortunate time for grandstanding and politicking.
Read on for the day’s news.
Sy Mukherjee
sayak.mukherjee@fortune.com
@the_sy_guy
DIGITAL HEALTH
Mayo Clinic expands its telehealth footprint. The Mayo Clinic has touted digital health and telemedicine. And its interest in the space just keeps growing. As many other big-name providers have turned to virtual medicine during the COVID pandemic, the Mayo Clinic is now attempting to connect urban and rural patients with its expansive health system. That includes people who may not be able to get access to specialists at the current moment. (Healthcare IT News)
INDICATIONS
California's "pay for delay" law remains in place (for now). A California law prohibiting so-called "pay for delay" arrangements between brand name and generic drug makers continues to stand following a federal appellate court ruling. The generic drug industry has claimed that the law is unconstitutional and harms generic drug makers; the court disagreed. Under pay-for-delay, brand name pharmaceuticals can can pay generic rivals to keep their cheaper alternatives off the market. (Reuters)
THE BIG PICTURE
Top pharma execs spurn White House visit. Following a slew of executive orders on drug prices issued by President Donald Trump last week, Big Pharma CEOs declined to attend a planned meeting at the White House on Tuesday, Politico reports. The biopharma industry's biggest lobbying groups, PhRMA and BIO, painted the discussions as a distraction while slamming the recent executive order as harmful to drug makers. (Politico)
REQUIRED READING
Herd immunity works—if you don't care how many people die, by Laurie Garrett and John Moore
SAP says goodbye to Qualtrics, by Michal Lev-Ram
How to celebrate milestones while social distancing, by Brooke Henderson
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fortune--2020-07-28--Sierra Club’s John Muir apology shows that racism in the outdoors was built by design

We must, I’m afraid, reclassify John Muir.
He seemed the safe one, the nineteenth century naturalist who helped stoke a deep, American love for the outdoors and the will to preserve the wild spaces of a colonialist nation. Nice guy. Cool jacket. Big beard. A walking Successory poster. Just the mention of his name conjured, for many, sepia toned images of a simpler time along with your basic Ken Burns soundtrack.
The truth is more complicated, and the Sierra Club has now felt compelled to acknowledge their co-founder’s problematic past.
“The Sierra Club is a 128-year-old organization with a complex history, some of which has caused significant and immeasurable harm,” the environmental group said in an article titled “Pulling Down Our Monuments.” On the subject of John Muir, they were direct. “He made derogatory comments about Black people and Indigenous peoples that drew on deeply harmful racist stereotypes, though his views evolved later in his life. As the most iconic figure in Sierra Club history, Muir’s words and actions carry an especially heavy weight. They continue to hurt and alienate Indigenous people and people of color who come into contact with the Sierra Club.”
But the story of the Sierra Club gets worse before it gets better:
“Other early Sierra Club members and leaders — like Joseph LeConte and David Starr Jordan — were vocal advocates for white supremacy and its pseudo-scientific arm, eugenics. Jordan, for example, served on the board of directors during Muir’s presidency. A “kingpin”of the eugenics movement, he pushed for forced-sterilization laws and programs that deprived tens of thousands of women of their right to bear children — mostly Black, Latinx, Indigenous, and poor women, and those living with disabilities and mental illness. He cofounded the Human Betterment Foundation, whose research and model laws were used to create Nazi Germany’s eugenics legislation.”
It should come as no surprise, then, that membership in the club was white—by design—until the 1960s.
RaceAhead has covered the white supremacist convictions of the early conservationists in detail—and why, as an avid fly-fisherperson, I never encounter any people of color on any river, in any capacity. Yes, Muir evolved. Decent people often do when faced with the error of their ways. But acknowledging the “complex history” of the Sierra Club is an opportunity to have important conversations about how the same ideas that preserved the outdoors for the benefit of white people are baked into the foundations of every part of American life.
So, while we’re pulling down the monuments, take a moment to go outside in nature and refresh you spirit, if you can. That’s my plan for the week. Think of it as a radical act of democracy.
Ellen McGirt
@ellmcgirt
Ellen.McGirt@fortune.com
On point
Google ad portal equates Black, Latina, Asian girls with porn If you want to target your Google ads to a certain demographic, Google’s Keywords Planner is designed to help you choose keywords to help improve your search results. However, if you query “Black girls,” “Latina girls,” and “Asian Girls,” most of the terms are pornographic, reports The Markup. Search for “white girls” and “white boys,” and there are no suggested terms. This is the remnant of a larger issue revealed in 2012 by UCLA professor Safiya Noble, who found that Google searches for “Black girls” yielded results linked to porn sites. Click through for more on the ad portal, and the racist history of search.
The Markup
State insurance regulators to analyze car insurance rates for racial bias People have been complaining about this problem for decades, begins personal finance expert Penny Wang, never one to bury the lede. Now, the National Association of Insurance Commissioners, the body that oversees state insurance regulators, are planning to analyze how insurers set premiums and the way they use credit scores, education, and occupation in their assessments. "Within the NAIC, we're seeing unprecedented discussions between our members and stakeholders on race and its role in the design and pricing of insurance products," the organization’s president told Wang in a statement. Oh! And this ProPublica story from 2017 shows that insurers in California, Texas, Illinois, and Missouri were charging Black and brown neighborhoods some 30% more than white ones with the same level of risk assessment.
Consumer Reports
Nike announces a new chief talent and diversity officer in a bid to improve diversity in senior ranks Felicia Mayo joined Nike last year from Tesla, and is now set to lead a newly formed team as chief talent, diversity and culture officer. She will be replacing Kellie Leonard, who was appointed diversity chief in April 2018 after a series of high profile complaints about the company’s culture. The move is part of a broader restructuring by Nike’s still newish CEO, John Donahue. Mayo is the real deal; I interviewed her in 2018 at Fortune’s Most Powerful Women conference.
Wall Street Journal
There are still people alive whose parents were enslaved It wasn’t that long ago, and Daniel Smith, now 88, remembers the stories his father told him about being born into slavery in Virginia, and his grim life in the years after the Civil War. Smith is his own witness to history, a medic in the Korean War, a march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge as a foot soldier for voting rights, as a federal worker. So, what’s it mean to be a living reminder of the country’s evil past? “Quite frankly, I’ve just grown up and been busy, and I’ve never thought much about it,” Smith said. And yet, now, when he thinks about it, it seems the country is “almost to the point where [slavery] could happen again.”
Washington Post
On background
Should business leaders support reparations? Michael Gee, business strategist and diversity expert says yes. As a Black business leader, be benefitted from affirmative action in the 1970s, then watched diversity initiatives come and go. “After all that, we’re left with a lopsided world where white people have some 10-20 times the net worth of Black people and we are severely underrepresented in white collar jobs in general,” he says. He offers a reading list for the skeptical or underinformed, which starts with “Why We Need Reparations for Black Americans,” from the Brookings Institute, published this spring. His big takeaway: Even without federal action, reparative acts are happening – such as Netflix’s investment in Black-owned banks.
HBR
Being Black on the Appalachian Trail In light of Muir’s reclassification, I thought I’d re-up this gorgeous piece from Rahawa Haile who is Black —from Miami by way of Eritrea —“but not Black-Black,” a friendly white man is quick to point out to her at a popular layover on the Appalachian Trail. “Blacks don’t hike.” And so begins her extraordinary I-hiked-the-Appalachian-Trail-alone tale. “Heading north from Springer Mountain in Georgia, the Appalachian Trail class of 2017 would have to walk 670 miles before reaching the first county that did not vote for Donald Trump,” she writes. Cold, wet, achy, and awed, she reconciles the grandeur of nature and the smallness of those who profit from it. “It will be several months before I realize that most AT hikers in 2016 are unaware of the clear division that exists between what hikers of color experience on the trail (generally positive) and in town (not so much).” A must read, if only for the resplendent prose.
Outside Magazine
Remembering Mimi Jones She was just 17-years- old when a photo of her went the 1964 version of viral: Her face contorted in fear as a motel owner dumped acid in the Florida public pool she was swimming in to protest segregation. “The water bubbled up like a volcano right in front of my face,” she told the Boston Globe in 2017. The young activist died recently, at 73, an underacknowledged foot soldier and lifelong activist. “I cannot tell you how many times Mimi got arrested,” said her younger sister, Altomease Ford Latting of Birmingham, Ala. Rest in power, Mimi.
Boston Globe
raceAhead is edited by Aric Jenkins.
Today's mood board


fortune--2020-07-28--Jeff Bezos’s ex-wife MacKenzie Scott says she’s donated $1.7 billion to racial equity and other caus

Jeff Bezos’s ex-wife MacKenzie Scott says she’s donated $1.7 billion to racial equity and other causes

MacKenzie Scott—the writer and ex-wife of Jeff Bezos, now going by her middle name—said in a Medium post on Tuesday that she has donated $1.7 billion to charitable causes over the past year.
After her divorce in 2019, Scott signed the Giving Pledge, a commitment among the wealthy to give away a significant portion of their money over their lifetimes. Scott’s promise was to distribute at least half of her approximately $35 billion fortune.
Along with the announcement of the $1.7 billion in donations, Scott offered a frank reflection on the societal systems that have allowed her to accrue such wealth; she is the world’s second-richest woman, according to Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index.
“There’s no question in my mind that anyone’s personal wealth is the product of a collective effort, and of social structures which present opportunities to some people, and obstacles to countless others,” she wrote.
She added: “I began work to complete my pledge with the belief that my life had yielded two assets that could be of particular value to others: the money these systems helped deliver to me, and a conviction that people who have experience with inequities are the ones best equipped to design solutions.”
Scott said she decided to share her progress on that commitment in response to the societal upheaval of the past few months.
“Like many, I watched the first half of 2020 with a mixture of heartbreak and horror…My own reflection after recent events revealed a dividend of privilege I’d been overlooking: the attention I can call to organizations and leaders driving change,” she wrote.
Scott—who was known as MacKenzie Bezos until today, when she announced her name change on Twitter—says she has given the majority of the funding so far to racial equity causes, with donations totaling $586.7 million. That category is followed by donations in support of causes related to “economic mobility,” gender equity, public health, and climate change.
She named several specific organizations she has supported, including Black Girls CODE, Futures Without Violence, Movement for Black Lives, National Domestic Workers Alliance, and several historically black colleges and universities, including Morehouse College and Spelman College. She did not specify the sizes of individual gifts or which donations she considered part of which category.
Scott is one of 210 millionaires and billionaires to sign the Giving Pledge. Her cosigners include Bill and Melinda Gates, who started the pledge with Warren Buffett; Steve and Jean Case; Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan; and Sara Blakely. Many of the signers of the pledge are couples. As Jeff Bezos has not signed the pledge, Scott stands out for her decision to promise significant philanthropy over her lifetime after separating her finances from her former husband’s.
Scott said that she developed a team of nonprofit advisers last fall who have helped guide her choice of causes.
“Life will never stop finding fresh ways to expose inequities in our systems; or waking us up to the fact that a civilization this imbalanced is not only unjust, but also unstable,” she wrote. “What fills me with hope is the thought of what will come if each of us reflects on what we can offer.”


fortune--2020-07-28--Uber and Lyft drivers win right to collect unemployment in New York

Uber Technologies Inc. and Lyft Inc. drivers won the right to immediately receive unemployment insurance benefits after a federal judge ruled New York Department of Labor was taking too long to make payments.
U.S. District Judge LaShann DeArcy Hall in Brooklyn on Tuesday cited a backlog of claims by the ride-share drivers who sued the state in May, claiming it was either failing to pay their unemployment benefits or taking months to make them, even while other workers got them in as little as two weeks.
The judge said there had been “an avoidable and inexcusable delay in the payment of unemployment insurance,” to the drivers and directed the state to create a streamlined process for them to apply for unemployment. DeArcy Hall further criticized app-based companies like Uber and Lyft for engaging in “gamesmanship” by arguing the drivers are self-employed and therefore don’t need to broadly report wages and earnings.
DeArcy Hall gave the state a week to create a working group to deal with the backlog. She also gave the Labor Department 45 days to resolve outstanding claims.
The judge said while the state provided evidence showing it tried to obtain wage and earnings information from app-based companies, the evidence also shows the companies “have appealed the vast majority of those decisions — and then abandoned most of those appeals,” causing more delays.
“While the New York Department of Labor may be hamstrung by the conduct of app-based for hire vehicle companies in its effort to obtain wage and earnings data universally, this should not, as it has, result in delays to the prompt payment of unemployment benefits to drivers,” DeArcy Hall said.
Uber gave the New York Department of Labor all the data it requested, company spokesperson Alix Anfang said in a statement.
“Our current employment system is outdated and unfair because it requires that employees get benefits and protections, while independent workers who choose flexible work don’t,” Anfang said. “We will continue to fight for all workers to get financial support — not just those doing a certain type of work.”
The judge also noted the state had argued “it would be imprudent to dedicate resources to providing preliminary relief” and pay the drivers. “To the contrary, it is precisely because of the current economic climate that such immediate relief is demanded,” she said.
A spokesperson for the Department of Labor didn’t immediately return an email seeking comment about the decision.


fortune--2020-07-28--Google’s upcoming Grace Hopper subsea cable will span the Atlantic Ocean

Google’s upcoming Grace Hopper subsea cable will span the Atlantic Ocean, connecting the U.S. to Europe.
The search giant revealed its latest undersea cable on Tuesday, saying in a blog post that the cable will connect New York City to Bude, U.K., and Bilbao, Spain. Google said that it expects the cable, named after acclaimed computer scientist Grace Hopper, to be complete sometime in 2022.
Undersea cable provider Subcom is contracted to build the cable. Subcom has led a number of undersea cable projects, including one cable that links Australia to Oman and another one that connects Virginia Beach to Saint-Hilaire-De-Riez in France, according to the company’s website.
The planned Grace Hopper cable will be Google’s “first-ever route to Spain” and the company’s first investment in a cable that goes to the U.K., vice president of the Google global network Bikash Koley said in the post. Some of Google’s other subsea cable projects include Curie, which connects the U.S. to Chile, and Equiano, which links Portugal to South Africa.
Like other tech giants, including Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft, Google has been investing in massive subsea cable projects as part of its vast cloud-computing data center network. These subsea cable networks help funnel nearly 99% of the world’s Internet traffic and are especially important for companies like Google that provide web services to users all around the world.
But some subsea cable projects are more controversial than others.
The U.S. Justice Department, for instance, is opposing a Google- and Facebook-backed subsea cable project that would connect the U.S. and Hong Kong, citing national security issues. Earlier this summer, a government working committee comprising members of the Justice Department and Homeland Security, among others, said that the cable project should “be rejected entirely if the route includes Hong Kong,” as Fortune previously reported.


fortune--2020-07-28--When will the pandemic end? Not before 2022, ex-U.S. surgeon general warns

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Even if the race for a COVID-19 vaccine has a winner soon, don’t expect the pandemic to end before 2022, a former U.S. surgeon general warned Tuesday.
“If the goal is to return life to some semblance of what it was like pre-pandemic, I don’t see that happening in 2021,” Vivek Murthy, a surgeon general under President Obama, said during a virtual event organized by cruise operator Carnival Corp. and the World Travel & Tourism Council.
More than 160 efforts are underway to develop vaccines for COVID-19, according to the World Health Organization, with about 25 being tested on humans in clinical trails. A handful of vaccines—including those developed by the University of Oxford with AstroZeneca, Moderna Therapeutics with the National Institutes of Health, and several Chinese entities—have advanced to the Phase III stage of being tested on thousands of patients.
But Murthy, who previously led U.S. responses to the Ebola and Zika outbreaks, cautioned that “even in an optimistic scenario, it would likely be closer to mid-2021 that we would see vaccines starting to be distributed at scale.”
That distribution will bring its own challenges, including the need to overcome Americans’ growing anti-vaccine sentiment of recent years and their new skepticism about the vaccines being developed for COVID-19. So even if a final vaccine is 100% effective—“which would be extremely rare,” Murthy pointed out—at least 70% of the population would need to be vaccinated in order to reach “herd immunity” against the coronavirus.
“Is there a chance we could do this all and vaccinate 70% of the population by the end of 2021? I think it would take the best vaccination campaign that we’ve ever assembled in the history of the world to do that,” Murthy said. “Could it be done? Well, there’s a first time for everything.”
It was one of the more bluntly grim timelines offered by public health experts in recent days, as U.S. infections of COVID-19 surge in the face of various city and state efforts to reopen. Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, last week acknowledged that there is “so far essentially no end in sight” to the pandemic and that it would never be fully eradicated.
But he was also slightly more optimistic than Murthy about the speed of a return to normal. “With a combination of good public health measures, a degree of global herd immunity, and a good vaccine, which I do hope and feel cautiously optimistic that we will get…we will get control of this,” Fauci told the TB Alliance during a virtual interview last week. “Whether it’s this year or next year, I’m not certain.”
Murthy’s prediction was probably not welcome news to the hosts of the Global Scientific Summit, where he spoke on Tuesday. The event was put together by the World Travel & Tourism Council (WTTC), a travel industry trade group, and Carnival, a company that’s desperately hoping that the cruise business somehow manages to resume normal operations before 2022.
CEO Arnold Donald said earlier this month that he is confident Carnival can survive “into late next year, even in a zero-revenue scenario.” But his company and its competitors are also mustering panels of public health experts to reassure passengers that it will be safe to board cruise ships long before then. (If, that is, governments allow it. Earlier this month, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention extended its “no sail” order for cruise companies for a second time, barring them from resuming passenger operations in U.S. waters until at least Sept. 30.)
Other travel executives have warned that they expect the pandemic to continue hurting their industry until 2022, or longer. Earlier this month, Delta CEO Ed Bastian warned that “it could be two years or more before we see a sustainable recovery” in air travel.
Murthy and other speakers at Carnival’s virtual event, which was cohosted by Donald and WTTC CEO Gloria Guevara, did not spend much time addressing cruises specifically. Donald ended the program by saying that he had wanted to keep the event to “just science, and not make it promotional for cruise or travel,” but added that many of the scientists who spoke during the event were working with Carnival on its health and safety standards.
“Wear your mask, wash your hands, stay safe, get tested,” he concluded, “and the world will be a better place.”


fortune--2020-07-28--Amid pandemic, top CEOs say digital transformation is accelerating. Where it’s headed? Less clear

In the end, there was really only one question to ask an all-star panel of CEOs assembled for a Fortune CEO Initiative virtual event held Tuesday about leadership in challenging times:
How has the novel coronavirus pandemic affected business?
“Acceleration of the future,” Intel CEO Bob Swan offered, rather succinctly, after silently listening to his peers’ responses. “Clarity of the future? Not so sure.”
Swan joined Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Accenture CEO Julie Sweet, and HP CEO Enrique Lores in an hourlong discussion led by Fortune‘s own chief executive, Alan Murray.
The other tech executives were in strong agreement with Swan. All said corporations—their executives, partners, employees, and shareholders, across all industries—were seeing the pace of change dramatically accelerate, but only some of the CEOs were willing to guess the direction of that change.
“We are in a point of time which is really going to be defining for our lifetime,” said Lores, citing examples in health and education. “We are talking about the future of work, but we’re experiencing it today.” The HP CEO added as way of an example that he has spent “more than 1,000 hours in video conferences in the last three months.”
His peers knowingly chuckled.
Business change comes in many forms. Reflecting on their own companies, the executives described shifts in their supply chains, in the geopolitical landscape, and in the “very personal” (to use Lores’ words) ways individuals are working from homes they share with pets, family members, and furniture not intended for full-time productivity.
“This is the most unprecedented situation,” said Nadella. We’re running a massive experiment at scale.”
The Microsoft CEO took pains to say that he didn’t want to proclaim that the present situation is our collective future: “It’s a little bit too early, I think.” But he did offer three examples of clear change.
The first: How we collaborate. Meetings are transactional, Nadella said; real work happens around them. As white-collar work shifts to virtual spaces, “we’re burning up a lot of the social capital that we all built working together,” he said. We’re able to stay productive because we built social capital working in physical spaces, but there’s more cognitive load in the virtual environment. That needs to be addressed, he said.
The second: How we learn. “Corporations are about learning and knowledge creation,” Nadella said, but the old mechanisms for achieving that are disappearing. Businesses need better ways to upskill and re-skill employees for a new operating environment, he said.
The third: How we achieve well-being. “We just can’t measure productivity in the narrowest way,” Nadella said. According to Microsoft’s own research, most people—especially younger workers—are “burnt out” after 30 minutes on a video call. How do you combat that in a world of back-to-back virtual meetings?
And then there’s the matter of the big picture. “We need to have better measurements” for corporate innovation in this pandemic environment, Nadella added, so as not to lose sight of long-term goals. “You can be productive burning down a backlog,” he said. “But are you creating new?”
Sweet, whose professional services company is focused on helping companies achieve digital transformation, warned that companies are great at acquiring transformational technology but often fail at changing or simplifying how they work in response to it.
“This is the largest behavioral change at one time in history,” she said of the pandemic. “It exposes a lot of the flaws in companies.”
Sweet offered a statistic to underscore her point: Artificial intelligence spend among corporations has accelerated by 60%, but only 3% of executives also invest in employee training for the capability.
“How do we build into this acceleration the ability to be more responsible businesses?” she asked.
Swan said the COVID-19 pandemic, social injustice protests, and changing geopolitical dynamics will continue to influence the trajectory of global business.
“The interconnect of these three things is changing virtually everything,” the Intel chief said. “At the most simple level, it’s going to accelerate the role that the CEO plays…to be in the here and now.”


fortune--2020-07-28--Quibi actually got 10 Emmy nominations—and other surprises

The Emmy Award nominations announced Tuesday included some snubs and surprises.
The force is strong with this one
“The Mandalorian” — maybe thanks to Baby Yoda — snagged a surprising 15 nominations, mostly technical nods for things like production design, costumes, stunts, makeup and cinematography.
But it also earned Disney+ a nod for guest actor in a drama series for Giancarlo Esposito and a spot in the best drama race. It had gotten no nominations at the Golden Globes.
“The Mandalorian” stars Pedro Pascal as the mysterious title character, navigating his way through the Star Wars galaxy. The show has helped boost Disney and proven that there is a lot more life in the Star Wars franchise outside of the Skywalker Saga.
One of the hit characters from the show resembles a baby version of Yoda. A second season for “The Mandalorian” is coming in October
Yes, somebody is watching
HBO’s “Watchmen,” an adaptation of one of the most acclaimed graphic novels of all time, was ignored by the Golden Globe voters but not by the Emmys.
The dark superhero tale earned a leading 26 nominations, including for cinematography, costumes, original music, three for directing and three for editing.
Jeremy Irons and Regina King got lead actor nods, while Yahya Abdul-Mateen, Jovan Adepo, Jean Smart and Louis Gossett Jr. earned supporting nods. “Watchmen” was also nominated for outstanding limited series.
The show follows a group of masked vigilantes with no real superpowers and addresses race relations in a way that proved to be extremely timely.
Despite glowing reviews from critics, HBO’s adaptation proved to be divisive among some comic book fans. Some disdainful viewers were frustrated that showrunner Damon Lindelof’s “Watchmen” was too political.
Plenty of love for bite-sized platform
Quibi, the mobile phone-only platform that offers installments of movies and TV shows in 10 minutes or less, found itself long on Emmy admiration.
The platform was launched at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic and has endured a rocky start, with fewer subscribers than hoped. The company submitted more than a dozen shows for Emmy consideration and got a healthy 10 nods, mostly in the short form comedy or drama categories.
Laurence Fishburne, Jasmine Cephas Jone and Stephan James all got nominations for the police drama “#FreeRayshawn,” while Christoph Waltz got a nod for “Most Dangerous Game” and Corey Hawkins for “Survive.”
Anna Kendrick earned a nomination for “Dummy,” Kaitlin Olson for “Flipped” and Kerri Kenney-Silver for a reboot of “Reno 911!” In addition, “Most Dangerous Game” and “Reno 911!” also earned outstanding short form comedy or drama nods. Quibi earned as many nominations as Comedy Central and BBC America.
That represents a success for Quibi’s creators Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman, who have been pushing for the platform to finally get some buzz and recognition. In its first year, that’s no small accomplishment.
‘Devs’ brush-off
Quantum mechanics is not often the subject of a TV series, and Emmy voters chose to largely ignore the cerebral FX series “Devs.”
The show starring Nick Offerman earned only four nominations, including for sound editing, special visual effects, cinematography and sound mixing.
Alex Garland, who wrote and directed each episode, created an absorbing meditation on the very essence of human existence and free will, all hidden in an elegant techno-thriller. But it got no cheers in the best limited series category.
Fans of Garland’s breakthrough film “Ex Machina” found familiar stylish fingerprints: Unrushed storytelling, cool menace, elegant doses of philosophy, an affinity with darkness and stillness, profound musical choices and striking visual effects. But some critics were put off by its pretense and air of detachment.
Airing Jordan
Michael Jordan proved his competitive pull once more as the ESPN documentary “The Last Dance” earned three Emmy nominations.
The documentary won nominations for outstanding documentary, documentary directing and editing.
The 10-part docuseries, airing on ESPN in the United States and on Netflix elsewhere, details the 1998 Bulls’ season, Jordan’s final year with the team and the organization’s last championship.
It was ESPN’s most watched documentary ever. The series was also a hit on social media. It was the trending topic on Twitter for five straight Sundays. The network moved up the docuseries to April from June in order to fill the void left after most sports were shut down in the face of the coronavirus pandemic.
Low-key ‘Homeland’ send-off
“Homeland” ended its eight-season run on Showtime this April, but the Emmys didn’t give it much of a goodbye gift.
The show earned just one nomination — for directing. Star Claire Danes will not win a third Emmy in her role as CIA analyst Carrie Mathison, nor will Mandy Patinkin get a statuette for his Saul Berenson.
“Homeland” over its run has won eight Emmy awards — for outstanding drama series, writing, editing and casting, among the trophies. Danes won back-to-back awards for best actress in a drama from 2012-13 and co-star Damian Lewis won once.
But after debuting with such a splash in its first few seasons, the show hasn’t won an Emmy since 2013, despite getting plenty of nominations since then. Emmy voters largely shrugged this time and let Danes’ Carrie Mathison drift into the Russian sunset.
Another show that used to be red-hot with Emmy voters and also said goodbye is ABC’s “Modern Family,” with five record-tying best comedy series Emmys over 11 seasons. On Tuesday, its last season got just a nod for sound mixing, directing and a posthumous nomination for Fred Willard, who played Frank Dunphy.