fortune--2020-12-23--Trump imperils bipartisan stimulus deal with last minute demand for bigger checks

President Donald Trump’s surprise attack Tuesday on Congress’s historic coronavirus relief package left aid for millions of Americans hanging in the balance as the pandemic continues to batter the nation.
The famously unpredictable president slammed the $2.3 trillion bill as a “disgrace” less than 24 hours after Congress approved the legislation with overwhelmingly bipartisan votes. Trump demanded larger stimulus payments for individuals and called for eliminating “wasteful and unnecessary items,” but he didn’t say whether he would veto it.
Trump’s last-minute demands nonetheless sent shockwaves through Washington. In addition to $900 billion in pandemic-related measures, the package includes $1.4 trillion to fund government operations through next September. If the president doesn’t sign the legislation by Dec. 28, government funding would lapse after midnight that day, triggering a partial shutdown.
The angst might run deepest among the president’s fellow Republicans, who preferred a smaller pandemic relief package closer to $500 billion. They agreed to a $900 billion effort in the end, pressured by the political costs of holding up the relief package just weeks before a crucial runoff election for Georgia’s two Senate seats, which will determine control of that chamber.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi quickly seized on Trump’s call for $2,000 in individual stimulus payments — well above the $600 included in the relief bill — and said the House would try to pass this additional measure during a pro forma session on Thursday, a move that could be blocked by a single member of Congress.
Republicans repeatedly refused to say what amount the President wanted for direct checks. At last, the President has agreed to $2,000 — Democrats are ready to bring this to the Floor this week by unanimous consent. Let’s do it! https://t.co/Th4sztrpLV— Nancy Pelosi (@SpeakerPelosi) December 23, 2020
That bill would be a standalone measure to strike all references of $600 in the current legislation, to be replaced with $2,000, according to two people familiar with the plan. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said he was said he was on board and challenged Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to agree.
Increasing the payment amounts to $2,000 would increase the cost of this provision to more than $500 billion, a significant increase from the more than $160 billion the Joint Committee on Taxation projects the current $600 payments to most Americans will cost.
Soaring Virus Cases
While many Senate Republicans are likely to balk at such a request, Missouri Republican Josh Hawley had joined with progressives to call for direct payments of at least $1,200. His proposal was blocked in the Senate last week by Senator Ron Johnson, a Wisconsin Republican.
The Covid-19 relief deal took more than six months to form and was only sealed after a frantic weekend of negotiations between congressional leaders staring down the end of this Congress. Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, one of Trump’s top allies, urged him sign the existing bill to get relief to struggling businesses and families.
Virus cases continue to soar in the U.S. — more than 18 million people have been infected and more than 322,000 have died — and job growth has slowed, which increased the sense of urgency on Capitol Hill.
If Trump vetoes or declines to sign the measure, it would suspend benefits from the previous Covid relief bill that expire at the end of the month, including a moratorium on evictions and extended unemployment insurance for those who lost their jobs during the pandemic — all of which were addressed in the giant package approved Monday night.
It would also mean stimulus checks would not go out in the days after Christmas, as Trump’s own aides had promised, businesses would not receive access to additional loans, and no new funding for vaccine distribution, schools and airlines would be approved.
“I am asking Congress to amend this bill,” Trump said in a video announcement posted to Twitter. “Send me a suitable bill or else the next administration will have to deliver a Covid relief package. And maybe that administration will be me, and we will get it done.”
Critical Relief
Trump’s decision to publicly criticize the legislation came as a surprise, as his advisers had not suggested he was unhappy with the bill and indicated that he would sign it. Earlier Tuesday, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin had lauded the package, tweeting that it would provide “critical economic relief for American workers, families and businesses.”
Trump said in the video that the stimulus bill had “taken forever” to come together and blamed Democrats of having “cruelly blocked” aid to improve their chances of winning the 2020 election.
Yet for months, the president took a mostly hands-off approach to negotiations with Congress. He declined to engage directly with Pelosi, and he did not convene bipartisan meetings at the White House to reach an agreement. Trump has instead focused on his ill-fated effort to overturn his loss to President-elect Joe Biden over baseless allegations that widespread voter fraud tainted the Nov. 3 election results.
Still, Trump had indicated privately that he was unhappy with some of the provisions. He had been working on a statement calling for $2,000 stimulus checks, but White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows raised objections to releasing it over concerns it could torpedo the fragile talks, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Trump released the video at a time when a number of his senior aides, including Meadows, were out of town for the holidays.
Trump’s about-face on the stimulus comes as he has vented anger at Senate Republicans for refusing to vocally support his extraordinary bid to undo Biden’s victory. On Tuesday night, the president lashed out at Senator John Thune of South Dakota, the No. 2 Republican in that chamber. Thune said Monday that any attempt by a handful of House conservatives to challenge the Electoral College’s results proclaiming Joe Biden the next president is “going down like a shot dog.”
“RINO John Thune, ‘Mitch’s boy’, should just let it play out,” Trump said Tuesday, using an abbreviation for Republicans-in-name-only, and referring to McConnell. “South Dakota doesn’t like weakness. He will be primaried in 2022, political career over!!!”
In criticizing the virus relief package, Trump appeared to be bending toward the right flank of his party that has been critical of the package and also supportive of his efforts to undermine the election. His public criticism came one day after a White House meeting with a cadre of conservative House members. Another one of his loyal GOP supporters, Representative Jim Banks of Indiana, cheered on the move, comparing it to the president’s 2018 vow never to sign another massive spending bill.
When @realDonaldTrump said “I will never sign another bill like this again” he meant it. #coronabus #PromisesKept— Jim Banks (@RepJimBanks) December 23, 2020
Trump’s social media chief, Dan Scavino, foreshadowed Trump’s move by assailing the stimulus package in a Tuesday morning Facebook post. “The COVID Relief Bill/Package is a TOTAL DISGRACE, INSULT, and EMBARRASSMENT!!” Scavino wrote.
‘Do Better’
Opposing the bill, however, creates a difficult situation for Republican Senators David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler seeking re-election in Georgia’s Jan. 5 runoff races. Both touted their votes for virus relief package in campaigns against their Democratic opponents, Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock.
Ossoff, who called the $600 checks a “joke,” went after Perdue following Trump’s statement.
“Even @realdonaldtrump says $600 is a joke. @Perduesenate, do better,” he tweeted.
Trump’s comments are just the latest conflicting signals about his priorities for pandemic relief, showing how his chaotic approach has complicated the negotiations. In October, he pulled his team from talks with Democrats, and then demanded a bigger bill than Pelosi herself had favored.
Senior Senate GOP members counted keeping the relief effort below $1 trillion as a win, compared to the $2 trillion and more sought by Democrats.
–With assistance from Saleha Mohsin, Josh Wingrove, Justin Sink, Steven T. Dennis and Billy House.


fortune--2020-12-23--How an overlooked scientific feat led to the rapid development of COVID-19 vaccines

Ripple says it will be sued by the SEC , in what the company calls a parting shot at the @ @

The year 2020 has been a rough one, but at least it’s ending on a positive note.
In the past few weeks, vaccine makers like Pfizer and Moderna have begun rolling out vaccines to people in the U.S. and U.K., with plans to increase distribution globally in 2021.
Meanwhile, Chinese vaccine makers have already begun distributing millions of vaccines in China and to other countries including the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain—with more vaccines likely on their way. Nearly 100 vaccine makers have begun testing candidates in clinical trials, with 18 of those testing candidates in the final, Phase III stage, according to the New York Times.
All of these efforts have relied on one crucial scientific discovery—sequencing the COVID-19 genome. The genome, which researchers in China made publicly available on Jan. 11, has formed the foundation of scientific efforts to tackle the virus, from testing, to tracking how the virus is mutating, to developing those vaccines.
Yet at the start of 2020, there was no guarantee that the data would be released as early as it was. Advances in modern technology, and the daring efforts of a Chinese research lab, ensured that vaccine makers and scientists around the world had open access to the mapped genome—all before much of the world even knew that the virus existed.
A risky release
On Jan. 3, Zhang Yongzhen, a virologist at Shanghai’s Fudan University, received a sample pathogen taken from a patient infected by a mysterious virus in Wuhan, China. Over the next two days, Zhang and a team in Shanghai worked day and night to map out a genome.
“It took us less than 40 hours [to map the genome], so very, very fast,” Zhang told Time in August. In 2003, researchers had spent months sequencing SARS, a virus that spread through China and killed hundreds around the world. Now, Zhang could deploy new, next-generation sequencing tools to map the genome in just a matter of days.
On Jan. 5, Zhang says, he alerted health authorities in China about his findings and the potential severity of the virus, which bore a resemblance to SARS. He also posted his results on Jan. 5 to the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), a U.S. government–run biomedical database, he told Time.
Over the next six days, Zhang continued to meet with Chinese public health officials to discuss the virus, as his paper awaited review on the NCBI’s GenBank database, he says.
Yet Zhang’s delay in making the genome public may have also been related to the fact that China’s government actively sought to suppress information relating to COVID-19. On Jan. 3, China’s National Health Commission, the country’s top health body, had ordered research institutions in China not to publish any information related to the emerging Wuhan disease outbreak, according to Chinese media outlet Caixin.
Zhang told Nature in December that he had not known about the government order but had worried that officials might object to his releasing the genome.
Yet on the morning of Jan. 11, Zhang says, he got a call from a colleague, Sydney University virologist Edward Holmes, who urged him to make the mapped genome available to the public.
At the time, Zhang’s team was likely one of several labs in China to have cracked the genetic code. But after talking with Zhang, Holmes successfully uploaded the genome to viralogical.org, an open discussion forum for epidemiological researchers.
Vaccines
At the time, the data release was not widely recognized for the turning point it was—even as some researchers described it as what they called a “holy shit” moment—when it became clear that the virus could be a potential threat to global public health.
Upon seeing the genome, professor Ben Cowling, an epidemiologist at Hong Kong University, said he worried that the virus was both similar to SARS but also a “completely new virus.”
But the genome gave scientists a tool to track the virus’s spread, according to Cowling.
“It was really important to identify the pathogen and publish it,” says Cowling. “Within a few days of the sequence being published, many laboratories (including the lab here at Hong Kong University) were able to make diagnostic PCR kits for the new virus and start testing people.”
Beyond its value for testing, publishing the virus genome allowed vaccine makers globally to get to work before much of the world was even aware that a viral outbreak was happening in Wuhan, China.
“With the genomic sequence, we were off to the races,” Anthony Fauci, head of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told the Financial Times in March, about starting the COVID-19 vaccine development effort.
American vaccine maker Moderna, which recently received approval to distribute its vaccine in the U.S., says that it used the genome to develop a COVID-19 vaccine by Jan. 13, just two days after the genome was uploaded.
Researchers at Oxford University, which developed a COVID-19 vaccine with British pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca, also got to work shortly after the genetic code was released.
So while 2021 may be the year in which these vaccine makers are able to get control over a global pandemic, their work was launched by one man’s historic decision in the early days of 2020.
“January 11 was a turning point for understanding that [the virus] is serious,” Zhang told Nature in December. “It was a turning point for China. It was a turning point for the world.”


fortune--2020-12-23--France agrees to reopen border after U.K.’s trucking route to Europe paralyzed over mutant virus fea

France agrees to reopen border after U.K.’s trucking route to Europe paralyzed over mutant virus fears

Critical trade and transportation links between the U.K. and continental Europe are to resume after France agreed to end a suspension that crippled Britain’s busiest port at a time of high political drama over Brexit.
European Union citizens and residents able to show negative Covid-19 tests will be able to travel from the U.K., according to French Prime Minister Jean Castex. The objective is now to have freight traffic moving by Wednesday morning, a French official said.
France cut off shipments from Dover in southeast England on Sunday because of concern over a faster-spreading variant of Covid-19 that prompted the U.K. government to lock down London and surrounding areas.
What followed was two days of cross-Channel political bartering over the reopening of routes just as negotiations with the EU over a post-Brexit trade deal intensified. With less than 10 days to go before a transition period ends on Dec. 31, the upheaval gave a snapshot of the potential pain Britain’s closest continental neighbor can unleash.
The U.K. found itself effectively isolated as more than 40 countries restricted flights, including many EU members. On Wednesday, the Nikkei reported that Japan will suspend all foreign arrivals from the U.K. while the Philippines will halt all flights from Dec. 24 to Dec. 31 to prevent the spread of the new coronavirus variant. India, Hong Kong and Singapore have implemented similar measures.
Almost 3,000 trucks have been stuck in southeast England, threatening a deficit of some fresh food items in British supermarkets. German airline Deutsche Lufthansa AG said it would airlift fresh produce to the U.K. on Wednesday to ease any potential shortages.
Testing Talks
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson called French President Emmanuel Macron on Monday to try to find a solution and both sides had promised to resolve the border issue within hours. Instead, the impasse dragged on over a disagreement on how to ensure truck drivers were not carrying the new coronavirus strain into France.
The French side was pushing for haulers to take PCR tests, which give a result in between 24 and 48 hours, two people familiar with the matter said. The U.K. preferred lateral flow tests that are less accurate, but take only about 15 minutes — so could ease the blockage faster.
The British military and National Health Service will establish multiple testing sites in Kent, the county where Dover is located, Sky News reported.
The new travel restrictions will apply until at least Jan. 6, the French government said. The British side asked to publish any announcement late in the day to avoid too many trucks driving to Kent, according to a person familiar with the matter.
“Truckers shouldn’t, and it’s important, gather at departure points in Kent to avoid saturating the system we’re putting into place,” Jean-Baptiste Djebbari, French junior transport minister, told BFM TV.
U.K. Transport Secretary Grant Shapps echoed that request in a statement on Tuesday evening. “This protocol will see the French border reopen to those traveling for urgent reasons, provided they have a certified negative Covid test,” Shapps said. “We continue to urge hauliers not to travel to Kent until further notice as we work to alleviate congestion at ports.”
Isolating Britain
EU ambassadors meeting in Brussels agreed to continue monitoring the epidemiological situation closely and the EU’s crisis response unit is ready to meet if necessary in the coming days, EU diplomats said. The envoys stressed the importance of maintaining the flow of freight into and out of the U.K.
Doug Bannister, chief executive of the Port of Dover, said earlier that the backlog of cargo could be quickly cleared once France reopens its border. After a security-related shutdown was lifted in September, 4,500 trucks boarded ferries in just 12 hours, he said.
“Glad it’s finally been reopened,” said Duncan Buchanan, policy director of the Road Haulage Association, which represents U.K. trucking firms. “It was an unsustainable position to blockade the U.K. like that. Testing is a waste of time, but if you have to, you have to.”
Earlier on Tuesday, the European Commission called on member states to reopen critical trade and passenger transport links to the U.K. while discouraging non-essential travel.
Non-essential travel between the U.K and the EU is set to be temporarily restricted anyway from Jan. 1, when Britain leaves the continent’s customs union. As a so-called third country, the U.K. will be subject to Covid-related restrictions.
With 2021 looming, the broader contours of Britain’s future relationship with the EU are still being thrashed out by negotiating teams holed up in Brussels trying to finalize a trade deal.
The EU’s chief Brexit negotiator, Michel Barnier, said Britain and the EU are giving negotiations on a trade deal “a final push,” while officials on both sides talked of a possible agreement as soon as Wednesday.
–With assistance from Alberto Nardelli, Lizzy Burden and Siddharth Philip.


fortune--2020-12-23--The 5 biggest Chinese IPOs of 2020—and what to watch for in 2021

In a year battered by pandemic-induced economic slowdowns, the global IPO market will end 2020 with a bang—up more than 23% in value, compared to 2019, according to accounting firm KPMG.
That increase is due in large part to a surge in activity in Hong Kong and mainland China. Five of the 10 biggest IPOs of 2020 (and four of the top five) occurred on exchanges in Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Shenzhen. Of course, hanging over that record is the much-anticipated IPO that never was—the launch of Jack Ma’s Ant Group on the Shanghai and Hong Kong markets, which was scuttled in November.
Meanwhile, next year’s Chinese IPO pipeline also looks to be a crowded one, heavy on tech startups and U.S.-listed Chinese firms pursuing secondary offerings in Hong Kong or mainland China—two trends that characterized much of 2020’s IPO scene.
1) Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC)
China’s biggest semiconductor maker, SMIC, raised over $7.5 billion on Shanghai’s Star market in July. SMIC is already listed in Hong Kong, and also traded on the New York Stock Exchange before it delisted from the NYSE in 2019.
The firm is regarded as essential to the Chinese government’s goal of self-sufficiency in chipmaking. SMIC shares jumped 245% at the open on its first day of trading, reflecting investors’ eagerness to get a piece of the national chipmaking champion.
SMIC shares suffered this month, first after co-CEO Liang Mong Song abruptly resigned, and then after the U.S. government added SMIC to an export blacklist that restricts its access to U.S. technology. The company said its inclusion on the blacklist will have a “major adverse impact” on advanced technology development.
JD.com, China’s second-largest e-commerce company, went public in Hong Kong in June and raked in $4.5 billion in proceeds, according to KPMG.
The float was a secondary offering for JD.com, which debuted on Nasdaq in 2014. JD.com’s New York–listed rival Alibaba Group also completed a secondary listing in Hong Kong in 2019.
JD.com’s online retail sales surged during the pandemic, but, like Alibaba, the firm is expanding into tech sectors like logistics and cloud computing.
3) Beijing-Shanghai High Speed Railway
The rail operator raised $4.4 billion in Shanghai on Jan. 16, less than two weeks before coronavirus lockdowns across China erased demand for cross-country travel and slashed the company’s passenger volume and revenue. The company’s stock has suffered accordingly.
Domestic travel in China has since rebounded to pre-coronavirus levels, so Beijing-Shanghai High Speed Railway’s end-of-year financial results may show an improvement on the firm’s half-year results, in which the operator reported a 90% year-on-year decrease in net profit.
4) JD Health
JD Health, the health care subsidiary of e-commerce giant JD.com, raised $3.5 billion before trading began when it debuted in Hong Kong earlier this month.
The IPO of tech-focused JD Health was a boon for Hong Kong; over the past two years, the stock exchange has instituted various listing reforms and launched a new tech index in an effort to attract more technology companies.
JD Health’s shares closed at around 60% above the list price on the first day of trading, indicating that Hong Kong investors are enthusiastic about Chinese “new economy” tech stocks.
5) NetEase
Gaming giant NetEase raised $3.1 billion in a Hong Kong secondary offering in June. Like JD.com, NetEase already trades on Nasdaq and saw its sales boom during the pandemic, when millions of homebound consumers turned to online gaming to pass the time under lockdown.
NetEase is China’s second-largest gaming company after Tencent. Almost 80% of its revenue comes from online gaming, while the remaining 20% comes from NetEase’s smaller live-streaming, music streaming, and online education businesses.
Ant Group—the IPO that never was
One of the most anticipated Chinese IPOs of 2020 was that of Ant Group, the fintech unicorn founded by Alibaba cofounder and billionaire Jack Ma.
Ant planned to list simultaneously in Hong Kong and Shanghai and reportedly raised as much as $37 billion, which would have sailed past Saudi Aramco’s record $29 billion 2019 debut. That means it would have been the biggest initial public offering in history—in a global display of China’s homegrown tech prowess.
But on Nov. 3, two days before Ant’s scheduled float, the Shanghai stock exchange said it was suspending Ant’s listing over concerns that it wasn’t meeting “listing qualifications or disclosure requirements.” Ant suspended the Hong Kong portion of the listing after Shanghai’s announcement.
The dramatic last-minute halt was reportedly the culmination of years of increasingly strained relations between China’s financial regulators and the famously outspoken Jack Ma, who had delivered a public speech criticizing China’s regulators and state-led banking sector in the weeks leading up to Ant’s planned IPO. According to the Wall Street Journal, Chinese President Xi Jinping personally decided to suspend the IPO.
Chinese regulators said they were concerned about the financial risks in Ant’s microlending business, and said Ant will need to comply with new regulatory requirements before it can pursue the listing.
Ma reportedly offered parts of Ant’s business to the Chinese government to try to salvage the IPO, which is on ice indefinitely, without a rescheduled date and amid reports that it might take until 2022 to list.
Chinese IPOs to watch in 2021
A slew of Chinese tech companies are reportedly gearing up for initial public offerings next year.
JD.com subsidiary JD Digits, a fintech firm, filed an application to list in Shanghai in September. It will likely list in 2021 and raise up to $3.1 billion. The fallout of Ant Group’s suspended IPO and the stricter rules around fintech companies brought uncertainty for JD Digits, which may have otherwise listed in 2020.
Tech giant ByteDance—the owner of TikTok and, by some measures, the most valuable unicorn in the world—is considering separate Hong Kong listings for news aggregator Toutiao and Douyin, TikTok’s mainland China sister app, according to Bloomberg.
Short-video app Kuaishou, which rivals Douyin in the mainland China market, filed for an IPO in Hong Kong that could raise up to $5 billion, which would value the startup at $50 billion. Kuaishou is reportedly aiming for a late January float.
Two Nasdaq-listed Chinese firms, short-video app Bilibili and video streaming company iQiyi, are reportedly seeking secondary offerings in Hong Kong next year. Bilibili could raise as much as $1.5 billion.
The floats would add Bilibili and iQiyi to the growing list of U.S.-listed Chinese companies pursuing secondary listings closer to home, as regulatory restrictions on U.S. exchanges get stricter for Chinese firms.


fortune--2020-12-23--Trump focused too much on fraud—and it might have cost him the election

Texas shows us how Donald Trump could have averted his loss of the 2020 election. But nobody’s paying attention, lost in a tsunami of outlier claims of election rigging.
Trump’s most passionate loyalists, along with Trump, cling to the claim of a rigged election. Ineffectual as a challenge, that claim inoculates Trump from being branded a loser, his worst nightmare. And, as recently noted by the New York Times, it brings Trump hundreds of millions of dollars in ready political cash, enhancing his ongoing power.
Trump partisans cite some evidence of fraud, but none of it, according to Attorney General William Barr, a Trump loyalist, was of sufficient scale to have invalidated the election results. Trump must face the truth: He lost fair and square.
Instead of complaining about fraud, Trump should have done more to energize the voters who could propel him to victory. Consider, for instance, what Texas Republicans did—courtesy of political strategist Steve Munisteri—to repel a concerted national effort by Democrats and their donors to turn the state blue.
As reported by R.G. Ratcliffe in Texas Monthly: “To achieve sweeping wins in 2020, Munisteri told me last year that Republicans needed to increase their party’s turnout. He hypothesized that 10.5 million to 11 million Texans would cast ballots in 2020—up from 9 million in 2016—and Democrats could count on a guaranteed 4 million votes and Republicans 4.5 million. To reach the projected winning total of 5.5 million, Munisteri oversaw a $10 million voter registration effort to target unregistered Texans who live in reliably Republican areas. Democrats and allied groups run voter registration drives every election cycle, but Munisteri’s effort was the first for the GOP in years.”
That $10 million voter registration effort—a modest expenditure in this $14 billion election cycle—might have helped provide the more than 630,000 votes Trump won by in Texas.
It might have worked elsewhere too. But instead of making a robust reelection effort, Trump instead distracted his supporters with unsupported theories about widespread election fraud. Once that failed to surface, there wasn’t enough of a campaign underneath it to help him win.
Rather than adequately buttressing his base, Trump emulated, and continues to emulate, the boy who cried wolf. When no wolf was found, the crier lost all credibility.
Trump has been loudly crying “voter fraud” since the 2016 Iowa caucuses. Per the New York Times, “In the now-distant Republican presidential primaries of 2016, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas handily won the Iowa caucuses…One of the losers in Iowa, the developer and television personality Donald J. Trump, soon accused Mr. Cruz of electoral theft. He fired off several inflammatory tweets, including this foreshadowing of our current democracy-testing moment: ‘Based on the fraud committed by Senator Ted Cruz during the Iowa Caucus, either a new election should take place or Cruz results nullified.’”
Shortly before the 2016 election, Politico published “A guide to Donald Trump’s ‘rigged’ election: Zombie Democrats, colluding reporters, and backstabbing Republicans.” It cites Trump’s tweet from 2016, before he won the presidency, claiming that voting was rigged: “Of course there is large scale voter fraud happening on and before election day. Why do Republican leaders deny what is going on? So naïve.”
If Trump truly thought systematic fraud was going to sink his election, something for which there was and is no persuasive evidence, then or now, he should have done more to neutralize it. That said, it’s impossible to stop an imaginary hobgoblin.
Consider Trump’s reliance, instead, upon legerdemain. Trump’s privy councillor and son-in-law Jared Kushner revealed to the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward the four texts required to make sense of Trump. Preeminent is Scott Adams’s Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don’t Matter.
As Bryan Gardiner recently noted at Wired, “Humans, it turns out, are not rational actors. People believe things simply because they hear them a lot; they easily succumb to confirmation bias and cherry-pick evidence that supports their ideas; they even interweave certain beliefs into their own worldview and sense of cultural identity.”
Trump shrewdly propelled his variegated careers based on this insight. That said, Trump’s careers—in real estate, branding, TV, politics, and government—while glorious, have experienced repeated setbacks. As both the President and the boy who cried wolf experienced, cries unsupported by facts, while sensational, are insufficient to sustain success.
Relying exclusively on the power of cries can propel a rascally antihero to glory. But then—right into the jaws of the wolf. It really is better to incorporate facts. They keep the wolf from the door.
Yet, lest those who disdain Trump take too much comfort from the conclusion of “The Boy Who Cried Wolf,” consider the denouement of another classic children’s story wherein a hunter arrives, takes his knife to the wolf, “and after one or two more cuts out skip[s] [Little] Red [Riding] Hood.”
If the GOP wishes to win back the White House, it would do well to call in a different kind of hunter: a vote hunter like Steve Munisteri. The party needs someone who can build such a strong electoral margin that there will never again be a desire from its nominee to cry wolf.
Ralph Benko is a former Reagan White House deputy general counsel, author of The Capitalist Manifesto, and chairman of the Capitalist League.


fortune--2020-12-23--Trump pardons Republican allies and Blackwater guards

President Donald Trump on Tuesday pardoned 15 people, including Republican allies, a 2016 campaign official ensnared in the Russia probe and former government contractors convicted in a 2007 massacre in Baghdad.
The pardons included former Republican Reps. Duncan Hunter of California and Chris Collins of New York.
Collins, the first member of Congress to endorse Trump to be president, was sentenced to two years and two months in federal prison after admitting he helped his son and others dodge $800,000 in stock market losses when he learned that a drug trial by a small pharmaceutical company had failed.
Hunter was sentenced to 11 months in prison after pleading guilty to stealing campaign funds and spending the money on everything from outings with friends to his daughter’s birthday party.
Trump also announced a pardon for George Papadopoulos, his 2016 campaign adviser whose conversation unwittingly helped trigger the Russia investigation that shadowed Trump’s presidency for nearly two years.
By pardoning Papadopoulos, Trump once again took aim at special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe and is part of a broader effort by Trump to undo the results of the investigation that yielded criminal charges against a half-dozen associates.
Last month, Trump pardoned former national security adviser Michael Flynn, who had twice pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI, and months earlier commuted the sentence of another associate, Roger Stone, days before he was to report to prison.
In the group announced Tuesday night were four former government contractors convicted in a 2007 massacre in Baghdad that left more a dozen Iraqi civilians dead and caused an international uproar over the use of private security guards in a war zone.
Supporters of Nicholas Slatten, Paul Slough, Evan Liberty and Dustin Heard, the former contractors at Blackwater Worldwide, had lobbied for pardons, arguing that the men had been excessively punished in an investigation and prosecution they said was tainted by problems and withheld exculpatory evidence. All four were serving lengthy prison sentences.


fortune--2020-12-22--Elon Musk: Apple refused to discuss $60 billion Tesla acquisition

Apple CEO Tim Cook refused to take a meeting years ago to discuss acquiring Tesla, Elon Musk said on Twitter Tuesday.
Tesla CEO Musk said in a tweet that he reached out to Apple during the “darkest days” of development of his company’s Model 3 to talk about a possible a deal. Musk said he planned to discuss the possibility of selling Tesla to Apple for one-tenth of its current value, indicating a valuation of about $60 billion.
Production of the Model 3 began in 2017, around the same time Apple decided to shift from development of a full-fledged Tesla competitor to an underlying self-driving car system. In recent years, Apple has hired a number of ex-Tesla executives who specialize in drive train, car interior and self-driving technology, indicating that the company is once again considering entering the market.
An Apple spokesman didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Apple stock has climbed, while Tesla stock has slipped in response to a Reuters report that Apple is aiming it put a car into production as early as 2024. Apple shares climbed 2.9% to $131.88 on Tuesday.


fortune--2020-12-22--When to expect your $600 stimulus check

When to expect your $600 stimulus check

On Monday, the Democratic-controlled House and the Republican-led Senate passed the $900 billion stimulus package that both sides agreed to over the weekend. Now it just needs to be signed into law by President Trump (who on Wednesday threw a wrench into the process by demanding bigger checks).
But if the deal moves forward, the current coronavirus relief package would send most Americans a $600 stimulus check. That’s down from the $1,200 checks sent via the CARES Act in the spring.
So if the bill is signed into law, when would Americans actually see their money?
When will stimulus checks start to arrive?
If the last go-around is any indication, the first of the $600 checks would start to be deposited within two weeks of the legislation passing. After the passage of the $2.2 trillion CARES Act on March 27, Americans started to receive their $1,200 stimulus checks as early as the week of April 13. So the $600 checks could start to arrive the week ending Jan. 9, if passed this week.
But Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin thinks the government can speed up that timeline—given that a distribution system is already in place.
“People are going to see this money at the beginning of next week,” Mnuchin said on CNBC. “The good news is this is a very, very fast way of getting money into the economy.”
And this time there should be fewer delays. Back in the spring, millions of Americans, including those on Social Security, saw their checks delayed until they provided additional information. Since this payment would be based on the same tax year, it’s unlikely more information will need to be verified—at least among those who received their first round of payments.
One quirk of the calendar for those watching the clock: Federal government employees are off on Friday, Dec. 25, and Friday, Jan. 1. But that shouldn’t cause any substantial delays.
Who will get a stimulus check?
The plan agreed upon by Democratic and Republican leaders would send $600 checks to most adults, and $600 for each dependent child. However, the funds will phase out for people earning higher incomes. These stimulus checks will decrease for households with 2019 adjusted gross income—that is, federally taxable income—above $75,000 per individual or $150,000 per qualified couple. The checks completely phase out for individuals earning above $99,000, and joint filers with no children at $198,000.
How do I get my check?
For anyone who is eligible and previously provided their direct deposit information to the IRS, no action is needed. Your money will be deposited to your account. According to the IRS website, “Direct deposit is the safest and fastest way to receive a payment including a tax refund.” Taxpayers who don’t have direct deposit will receive a paper check in the mail, a process that last spring did take longer than the direct deposits.
Still for many Americans it will be a welcome holiday gift—even if it’s technically a few days late.
Correction: Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article said that the Senate had not yet passed the stimulus bill. In fact, the Senate did so late Monday night.
Update December 23rd: This story has been updated in the first paragraph to reflect President Trump’s new demand for bigger stimulus checks.


fortune--2020-12-22--How Peloton’s $420 million Precor deal positions the company for post-pandemic life

Peloton Interactive has been one of the pandemic’s big winners. Affluent consumers, stuck at home but still eager to work out, have shelled out big for its equipment and instructional apps, making the company one of Wall Street’s breakaway darlings in 2020.
But the stationary-bike maker clearly has its eyes set on the next phase of its growth, once the tailwind of the pandemic fades. Peloton late Monday said that it was buying Precor, a fitness equipment maker with deep and longstanding relationships with commercial customers like hotels, gyms, corporate campuses, and apartment buildings, for $420 million. Precor’s customers, hurting and abandoned for now, will recover once COVID-19 restrictions ease and people start getting out and about more.
What’s more, Precor has the manufacturing muscle Peloton needs to meet demand. Peloton has lost out on business because of customers frustrated by long wait times. But Precor has 625,000 square feet of manufacturing space in North Carolina and Washington State, which should be helping Peloton manufacture its connected fitness equipment in the U.S. by the end of 2021.
“By making fitness equipment closer to U.S. consumers, Peloton will be able to deliver connected fitness products to members sooner,” the company said in its press release on Tuesday.
Last month, Peloton warned investors that it would be grappling with supply limitations “for the foreseeable future,” with longer wait times on its original product and its top-selling product, the Bike+, for two more quarters. Its newer bike, one with a contraption that allows users to move the display screen so they can do workouts off the bike, met with enormous demand, adding to the pressure on Peloton.
The acquisition news was received warmly by investors, who sent the shares up 12% on Tuesday. For the year, Peloton shares have more than quintupled. (In early November, they took a hit on news of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine’s strong efficacy, but they have more than rebounded since then.)
After the deal is closed sometime in early 2021, Precor will operate as a business unit within Peloton and continue to make its own branded products, which it already sells in more than 100 countries.
Precor sales will also add about $500 million in annual revenue to Peloton (which took in more than $2 billion over the past 12 months) by some estimates. In all, the deal could enable Peloton to become a savvier, more effective manufacturer able to serve a far wider market, and help it mature from pandemic juggernaut-du-jour into a long-lasting business.


fortune--2020-12-22--Apple’s car plan is a ‘bear case’ for Tesla’s stock, Morgan Stanley says

Apple’s reported foray into making its own self-driving, electric cars creates “a new Tesla bear case,” according to analysts at Morgan Stanley.
Tesla shares fell as much as 5.5% Tuesday, adding to their 6.5% drop on Monday, after Reuters reported that Apple is moving forward with autonomous technology and aims to produce a passenger vehicle by 2024 that could include its own battery design. Tesla’s two-day slump also follows its admission into the benchmark S&P 500 Index before the open on Monday.
“Apple’s potential entry into autos represents perhaps the most credible/formidable bear case for Tesla’s stock that investors have had to consider for some time,” analysts led by Adam Jonas wrote in a note Tuesday. Jonas gives Tesla a buy-equivalent rating with a $540 price target, about 15% below where it’s trading currently.
The iPhone maker getting into the vehicle market could also pose a threat to legacy automakers like General Motors and Ford Motor, which will have a hard time competing if “Apple were to really throw its weight around,” Jonas said.
For suppliers of electric, autonomous and connected-car systems, meanwhile, Apple’s plans “could very likely mean a significant inflection in the speed and magnitude of a wide range of investments,” he added. Lidar suppliers include Luminar Technologies and Velodyne Lidar rallied Monday after the report and continued to rise Tuesday.


fortune--2020-12-22--Alex Padilla to replace Kamala Harris, becoming the first Latino senator from California

California Secretary of State Alex Padilla will replace Vice President-elect Kamala Harris in the U.S. Senate, becoming the first Latino in the western state to serve in the chamber.
Padilla, a former Los Angeles city councilman and state senator, will also be the first Southern Californian to join the Senate in almost three decades. His pick by Governor Gavin Newsom followed intense jockeying by the state’s top Democrats over who would fill the role.
“Through his tenacity, integrity, smarts and grit, California is gaining a tested fighter in their corner who will be a fierce ally in D.C., lifting up our state’s values and making sure we secure the critical resources to emerge stronger from this pandemic,” Newsom said in a statement Tuesday.
Padilla, 47, is the son of Mexican immigrants and an engineer by training who attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. After working as an intern for California’s senior senator, Dianne Feinstein, he moved on to a career in politics that included his tenures in the Los Angeles City Council and California state senate. He was also statewide chair of Newsom’s first run for governor in 2009 before being elected as secretary of state in 2014.
Latino groups lobbied for his pick. Almost 40% of California’s 39.5 million residents are Latino, yet until now, the state has never been represented in the U.S. Senate by someone of Hispanic ancestry. Latinos have become a larger and more important part of the Democratic base in California, now accounting for about 30% of all eligible voters in the state.
Padilla “is a stalwart leader and fierce advocate who has dedicated his life to public service, creating meaningful change that improved Californians’ lives through effective legislation,” Nathalie Rayes, chief executive officer of the Latino Victory Fund, said before he was named. “As secretary of state, he’s worked tirelessly to strengthen voting rights by increasing voter registration and participation.”
Control of the U.S. Senate won’t be clear until after the January run-off elections in Georgia. But the California seat won’t tip the balance either way, because Padilla, like Harris, is a Democrat. The incoming senator will need to campaign for re-election in 2022.
Padilla will be joined in Washington by California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, who was named as President-elect Joe Biden’s health and human services secretary. Newsom still has to make his pick for Becerra’s replacement.


fortune--2020-12-22--Biden won’t get Trump’s followers when taking over White House Twitter accounts

Twitter has told President-elect Joe Biden’s transition team that President Donald Trump’s followers will not carry over to the official Twitter accounts assigned to the new president and White House in January, a reversal from 2016.
That means the Biden administration will start with zero followers and would cut off a way for Biden to instantly reach millions of people that Trump enjoyed.
Biden’s own account, @JoeBiden, has 21.7 million followers.
The @POTUS account has more than 33 million followers while @WhiteHouse has 26 million. Each account had more than 13 million followers on Inauguration Day 2017. At 12:01 p.m. that day, when Trump was sworn in, all the followers of @POTUS also automatically followed @POTUS44, an archive of President Barack Obama’s official tweets. But they also stayed with the official accounts.
“Twitter has informed us that as of right now the Biden administration will have to start from zero,” Biden digital director Rob Flaherty tweeted Tuesday. He later added that the Biden team had, via email, pushed back on the company’s plans and “were told this was unequivocal.”
Twitter spokesman Nick Pacilio said the company “has been in ongoing discussions with the Biden transition team on a number of aspects related to White House account transfers.”


fortune--2020-12-22--Lufthansa will airlift food to the U.K. amid border closure and fears of food shortages due to new C

Lufthansa will airlift food to the U.K. amid border closure and fears of food shortages due to new COVID strain

Lufthansa will airlift fresh produce to Britain on Wednesday amid fears of shortages over the festive season, even as France prepares to reopen the main truck-ferry route with its neighbor.
The German airline will fly 80 metric tons of food to Doncaster-Sheffield airport in northern England using a Boeing Co. 777F freighter, a spokesman said Tuesday.
While the European Union called for the resumption of transport to the U.K., the key port of Dover remained snarled with trucks unable to cross to Calais for a second day. France, which severed the link after a faster-spreading strain of COVID-19 emerged in Britain, told the EU the route should reopen by midnight, according to people familiar with the matter.
Lufthansa said the emergency flight will carry unspecified “perishable goods” from Frankfurt, a major European hub for food distribution that has strong connections to producers in Italy, France and Spain, as well as the Netherlands, where food is grown under glass to extend the growing season.
The carrier said it’s working with multiple freight-forwarding specialists, which it declined to name.
The head of Britain’s Food and Drink Federation, Ian Wright, told Bloomberg TV earlier that if the port crisis wasn’t resolved there would be shortages of foodstuffs sourced from outside the U.K., such as citrus fruits and some green vegetables.
Sainsbury warned Monday that the chaos at Dover could result in gaps on its shelves for items including lettuce, other salad leaves, cauliflowers, and broccoli, as well as fruit. Tesco, Britain’s biggest retailer, urged customers not to panic-buy, saying it had good levels of stock, including foods sourced from France.
The British Retail Consortium estimates that around 40% of the food supermarkets import comes through Dover, with a higher proportion for fresh produce.


fortune--2020-12-22--Biden can create better jobs by giving workers a seat at the boardroom table

A majority of the American labor force are high school graduates without college degrees. They have been falling behind economically for well more than a generation: Their median real wage has dropped 12.3% since 1979, while the median wage of those holding college degrees has increased 14.4%. Overall, barely one-third of those without college educations now earn the national median wage.
During the presidential campaign, President-elect Biden promised relief to this demographic group with policies to change corporate behavior. Biden is spot-on in acknowledging that corporate boardrooms are accountable for America’s working-class plight. His success in fulfilling that promise hinges on how effectively he upgrades boards’ governance of U.S. corporations—by requiring them to give workers a seat at the table.
Corporate boards and wage suppression
A central practice of U.S. boards of directors since the Reagan era has been wage suppression to maximize share value. Characteristics of this shareholder capitalism include outsourcing and kneecapping collective bargaining at home while (since the maquiladora era decades ago) offshoring well-paying jobs to low-wage producers in Mexico and Asia.
The alternative to this model is stakeholder capitalism, where corporate boards pursue policies that benefit local communities and employees in addition to shareholders. Biden embraced stakeholder capitalism in a speech in July. But he was silent on the mechanism utilized by rich democracies of Northern Europe to effectuate stakeholder capitalism—a mechanism that economists call codetermination. In codetermination, management and workers cooperate in decision-making, especially through the representation of workers on boards of directors.
Minority Leader Charles Schumer and 13 other Senate Democrats have endorsed codetermination, and rightly so: It is the only version of capitalism proven effective in improving the economics of non-college workers along with other stakeholders. Just as it has in Northern Europe, a Biden administration embrace of codetermination can transform U.S. corporate boards from predators to advocates for working-class Americans.
Northern Europe’s working-class renaissance
Codetermination is why Northern European nations have succeeded where the U.S. has failed in creating high-wage jobs that successfully integrate non-college-educated men and women into their national economies. According to the OECD, the pay of workers in this demographic in Northern Europe is closer than that of their U.S. counterparts to national medians, and 80% to 85% of them were employed in 2017, compared to just 70% of American non-college workers that same year.
The rich democracies of Northern Europe over the last half-century have implemented stakeholder capitalism with codetermination reforms, requiring that a hefty portion of corporate directors represent the interests of employees and local communities. In Germany, for example, 50% of directors on the boards of the largest 2,000 or so firms are elected by employees, not shareholders. At these powerful firms, which include familiar names like Adidas, Bayer, Daimler and EON, half the board members are employee representatives. Multiple analyses, including by the National Bureau of Economic Research, have affirmed that codetermination advantages workers as well as enterprise investment and bottom lines.
Codetermination has proven over many decades to be a systemic, market-based remedy to U.S.-style wage suppression. It is why wages in Germany and its neighbors across Northern Europe are higher than U.S. wages, according to the Conference Board. Moreover, their policies have resulted in a disproportionate share of output across Northern Europe being produced by high-skill industries husbanding high-wage jobs at home. The 30 largest German corporations (members of the DAX 30) sell only 21% of their global output in Germany itself, but 36% of their global workforce is there. Only 15% of Daimler sales are German, for example, but more than half of its global workforce is there. And Volkswagen sells only 9% of its output in Germany, while 40% of its global workforce is there.
Workforces moving in opposite directions
The focus of codetermination-staffed corporate boards on high-productivity product lines has required the aggressive upskilling of domestic workforces. Because the share of college-educated workforces across Northern Europe in nations like the Netherlands (37%) is far smaller than the proportion of people employed in skilled job sectors (53%), corporations reach deep into the ranks of non-college-educated men and women for workers to upgrade.
This stands in sharp contrast with the U.S. Habitual corporate wage suppression caused the share of jobs considered “skilled” to decline in the U.S. between the mid-1990s and mid-2010s, according to the OECD. Yet the share of such jobs rose sharply in every Northern European economy, including a huge 21.8-percentage-point jump in the Netherlands and a 20.8-point leap in France. By as early as 2006, that share across all of Northern Europe, including Norway (48%), Germany (44%), and the Netherlands (53%), had surpassed the U.S. share (39%). That transformation occurred despite the enviable edge provided by Silicon Valley and the dominant U.S. role in global information technology.
Worse, the downgrading of U.S. workers by corporate boards is systemic: While the share of high-skill jobs dropped, the share of all U.S. jobs classified as low-skill increased 3.3 percentage points during this span. In contrast, codetermination corporations abroad shed low-wage jobs: The low-skill share of domestic workforces declined 7.8 percentage points in the Netherlands, for instance, and 6.4 percentage points in France.
Strengthening workers is good politics
Aside from economics, there are domestic political considerations warranting a Biden codetermination initiative. First, it responds to expectations from the Democratic Party’s most ardent supporters that the party will prioritize policies benefitting those who are economically lagging. Along with higher minimum wages, stronger collective bargaining, and college debt forgiveness, codetermination can enhance opportunity for those earning less than $100,000, union members, minorities, and youths—the party’s core, many of whom are being battered by the pandemic.
Second, codetermination is a bridge to that segment of Trump voters primarily concerned with economics rather than immigration, law and order, or social issues like abortion. That segment certainly includes numerous economically stressed non-college-educated men and women, a demographic overrepresented in U.S. counties that supported Trump in November. And it is sizable. Separate exit polling found that economics was either the most important issue influencing Trump voters, or second to fighting terrorism. Overall, 35% of voters named the economy as their top reason for selecting a candidate, and 83% of those voters voted for Trump. The characteristics that accompany codetermination—higher wages, ending job offshoring, and stronger employment—will certainly enhance their lives.
The true test of Biden’s commitments to America’s working class and expanding the Democratic Party will be his willingness to back codetermination. Biden lauds evidence-based medical science. He should apply evidence-based economics to the plight of non-college-educated Americans.
Codetermination stands alone as the most powerful mechanism of capitalism for improving working-class economics. It strengthens market capitalism. And it is the only option proven to expand opportunity and reduce economic inequality by reintegrating non-college-educated men and women into America’s economic mainstream.
President-elect Biden should seize the moment.
George Tyler is a former deputy assistant treasury secretary and World Bank official. He is the author of books including Billionaire Democracy and What Went Wrong.


fortune--2020-12-22--Fueled by COVID-19, U.S. deaths will top 3 million in the deadliest year on record

The year about to end will be a record one on a sad front for Americans: The number of U.S. deaths in 2020 will hit an all-time high, topping 3 million for the first time, with much of the toll coming from the pandemic.
Some 3.2 million Americans will have died by the end of the year of all causes, according to an Associated Press analysis of U.S. government data. That is about 13% more than last year’s tally of 2.85 million deaths, with the increase almost entirely the result of the COVID-19 pandemic. The outbreak is wreaking havoc around the world, but is proportionately deadlier in the U.S. than in many other countries.
The number of deaths in the nation typically rises by a few tens of thousands every year, because of the aging of the population. But this year’s percentage increase, according to the AP, will be the biggest since another major pandemic ripped through the country: the 1918 influenza outbreak that coincided with the final year of World War I.
In the United States, according to the Johns Hopkins data tracker, the death toll attributable to the pandemic has now reached almost 320,000, a tally sure to keep rising given that the number of new daily cases has topped 200,000 this month, even as mortality rates are lower than at the start of the outbreak in late winter. There have been days in December that have seen 3,000 deaths or more.
The year 2021 is likely to bring relief, thanks to planned mass vaccinations. So far 615,000 Americans have been inoculated, including President-elect Biden and, on Tuesday, the country’s top epidemiologist, Anthony Fauci.
Before the pandemic, the U.S. had seen the age-adjusted death rate fall, and last year, life expectancy rose by about six weeks, to 78.8 years, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
In addition to the loss of life and the spread of an often devastating illness, COVID-19 continues to take a deep toll on the U.S. economy. On Monday, Congress passed a $900 billion COVID-relief bill to help tens of millions of Americans out of work and businesses shuttered during the pandemic.


fortune--2020-12-22--COVID vaccine recipients may still be infectious. When will we know for sure?

It’s surprising, but experts agree: The tens of thousands of people being vaccinated against the coronavirus right now may still be able to carry and transmit the SARS-CoV-2 virus to others, despite being well-protected against the symptoms of COVID-19 themselves. That means they must still wear masks and practice social distancing to protect those around them.
“We still have yet to learn how much infectivity is impacted by vaccination, thereby producing protection for those I am in contact with, not just for myself, when I receive a vaccine,” says Dr. Janet Baseman, a public health expert at the University of Washington.
This uncertainty is a consequence of the extremely rapid vaccine development process. Normally, a vaccine trial would observe recipients of a vaccine for a longer period of time, showing not just whether they became ill, but whether they spread contagion, before a vaccine entered wide use. While it’s likely that the various coronavirus vaccine candidates provide at least some reduction in transmission, it’s simply too soon to know for sure, or to what degree.
The science behind this seeming contradiction is relatively straightforward. Vaccines like Pfizer’s and Moderna’s are injected into deep muscle and provide so-called systemic immunity. But they may still leave areas, particularly nasal mucous passages, where the virus is relatively free to multiply. Even without making the host sick, that virus can then potentially spread through coughing or sneezing, just as it is spread by a person with a full-blown coronavirus infection.
“Having systemic immunity is like having a security guard that’s somewhere in the building,” says Joshua Michaud, an epidemiologist at KFF (formerly the Kaiser Family Foundation). “Having mucosal immunity is like having a security guard right at the door, ready to take on the incoming virus.”
It could take researchers months to determine just where that viral security guard is stationed, because it requires monitoring people who have already been vaccinated. According to Baseman, a study focusing on vaccinated people “with high levels of mixing and high risk of transmission,” such as college students, could provide faster data on post-vaccination transmission. Michaud expects focused transmission studies to be conducted in “the coming weeks and months.”
Insight on the question will also come through ongoing vaccine trials. Though both Pfizer’s and Moderna’s vaccines have been approved for emergency use by health authorities such as the U.S. FDA, the drugmakers are continuing the standard trials that should lead to permanent approval.
“Our trial will continue to determine the full protection and potential of the vaccine,” including transmission after vaccination, according to a Pfizer spokesperson.
But until long-term trial data or other experimental results are released, post-vaccine infectivity will be made clear only by measuring the spread of the coronavirus through populations with high vaccination levels. If the spread slows, it will demonstrate that transmission is lowered by vaccination. But it is expected to take much of 2021 to reach high levels of vaccination even in countries at the front of the line, so that approach could take the better part of a year.
According to the FDA, most vaccines that protect from viral illnesses also reduce viral transmission by those who are vaccinated, and there is reason for optimism that the current wave of COVID vaccines will, as well. Most notably, Moderna’s vaccine trial showed some reduction in asymptomatic infections as measured through nasal swabs, which could suggest reduced transmission after vaccination. Dr. Eric Topol of the Scripps Research Translational Institute has described those findings as inconclusive, but promising on the question of post-vaccine transmission.
Until more conclusive data arrives, though, the message from health authorities is clear: Even after you’ve been vaccinated, don’t toss that face mask.


fortune--2020-12-22--Nearly twice as many Americans are hospitalized right now with COVID-19 than in spring

COVID-19 has hospitalized almost twice as many Americans as at any point in the pandemic, leaving medical providers on the brink of crisis with vaccine doses months away for most people.
The U.S. health care system and those who serve it are enduring more strain than ever. And the virus’s grip on hospitals has shifted toward more rural communities, where treatment alternatives are scarce.
In the near term, sustained patient loads threaten to accelerate deaths, as access to critical care declines in intensive care units. Longer term, the risks are more systemic: fatigue, attrition, and mental health damage to the doctors and nurses working to care for the sick.
“The moment when the percent of beds occupied by COVID patients increases, that really drives a lot of the staffing issues,” said Pinar Karaca-Mandic, a health care risk management professor at the University of Minnesota. “It exposed a lot of the fragmentation in our health-care system.”
More than 115,000 Americans are currently hospitalized with coronavirus, according to COVID Tracking Project data—a number that has risen alongside daily cases since early October. California, Texas, and New York account for more than a quarter of the national total.
Almost one in five U.S. hospitals reported critical staffing shortages on Friday, according to data from the Department of Health and Human Services. Earlier this month, HHS released figures that gave a more localized view of the devastation, which was previously obscured by national or statewide numbers.
Non-metro areas are suffering more in the current wave, with larger occupancy rates than more densely populated regions, said Karaca-Mandic, whose team analyzed the data.
More than a dozen counties—such as Burke, North Carolina, and Hale, Texas—reported at least 90% of their ICU beds filled by COVID-19 cases, leaving hardly any capacity to treat others. Karaca-Mandic’s research has linked ICU bed use to increased mortality.
“What the facility-level data is showing us is how localized the pandemic can be,” she said.
The U.S. West is grappling with some of the most acute repercussions. When scaled for population, Nevada and Arizona reported the highest hospitalization rates nationwide Monday.
Late night calls
In Mesa, Arizona, about 20 miles east of Phoenix, Lee Allen passes families pressed against the windows of the hospital where he works as a nurse anesthesiologist. Some hold cardboard signs with words of encouragement.
Just inside, patients are being treated in the nearly full ICU, which has been expanded into under-used parts of the building. Many can’t read the signs as they lay face down to improve airflow to their lungs.
Though Allen’s primary specialty is obstetrical anesthesia, he has gotten more frequent calls for assistance with especially difficult intubations, such as for patients who have co-morbidities or are morbidly obese. Just a few days ago, he was called in at 2 a.m.
“I’m hopeful that the vaccine is going to help out,” said Allen, who is immunocompromised himself and got the vaccine on Monday.
In neighboring California, the virus has exploded with renewed fury. Cases, hospitalizations and deaths all smashed records last week.
Governor Gavin Newsom said Monday the state could see more than 90,000 people hospitalized with COVID-19 by mid-January, if the current surge doesn’t slow down. California reported a record 18,359 COVID patients in its hospitals Monday, a 67% increase in two weeks. ICUs in Southern California and the San Joaquin Valley are effectively full, and just 2.5% of the entire state’s ICU capacity remains open. The state has lost 2,741 people to the coronavirus in the last two weeks alone.
“Some counties or some regions may begin to exceed their existing, stated hospital capacity—not just ICU capacity—by the end of the month and in early January,” Mark Ghaly, secretary of California’s Health and Human Services agency, said during a news conference Monday. “We don’t see that across the entire state at that time, but we’re watching it very closely.”
California opened four temporary care facilities and has another seven ready if needed. Ghaly said hospitals have been making contingency plans to activate “crisis care teams,” which would make the difficult decisions of prioritizing care among sick patients should facilities become overwhelmed.
The state so far has been able to transfer patients from overloaded hospitals to those with more capacity, but that is becoming more difficult as the outbreak grows, he said.
Even though bed availability is tight in certain parts of the country, bottlenecks often stem more from staffing constraints. Those with coronavirus are more time consuming, costly and labor-intensive than typical patients.
“We can’t really downplay the emotional strain,” said Ann-Marie Alameddin, president and chief executive officer of the Arizona Hospital and Healthcare Association, where hospital bed occupancy is estimated at 78% statewide. “I think there’s going to be lasting effects that we’ll be navigating for months and years to come.”
The persistence of the COVID-19 crisis has worn down the health-care workforce. While much of the public has moved on from the April period when they stayed home and clapped for medical workers, “for many of our providers, that workload, those 13-hour days haven’t really stopped,” said Andy Brailo, chief customer officer at Premier Inc., which provides purchasing, technology and consulting services to more than 4,000 hospitals.
Attrition surge
Premier’s clients have watched attrition spike, on average seeing turnover of 30% among clinical staff during the last few months, Brailo said. Some workers are retiring or shifting to part-time status. Others have been sidelined temporarily for illness or exposure to COVID-19, or must stay home to take care of children or family.
Health systems are boosting bonuses and overtime pay to recruit and retain staff, as well as reaching out to retirees. Demand for travel clinicians who take temporary assignments is extremely high.
More sophisticated care and treatments, like Regeneron Pharmaceuticals Inc.’s antibody cocktail, have improved the outlook for patients who end up in hospitals. In New York, patients are moving through the hospital faster and a smaller ratio require intensive care and intubation.
As hospitals fill up, some people who might normally have been admitted for COVID-19 or other conditions get sent home instead, said Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health.
The strain on capacity could lead to worse outcomes particularly for people whose conditions are borderline—not so critical that they must be admitted immediately, but not so mild that they wouldn’t benefit from hospital care.
“Every bit of data suggests that a lot of those people aren’t going to do as well,” Jha said. They may get better, or return to the hospital sicker later on, or even die at home. “When you get into crowding situations, when emergency departments get overwhelmed or when hospitals get really full, everybody tends to do a little bit worse.”


fortune--2020-12-22--Boeing 737 Max sales streak continues with Alaska Airlines order

Boeing extended its sales streak of 737 Max jets as Alaska Air Group boosted an order agreement to 68 jets and announced plans to return to a fleet with a single aircraft type.
The airline will return its Airbus A320-family planes, which it got from buying Virgin America four years ago, as their leases expire, Alaska Chief Executive Officer Brad Tilden said ahead of the Tuesday announcement. Before the Virgin America deal, the Seattle-based airline had a long history as an all-Boeing operator and corporate neighbor of the planemaker’s factories.
The Alaska order buttresses Boeing’s effort to sell the Max despite the worst aviation downturn on record and the longest grounding in U.S. history, as airlines press for discounts and prepare for an eventual travel rebound. With the deal, Boeing continued to boost sales of its workhorse single-aisle jets since U.S. officials cleared the Max to resume flying last month, including a 75-plane order by Ireland’s Ryanair Holdings Plc.
“There is a huge advantage to a simple, single fleet structure,” Tilden said Monday in a video interview, citing lower ownership costs from maintenance, training and other expenses.
‘White tails’
The carrier boosted its Max 9 order from a prior deal for 32 that it placed in 2012. The jets will carry 178 seats, the same as Alaska’s existing fleet of older 737-900 and 737-900ER aircraft.
Alaska’s order includes nine so-called “white tails”—the industry term for new jets without buyers—that Boeing will rework for the airline. The manufacturer is scouting new takers for about 100 of the 450 aircraft that it built but never delivered during the 20-month grounding. Aviation regulators grounded the Max in March 2019 following two crashes that killed 346 people.
The deal with Alaska also includes 13 of Boeing’s Max 9 jets that it will lease from Air Lease, under the terms of a transaction announced last month. Air Lease agreed to buy 10 A320 planes from Alaska.
Alaska will take 13 Max 9 aircraft next year, with the first delivery in January and commercial service starting two months later. Those planes will be followed by 30 in 2022, 13 in 2023 and and 12 in 2024. The company will shed its last Airbus jets by returning six in 2024 and the final three the following year, according to a regulatory filing.
The carrier will also have options for 52 additional Max aircraft, with rights for the larger and smaller versions.


fortune--2020-12-22--Want to innovate while working remotely? Rethink the way you brainstorm

Most companies start with a great idea, but only organizations that keep generating great ideas—and execute on them—stay relevant. One key to unlocking continuous innovation? Effective brainstorming.
In March, when the world transitioned to remote work in response to the coronavirus pandemic, we at Lucid quickly realized that we didn’t have a way to collaborate and brainstorm the way we did in the office. That meant we couldn’t innovate as before. We needed a way to re-create the collaborative experience of in-person brainstorming with a dry-erase board. So we innovated and built a virtual whiteboard called Lucidspark.
Facilitating creativity, bringing together diverse perspectives, and developing an action plan are the foundation of impactful brainstorming. Right now, as we all navigate this new normal, effective brainstorming will be critical to staying relevant and innovative in overcoming future challenges.
What makes good brainstorming
Every organization approaches brainstorming a bit differently. Here are five best practices we use that you can apply to your company.
Embrace structure.
Most people are familiar with the adage “Creativity loves constraints.” Free-form, unstructured brainstorming doesn’t necessarily lead to creativity and ideas. Without proper guidance, brainstorming sessions can quickly derail into silent coworkers waiting for one another to speak up, hindering the ideation process.
The fix is simple: Structure your brainstorming session. According to a recent study, it’s only when your teams have focus and direction that creativity really starts to thrive. While every minute doesn’t need to be planned out, providing some structure facilitates the flow of ideas. This can be accomplished by setting time limits, budgets, or rules for the brainstorming session.
These guidelines aid your teams in drawing connections between important concepts, leading to fresh insights and innovative solutions. Constraints challenge teams to think divergently and avoid complacency in the ideation process. Providing this structure means your teams can think outside the box, making it easier to pivot quickly, adapt to changes to meet customer needs, and find unique solutions for your organization’s problems.
Attract a diversity of perspectives.
Homogeneous thinking kills innovation. When you bring the same five people to the table, you risk not hearing from new voices that may have ideas to drive your business forward.
Creativity thrives in cross-functional brainstorming. Each team member offers a distinct background, skill set, and expertise to foster productive, innovative brainstorms. By leveraging these diverse perspectives, your teams can generate original ideas that better reach your customers and understand their pain points.
For example, you can bring UX, product, and marketing teams together to brainstorm the priorities in launching a new product. With UX and product present, marketing teams can better craft materials that speak directly to customer needs. Meanwhile UX and product teams gain insight into how marketing intends to position the product.
Establish an action plan.
An idea is only as good as its execution. Our own research found that 83% of remote workers came up with a great idea in a team brainstorm but never saw any follow-through. What’s more, 70% of remote workers reported they had an idea that never made it into the notes and, therefore, wasn’t addressed in next steps.
Creating an action plan that outlines next steps and assignments aligns the team, keeps projects moving forward, instills accountability, and makes it possible to bring ideas to life. Regardless of whether you’re holding a virtual or in-person brainstorming session, when you take the time to record specific next steps and assign ownership, it’s easier to keep teams aligned and more efficiently turn ideas into reality.
Encourage visual collaboration.
We discovered that the best way to improve brainstorming with remote workers is through visual collaboration. This means bringing our teams together into a shared virtual space (we use Lucidspark as well as other solutions) where projects, priorities, and ideas are laid out visually, allowing for easier understanding and quicker team alignment.
Traditional dry-erase boards are limiting and can create a bottleneck to creativity. Virtual whiteboards provide a space where every voice can be heard, seen, and acted on. At in-person brainstorming sessions, a single person is often responsible for recording and interpreting the group’s thoughts, which can slow down creativity and unintentionally discard ideas in the process. Instead, virtual whiteboards provide teams with a clear picture from initial idea all the way through to completion.
With all of this information organized in one central location, teams can stay on the same page and adapt quickly even if they are not in the same location. Visual collaboration brings together distributed and remote teams in a way they couldn’t collaborate before. At Lucid, we can now provide employees with a way to better work with colleagues across offices in the U.S., Australia, and the Netherlands. Even if someone can’t attend a brainstorming session, they can access the board afterward to quickly review ideas and next steps in a digestible, visual way. This allows teammates to add their own ideas at a later time and maintain team alignment.
Create a culture of trust.
Do you really want to foster true innovation? Then you need to create a culture of trust. Establishing an environment where every employee feels comfortable sharing ideas facilitates better brainstorming, boosts teamwork, bolsters creativity, creates ownership, and ultimately elevates your corporate culture.
Innovation doesn’t only happen in a conference room. It happens when employees discuss, debate, and ideate in settings both unstructured and structured. Leaders can set a standard of pushing boundaries in brainstorming sessions without fear. So encourage your teams to challenge the process. Encourage them to ask questions. Encourage them to experiment with ideas.
In the new normal wrought by COVID-19, fostering effective brainstorming is at the forefront of staying relevant and driving business success. By following these best practices, your teams can become more creative and collaborative, working together to push forward innovation. And who knows—perhaps your teams end up with not just one but many ideas to keep your company moving forward.
Karl Sun is the CEO and cofounder of Lucid, a software company in Salt Lake City.


fortune--2020-12-24--LinkedIn saw a massive influx in user posts and violations this year

LinkedIn faced an unprecedented challenge this year as users increased the number of posts they made by 50%, representing a record rise in content on the service. But the influx also led to more problematic posts, prompting LinkedIn to tighten its rules and expand its content moderation team.
But as events like the coronavirus pandemic, Black Lives Matter protests, and the 2020 U.S. presidential election led to increasing tensions both online and off, more posts on LinkedIn strayed from professional conversations to conspiracy theories, misinformation, and hate speech.
“We really needed to standardize and make clear what it meant to be constructive and respectful on LinkedIn,” said Liz Li, LinkedIn’s director of product management.
This year, LinkedIn made a slew of policy changes, including prohibiting coronavirus-related misinformation in spring (the policy also extends to misleading information about the coronavirus vaccine). Following a rise in posts related to QAnon, a conspiracy theory tied to the far right, the service began cracking down in summer. It removed QAnon posts that contained misinformation and disabled popular hashtags related to it. Then, in fall, LinkedIn clarified a number of policies adding verbiage like “unwanted advances” to its sexual harassment policy, forbidding the use of racial and religious slurs, and banning excessively gruesome or shocking content.
The actions taken by Microsoft-owned LinkedIn come as all social media companies grapple with a rise in divisive, hateful, and misleading posts. Twitter and Facebook also have been rapidly changing their policies, labeling or removing everything from white nationalism to Holocaust denial and false claims of victory during the U.S. presidential election. For the most part, LinkedIn previously avoided many of the tougher challenges related to content moderation given that members tended to use the service only for professional networking and job hunting. But this year, that began to change.
“We started to see the content and the conversations on LinkedIn really sort of transform,” Li said. “A ton of it is great—it’s professional, it’s respectful. But at the same time, we’ve also seen an increase in members reporting that there’s stuff that they either don’t want to see or even stuff that would violate our policies.”
LinkedIn said it made a “significant investment” to expand the number of content moderators it employs, though it wouldn’t specify how many of its 16,000 employees review posts for the service. For comparison, Facebook employs more than 15,000 content moderators around the world. It also has been working to strengthen its technology to proactively detect and remove problematic content before anyone sees it. This year, LinkedIn also started asking members to specify what content they do and don’t want to see on their feeds and provide reasons why.
As a result, LinkedIn is removing more harmful content than it ever has before. For example, in the months from March to August, LinkedIn said it removed more than 20,000 pieces of content for being hateful, harassing, inflammatory, or extremely violent. For reference, the service removed about 38,000 posts for the same violations over the entirety of last year.
Li said LinkedIn employees who have been working on the issue have come together and collaborated more than ever this year, which was especially surprising given that workers are still working from home. She said following this year, the teams are “stronger operationally” and that overall, there’s a bigger effort aimed at tackling content moderation issues.
“A lot more people’s attention and bandwidth is focused on this area,” Li said.


fortune--2020-12-24--The best business documentaries, movies, and TV shows to stream during your time off

With winter fully underway and stay-at-home orders back in place in many regions, you might be looking for some new (or at least, new to you) content to stream.
Maybe you have some vacation days to kill, or just want something to put on in the background while working from home. Either way, these documentaries, movies, and TV shows will simultaneously entertain and enlighten you for hours upon hours.
Documentaries
From left: Wong He, Kenny Taylor, and Jarred Gibson in Julia Reichert and Steven Bognar’s “American Factory,” on Netflix. Aubrey Keith—Netflix
American Factory
Roughly a year after they left the White House, the Obamas inked a multiyear deal with Netflix to produce a number of original documentaries, series, and movies for the streaming service. The first project to debut was American Factory, a documentary about Chinese company Fuyao’s factory in rural Ohio, built on what was once the site of a General Motors plant. Depicting the cultural and economic clashes of high-tech China with working-class America, the 2019 film won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in February 2020.
Where to watch: Netflix
Photographer Lauren Greenfield attends a press viewing of her exhibition “Generation Wealth.” Her film of the same title, on Amazon, tracks our growing obsession with affluence. GEORG WENDT—dpa/AFP via Getty Images
Generation Wealth
While many of the subjects in Generation Wealth might seem concerned only with what is flashy and new at the present moment, American artist and filmmaker Lauren Greenfield put in the long-haul work for this in-depth examination of our growing obsession with wealth in the post–Great Recession era. Production lasted from 2008 to the film’s release in 2017, tracing Greenfield’s journey across the world—with notable stops in Los Angeles, Moscow, and Dubai—as she interviewed not only the international elite (or at least those who consider themselves as such) but also students, single parents, and others suffering under crushing debt, whether from tuition or credit cards or health care bills. Her film makes it impossible for the viewer to look away from the stark economic gap that has only grown wider in the past decade.
Where to watch: Amazon
Evidence presented in HBO’s docuseries “McMillions.” Courtesy of HBO
McMillions
Rare is the investigative feature (published online only, not in print) that monopolizes the Internet’s attention so quickly and immensely—on a weekend, no less. By the week after its July 2018 debut, there was already an extra-hot bidding war for the adaptation rights to The Daily Beast’s engrossing exposé about the FBI’s investigation into a complex web of characters who rigged McDonalds’s popular Monopoly game at the turn of the millennium. There is a Hollywood film now in development—with the working title McScam, and Matt Damon and Ben Affleck attached to the project—but HBO’s documentary McMillions looks at the debacle from the FBI’s perspective, featuring numerous interviews with players on both sides of the investigation.
Where to watch: HBO
Elizabeth Holmes and her Theranos debacle are parsed in HBO’s “The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley.” Courtesy of HBO
The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley
Speaking of notorious scam artists, there might be none more fascinating, peculiar, or infuriating than Theranos founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes. (Seriously, can you imagine if Theranos was still around in its prime form and trying to peddle COVID tests?) Building off the momentum from Wall Street Journal reporter John Carreyrou’s monumental investigative reporting and subsequent bestseller Bad Blood, which revealed Theranos’s blood tests to be a complete sham, The Inventor adds faces to many of the voices who spoke out and blew the whistle on Theranos—not only to the detriment of their careers but at risk to their personal safety. The Inventor also includes interviews with analysts and journalists who followed Theranos during its rise and fall—among them Fortune’s Roger Parloff, who speaks candidly about his own reporting on the once-wunderkind, now-disgraced Silicon Valley unicorn.
Where to watch: HBO
The Fyre Festival Documentaries: Fyre Fraud and FYRE: The Greatest Party That Never Happened
There was a brief period in 2018 when you couldn’t go to a café or bar (indoors even!) in any major city without overhearing a variation on the question, “So, have you watched the Hulu documentary or the Netflix one yet?” This would undoubtedly have been a reference to the almost simultaneously released documentaries about the infamous Fyre Festival in the Bahamas in 2017. No need to go into what happened (in case you missed it) as both documentaries will break it down, but what’s remarkable is that each production comes at the story from different angles with different voices. Quite possibly the only success story to emerge from the mess was the production of these companion documentaries themselves.
Where to watch: Fyre Fraud on Hulu; FYRE on Netflix
Movies
Jon Favreau (left) and John Leguizamo in “Chef.” Courtesy Open Road Films
Chef
Somewhere between 2009 and 2015, food trucks ate the planet. Of course, someone made a movie about one. Written, coproduced, directed by, and starring Jon Favreau, Chef follows a head chef in Los Angeles who up and quits his job amid frustration with a domineering restaurateur and after an altercation with a food critic. Favreau’s character decides to head back to his roots, trying to find his flavor again by launching a food truck in Miami. Word to the wise: Either eat a big meal before watching or plan to eat while streaming. Food is the true star of this film.
Where to watch: Netflix
Like a Boss
Let me get this out of the way right now: This movie is ridiculous. More important: It’s so much fun. Starring Salma Hayek, Tiffany Haddish, and Rose Byrne, the plot follows a pair of childhood friends turned business partners (Haddish and Byrne) who have their own private beauty brand that’s growing a loyal customer base. One of their products happens to catch the eye of a beauty conglomerate bigwig (Hayek), who proposes to buy their business and seemingly promises them creative and financial autonomy. (And, of course, that doesn’t go to plan.)
Where to watch: Amazon
Moneyball
In what could be the most perfect sports-meets-business movie, 2011’s Moneyball stars Brad Pitt as Oakland Athletics general manager Billy Beane, whose stroke of genius in just trying to balance a budget results in the complete overhaul of Major League Baseball.
Where to watch: Netflix
Up in the Air
Certainly, there are more soul-killing jobs than being assigned to conduct layoffs at local offices across the country. And yet 2009’s Up in the Air really sits with you long after viewing. George Clooney’s corporate “downsizer,” Ryan Bingham, soon finds himself fighting for his own job amid company budget cuts. (The irony is palpable.) Anna Kendrick’s Natalie Keener brings a bit of levity and humanity to the narrative as a young professional learning the ropes while on tour with a reluctant Bingham. For frequent fliers, the B-plot is most certainly Bingham’s quest to surpass 10 million frequent-flier miles and have his name embossed on a jumbo jet. (Some of us are satisfied with just being bumped up to business class.)
Where to watch: Amazon
Working Girl
Naive but charming in a way that only a 1980s rom-com could be, Working Girl follows Melanie Griffith’s Tess from Staten Island to Wall Street, and from secretary to businesswoman. Griffith is delightful and bubbly, quick with savvy ideas that often go overlooked owing to her professional station and gender. However, to be perfectly honest, not everything in this movie has aged well. (Sorry to say, but Harrison Ford’s character and dialogue frequently come off as creepy, if not downright sleazy.) Also, Sigourney Weaver’s character is often regarded as the “villain” of this movie. (Okay, she might have stolen a few ideas from Tess.) But looking at it through a 2020 lens, she’s not all that bad. She’s depicted as “unlikable” (that hideous term), but frankly, no one has the right to live in her apartment or use her clothes without permission! Nevertheless, the ending, the soundtrack, and Joan Cusack make this film worth watching over and over and over again.
Where to watch: Hulu
TV Shows
Staff meeting at the talent agency ASK in Netflix’s “Call My Agent!” Courtesy of Netflix
Call My Agent!
Step away from Emily in Paris. This is the Paris-set comedy you should be streaming this winter. Originally titled Dix Pour Cent (Ten Percent), Call My Agent! is a satire about cutthroat entertainment agents dealing with all the grunt work for their vain actor clients (played by real French stars).
Where to watch: Netflix
HBO’s new reality series “House of Ho” tells the tale of a wealthy Vietnamese-American family in Houston who’ve built a multimillion-dollar empire. Courtesy of Elizabeth Morris—HBO Max
House of Ho
On the surface, House of Ho might seem as if it’s trying to mooch off the success and popularity of 2018’s Crazy Rich Asians. But this is not your average reality show, and even with all the excessive displays of wealth, this is not anything like Keeping Up With the Kardashians. The HBO series chronicles the lives of a wealthy Vietnamese-American family in Houston. Binh and Hue Ho came to the U.S. during the mass exodus of immigrants from South Vietnam in 1975, and both worked in lower-income jobs for years before launching businesses (a bank and real estate development company) that produced millions, enabling their lavish lifestyle. But their children have only known lives of luxury, and this series homes in on that generational divide between immigrant parents and first-generation American children—to an extreme degree, to be sure, but one that might not seem so foreign to many viewers.
Where to watch: HBO
David Jonsson stars in HBO’s “Industry,” a drama that tracks recent grads as they navigate workplace culture and ambition in London’s financial world. Courtesy of Amanda Searle—HBO
Industry
For some of us, it’s hard to imagine or even watch new shows set in office environments, given how many people are working from home indefinitely right now. But HBO’s latest drama series offers a complete escape (at least for most of us normals) from reality in any time period. Industry follows a group of Gen Z professionals competing for jobs at a top investment bank in London. And given that this is HBO, there is a lot of backstabbing and workplace “romances” (if you will).
Where to watch: HBO
Siblings (played by Jeremy Strong and Sarah Snook) vie for control of a family media empire in the HBO drama “Succession.” Courtesy of Peter Kramer—HBO
Succession
Where does one even begin with one of HBO’s best shows ever, if not one of the best shows on television ever? Loosely based on the Murdoch family, Succession follows the Roy family after the patriarch suffers a major medical emergency, calling into question—you guessed it—who among his children will control the company’s major assets. This show gets better and better with each episode, and while it’s easy to binge both seasons available so far, season three is a long way off, given production was delayed because of the pandemic. (The COVID crisis has also inspired fans to imagine how each Roy reacted to the lockdowns and where they quarantined. You just know that Roman held a secret party on that yacht, which turned into a superspreader event.)
Where to watch: HBO
Suits
You don’t need to go to law school to figure out that most of the plotlines in USA Network’s Suits are simply not possible in the real world. But this show is just so much fun to watch that it doesn’t matter. The dialogue is snappy, the pop culture references would be overwhelming if that weren’t the point, and yes, the suits (in terms of the wardrobe) are pure eye candy. If you’re looking for a show to binge-watch for a long period of time, Suits has nine seasons of material, and quite a few of the series cast members stick it out until the end. (I would have walked if Rick Hoffman left early. Louis Litt is this show.)
Where to watch: Amazon
Younger
The premise of this series, from Sex and the City producer Darren Star, is that a woman reentering the working world at age 40 pretends to be much…younger to get her dream job (or at least a stepping-stone to a dream job). Now, to some, that may seem preposterous. To the rest of us, that actually sounds plausible. Since its release in 2015, the dramedy, starring Sutton Foster and Hilary Duff, has sustained positive reviews and a loyal following, and there is still time to catch up as the seventh season, scheduled to resume filming next year, is expected to be the show’s last.
Where to watch: Hulu


fortune--2020-12-23--Crypto firm BitGo touts record assets as PayPal deal falls through

In October, rumors swirled that PayPal was poised to acquire BitGo, one of the country’s oldest cryptocurrency firms. That deal will not happen, according to multiple sources, and BitGo is now charting a new path.
In a recent interview with Fortune, BitGo CEO Mike Belshe noted that his company now holds over $16 billion worth of cryptocurrency assets for its customers and that it’s acquiring several significant clients every week.
While BitGo has been around since 2013, it has a lower profile than firms like Coinbase and Kraken, which offer exchanges for anyone to buy and sell Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. BitGo’s core offering is instead a custody service that securely stores crypto on behalf of institutions and other wealthy clients.
In the past year, BitGo has aggressively sought to redefine itself as a full-service crypto shop that offers other tax and lending services, as well as a means for clients to discreetly arrange large trades.
Belshe notes BitGo is among many companies that has benefited from the current Bitcoin bull market. But he says the crypto industry faces challenges in building infrastructure—including security—as large companies like PayPal and Square move into the field.
Belshe adds that the biggest crypto custodians, which also include Fidelity and Coinbase, will play a key role in working to ensure crypto continues to gain a foothold in mainstream finance.
As for the PayPal rumors, Belshe wouldn’t confirm them, but he said BitGo has been “in talks with everyone” over the years and that the privately held company won’t accept a “small exit.”
PayPal declined to comment on acquisitions talks. But a person close to the payment giant confirmed the BitGo talks had fallen through, adding that PayPal is exploring other potential acquisitions.
According to Belshe, BitGo is not currently profitable, as it is in “growth mode,” but that it has a “very healthy balance sheet” and has no plans to raise capital in the near future.