fortune--2020-08-11--Rent and mortgage relief: How to find out if you’re eligible for new programs in your area

As the coronavirus pandemic continues to hamper the U.S. economy, more local governments across the country are rolling out relief programs designed to help struggling Americans pay their rent and mortgage.
Los Angeles County is set to launch a new $100 million relief fund next week that will target low-income residents in need of rent assistance. Up to 9,000 households in LA County will receive aid via a lottery that will be held at the end of a two-week application period beginning Aug. 17, with residents eligible to receive up to $10,000 depending on their income level.
In Illinois, Gov. J.B. Pritzker announced the launch of two new programs on Monday meant to help both lower-income renters and homeowners struggling to make ends meet. The state’s $150 million Rental Assistance Program, which opened for applications this week, will provide one-time grants of up to $5,000 for renters in need of assistance, with up to 30,000 tenants expected to receive help. Illinois will also open applications for another $150 million program later this month that will assist up to 10,000 struggling homeowners, who will be eligible to receive grants of up to $15,000.
The initiatives in both Los Angeles and Illinois are open specifically to those experiencing economic hardship due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The grants provided by those local and state governments will be paid directly to landlords on behalf of their tenants (or to mortgage servicers on behalf of homeowners, in the case of Illinois’ mortgage assistance program), and will cover missed payments dating back to March 1.
The programs are made possible through the CARES Act, the $2.2 trillion coronavirus aid package passed by Congress in March. In addition to including mortgage forbearance provisions and an eviction moratorium for those living in federally-backed rental housing, the bill also allocated billions of dollars to local and state governments for aid programs of their own.
With Congress still deadlocked over a followup measure to the CARES Act, many local, state, and federal housing moratoriums have either expired or are due to expire in the coming weeks and months. As such, it’s been left to leaders at the state and local levels to roll out measures assisting Americans who are still suffering from the pandemic’s economic consequences.
Beyond the initiatives in Los Angeles and Illinois, the National Low Income Housing Coalition has developed an interactive, searchable database of state and local rental assistance programs across the country.


fortune--2020-08-11--After protracted VP search, Joe Biden goes with ‘fearless fighter’ Kamala Harris

Everything we know so far about the second round of stimulus checks

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Joe Biden has picked California senator Kamala Harris, a former candidate for the democratic presidential nomination, to run alongside him as vice president in his campaign for the Oval Office this November. If elected, Harris would be the first woman and first person of color to serve in the role.
“I have the great honor to announce that I’ve picked Kamala Harris — a fearless fighter for the little guy, and one of the country’s finest public servants — as my running mate,” Biden tweeted Tuesday afternoon.
Harris, the daughter of an Indian-born mother and Jamaican-born father, previously served as the first woman, first Black person, and first Asian attorney general of California. While serving in the Senate, she became known for her hard-line, attention-grabbing form of questioning where she often took witnesses to task, especially during investigations into Russia’s meddling in the 2016 presidential elections.
Harris, 55, who is also the first graduate of a historically black college to potentially hold the position, will work to bring racial, gender, and age diversity to Biden’s campaign. Biden wrote on Twitter that he first came to know Harris when she worked with his late son, Beau, as California’s attorney general, a position she held between 2010 and 2016. “I watched as they took on the big banks, lifted up working people, and protected women and kids from abuse. I was proud then, and I’m proud now to have her as my partner in this campaign,” he wrote.
“This is a historic moment. We’ve only had a woman nominated three times in the country’s history. This is the very first time we’ve seen a woman of color nominated to be on the presidential ticket,” Tina Tchen, CEO of Time’s Up told Fortune. “That’s a moment worth celebrating no matter what your party affiliation.”
As a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Harris co-sponsored the first bill to make lynching a federal crime in 2018. She also worked this spring to push police reform legislation in the wake of the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor.
But her no-nonsense views have also stirred controversy. As attorney general, she jailed more than 1,500 people for marijuana-related charges. NORML executive director Erik Altieri told Rolling Stone that her history on drug reform has been “problematic,” and her “record is not one anyone would qualify as progressive, particularly when it comes to marijuana.” She has reversed her stance and now supports progressive marijuana policy.
Harris also championed a state-wide truancy law that punished and sometimes jailed the parents of habitually truant schoolchildren. She later expressed regret over the policy.
During the presidential debates, Harris and Biden butted heads over school busing policy in a moment that went viral and brought national attention to Harris’ campaign. Harris said that Biden’s work with segregationist senators like James O. Eastland of Mississippi and Herman E. Talmadge of Georgia was “hurtful.”
“It was not only that, but you also worked with them to oppose busing,” Harris said. “And you know, there was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools, and she was bused to school every day. And that little girl was me.”
The pair have since publicly made amends.
The Trump administration has already launched an attack against Harris with an ad calling her “phony,” among other names. In a statement, RNC chairwoman Ronna McDaniel said that Harris had “extreme” positions “from raising taxes to abolishing private health insurance to comparing law enforcement officials to the KKK.”
“Senator Harris and every woman running for political office are going to face the racist and sexist attacks that have marked women candidates forever,” Tchen said. “These attacks play into the trope that women don’t belong here, and they’re pretending to be leaders. Using this kind of imagery that suggests that women aren’t serious or ready for the job in some fashion is sexist and couldn’t be further from the truth.”
Earlier this month, reports claimed that Biden insiders believed Harris was too “ambitious” for the job, another disproven claim. Numerous studies find that voters are fine with ambitious women, according to Ana Catalano Weeks, a University of Bath comparative politics professor and coauthor of the July paper “Ambitious Women: Gender and Voter Perceptions of Candidate Ambition.”
Harris, meanwhile, has frequently worked with her Republican colleagues in the Senate on an election security bill and a workplace harassment bill. Republican senator Lindsey Graham said of her in May: “I know her. I didn’t like what she did in the Kavanaugh hearings by any stretch of the imagination. But she’s hard-nosed. She’s smart. She’s tough.”
The search for Biden’s vice president has been drawn out and closely watched. In March, during the Democratic primary debates, the former vice president promised that he would choose a woman as his second in command. “There are a number of women who are qualified to be president tomorrow,” he said. “I would pick a woman to be vice president.” In the following months, speculation ran rampant. Names like Harris, Elizabeth Warren, Amy Klobuchar, and Tammy Duckworth were floated as the former vice president’s shortlist grew longer.
But political and civil unrest reignited after the killing of George Floyd by a white police officer and changed the dichotomy of the decision-making process. Klobuchar, a white woman presiding over Floyd’s state of Minnesota, withdrew herself from consideration, and calls for a woman of color to fill the slot grew stronger. A new list of names, like former chair of the Black Congressional Congress representative Barbara Lee, Atlanta mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, and former United States ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice, were added to the mix.
“My warmest congratulations to Kamala Harris,” Rice, who was thought to be a top pick, tweeted Tuesday. “I am confident Biden-Harris will prove to be a winning ticket. I will do my utmost to help them win and govern.”
Biden felt the pressure mounting to pick a Black woman as his vice president as a group of activists and operatives wrote two open letters to the former vice president last week and on Monday where they said he would need strong Black turnout in swing states like Florida, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania to win his election.
“He better pick a Black woman,” Virgie Rollins, chair of the Democratic National Committee Black Caucus, told Politico Tuesday.
Harris is expected to speak at the Democratic National Convention next week.


fortune--2020-08-11--How HBO—the treatment, not the TV network—could help doctors fight COVID-19

In a world full of acronyms—NASA, scuba, and, yes, COVID, among others—it may seem imponderable that one of the most well-known has gone largely unmentioned during discussions of the novel coronavirus. I mean, how could HBO get left behind?
The answer is both complicated and promising. But at its heart is this: As it pertains to the virus, HBO is most certainly not something you can find with your remote.
Rather, we’re talking about the acronym for a treatment that we’ve used for nearly a century to address various maladies: hyperbaric oxygen, or HBO in the medical shorthand. And although the research is still young, the early results from HBO’s use on COVID-19 patients range from encouraging to surprisingly strong.
Despite this, we’ve heard very little about hyperbaric oxygen and its apparent ability to help patients fight some of the virus’s effects. I review volumes of medical literature each week, and even I was surprised to discover how little there was on this topic until it appeared in a physician chat group recently.
A little about the basics: During HBO treatment, a patient is placed in a sealed single- or multi-person chamber, where high levels of oxygen are delivered to the lungs, and then absorbed into the bloodstream under pressure. This is very similar to what happens when a scuba diver breathes oxygen from a tank at depth—more oxygen enters the tissues. And HBO has been found over the years to advance healing and successfully treat a variety of conditions, including burns, soft-tissue infections, and chronic wounds. It has a long track record of safety.
So what’s the COVID connection? As we know, patients with coronavirus often develop pneumonia or respiratory issues, and in severe cases oxygen levels can plummet, sometimes precipitously. Rather than place patients on a ventilator, where mortality rates can be quite high, one option may be to employ HBO therapy earlier in the patient’s course, in hope of improving their oxygenation enough to avoid mechanical ventilation altogether.
There are likely additional benefits. In both animal and human studies, HBO has been shown to reduce inflammation and inhibit cytokine synthesis, which could prove critical if it helps to mitigate the deadly cytokine storm of the immune system that can cause multi-organ injury in some COVID-19 patients.
Because the Food and Drug Administration has not granted emergency authorization for HBO treatment in COVID-19, some physicians are bravely using the chambers “off-label” to treat small numbers of patients—and, anecdotally at least, they appear to be having some success. At the Christus Shreveport-Bossier Health System, more than 20 moderately or severely ill patients underwent HBO therapy, and the majority of them went home with good outcomes. “Our medical staff embraced this, and we haven’t looked back,” said Dr. Susan Kemp, medical director of the Christus Hyperbaric and Wound Care Center. “The patients all tell me they don’t feel like they have to work to breathe in the chamber. They don’t want to get out!” Kemp added that HBO is not a stand-alone therapy, “so we are being purposeful in patient selection for those who we feel are not responding to other treatments.”
Published studies in Wuhan, China, and at Opelousas General Health System in Louisiana also reported very promising results, with five critically ill patients treated in each case, all of whom experienced improvements by multiple criteria. In the largest study, to be published this month by the Undersea and Hyperbaric Medical Society, doctors at NYU Winthrop Hospital gave 20 patients (aged 30 to 79) a maximum of five HBO treatments, then compared them to similar patients who did not receive such treatments. In follow-ups with the HBO group, only one-third as many needed a ventilator, less than half as many died, and fewer remained hospitalized compared to the control group. These are astounding results.
“It’s possible that hyperbaric oxygen therapy could cut the mortality of COVID-19 by more than half,” coauthor Dr. David Lee told me in an email exchange. “But our study was small, and funding is needed for a larger, multicenter randomized clinical trial.”
I second that—and the sooner the better. Still, we’ve seen significant headlines generated by other possible COVID treatments that had far less going for them. Why has HBO attracted so little attention?
One reason may be that not too many hospitals possess HBO “dive chambers,” as they’re called, where they can treat patients emergently; only about 130 of the 1,400 hyperbaric centers in the U.S have these capabilities. This also is a labor-intensive process that requires transporting sick people back and forth from an ICU to a chamber multiple times for treatment. Infection control certainly may be a concern.
But don’t discount another possibility: This therapy has nothing to do with Big Pharma, which funds and drives most of the research and treatment in medicine—and dominates the news cycles and mass-media advertising. HBO therapy is really just heavy-duty oxygen treatment; there are no drugs involved, so the pharmaceutical industry doesn’t profit. Without Big Pharma’s support, securing attention and funding for HBO trials can be a real challenge.
If it were me lying sick with COVID-19, I would choose HBO treatments, with their long history of safety, over a mechanical ventilator. Still, with the limited data we have, we cannot draw broad medical conclusions. As Dr. Davut Savaser, hyperbaric and emergency physician at UC San Diego Health, observed, “We must rely on producing a gold standard of randomized control trials that will definitively demonstrate a benefit that we can hang our stethoscopes on.”
Amen. In the meantime, keep an eye on the acronym you didn’t see coming. It could be HBO to the rescue.
Carolyn Barber is a 25-year emergency department physician, cofounder of the homeless work program Wheels of Change, and a nationally published author.


fortune--2020-08-11--Microsoft just delayed Halo Infinite, but plans to release Xbox Series X in November

The release of Halo Infinite, the hotly anticipated game for Microsoft’s upcoming Xbox Series X video game console, has been delayed to 2021.
The first-person alien shooter was to be released alongside Microsoft’s Xbox video game console during the holiday season.
But on Tuesday, Microsoft said that the Xbox Series X console would debut in November while the latest iteration of its flagship Halo series would be delayed “to ensure the team has adequate time to deliver a Halo game experience that meets our vision.”
Chris Lee, head of the studio behind Halo Infinite, cited “ongoing COVID-related impacts” as contributing to “development challenges” affecting the game’s launch. Halo Infinite is being developed by 343 Industries, one of several Microsoft-owned video game studios.
“I want to acknowledge the hard work from our team at 343 Industries, who have remained committed to making a great game and finding solutions to development challenges.” Lee wrote in a blog post. “However, it is not sustainable for the well-being of our team or the overall success of the game to ship it this holiday.”
Just a few weeks ago, Microsoft was promoting Halo Infinite as a lead video game title exclusive to Microsoft, meaning that people will be unable to play the new Halo on competing video game consoles like Sony’s upcoming PlayStation 5 or Nintendo’s Switch.
The delay of Halo Infinite is a big blow to Microsoft because it’s one of company’s most popular video game titles, and analysts had expected to the game to entice people to buy the new Xbox console. The Halo franchise is to Microsoft as the Mario video game franchise is to Nintendo.
But the repercussions of the coronavirus pandemic have affected many video game studios, leading to video game delays at a time when people are stuck at home looking for ways to entertain themselves.
For instance, Paradox Interactive said that it would delay its Vampire: The Masquerade—Bloodlines 2 role-playing game to 2021 instead of 2020. InXile game studio said in the spring that it would delay its postapocalyptic game Wasteland 3 until Aug. 28 instead of May 19 because of the challenges of its employees working from home.
Sony’s Naughty Dog video game studio delayed the release of its The Last of Us Part II adventure game from May 29 to June 19.


fortune--2020-08-11--Joe Biden has picked a running mate—and the announcement could come today

Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden has picked his running mate and informed his top advisers, with an announcement possible as early as Tuesday, according to two people familiar with the process.
Biden was expected to announce his selection this week and he finished his interviews in the last few days.
The announcement will be followed by a grassroots fundraiser with Biden and his vice presidential candidate. There will also likely be an in-person event with Biden and the pick, as advance staff are setting up at the Hotel DuPont in Wilmington.
Leading contenders for the vice presidential nod include California Senator Kamala Harris, former National Security Adviser Susan Rice, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, California Representative Karen Bass, Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren and Illinois Senator Tammy Duckworth.
Biden promised in early spring that he would pick a woman. Since the racial justice protests started in June, he has been under pressure to pick a Black woman, which helped propel Harris and Rice toward the top of the list in addition to their other qualifications.
Earlier Tuesday, the Biden campaign announced a team of aides who will staff his eventual running mate as he prepares to announce his selection of a vice presidential nominee. The list includes longtime Biden insiders, veterans of former President Barack Obama’s White House and more recent campaign hires.
Even before the pick was announced, the Biden campaign is rebutting attacks from President Donald Trump and his allies.
“The Trump campaign has already discredited their attacks before we’re even out of the gate by announcing that regardless of who Joe Biden nominates, they’ll strain to depict the VP candidate as ‘radical’ — just like they’ve tried and failed to do with Biden himself for months. In other words, they’ve flat out admitted they will lie.”


fortune--2020-08-11--Kroger launches an online marketplace to better fight Amazon and Walmart

The online grocery wars are about to get more intense.
Kroger, the largest U.S. operator of grocery stores, said on Monday it is expanding its two-year-old Kroger Ship program by integrating it with a new marketplace of third-party sellers. Set to launch this fall, the platform will enable the grocer to expand its product selection by 50,000 items.
The move looks to build on the 92% increase in digital sales in Kroger’s first fiscal quarter and to make the company, a relatively late arrival to the online grocery wars, more competitive with Amazon, Target, Costco, and Walmart, all of which also saw their online grocery sales explode during the coronavirus pandemic.
Those chains’ massive general merchandise selections give them a big edge over Kroger’s online assortment, a weak spot the marketplace is intended to mitigate. According to a Deutsche Bank research note, Kroger’s online momentum had further accelerated as of the first few weeks of the current quarter.
“As part of our continuing transformation, we look forward to accelerating the development of our e-commerce platform and providing our customers with even more choices,” said Stuart Aitken, Kroger’s SVP and chief merchant and marketing officer. In addition to its namesake chain, Kroger owns other grocery retailers including Ralphs and Fry’s.
The additional products will include things like housewares and toys, a bid to bringing it a bit closer to rivals Walmart and Amazon in particular, whose assortments of products run in the tens of millions of items. Another benefit of a third-party marketplace, which the grocer is working with tech company Mirakl to build, is that Kroger can offer customers a wider variety of products, many of them nonfood, without having to buy the inventory, lessening the charges of being saddled with unsold merchandise it could have to discount.
Kroger’s successful e-commerce push has lifted its stock 20% this year so far.


fortune--2020-08-11--Hateful posts on Facebook and Instagram soar

Facebook and Instagram users are increasingly posting hateful content despite backlash from advertisers.
Facebook removed 22.5 million posts during the second quarter that violated its rules against hate speech, more than double the number during the first quarter and nearly quadruple from the same period in 2019.
Meanwhile on Instagram, the number of hateful posts removed more than quadrupled to 3.3 million in the second quarter from 800,000 during the preceding one. Facebook didn’t report the number of hate speech violations on Instagram during the second quarter of last year.
“This change is largely driven by an increase in proactive technology detection,” said Guy Rosen, Facebook’s vice president of integrity, attributing the rise to better technology for detecting and removing posts, including in more languages.
The news comes as Facebook faces increasing scrutiny for the hateful and discriminatory content that users post. In July, more than 1,000 advertisers, including large companies like Unilever and Coca-Cola, boycotted buying ads on Facebook in an effort to force the company to do more to police its service. Facebook has also been criticized for allowing inflammatory posts by President Trump to remain on its service. Since those complaints, Facebook has tweaked its rules for politicians so that it now flags violating posts with a label that says the post is considered newsworthy but breaks its policies.
In its ongoing efforts to show that it aggressively fights hate, Facebook said that its algorithms are getting better at identifying violations before users complain. The company claimed that its technology flagged nearly 95% of hateful posts on Facebook before users reported it, up from 89% the previous quarter, and that it proactively identified 84% of them on Instagram, up from 45%.
Facebook also announced a new policy against users posting images of people in blackface. Though it has announced the new rule, enforcement has not yet begun.
Instagram also saw a rise in adult nudity and sexual activity. The service removed 12.4 million posts during the second quarter, up from 8.1 million in the prior quarter. Additionally, posts that included bullying and harassment—an area which Instagram and Facebook still have trouble policing, using technology—increased to 2.3 million, up from 1.5 million in the first quarter. However, posts that exploit children declined to 479,400 during the second quarter from 1 million in the preceding period. The decrease was likely the result, at least in part, of fewer human reviewers focusing on the problem.
Because of the coronavirus pandemic, many of Facebook’s content reviewers started working from home. In response, the company shifted some of the kinds of content they reviewed and increased the use of artificial intelligence to police its service.
In terms of policing misinformation about the coronavirus, Facebook said it removed more than 7 million posts on Facebook and Instagram. It also added misinformation labels to 98 million posts that made false claims about the coronavirus on Facebook, but it did not remove them entirely.
Facebook also said that it had removed 1.5 billion fake accounts during the second quarter. During the first half of the year, Facebook removed 3.2 billion fake accounts—or far more than its huge base of 2.7 billion monthly active users.


fortune--2020-08-11--The pandemic is speeding up automation, putting jobs in question

Forced to tighten their belts financially by the coronavirus pandemic, businesses are increasingly using software that automates back-office tasks.
The technology handles repetitive duties like filling in numbers in a spreadsheet or matching invoice data to payment orders. The idea, of course, is for companies to save money by reducing the number of workers they need to handle clerical work.
Although the technology, called robotic process automation, or RPA, has existed for years, recent advances in machine learning and natural language processing have made it possible for it to do more complicated tasks. That includes deciphering financial jargon in PDF documents, analyzing that data, and then using it to fill in information in spreadsheets, which is helpful for cataloging invoices, among other tasks.
Mihir Shukla, CEO of Automation Anywhere, which sells RPA software, pointed to the financial industry as among the many adopting the technology. He cited unspecified banks that are using the technology to help process the flood of small business loans that were handed out by the federal government.
“It would have taken two years to change 6 million records without the bots,” Shukla said.
Echoing what other executives have told Fortune, Shukla said that companies have recently cut spending on big IT projects that have no quick payoff. But as Fortune CEO Alan Murray has previously written, RPA projects, in contrast, are “low-hanging fruit, with a potential for quick savings.”
The job-killing aspect of RPA is a sensitive topic. Rather than eliminating jobs, companies that sell the technology prefer to say that it lets customers shift their workers to more creative and higher-paying roles.
But He Wang, a healthcare analyst for CB Insights, recently told Fortune that some companies are primarily interested in automation tech to reduce spending on “human capital,” i.e. people. The pandemic is merely speeding up the phenomenon.
Jonathan Vanian
@JonathanVanian
jonathan.vanian@fortune.com
A.I. IN THE NEWS
Guilt by association. A class action lawsuit was filed in Illinois against Macy’s, alleging that the retail giant violated the state’s biometrics and data privacy laws by using facial-recognition software sold by the controversial startup Clearview AI, Bloomberg News reported. Macy’s used Clearview’s tools “to identify shoppers from security-camera footage,” the report said. Numerous civil-rights groups and politicians have criticized Clearview AI for what they believe are egregious violations of data privacy.
Another city says goodbye to facial recognition. City officials in Portland, Maine will no longer be able to use facial recognition tools after local government representatives instituted a ban on the technology, the Portland Press Herald reported, via the Government Technology news website. Other U.S. cities that have debuted facial recognition bans include San Francisco, Oakland, Cambridge, Mass., and Somerville, Mass.
When algorithms become racist. The United Kingdom’s Home Office, a government department that oversees immigration, will discard a decision-making algorithm used to process visa applications that critics have called racist, The Guardian reported. A director for the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants charity said of the so-called streaming algorithm: “This streaming tool took decades of institutionally racist practices, such as targeting particular nationalities for immigration raids, and turned them into software."
These telemarketers just don’t stop. Chinese residents are being bombarded by unsolicited sales calls, thanks to A.I. technologies being increasingly used in corporate call centers, The South China Morning Post reported. One problem for consumers, a tech analyst noted: “After the bot developers sell their technology to companies, they do not care to know whether it is used legally or ethically.” If you were annoyed with unsolicited calls now, just think of how many more you will get after more companies adopt call-center A.I. tech.
The report also cited a Shanghai resident who described her experience with one of the call-center bots:
“At first I didn’t even realise I was speaking to an automated service. I told the ‘person’ that I did not require an energy-boosting product and the voice went on to recommend another, similar product,” she said. “When I asked ‘didn’t you hear what I just said’, the voice did not appear to understand. Just as I was about to hang up the phone, the voice suddenly identified itself as an AI phone assistant.”
The automation of everything. The MIT Technology Review plans to debut a new podcast on Aug. 12 exploring A.I.’s various societal effects, touching on subjects like the influence of decision-making algorithms in education, criminal justice, and work. A description of "In Machines We Trust" from its Apple podcast page says it’s “a podcast about the automation of everything.”
EYE ON A.I. TALENT
Amwell has picked Serkan Kutan to be the healthcare technology firm’s chief technology officer. Kutan was previously the CTO of Haven and Zocdoc.
Bitfury Surround has hired George McIntyre to be the startup’s chief technology officer. McIntyre was previously the CTO of Active Media Platform.
EYE ON A.I. RESEARCH
Crime time. Researchers from University College London’s COMPASS (Computational Security Science) Group published a paper in the Crime Science journal about the possibility of criminals using A.I. for nefarious purposes. Leading the list of most dangerous uses of A.I. is the generative adversarial network (GAN) technique used to create seemingly realistic but fake videos, photos, and audio clips.
Here’s a sample of how people could use deepfake technology for crime:
Delegates envisaged a diverse range of criminal applications for such “deepfake” technology to exploit people’s implicit trust in these media, including: impersonation of children to elderly parents over video calls to gain access to funds; usage over the phone to request access to secure systems; and fake video of public figures speaking or acting reprehensibly in order to manipulate support.
Self-driving cars also have the ability to be used for crime:
Autonomous vehicles would potentially allow expansion of vehicular terrorism by reducing the need for driver recruitment, enabling single perpetrators to perform multiple attacks, even coordinating large numbers of vehicles at once. Driverless cars are certain to include extensive safety systems, which would need to be overridden, so driverless attacks will have a higher barrier to entry than at present, requiring technological skill and organisation.
And while it’s not ranked as severe as others, A.I.-assisted stalking is another concern:
Use of learning systems to monitor the location and activity of an individual through social media or personal device data. Also considered to encompass other crimes around coercive relationships, domestic abuse, gaslighting etc., and to relate to a current news story concerning the complicity of Western technology companies in the provision of apps for enforcing social norms in repressive societies (Hubbard 2019). Harms were rated as low, not because these crimes are not extremely damaging, but because they are inherently focused on single individuals, with no meaningful scope for operating at scale.
FORTUNE ON A.I.
The TikTok effect: U.S. ban could doom the global ambition of Chinese tech—By Naomi Xu Elegant
Here’s what TikTok may look like if Microsoft buys it—By Jonathan Vanian
Why you can trust the new coronavirus contact-tracing apps to safeguard your privacy—David Z. Morris
What would it be like if the Internet suddenly went dark?—By Robert Hackett
BRAIN FOOD
The quest for the vaccine. Fortune and Eye on A.I. columnist Jeremy Kahn has authored a gripping read about AstraZeneca’s quest to mass-produce a coronavirus vaccine. Although Kahn’s piece is more of a profile about AstraZeneca and how it came to be considered a key player in fighting COVID-19, it’s fitting to include in this newsletter because AstraZeneca was only able to embark on its ambitious project thanks to a massive “corporate reinvention,” a business and cultural makeover that can help companies carry forth transformational A.I. projects. CEO Pascal Soriot helped lead “AstraZeneca’s remarkable R&D rebound.”
From the article:
AZ has also used new digital technologies to reinvent its approach to clinical trials. Software called Merlin enables AZ to select trial sites 70% faster than before, according to Cristina Duran, chief digital health officer for the R&D division. Merlin produces trial cost estimates in minutes (it used to take days). In a research ecosystem where trial volunteers often skew disproportionately male and white, Merlin helps select trial populations that better reflect real-world demographics. Another software system, called Control Tower, allows managers to get a visual snapshot of all AZ’s trials on a single dashboard, helping them predict problems in patient recruitment. “We’ve taken systems that the company was using for 20 years, and in the past two years we changed them—which is either insane or brave, but it has been successful,” Duran says.


fortune--2020-08-11--How to watch the Perseid meteor shower on August 11

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This week marks the beginning of peak viewing for the Perseid meteor shower, one of the biggest astronomical events of the year. Shower-viewing also happens to be perfectly suited for the pandemic, since you’re outdoors and can easily social distance. If you want to get the most out of viewing the Perseid meteor shower, here’s everything you need to know.
When’s the best night to watch the Perseid meteor shower?
The Perseid shower lasts from around July 22 to Aug. 22, according to the trusty Farmers’ Almanac. But the peak of the cosmic display starts Aug. 11, and runs through dawn on Aug. 13. Aug. 11 is expected to be the best single night to watch the shower, but Aug. 12 should offer plenty to see, too.
What does the meteor shower look like?
A meteor shower is a singular chance to see the strange and massive forces of the cosmos at work with your naked eye. It is made up of dozens of bright spots streaking across the sky, the kind often inaccurately referred to as “falling stars.” They’re actually tiny specks of matter burning up against the Earth’s atmosphere. They can come in rapid succession or be separated by long pauses. Scanning the sky to catch as many of the streaks as possible is a big part of the fun.
When’s the best time to watch the Perseid meteor shower?
In most years, you’d want to set your alarm clock to view the Perseids a bit before dawn, when deep darkness makes them most visible. But this year, the Perseids are competing with a moon in its last quarter phase, which rises around midnight and casts enough light to interfere with meteor visibility.
So in 2020, you’ll want to look up your local moonrise time and watch the meteor shower before the moon appears. On the East Coast, moonrise is just after midnight. Good news for not-so-early risers.
Where’s the best place to watch the meteor shower?
As with any night-sky phenomenon, darkness is your friend. If you can get outside urban areas for your (socially distanced) viewing party, the reduced ambient light levels will help you see more.
Where should I look for meteors?
Streaking meteors could appear nearly anywhere in the night sky. But as the shower’s name suggests, they’ll be centered around the constellation Perseus, which is in the northern sky near Andromeda.
It might take some star-savvy, but training your eyes on Perseus could improve the show. The Perseid meteor shower will appear to originate near the constellation—though this is a trick of perspective, since the streaking lights are actually vastly closer to Earth than the constellation (see below).
Where can I watch the Perseids online?
If you live in a place where the shower might not be fully visible to the naked eye—such as a light-polluted major city—you might consider the distant-second backup option of watching online. NASA has you covered with a variety of webcasts from the Virtual Telescope Project. You can find those streams here.
What causes the meteor shower?
Like so many things of beauty, the Perseid meteor shower is born of destruction.
In fact, the term “meteor shower” is misleading. Rather than objects falling onto Earth, the visible Perseid “shower” is actually caused by Earth passing through a cloud of space rubble. Specifically, it’s made up of the cast-off shards of the massive Swift-Tuttle comet. Swift-Tuttle is the largest object that regularly passes close to Earth, and when it makes its pass every 133 years, it leaves a huge trail of dust and debris.
Swift-Tuttle leaves so much trash behind that, though the comet itself only visits once in a long while, its immensely long dust-trail is waiting for Earth to pass through every year. The dust and fragments, like the comet, are traveling very fast, helping turn the tiny shards into what look like shooting stars when they contact the Earth’s atmosphere and burn up.


fortune--2020-08-11--Betting on a casino operator during the time of social distancing

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Barry Diller’s IAC, which has focused on internet companies in recent years, has taken a $1 billion stake in gambling titan MGM Resorts International.
The stake gives IAC, which recently spun off its stake in online-dating company Match, a 13% stake in the publicly-traded casino and hotel company.
It’s a bold bet. Casinos are perhaps one of the most vulnerable places to be during the pandemic: On a typical day, people mill about in close quarters in windowless, indoor spaces. Hardly a choice hangout spot in a time of social distancing.
Even public market investors, who have bullishly taken the S&P 500 to near-record highs, are wary of the sector. Shares of Wynn Resorts, for instance, stand at roughly 40% down from the start of the year, compared to the S&P’s 3% gain.
So why is IAC betting on MGM? In particular, it’s interested in “an area that currently comprises a tiny portion of its revenue—online gaming,” said Diller, chairman and senior executive at IAC in a statement. “There is a digital first opportunity within MGM Resorts’ already impressive offline businesses… We hope we can strongly contribute to the growth of online gaming.”
Every company is becoming an internet company, or so it seems. But keep track of another part to the deal: While tech valuations are at or above pre-pandemic levels, companies with heavy real estate presences, like MGM, have not recovered from the coronavirus market dip—which, from a P/E ratio perspective, spells opportunity.
Whether IAC can execute is a different question.
Investing in the Black tech community: Valence, a network specifically aimed at connecting Black tech professionals, raised $5.25 million in Series A funding. It’s an interesting deal, because while diversity has been a growing issue in Silicon Valley, from a revenue perspective, the Black tech community is not exactly a huge one in the U.S., with the group consistently underrepresented in Silicon Valley and in executive teams.
But GGV Managing Partner Hans Tung is betting that there are a core group of Black executives on that platform that can broaden the network. It comes at a time when the venture capital community may be more aware of racial inequalities than ever. But the Valence deal, he says, was underway well before the current conversation around Black Lives Matter.
“It is not a charity case. It will be a revenue-generating opportunity,” Tung says of Valence. He also applied his experience with investments in the female executive networking space to Valence. GGV invested in Chief, a company that networks women executives, adding a paid-model can enhance value: “There are many women groups out there. But the value will be more limited if it is free if you can’t hire the best with full-time dedication.”
While Valence is still very much in its early stages, Tung says the company, which currently offers virtual events and job postings for free, is exploring the idea of a freemium model, in which some services—say, mentoring—require a membership fee. The community currently has a membership of about 10,000 Black professionals.
GGV Capital led the round, and was joined by existing investor Upfront Ventures. Other investors include Maveron, Softbank Opportunity Fund, B Capital, True Capital Management, Neil Sequeira (Defy), Rick Heitzmann (FirstMark), David Krane (GV), Gunderson Dettmer, pro football player Kelvin Beachum and Sunny Dhillon (Signia).
Lucinda Shen
Twitter: @shenlucinda
Email: lucinda.shen@fortune.com
VENTURE DEALS
- HMD Global, the Finnish company behind Nokia phones, raised $230 million. Google, Qualcomm and Nokia Technologies led the round.
- Waterdrop, a Chinese healthcare crowdfunding platform, raised $200 million valuing it at about $2 billion, per Bloomberg. Firms including Tencent back the firm, which is currently weighing an IPO. Read more.
- Dyne Therapeutics, a Waltham, Mass.-based biotechnology company focused on serious muscle diseases, raised $115 million. Vida Ventures and Surveyor Capital led the round and were joined by Wellington Management Company, Logos Capital, Franklin Templeton, Atlas Venture, Forbion, and MPM Capital.
- Atomwise, a San Francisco-based startup using AI in drug discovery, raised $123 million in Series B funding. Sanabil Investments and B Capital led the round.
- Coda, a San Francisco-based startup which helps users collaborate in online documents, raised $80 million in a funding round that values the company at $636 million. Kleiner Perkins led the round, and was joined by existing investors Greylock, Khosla Ventures and General Catalyst. Read more.
- Parsable, a San Francisco-based platform for industrial companies, raised $60 million in a Series D funding. Activate Capital and Glade Brook Capital Partners co-led the round, and were joined by investors including Alumni Ventures Group, Cisco Investments, Downing Ventures, Evolv Ventures, Princeville Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Future Fund and B37 Ventures.
- Pattern, a Salt Lake City-based ecommerce firm, raised $52 in funding. Ainge Advisory and KSV Global co-led the round.
- Mux, a San Francisco-based video platform for developers,raised $37 million in Series C funding. Andreessen Horowitz led the round and was joined by investors including Cobalt and Accel.
- AREVO, a Milpitas, Calif.-based 3D printing company, raised $25 million in Series B funding. Defy Partners and GGV Capital co-led the round and were joined by investors including Khosla Ventures and Alabaster.
- Nurx, a San Francisco-based digital practice for women’s health, raised an additional $22.5 million in funding. Trustbridge led the round and was joined by investors including Comcast Ventures, and Wittington Ventures.
- GoSite, a San Diego, Calif.-based platform for small businesses to transition operations online, raised $16 million in Series A funding. Longley Capital led the round and was joined by investors including Stage 2 Capital, Ankona Capital, Serra Ventures, and SaaS Ventures.
- Simpplr, a Redwood City, Calif.-based maker of intranet software, raised $10 million in Series B funding. Norwest Venture Partners led the round and was joined by investors including Salesforce Ventures.
- Parabola, a San Francisco-based data task automation company, raised $8 million in Series A funding. Matrix Partners led the round and was joined by investors including Thrive Capital, and Elad Gil.
- WayScript, a New York-based company with a platform to turn scripts into internal business applications, raised $5 million in seed funding Greycroft led the round and was joined by investors including Tectonic Ventures, and Contour Venture Partners.
- The Demex Group, a Washington D.C.-based climate financial risk solution, raised $4.2 million in seed funding. Anthemis and IA Capital Group were the investors.
- Brella Insurance, a New York-based provider of a health insurance plan for Texas-based employers and their teams, raised an additional $1.5 million. Investors include Digitalis, Operator Partners, and angel investor Ron Bouganim.
- Clearstep Health, a New York-based virtual triage platform, raised $1.3 million in pre-seed funding. RRE Ventures, Newark Venture Partners, and OCA Ventures invested.
- hey, a Japanese payments and e-commerce platform, raised an undisclosed amount in Series E funding. Bain Capital Tech Opportunities led the round and was joined by investors including PayPal Ventures, Goldman Sachs, YJ Capital, Anatole, and existing investor World Innovation Lab.
PRIVATE EQUITY
- Align Capital Partners acquired Electronic Transaction Consultants Corporation, a Richardson, Texas-based maker of electronic tolling equipment. Financial terms weren't disclosed.
- Advent International agreed to buy stakes in the U.K. and German logistics operations of Otto, a German retailer. Financial terms weren't disclosed.
- Arsenal Capital Partners acquired Cello Health, a healthcare-focused advisory firm, for a total enterprise value of £181.8 million.
- BHI Energy, backed by AE Industrial Partners, acquired Coastal Electrical Construction, a provider of substation, transmission, and distribution construction and maintenance services. Financial terms weren't disclosed.
BREAKUPS, HANGUPS, AND BANKRUPTCIES
- Sur La Table, the home kitchenware chain, plans to sell itself out of bankruptcy for nearly $89 million to a joint venture between e-commerce business CSC Generation and brand owner Marquee Brands. Read more.
IPOS
- Guoquan, a Chinese hotpot ingredients supplier, is weighing an IPO as soon as next year that could raise as much as $500 million, per Bloomberg. IDG Capital backs the firm. Read more.
- CureVac, a German drugmaker developing a vaccine against the coronavirus pandemic, aims to raise up to $245 million in an IPO of 15.3 million shares priced between $14.00 and $16.00 apiece.
EXITS
- American Express is in advanced talks to acquire Kabbage, a small business lender backed by SoftBank Group and Reverence Capital Partners, per Bloomberg. The deal could value Kabbage at as much as $850 million. Read more.
- The Carlyle Group is weighing options for Logoplaste, its Portuguese plastic-packaging firm, including a potential sale that could value the firm at 1 billion euros ($1.2 billion), per Bloomberg. Read more.
F+FS
- Industry Ventures closed Industry Ventures Direct II with $180 million in commitments.


fortune--2020-08-11--Will Google Shopping finally take off?

Will Google Shopping finally take off?

Good morning, Data Sheet readers. Tech writer Danielle Abril here, filling in for Adam.
The coronavirus has helped Amazon’s already massive e-commerce business skyrocket. Now another tech behemoth hopes it can get in on the action.
Google has spent the last 18 years trying—and failing—to become a major e-commerce player. You may recall Froogle, the company’s price comparison website that represented its first foray into the space in 2002. Since then, Google has debuted a series of fragmented shopping initiatives, including same-day delivery from local stores and charges to sellers for listings on the search engine’s shopping tab. Nothing has really stuck.
But late last year, the company scored a big hire in Bill Ready, the former chief operating officer at PayPal, and handed him control of shopping, travel, augmented reality, and Lens, Google’s image recognition software. He spoke with me last week to explain how he’s revamping his new unit.
His strategy? Remove all the fees and complications for sellers that Google had created and get back to the basics: free services supported by ads. “It was a return to first principles for Google,” he told me.
Under Ready’s leadership, Google’s done things like eliminate the fees that sellers previously had to pay to show up on Google’s shopping tab and in search. The idea is to open the services to more merchants and marketplaces, regardless of their size.
The company also killed the commissions it took from companies that used its checkout feature and added PayPal and Shopify as third-party choices instead of forcing sellers to use Google’s payment processing.
And to make it easier for sellers to shift from other services, say Amazon, Google started accepting listings in commonly used digital formats. “One of the things that we’re trying to make very clear is, we’re not the retailer,” Ready said.
The early signs are promising, he said. The number of clicks from users viewing the new shopping tab, which allows free listings, was 74% higher than those who hadn’t yet received access at the end of April, according to Google.
But Google still has a long way to go to become a major player in e-commerce. And Ready is aware this is just the beginning.
In March, just two months after Ready joined Google, the coronavirus quickly altered the shopping landscape. Online shopping, as an industry, exploded as people stayed home. “Interestingly, what we wanted to go do … didn’t change at all,” Ready said. But “the urgency absolutely changed.”
Not even a year into Ready’s tenure, a lot has changed for Google Shopping. But will this finally be the winning strategy? Maybe the 18th time will be the charm.
Danielle Abril
@DanielleDigest
danielle.abril@fortune.com
***
Fortune is collecting nominations for our annual Most Powerful Women lists: We’re shaking things up a little this year, adding a new criterion: how the executive wields her power to shape her company and the wider world for the better. (Examples might include instituting hazard pay for frontline employees during the pandemic, instituting gender/racial pay parity, creating a program or business unit that serves a disadvantaged population, measurably reducing the company’s carbon footprint, or creating new hiring pipelines that have resulted in a more diverse workforce.)
We’re accepting submissions through this online form. The deadline for applications is Aug. 24.
This edition of Data Sheet was curated by David Z. Morris. Check out The Ledger, the fintech newsletter he edits weekly.
NEWSWORTHY
From malls to Amazon centers. In what could be the biggest signal yet of the rapid erosion of physical retail by online shopping, Simon Property Group is reportedly negotiating with Amazon to turn former anchor spaces into online fulfillment centers. Simon is the top mall developer in the U.S., and the fulfillment centers would fill spaces being vacated with increasing speed by department stores like J.C. Penney and Sears. A retail consultant speaking to Fortune’s Phil Wahba called it “a white flag moment”—that is, a surrender.
2,500 electric garbage trucks. The much-questioned hydrogen-electric trucking startup Nikola says it has inked a deal with Republic Services to deliver 2,500 battery-powered garbage trucks, with testing starting in 2022. Orders like this are great, but it’s arguably another swerve from the startup, whose core premise has long been producing long-haul freight trucks powered by hydrogen fuel cells, not batteries. Nikola has not yet delivered a vehicle, but its stock appears to have drafted on Tesla’s own wild ride to a massive (if frothy) valuation.
Tech giants for H-1Bs. Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and other tech companies filed an amicus brief Monday in a suit against the Trump administration’s June suspension of guest worker visas, including the H-1Bs they rely on heavily. The companies said the suspension harms the American economy and, ultimately, American workers. Trump’s move is part of a broad anti-immigration campaign driven by advisor Stephen Miller, for whom the health of the economy does not appear to be a primary concern.
The startup shakeout never came. “We have seen a very, very fast recovery,” says the CEO of Getaround, one of many digital startups whose worst fears of pandemic fallout have not come to pass. As detailed by Fortune alum Erin Griffith, venture capital is flowing as freely as ever, as digital services, delivery, streaming, payments, stock speculation, and other startup specialties experience huge growth.
FOOD FOR THOUGHT
“If job searches and funding searches can be conducted just as easily online as in person, and if offices can be replaced with Zoom and Slack, much of the reason for cities to exist will evaporate. That’s a big ‘if,’ of course - many have predicted that cities would decline due to teleworking technologies in the past, but it has never materialized. Still, the pandemic, by forcing knowledge industries to go remote, may force companies, workers and financiers to realize that telework tools have reached a critical level of effectiveness. If so, that will weaken superstar cities’ productivity advantage.”
That's Bloomberg's Noah Smith on the potential for coronavirus and remote-working technology to transform cities forever.
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
The U.S. wanted to starve Huawei of chips. It’s working — Eamon Barrett
TikTok’s woes won’t end after 45 days, even if if finds a buyer — Lucinda Shen
New York’s public transit asks Apple to solve its iPhone Face ID problem — David Porter
The U.K.’s facial recognition tests violated privacy laws, court rules — David Meyer
(Some of these stories require a subscription to access. Thank you for supporting our journalism.)
BEFORE YOU GO
Social media and algorithms have killed the mystery and wonder of the internet that once was. A group of code artists called The Internet Temple is bringing it back, one strange digital experience at a time.


fortune--2020-08-11--Software firm MicroStrategy makes a massive bet on Bitcoin with a $250 million purchase

MicroStrategy, a Virginia-based business intelligence software company that trades on the NASDAQ, announced on Tuesday it has acquired 21,454 Bitcoin in what describes as a “capital allocation strategy.”
The move is a novel one for a publicly traded firm. While many companies put surplus capital into bonds and other investments as part of their treasury management strategies, a bet of this size on Bitcoin is all but unheard of.
“[I]nvesting in the cryptocurrency would provide not only a reasonable hedge against inflation, but also the prospect of earning a higher return than other investments,” said the company in a statement.
MicroStrategy, which was founded in 1989, has a market cap of around $1.2 billion, and posted a profit of $34 million in 2019. Its clients reportedly include big retailers like Pepsi and Adidas, while IBM and Oracle are among its competitors.
MicroStrategy’s decision to plow $250 million into Bitcoin may amount to more than a capital allocation strategy. Barry Silbert, the founder of crypto conglomerate DCG, noted on Twitter that the move could serve to tie MicroStrategy’s valuation to Bitcoin.
MicroStrategy, a $1.2 billion company, just turned itself into a publicly-traded bitcoin play. Smart https://t.co/tCXiAVc8w7 — Barry Silbert (@barrysilbert) August 11, 2020
If investors equate MicroStrategy’s valuation with Bitcoin’s performance, it would not be the only company in this position. The online retailer Overstock is also heavily invested in crypto, a strategy that may have buoyed its share price even as its core business slumps.
The strategy could pay off if Bitcoin prices, which have rallied in recent months, continue to rise. After slumping for most of 2019, the cryptocurrency has risen to around $12,000 in August.
Many crypto boosters believe the price increase is tied to the flood of money printed by central bankers in recent months as countries try to stave off the economic crisis triggered by the pandemic. Unlike national currencies, Bitcoin has a finite supply of 21 million, which makes it a hedge against inflation akin to gold in the view of Silbert and others.
MicroStrategy disclosed the Bitcoin purchase in an SEC filing this week. The filing or Tuesday’s press release does not disclose how or where Microstrategy obtained the Bitcoins.
More must-read finance coverage from Fortune:


fortune--2020-08-11--Bars are fighting to stay in compliance with their states’ changing regulations

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Just steps away from Philadelphia’s “Singing Fountain” and the sounds of Sinatra rolling through its speakers, Manatawny Still Works lured in customers with music of its own. People killing time around Passyunk Square before their dinner reservations would turn to the sounds flowing from Manatawny’s French door window, noticing its huge flower box and then its “tasting room” sign.
When Gov. Tom Wolf ordered restaurants and bars to stop dine-in services in March, the window went from passersby attraction to service window for whiskey to-go, operations manager Jennifer Sabatino tells Fortune. Then, when the new mandate said that bars had to serve food, Sabatino came up with a spiel for her newest menu item.
Operations manager Jennifer Sabatino (right) at the front window of Manatawny Still Works’ tasting room. Courtesy of Jennifer Sabatino
“Due to the current mandates of Pennsylvania we now have to serve you a meal. Tonight we have an incredible selection of handcrafted peanut butter and jelly sandwiches,” she recites. “You are going to get half of one for 75 cents, and if you would like to order more, you’re more than welcome.”
With a little humor and a lot of uncertainty, bar owners are thinking on their feet to keep up with their states’ changing regulations. Nationally virus cases continue to rise, and some experts are pointing their fingers at bars, forcing them to shut down completely in some states while restaurants are allowed to continue to operate. It remains to be seen how many will never open again.
For bars that were fortunate enough to keep operating in some way, Sabatino says, the new challenge is to adapt to new rules. Every morning when she wakes up, she checks the Pennsylvania Restaurant & Lodging Association website to see what might have changed. What will I have to do this week to keep my staff employed and this operation going? Sabatino asks herself.
“At first, we were going to be allowed to open outside dining, and then they put a hold on outside dining. And then we were going to be able to do indoor dining, but then they put a hold on indoor dining. We’re kind of just trying to keep up,” Sabatino says.
For the first two months, Manatawny Still Works did pretty well. The state had closed liquor stores, making them one of the few places to buy spirits. To enable the outdoor dining that’s keeping the tasting room alive, the city created a temporary outdoor dining permit. Now the cost of doing business involves dealing with the public, and Sabatino says patrons don’t want to be told what to do about anything—including wearing masks.
“It’s a lot to put on service-industry people to regulate how their guests and people outside of the realm of their guests are acting,” she says.
Saratoga Springs, N.Y.
Irish pub owner Matthew Bagley learned this lesson firsthand when he started selling “Cuomo Chips” at Harvey’s Irish Pub in Saratoga Springs, the birthplace of the potato chip. The pub has a full kitchen and dinner menu, but when the New York governor ordered that bars could not serve alcohol without food, Bagley wanted to give his customers a way to enjoy their drinks without buying a full meal.
The pub ran out of chips in a day and a half as news of the offer went viral, but the joke had some unintended consequences. That same week, the state liquor authority called. The chips weren’t compliant, the authority said. The good news? The solution was simple: add salsa.
His bar had also attracted clientele who thought masks were optional.
“It was supposed to be like, ‘Look, we made a funny,’” Bagley says. “But now people think I’m some alt-right bar owner who wants to stick it to the governor and not wear masks, and that’s not it at all.”
Boise
Before it was called State Street, it was Highway 44, the namesake of the Boise karaoke bar, 44 Club. When manager Judy Smith passed away after running the bar for 30 years, no one, not even the owner, knew who could replace her.
Her daughter, Debbie, quit her job as an EKG technician to run her mother’s favorite place in the world.
“I used to go down there and see her, and now I’m actually right in her shoes,” Thompson says. “I stand exactly where she did. I have her friends now. I have her dogs. Now, I have her job.”
Folk singer Pinto Bennett and his band perform at the 44 Club. Courtesy of Debbie Smith
Because the regulars loved her mom, Thompson says, they love her, too. They helped her learn how to run the bar, and with guidance from nightlife expert Jon Taffer—she watched every Bar Rescue episode she could find—55-year-old Thomspon has run the 44 Club successfully for the past seven years.
That’s how Thompson planned on spending the rest of her life—until the pandemic left the bar’s future in limbo. Idaho Gov. Brad Little ordered bars to shut down in mid-March, then allowed them to reopen in May before shutting them down again in late June. The 44 Club has since remained closed, left with so little operating capital after all the fits and starts that Thompson isn’t sure if it will be able to open again. All the money the bar made in May went to paying property and corporate taxes that were due in June, she says.
“My mom went in every day knowing her life was coming to an end and did her job. She ran the place right up until she passed away from cancer, and I don’t want to get all sad here, but that’s kind of what I thought I would do, too,” she says.
During the first shutdown, all her beer expired. The second time around, Thompson was on it: She suspended her trash service immediately and cut the cable off. Then the phone. Then she turned the coolers down low to save as much power as possible, and she returned the expensive bottles of liquor to the store.
With unemployment checks running out, Thompson is worried she’ll have to find another job.
“My son said he can hire me to run parts; he runs an auto shop,” Thompson says. “Right now, I mow my son’s lawn to make a little extra money because he works hard all week.”
Inside the Standard Pour, in Dallas. Courtesy of Eddie Campbell
Dallas
Over the years as a leading mixologist in Dallas’s bar and restaurant scene, Eddie “Lucky” Campbell has been able to put together a pretty outstanding private collection of rare whiskey, including all of the rare Pappy Van Winkle bourbons. One 23-year-old bottle of Pappy Van Winkle’s Family Reserve can sell for as much as $3,000, and Campbell sold all of them at half price to collect as much money as he could for his family and the three bars and restaurants he co-owns.
“When the closure ends, and they allow you to reopen, everybody thinks that the struggles are over. But with such high occupancy restrictions, no one’s really making money,” says Campbell, who also sold his Ford F-150 Raptor pickup, both his dream car and the bestselling truck in the U.S. for the past 40 years. “If we had to go through another one? It would bury us.”
But the hardest part, he says, is being separated from his 5-year-old son. Because Campbell comes in contact with new customers every day at his cocktail restaurant, the Standard Pour, he’s been careful to keep his distance, sticking to FaceTime calls or visits from the front yard.
“I think for every parent in the hospitality industry, they are terrified of exposure,” he says. “After dealing with guests every night, they’re sanitizing themselves like crazy in their cars out of worry and fear.”
After the initial shutdown, bars in Texas were allowed to reopen in May at 25% occupancy, then forced to close again in June. July brought a chance to reopen—if a bar could make over half of its revenue from something other than liquor sales, technically making it a restaurant in the state’s eyes.
Campbell would be the first to admit that right now, bars are a want but not a need. But when states close bars and not restaurants, he says, it doesn’t mean people will stay home. They’ll just go across the street to open restaurants where they can still drink.
“It’s not an effective strategy at all,” says Campbell, whose bar Parliament is currently closed. “It almost encourages over-gathering in some of those places, because for young people, they feel like they’ve got the inside track on all the parties happening at restaurants tonight.”


fortune--2020-08-11--What is Trump’s payroll tax holiday and how will it affect you? Everything you need to know

Amid a standstill in Congress over a fresh round of stimulus, President Trump issued several executive orders over the weekend to fast-track some economic aid initiatives to deal with the continued fallout from the coronavirus pandemic. One key order is a so-called payroll tax holiday—which would put a moratorium on paying certain payroll tax until next year.
The order has already been met with a lot of criticism, including that the tax deferral wouldn’t help the people who might need it most who have lost their jobs and aren’t currently paying payroll tax. Meanwhile, there’s a catch: the order is only a deferral of the taxes, so it won’t forgive them—as things stand, you’ll have to pay the taxes later.
“It is far from clear that the payroll tax holiday will achieve its intended objective of, as the president said, ‘save American jobs and provide relief to the American workers’,” Bankrate.com senior economic analyst Mark Hamrick said in a note Monday. “The bill is still due, it just isn’t due in the short-term. Let’s remember it is the unemployed who need help, not so much Americans who are still working and who’d get the benefit.”
What is the payroll tax holiday?
Under the order, if you take home less than $4,000 every two weeks (or less than roughly $104,000 a year), you wouldn’t have to pay certain payroll tax from September 1 through December 31 this year. For pay periods that are not bi-weekly, the memorandum notes it’s the same for an “equivalent amount.” In theory, that could save you up to 6.2% per paycheck that usually goes to Social Security as part of the 7.65% in payroll taxes both the employee and employer pay (including 1.45% for Medicare).
Via the order, President Trump is instructing the Treasury Department to “allow employers to defer payment of the employee portion of certain payroll taxes.”
Since the order is only to defer payroll taxes until next year, companies—and by extension their employees—would still be on the hook for paying the taxes back. Those like Glen Birnbaum, a CPA based in Illinois, believe this might also be an “administrative challenge” for payroll companies, employers, and employees—he suggests there would likely have to be changes (adding “new lines”) to W-2s to account for the wages earned during the deferral period, and that it could even potentially mean “a delay to when tax season starts, [although] it’s kind of crazy to say that on August 10,” he tells Fortune.
Meanwhile, others like Ed Zollars, a CPA based in Arizona and lecturer for Kaplan Financial Education, point out more practical issues: “If the employer isn’t going to withhold it, how would the employees pay back the balance they owe? Would it be on their 2020 Form 1040 or would there be some other mechanism?” Zollars told Fortune via email.
Still, as some have noted, the order may be “just a way to get Congress to act because it’s just going to be an administrative challenge if we really have to implement this stuff starting September 1,” Birnbaum suggests.
What does the payroll tax holiday mean for your paycheck?
In the simplest terms, the holiday means you wouldn’t have to pay payroll taxes through December. Based on how much you make, the holiday could theoretically save you as much as over $2,000 spread across those four months. President Trump claimed in a press briefing Saturday that “This will mean bigger paychecks for working families,” while White House economic advisor Larry Kudlow recently estimated on CNN’s “State of the Union” it would be “about a $1,200 wage increase after tax” (based on an annual salary of roughly $60,000). However, it’s important to remember two things: it’s not a true tax cut, and you’ll still owe taxes once the “holiday” is over after December—plus, it might not automatically trickle down to employees’ paychecks either.
For one, Birnbaum notes the obvious: “If they give their employees this money and later on they have to pay it back, does it help much?”
To that end, President Trump said at a press briefing alongside the announcement that, “if I win [the election], I may extend and terminate. In other words, I’ll extend it beyond the end of the year and terminate the tax.” The text of the order itself urges the Treasury to “explore avenues, including legislation, to eliminate the obligation” to pay it back. But experts note that won’t happen without going through Congress (it’s not in the president’s power to terminate taxes sans Congress).
But there’s another problem: Several experts point out that companies won’t be keen to take a chance and payout the money they would otherwise withhold for payroll taxes because they don’t want to risk the money not being forgiven.
The issue is that deferral doesn't ultimately relieve employers of payroll tax liability, so many employers will continue to withhold Social Security taxes from paychecks lest they be on the hook for the $$$ next year. So this likely won't do all that much … 7/ — Daniel Hemel (@DanielJHemel) August 9, 2020
In an op-ed for the Washington Post on Monday, Daniel Hemel, a law professor at the University of Chicago, wrote that because forgiveness of the taxes is such a big if, “Employers therefore have every reason to worry that if they stop withholding payroll taxes now, they’ll face a large bill come January. As a result, many will continue to withhold, which means their workers won’t see the boost in take-home pay that Trump has touted.”
In short, there’s a chance employees might not see the cash at all.
Zollars, for one, wonders if employees who “don’t want to risk having to pay up” will be able to opt out, or if companies who are nervous about “being stuck” with the bill will be able to keep withholding anyway.
Indeed, Birnbaum points out that “companies will be very resistant to changing normal payment protocol without more guidance,” and that “either they continue to remit the employee payroll taxes to [the Department of Treasury] as per usual or they don’t withhold and it is in effect paid to the employees.” He adds: “I think it’s the last thing that somebody is going to want, it’s a last resort.”
Who will benefit the most?
In President Trump’s memorandum, the payroll tax holiday would “put money directly in the pockets of American workers and generate additional incentives for work and employment, right when the money is needed most.” But it’s not quite as simple as that.
Employers were already able to defer some payroll taxes through 2021 via the CARES Act, but because of the concerns around liability of paying the taxes back, Birnbaum, for one, notes he hasn’t seen many businesses taking advantage. And as several experts including Birnbaum point out, it’s possible the holiday won’t be felt by employees.
Meanwhile, The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has also argued the largest benefits of a payroll tax cut would go to those who make more money (or, in this case, those making the maximum some-odd $104,000 per year) versus those with lower incomes.
And for CPAs like Birnbaum, questions still remain around how the holiday would work for self-employed individuals or those with multiple jobs.
But the big kicker: a payroll tax holiday won’t help the some 16.3 million people unemployed right now.
Is the payroll tax holiday legal?
This is where things get a little (more) tricky.
Experts have pointed out that it’s legal for the president via the Treasury secretary to defer tax collection for one year in the event of a disaster, as Fortune also recently reported. However, for the taxes to actually be forgiven and not just deferred, Congress would likely need to pass legislation. Plus, it’s unclear whether the president would be able to require businesses to actually give back the withholdings to their employees.
Adds Bankrate.com’s Hamrick: “Whether the president’s orders help motivate lawmakers to act or give them the false impression that immediate action isn’t needed, remains to be seen.”


fortune--2020-08-11--Why some Black execs are moving abroad—for good

This is the web version of The Broadsheet, a daily newsletter for and about the world’s most powerful women. Sign up to get it delivered free to your inbox.
Good morning, Broadsheet readers! McDonald’s sues its former CEO, Stacey Abrams talks about her political future with Janelle Monáe, and Black American executives working abroad reflect on why they have no plans to come back. Have a lovely Tuesday.
– America’s Black brain drain. Today’s guest essay comes to us from Fortune senior editor Beth Kowitt:
Last June at Fortune’s Most Powerful Women conference in London (remember when we used gather in person?) I met Najoh Tita-Reid, an American marketing executive working in Switzerland. As we chit-chatted, Tita-Reid recounted what a positive experience she was having as a Black woman working outside the confines of corporate America. I tucked the conversation away in the back of mind until this spring when I checked in with Tita-Reid in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd and the protests that followed. I wanted to understand how the fight for racial justice in the U.S. was impacting her thinking about living abroad, as well as the experiences of other Black American expats.
The result of that reporting is out this week. I interviewed more than a dozen Black Americans living overseas for the story, and one theme came through in every single conversation: Their international experience was the first time race was not the primary frame of reference through which they were viewed.
Living abroad, “you’re an American, you’re not African-American,” Shaundra Clay, who lived in Europe for eight years as a health care executive, told me. “You are not made to feel like you are carrying the burden of anything. You are carrying the power of something.” She said it was a level of privilege she had never experienced before in her life. In the U.S., Nancy Armand, an executive at HSBC Bank USA, was always conscious of her gender and race, she told me. In the U.K., she was always conscious of her nationality first. “I’d never been an American first and then Black. It’s a refreshing change.”
As Tita-Reid explained, working in Europe has been like wearing an oxygen mask, allowing her to breathe—to lead and perform at her best without feeling the crushing weight of America’s dysfunctional racial dynamics at every moment. But for her, like many others I spoke with, being outside the U.S. as the Black Lives Matter movement continues to take hold has elicited complicated feelings—both guilt at not being on the front lines, mixed with affirmation of why they did not want to return.
As much as the story is about working and living abroad as a Black American, for me, it was also eye opening in what it revealed about the environment they are leaving behind—the exhausting struggle of being a Black executive in corporate America today.
Read the full story here.
Beth Kowitt
beth.kowitt@fortune.com
@bethkowitt
Today’s Broadsheet was curated by Emma Hinchliffe.
ALSO IN THE HEADLINES
- Broader representation. The movement to achieve gender diversity on boards of directors has been largely successful—and now it's putting its muscle behind racial diversity. TheBoardlist, the platform for companies to find qualified female directors, will open its service to men of color. Emma spoke to theBoardlist founder Sukhinder Singh Cassidy about why the platform is making the change—and to state lawmakers who have led on women's board representation about whether they could follow suit. Fortune
- Behind the arches. McDonald's sued former CEO Steve Easterbrook, who was fired for "sexting with a subordinate" last year. Now, after another employee came forwarded alleging a sexual relationship, the fast food chain accuses Easterbrook of hiding evidence and lying during the investigation into his conduct. McDonald's is seeking the return of compensation worth $40 million; the former CEO's attorney didn't respond to request for comment in this story. New York Times
- Listen up. How did Spotify secure an exclusive show with Michelle Obama less than two years after the music streaming service got into podcasts? That would be thanks to Dawn Ostroff, the company's chief content officer. The former CW and Condé Nast executive "sparked an arms race for podcasting companies and talent" with her big ambitions—and wooed the former President and first lady with the size of Spotify's non-paying audience. Wall Street Journal
MOVERS AND SHAKERS: Seed hired AO Biome Mother Dirt director of research and product development Jennifer Cookson as director of product development at Seed Health and Yamibuy.com CMO Jo Lu as SVP of revenue and growth. Buffalo Wild Wings hired Target VP of brand management Rita Patel as CMO.
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
- VP watch watch. As vice presidential speculation heats up, women's rights groups and the Biden campaign are anticipating sexist and racist responses to Joe Biden's eventual pick. In this column, writer Margaret Sullivan advises media organizations on how to avoid sexist and racist tropes in their coverage.
- All about Abrams. In an interview with actor and singer Janelle Monáe, Stacey Abrams says that she will "absolutely" run for President one day. But to the fixation on her future political prospects, she adds: "I don't need a title to do the work." Harper's Bazaar
- Color-coded. Several female members of Parliament in Poland last week wore rainbow colors to the swearing-in ceremony for President Andrzej Duda. Duda is known for his anti-LGBTQ views and policies, and the liberal women of Poland's Parliament coordinated their masks and dresses to express solidarity with the country's LGBTQ community. Vogue
ON MY RADAR
Was Susan B. Anthony anti-abortion? Two sides are dueling over the answer—and the definition of feminism The Lily
Porsha in protest New York Times
Mumbai put female figures on traffic signals. Some women are not impressed New York Times
PARTING WORDS
"That’s what happens when you’re told you can’t."
-Former jockey Diane Crump on fighting to be one of the first women in the field


fortune--2020-08-11--King euro: why investors are flocking to the common currency and shunning the dollar

There’s been a seismic shift in the euro’s fortune.
Money managers are the most optimistic they’ve ever been on prospects for the common currency after its best month in almost a decade. And demand for European assets is so high that the currency is within a whisker of being more expensive than the dollar for the first time since funding pressures jumped earlier this year.
That’s because the European Union’s landmark rescue fund has gone a long way in soothing concerns over the bloc’s structural risks, and efforts to control the coronavirus and reignite the economy look particularly promising compared to the U.S. Those factors are setting the stage for a long-lasting change for the euro.
“This is not a matter of growth this year or next year or predictions about the cycle — it’s really something more structural,” said Nicolas Veron, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. “The budget deal changes the way financial markets look at the euro zonein a significant way,” he said, adding that “it’s a big reinforcement of the EU and of the euro.”
Such is the euphoria over the turn in the euro’s paradigm that stocks, which typically see demand fall as their underlying currency strengthens, are rising as traders capitalize on growth differentials between Europe and the U.S. And the rates on some of the highest-yielding sovereign bonds in the 27-member bloc have plummeted to pre-lockdown levels.
The Big Shift
Underpinning the euro’s transformed fortunes is the EU’s landmark €750 billion ($882 billion) package. The deal, thrashed out in July to support the economic recovery, succeeded where years of political wrangling had failed. The rescue fund, which will be financed by the sale of joint bonds, has helped calm fears of a breakup.
Coupled with European Central Bank’s quantitative easing programs, the difference in yield between benchmark Italian and German bonds, a measure of risk in Europe that soared in March, is now the lowest since February.
“It’s a powerful story for the euro,” said Tony Small, head of European interest rate strategy at Morgan Stanley. “A big portion of the tail associated with a euro break-up will likely be perceived to have gone away, and will be replaced by an attractive high quality issuer, which will pull up the entire credit quality of the euro.”
The euro’s 4.8% jump in July sent the currency flying through a bearish trend line that capped gains since 2008, unlocking its potential for more rallies. It also spurred a rush among analysts to revise their forecasts higher.
And while the currency has taken a breather in the spot market in August — rising 0.2% to $1.1799 on Tuesday—net-long positions in the security rose to an all-time high, according to CFTC data.
Beating the dollar
The currency’s fundamentals look especially strong when compared with the dollar, which has seen net-short positions versus major peers rise to the highest since 2012, according to Bloomberg calculations of CFTC data.
A gauge for the greenback suffered its worst July since 2010, ending the month near the lowest level in almost two years. It’s being weighed down by the rising number of infections in the U.S., which exceeded 5 million, the nation’s fragmented response to the virus, a Washington standoffover a new economic relief bill, and what may be a contentious presidential election in November.
These risks play in the euro’s favor.
There are signs the euro area has succeeded in breaking the link between economies re-opening and the virus escalating, helping to boost forecasts for growth. Even though Europe’s lockdown and initial downturn were larger, gross domestic product is poised to expand 5.5% in 2021, about 1.5 percentage points faster than the U.S., according to estimates compiled by Bloomberg.
That’s only happened eight times since 1992, according to International Monetary Fund data.
Real Yields
Nonetheless, there are mounting concerns about new flare-ups in infections in Europe. The number of confirmed cases in Germany, the continent’s biggest economy, rose more than 6,000 in the seven days through Sunday, the most since May, according to data collected by Johns Hopkins University and Bloomberg News.
“The risks remain that new outbreaks will occur, particularly as we get into winter,” said Iain Begg, a research fellow at the European Institute of the London School of Economics. “But the range of policies—both the economic and containment policies in Europe—seems to me to be better-attuned to dealing with both the health crisis and the economic crisis than the U.S.”
With real yields in the U.S. at a record low and falling faster than elsewhere, investments are flowing back into Europe where the government response to the virus is more predictable, said London-based Jordan Rochester, a Group-of-10 foreign-exchange analyst at Nomura International.
Until those dynamics change or there’s a second wave, Kenneth Broux, a strategist at Societe Generale SA in London, recommends buying dips in the euro in the medium term.
“It’s not just growth,” said Peter Chatwell, head of multi-asset strategy at Mizuho International Plc, who sees the currency rising to $1.30 by July 2021. “It’s also that politically, the euro has never been as strong as this, and it’s never been as close to being properly constructed as this.”


fortune--2020-08-11--U.K. facial-recognition pilots broke privacy, data protection, and equality laws, court rules

The U.K. has long been an enthusiastic surveillance state—it has one CCTV camera for every 11 people. And like many other countries these days, its authorities are increasingly putting facial-recognition smarts behind those cameras.
However, one of the U.K.’s pioneering deployments of automated facial recognition has been ruled unlawful by an appeals court on three separate grounds: privacy, data protection, and equality.
South Wales Police, which was behind the 2017–18 technological trials, will not appeal against the ruling.
The ruling could have major implications for the guidelines police must follow when using such technology, as the country’s surveillance-camera watchdog has now criticized the government for failing to keep those guidelines up to date.
The case was brought by a civil liberties campaigner named Ed Bridges, whose image was captured at least twice by police cameras in the Welsh capital, Cardiff—once when he was shopping for Christmas presents in 2017, and once when attending a protest outside an arms fair in 2018.
With backing from the civil liberties group Liberty, Bridges complained to the High Court about violations of his rights. He lost in September 2019, but won his appeal on Tuesday.
The automated facial recognition (AFR) system involved in the case is known as AFR Locate. It captures images of people’s faces and compares them with a watchlist, then throws away the images if there is no match. The watchlist includes people for whom there is an outstanding arrest warrant, people suspected of committing crimes, vulnerable people, and so on.
On Tuesday, the Court of Appeal upheld three of the five grounds for Bridges’ appeal.
Human rights
The first was about the privacy rights in Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights. To comply with this rule, public authorities can only interfere with someone’s privacy if they have sufficient backing from their country’s laws in doing so, and if it’s necessary for reasons such as national security or the prevention of crime.
The court said there was “no clear guidance on where AFR Locate could be used and who could be put on a watchlist,” so it upheld this part of Bridges’ appeal.
The failure of South Wales Police to comply with Article 8 also meant the police force failed to conduct a proper data-protection impact assessment before deploying the system; its impact assessment assumed the force wasn’t infringing on people’s privacy rights, which made it inadequate.
The third successful part of Bridges’ appeal was about the question of bias.
It is by now well known in tech and policy circles that the artificial intelligence algorithms underpinning facial recognition systems are often inherently biased, because they are more likely to incorrectly identify women and dark-skinned people. The racial-profiling implications are so severe that IBM pulled out of the facial-recognition space a couple of months back.
Under the U.K.’s Equality Act of 2010, public authorities are supposed to consider the potentially discriminatory implications of their policies. According to the court, South Wales Police “erred by not taking reasonable steps to make enquiries about whether the AFR Locate software had bias on racial or sex grounds.”
‘Major victory’
Bridges tweeted that he was “incredibly, ecstatically pleased” by the ruling.
I'm incredibly, ecstatically pleased by today's judgement on the case I brought with @libertyhq against the use of automatic facial recognition technology by South Wales Police. The Court of Appeal agreed that this technology threatens our rights. https://t.co/2kZiz7lJpv [1/5] — Ed Bridges (@DrEdBridges) August 11, 2020
Liberty, the group that supported him in the case, said in a statement that the ruling was “a major victory in the fight against discriminatory and oppressive facial recognition,” and called for the technology to be banned.
“The Court has agreed that this dystopian surveillance tool violates our rights and threatens our liberties,” said Liberty lawyer Megan Goulding in a statement. “Facial recognition discriminates against people of color, and it is absolutely right that the Court found that South Wales Police had failed in their duty to investigate and avoid discrimination.”
It should be noted that the court did not say there was any evidence that the system was discriminatory—it just said the police force failed to check whether it was or not. Separately, London’s Metropolitan Police claimed earlier this year that the algorithms it uses only generate false positives 0.1% of the time, but news reports have suggested inaccuracy rates as high as 81%.
South Wales Police said it would not appeal against Tuesday’s ruling. Indeed, chief constable Matt Jukes described it as “a judgment that we can work with.”
“Our policies have already evolved since the trials in 2017 and 2018 were considered by the courts, and we are now in discussions with the Home Office and surveillance camera commissioner about the further adjustments we should make and any other interventions that are required,” Jukes said.
The chief constable, who said the use of automated facial recognition had resulted in 61 arrests so far, singled out the bias issue as one his force was working particularly hard to address.
“In 2019 we commissioned academic analysis of this question, and although the current pandemic has disrupted its progress, this work has restarted and will inform our response to the Court of Appeal’s conclusions,” Jukes said.
‘Asleep on watch’
Tony Porter, the U.K.’s surveillance camera commissioner, responded to the ruling with an attack on the Home Office, the government department responsible for overseeing police activity.
Porter said he had been trying “fruitlessly” to get the Home Office to update its code of practice around facial recognition’s use by the authorities. He accused the department of being “asleep on watch” and called on it to act in the public interest and update those guidelines.
“I do not believe the judgment is fatal to the use of this technology, indeed, I believe adoption of new and advancing technologies is an important element of keeping citizens safe. It does however set clear parameters as to use, regulation, and legal oversight,” Porter said.
“Maybe the regulators at the sharp end of this subject matter really do understand things a little more than those advising ministers sometimes purport to.”
Fortune has asked the Home Office for a response to Porter’s criticism, but has received no reply at the time of writing.


fortune--2020-08-12--My daughter Heather Heyer’s death taught me how to grieve. We all need to know how today

What is Trump ’ s payroll tax holiday and how will it affect you ?
Everything you need to know

As of today, the U.S. has suffered over 160,000 deaths due to COVID-19. That is a great deal of pain and grief across a wide swath of the population—grief around losing a job, a family member, a friend, a lifestyle.
But most of us have never talked about how to grieve. Do we even know how to bring it up? Everyone’s grief journey is unique, but hearing how others handle it can be a launching point to discussion and understanding.
If you ask me which I prefer—mountains or beach—I will always choose mountains. My childhood was spent in the Shenandoah Valley, surrounded by mountains. My heritage is coal mining, carved deep from the Appalachian Mountains.
When I was about 5, my parents took me to Myrtle Beach, S.C. Having never seen the ocean, I was somewhat excited. That was until my babysitter that year, my grandmother, regaled me with stories and pictures from encyclopedias of riptides, crashing waves, sharks, lampreys, and jellyfish. It took a great deal of coaxing to get me into the water. As a chubby child and teenager, the beach was never a place I fully enjoyed.
But now, I live at the beach. Not in real life, but metaphorically.
Three years ago today, I was tossed into the ocean. My daughter Heather Heyer’s murder, at a counterprotest to a “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Va., put me in a position of public scrutiny and speculation. I took charge of the situation by dealing with the press and politicians head-on and planning Heather’s memorial. The waves crashed over my head, but I spluttered to the top, treading and swimming as best I could.
The first night, I quietly sobbed in bed for hours next to my exhausted husband. But I was so busy handling the press, politicians, and “immediately urgent details” that I don’t remember crying very much for a while after that.
Then came an influx of cards and notes, many with small amounts of money. They poured in through the funeral home, the mayor’s office, general delivery, and even TV stations. With the help of Heather’s supervisor from work, I started a scholarship foundation in her name. But I don’t remember crying much during that time. Life was just…busy. I spoke on national television, accepted posthumous awards for her, and traveled.
But at some point, there came a reckoning. I’d only allowed myself to experience waves of grief in trickles. I refused to cry in public, as the press would quickly air raw emotion but entirely disregard the parts about justice or equity. I built a dam to hold in my emotions. But we all know what happens to walls of sand when the waves roll in.
About five months later, when the holidays came, the dam broke. Pent-up tears flowed and flowed. I sat in my chair for hours on end, tears rolling down my face. Each new thought of Heather would start the sobbing anew. I think I cried for a couple of weeks. My poor husband was completely at a loss. He had recently lost two siblings as well. We had seen a grief counselor, but stopped at some point due to my travel schedule.
Friends told me it would hurt less as time went on. In my darkest moments, that was hard to believe. But I studied how others handled grief. Listening and reading when others shared their pain, I drew a few conclusions.
First off, we all die. That is inevitable to the human experience. We don’t get to choose who dies, when they die, or how. And if you loved them, you will hurt when it happens. But loving someone fully and completely is worth the cost of the pain of losing them. You will have the pain of loss anyway. But choosing to love at least minimizes regret.
Second, grief is like the waves of the ocean. It washes over you in both predictable and unpredictable waves. The waves come at holidays, at birthdays, at death anniversaries. They come as you fold her jacket to donate or wrap yourself in the blanket you crocheted her for her 16th winter. Rage comes as well. Holding back the waves only makes them hit with greater ferocity later.
Third, we can choose how to deal with the waves. I, for one, refuse to let them drown me. Others are still here who I love. I refuse to chase the waves, to eternally be a victim. I let them come as they must, and then stand in the shallows as I move on with my life. I can feel the pain of the wave and accept that pain. They always pass. And when they do? I breathe again.
Fourth, I recover more quickly if I do something of value in her memory. I choose to turn my attention away from the waves. The “something of value” doesn’t have to be big. It just helps to do for others in their name.
So I live at the beach, standing always in the shallows, always missing her, and always working to grow from our shared causes. It is common to the human experience to lose a loved one, and knowing I am not alone gives me comfort. Waves crash over or lap gently from time to time, and the tears fall. But I keep looking ahead. I have work to do. I have a purpose for being here, and I choose to survive.
I cannot promise that what worked for me will work for you. But acknowledging your pain and grief to others can be hugely cathartic if done properly. Find a grief counselor. Find a grief support group in person or online, but keep your wits about you. Predators certainly lurk.
Just know that holding back the waves only causes them to build up, leading you to a tidal wave further down the beach. I’m sorry to welcome you to the shallows, but know you are not alone.
Susan Bro is the mother of Heather Heyer and has spent the last three years working to be antiracist, in addition to training to be a certified life coach. She is a respected voice on issues of trauma and commitment to difficult conversations, restorative justice, diversity, and equity.