fortune--2020-10-05--Here’s when your second stimulus check could arrive if Congress passes more economic aid

On Sunday House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told CBS News that Democratic and Republican leaders are “making progress” on another stimulus package.
After weeks of deadlock, the two parties are finally moving closer to a stimulus deal. Some insiders still believe a deal could be reached this week.
Both Democratic and Republican leaders have already agreed that if another package is signed into law it would include another round of $1,200 stimulus checks. But when should Americans expect those checks if the an economic aid package does get signed?
If the last go-around is any indication, the first of the 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 stimulus checks as early as the week of April 13.
But the payments might come faster this time. White House officials have suggested the distribution of the checks could be sped up, given the system is already in place.
Depending on when Congress reaches a deal, it could be too late for the payments to reach households before the election. However, the Republican-controlled U.S. Department of the Treasury could work to speed up that payment.
And direct payments will face fewer roadblocks this time. 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 use 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.
All signs point to the stimulus checks being nearly identical to the first round. The direct payment sent in the spring were worth as much as $1,200 for individuals or $2,400 for married couples, plus $500 for each qualifying child. That amount would decrease for adjusted gross income above $75,000 per individual or $150,000 per qualified couple. And the checks phase out for individuals earning above $99,000, head of household filers with one child above $146,500, and joint filers with no children at $198,000.
What’s holding up the next economic aid package? Democrats want an economic stimulus bill worth at least $2.2 trillion, while the White House hasn’t offered more than $1.6 trillion. But the two parties are much closer than they were in August when Democratic leaders wanted $3.4 trillion and top Republicans wouldn’t go above $1 trillion.
While the two parties disagree on the dollar size of the next stimulus package, they do agree on lots of the spending areas: Both parties support more funding for education, coronavirus-related projects, mortgage and rental assistance, and food programs.
Their main areas of disagreement—outside of the total package size—are on items like a steep increase in federal aid to state and local governments, which Democrats support, and COVID-19 lawsuit immunity for businesses, which Republicans support. And Republicans would like to see $400 weekly enhanced unemployment benefits, while Democrats would like it to go back to $600 per week.


fortune--2020-10-05--Why was the leader of the free world given an experimental therapy?

Housing flips the recession script : Prices will keep rising for up to a year , but here ’ s @ @ @ @ @

In the craziness that is 2020, we’ve perhaps become accustomed to seeing things that either surprise or dismay us. But as a physician, it’s still hard for me not to be shocked that the President of the United States was administered an experimental drug therapy on Friday.
According to White House reports, Donald Trump has experienced “mild” symptoms related to his case of COVID-19, including fever, cough, and fatigue. Though those reports have been muddied, we do know that the President’s oxygen saturation levels dropped below 94% on two occasions, necessitating supplemental oxygen.
A statement from his physician Sean Conley on Oct. 2 notes that he received a single eight-gram intravenous dose of Regeneron Pharmaceuticals’s polyclonal antibody cocktail as a “precautionary measure.” The goal of the antibody treatment is to try to boost one’s own immune response by giving an individual an extra dose of fighting antibodies to neutralize the virus and hopefully stop the infection dead in its tracks.
The Regeneron “cocktail” includes two humanmade monoclonal antibodies engineered in a lab. Clinically, one would hope that the treatment would help prevent mild disease from progressing to something more serious like pneumonia, respiratory failure, or cytokine storm.
The stakes are real enough. With his age and sex, and the weight he carries, Trump is at higher risk of contracting a more serious form of the illness. Based on data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), his age alone places him at approximately 90 times greater risk of death compared to 18- to 29-year-olds.
Thus, it’s understandable that one might consider various preventive treatments for the President. But Regeneron’s antibody treatment is experimental and still in clinical trials. It has not received emergency use authorization by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), nor has it received formal approval for use.
In fact, it has not completed its current trial, of which it released partial data this week in a news release—not a scientific report. This is a critical distinction. The company discussed data from its first 275 volunteers, but that is out of a planned 1,300-person trial that has not been peer reviewed yet.
According to the report, Regeneron’s early results demonstrated that the antibody cocktail reduced viral levels and associated symptoms in nonhospitalized COVID-19 patients. The effect was greatest for those who had not yet mounted an effective antibody response, with these patients demonstrating symptom improvement in six to eight days on average versus 13 days for the control group. The cocktail appeared to be well tolerated, though two patients given the treatment experienced transfusion reactions. No deaths were reported.
Regeneron cofounder George Yancopoulous said, “We think that there’s a lot of evidence here to suggest that this is a therapeutic solution that could really benefit quite a number of individuals and patients.” But one has to be very careful with incomplete trials, partial data, and news releases from drug manufacturers, which are neither scientific reports nor peer-reviewed studies.
Regeneron did publish in Science in August a study performed in mice and humans in which it identified its therapeutic antibody cocktail. This cocktail is what is now being tested in human trials. However, completed large-scale, double-blind randomized control studies—our gold standard—are needed to truly know how well this treatment works.
Richard Besser, a former acting CDC director, told CNN, “I would withhold judgment on this until we see the data. You know these early results that keep coming out from companies in press releases strike me as being about much more, much more about the stock price than they are about science.”
Regeneron confirmed that the President did receive the antibody cocktail Friday morning on a compassionate-use basis. According to the FDA, compassionate use means that an experimental treatment may be used when other treatment options have failed or an “immediately life-threatening or serious condition” exists. Though this did not appear to be the indication for use here, it would be hard to imagine anyone denying a request from the White House for the commander-in-chief.
While I hope and pray this antibody treatment helps Trump, I think it gets pretty dicey when a person of his stature is given an unproven, investigational therapy. Side effects of monoclonal antibodies range from mild to life-threatening. Since one is injecting proteins into the body, monoclonal antibodies can cause allergic reactions. Other reported effects may include fever, shortness of breath, weakness, vomiting, chills, low blood pressure, and even a challenging condition called serum sickness, in which an overactive immune response leads to fever, rash, and joint swelling.
Fortunately, monoclonal antibodies have been used successfully to reduce mortality from other viruses like Ebola and to aid in the immune response to diseases like cancer, so it’s certainly possible that all goes well here. One has to wonder though: Did Trump develop fever, cough, shortness of breath, and low oxygenation levels prior to being given this experimental treatment—or after?
Carolyn Barber, M.D. has been an emergency department physician for 25 years. She is co-founder of the homeless work program Wheels of Change, and the author of the new book Runaway Medicine: What You Don’t Know May Kill You, which was recently Amazon’s top-ranked bestseller in health care administration.


fortune--2020-10-05--What’s more destructive than COVID-19? The twin shocks of a pandemic and no-deal Brexit, Germany war

What’s more destructive than COVID-19? The twin shocks of a pandemic and no-deal Brexit, Germany warns

A no-deal Brexit would be “irresponsible” during the COVID-19 pandemic. German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas warned Monday.
Brexit technically took place at the end of January, but the Brexit transition—during which the U.K. is still subject to the EU’s rules for its members—runs out at the end of this year. If the U.K. and EU haven’t agreed on the terms of their future trading relationship by then, a range of trade barriers will spring up, including customs checks, tariffs and other regulatory hurdles.
“With today’s health and economic challenges, people on both sides of the channel have enough to shoulder, so it would be totally irresponsible to burden them in this position with additional problems through a no-deal,” Maas said after meeting the EU’s top Brexit negotiator, Michel Barnier, in Berlin.
Maas also tweeted that the pandemic has “made conversations even more difficult, in every respect. But it has also made an agreement even more urgent.”
Wenn wir es beim #Brexit noch ins Ziel schaffen wollen, müssen wir jetzt vorankommen in Verhandlungen mit 🇬🇧. #COVID19 hat Gespräche noch schwieriger gemacht – in jeder Hinsicht. Aber es hat auch eine Einigung noch dringlicher gemacht. Habe darüber mit @MichelBarnier gesprochen. pic.twitter.com/HWxtL1i38m — Heiko Maas 🇪🇺 (@HeikoMaas) October 5, 2020
Time is extremely tight for the negotiators. They originally had a deadline of October 15 to strike a deal—allowing the EU’s national governments time to endorse the deal so it can be adopted and signed next month—but on Saturday British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen agreed to extend the talks by a further month.
The leaders said “progress had been made in recent weeks but that significant gaps remained, notably but not only in the areas of fisheries, the level playing field and governance.”
The fishing issue is about how much access EU companies will ultimately get to British waters. The “level playing field” is Brussels-speak for the U.K. continuing to stick to EU rules in areas such as state aid, so that British companies don’t gain an unfair advantage over their EU counterparts.
There is also a major disagreement over aspects of the Withdrawal Agreement that affect Northern Ireland—the U.K. is preparing to introduce a law that overrides that treaty, signed just this year, and the EU has launched legal proceedings against the U.K. as a result. But, while this argument may have an effect on trust, it has so far failed to derail the Brexit trade talks.
Elevated risk
Maas’s warning over the consequences of a no-deal Brexit came a day after Johnson said his country could “live with” that prospect and indeed “prosper mightily under those circumstances.”
However, law firm Baker & McKenzie released a report Monday that said the double-whammy of the COVID-19 pandemic and a no-deal Brexit would lop 6% off the U.K.’s GDP over the next decade—that’s £134 billion ($174 billion) a year.
“In a no-deal scenario, businesses will face additional costs from trade tariffs and other non-tariff barriers,” said Sunny Mann, the law firm’s EMEA head of international trade, in the report. “Rising costs, coupled with reduced labor, will amplify output loss, which will further depress export revenues. A negative investment outlook, combined with stricter foreign investment controls, will also put a strain on businesses seeking recovery in the post-COVID-19 landscape, especially those who need liquidity or need to divest assets.”
Some forecast a doomy scenario even if the talks result in just a “skinny deal” that covers limited aspects of the future trading relationship, such as goods but not services.
“The differential between both scenarios is not trivial, but both mean U.K. potential growth below 1% with sizeable long-term losses; both cut neutral rates even further and pin the [Bank of England] to near-zero rates for a very extended period,” BofA said in a note last week. “We assume there will be a skinny deal in our base case forecasts. The chances of no deal remain elevated, however.”
Goldman Sachs also said in a Monday note that it expects a “thin” zero-tariff deal to materialize by early November, in time for ratification by year end, but warned that “the risk of a breakdown in negotiations cannot be ruled out.”
“Whatever happens now, we will be involved in a day-to-day struggle to ensure the goods that we need to see flowing across our borders,” said Paul Everitt, CEO of aerospace trade organization ADS told a parliamentary inquiry in London last week.
Meanwhile, Japan’s Nikkei reported Monday that carmakers Toyota and Nissan want the British government to reimburse them for the new tariffs—likely to be in the order of 10%—they would have to pay when exporting British cars to the EU, if there is no deal. Nissan has already warned its British manufacturing plant, which employs 7,000 people, would become “unsustainable” in such a scenario.


fortune--2020-10-05--Alibaba’s making an opportunistic investment in Dufry

This is the web version of Term Sheet, a daily newsletter on the biggest deals and dealmakers. Sign up to get it delivered free to your inbox.
On Monday, the hospitality and tech sectors saw a marriage, highlighting how the former may not ever be the same again due to COVID-19.
Chinese tech titan Alibaba announced plans to acquire up to a 10% stake in Dufry, a Swiss duty free group that has struggled with the effects of global lockdowns. They’re forming a joint venture that will focus on expansion in the Middle Kingdom.
The partnership will help the two “explore and invest in opportunities in China” while bolstering “Dufry’s digital transformation,” according to a statement from Dufry.
It’s a tie-up that makes sense not only because of the e-commerce line—but also because appetite for duty-free spending appears to continue in China, pandemic or not.
In China, travel stocks have soared as domestic travel has resumed with coronavirus rates within the country remaining low. In the hopes of reviving spending, Chinese authorities in June relaxed rules on domestic duty-free spending. Travelers to Hainan, dubbed the Hawaii of China, can now spend three times more on duty-free items than previously allowed.
And when it comes to luxury goods—a staple of duty-free shopping—retailers are now doubling down on China as mainland tourists forgo Paris and Milan for closer-to-home abodes. China is “the only major economy expected to show growth this year” in the luxury market, per Reuters.
Dufry also plans to buy out its Hudson unit via a new rights issue. While it previously hoped to raise about 500 million Swiss francs through the process, it now hopes for about 700 million Swiss francs ($763 million) with the Alibaba commitment. Advent International, the private equity firm, is also expected to invest in the rights issue.
AIRBNB’S IPO? The home-sharing startup is reportedly seeking to raise $3 billion at a valuation of $30 billion. It’s surprising, considering the pandemic took that number from $31 billion to $18 billion at one point in private rounds. Airbnb reportedly is seeking to release its IPO filing in November after the election and target a listing sometime in December. Read more.
Lucinda Shen
Twitter: @shenlucinda
Email: lucinda.shen@fortune.com
VENTURE DEALS
- Strava Inc., a San Francisco-based social network for athletes, is looking to raise at a $1 billion valuation, per Bloomberg citing sources. Read more.
- Cooler Screens, a Chicago-based maker of screens for store coolers, raised over $80 million in Series C funding. Investors include Verizon Ventures, M12, Great Point Ventures, and Silicon Valley Bank.
- Alucent Biomedical, a Salt Lake City, Ut.-based medical technology company for vascular disease treatments, raised $35 million in Series B funding. Investors included Fresenius Medical Care Ventures.
- Your.MD, a London-based maker of a self-care app Healthily, raised $30 million in Series A funding. Reckitt Benckiser was the investor.
- ScriptDrop, a Columbus, Oh.-based IT solution connecting pharmacies, couriers, providers, pharmaceutical manufacturers, and patients, raised $15 million in Series A funding. Ohio Innovation Fund led the round and was joined by investors including North Coast Ventures, M25 and Rev1Ventures.
- CoreView, an Alpharetta, Ga.-based Microsoft 365 management platform, raised $10 million in Series B funding. Insight Partners led the round.
- BSPK, a Menlo Park, Calif.-based maker of a platform connecting luxury brand shoppers with advisors, raised $7 million in Series A funding. Northern Light Venture Capital led the round. Read more.
- Engrain, a Denver-based interactive mapping technology and data visualization software maker, raised $3.7 million in funding. RET Ventures led the round.
- Scener, a Seattle-based social video and movie platform, raised $2.1 million in seed funding. Spun out of RealNetworks, investors include SeaChange, Glaser Investments, LAUNCH, and RiffTrax.
- Nu Quantum, a Cambridge, U.K.-based quantum photonics company, raised £2.1 million in seed funding. Amadeus Capital Partners led the round and was joined by investors including Ahren Innovation Capital, IQ Capital, Cambridge Enterprise and Martlet Capital.
- Airly, a Palo Alto, Calif.- and Poland-based air quality monitoring service, raised $2 million. Giant Ventures led the round. Read more.
PRIVATE EQUITY
- GIC plans to invest $752 million while TPG plans to invest $250 million in Reliance Retail, the India-based arm of Reliance.
- AEVEX Aerospace, backed by Madison Dearborn and CoVant Management, acquired IKHANA Aircraft Services and Geodetics Incorporated. IKHANA Aircraft Services, based in Murrieta, Calif., provides aircraft engineering, modification, and maintenance. Geodetics, based in San Diego, California, designs, develops, and manufactures commercial navigation products. Financial terms weren't disclosed.
- Altamont Capital Partners invested in Cornerstone Advisors, a Scottsdale, Ariz.-based provider of advisory services to banking institutions. Financial terms weren't disclosed.
- Bain Capital is in talks with LV=, a U.K.-based insurance company. Read more.
- CC Capital and Motive Partners agreed to acquire Wilshire Associates, a Santa Monica, Calif.-based investment tech and advisory firm. Financial terms weren't disclosed.
- Kohlberg and Company agreed to acquire Parts Authority, a Lake Success, NY.-based provider of automotive aftermarket parts. Financial terms weren't disclosed.
- Imaweb, backed by Providence Strategic Growth, acquired Evolutive, a Belgium-based provider of automotive software. Financial terms weren't disclosed.
- TA Associates invested in Priority Software, a provider of enterprise resource planning software. Financial terms weren't disclosed.
OTHERS
- Noble Energy (NASDAQ: NBL) shareholders approved the pending merger with Chevron Corporation (NYSE: CVX), the U.S.-based oil provider. Read more.
- Global Payments (NYSE:GPN) is considering a sale of Netspend, its debit card unit, valuing it at over $2 billion, per Reuters. Read more.
- Tesla (Nasdaq: Nasdaq) agreed to acquire German ATW Automation, a company that assembles battery modules and packs for the auto industry. Read more.
- Kissner Group, controlled by Stone Canyon Industries Holdings, is in talks to acquire Morton Salt, the North America-based salt business, from K+S AG. Read more.
- Weir Group agreed to sell its oil and gas division to Caterpillar for $405 million. Read more.
EXITS
- NEC acquired Avaloq, a Swiss provider of cloud solutions for banks and wealth managers, for an enterprise value of about 2.05 billion Swiss Francs (US$2.2 billion). Warburg Pincus backed the firm.
- Omnicell acquired Pharmaceutical Strategies Group, a Plano, Texas-based pharmacy benefits consulting firm, from Blue Wolf Capital for $225 million.
IPOs
- C3.ai, a Redwood City, Calif.-based predictive analytics company founded by Tom Siebel, is gearing up for an IPO next year that could value the firm at far higher than $3.3 billion, per Reuters citing sources. Current investors include BlackRock, TPG and Shell Ventures. Read more.
- Ascensus, a Dresher, Penn.-based servicer of savings plans, is preparing for an IPO next year that could value it at about $3 billion, per Reuters. Genstar and Aquiline Capital Partners back the firm. Read more.
- Deliveroo, the U.K.-based food delivery company, is planning an IPO in the U.K. that could value it at over 2 billion pounds ($2.6 billion), per Sky News. Read more.
- Foghorn Therapeutics, a Cambridge, Mass.-based preclinical biotech for hematologic cancers and solid tumors, filed to raise $100 million. Flagship Pioneering and Klarman Family Foundation back the firm. Read more.
- Biodesix, a Boulder, Colo.-based provider of diagnostic tests and services for lung disease, filed for a $75 million IPO. It posted revenue of $24.6 million and a loss of $14.6 million in 2019. Read more.
SPACS
- Romeo Systems, an electric battery company, plans to go public via merger with RMG Acquisition Corp. (NYSE: RMG), a SPAC. The combined company will be valued at about $1.3 billion.
- Danimer Scientific, a bioplastics company, plans to go public via merger with Live Oak Acquisition Corp (NYSE: LOAK), a SPAC in a deal that could value the firm at $890 million.
- Ecobee, a home automation startup, is in talks to go public via merger with Canaccord Genuity Growth II Corp., a SPAC, per Bloomberg. The Amazon Alexa Fund backs Ecobee. Read more.
- Global Knowledge Training and Skillsoft, two education tech companies, are in talks to go public via merger together with Churchill Capital Corp. II, a SPAC.Read more.
- Atlas Crest Investment Corp., a blank check company formed by Moelis & Company, filed to raise $500 million. Read more.
- Cerberus Telecom Acquisition, a SPAC formed by Cerberus Capital Management, filed to raise $400 million. Read more.
- DPCM Capital, a blank check-company formed by former Uber Technologies executive Emil Michael, plans to raise $250 million. Read more.
- Lefteris Acquisition, a blank check company seeking a fintech target, filed for a $225 million IPO. Vestigo Ventures General partner Mark Casady and former E*Trade CEO Karl Roessner formed the firm. Read more.
- Tastemaker Acquisition, a blank check company focused on a target in the services or hospitality sector, plans to raise $200 million. It was formed by a former CEO of Jamba Inc, Dave Pace, and co-founder of the Bartaco brand, Andy Pforzheimer. Read more.
- BCLS Acquisition, a blank check company formed targeting a healthcare business, filed to raise $125 million. Bain Capital backs the firm. Read more.
F+FS
- Ayala Corp., a Philippines-based conglomerate, raised $180 million for its venture capital fund. Read more.


fortune--2020-10-05--Boris Johnson’s approval rating soared after COVID-19 hospitalization. Trump shouldn’t expect a simi

Boris Johnson’s approval rating soared after COVID-19 hospitalization. Trump shouldn’t expect a similar bounce

Ten days after testing positive for COVID-19 United Kingdom Prime Minister Boris Johnson was hospitalized on April 5. The Conservative Party leader would soon end up in intensive care and he was nearly placed on a ventilator.
After getting discharged on April 12 Johnson acknowledged the virus nearly claimed his life: “It could have gone either way.”
Benefiting from a wave of sympathy, Johnson’s near-death experience was followed by a massive jump in his approval rating. On March 16, 46% of British adults said Johnson was doing “very well” or “fairly well” job as prime minister. But by April 13, that had soared to 66% approval, according to YouGov polling.
The uptick in Johnson’s approval begs the question: Could President Donald Trump, who was admitted to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center for COVID-19 on Friday, see a similar upswing?
We won’t know for sure until later this week when polling from the weekend publishes. In the meantime, Fortune took a look at the data to see what we could expect.
The data suggest a COVID-19 boost would be minimal for Trump. For the most part Trump’s approval rating holds steady during both good and bad news cycles. The president seems to have a low ceiling—a 47.8% approval high-point achieved the first week of his presidency—and a high floor—36.4% approval in December 2017.
Despite impeachment, a pandemic, and recession, Trump’s approval rating has barely moved this year: Peaking at 45.8% in April, and reaching a bottom of 40.1% in July. As of Monday, Trump has a 44.2% approval rating, finds FiveThirtyEight’s aggregated polling calculation.
And if Trump does get an approval rating bounce like Johnson, it could be short-lived. The United Kingdom prime minister saw his approval peak at 66% after leaving the hospital. However, by June, it was down to 43%. Johnson’s current approval stands at just 35%.
But the Trump campaign would likely be happy with even a short-term lift. Trump’s 44.2% approval rating is lower than the last four incumbent presidents who were re-elected: Ronald Reagan (54.5%), Bill Clinton. (57.8%), George W. Bush (49.3%), and Barack Obama (49.3%), according to FiveThirtyEight. Trump’s pre-election approval rating beats those of Jimmy Carter (37.9%) and George H.W. Bush (32.6%)—both lost their re-election campaigns.
And trump is falling behind Democratic nominee Joe Biden. The former vice president leads Trump in nine states the President won in 2016, according to RealClearPolitics poll averages. If Biden were to win every state carried by Hillary Clinton along with the nine Trump states he’s leading in (Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin), he would walk away with at least 368 electoral votes. A win requires only 270 electoral votes.
As of Monday, FiveThirtyEight forecast the odds of Biden winning the electoral college at 80%, while The Economist forecast the Democratic nominee having a 89% chance.


fortune--2020-10-05--A goodbye after 19 years

A goodbye after 19 years

This is the web version of Data Sheet, Fortune’s daily newsletter on the top tech news. To get it delivered daily to your in-box, sign up here.
After 19 glorious, rewarding, life-changing years, I am leaving Fortune.
I am pleased to tell you I’ll have a lot going on in my post-Fortune life.
For starters, I am becoming editor in chief of World 50, an organization that builds private peer communities for CEOs and other top executives at leading global corporations. I have been moderating conversations for World 50 for more than a decade, and while the name of the outfit might not ring a bell, its members are the brightest lights at the world’s most important companies. World 50 itself is growing quickly, and I have a hunch its profile is going to rise in the months and years to come.
I also have signed on as a contributing writer for Business Insider and its various Insider properties, writing an every-other-week reported column on business as well as several feature stories a year about whatever swing-for-the-fences topics I can scare up. BI is investing aggressively in quality journalism, particularly for its premium subscription offering, and I am energized to be working with its growing team of reporters and editors.
There’s more. I will continue as a regular contributor to the Fox Business Network. I’m also working with a friend on a really exciting documentary film series, a project that’s so much fun we think it won’t be our last. And I think I might have the idea for my next book.
I cannot begin to describe how much I love Fortune and always will. Before one of several color-scheme redesigns, I frequently said I bled Fortune blue. I still do. When I joined Fortune my hair was brown, I was a newlywed, and I had never written a proper magazine feature. I was in awe of the giants who roamed the hallways of our Time-Life Building offices. Now my hair isn’t brown anymore, I celebrated my nineteenth wedding anniversary last week, and I’ve written (and edited) more features than I can count. Whatever I have accomplished here, I stand on the shoulders of all who came before me as well as Fortune’s current crew of hardworking, ambitious, talented, and committed journalists.
Fortune has been the professional gift that kept on giving. I have traveled the world, helped build a conference business, written two books, dived deep into topics far beyond commerce, and interviewed more CEOs and other luminaries than I can remember. I even shook hands with the Pope! I have been part of an organization that long knew exactly what it was about: committing journalism on behalf of its readers.
Speaking of readers, I have truly enjoyed my relationship with you. Many of you are my sources, subjects, friends, confidantes, dinner companions, onstage dueling partners, cherished critics, and more. I fully intend to keep our relationship going.
My last day at Fortune is Oct. 14, and I plan to run through the tape, including writing a feature for the November issue. I also intend to complete a few projects after my departure, such as the six-episode podcast we launched and Brainstorm Tech on Dec. 1-2. My family and I are remaining in San Francisco. The rest of this is change enough.
By the way: Data Sheet will go on. Stay tuned on who will write it next.
Adam Lashinsky
@adamlashinsky
adam.lashinsky@fortune.com
This edition of Data Sheet was curated by Aaron Pressman.
NEWSWORTHY
Consistently inconsistent. When President Trump announced he had COVID-19 on Friday, the reaction on social media was mixed to say the least, prompting Twitter to declare it would not allow posts wishing for the president's death. But that prompted an outpouring of protest from the many people who have been the subject of similar death tweets and other abuse that the service failed to take down. On Saturday, the company acknowledged the problem in a lengthy tweet storm reply: "We agree we must do better, and we are working together inside to do so."
The worst course of action. Speaking of the pandemic, hackers are taking aim at the medical establishment. A ransomware attack on eResearchTechnology, which supplies software to run clinical vaccine trials, has forced some researchers to track their patients the old-fashioned way, on paper. AstraZeneca’s vaccine trial and Bristol Myers Squibb's COVID test were both affected, the New York Times reports. In more positive pandemic tech developments, 10 states including New York and New Jersey have released COVID tracing apps for mobile phones based on Apple and Google's APIs, CNBC notes.
Pay me what I'm worth. Japanese IT giant NEC is hunting for acquisitions in Europe. The company announced a deal on Monday to buy Swiss banking and payments software developer Avaloq for $2.2 billion. Elsewhere in the island nation, Honda said it was pulling out of the F1 racing series, where it sponsored the Red Bull team, because it needed to spend more on developing emission-free vehicles. While rivals have been selling such cars for years, Honda is just releasing its first mass-market, all-electric car, the Honda e, this month. Top Gear calls it "beautifully engineered and crammed with tech."
I'd like to see that expense report. Microsoft President Brad Smith traveled to the Acropolis Museum in Athens to announce a $1 billion deal to build cloud data centers in Greece. The company will also offer digital skills training to 100,000 Grecians.
FOOD FOR THOUGHT
As mentioned, healthcare facilities have become a top target for ransomware crooks during the pandemic. For an article in Wired, San Francisco writer Sonner Kehrt delves into the formation of an ad-hoc team of experts trying to turn back the attacks. She spoke to Nate Warfield, a Microsoft security manager who is participating in the effort dubbed the Cyber Threat Intelligence League.
While the initial idea was to help protect hospitals, by this point the league had experts in everything from advanced persistent threats to malware analysis to dark web tracking. It also had raw manpower—members were spread across nearly every time zone. Rather than just searching for vulnerabilities in health care systems, they’d also analyze malware, hunt down malicious websites, pore through repositories of phishing scams, and comb the dark web for compromised medical facility credentials and virus-related scams. “The deeper we go, the more areas we find where we’re like, Hey, we can help here, we can help there,” Warfield says.
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
Want a Second Home During COVID? These Zillow Vets Have Invented a Radically Less Expensive Way to Buy One by Lee Clifford
Ransomware Victims Find Themselves Between a Rock and a Hard Place by Robert Hackett
A.I. Gets Down in the Dirt as Precision Agriculture Takes Off by Aaron Pressman
How to Fix Silicon Valley by Maelle Gavet
These Deepfake Videos of Putin and Kim Have Gone Viral by Jeremy Kahn
These Noise-Cancelling Headphones May Be Indispensable for Families Stuck at Home Together by Jonathan Vanian
The Zoom Effect: Why Plastic Surgery and Cosmetic Procedures Might Be More Popular Because of the Pandemic by Rachel King
(Some of these stories require a subscription to access. Thank you for supporting our journalism.)
BEFORE YOU GO
Chinese science fiction author Liu Cixin's instant classic, The Three Body Problem, attracted much praise. TV producers David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, the brains behind HBO's Game of Thrones, snapped up the rights to the book last month for a future Netflix series. But Cixin's political views, particularly defending the Chinese government's mistreatment of Uyghur Muslims, has some U.S. politicians calling for the show to be cancelled. Netflix says it's sticking with the plan.
Aaron Pressman
@ampressman
aaron.pressman@fortune.com


fortune--2020-10-05--Getting involved in diversity and inclusion is optional. That’s a problem

As our society continues to face a reckoning on race, companies are being held to a higher standard than ever before. Employees and customers want more than words. They want action. Many Fortune 500 companies are meeting the moment by putting out commitments to change to signal that they are sincere in their support of Black Lives Matter—both in broader society and within their own walls.
But in order to live up to these pledges, leaders can’t keep treating their companies’ diversity and inclusion (D&I) efforts as extracurricular activities. Rather, D&I has to be core to the way companies do business and develop talent. This can only be successful with the full support and backing of white men, who still, after all, hold key decision-making power in most organizations.
In Coqual’s recent study, “What Majority Men Really Think About Diversity and Inclusion (and How to Engage Them in It),” we set out to learn not only the attitudes but also involvement of “majority” men (straight, cisgender, predominantly white) in their companies’ diversity and inclusion efforts. We conducted our national survey back in February, before our recent crises shone a spotlight on systemic racial inequities.
Given the opportunity and space to make their opinions heard, majority men had something encouraging to tell us: Only 10% think diversity and inclusion has no importance at all. Compare that to 42% who say D&I is “very” or “extremely” important (we call them True Believers), and another 32% who think it is somewhat important. Among majority men, there’s a solid base of support and good will.
These findings beg the question: If so many leaders think diversity and inclusion is worthy, then why has progress been so slow? The problem is apparent in the gap between belief and action. Even among the True Believers, only slightly more than half (56%) say they’ve gotten involved with diversity and inclusion efforts at their companies. The greatest reason cited for their lack of action? They’re too busy. This is shorthand for: Getting active won’t ensure I meet my business targets or move forward in my career.
Corporate D&I leaders need not throw out meaningful staple offerings, such as anti-bias training, employee resource groups, and milestone celebrations. But they need to speak directly to majority men by not only emphasizing but requiring that managers build diverse, inclusive teams. It’s well-known that inclusive leadership behaviors are associated with innovation, profit, and employee engagement—in other words, that these behaviors are good for organizations.
The paradigm shift we need to push—and which our report helped reveal—is that there’s also plenty in it for white men themselves.
For one thing, we find majority men who believe in D&I are highly represented in top leadership positions. Sixty-two percent of majority men in executive corporate suites are True Believers. We also find that True Believers tend to have higher belonging scores, which correlate with engagement at work and loyalty to their organizations. Those who also have high belonging scores are also less likely to feel stalled in their jobs.
So, in answering the urgent call for racial equity by making D&I work core to the way they do business, majority men in positions of power can also strengthen their own career engagement and progress. This is far from a zero-sum game.
How can we make sure majority men absorb this message and make time for D&I? Here are five ways to get started.
Reconsider reward structures
First, make inclusivity a key factor in deciding who moves up and who gets rewarded. Hiring and promotion decisions, performance reviews, annual goal-setting, and compensation and bonus considerations can include assessments of whether employees and managers are meeting D&I targets and exhibiting inclusive behaviors.
Pass the mic to the role models
Our numbers show that many executives are True Believers: Encourage these men to speak up to all employees, and particularly aspiring leaders, about how these executives’ ability to assemble diverse teams and absorb different perspectives helped advance their own careers.
Senior leaders can also build a more inclusive culture by modeling vulnerability and sharing their own experiences with bias. Set the tone from the top by equipping leaders to prompt and engage in conversations about sensitive topics like racism, sexism, or ableism.
Consider Northrop Grumman’s Building the Best Culture (BBC) program, which through two-day experiential workshops convenes its leaders to increase their inclusive leadership competency and strategize ways to cascade the values of D&I throughout the organization. The BBC program helps leaders feel more confident about speaking up and engaging with fellow employees about the importance of an inclusive workplace culture.
Create a culture of active allyship
Normalize calling out microaggressions and intervening rather than standing by during incidents of intolerance. That proactivity is necessary for a learning and healing process in the workplace. It can be established, first, through resources and trainings that explain the systems of inequity that underpin microaggressions and other structural obstacles facing women, Black, Latinx, and other underrepresented groups of employees.
Lockheed Martin models this idea with its mandatory Effective Leadership of Inclusive Teams (ELOIT) program, designed to help its white male executives better recognize the norms of white male culture, which can lead to exclusion for others in the workplace. All white male executives at the director level or above go through a three-and-a-half-day immersive learning lab, run by the diversity, equity, and inclusion consultancy White Men as Full Diversity Partners, where the executives deepen their understanding of prejudice and privilege and learn how to activate their allyship.
Support sponsorship
Establish a robust culture of sponsorship for high-performing employees from underrepresented groups. Our research shows they are less likely to receive this type of career-focused advocacy organically, which puts them at a disadvantage (and damages representation in leadership).
In recent years, EY has made an effort to purposefully reach out to and include white men in conversations and strategies around D&I—and a key part of this approach includes continuing EY’s thriving culture of sponsorship. Male leaders are offered opportunities to connect with aspiring leaders from underrepresented groups, and invited to serve in executive sponsor roles for employee resource groups.
Focus on the positive
D&I leaders have an endlessly expanding, and sometimes competing, list of priorities. Don’t waste too much time and energy on the small number of people who don’t accept the importance of D&I at all. Do set and enforce policies to ensure that they don’t hold underrepresented employees back. Otherwise, speaking to the great numbers of majority men who are ready to embrace D&I should be the focus of leaders’ attention.
Shifting D&I from the periphery to the core of company operations may seem like a heavy lift, but it’s well within leaders’ grasp. After all, successful executives already effect change. They regularly harness the untapped energy and interests of those who work for them. They innovate. This is just one more change they need to drive.
Yes, it will take time, persistence, and learning new skills. But if inclusivity shifts from “extracurricular” to “core requirement” for leadership, we can meet the promises we’ve made to drive equity in our companies and in our world.
Julia Taylor Kennedy is executive vice president at Coqual (formerly Center for Talent Innovation), a nonprofit think tank that studies diversity, equity, and inclusion. She is also primary research lead on Coqual’s study, “What Majority Men Really Think About Diversity and Inclusion (and How to Engage Them in It).”
Pooja Jain-Link is executive vice president at Coqual and secondary research lead on the aforementioned study.


fortune--2020-10-05--865,000 women dropped out of the workforce in September

This is the web version of The Broadsheet, a daily newsletter for and about the world’s most powerful women. Sign up to get it delivered free to your inbox.
Good morning, Broadsheet readers! Amy Coney Barrett’s Rose Garden nomination ceremony is under scrutiny as a source of coronavirus transmission, Megan Thee Stallion brings Breonna Taylor protests to ‘SNL,’ and 865,000 women dropped out of the workforce in September. Have a mindful Monday.
– Workforce dropouts. 865,000.
That’s the number of women who left the workforce in September. The figure is even more sobering when compared to how many men left their jobs last month: 216,000. Put another way, 80% of the 1.1 million workers who dropped out of the workforce last month were women. And another: four times more women than men stopped working or looking for work in September.
The National Women’s Law Center crunched these numbers based on the month’s jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. And it’s easy to speculate about the cause of this gigantic disparity.
“This is the devastating impact of the ongoing breakdown of our nation’s caregiving infrastructure in the face of COVID-19,” Emily Martin, the NWLC’s vice president for education and workplace justice, told CNBC. “As families across the country struggle to figure out how to keep their jobs while also making sure their children are cared for, safe and learning every day, it’s women who are being pushed out of work.”
Back in April, 14% of women were considering quitting their jobs because of the coronavirus pandemic, according to a survey by pay equity startup Syndio. Since then, access to childcare has only become more critical as the pandemic continues into the new school year and, it seems safe to assume, through the end of 2020. Late last month, Zinthiya Ganeshpanchan, a nonprofit executive whose organization serves vulnerable women in the U.K., told the NYT that the pandemic and lack of access to childcare would take the women she serves “10 years back.”
These numbers also bring to mind the statistics that have come out during the pandemic showing how the burden of childcare and homeschooling has fallen disproportionately on women. Remember this May NYT headline? “Nearly Half of Men Say They Do Most of the Home Schooling. 3% of Women Agree.”
The women who left the workforce—which means they’re neither working nor looking for work—in September outnumber the 661,000 jobs the U.S. economy added last month. Women gained only two in five of those positions.
Of the 865,000 women who dropped out, 58,000 were Black women and 324,000 were Latinas—who also saw unemployment increase from 10.5% in August to 11% in September, one of the only increases in joblessness for any group.
Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com
@_emmahinchliffe
Correction: Friday’s Broadsheet incorrectly identified Charlie Scharf. He is the CEO of Wells Fargo. We regret the error.
ALSO IN THE HEADLINES
- Garden gathering. Since Friday, several more figures connected to the Trump White House, including Kellyanne Conway, have announced positive COVID-19 diagnoses. The Rose Garden event to nominate Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court is now under scrutiny as a possible source of the spread. New York Times
- Saturday night pride. During this weekend's season premiere of Saturday Night Live, musical guest Megan Thee Stallion protested the Breonna Taylor ruling, which failed to charge any of the officers who shot Taylor with her death (see an update on the grand jury story here). Her performance quoted Malcolm X—"The most disrespected person in America is the Black woman"—and criticized Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron. NPR
- Brainstorm this. Fortune's Michal Lev-Ram is cohost, with Brian O'Keefe, of a new podcast: Fortune Brainstorm. Their first guest was Aparna Bawa, COO of Zoom. Fortune
MOVERS AND SHAKERS: Home Depot promoted Ann-Marie Campbell to EVP of U.S. stores and international operations, adding responsibility for Canada and Mexico to her current role.
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
- Victoire in Togo. Victoire Tomegah-Dogbe is now the first female prime minister of Togo; she was appointed last week after the resignation of her predecessor. Tomegah-Dogbe chose a government in which women hold 30% of ministerial positions, a record for the country. Reuters
- Pantone, period. Pantone has a new color of the year: period red. The company hopes the shade will "embolden people who menstruate to feel proud of who they are." New York Times
- Empathy in SV. Maelle Gavet, former COO of Compass, writes in a Fortune op-ed about the solution to Silicon Valley's gender and racial diversity problems. One key step: increasing empathy. Fortune
ON MY RADAR
The secret history of Kimberly Guilfoyle's departure from Fox The New Yorker
Who gets to be an equestrian? Elle
Meet theater's most famous superfan: Hillary Clinton New York Times
PARTING WORDS
"Everybody, no matter what side of the aisle you’re on, was going to need comfort food."
-Ina Garten on scheduling the release of her new cookbook, Modern Comfort Food, for a few weeks before the U.S. presidential election


fortune--2020-10-05--A.I. gets down in the dirt as precision agriculture takes off

In recent weeks, farmers across the Midwest have begun harvesting millions of acres of corn, soybeans, and other fall crops. As tractors and combines crisscross the fields, the farm sector faces tough times because of low prices, a consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic’s hit to restaurants, hotels, and other big food buyers.
Some farmers have turned to a high-tech solution for improving yields and reducing costs. For example, harvesting combines introduced this year by Deere & Co. include high-resolution cameras and sensors linked to A.I. software.
The system monitors grain as it’s collected and adjusts dozens of settings on the combine in real-time to maximize how much grain is chopped from each stalk and to minimize waste. An X9, as the new machine is called, can harvest a field 45% faster than Deere’s older equipment lacking the automated system and it uses 20% less fuel.
“Historically, those settings were a bit of an art form for the farmer to maximize the grain going into the combine,” Deere’s chief technology officer, Jahmy Hindman, says. “It takes the burden of having to manage a lot of different things on the combine from the operator. And we can do a better job.”
The improvements couldn’t come at a better time for the agricultural sector, which has been dealing with droughts and other harsh weather conditions due to climate change, escalating trade wars between the U.S. and China, as well as declining demand for their crops due to the pandemic. Widespread use of precision agriculture methods could reduce farming costs by $100 billion while saving 180 billion cubic meters of water by 2030, according to a McKinsey study done for the World Economic Forum. Using data crunching and A.I. analysis could increase farmer incomes by another $70 billion by 2030, the study found.
So far, the tech battle is largely between established ag giants like Deere and Bayer’s Monsanto, and startups backed by venture capital. Three years ago, Deere bought machine-learning startup Blue River Technology for $305 million to accelerate its efforts.
But the tech giants are stirring. Microsoft, for one, has been increasingly pushing into agriculture, and struck up a wide-ranging partnership this summer with farming collective Land O’Lakes covering data collection and analysis using Microsoft’s Azure cloud service.
Still, technology may not be a panacea for the hard-pressed farming sector. Some once-promising areas, like using robots to pick fruit or autonomous drones to monitor fields for drought or pests, have not panned out as quickly as expected. The technologies haven’t improved as quickly as expected and remain expensive.
That hasn’t deterred Deere from adding a host of A.I.-driven features to further its push into precision agriculture. In addition to smart harvesting combines, the company is also developing technology using cameras to inspect individual plants and weeds in a field to modulate the amount of fertilizer and pesticides applied based on need. Called “See & Spray,” the feature should arrive next year and could reduce the use of herbicides by 40% to 50% in some applications, analysts at Morgan Stanley noted in a report earlier this year.
For Steve Pitstick, an Illinois farmer with 2,500 acres of corn and soybeans, Deere’s harvest-sensing technology could be exactly what he needs. Pitstick, who has been farming for more than 40 years, has seen vast changes in equipment. Where harvesting gear once ran at just three miles per hour over 10-foot wide patches of a field, it now rides twice as fast and harvests up to 60-foot wide swathes.
“You have a lot of things coming at you and you just can’t react fast enough,” while driving the harvester, he says. “I’d love to let the machine do it.”
Pitstick started testing the equipment this year, but he knows not every new technology will prove worthy.
“We’ve experimented with just about everything that’s out there if it looks like it could be a game changer,” he says. “Some things work out, some don’t.”
Big farms using expensive tractors—an X9 can cost $800,000 or more—aren’t the only ones using A.I. Farmers in search of a cheaper technology are turning to seven-year-old startup Ceres Imaging. The company sells its irrigation, pest, and nutrient analysis as a service to hundreds of orchards, vineyards, and farms for as little as $4 per acre per year.
It’s not offering the same kind of real-time, continual analysis as more expensive strategies. Instead, on a weekly or monthly basis, Ceres flies planes loaded with high-resolution imaging equipment over customers’ fields (the idea was sparked when founder and CEO Ashwin Madgavkar saw a NASA spectral imaging sensor in action while in grad school at Stanford University). A.I. computer-vision software reviews the aerial images and overlays information about which areas may need more or less water, fertilizer, or other resources.
Red and yellow shading can indicate problems; healthier areas appear in blue and green. Farmers can review the images on a mobile phone or laptop, using the guidance to cut back on unnecessary applications of fertilizer, for example. That saves money and helps protect the environment.
“Climate change and sustainability are big challenges for farmers globally,” Madgavkar says. “We see this as a technology which can help all farmers.”
California’s world-leading almond industry is a major customer, as almond trees require large amounts of water, which has been in short supply in recent years. A Ceres image of one customer’s fields highlights parts of an orchard in yellow where irrigation equipment may have clogged or broken down, Madgavkar explains.
“We do this by looking at different wave lengths of light and applying computer vision and A.I. models to it,” he says. “Those patterns tell me there’s something wrong with the plumbing. The drip tape that’s installed here often malfunctions.”
Some companies are taking a much more radical approach that relies even more heavily on A.I. algorithms and machine learning.
Five-year old startup Bowery Farming, based in New York, is building vast indoor farms where every aspect of the growing conditions, from temperature and humidity to the amount and type of light, can be controlled. The farms are replete with sensors, including A.I.-backed cameras, that monitor crops in real-time, allowing the system to make changes to growing conditions.
So far, Bowery has built three large farms and focused on producing leafy greens and fresh herbs for supermarket chains like Whole Foods and Stop & Shop. Each farm serves only its local area, ensuring the produce stays fresh and minimizing the cost and environmental impact of shipping long distances.
But the plan is to expand into all kinds of produce, from tomatoes and peppers to berries and potatoes, and build indoor farms all over the world. It’s not economically viable for massive crops like corn or soybeans, however.
As the company expands, the machine-learning system should gain more and richer data to draw on for controlling the crops and improving yields, CEO Irving Fain says.
“As we’re learning and improving and iterating, our farming operation continues to improve,” Fain says. “The A.I. and software are critical components as the network itself gets smarter and smarter.”


fortune--2020-10-05--Here’s what Google’s new Nest Audio speakers are like

The new Nest Audio Internet-connected speaker, introduced on Monday, is Google’s latest attempt to catch up to the category leader, Amazon’s Echo. But this time, Google is trying a new tactic: It’s focusing on better sound quality rather than new artificial intelligence features that have previously been its main sales pitch for the devices.
The move to focus on audio quality underscores that while people may use smart speakers for asking questions and quickly retrieving recipes, they mostly use them to play music.
Since 2016, Google has released several versions of its smart speakers, including small and large models. But the basic premise has remained unchanged—people can use the their voices to adjust the speaker’s volume, play their favorite songs, or check the weather.
The size and appearance of the latest speaker—branded for the first time under Google’s home device unit, Nest—is a big departure from the older models. Instead of resembling a plastic canister, the Nest Audio speaker is sleeker, akin to a 7-inch pill draped in felt. It’s also heavier, weighing twice as much (2.7 pounds) than its predecessor, Google Home. The increase in heft is partly due to the big changes in the speaker technology, explained Google Nest product manager Chris Chan.
The Nest Audio now contains a 75-millimeter woofer and 19 millimeter-tweeter used to produce deeper bass and treble, respectively. The older model lacked a woofer, Chan said, and instead relied on a smaller speaker technology known as a passive radiator.
Using the Nest Audio, I found that the funky bass lines of “Night Fever” by the Bee Gees came through clearly, without sounding muffled. The improved bass also helped the low end of Rihanna’s “Work” stand out amid the song’s synthesizers and samples.
Nest Audio
It’s unclear how the Nest Audio’s revamped sound quality compares to its newly redesigned Echo, which is now spherical and contains so-called stereo drivers that can simulate the sound of two speakers. The Echo’s speakers therefore, presumably produce sound that better permeates through a room.
Chan said that he hasn’t tested the new Echo, so he couldn’t compare the two speakers. But generally, he said that Google’s user tests showed that people place their smart speakers against the wall rather than in the center of a room, so designing speakers that distribute sound in 360 degrees isn’t very important.
Google didn’t announce any major changes to Google Assistant—its voice-recognition technology— except to make it automatically speak more loudly when in a noisy room. The new speaker has the same machine-learning chip as the $50 Nest Mini speaker, but not for the bigger Google-branded speaker, which debuted in 2017. That computer chip helps Google Assistant more quickly do things like playing a certain song when asked.
Using Google Assistant depends on how worried you are about data privacy. For instance, I typically go into my Google account settings to stop Google from recording my search and browser activity or location for all Google services. Doing so, however, limits what Google Assistant can do, making it unable to retrieve certain answers from Wikipedia to my questions or play songs from my Spotify account when I ask.
“For instance, let’s say I ask the Google Assistant, “Who is LeBron James?” If I disable my web and app activities from being tracked, Google Assistant tells me, “For help with that, you’ll need to go to the Google Home app and turn on web and app activity.” However, when I reactivate my “web and app activity” setting, Google Assistant retrieves an answer from Wikipedia about the NBA player.
I had to manually change my Google account’s privacy settings to allow the company to track my web and app activities for all of Google Services in order to get access to all of Google Assistant’s features.
Ultimately, my existing stereo system produces better sound quality than the new Nest Audio speaker. That’s to be expected considering that my stereo system has two speakers and a powerful amplifier, and that they’re more expensive than Nest Audio, which costs $100.
But using Nest Audio as an extra speaker that I can use in my bedroom or kitchen is a notable improvement from its predecessor. The sound it produces is more defined and louder, considering its size—about the same as my toaster.


fortune--2020-10-05--What is ‘VIP syndrome’? Trump’s COVID-19 diagnosis underscores challenge of treating famous patients

The team of medical professionals treating U.S. President Donald Trump for COVID-19 are providing him with “all the standard of care and beyond,” Trump’s personal physician, Sean Conley, said on Saturday.
The medical team in charge of Trump’s care have prescribed the President an experimental antibody cocktail, an antiviral drug, and a steroid usually administered to patients with severe cases of COVID-19. The comprehensive nature of Trump’s treatments and the conflicting reports about his health have led medical experts to raise concerns about a new risk: “VIP syndrome.”
“VIP syndrome,” coined in 1964 by Walter Weintraub, a doctor at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, describes a phenomenon in which the medical treatment of a famous, powerful, or influential patient—a very important person, or VIP—faces challenges caused by the person’s fame, power, or influence.
Subscribe to The Capsule , a weekly brief monitoring advances in health care and biopharma, delivered free to your inbox.
Doctors might make decisions they wouldn’t normally make because they are more willing to accede to the famous person’s demands or are more concerned than usual that the VIP avoids feeling pain or recovers quickly.
“[VIP syndrome] often pressures the health care team to bend the rules by which they usually practice medicine,” according to a 2011 paper in the Cleveland Clinic Journal of Medicine.
Complications can arise when doctors embark on medical treatments that diverge from the standard course of care that may turn out to be detrimental to the patient’s health.
“A VIP draws special attention based on his or her status in society and level of importance as perceived by the health care professional providing treatment,” according to a 2007 article in the peer-reviewed medical journal Intensive Care Medicine. “The special handling of the VIP patient…induces the potential for inappropriate and ineffective care.”
To be clear, there is no firm evidence that VIP syndrome is a factor in the President’s care, but experts have offered it as a possible explanation for the mixed messages from Trump’s medical team.
Thomas McGinn, physician-in-chief at Northwell Health in New York, told the New York Times that the range of drugs prescribed to Trump “raises the question: Is he sicker than we’re hearing, or are they being overly aggressive because he is the President, in a way that could be potentially harmful?”
Trump announced his diagnosis early Friday. By the end of the day, he had been airlifted to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center and had received an unauthorized, experimental antibody treatment developed by U.S. biotech firm Regeneron that’s been issued to patients 10 or fewer times.
Conley, Trump’s physician, said at the Saturday press briefing that Trump had started advanced therapies “a little bit earlier than most of the patients we know and follow.”
In addition to the antibody treatment, Trump is on a course of remdesivir, an antiviral drug with emergency use authorization from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Trump’s doctors also gave him dexamethasone, a steroid given only to people with severe cases of COVID-19.
Conley also said on Saturday that Trump was “up and active” and his cholesterol and blood pressure levels were “great.” In response, one reporter asked why the medical team had decided to transfer Trump to Walter Reed. “Because he’s the President of the United States,” Conley said.


fortune--2020-10-05--The ‘world’s best airport’ issues a new forecast about travel in the COVID era

Not even the “world’s best airport” can escape the fallout of COVID-19.
On Friday, Changi Airport Group—operators of the Changi International Airport in Singapore, known for its indoor waterfall and lush vegetation—announced a 36% decline in profit for the financial year ended March 31 and warned that “the battle with COVID-19 has only just begun.”
According to its report—which covers the year from April 2019 to March 2020—the Singapore airport operator saw revenue increase 2.6% over the previous year to $2.28 billion. But most of those earnings came in the first 10 months of the fiscal year—April to January. The airport’s initial “strong performance,” the group says, was “severely negated by the collapse in air travel” in February and March.
Subscribe to Eastworld for weekly insight on what’s dominating business in Asia, delivered free to your inbox.
On Feb. 1, Singapore became the first country in Southeast Asia to ban arrivals from mainland China, where the coronavirus outbreak was spreading rapidly. The hit to Changi was immediate, since Chinese tourists account for roughly 20% of its arrivals. In March, the government went further and banned all “short term” arrivals—meaning tourists and those in transit couldn’t use Changi Airport.
Passenger numbers at the Asia transit hub plummeted 33% and 71% in February and March, the last two months of the reported year, compared with the year before. In a bid to consolidate operations, the group suspended them at Terminal 2 for 18 months, beginning May 1. Terminal 4 operations have been placed “on standby” until air demand returns—but the future of air travel remains hazy.
In July, Singapore’s Ministry of Transport halted construction at a $10 billion fifth terminal for at least two years, while the government reviews the need for another terminal in a post-pandemic world. (Changi Airport is government-owned; the group manages the airport’s operations as a licensee.)
“We have decided to take a pause for two years. Let us complete this study of the future of aviation,” Transport Minister Khaw Boon Wan said. “The key words there are ‘this study of the future of aviation,’ not just ‘a reassessment of local demand.’”
Changi Airport Group is exposed to the global downturn in aviation in a way besides the obvious. Roughly half the group’s profit decline this year came from a write-down on its assets in Rio de Janeiro’s Tom Jobim Airport. The group has a 51% stake in Tom Jobim, which was performing poorly before Brazil recorded the third-highest number of COVID-19 cases in the world.
The pandemic has only worsened after the fiscal year ended in March, with Singapore imposing mandatory stay-at-home orders in April. So the group predicts revenue will be “materially and adversely impacted” for the year ahead, too, “with travel recovery highly dependent on how countries around the world manage border controls, the relaxation of air travel requirements, and the development of viable medical treatments for the virus,” the group said.
“The future does appear daunting, with the situation showing no signs of abatement.”


fortune--2020-10-07--COVID-19 is devastating Filipino Americans

Here ’ s when your second stimulus check could arrive if Congress passes more economic aid

Every October, the country largely ignores Filipino American History Month, which is a shame, given the enormous, contributory role Filipino Americans have played in shaping the American experience for everyone. But in the COVID age, the situation is even more dire. More on that in a moment.
This year, in the light of a pandemic of a different sort, the Seattle-based Filipino American National Historical Society (FANHS) has decided Fil-Am History Month is dedicated to shedding light on the long history of Filipino American justice activism.
“We choose this theme to highlight the myriad ways Filipino Americans have participated in social justice movements, including but not limited to, the United Farmworkers Movement, the fight for Ethnic Studies, Hawaii Sugar Plantation strikes, Washington Yakima strikes, and Anti-Martial Law Movements across multiple decades,” the FANHS said in a statement.
They’ve launched #FAHM2020, which has turned into a steady stream of art, culture, literature, history and other revelations.
Bottom line, respect must be paid. “Though Filipino Americans were the first Asian Americans to arrive in the U.S. in 1587 (33 years before the Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock in 1620), little was written about the history of the Philippines or of Filipino Americans in the U.S.,” writes Kevin Nadal, a psychology professor at the City University of New York and HuffPost contributor. As a group, they’ve often been excluded from Asian American organizations and academic literature and have formed alliances with Latinx and Black communities with whom they’ve found unique solidarity. “As one of the largest immigrant groups in the country, we want our history to be recognized and our stories to be told,” says Nadal.
Tragically, one of those stories is now about COVID-19.
A new report from the National Nurses Union finds that Filipino American nurses make up just 4% of nursing personnel in the US, but 31.5% of COVID-19 deaths in their ranks. The regional numbers are even more alarming—some 20% of registered nurses in California are Fil-Am. “And because they are most likely to work in acute care, medical/surgical, and ICU nursing, many “FilAms” are on the front lines of care for Covid-19 patients,” reports Stat News.
An investigation by the Los Angeles Times shows that people with Filipino heritage make up one-quarter of the Asian American population in California, but at least 35% of the COVID-19 deaths in that broad cohort. The shocking mortality rate is driven by many factors, experts say, including their propensity to be front line workers, poverty, housing and economic insecurity, preexisting health conditions and lack of health insurance. “It’s the perfect storm,” Adrian De Leon, an assistant professor in USC’s department of American studies and ethnicity told the paper. “In terms of exposure to the pandemic, exposure to the virus, but also exposure to a lot of other factors, too—like dense housing tends to be in places that have environmental hazards.”
I’ll leave it to you to draw a bright, angry line between President Trump’s bizarre handling of his own coronavirus illness with the disgraceful way his administration has left entire swaths of citizens to fend for themselves.
But with a nod to their long history of a fully inclusive social justice activism, it’s worth thinking about what role we all have to play in making sure Filipino Americans—who are the second-largest Asian American group in the nation and the third-largest ethnic group in California—find their rightful place in both the country’s narrative and on policymakers’ agendas.
Ellen McGirt
@ellmcgirt
Ellen.McGirt@fortune.com
On point
Will focus on race lead to policy change? This is the subject of new research from the Pew Research Center, published today, which finds that Americans have mixed views on how the focus on systemic racial inequality will play out for the country. A scant 52% of all respondents said that the work being done will lead to lasting improvement in the lives of Black people, but further breakdowns yield more insights. A majority of Black adults (64%) say they’ve been educating themselves on issues of race and inequality and have moved to support non-majority culture owned businesses in the last three months, while some 40% of white, Asian, and Latinx said the same. The partisan divide is stark: Some 78% of Democrats or those who lean Democrat say the country hasn’t gone far enough to ensure the equal right of Black people, compared with just 17% of Republican and Republican-leaning respondents.
Pew Research
A shot across the bow for marriage equality In a not-so-subtle jab at the 2015 Supreme Court same-sex marriage ruling, Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr., have issued a four-page statement that appears to signal that the decision should be revisited. “By choosing to privilege a novel constitutional right over the religious liberty interests explicitly protected in the First Amendment, and by doing so undemocratically, the court has created a problem that only it can fix,” Justice Thomas wrote, in an opinion joined by Justice Alito. The statement was part of a decision in a case brought by Kim Davis, the Kentucky clerk who had been sued for failing to provide marriage licenses for same-sex couples. Though the Supreme Court denied her appeal, the additional statement sent shockwaves through the LGBTQ and ally community.
New York Times
Architect Sir David Adjaye takes a top prize The Ghanian-British architect has been awarded the 2021 Royal Gold Medal from the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), for his outstanding contributions to global architecture. He is the first Black recipient in the organization’s 172-year-old history. Adjaye maintains offices in both London and Accra, Ghana. While he may currently be best known for his work on the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C., he’s got plenty of boldfaced buildings to his credit.
The Architect’s Newspaper
Look at what Ireland just did Lacrosse may not get the same airtime as soccer around the world, but its players know how to represent. When the Irish national team learned that the number 3 seeded Iroquois Nationals were not eligible to compete in the 2022 World Games in Birmingham, Ala., they joined a call for their inclusion. The organizers said the rules prevented them from including any team that wasn’t a "sovereign nation" — and although a public outcry encouraged them to change the rules, by then the roster was full. In response, Ireland bowed out to make space for the Iroquois team. It was a poignant move: The Iroquois team represent the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, who are the originators of lacrosse, known as “the medicine game.” A player for Ireland’s lacrosse team told NPR, "none of us would be going to Birmingham, Ala., in the first place if it wasn't for the Iroquois and giving us the gift of their medicine game.” Well played.
NPR
On Background
A lost interview with James Baldwin You can thank the higher power of your choice for packrat writers and dutiful nieces, both of whom are responsible for this gem from the man who knew America’s heart like no other. Baldwin’s first biographer was a woman named Fern Marja Eckman, who wrote for the New York Post back in the day, and who died in 2019 at age 103. Her niece, Leslie J. Freeman, cleaned out her aunt’s apartment and sets the scene: “Hidden in a concealed drawer of an old mahogany desk, I found transcripts of interviews that she had conducted with Baldwin… [i]t is especially interesting to read the carefully typed transcripts of their conversations in light of our current moment.” While some of the material made its way into books, much did not. What follows will not disappoint. More to the point, it’s about a terrifying get-out-the-vote effort Baldwin covered in Selma, Ala., October 1963: “Here is a town that’s ruled by terror, that’s ruled by mob. The white population and the police are all the mob, and there’s no protection for any Negro in the town of any kind whatever,” he told Eckman. “You cannot call the police. You’d be out of your mind. And the Negroes are not armed. They cannot protect themselves. It’s not a rich town, so everyone there is, in one way or another, dependent for his livelihood on some white man. Now, to get, as Jim [James Forman] did, three hundred and seventy-five Negroes out to vote… Fantastic!”
New Yorker
Today's mood board
This colorful detail from a mural in Los Angeles’ Filipinotown shows Philip Vera Cruz and Larry Itliong. Underneath them, people hold signs at a strike. To their left are people working in the fields. To their right is the star from the flag of the Philippines.
—photo courtesy of the student-led Asian Americans and the Struggle for Social Justice blog at Brown University


fortune--2020-10-07--Outdoor industry leaders: Why we’re giving our employees the resources to vote

As some of America’s leading outdoor recreation brands, we value the power of a well-informed plan. Devising strategies to meet and exceed our customers’ needs means they can execute better outdoor experiences and adventures. When they go on a hike or a camping trip, each outing requires that they make a plan and chart a course before they start.
Nov. 3 is the truest example of democracy, and on election day Americans will make another series of choices to help shape the future of our communities, our economy, and our environment. Millions of these voters are our customers and our employees.
We believe it is our corporate responsibility to stress the importance of democratic elections and provide our employees with the resources to vote. We urge leaders in every industry and corner of America, from local small business owners to large national corporations, to join us.
Although many of us compete on the retail floor, we stand side by side in our commitment. Nearly half of expected voters will go in person to polling places this year despite the unique challenges presented by COVID-19. Accessing the polls requires time. No American should have to choose between earning a paycheck and voting.
Companies across the outdoor recreation industry are offering support and scheduling accommodations to vote in local, state, and federal elections, be it in person or by mail. For example, in addition to Keen’s “Vote Love” campaign, which asks fans to show care for others by turning out for the election, the footwear company encourages its own employees to exercise their right to vote, and provides two hours of paid leave for employees that need time to vote during work hours on election day.
L.L. Bean is delaying the opening of all retail stores on election day to ensure employees have ample time to vote, as well as donating face masks to the company’s home state of Maine to ensure all poll volunteers and those voting in person remain safe.
Orvis is supporting employee participation in the democratic process by opening all retail stores later in the day, at noon local time, to allow associates the opportunity to vote in person.
Helping employees get out to vote not only honors their constitutional rights, it strengthens our communities and even our industries. Each sector is united by a set of shared values. In the outdoor recreation industry, every election presents an opportunity to make a clear statement of our support for a thriving economy, thriving people, and a thriving planet.
Our companies already prioritize these values by fighting to protect public lands and waters, increase access to the outdoors, mitigate climate change, and restore our economy. We have seen how our collective efforts can change and improve the lives of everyday Americans. Imagine if industries applied this same united spirit to supporting the electoral process.
With some of the barriers to voting removed through employer initiatives, employees can more easily map out how and when they will vote. The first step anyone should take—as soon as possible—is to find out if they are registered to vote and make sure that their registration is up to date. Those who are not registered can do so online in most states.
If employees plan to vote early through a mail-in ballot, this is another process that needs to be initiated sooner rather than later. Next comes understanding the issues and candidates. Who is on the ballot at the federal, state, and local levels? Where do candidates stand on the issues?
How employees choose to vote is ultimately a personal decision. But choosing to vote in the first place is something we should all agree on and encourage. Only 56% of Americans who were registered to vote did so in the 2016 election, and 36% of eligible Americans are not registered, according to the Pew Research Center.
We must do better. Businesses have the responsibility to remove barriers that could get in the way of their employees participating in the democratic process. We look to leaders in other industries to join us.
Lise Aangeenbrug is executive director of the Outdoor Industry Association.
Tom Adams is chief operating officer of Petzl.
Arne Arens is global president of the North Face.
Erik Burbank is chief brand officer of Keen.
Jon Hoerauf is president of Arc’teryx.
Abel Navarrete is vice president of sustainability and community impact at Columbia.
Simon Perkins is president of Orvis.
Steve Rendle is chairman and CEO of VF Corporation.
Casey Sheahan is CEO of Simms Fishing Products.
Stephen M. Smith is president and CEO of L.L. Bean.


fortune--2020-10-06--Trump wants a COVID vaccine before Election Day, but fewer Americans are saying they’ll get one

President Donald Trump has made it clear that he wants COVID-19 vaccine authorized before the November 3 election. That will be an uphill climb, according to pharmaceutical industry executives. Safety and efficacy standards must be met via clinical trials for a coronavirus vaccine to receive emergency use authorization (EUA), as the Food and Drug Administration stated in newly issued and long-awaited guidelines on Tuesday.
And then there’s another challenge: convincing Americans to actually get a vaccine once one receives emergency authorization. According to a new CNN poll released Monday, only 51% of those surveyed said they would try to get vaccinated if a low-cost therapy is widely available while 45% said they wouldn’t.
That’s a drop from August, when 56% said they would try to get a vaccine, and a significant falloff from May, when 66% said the same.
It’s unclear what’s driving that trend, though racial, age-related, and political demographics all seem to play a part. A far higher number of older Americans would try to get vaccinated compared to younger respondents.
The trouble with just a 51% participation rate is that it’s not high enough of a number to achieve herd immunity, wherein vaccinated people offer protection to the more vulnerable.
One solution may be education and outreach programs touted by executives as Johnson & Johnson CEO Alex Gorsky and Pfizer’s biopharmaceuticals division president Angela Hwang (both companies are working on COVID vaccines) have told recent panels held by Fortune.
Previous polling has also found that 60% of American voters prefer a proven and safe coronavirus vaccine than one that’s been rushed to market.
To that end, Tuesday’s new FDA guidance seems to hit that standard in defiance of Trump’s insistence at a quickly made vaccine.
Could we see a vaccine prior to the election? My take: Very unlikely.
– Trials not done yet
– FDA wants 2 months of follow-up
– Company then needs to review data and submit EUA
– FDA will then need "weeks" to review (likely 2-3) — Alexander Gaffney (@AlecGaffney) October 6, 2020
One of the most significant elements of those guidelines—and one that would almost certainly delay a vaccine till past Election Day—is that follow-up period for trial participants before the FDA even considers an experimental treatment. But, as the previous polls show, that’s a measure most Americans find prudent.


fortune--2020-10-06--Facebook bans all Pages, Groups, and Instagram accounts with QAnon connections

Facebook Inc. is expanding its approach to the QAnon conspiracy movement, saying it will remove all Pages, Groups and Instagram accounts linked to QAnon’s followers in an effort to limit their reach and growth online.
Facebook had previously banned QAnon Pages, Groups and accounts if they called for or celebrated violence. But that meant Groups and Pages that peddle the QAnon conspiracies, but were not explicitly violent, remained on the service.
Now associating with QAnon is in many instances against the company’s rules, Facebook said Tuesday in a blog post. Individual accounts and posts related to QAnon are allowed on the social network, but the company imposed the ban on Groups and Pages in an effort to keep followers of the conspiracy movement from congregating. Instagram accounts linked to QAnon are also banned. The photo-sharing app doesn’t require people to use their real identities.
In the blog post, Facebook said its Dangerous Organizations Operations team will proactively seek out content tied to QAnon, instead of just relying on user reports. “This work will take time and will continue in the coming days and weeks,” the company said.
The QAnon conspiracy group has become more mainstream thanks in large part to Facebook’s products. The network’s Groups feature has allowed QAnon believers — who think that President Donald Trump is fighting a cabal of high-profile child molesters — to find one another and spread their beliefs. Facebook removed hundreds of Pages and Groups linked to the movement in August, but an internal report uncovered by NBC News found that QAnon Groups on Facebook had millions of followers.
Trump has also promoted the group through posts and retweets on his social media accounts. The Federal Bureau of Investigation labeled QAnon as a domestic terrorist threat as early as August 2019.
Facebook said it chose to update the policy after watching how QAnon Groups spread misinformation about other issues, including the recent wildfires in the western U.S.
“We’ve seen other QAnon content tied to different forms of real world harm,” the company wrote. “Additionally, QAnon messaging changes very quickly and we see networks of supporters build an audience with one message and then quickly pivot to another.”


fortune--2020-10-06--Why it feels like we’re in a recession—even though we aren’t

You’d never know it from the headlines, but we’re not in a recession.
In just the past week, Time proclaimed “The Recession Isn’t Over – and It’s About to Get Much Worse for Some.” USA Today said “Efforts to lift economy out of recession pose risk of financial crisis.” The San Jose Mercury News warned that “The coronavirus recession could do long-term damage to California’s economy.”
So it’s jarring to hear Fed Chairman Jerome Powell say, as he did today, that “the recovery has progressed more quickly than generally expected” and that projections at last month’s meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee “show the recovery continuing at a solid pace.”
Recovery? Solid pace? With the latest week’s initial unemployment claims still more than three times greater than just before the pandemic? What planet’s data is the Fed looking at?
In fact, Powell is right—and so are the rest of us. Understanding how economists talk helps explain why they say there’s no recession and why ordinary civilians feel as if we’re in a bad one.
To an economist, the term “recession” isn’t about the level of economic activity but only about the direction of change. Until March, the direction was up. The economy was growing at a moderate pace; that’s an expansion. Then the coronavirus arrived in a big way; large parts of the economy shut down, and GDP fell 31% annualized in the second quarter. That’s the start of a huge recession. If it lasted long enough, we’d call it a depression, a less formal term among economists.
But, uniquely in U.S. economic history, it didn’t last very long at all. As businesses reopened and Washington injected some $3 trillion into the economy, activity began to rebound. Consumption of goods has bounced back, and business investment is increasing. To an economist, that change in direction of economic activity, from plunging to rising, is the end of a recession and the start of a recovery.
To a non-economist, a recession isn’t about direction of change; it’s about how bad things are, and they’re still bad. The official unemployment rate, 7.9%, is down from its April spike but still higher than it has been in nearly eight years and nearly twice what it was pre-pandemic. The official rate understates the suffering because millions of people have dropped out of the labor force since COVID-19 arrived, and they aren’t counted as unemployed because they’ve given up looking for work. In addition, workers who’ve been furloughed and aren’t working or getting paid are also not counted as unemployed. Powell estimates that the true unemployment rate is around 11%, the highest since 1940.
Combine those facts with the end of additional federal unemployment benefits in early August, and it’s easy to see why most people think we’re still in a severe recession. The Congressional Budget Office forecasts that GDP won’t get back up to its pre-pandemic level until the third quarter of 2022.
Maybe the best way to say it is this: We’re slowly climbing out of a very deep hole, and we won’t be entirely out for quite a long time. For economists, the key words are “climbing out.” For everybody else, the key words are “very deep hole.”


fortune--2020-10-06--Guitar legend Eddie Van Halen dies of cancer at 65

Eddie Van Halen, the guitar virtuoso whose blinding speed, control and innovation propelled his band Van Halen into one of hard rock’s biggest groups, fueled the unmistakable fiery solo in Michael Jackson’s hit “Beat It” and became elevated to the status of rock god, has died. He was 65.
A person close to Van Halen’s family confirmed the rocker died Tuesday due to cancer. The person was not authorized to publicly release details in advance of an official announcement.
With his distinct solos, Eddie Van Halen fueled the ultimate California party band and helped knock disco off the charts starting in the late 1970s with his band’s self-titled debut album and then with the blockbuster record “1984,” which contains the classics “Jump,” “Panama” and “Hot for Teacher.”
Van Halen is among the top 20 best-selling artists of all time, and the band was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2007. Rolling Stone magazine put Eddie Van Halen at No. 8 in its list of the 100 greatest guitarists.
Eddie Van Halen was something of a musical contradiction. He was an autodidact who could play almost any instrument, but he couldn’t read music. He was a classically trained pianist who also created some of the most distinctive guitar riffs in rock history. He was a Dutch immigrant who was considered one of the greatest American guitarists of his generation.
The members of Van Halen — the two Van Halen brothers, Eddie and Alex; vocalist David Lee Roth; and bassist Michael Anthony — formed in 1974 in Pasadena, California. They were members of rival high school bands and then attended Pasadena City College together. They combined to form the band Mammoth, but then changed to Van Halen after discovering there was another band called Mammoth.
Their 1978 release “Van Halen” opened with a blistering “Runnin’ With the Devil” and then Eddie Van Halen showed off his astonishing skills in the next song, “Eruption,” a furious 1:42 minute guitar solo that swoops and soars like a deranged bird. The album also contained a cover of the Kinks’ “You Really Got Me” and “Ain’t Talkin’ ’Bout Love.”
Mike McCready of Pearl Jam told Rolling Stone magazine that listening to Van Halen’s “Eruption” was like hearing Mozart for the first time. “He gets sounds that aren’t necessarily guitar sounds — a lot of harmonics, textures that happen just because of how he picks.”
Van Halen released albums on a yearly timetable — “Van Halen II” (1979), “Women and Children First” (1980), “Fair Warning” (1981) and “Diver Down” (1982) — until the monumental “1984,” which hit No. 2 on the Billboard 200 album charts (only behind Michael Jackson’s “Thriller”). Rolling Stone ranked “1984” No. 81 on its list of the 100 Greatest Albums of the 1980s.
“Eddie put the smile back in rock guitar, at a time when it was all getting a bit brooding. He also scared the hell out of a million guitarists around the world, because he was so damn good. And original,” Joe Satriani, a fellow virtuoso, told Billboard in 2015.
Van Halen also played guitar on one of the biggest singles of the 1980s: Jackson’s “Beat It.” His solo lasted all of 20 seconds and took only a half an hour to record. He did it for free, as a favor to producer Quincy Jones, while the rest of his Van Halen bandmates were out of town.
Van Halen received no compensation or credit for the work, even though he rearranged the section he played on. “It was 20 minutes of my life. I didn’t want anything for doing that,” he told Billboard in 2015. “I literally thought to myself, ‘Who is possibly going to know if I play on this kid’s record?’” Rolling Stone ranked “Beat It” No. 344 on its list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. Jackson’s melding of hard rock and R&B preceded the meeting of Run-DMC and Aerosmith by four years.
But strains between Roth and the band erupted after their 1984 world tour and Roth left. The group then recruited Sammy Hagar as lead singer —some critics called the new formulation “Van Hagar” — and the band went on to score its first No. 1 album with “5150,” More studio albums followed, including “OU812,” “For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge” and “Balance.” Hit singles included “Why Can’t This Be Love” and “When It’s Love.”
Hagar was ousted in 1996 and former Extreme singer Gary Cherone stepped in for the album “Van Halen III,” a stumble that didn’t lead to another album and the quick departure of Cherone. Roth would eventually return in 2007 and team up with the Van Halen brothers and Wolfgang Van Halen, Eddie’s son, on bass for a tour, the album “A Different Kind of Truth” and the 2015 album “Tokyo Dome Live in Concert.”
Van Halen’s music has appeared in films as varied as “Superbad,” “Minions” and “Sing” as well as TV shows like “Glee” and “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.” Video games such as “Gran Turismo 4” and “Guitar Hero” have used his riffs. Their song “Jamie’s Cryin” was sampled by rapper Tone Loc in his hit “Wild Thing.”
For much of his career, Eddie Van Halen wrote and experimented with sounds while drunk or high or both. He revealed that he would stay in his hotel room drinking vodka and snorting cocaine while playing into a tape recorder. (Hagar’s 2011 autobiography “Red: My Uncensored Life in Rock” portrays Eddie as a violent, booze-addled vampire, living inside a garbage-strewn house.)
“I didn’t drink to party,” Van Halen told Billboard. “Alcohol and cocaine were private things to me. I would use them for work. The blow keeps you awake and the alcohol lowers your inhibitions. I’m sure there were musical things I would not have attempted were I not in that mental state.”
Eddie Van Halen was born in Amsterdam and his family immigrated to California in 1962 when he was 7. His father was a big band clarinetist who rarely found work after coming to the U.S., and their mother was a maid who had dreams of her sons being classical pianists. The Van Halens shared a house with three other families. Eddie and Alex had only each other, a tight relationship that flowed through their music.
“We showed up here with the equivalent of $50 and a piano,” Eddie Van Halen told The Associated Press in 2015. “We came halfway around the world without money, without a set job, no place to live and couldn’t even speak the language.”
He said his earliest memories of music were banging pots and pans together, marching to John Philip Sousa marches. At one point, Eddie got a drum set, which his older brother coveted.
“I never wanted to play guitar,” he confessed at a talk at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History in 2015. But his brother was good at the drums, so Eddie gave into his brother’s wishes: “I said, ‘Go ahead, take my drums. I’ll play your damn guitar.’”
He was a relentless experimenter who would solder different parts from different guitar-makers, including Gibson and Fender. He created his own graphic design for his guitars by adding tape to the instruments and then spray-painting them. He said his influences were Eric Clapton, and Jimi Hendrix.
Van Halen, sober since 2008, lost one-third of his tongue to a cancer that eventually drifted into his esophagus. In 1999, he had a hip replacement. He was married twice, to actress Valerie Bertinelli from 1981 to 2007 and then stuntwoman-turned-publicist Janie Liszewski, whom he wed in 2009.


fortune--2020-10-06--Ripple threatens to leave U.S. over crypto regulation

A senior executive from Ripple, one of the country’s most prominent cryptocurrency firms, warned on Tuesday the company is close to moving its headquarters overseas in response to excessive regulation.
Executive chairman Chris Larsen said San Fransisco-based Ripple has grown increasingly frustrated over what it perceives as a hostile attitude to the cryptocurrency industry by the federal government, and in particular the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Ripple has been locked in a long-running battle with the SEC and investors over whether the digital currency XRP is a security. While Ripple owns a large hoard of XRP, the company maintains that the network that oversees XRP transaction is decentralized like Bitcoin or Ethereum—two rival cryptocurrencies that the SEC has concluded are not centrally controlled, and therefore exempt from securities laws.
Larsen made the comment about Ripple relocating during a virtual interview with Fortune at the LA Blockchain Summit. He added that nearly every other country offers a more favorable regulatory climate for crypto than the U.S., but named the U.K. and Singapore as the most likely destinations if Ripple leaves the U.S.
Larsen also acknowledged that moving Ripple’s headquarters wouldn’t end U.S. jurisdiction over many of its operations, but said it be a relief to have another country as Ripple’s chief regulator.
The tussle between Ripple and U.S. regulators echo a similar one taking place over Libra, the digital currency proposed by Facebook, which has been repeatedly delayed as a result of political and regulatory skepticism.
The disputes come amid a broader debate over the role of central banks and digital currencies. Some critics, including Larsen, warn that the U.S. risks ceding financial innovation to China, which is on the cusp of launching a digital version of the yuan. They fear that the U.S. could not only fall behind on blockchain technology (the digital ledger that underlies currencies like Bitcoin), but see the U.S. dollar lose its status as the world’s reserve currency.
The debate also comes as companies like MasterCard are rolling out software that allows central banks to test digital currencies in controlled payment environments.
In his comments on the U.S. government’s attitude to digital currency, Larsen noted that its alleged hostility given the Trump Administration’s tough stance on China—a stance that Larsen claims is correct. As for the increasingly likely possibility of a Democratic administration led by Joe Biden, Larsen expressed cautious optimism it could bring a more favorable regulatory climate.
Larsen predicted that a Biden White House would change the cryptocurrency industry by placing carbon taxes on its energy-intensive mining operations—possibly helping to repatriate some mining activity from overseas. He noted that Chinese miners currently control 65% of cryptocurrency output, and that the miners are subject to the dictatorial control of the Chinese Communist Party.
More must-read finance coverage from Fortune: