fortune--2020-10-19--Airlines are trying to develop an alternative to the 14-day quarantine

The International Air Transport Association is working to set up a testing system that will replace compulsory quarantine to help revive the airline industry that’s been decimated by the coronavirus outbreak.
IATA, which represents about 290 airlines globally, is working with the International Civil Aviation Organization and the World Health Organization to put in place scalable, affordable and fast testing systems, said Conrad Clifford, IATA’s regional vice president for Asia Pacific.
“We need testing because we need to get rid of quarantines,” Clifford said in an interview on Bloomberg Television Monday. “What we’ve seen so far is if there’s a 14-day quarantine, it’s the same as closing your borders.”
Clifford said IATA would “prefer to see some testing before departure and ideally, if we can find countries with similar levels of Covid risk, much like Singapore and Hong Kong, then that takes away the need for further testing.”
Singapore and Hong Kong agreed last week to open their borders to one another for the first time in almost seven months, exempting people in both cities from compulsory quarantine to help reinstate links between Asia’s two premier financial hubs. Details on the arrangement, which is expected to start within weeks, haven’t yet been publicly laid out.
Tests should ideally cost less than $10, Clifford said.
The risk of passengers getting infected is “very low” as airlines are carrying out deeper sanitizing of planes, and cut back on in-flight catering and magazines, Clifford said. Based on about 44 potential cases of infection on board recorded this year, the chances of passengers getting the virus is about one in 27 million, he said.
The chance of being infected on board is lower than that of being struck by a lightning, Clifford said. “There have been a lot measures airlines have taken to absolutely drive that chance down to as close to zero as we can get it. So it’s a very safe environment indeed.”
While IATA forecast in June that airlines will lose a combined $84 billion this year because of the virus, that number is set to be larger because the market hasn’t opened as the industry had hoped, Clifford said. The group has said that it expects travel demand won’t recover to the pre-Covid levels until 2024.
Cargo has been “a little bit of a silver lining” for the industry — partly fueled by online purchasing — and that is set to continue for the coming years, Clifford said. Airfreight is expected to account for about 26% of carriers’ revenue this year, compared with 12% in 2019, he said.
Cargo rates jumped after thousands of passenger planes, which carry more than half of airfreight, were grounded due to the travel restrictions. That prompted airlines to convert passenger planes to haul goods.


fortune--2020-10-19--Everything to know about the political food fight over Section 230

The polls are wrong .
The U.S. presidential race is a near dead heat , this A.I .
‘ sentiment @ @ @ @

Regulators are increasingly squeezing social media companies over a law that protects them from liability from obscenity, child pornography, and violence that their users post.
On Thursday, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai said he plans to review Section 230, as the law is known, to “clarify” the law to determine whether it should be reined in or eliminated.
For Facebook and Twitter, the law is critical to how they operate. Without the legal protection, the companies would have to further restrict and police content on their services—at a huge cost considering the millions of posts in question annually.
“Social media companies have First Amendment right to free speech,” Pai said in a statement. “But they do not have a First Amendment right to special immunity denied to other media outlets.”
Here’s what you need to know about the fight over Section 230.
What Section 230’s opponents say
Lawmakers from both political parties have pushed for increased regulation of social media companies. Republicans accuse Twitter and Facebook of unfairly censoring conservative views while Democrats complain that they fail to control misinformation and hate speech.
In September, the Justice Department unveiled proposed changes to Section 230. First, it recommended new language that would hold online services accountable for “unlawfully” censoring speech. Second, the agency wants to crack down on services for “knowingly” facilitating online criminal activity, by making them subject to civil suits, especially related to child sexual abuse and terrorism.
Earlier this year, lawmakers introduced several bills that could affect Section 230. One, proposed in March, would remove some of the legal protections for companies while another, in June, is somewhat less aggressive.
The federal government put Section 230 in its sights after President Trump signed an executive order in May requesting that the FCC and the Federal Trade Commission eliminate legal protections for social media companies. His move came after Twitter had added new warning labels to some of his tweets because he had included false information.
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas added fuel to the fire by suggesting that online services have benefited from “sweeping protections” that go beyond the actual text of the law. Thomas said the court should consider narrowing what the law covers if there’s a relevant case the justices can review.
What Section 230’s supporters say
Tech industry supporters say Section 230 is critical for people to express themselves freely online. Instead of reducing misinformation, they say the repealing the law will silence users and cause companies to go overboard in policing speech on their services.
U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden, a Democrat from Oregon who co-authored Section 230 pointed to yet another consequence of changing the law: Companies would be reluctant to remove and label misinformation, which he suggested plays into Trump’s hand.
“Without Section 230, sites would have strong incentives to go one of two ways,” he said in a CNN op-ed in June. “Either sharply limit what users can post, so as to avoid being sued, or to stop moderating entirely. … I think we would be vastly worse off in either scenario.”
What’s fueling the fight?
Lawmakers had hoped to take swift action on Section 230 because of the upcoming election and the various related problems on social media.
Some lawmakers are upset by several recent actions social media companies have taken that clamp down on free speech, while others think the companies are doing far too little far too late. Over the past several months, Facebook and Twitter have increasingly been cracking down on misinformation and adding new rules banning QAnon conspiracy theories and prohibiting Holocaust denial. They’ve also tightened restrictions on voter misinformation and intimidation, labeling and in some cases removing posts aimed at deterring people from voting.
Meanwhile, Twitter and Facebook both targeted a recent New York Post article that links Biden to corruption in Ukraine. Twitter blocked the article only to later reverse its decision after receiving blowback from conservatives who suggested the move censored important information that could sway voters. Facebook said it reduced the sharing of the article in order to allow third-party fact checkers to review the content for accuracy.
Despite the new rules and extra vigilance, the companies are struggling to keep up with the number of problematic posts. Conspiracy theories and misinformation continue to go viral across the services.
Correction: An earlier version of this story mischaracterized some of the protections Section 230 provides to Internet companies. The story has been updated.


fortune--2020-10-19--Why stronger labor unions would speed up America’s post-COVID recovery

Recessions always inflict the most pain on Americans in the middle and lower end of the income distribution range, destroying jobs, eroding wages and wiping out savings for those working in industries such as construction, manufacturing, hospitality and retail.
But the crushing economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic have reached levels unseen in the last four decades, and the long-term scarring will be severe without intervention from Congress – not just in the form of emergency relief, but also with targeted policy solutions.
One solution lawmakers should prioritize is a historic workers’ rights proposal, given that defanged labor protections are a large part of the reason the downturn has been so devastating to those who can least afford it. We need to bring back fairness to an economy that is increasingly plagued by a fundamental imbalance of power between workers and employers. And at a time when our nation is engaged in a vital conversation about economic justice, we need to make union membership a civil right.
When the pandemic struck, only about one in ten workers were unionized, a steep decline from the nearly one-third of workers who were members of a union in 1964, myself among them. As a result, millions of Americans—many of them essential workers—were left without a voice at the table when employers were deciding their fate. They had no ability to minimize layoffs or to define what paid sick leave would look like during the pandemic.
The consequences of this are hard to overstate. At the peak of the pandemic, jobs in low-wage occupations—many of which have chronically low rates of union membership, such as food services—disappeared at roughly eight times the rate at which high-wage jobs did. This inequity has especially ravaged communities of color.
It’s long past time to reverse the trend in declining union membership.
The Protecting the Right to Organize Act (PRO Act), which passed the House in February just weeks before the coronavirus began to spread in the US, would authorize financial penalties for employers that violate workers’ rights, strengthen the ability of workers to join together in boycotts and strikes, and facilitate collective bargaining agreements, along with a number of other sweeping reforms. In so doing, the PRO Act would modernize federal labor laws.
Republicans in the Senate said in February that they would not take up the legislation, and some in the business community have claimed that it is “completely stacked against employers.” But after eight months of economic devastation to workers, Senate leadership owes it to the American people to give the bill a fair hearing.
When enabled, unions have proven remarkably effective in helping workers during the pandemic. The International Brotherhood of Teamsters, for example, reached an agreement with UPS guaranteeing paid leave for any worker who is diagnosed with COVID-19 or who is required to be quarantined due to their illness or that of a family member.
Stronger union membership must be a pillar of our nation’s recovery plan. When unions are strong, America is strong: Unions boost wages of both union and non-union workers, they create a more balanced economy, and they improve the health and safety of the workplace. By contrast, when unions are weak, inequality skyrockets.
In order to protect America’s most vulnerable workers, it’s time for lawmakers to update our nation’s outdated labor laws. And we especially need to make union membership a civil right which is just as codified and protected as all other civil rights.
Leo Hindery, Jr. is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and formerly CEO of AT&T Broadband and its predecessor, Tele-Communications, Inc. (TCI). He is currently Chairman and CEO of Trine Acquisition Corp., a NYSE-listed company which he founded.


fortune--2020-10-19--Can COVID-19 cause diabetes? Here’s what we know

It’s been well-established that people who have diabetes are more susceptible to serious cases of COVID-19. This is one of the higher-risk groups for severe illness and complications related to the novel coronavirus, though they aren’t any more or less susceptible to actually contracting the pathogen than others.
But a growing body of evidence suggests that COVID and diabetes might be a two-way pathological street. That is, patients who contract COVID-19 may also form type 1 or type 2 diabetes, even if they don’t have traditional risk factors for the conditions such as being overweight or older.
Scientists are still trying to figure out the answers to this peculiar medical mystery. Diabetes is a metabolic disorder, so it’s possible that the virus somehow affects the insulin-producing pancreas (which regulates blood sugar levels) or raises the level of glucose in the blood itself.
A team of doctors being led by King’s College London’s Dr. Francesco Rubino, who chairs the school’s department of metabolic and bariatric surgery, is trying to get to the bottom of the issue in collaboration with physicians from around the world who are sharing stories of patients who developed diabetes post-COVID, Reuters reports.
It’s not a new phenomenon. In August, Rubino and a host of other medical experts spelled out their initial observations in the medical journal NEJM, describing COVID-19 and diabetes as a a “bidirectional relationship.”
“On the one hand, diabetes is associated with an increased risk of severe COVID-19. On the other hand, new-onset diabetes and severe metabolic complications of preexisting diabetes, including diabetic ketoacidosis and hyperosmolarity for which exceptionally high doses of insulin are warranted, have been observed in patients with COVID-19,” wrote the study authors.
The latter observation about diabetic ketoacidosis is particularly important. Inflammation caused by the virus may exacerbate the chances of someone with underlying diabetes, or newly formed diabetes due to COVID, experiencing that potentially deadly condition, wherein the body produces excess levels of blood acid called ketones. That can lead to fatigue, muscle pain, extreme thirst, frequent urination, trouble breathing, nausea, and confusion and could require emergency care.
While it may take years to fully unravel this relationship, one working theory is the answer may lie in the types of enzymes that coronavirus tends to bind to. These so-called ACE2 receptors are found in many parts of the body, particularly the lungs (which COVID may affect severely), but is also found in organs like the pancreas.
Rubino and company’s global registry of COVID-diabetes cases could provide greater insights in due time.


fortune--2020-10-19--Are you entitled to time off work to vote? Depends where you live

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With voter turnout on track to be the highest percentage of registered voters in a century or more, employers and employees need to know the rules on taking time off to vote. Millions have already voted by mail or in person, but millions more will wait until Election Day on November 3. Who’s entitled by law to skip work and possibly get paid for voting?
The answers vary widely by state. Employers must give employees time to vote on Election Day in 30 states, says a compilation of relevant laws assembled by Workplace Fairness, a nonprofit that connects individuals with employment lawyers. In 23 of those states, workers must be paid for their time. The full state-by-state compilation is here.
Employees in states requiring time off to vote shouldn’t start planning a vacation day, though; most states allow only limited time off, typically two hours. Other restrictions are significant: If polls are open before or after an employee’s shift, typically for two or three hours, then in most states no time off needs be given.
Some states require employees to notify their employer they intend to take time off to vote.
In several states—Arizona, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, others—the employer can decide when time off is taken during the day.
Some states that require paid time off specify that employees must vote in order to get paid. Hawaii and Oklahoma require that employees provide proof they voted; Maryland also allows proof of attempting to vote.
In Ohio, only salaried employees must be paid for their time off to vote. More than 1,600 employers have joined Time to Vote, a nonpartisan, nonprofit initiative formed in 2018 by Levi Strauss, Patagonia, PayPal, and other major companies to promote voting. Many of the members have pledged to pay employees for time they spend voting, regardless of whether it’s required by law. Other major employers who haven’t joined Time to Vote, including General Motors and the Paul Weiss law firm, are going beyond legal requirements to promote voting on their own.


fortune--2020-10-19--How Trump could repeat his 2016 upset in Pennsylvania

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You might yawn and click on for deeper election punditry if I told you that a prominent Republican consultant in Pennsylvania predicts that Trump will pull an upset victory that surpasses his miracle win there in 2016. But Charlie Gerow is so well tuned to the ebbs and flows of momentum in every corner of the Keystone State, from the soccer sidelines in the Philadelphia suburbs to the saloons of the fracking patch, that it’s well worth hearing why he believes Trump’s poor poll numbers way understate his chances.
“I’d say we’re where we were four years ago, maybe slightly better,” Gerow told me. “Of course, an incumbent should be very far ahead at this stage if they’re going to win. But Trump’s a special case. I believe there’s a significant under-vote that doesn’t show up in the polls. A lot of Trump supporters don’t want to be visible.”
Gerow adds that the polls aren’t catching the surging enthusiasm for Trump in the state’s western oil tier. “These counties that were traditionally rock-ribbed Democratic are registering Republicans, a sign of a Trump victory bigger than last time,” he says. “It’s hard to fathom the support for Trump in the western region until you see the yard signs and talk to the folks in the bars and after church.”
Gerow served on Ronald Reagan’s staff during all three of his presidential runs, and worked as a surrogate for George G.W. and George W. Bush on their campaigns for the White House. I first met Gerow by chance one evening at the New York steakhouse Smith & Wollensky, where he was dining with his former boss Ed Rollins, Reagan’s top political lieutenant during his first term. Rollins regaled us with stories about how Nancy Reagan would spend the day calling her wealthy socialite friends in New York and Washington to glean gossip they’d heard at galas and cocktail parties on schemers planting stories to undermine her husband or his favorite aides; then she’d pepper the political team with warnings of alleged plots and plotters. (Rollins is now a partner in Gerow’s firm, Quantum Communications, based in Harrisburg.)
Trump won Pennsylvania by just 44,300 votes, or 0.57% of the total, in 2016, notching the first Republican victory in the state in 28 years. Gerow notes that Hilary Clinton carried the five heavily populated counties that encompass Philadelphia and its suburbs––Philadelphia, Delaware, Montgomery, Chester and Bucks––by 70% to 30%, gaining a 660,000-vote margin out of the total of 6 million cast. Three other urban counties also went to the Clinton column: Allegheny, Lackawanna and Dauphin, respectively homes to Pittsburgh, Scranton and Harrisburg. Trump actually did worse than Mitt Romney in the Philly suburbs, losing Chester, a Republican win in 2012, by 10 points. His coup was taking 56 of 67 counties, sweeping the rural and rust belt corridors, by 58.3% to 41.7%, amassing 250,000 more votes outside the cities and major suburbs than Romney captured four years earlier.
As Gerow points out, the hurdle for Trump is once again garnering a gigantic margin in blue collar and rural communities to offset his big deficits in the metros. The polls are predicting he can’t do it. “I’d say he’s the same or a bit weaker than the last time in Philadelphia and the suburbs,” he says. “But he’s much stronger in the southwest.”
Trump is big in ‘The T’
Gerow predicts that Trump will win five counties in the region south of Pittsburgh––Washington, Greene, Fayette, Westmoreland and Cambria, home to Johnstown––by a wider margin than his 66% win in 2016. He thinks that he’ll also outrace 2016 in the northern farming and forestry tier, known as “The T.”
The southwestern counties form an industrial belt loaded with healthcare and defense manufacturers where Trump’s “America first” trade policies, Gerow says, resonate strongly. “Those were traditional, rock-ribbed Democratic strongholds until the last couple of elections, and Trump has gone much farther than past Republican candidates in turning them red,” says the operative. Trump also flipped Erie County in 2016, and Gerow thinks he’ll expand his 1.5% margin there this year.
Nothing exemplified the 2016 reversal of fortunes better than Trump’s showing in Luzerne County, whose largest town is Wilkes-Barre. The area’s economy was pummeled by the fall of anthracite coal mining, but has rebounded as a hub for distribution centers. In 2012, Romney lost Luzerne by five points. Four years, Trump won by 19%, scoring a 24 point reversal. Gerow believes Trump will win by more this time. He also reckons that Trump’s blue collar wave will capture Lackawanna County, which encompasses Scranton—the city where Joe Biden was born, and that Trump narrowly lost in 2016.
Gerow cites fracking as perhaps the biggest issue in Trump’s favor. “Biden and Harris have flip-flopped on fracking, and voters think that based on their past opposition, they’re fibbing when they say they won’t ban it,” he says. “Their position isn’t lost on a state where several hundred thousand jobs depend on safe development of natural gas.” The roustabouts, rig operators, and mud loggers of the fracking region, he observes, aren’t inclined to the Green New Deal. Gerow also believes that African-American voters in the cities will vote for Trump in much bigger numbers “than the national media would ever think.”
Most of all, Gerow thinks that voters respond more to symbolism than to policies, and Trump is projecting a far more powerful, energetic image than Biden. “The physical difference is a huge plus for a president,” he says. “I’ve worked for three presidents, and after their first term, they’ve all looked a hell of a lot worse. They all get weighed down by the gravity of the office.” He marvels that Trump lives on junk food, doesn’t exercise, and grows ever more overweight, and yet “He thrives on the combat. You may hate him, but he’s the only president who looks better than four years ago.”
Trump’s energy level also astounds this political veteran. “You can say what you want about Trump, but he’s got more stamina than most 20 year olds. After the bout with COVID, he was chomping at the bit to get out. Now he’s buzzing all over the place.” For Gerow, the image of a robust Trump raging at rowdy nightly rallies “connects with voters as no words can.”
Trump’s now trailing by 4.4% in the RealClear Politics average of Pennsylvania polls. But he’s gained 2.7 points from his 7.1% deficit from October 7 to 14. Gerow is predicting a super-close, “knife edge” race that Trump will win by a hair more than the last time. No mystery in politics is more compelling than how the pull of Pennsylvania’s cities and suburbs versus the push of the farming and industrial regions, so closely matched, will play out on November 3.


fortune--2020-10-19--NASA plans first cellular network on the moon

Nokia has been chosen by NASA to build the first ever cellular network on the moon.
The Finnish telecommunications firm said on Monday that the partnership will create a path toward “sustainable human presence on the lunar surface,” and will result in the first LTE/4G communications system in space.
Nokia’s Bell Labs unit is planning to build what it describes as an “ultra-compact, low-power, space-hardened, end-to-end LTE solution” that will be available on the moon by late 2022.
The idea is to provide the kind of technology that makes it possible to remotely control lunar rovers, or allow real-time navigation and streaming of high definition video, Nokia said.
“The solution has been specially designed to withstand the harsh conditions of the launch and lunar landing, and to operate in the extreme conditions of space,” it said.
The company said the technology it’s using — the precursor to 5G — is “ideally suited” for providing the kind of wireless connection “that astronauts need.”
Nokia is working with Intuitive Machines to integrate the network into a lunar lander and deliver it to the surface of the moon, where it will self-configure, it said.


fortune--2020-10-19--Down to the wire: What to know as stimulus negotiations near a Tuesday deadline

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Stimulus talks are truly down to the wire. On Sunday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told the White House a deal must be reached by Tuesday if the two sides are going to pass a package before the election.
As the clock keeps ticking, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Pelosi will attempt to hash out a stimulus agreement when they meet Monday afternoon, according to a report by Bloomberg.
The two sides are still far apart on issues like coronavirus testing—Pelosi wants more guarantees on how the money would be spent, and the Speaker said on ABC Sunday that “we don’t have agreement in the language yet, but I’m hopeful” in relation to a deal. But the main sticking point remains the overall price tag : Democratic leaders want $2.2 trillion, while the White House has offered $1.8 trillion. The two sides have come closer in recent weeks: Back in July, Democrats wanted $3.4 trillion, and the White House was under $1 trillion.
Read: How President Trump measures up on jobs in 6 charts
But even if the White House and Pelosi do reach a deal, it doesn’t guarantee passage in the Senate. Indeed, Republican senators including Rick Scott and Marsha Blackburn have already rejected the idea of passing a stimulus package of $1.8 trillion.
“If Speaker Pelosi ever lets the House reach a bipartisan agreement with the administration, the Senate would of course consider it,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said in a statement Saturday.
The more fiscally conservative Republicans’ reticence to pass a larger deal is in stark contrast to the White House’s attitude to spending whatever it takes. President Trump said he’d be willing to raise the price tag above the $1.8 trillion mark to get a deal done. Some see Trump’s concession as being driven by electoral calculations: Bankrate.com senior economic analyst Mark Hamrick recently told Fortune that the offer was “desperate.”
“The White House seems willing to spend whatever to win, which is logical. It just seems the Senate is breaking with the White House,” Brett Ryan, senior U.S. economist at Deutsche Bank, tells Fortune. Ryan calls the situation “an intra-party fight amongst Republicans, essentially.”
Indeed, Senate Republicans already look like they’re going to move forward without an agreement between the White House and Pelosi. On Wednesday, they’ll vote on a more modest stimulus package of $500 billion. The deal will include enhanced unemployment benefits, Paycheck Protection Program loans, and funding for testing and schools. It won’t include another stimulus check or funding for hard-pressed state governments.
Though unemployment remains high and the clock is ticking for aid like enhanced unemployment insurance to make its way to those in need, economists like Ryan aren’t optimistic economic necessity will win the day on Capitol Hill when it comes to the timing of a stimulus deal. “They are pretty much going through the political motions here ahead of the election,” Ryan says, “so that everybody can say, ‘We tried and we can blame the other side for not coming through’ or something along those lines.”
While the White House and Democratic leaders are butting heads on the dollar size and many of the specifics of the next stimulus package, there is some common ground on where the money should be spent. Both parties have reaffirmed support for another round of $1,200 stimulus checks. Both parties support more funding for education, coronavirus-related projects, enhanced unemployment benefits, mortgage and rental assistance, and food programs.
But as the back and forth continues as time runs out, Ryan highlights the reality: “The risk here is that you’re setting the recovery back.”


fortune--2020-10-19--Why America’s volunteer spirit could save the election

Regardless of anyone’s political leanings, the elevated hostility this election cycle has most Americans shuddering. American democracy is endangered by the specter of partisans pressuring voters at polling places.
But there is a silver lining: People on all sides of the aisle are protecting the election process, with the encouragement and support of various entities.
Numerous organizations support a fair and free election process where all people have a chance to vote. These include the Aspen Institute, NAACP, ADL, Business Roundtable, Civic Alliance, and When We All Vote. They are joined by high-profile companies like Amazon, Starbucks, Deloitte, Johnson & Johnson, and Dow.
General Motors, for instance, has been giving employees flexible time off to vote, voting information, and opportunities to do volunteer work since September. CEO Mary Barra said of these efforts, “We consider these to be best practices, which we encourage more companies to adopt.”
PepsiCo has implemented a similar program, encouraging citizen engagement in the political process with a nonpartisan video message sent from top leaders to employees on how this election is unique.
Many major law firms, such as Paul Weiss, have joined their clients to provide hundreds of election day volunteers. Brad Karp, chairman of Paul Weiss, said, “With the threat to safe, free, and fair elections greater now than at any time since Jim Crow, we are encouraging our lawyers and staff to protect the right to vote, prevent the intimidation of voters exercising that right, and safeguard the rule of law and our democracy.”
Civic engagement programs at universities and colleges nationwide have allowed thousands of students to join this volunteer effort.
These organizations don’t only share lofty mission statements; they also promote concrete initiatives such as paid time off to vote or to volunteer at the polls, as well as technological efforts to reinforce integrity in campaigning and the election process. As a result, more than a million employees have paid time off to vote and more than a half a million are encouraged to work as volunteers at the polls on election day.
Almost as impressive as the participating companies and numbers of volunteers recruited is that these initiatives work in complementary ways. Rather than compete with grandiose ambitions, their websites reference each other and connect voters to secretaries of state and election registrars around the nation.
Such a stance benefits companies. A new Morning Consult survey found that over six in 10 adults would be more proud to work for a company if it gave them time off to vote or advocated for safe and free elections.
As we turn to business to help provide guardrails, there is good precedent for such corporate statesmanship. Forty years ago, Business Roundtable pioneer, Irving Shapiro of DuPont, rejected the ideas of free-market fundamentalist Milton Friedman, who was channeling Friedrich Hayek by way of Adam Smith. Shapiro told me in a 1981 interview:
“Most businessmen are sensible and rational people. They recognize that they’ve got to meet the needs of our society or they’re not going to be successful. Free enterprise is a slogan. It means different things to different people. You pour your own meaning into it. I don’t know anybody who really believes in dirty air or dirty water. I don’t know anybody who believes that you ought not to have safety in your plants—that you ought to be indifferent to accidents or death and so on. And so I would make the case that we must get rid of the adversary approach and simply say we have a common objective.”
Perhaps Friedman did not read Alexis de Tocqueville, but Shapiro did, and knew that Tocqueville’s 18th-century image of American capitalism embraced community contribution.
Social capital matters to capitalists. The selfless civic engagement we see this season is to be applauded, as fortifying democracy becomes the business of American business.
Jeffrey Sonnenfeld is a senior associate dean and professor of management practice at the Yale School of Management, where he is president of the Chief Executive Leadership Institute. Follow him on Twitter.


fortune--2020-10-19--The election night winner could get dumped by faithless electors

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Donald Trump won 30 states in 2016—enough for 306 electoral votes—while Hillary Clinton’s haul of 20 state victories would equate to 232 electoral votes.*
But that didn’t happen. When it came time for the Electoral College to vote, Trump lost two electoral votes and Clinton lost five. In Washington alone, four electors passed on Clinton: Three voted for former U.S. secretary of state Colin Powell, the other for Faith Spotted Eagle, a Native American activist.
Members of the Electoral College—with the exception of Maine and Nebraska which allocate by congressional districts—are pledged to vote for the highest vote getter in their state. However, in most states, nothing stops them from breaking that pledge and voting for another candidate. And there is a name for them: faithless electors. A total of 10 electors cast faithless ballots in 2016, with seven—the highest since 1912—actually counting.
Those seven faithless electors weren’t numerous enough to swing the election—it takes 270 electoral votes to win—but faithless electors could swing the election in 2020 if it’s close between Trump and Democratic nominee Joe Biden.
Biden is currently leading polling averages in eight states Trump won four years ago: Arizona (+3.9 points), Florida (+1.4 points), Georgia (+1.2 points), Iowa (+1.2 points), Michigan (+7.2 points), North Carolina (+2.7 points), Pennsylvania (+4.4 points), and Wisconsin (+6.1 points).
If Biden pulls off victories in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, he’d have enough for 278 electoral votes. But let’s say nine electors in states Biden wins don’t vote for the Democratic nominee or Trump. That would mean neither candidate hit 270 electoral votes. In a scenario where none of the candidates reach 270 electoral votes, the vote would move to the House of Representatives. But instead of voting as individual representatives, they’d have to vote as a state—with each state getting one vote. While Democrats have the most House seats, Republicans currently control the most state delegations. As of today, Trump would be favored in such a scenario, as along as representatives voted along party lines.**
There are some laws to prevent faithless electors: Electors in 14 states, including Iowa and Michigan, would see their vote canceled if they don’t cast it for the statewide winner, according to fairvote.org. Those state laws were upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in July when it ruled on the Chiafalo v. Washington case. The Supreme Court also deemed state penalties on unfaithful electors as legal. Five states penalize unfaithful electors with fines.
State legislatures have the power to determine how electors for their state are chosen. In all, 538 electors make up the Electoral College. They’ve never changed the final outcome for President. However, in 1836, they nearly changed the vice president outcome—which electors are also required to vote for. Enough electors flipped from Democratic nominee Richard Johnson that it forced the vice presidential race to the Senate—where he was confirmed. If none of the vice presidential candidates top 270 electoral votes, the Senate gets to pick.
As of Monday, FiveThirtyEight forecast the odds of Biden winning at 88%, while The Economist forecast the Democratic nominee having a 91% chance of winning. Biden holds a +8.9 point national polling average, according to RealClearPolitics. Clinton held a +5.5 national polling average on this same day four years ago.


fortune--2020-10-19--Has CFIUS become a tool for crony capitalism?

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It’s not uncommon to see federal agencies rise in times of crisis: The CIA was birthed from World War II, while the Federal Reserve was formed in 1913 following a string of financial panics.
In this administration, amid a technological arms race against China and other nations, the Committee on Foreign Investments in the United States has dramatically ramped up its power. Also known as CFIUS, the organization has the ability to block acquisitions it deems detrimental to national security. It’s rarely invoked that since its creation in 1975, but in the Trump era, CFIUS has become dinner-table lingo: It blocked China’s Ant Financial from acquiring money transfer service MoneyGram in 2018, and also has a key say in the deal to sell a part of TikTok to a consortium of U.S. investors including Oracle and Walmart.
While national security as a blanket term is all well and good, CFIUS itself and its ability to stay impartial is under question. As my colleague Jeff John Roberts writes for Fortune’s November 2020 issue:
“B]The TikTok saga, which could see a prominent supporter of President Trump obtain a big stake in the app (Term Sheet note: Oracle founder Larry Ellison is known to be a Trump supporter), is also stoking a backlash among critics who see CFIUS as a powerful tool for crony capitalism.”
Even those who share the President’s hawkish views on China have been disturbed by his advocacy for TikTok to be owned in part by Oracle—raising concerns that the wall between CFIUS and the executive branch is showing cracks.
Of course, what happens post-election is certainly up in the air.
Read more.
LEE FIXEL RAISES HIS SECOND FUND IN LESS THAN FOUR MONTHS: It’s a blistering pace for any fund. Addition, the venture shop of Tiger cub Lee Fixel (known for successful bets in Peloton and Flipkart), filed to raise $1.4 billion for its second fund last week. Except, as it turns out, Addition had already raised that $1.4 billion less than four months after securing $1.3 billion for its debut vehicle, per the Financial Times. Fixel does not plan to invest out of the second fund until next year, per the report.
Addition has not been shy about dealmaking in the pandemic: It recently led a $110 million round in Lyra Health, a mental health-care benefits company, as well as a $200 million round in Snyk, a developer security company.
***
Fortune’s latest Reinvent podcast focuses on the reinvention of the NBA and its incredible season. From its cancellation in March due to COVID-19, to its resumption last summer in the renowned “bubble” at Disney World in Florida, the NBA accomplished this incredible logistical feat in the midst of a pandemic and tremendous social unrest. The episode features exclusive excerpts from Adam Lashinsky’s interview with NBA commissioner Adam Silver. An additional guest is Mehdi Bentanfous, managing director of Kinexon (the company that created the tracing/monitoring bands that everyone in the bubble wore). Listen here.
Lucinda Shen
Twitter: @shenlucinda
Email: lucinda.shen@fortune.com
VENTURE DEALS
- Hyperscience, a New York-based maker of process-automation software, raised $80 million funding. Tiger Global Management led the round.
- Future, a San Francisco-based digital personal training fitness platform, raised $24 million in a Series B funding. Trustbridge Partners led the round and was joined by investors including Kleiner Perkins and Caffeinated Capital.
- Silent Eight, a Singapore-based company seeking to prevent money laundering and terrorism financing, raised $7.5 million in new funding. OTB Ventures led the round and was joined by investors including Koh Boon Hwee (General Partner of Altara Ventures) and SC Ventures.
- AiFi Inc, a Santa Clara, Calif.-based maker of autonomous store technologies, raised $15 million in funding from Qualcomm Ventures, Cervin Ventures, TransLink Capital, and and Plum Alley.
- Wayflyer, a New York and London-based an eCommerce revenue-based financing and marketing analytics platform, raised $10.2 million in seed funding. QED Investors led the round and was joined by investors including Speedinvest and Middlegame Ventures.
- Blubrake, an Italy-based e-mobility company, raised $6 million in Series A funding. e-Novia led the round and was joined by investors including Progress Tech Transfer.
- Canela Media, a New York-based digital media tech company, raised $3 million in funding. BBG Ventures and Reinventure Capital led the round and were joined by Mighty Capital, Angeles Investors, Portfolia’s Rising America Fund and Alumni Ventures Group.
- Lawmatics, a San Diego startup that’s building marketing and CRM software for lawyers, is announcing that it has raised $2.5 million in seed funding. Eniac Ventures led the round. Read more.
PRIVATE EQUITY
- Partners Group agreed to acquire a significant equity stake in Telepass S.p.A, a European electronic toll collection ("ETC") services provider. The deal gives Telepass an enterprise value of over €2 billion ($2.3 billion).
- I Squared Capital agreed to acquire the telecom infrastructure division of GTT Communications (NYSE: GTT), a Virginia-based provider of telecommunications and internet services, for about $2.15 billion.
- Brookfield Asset Management will acquire a near 20% stake in American Equity Investment Life Holding Co (NYSE: AEL), a Des Moines, Iowa-based life insurer, creating a partnership aimed at warding off an unsolicited bid Athene Holding (NYSE:ATH) and Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Co. Read more.
- Prometheus Group, backed by Genstar Capital, acquired Utopia Global, a Mundelein, Ill.-based data governance and migration company. Financial terms weren't disclosed.
- Thoma Bravo agreed to acquire a controlling stake in AxiomSL, a New York-based provider of risk management and regulatory solutions for banking, investment management, broker dealers and commodity trading institutions. Financial terms weren't disclosed.
BREAKUPS AND HANGUPS
- G.I. Sportz Inc. and Tippmann Sports, paintball equipment makers, defaulted on $29 million of debt and entered bankruptcy. Read more.
EXITS
- Bansk Group agreed to acquire Woodstream, a Lancaster, Pa.-based maker of pest control and animal containment products, from Vestar Capital Partners. Financial terms weren't disclosed.
- Lee Equity Partners has agreed to acquire Simplicity Group, a Summit, an N.J.-based financial products distribution business, from Aquiline Capital Partners. Financial terms weren't disclosed.
OTHERS
- ConocoPhillips (NYSE: COP) agreed to acquire Concho Resources (NYSE: CXO), creating the largest U.S. independent oil producer, in a deal valued at $9.7 billion.
- Altice USA (NYSE: ATUS) raised its bid for Cogeco (TSX: CGO) and Cogeco Communications (TSX: CCO), two Canadian telecommunications businesses, to $8.4 billion after a $7.8 billion proposal was rejected. Read more.
- Alibaba Group plans to invest about $3.6 billion for a larger stake in Sun Art Retail Group, a Chinese grocery retail chain. Read more.
- Traton, Volkswagen’s truck business, raised its bid to takeover Navistar International Corp (NYSE: NAV), a Lisle, Ill.-based maker of trucks and buses, to $44.50 per share from $43, or about $3.7 billion.
- First Citizens BancShares Inc (Nasdaq: FCNCA) plans to acquire CIT Group Inc (NYSE: CIT), a New York-based regional bank, in a deal valued at $2.2 billion.
- Andrew Forrest, an Australian mining billionaire, acquired R.M. Williams, a bootmaker, from LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton. The deal was valued at the equivalent of about $135 million. Financial terms weren't disclosed. Read more.
- Uber is considering an external investments for Uber Elevate, its aerial ridesharing business, per Axios citing sources. Read more.
IPO
- Nextdoor, a San Francisco-based social network for sharing information and trading goods among neighbors, is weighing an IPO that would value it between $4 billion to $5 billion, per Bloomberg citing sources. Investors include Benchmark, Greylock Partners, Kleiner Perkins, Riverwood Capital, Axel Springer and Tiger Global Management. Read more.
- IN8bio, a New York-based maker of therapies for cancer and solid tumors, filed for an $86 million IPO. Bios Partners backs the firm. Read more.
- Opthea, an Australia-based maker of therapies for retinal diseases, raised $128.2 million in an offering of 9.5 million ADS (10% sold as warrants to acquire ADSs at the offering price) priced at about $13.50 apiece. Read more.
- Playtika Holding Corp, an Israel-based mobile gaming company backed by Chinese investors, filed confidentially for an IPO in the U.S. Read more.
SPAC
- Billtrust, a Lawrenceville, N.J.-based payments automation company, agreed to go public via merger with South Mountain Merger Corp, a SPAC, valuing it at about $1.3 billion.
- dMY Technology Group III, a blank check company seeking an app business, filed ro raised $250 million. Read more.
- Turmeric Acquisition Corp, a blank check company formed by MPM Capital seeking a biotech target, raised $85 million. Read more.
F+FS
- LLR Partners closed LLR Equity Partners VI with $1.8 billion including GP commitments.
- Sinovation Ventures is looking to raise $1 billion for its newest fund, Sinovation Disrupt Fund. Read more.
- Eureka Equity Partners, a Philadelphia, Penn.-based private equity firm, raised $195 million so far of a $225 million goal for its fourth fund. Read more.
- Josh Buckley, a solo investor, raised $100 million so far of a planned $150 million second fund, per the Wall Street Journal. Read more.
- New Frontier Capital, a Bozeman, Mt.-based venture fund, has raised $55 million of a planned $100 million for its third fund. Read more.
PEOPLE
- EQT named Marc Brown, former Microsoft corporate vice president, as partner and head of EQT Growth.


fortune--2020-10-19--Big Chocolate’s child-labor problem is still far from fixed

As Americans stock up on chocolates for Halloween this month, they might want to consider this grim statistic: About 1.56 million children—many as young as five—are engaged in the back-breaking work of harvesting cocoa for that chocolate in Ivory Coast and Ghana. Those two West African countries together supply about 70% of the world’s cocoa beans, the raw ingredient for the bars and treats made by the likes of Hershey, Mars, and Nestlé.
That estimate appears in a major report out on Monday, commissioned by the U.S. Department of Labor and written by the research institute NORC at the University of Chicago, at a cost of nearly $3.5 million. The 300-page document says the proportion of children in Ghana and Ivory Coast between the ages of five and 17 who work on cocoa farms has increased by a staggering 14 percentage points in the past decade, up from 31% to 45% of children living in the two countries.
While the report does not fully explain the increase, it suggests that some of it might be due to the fact that cocoa production has risen about 60% over the past decade, drawing in ever-growing numbers of children as farmers race to harvest their beans.
What’s more, about 95% of those kids face one or more significant safety hazards on cocoa farms, including using sharp machetes to hack away at pods the size of footballs, or working on land sprayed with pesticides. The use of pesticides on the farms has surged 20% in five years, according to NORC, which surveyed thousands of cocoa holdings during last year’s harvest season. “A large proportion of children in cocoa agriculture carry heavy loads, undertake land clearing, and are exposed to agrochemical products,” the report says. “The injuries reported by children seem to be reflecting the consequences of these hazards related to cocoa agriculture.”
(Read “Bitter Sweets,” Fortune’s 2016 report from West Africa.)
The report makes for troubling reading. Yet just as worrying—and infuriating to child-labor campaigners—is that companies and cocoa traders have failed to resolve an issue that they committed to tackling nearly 20 years ago. Under a 2001 protocol approved by Congress, eight of the industry’s biggest players agreed to eradicate 70% of the worst forms of child labor by 2020—a deadline it has missed. It also missed interim targets in 2005, 2010 and 2015.
On Monday, the World Cocoa Foundation, whose 100 member companies comprise about 80% of the industry, said it aimed to have its anti-child-labor programs reach all cocoa farmers by 2025, and that it would invest about $1.2 billion in paying farmers above the market rate for their beans. “As this report shows, there are today still too many children in cocoa farming doing work for which they are too young, or work that endangers them,” foundation president Richard Scobey said in a statement as the report was released. “Child labor has no place in the cocoa supply chain,” he said.
Yet in the minds of many, the chocolate companies’ efforts have come very late, and with reluctance.
“The industry and others want to do the minimum amount they can get away with, because it is a pain in the neck to them,” says Rep. Eliot Engel, a Democrat from New York who cosponsored the 2000 deal, known as the Harkin-Engel Protocol. Now chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, he said in a briefing last week with the International Labor Organization, the U.S. Department of Labor, and Unicef, that much more needs to be done. “We need industry to work with us, and not fight us on it,” he said.
Campaigners working on abuses in cocoa farming put it even more bluntly than that.
They describe a $100 billion industry whose lucrative sales are a jarring contrast with the extreme poverty of African cocoa farmers. By some estimates, many farmers earn about $1 a day—not enough to enjoy a bar of chocolate. “It is so scandalous to me,” says Etelle Higonnet, senior campaign director of Mighty Earth, an environmental organization in Washington, D.C., after studying the new report. Mighty Earth has spent years pushing for better cocoa-farming practices. “If these kids were white, you can bet we would not allow this to happen,” Higonnet says.
Monday’s report is not entirely bad news, and it includes signs of progress. For example, the estimate of 1.56 million child cocoa workers is lower than the previous figure of about 2 million, the estimate in a report five years ago, which is now thought to have been a miscalculation.
Faced with rising consumer concern over child labor, chocolate giants like Cargill, based in Wayzata, Minn., and the Switzerland-based Nestlé have begun ramping up programs to build schools, monitor cocoa farms, and implement awareness programs among farmers. “Over the past five years there has been an increasing call for due diligence, and companies have begun to identify risks and do something about it,” says Nick Weatherill, executive director of the International Cocoa Initiative in Geneva, an independent organization funded in part by the chocolate industry. “They are starting to scale up now.” He calls the NORC report “a mixed bag of sobering reminders, lower estimates and some signs of progress.”
A draft of the NORC report was shared with chocolate companies and cocoa traders several weeks ago, and includes a response from the industry, featured in a small box on the pages of the report, saying that it has financed new schools across the cocoa region, collected data on child labor, and expanded training programs.
Those programs are also splashed across the companies’ websites, as they increasingly work to stave off bad P.R. around child cocoa workers—a disturbing contrast to the feel-good products the companies sell.
Cargill, for example, says on its website that “it is our duty to make sure that children who work on farms outside school hours are not financially exploited, physically endangered or discouraged from studying or playing;” it illustrates its statement about child labor with a photo of kids playing with a soccer ball. On Nestlé’s website, next to a photo of an African child writing in class, the company states that “access to quality education is an essential tool to promote children’s rights and fighting child labor,” and says the company has joined an industry effort to invest in 10,000 primary schools in the cocoa region by 2030. Both Nestlé and Cargill are prominent members of the World Cocoa Foundation.
Yet the industry’s critics point to one major problem: Under the Harkin-Engel Protocol crafted in 2000, it agreed to regulate itself. That has shielded companies from any legal action relating to child labor.
“There is no mechanism that has consequences,” says Terry Collingsworth, executive director of International Rights Advocates in Washington, which has sued Cargill and Nestlé on behalf of a group of children who claim they were trafficked to cocoa farms to work there. That case goes to the U.S. Supreme Court in December. Since chocolate companies have now promised to eradicate child labor by 2025, “what they are saying is, ‘we can use child labor while we are trying to stop it,’” Collingsworth says. “It is so cynical.”
Despite the claims by Big Chocolate that they have invested heavily in child-labor programs, in several interviews over the past week, campaigners say they fear those programs have made little impact.
The NORC report estimates the programs reach only 20% of farmers, but NGOs believe even that estimate is too high. “We say to farmers, ‘You are producing for Cargill, so what is the impact of their program?’” says Charity Ryerson, legal director for the Corporate Accountability Lab in Chicago, who visited cocoa farms late last year. “They say, ‘We do not know we are producing for Cargill, and we have never seen the program.’”
Intractable trouble on cocoa farms
Indeed, the fragmented structure of the cocoa industry, as well as the remote, rural poverty in which the farmers operate, all make tackling child labor intensely difficult. Unlike in coffee or cobalt—two industries that have used children for decades—there are no sizable cocoa producers.
Instead, the vast majority of cocoa farms are tiny family enterprises of just a few acres. The farmers sell their beans to local cooperatives, or often to traders who pass by on motorbikes, buy their product and then resell them up the chain. Reaching tens of thousands of those farmers is not easy. “It goes all the way to the root causes: The poverty of farmers and the lack of alternatives,” Weatherill says. “There is a lot that companies can do to solve this, but they are not solely responsible.”
Still, two decades after the child cocoa workers became a global issue—and more than 20 years after Big Chocolate promised to rid their supply chain of child labor—the issue still seems far from being solved. And child-labor NGOs caution that COVID-19 has likely sent child labor soaring again—in all industries—as schools have closed and poverty has deepened.
Fair Trade certification has proliferated in recent years, giving some consumers the impression that companies are now producing chocolate in an ethical way. In reality, organizations say, the Fair Trade label refers to the premium price paid to farmers or cooperatives—little of which makes a dent in farmers’ dire poverty. “Consumers think, ‘This is an empowered farmer,” Ryerson says. “It is completely off from reality.”
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story incorrectly said that the chocolate industry planned to eradicate child labor by 2025.


fortune--2020-10-19--This is the fastest 5G mobile network right now

Verizon offered the fastest 5G connections of all carriers during the most recent quarter, but its service was the most difficult to find.
Verizon customers averaged 5G connection of 793 Megabits per second, blasting past AT&T’s 65 Mbps and T-Mobile’s 59 Mbps, according to research firm Ookla. But Verizon customers with 5G-compatible phones found a 5G connection less than 1% of the time compared to 54% for T-Mobile and 18% for AT&T.
The differences largely relate to the different types of 5G that the three carriers offered during the three months ending Sept. 30. AT&T and T-Mobile used gear that provided broad coverage but relatively slow connections while Verizon’s emphasized high speeds with minimal coverage.
That will likely change some in the current quarter because Verizon is also adding broader coverage and T-Mobile is rolling out faster service.
In another change, the fourth will be the first to include 5G-capable Apple iPhones. The iPhone 12 line, which ships next week, will be available through all the major U.S. carriers..
In the third quarter, Samsung’s line up of 5G-capable phones, including the Galaxy Note 20 Ultra 5G and Note 10+ 5G, achieved the fastest connections on average, Ookla said.
When it came to overall speed, including 4G connections, AT&T led Ookla’s rankings with an average of almost 42 megabits per second. T-Mobile was second at 33 Mbps and Verizon was last at 31 Mbps. The results are similar to what Ookla found in the second quarter.
AT&T also ranked best for consistency, which measured how frequently connections achieved a minimum level of speed. AT&T hit the consistency mark 81.4% of the time, followed by T-Mobile at 80.8% and Verizon at 76.9%.
Ookla calculates the average speeds by combining the results of millions of Speedtest app results from mobile users. That’s quite different from RootMetrics, a rival testing firm that employs professional testers who drive around the country and measure network performance. In January, RootMetrics ranked Verizon as the speediest wireless network.


fortune--2020-10-19--How tech’s most powerful women faced down the pandemic

This is the web version of Data Sheet, Fortune’s daily newsletter on the top tech news. To get it delivered daily to your in-box, sign up here.
For the 2020 incarnation of Fortune’s Most Powerful Women in Business list, the criteria have changed somewhat. As the pandemic and the protests after George Floyd’s death have made clear, serious problems need to be addressed in society. Add in climate change and the #MeToo movement, and it was time to add a new dimension to the MPW selection process. As Fortune’s Kristen Bellstrom and Beth Kowitt, who lead the project, explain:
“Simply put, 2020 is the year when we said a final goodbye to business as usual…We wanted to understand how an executive is wielding her power. In this moment of crisis and uncertainty, is she using her influence to shape her company and the wider world for the better?”
How has that changed the list? For the most part, 2020 has shined a harsh light on the tech industry’s failings, whether in stopping the spread of toxic misinformation or promoting competition in new markets. Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, Oracle CEO Safra Catz, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki, and Microsoft CFO Amy Hood all slipped from their 2019 rankings.
Still, Google CFO Ruth Porat, Best Buy CEO Corie Barry, AMD CEO Lisa Su, and Deirdre O’Brien, Apple’s SVP of retail and people, moved up. Porat gets credit for overseeing Google’s pandemic response, including a small-business aid program. Barry managed a massive online sales boom, and while Best Buy initially furloughed half the company’s part-time and hourly workers, it paid them until federal stimulus took over and has since brought back 80%. Su, whose company has rocketed ahead this year as Intel stumbled, is promoting greater diversity and representation in her sector through several initiatives. And O’Brien spearheaded Apple’s COVID response in its stores.
There are also some tech newcomers on the list, including Apple environmental boss Lisa Jackson, most recently seen up on the roof of the company’s spaceship-like headquarters, and Elon Musk’s rocket chief, Gwynne Shotwell (technically president and COO at SpaceX). Other new additions are Intel’s chief diversity and inclusion officer Barbara Whye, Netflix VP Bela Bajaria, and the heads of AT&T and Verizon’s business telecom units, Anne Chow and Tami Erwin.
I spent some time profiling another of the new tech inclusions, Amazon VP Alicia Boler Davis. After a childhood in Detroit and a long and successful career at General Motors, Boler Davis joined Amazon last year to oversee the company’s huge collection of warehouses and the multi-hundred-thousand employees who work in them. When Amazon’s early moves to safeguard its workforce from COVID were criticized, Boler Davis pivoted quickly.
“At Amazon, there’s a very high bias for action,” she told me. “Once you define a problem, you move very quickly to finding solutions and trying out different ideas. And then when you find something that works, you replicate that as quickly as possible.”
Aaron Pressman
@ampressman
aaron.pressman@fortune.com
NEWSWORTHY
A rolling semi gathers no moss. Be careful how you hint at your status. Embattled emission-free truck maker Nikola saw its shares plunge 16% on Friday after CEO Mark Russell hinted that negotiations with GM may end with no deal. “We have the ability and we have a base plan of doing it ourselves," he said. "If we have a partner, that just enables us to consider going faster and helps reduce the risk.” Nikola's stock, which listed through a SPAC merger in June, has lost two-thirds of its value over the past three months.
One click-fest. Amazon's made-up shopping holiday went well, research firm Edison Trends told Fortune. Spending on Amazon's U.S. e-commerce site on Oct. 13 to 14 rose 36%, compared to Prime Day in 2019. Amazon doesn't disclose the sales and spooked some investors when its weird press release about Prime Day didn't include the usual line that sales broke records. Its stock price lost 2% on Friday, leaving it with a paltry 77% gain for the year. Amazon also may be expanding its aims in the healthcare space, listing a job to pitch its internal telemedicine service to other companies.
I saw what you did there. The neighborhood social network Nextdoor is considering an alternate route to going public, Bloomberg reports. The startup would like to list at about double its 2019 private valuation of $2.2 billion via a SPAC merger or direct listing.
Giant calls are what you make. You may be forgiven for thinking 5G is all the rage. NASA apparently only needs 4G...on the moon. The space agency awarded Nokia a $14 million contract to build a network supporting lunar surface communications for its planned moonbase. Is that really a good idea? Did none of them see Space 1999 (which apparently is getting a reboot as Space 2099)?
Call me maybe. Privacy regulators from Ireland are investigating whether Instagram improperly allowed millions of children to share their phone numbers and email addresses. A security researcher uncovered a loophole in the way Instagram offered business accounts that enabled many kids to post their contact information, which was otherwise prohibited.
FOOD FOR THOUGHT
The Ocean Cleanup is the nonprofit that's scouring the seas for plastic waste, including in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Business Insider visual features reporter Mary Meisenzahl has a cool picture-laden essay about how Microsoft's A.I. team is assisting.
In 2018, Microsoft employee Drew Wilkinson reached out to The Ocean Cleanup by email about how the tech giant might help the nonprofit at its annual hackathon. "Microsoft has immense computational resources that could really help you track and monitor your efforts at a fraction of the cost using AI," he wrote in his outreach email. Over two company hackathons, Microsoft employees built a machine learning model to track plastic flowing through rivers with interceptors.
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
Anti-5G saboteurs raise alarm across Europe By David Meyer
How the secretive CFIUS became a powerful weapon in the trade wars By Jeff John Roberts
Not all cloud companies are keeping their pandemic boost By Lucinda Shen
How a funeral inspired the pandemic’s hottest hardware By Daniel Bentley
‘Virtual marathons’ see a spike as runners crave a fix and organizers fight to keep them engaged By Phil Wahba
Keurig is a machine: How the beverage giant is leveraging A.I. to fuel growth By Shawn Tully
(Some of these stories require a subscription to access. Thank you for supporting our journalism.)
BEFORE YOU GO
There's a cheating scandal roiling the staid world of competitive chess. While online chess play has taken off during the pandemic, so apparently has the use of covert chess calculator apps. Is nothing sacred?


fortune--2020-10-19--Telling men’s stories through their cars

Watches and cars share a common thread. In many ways these trappings of men with disposable income have become cliché. A Rolex or a vintage Porsche can be the shortcut to cool for well-heeled men of a certain bent. But beneath that veneer of showboating are often deeply personal tales. Those are the stories that photographer, magazine writer, and all-round bon vivant Matt Hranek teased out in his first book, A Man & His Watch (Artisan, 2017), and now with its sequel, A Man & His Car (Artisan, released Oct. 13).
In the new book, Hranek uses his 25 years of experience as a commercial and editorial photographer to capture the cars—warts and all—and his flair for conversation to tease out stories that will resonate with any car lover.
Fortune spoke with Hranek about the book and why men fall in love with their vehicles.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Hranek shoots a 1912 Hudson Speedster on his mobile set. COURTESY OF A MAN & HIS CAR/MATT HRANEK/ARTISAN BOOKS
Your first book was about men and their watches. Some of those same men are in this book talking about their cars. What’s the common thread between “watch guys” and “car guys”?
I think guys like aesthetically pretty machines. And I think they’re symbolically heavy. A watch and a car, your choices of those things—if you’re being very conscious about it—present yourself in a very specific way to the world. Both have emotional intimacy, or the potential for emotional intimacy: the watch you inherited from your father, in my case, or the car that you dreamt of in high school that suddenly becomes your own. They often mark great events in one’s life.
COURTESY OF A MAN & HIS CAR/MATT HRANEK/ARTISAN BOOKS
How did you logistically approach shooting this book? Obviously watches are a lot easier to get into a studio …
I knew that, like with the watch book, I wanted the cars to be seen as they are. Not washed and polished and retouched. I wanted to show patina and wear. I also thought about how we look at cars and how designers intend for the cars to be seen—which is front, rear, and side.
Logistically, this project was a beast. I knew I was going to be traveling around the world to shoot a bunch of these cars, and I didn’t have a massive budget to do that. So I had to be really smart. I wanted to shoot everything on a black background, like the watches, and so I created a mobile set. I had a custom ripstop nylon backdrop made, some water-filled “sandbags,” tent stakes, and rope, and packed that into a giant Filson hockey bag. After a year and a half of traveling around the world with it, I just wanted to burn it!
Marc Newson’s 1933 Bugatti Type 59. COURTESY OF A MAN & HIS CAR/MATT HRANEK/ARTISAN BOOKS
Which car in the book was your “white whale”—the one that was the hardest to track down?
Well, the funniest was Marc Newson, the industrial designer, who has this incredible, all-original 1933 Bugatti Type 59. When I interviewed him, he was in Greece, and he said, “Listen, the car is outside London being stored. You can go anytime and shoot it.” So I fly to London, organize a taxi service to schlep me out to the farm where it was stored … and nobody told them I was coming. The owner of the farm had broken his arm, and this Bugatti was buried in the garage, surrounded by all these other priceless cars. I said, “We gotta get the Bugatti out of here!”
So it was me, the taxi driver, and a man with a broken arm moving all these priceless cars out of the barn. We pushed at least eight like they were Jenga pieces, and I got the shot. Because there was no way I was leaving without a photograph of that, absolutely no way. You have to go into these things respecting the spontaneity of the situation, you know? Because something is probably not gonna go right.
Jay Leno’s restored 1955 Buick Roadmaster. COURTESY OF A MAN & HIS CAR/MATT HRANEK/ARTISAN BOOKS
Some of these men you interview, like Jay Leno and Ralph Lauren, have huge collections of hundreds of vehicles. How did they choose which car to talk about?
It came down to one question always, which was, Which of these cars do you have the deepest emotional connection to? And they weren’t always the most glamorous cars; they were not always the most expensive cars; they were not always the most expected cars. When you walk into Leno’s garage, there are some very impressive machines there, but he went to the 1955 Buick Roadmaster, which was the first car he bought after arriving in L.A. in 1972, for 350 bucks. It’s a car he slept in while trying to make it and the car he dated his wife in. And now it’s all beautifully restored.
Hranek’s own 1987 Porsche 911 Carrera Targa. COURTESY OF A MAN & HIS CAR/MATT HRANEK/ARTISAN BOOKS
What was the car that charmed you the most?
I love Fiat Pandas. My friend Paolo Tumminelli teaches about car design [at the University of Cologne] and has owned spectacular cars and driven some amazing things. But his passion is Fiat Pandas, the early ones designed by Giorgetto Giugiaro, and his passion is infectious! You have this little box that looks like a toy Land Rover, like a car that a kid draws. But the amount of thoughtfulness in the design of that car that most people probably wouldn’t even look twice at, I just think is spectacular.
You chose your own 1987 Porsche 911 Targa to open the book and set the tone. Why that one, out of the cars you own?
I was a kid of the ’80s, and I loved the Porsche 911. I had a poster in my room of a Targa. That was the car that just made my pupils dilate and my heart race. And when I met my wife, this was her ex-boyfriend’s car. Yolanda made him buy it at auction because she thought he wasn’t representing hard enough, in the car situation. Fast-forward, we borrow that car to drive from San Francisco to Palm Springs, and we eloped! There are a bunch of juicy details in between, but I ended up getting that car in a horse trade. I think I made out pretty good in that deal.
A version of this article appears in the November 2020 issue of Fortune with the headline, “A man & their cars.”


fortune--2020-10-19--Introducing Fortune’s 2020 Most Powerful Women

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! Jacinda Ardern’s Labour Party wins big in New Zealand, Nextdoor may be seeking an IPO, and we debut Fortune‘s 2020 Most Powerful Women list. Have a powerful Monday.
– The fab 50. It’s a big day for those of us on Fortune’s MPW team: Our 2020 list of the Most Powerful Women in Business went live this morning. (This is our domestic list—the international ranking will publish later this week.)
This year has been like no other—and it was clear to us that this year’s ranking, too, must break the old rules and evolve to meet the moment. So, for the first time in the list’s 23-year history (!!) we’ve changed our methodology and added a new consideration: In addition to weighing the power of each executive (by evaluating her business, career arc and influence), we asked how she is wielding that clout. Is she, in this time of global crisis and uncertainty, using her influence to shape her company and the wider world for the better?
Gratifyingly, for many of the business world’s leading female executives, the answer was a resounding yes.
This year’s No. 1, Accenture CEO Julie Sweet, leads not only a massive company—more than half a million employees and a market cap of nearly $150 billion—but one that is devoted to helping its clients navigate the new digital world order, a task that became all the more urgent due to the pandemic.
She’s joined in the top 10 by executives including Carol Tomé (No. 5), who took the reins at UPS at a moment when the shipping giant is playing an increasingly critical role in the coronavirus economy; incoming Citi CEO Jane Fraser (No. 6), who is poised to break banking’s highest, hardest glass ceiling; and Best Buy CEO Corie Barry (No. 9), who took aggressive steps to keep her employees safe—and has been rewarded with strong business performance.
One of the distinguishing factors of this year’s list is the number of new faces: 13 of our honorees are newbies to the ranking, while two others are making a triumphant return in brand new jobs. Many of these women are playing major roles when it comes to building more socially and environmentally conscious companies: Consider Apple sustainability head Lisa Jackson (No. 35)—she’s responsible for ensuring the tech juggernaut hits its goal of being carbon neutral by 2030—and Intel chief diversity and inclusion officer Barbara Whye (No. 40), whose company reflects the true composition of the U.S. workforce and is working to set diversity standards for the tech industry as a whole.
Covering industries ranging from space exploration to book publishing, and highlighting women who are using their power in myriad ways, we believe the 2020 ranking is more diverse and dynamic than any we have published before. We hope you’ll take a moment to explore it.
Kristen Bellstrom and Beth Kowitt
kristen.bellstrom@fortune.com, beth.kowitt@fortune.com
@kayelbee, @bethkowitt
Today’s Broadsheet was curated by Emma Hinchliffe.
ALSO IN THE HEADLINES
- Ones to watch. In addition to Fortune's Most Powerful Women, check out our Ones to Watch list. New York Times CEO Meredith Kopit Levien, Google general counsel Halimah DeLaine Prado, Universal Studio Group chairman Pearlena Igbokwe, and Clorox CEO Linda Rendle are all execs to keep your eyes on. Fortune
- Labour landslide. Jacinda Ardern's Labour Party earned a landslide victory in this weekend's New Zealand elections. With the party's strongest win in a half-century, Ardern holds an outright majority as she enters a second term as prime minister. BBC
- Next up for Nextdoor. Nextdoor, the neighborhood-based social media platform headed by CEO Sarah Friar, is reportedly seeking an IPO at a $5 billion valuation. The company is also said to be considering a direct listing. Bloomberg
- Racing ahead. As a professional runner, Lauren Fleshman grew fixated on her weight. She now believes that that singular focus prevented her from reaching her full potential. Now a coach, Fleshman is helping elite female athletes train their whole selves—and avoid the common pitfalls that affected their predecessors. New York Times
MOVERS AND SHAKERS: Melanie Boulden, president of the stills business unit for Coca-Cola North America, joins Adobe's board of directors. TaskRabbit VP of marketing and growth Helen Chang joins EXOS's board of directors. Bain & Company hired Amazon Web Services head of global business development Pearl Chen as EVP of global partnerships. Care.com hired former Uber senior counsel for safety Megan Poonolly as head of safety.
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
- Town hall talent. Savannah Guthrie drew wide-ranging praise last week for her grilling of President Trump at NBC's town hall. Her deft handling of the President—especially compared to the first presidential debate—also proved key to NBC as the network faced criticism for agreeing to air the event opposite Joe Biden's own. Associated Press
- Company dialogue. Earlier this month, Walmart CEO Doug McMillion wrote an op-ed for Fortune about "listen[ing] with open ears and an open heart" to employees. Now Cynthia Murray, a 20-year veteran Walmart associate and a founding member of United for Respect, a movement seeking better treatment of retail workers, responds with a piece of her own. She says that if Walmart truly values the perspectives of its workers, it should designate a seat for a representative of the workforce on its board of directors. Fortune
- Bad for business? In this Fortune op-ed, Stephanie Wylie, senior policy analyst for legal progress at the Center for American Progress, argues that a very conservative Supreme Court—as is likely if Amy Coney Barrett is confirmed—would be bad for business. Decisions that go too far in the direction of favoring business and shareholders, she writes, threaten to lose the gains of the move toward stakeholder capitalism, valuing consumers and workers. Fortune
ON MY RADAR
How one of the world’s biggest banks plans to tackle climate change Fortune
The long, worthwhile search for the five Black women of Grace Baptist Church New York Times
For Black women, the isolation of infertility is compounded by barriers to treatment STAT News
PARTING WORDS
"There’s not another band in the world that has two lead women singers, two lead women writers. That was my world’s mission."
-Stevie Nicks on Fleetwood Mac—and how abortion access made her career possible


fortune--2020-10-19--What the World’s 25 Best Workplaces have in common

Throughout the year, in partnership with people analytics firm Great Place to Work, Fortune publishes lists ranking the best U.S. workplaces across a number of categories. In 2020, on the Best Workplaces for Diversity, Millennials, Women, and Parents lists, as well as the Best Workplaces in Technology, tech conglomerate Cisco has ranked among the top eight—and it landed at No. 4 on this year’s domestic 100 Best Companies list.
So it should come as no surprise that Cisco tops GPTW and Fortune’s World’s 25 Best Workplaces list this year, for the second year in a row.
All 25 companies appearing here received top ratings on GPTW’s surveys of their employees in at least five countries. On average, these firms have offices in 12 different countries and employ 88,000 people worldwide. About half (12 of 25) are headquartered in the U.S., including four of the top five.
Illlustration by Sam Peet
As they did last year, technology companies—either in the IT or biotech and pharma industries—constitute 40% of the top 25. Dell Technologies (No. 17) is a newcomer this year, as are Daimler Mobility AG (the financial services and insurance arm of the German automaker), Cadence (electronics), Marriott International (hospitality), Volvo Group (manufacturing), and Deloitte (professional services).
For more on companies that prioritize employee satisfaction, social responsibility, and workplace diversity, please also see the Great Place to Work lists of the 100 Best Small and 100 Best Medium domestic workplaces, which Fortune published on Oct. 16.
World’s 25 Best Workplaces
See full list details here.
Company Number of employees Cisco 79,304 DHL Express 104,000 Hilton 173,504* Salesforce 52,000 Stryker 40,000 Mars 67,784 The Adecco Group 45,000 Mercado Libre 13,058 SAS 13,000 EY 300,675 Intuit 9,382 SAP 95,853 Adobe 22,000 Admiral Group 11,243 AbbVie 30,000 Daimler Mobility AG 14,000 Dell Technologies 165,000 Cadence 8,674 Marriott International 176,000 Volvo Group 100,000 Roche 98,000 Deloitte 286,200 Santander 194,000 Natura 6,396 Scotiabank 97,000
*As of Jan 1, 2020
A version of this article appears in the November 2020 issue of Fortune with the headline, “Global giants getting it right.”


fortune--2020-10-20--Ballot design should be boring

Ballot design should be boring

The last time a vice president from the Democratic Party sought the U.S. presidency, bad design probably cost him the election.
It was 20 years ago that Al Gore lost to Republican rival George W. Bush because he failed to carry Florida, a crucial swing state, in the Electoral College. Gore’s margin of defeat in Florida was razor-thin: just 537 votes. Immediately after the election, thousands of voters in Palm Beach County protested that they’d been baffled by new “butterfly ballots” that had led them inadvertently to vote for another candidate, conservative Pat Buchanan, or invalidate their ballot by marking it twice.
After a month of investigations, lawsuits, and nationwide outcry, rulings by the U.S. Supreme Court deemed Bush the victor. But the true tally in Palm Beach County remains one of American democracy’s great controversies.
Design is sure to influence the outcome of this year’s race as well. What’s harder to predict is how, by how much, and for whose benefit.
Eamon pointed out in this space a couple of months ago that ballot design has come a long way since the 2000 debacle, thanks to the work of institutions like the University of Illinois at Chicago’s Voting Experience Redesign Initiative (VERI), non-profit organizations like the Center for Civic Design (CCD), and design labs like IDEO.
Even so, CCD’s executive Whitney Quesenberry warns in a recent Washington Post article: “Every year we seem to have one or two big, horrible problems that make the news.”
As recently as the 2018 election, more than 430,000 absentee ballots were thrown out because of voter errors—often simple mistakes like failing to include a signature. That same year, almost 25,000 fewer people voted for senator than for governor in Florida’s Broward County, possibly because the box for the Senate race was listed at the bottom-left of the ballot under a translation of the voting instructions in Creole.
This year, with the pandemic raging, ballot design will matter more than in years past because a larger percentage of the electorate will be voting by mail.
The CCD, drawing on years of testing ballots and research into voter behavior, has produced a “field guide” for ballot design. Among its recommendations: don’t write important information in upper-case letters because that’s less legible than a combination of upper and lower-case letters; use a single sans-serif font like Arial or Helvetica; and don’t include political party emblems or other images that voters may not necessarily understand.
Dezeen this week explores how CCD designer Chistopher Patten redesigned the mail-in envelopes for North Carolina to make them simpler, clearer and less likely to be disqualified.
The United States goes to the polls in more than 3,000 counties, parishes, and boroughs. The CCD argues, optimistically perhaps, that “the anatomy of a ballot is fairly consistent” in all. It concedes, however, that ballot appearance is “constrained by legislation, technology, history, custom, cost and other factors” in the different districts.
Graphic designer Alicia Yin Cheng shows just how diverse, and often outlandish, the history and customs of those districts can be in a fascinating book the evolution of ballot, This Is What Democracy Looked Like: A Visual History of the Printed Ballot. In this interview with the Washington Post she reminds us that, in the early days of the republic, ballots were produced by individual parties and not cast in secret. They were meant, she says, to be “a public display of your allegiance.” They were a graphic carnival of riotous colors, fanciful lettering, and partisan (and often downright racist) cartoons and illustrations. It was not until 1900 that American states, inspired by the voting system of Australia, began administering standardized ballots and allowing citizens to cast their votes in private.
Cheng thinks modern ballots are “boring” and “graphically torpid.” But in the case of ballots, perhaps boring is best.
More design news below.
Clay Chandler
— Clay.Chandler@fortune.com
NEWS BY DESIGN
Enzo Mari
Italian industrial designer Enzo Mari died at the age of 88. Seen by some as the forefather of DIY design, Mari opposed consumerism and was an advocate for labor rights; he designed products that he hoped would inspire the workers who manufactured them.
Vote
Related to Clay's essay up top: North Carolina redesigned its mail-in ballot envelopes to make the process easier this year. The new envelopes were conceived by the non-profit Center for Civic Design, simplify the instructions for voters and make the process less daunting for first-time mail-in users.
Able
After a year of conversations and searching, the Ford and Mellon Foundations awarded the first of its new grants for artists with disabilities. Dubbed the Disability Futures initiative, the fund will pay out $50,000 to 20 artists but also pledges to help foster a new creative platform for the disabled creative community.
Hi 5
Here’s a quick rundown of the iPhone 12 launch, which was the subject of last week’s BxD. Besides the punt on 5G, perhaps the biggest change is the introduction of MagSafe charging, which Apple says is better for the environment because it’s one less USB charging cable in the world. But the move to “wireless” charging creates more disparity across the industry and leaves the issue of what to do with old charging cables unresolved.
Space waste
An incoming near-earth asteroid might turn out to be the returning husk of a rocket booster that propelled a NASA mission into space in 1966: a cosmic reminder of how polluting humans are. What to do with the junk humans leave floating around in space has been a favorite topic of Studio Roosegaarde as of late, while SpaceX’s reusable Heavy Rocket boosters could put an end to future homecomings of this sort.
EVENTS BY DESIGN
Dutch Design Week is cancelling the real-world elements of this year’s event in Eindhoven as coronavirus case numbers rise in the city. The online portions of the event will continue, October 17-25.
Swiss furniture designer Vitra is hosting its inaugural Vitra Summit October 22-23, bringing together architects, curators and designers to discuss the future of spaces. The event will be online.
November
Dubai’s inaugural architecture festival, d3 Architecture Festival, will run November 11-13 on the sidelines of Dubai Design Week. The event will focus on sustainability—an existential issue for the desert city.
Canada’s annual graphic design fest, DesignThinkers, is running online this year, November 10-21—the first time in the event’s 20-year history that it hasn’t been held in person.
QUOTED BY DESIGN
“During my long path of graduate education, across four institutions, I have had two people of color as educators. It was really sad to see that very little had changed for younger folks entering and graduating from art and design schools, especially those who may come from lower income backgrounds like myself.”
Says Esther Choi, an architectural historian, artist and co-founder of Office Hours—a non-profit that provides mentoring for BIPOC students in the creative industry. The initiative, launched as an Instagram account, was founded this past summer as BLM protests raged across the U.S.
This week’s edition of BxD was curated by Eamon Barrett. Email him tips and ideas at eamon.barrett@fortune.com


fortune--2020-10-20--Chelsea Clinton’s venture capital firm ramps up

Just three months after news broke that Chelsea Clinton was considering forming a venture capital firm, that firm is not just up and running, but also quickly gaining momentum.
On Tuesday, Metrodora Ventures, identified on its Twitter account as “a values-conscious venture capital firm focused on health and learning businesses,” announced its latest investment, the third startup the firm has publicly backed since its launch.
Metrodora exclusively revealed to Fortune that it is investing in Oula Health, a company that promises to be a “modern maternity center” combining different forms of pregnancy and birth care, from midwifery to obstetrics. Metrodora participated in a $3.2 million seed round for the startup, which is cofounded by Adrianne Nickerson and Elaine Purcell. Other investors include Female Founders Fund, Rock Health, and Kate Ryder, the CEO and founder of the fertility care company Maven. Collaborative Fund led the round. Oula plans to open a New York prenatal clinic and birth center as well as offer virtual coaching.
“Women should be at the center of their health care, especially during pregnancy,” Clinton said in a statement to Fortune about her investment in the startup. “That experience should be collaborative and holistic, and Metrodora is proud to support Oula Health to create an approach that does just that for prenatal and postpartum care.”
Nickerson and Purcell are aiming to make more accessible forms of pregnancy care that are more common outside the United States—like birth under the supervision of midwives. “Chelsea was one of the smartest investors we chatted with during the process,” says Nickerson. “She has a public health background. She was excited about—how do we take models we know work in other countries and apply them to the U.S.?”
Clinton’s public health background includes earning a master’s degree from and teaching at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health as well as working on related issues through the Clinton Foundation. Clinton recently joined Fortune’s Most Powerful Women Next Gen Summit for a conversation about vaccine hesitancy in the context of COVID-19. She also sits on the boards of startups Clover Health and Nurx.
Another recent investment by Metrodora Ventures demonstrates Clinton’s interest in the field. The fund backed Poppy Seed Health, also a startup in the maternal health space; the app allows users to submit by text questions about pregnancy and health care.
The third investment Metrodora has so far made public was in Fiveable, a startup on the other side of the firm’s stated interests. The education technology platform led by founder and CEO Amanda DoAmaral provides social learning for high school students.
“Investing in solutions that answer young people’s needs and challenges is an investment in our country’s future,” Clinton said in a statement about backing Fiveable. “As we launch Metrodora Ventures, we’re thrilled to be supporting a leader like Amanda, whose passion for democratizing access to high-quality education is at the core of every decision, and a company like Fiveable that fosters creativity and critical thinking for students inside and outside the classroom.”
Metrodora gets its name, the fund says, from ancient Greece, after the author of On the Diseases and Cures of Women, the first medical text known to have been written by a woman.


fortune--2020-10-20--COVID-19’s hit on holiday spending

COVID-19’s hit on holiday spending

This is the web version of CEO Daily. To get it delivered to your inbox, sign up here.
Good morning.
COVID-19 will take its toll on holiday spending this year, according to a report from Deloitte out this morning. (CEO Daily got an early look.) Planned spending will be down about 7% this year from last year. Travel spending will remain depressed—down 34% year over year. And a whopping 64% of the shopping budget will be spent online. You can view the entire study here.
Separately, C3.ai CEO and Founder Tom Siebel is our guest this week on the podcast Leadership Next. You will want to hear what he has to say—and not only because he tells of being mauled by a giant elephant. Siebel has been a successful entrepreneur for four decades and ridden multiple technology waves. But he says there has been nothing like the wave that’s breaking now—a combination of cloud computing, big data and artificial intelligence:
“This digital transformation is happening at 100 times the speed of the industrial revolution with 30 times the change. So this is 3000 times more impact than the industrial revolution. This is a big global event. And it is existential.”
I’ve known Siebel for a number of years. He has a long association with Stanford’s conservative Hoover Institution and a deep skepticism of government. But when it comes to applying A.I. to social systems, he told Ellen McGirt and me that government regulation will be essential. “You know I’m not a big government guy,” he told us. “That being said, if government does not regulate, we are going to be very sorry.” You can listen to the entire podcast here: Apple/Spotify.
Finally, lots of feedback, and a few cancelled subscriptions, in response to my commentary yesterday on Trump’s leadership. I kept tally throughout the day, and found it broke at almost exactly 50-50 between those who agreed and those who disagreed. My favorite in the latter category was a one word response: “Codswallop.” I had to look it up.
More news below. And learn how Jane Fraser broke banking’s highest glass ceiling here.
Alan Murray
@alansmurray
alan.murray@fortune.com
TOP NEWS
Intel memory
Intel is selling most of its flash-memory business to South Korea's SK Hynix. Prices for flash memory (used in hard drives, cameras and so on) have been sagging, and Intel has been looking to get out of the arena for a while. The $9 billion deal will leave Intel with its Optane line of data-center-oriented memory products. Wall Street Journal
Exxon and Trump
President Trump spent part of his Arizona rally last night telling the crowd how he could—if he wanted to, which he doesn't—call up the CEO of Exxon, establish that he needs some exploration permits, and say "You know, I’d love [for you] to send me $25 million for the campaign." "I would raise a billion dollars in one day if I wanted to," Trump said. Exxon felt compelled to tweet: "We are aware of the President’s statement regarding a hypothetical call with our CEO…and just so we’re all clear, it never happened." Reuters
Hong Kong banks
The Hong Kong Monetary Authority has advised banks to report customers' transactions that appear to violate China's national security law, which now applies in Hong Kong. Banks (should) already notify the authorities about violations of money-laundering and terrorist-financing laws, but the national security law is notoriously ill-defined, and compliance experts say banks might "report anything slightly related to a breach" in the absence of clear guidance. Financial Times
Impossible Foods
Impossible Foods's imitation beef has gone on sale in 200 supermarkets across Hong Kong and Singapore, marking its first expansion into non-U.S. grocery stores. Asia is responsible for 44% of the world's meat consumption. Impossible Foods' international VP Nick Halla: "Our mission is to replace animals in the food system with a much more sustainable way of producing meat, fish, and dairy goods. In order to do that we knew we had to start in Asia very quickly." Fortune
AROUND THE WATER COOLER
Child labor
The chocolate industry still uses the labor of over 1.5 million children in Ivory Coast and Ghana, according to a report commissioned by the U.S. Department of Labor. What's more the proportion of five-to-seventeen-year-olds in those countries who work on cocoa farms—often using machetes and pesticides—has gone up from 31% to 45% in the past decade. Fortune
COVID and diabetes
There is a growing body of evidence for the theory that contracting COVID-19 could lead to the formation of type 1 or type 2 diabetes. It is already known that people with diabetes are more susceptible to serious cases of COVID-19, but now researchers are trying to establish whether it's a two-way street. Fortune
Election fallout
If President Trump loses the election in a couple weeks, other national leaders might also be losers, including North Korea's Kim Jong-un, Saudi Arabia's Mohammed bin Salman, Turkey's Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Russia's Vladimir Putin, Brazil's Jair Bolsonaro, Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu, Poland's Andrzej Duda, Hungary's Viktor Orban, and even China's Xi Jinping. Fortune
Go vote
Yale's Jeffrey Sonnenfeld writes for Fortune that America's volunteer spirit—plus employers giving their workers time off to go vote—could help save the upcoming election: "Social capital matters to capitalists. The selfless civic engagement we see this season is to be applauded, as fortifying democracy becomes the business of American business." Fortune
This edition of CEO Daily was edited by David Meyer.