fortune--2020-08-18--These are the states that accepted Trump’s offer for $300 enhanced unemployment benefits

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President Donald Trump signed a memorandum earlier this month that grants $300 enhanced weekly unemployment benefits to people out of work if their state opts into the program.
As of Monday, 46 states have been approved to send out $300 per week in federal funds on top of regular unemployment benefits, according to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).
States that have been approved
Alabama
Alaska
Arizona
Arkansas
California
Colorado
Connecticut
Delaware
Florida
Georgia
Hawaii
Idaho
Illinois
Indiana
Iowa
Kansas
Kentucky
Louisiana
Maine
Maryland
Massachusetts
Michigan
Minnesota
Mississippi
Missouri
Montana
New Hampshire
New Mexico
New York
North Carolina
North Dakota
Ohio
Oklahoma
Oregon
Pennsylvania
Rhode Island
South Carolina
Tennessee
Texas
Utah
Vermont
Virginia
Washington
West Virginia
Wisconsin
Wyoming
Meanwhile, South Dakota became the first state to turn down the offer, citing a strong economic rebound and no need for the additional aid. The June unemployment rate in South Dakota was 7.2%, compared a 11.1% national jobless rate. FEMA has yet to announce the status of the remaining 42 states.
The $300 weekly enhanced unemployment benefit replaces the $600 enhanced benefit that expired the week ending July 25. The White House opted to replace the $600 enhanced benefits through a memorandum after negotiations for a broad stimulus bill between Democratic and Republican leaders broke down earlier this month.
The $44 billion allocated by Trump for the enhanced unemployment benefit is estimated to last five weeks, through the week ending Aug. 29, according to a report by the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. And there still remains the possibility the memorandum will face a legal challenge.
The White House has already made it clear the benefit will be paid retroactive to the week ending Aug. 1. And these $300 enhanced benefits will go only to jobless Americans who are already receiving at least $100 in state benefits. That is a smaller pool of recipients than the first round of enhanced checks, which weren’t limited in this manner.
Initially, Trump said he’d grant $400 enhanced weekly unemployment benefits to out-of-work Americans if their state picked up $100 of the tab. But after that announcement, states made it clear they couldn’t afford to throw in more money. As a result, the White House allowed states to count $100 of existing benefits as their match to get the $300 weekly federal benefit. Thus the enhanced benefit is now $300 per week, not $400.


fortune--2020-08-18--U.S. Postal Service carriers reveal how you can make their day better

When does the extra $ 400 unemployment benefit start ?
Everything to know about Trump ’ s executive order

As the U.S. Postal Service reels from a budget crisis and attacks from President Trump, a growing number of people are rushing to defend the agency. These include politicians from both parties but also many ordinary Americans, who are sticking up for the USPS and for their neighborhood mail carriers as well.
In a popular thread on the social media site Reddit, a reader posed the questions to postal workers: “What do you need right now? How can we brighten your day when we see you on our routes?”
The queries produced a flood of responses. Postal workers, who make a median hourly wage of $17.57 according to job site Indeed, have shared some of the toughest parts of their jobs—and offered ideas about how customers can make them better.
One big challenge of delivering the mail—especially this time of year—is the heat. A number of Reddit contributors pointed out that many USPS vehicles don’t have air conditioning, and that customers who leave ice water or cold drinks for carriers can brighten their day.
One carrier, though, said that while water and treats and cold beverages are appreciated, that the best thing a customer can do is provide a bigger mailbox—one that can be reached from the truck and accommodate all mail and parcels. A second carrier shared this sentiment.
“I got ice cold water homies. GIMME THAT BIG OLE BOX!!!!,” wrote one Reddit responder, who described themselves as a rural carrier.
Other carriers likewise pleaded to customers to make their job easier by ensuring that their address is clearly visible from the street, and to turn on porch lights for evening deliveries.
Some carriers on the Reddit thread reported anxiety over the pandemic, including one who asked customers to stay inside their houses until their packages have been delivered.
The most common sentiment, though, came in the form of postal carriers thanking customers who showed kindness and patience in the form of greetings or notes.
“When the quarantine was just getting started, a few of my customers left me a note in their mailbox,” wrote one. “I’d say this small kindness would be much appreciated again with all of this political nonsense interfering with my career.”


fortune--2020-08-18--NBCUniversal vice chairman Ron Meyer steps down after revealing affair and secret settlement

NBCUniversal Vice Chairman Ron Meyer stepped down from the entertainment company after revealing that he made a secret settlement with a woman with whom he had an affair and received extortion threats.
In a statement, Meyer said he told his family and the company that he “made a settlement, under threat, with a woman outside the company who had made false accusations against me.”
“Admittedly, this is a woman I had a very brief and consensual affair with many years ago,” said Meyer, 75.
Meyer said “other parties” learned of the settlement and tried to extort him into paying them money “or else they intended to falsely implicate NBCUniversal, which had nothing to do with this matter, and to publish false allegations about me.”
In a statement, NBCUniversal CEO Jeff Shell said that Meyer had “acted in a manner which we believe is not consistent with our company policies or values.”
Based on those actions, “we have mutually concluded that Ron should leave the company, effective immediately.”
Meyer, once called “Hollywood’s Mr. Nice Guy,” had worked for 25 years at the entertainment company, which is now a division of Comcast Corp. He was president of Universal Studios from 1995 until he was promoted in 2013 to be NBCUniversal’s vice chairman, providing strategic guidance across the media giant. In 1975, he co-founded Creative Artists Agency with fellow agents from the William Morris Agency.


fortune--2020-08-18--Elon Musk adds another $8 billion to become world’s fourth-richest person

Elon Musk’s financial upswing shows no signs of slowing.
The outspoken entrepreneur is now the world’s fourth-richest person after Tesla shares surged 11% on Monday, closing at a record high and boosting Musk’s net worth by $7.8 billion.
The rise vaulted the Tesla co-founder past French luxury tycoon Bernard Arnault, the wealthiest non-American on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Musk’s $84.8 billion fortune puts him within $15 billion of Mark Zuckerberg, No. 3 on the ranking of the world’s 500 richest people.
Monday’s Tesla rally is just the latest triumph for the billionaire who only two years ago was sued by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and had to resign as chairman of the electric-car maker over rogue tweets. Tesla shares, which rose 3% at 12:10 p.m. in New York, are up more than 353% this year, fueled by growing anticipation that the company will be included in the S&P 500 Index.
Musk’s Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX, is poised to pad his fortune by another $3 billion. The company announced it raised $1.9 billion in new funding in an SEC filing Tuesday. The funding round increases its equity valuation to $46 billion, Bloomberg reported last week.
Musk’s fortune has grown by more than $57 billion this year, the second-biggest increase on the index after Amazon.com Inc. founder Jeff Bezos’s. The world’s richest man has accumulated $73 billion in 2020 and is now worth $188 billion.
Tech shares have been on a tear this year as the Covid-19 pandemic drove more people online, lifting the fortunes of the companies’ founders and putting the industry under increased scrutiny. Facebook Inc.’s Mark Zuckerberg became a centibillionaire this month, joining Bezos and Bill Gates, the second-wealthiest person on Earth.


fortune--2020-08-18--Home Depot sales jump 25% as homebound shoppers spruce up their houses

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Home Depot reported a blockbuster second quarter on Tuesday, leaving no doubt that despite stratospheric unemployment and uncertainty about when the COVID-19 pandemic will loosen its grip, there is at least one area where American shoppers are splurging: where they live.
The home-improvement chain said that domestic same-store sales rose 25% in the quarter that ended in early August, roughly twice as much as Wall Street expected. The company’s total revenue was $38.1 billion in the quarter.
“Home is definitely the one place people are spending money on,” Edward Jones analyst Brian Yarbrough tells Fortune. “People aren’t going on vacation, so instead of spending that $5,000 or $10,000 on vacation, people are putting it into their homes.”
Home Depot also benefited from a resurgence in business from contractors once limitations stemming from COVID-19 lockdowns were lifted in May. It saw customers spend more per visit and visit more often. And encouragingly for Home Depot, business this month has been similar to recent months, according to executives on a conference call, despite the end of stimulus checks for consumers.
CEO Craig Menear said several factors explain why home spending is proving to be so resilient.
“The home has never been more important to the customer,” Menear said on an earnings call. “We’re all spending lots of time there; we’re seeing things that need to be done or things that you want to be done. There is additional wear and tear.”
What’s more, Home Depot got a lift from record low mortgage rates that is spurring the housing market, and by extension the need for renovations. Rival chain Lowe’s will report its quarterly results on Wednesday.
Despite spending $480 million in the quarter on incentives and efforts to clean stores more frequently, Home Depot’s bottom line also soared: Net income rose 24.5% to $4.33 billion, also ahead of Wall Street forecasts.


fortune--2020-08-18--The year’s hottest e-commerce stock is up more than 1,500%. Its founder cashed out before the rally

Quiz time: Which Nasdaq-listed e-commerce stock has become the clear favorite among tech bulls this year? Amazon? Shopify? Alibaba?
Nope, nope, nope.
The answer is Utah-based Overstock.com, up more than 1,500% year to date. More impressively, the stock has soared roughly 2,000% since the market’s mid-March lows. It’s part of the mighty Russell Microcap Index, which is outperforming the best of the best in Big Tech—the Nasdaq 100—in recent weeks. Overstock’s rocket rise has been generating windfall returns for plenty of investors, with one noteworthy exception: the man who founded the company more than 20 years ago.
On Tuesday, Overstock was down 1.7% in early trading, a day after Piper Sandler equities analyst Peter Keith initiated coverage of Overstock (ticker symbol: OSTK) with an “overweight” rating, saying the new management team and the company’s focus on home furnishings should help propel sales to $2.9 billion this year, more than doubling its year-earlier top line.
Unprofitable a year ago, Overstock is now expected to pull in a decent profit this year, with Keith estimating full-year earnings per share at $0.47.
“There are seismic forces at work that have dramatically improved the sales and profitability outlook for Overstock (OSTK) well into the future,” Keith wrote in a research note to investors.
And as with other e-commerce companies, COVID-19 is the big catalyst.
Stay-at-home stocks continue to dominate the wider markets rally as investors bet the digital economy will power the broader economy out of recession. It’s the proverbial clicks vs. bricks trade. But even among that group of high-flying tech stocks, there are clear standouts, as the below chart shows.
Overstock’s share price has grown six times more than Wayfair, which is having a heck of a run itself. Further down the list is Amazon, up a mere 72%, a performance making Amazon bulls very happy. But even they must be getting Overstock envy.
That an online retailer is rallying to record heights should be of little surprise at this stage in the tech-driven equities rally. But veteran Nasdaq watchers may recall how improbable a run this is for Overstock.com, which has had its run-ins with investors over the years.
It was almost exactly one year ago when Patrick Byrne, founder and CEO of Overstock, resigned abruptly. Days earlier, he had admitted to being questioned in a federal investigation related to the 2016 presidential election, blaming the whole affair on “the deep state.” That revelation spooked investors, who sent the shares crashing down by more than one-third over a two-day stretch.
Within weeks, Byrne had dumped all his shares in Overstock.com, public filings showed. That resulted in him missing out on the rally of a lifetime this spring and summer.
According to regulatory filings, he sold 4,790,459 shares in September, a stake that would have been worth roughly $566 million by this morning’s share price.
It’s possible Byrne has since bought back into the stock, though regulatory filings show no such purchases. Overstock itself is unaware of any such buys by its estranged founder. “Overstock doesn’t have information on every individual external investor that holds our shares, but we have no reason to believe Dr. Byrne has bought shares as he has had no involvement with the company since his resignation,” a company spokesperson told Fortune.
But don’t feel too bad for Byrne. Byrne realized about $90 million from the share sale. He penned an open letter last autumn to employees, explaining he was putting the $90 million into gold and silver (the appeal of the two precious metals: Both are stored outside the United States, and therefore “even more out of the reach of the Deep State,” he wrote) as well as in cryptocurrencies.
Gold-and-silver bugs are having an excellent pandemic, as are crypto bulls.
Alas, few assets have had the kind of six-month run that Overstock shares are enjoying.


fortune--2020-08-18--Why Kohl’s CEO thinks the retailer can win market share amid the COVID carnage

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Kohl’s sales fell 23% in its recently finished second quarter, but the retailer’s chief executive sees a lot of opportunity in the even bigger troubles many of its rivals are facing.
The low-price department store chain on Tuesday reported better than expected results for the quarter, when total store hours were down 25% because of the COVID-19-related lockdowns in May. But Kohl’s has benefited from its historically strong balance sheet—its debt is still investment grade—that is allowing it to ride out the intense storm that has felled or diminished rivals.
An S&P Global Intelligence reported on Monday, there have been 44 retailer bankruptcies so far in 2020, already matching last year’s tally. Those include J.C. Penney and apparel chains like Ann Taylor, which compete with Kohl’s. Another Kohl’s rival, Macy’s, is reeling and closing dozens of stores.
And all this wreckage provides Kohl’s with an opportunity to rebuild its business as it outlasts rivals, its CEO believes.
“COVID has created a lot of devastation,” Kohl CEO Michelle Gass tells Fortune on a media conference call. “There is going to be market share opportunity that cuts across a lot of different types of retailers.”
Only a small percentage of Kohl’s stores are in malls, with the majority in strip centers where the likes of Ulta Beauty, T.J. Maxx, and Target operate. So Macy’s and J.C. Penney are only indirect competitors, in the physical realm at least. But Gass says Kohl’s has the tech and experience to market to potential customers in areas that have lost such a store.
“When there is a local store closure, whether that’s a chain that’s gone out of business or a single store, we have an opportunity to target customers in that local area,” says Gass, noting that Kohl’s had a record number of shoppers, 65 million, last year. A key component of getting new customers into Kohl’s stores has been its two-year-old partnership with Amazon, for which it handles returns at Kohl’s stores.
Kohl’s strip mall neighbors, notably Ulta and Target, are formidable rivals with popular offerings. But Gass is betting that Kohl’s will be a draw for shoppers with tweaks to its own assortments.
While Target is renowned for its store brands, particularly in apparel, Kohl’s has banked on partnerships with national brands like Under Armour and Nike, which are not at Target, and new exclusive tie-ups with the likes of Toms Shoes and Lands’ End, all while cutting some of its own store brands.
And she’s also hoping that Kohl’s neat, uncluttered stores, long an advantage over Penney and Macy’s, will attract those chains’ customers away. Kohl’s has reduced the amount of inventory it carries in stores and simplified displays to enhance shoppers’ sense of security in its stores.
“We all believe there is going to be a long tail to people being concerned about their health and safety long past the acute part of COVID,” says Gass. “We have spacious stores, and we are making them even more spacious.”
At the same time, the quarterly results of other retailers showed Kohl’s vulnerability as an apparel-heavy chain during the COVID crisis. Kohl’s posted a second-quarter loss of 25 cents a share when excluding some items, albeit better than the estimated 70-cent loss, and sales fell to $3.2 billion.
In contrast, Walmart and Home Depot reported blockbuster quarter results on Tuesday, while Target is expected to do the same on Wednesday. Gass herself acknowledged the difficulties that are likely to be long lasting.
“The environment is expected to remain challenging,” she said.


fortune--2020-08-18--Downtrodden GM stock gets a boost from electric-vehicle spinoff speculation

General Motors’ beaten-down stock price could triple if the carmaker spins off its burgeoning electric-vehicle business, according to a Wall Street analyst.
Deutsche Bank analyst Emmanuel Rosner notes that with the stock market’s euphoria over other EV makers like Tesla, GM’s shares could hit $93 if the company spins off a stake in its EV business on the stock market. The carmaker is likely “actively evaluating the option,” Rosner wrote in a report on Monday. Such a move “would force the market to recognize (GM’s) robust EV technology and upcoming vehicle lineup and unlock considerable shareholder value.”
Other analysts have been similarly excited by the prospect. Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas notes that GM’s EV business plus the stake in its battery joint venture with LG, called Ultium Cells LLC, could propel the stock higher. “It’s about time Tesla had more competition, right?” Jonas wrote in a report on Tuesday. He raised his price target for GM stock to $46.
GM shares have gained as much as 21% in August so far on speculation about the possible EV spinoff. Trading was at $30.10 midday on Tuesday; however, the stock has still lost 18% this year and gained a total of less than 5% over the past five years.
“We haven’t announced anything and we don’t comment on speculation,” the company told Fortune Tuesday.
CEO Mary Barra was previously asked about the possibility of spinning off the business on GM’s quarterly earnings call with analysts in July, but didn’t give a detailed answer.
“We are evaluating and always evaluate many different scenarios,” she replied. “We are open to looking at and evaluate anything that we think is going to drive long-term shareholder value. So I would say nothing is off the table.”
GM unveiled its first all-electric Cadillac on Aug. 6. The LYRIQ SUV will have a range of over 300 miles and start at $60,000 when it hits the market in 2022. The company already sells the Chevrolet Bolt EV and has announced a revival of its Hummer SUV brand returning as an EV next year.
A potential spinoff would come as investors are growing excited about the possibilities of electric-car sales exploding over the next decade. Shares of Tesla, the market leader, have nearly quadrupled this year, giving Elon Musk’s company a stock market value of $355 billion. Smaller electric-vehicle makers like Workhouse Group and Arcimoto have done even better, seeing their stock prices rise fivefold.
That’s prompting more companies in the sector to go public, including Fisker, which announced its plan last month. On Tuesday, Canoo said it planned to raise $600 million and list on the stock market by merging with a special-purpose acquisition company.


fortune--2020-08-18--Electric-vehicle startup Canoo to go public, joining the wave of companies chasing Tesla’s success

Electric-vehicle startup Canoo announced Tuesday morning that it will go public at a $2.4 billion valuation later this year. It joins a raft of EV makers making the jump to public markets. Like some other new entrants, Canoo will use an unusual listing method that avoids a traditional IPO.
Canoo’s unique strategy revolves in part around what it calls its “skateboard architecture,” essentially a flat chassis that contains all the functional elements of a vehicle. That allows bodies tailored to a variety of applications—which Canoo refers to as “top hats”—to be built on top of a single type of frame. Canoo says this modular approach will allow the company to serve a variety of market segments at reduced cost.
Canoo is also notable for its planned subscription model, which it describes as month-to-month and “commitment-free,” while including maintenance, warranty, and charging. A similar subscription model is planned by Nikola, but Nikola is focused largely on commercial electric freight trucks and is expected to require more commitment from customers.
Canoo’s first vehicle, by contrast, will be a consumer-focused “lifestyle vehicle” called the Canoo, expected for release in 2022. The vehicle is very unusual, essentially a smoothed box that takes up the entire length of the chassis. Canoo has said this is intended to leverage the future potential of autonomous driving, and some of Canoo’s concept art shows the vehicle converted into something akin to a rolling lounge—with no driver.
The option of renting a consumer vehicle on a monthly basis would be fairly novel for consumers, while leaning into a broader trend toward recurring subscription revenue that has been embraced by entrepreneurs and investors. However, the no-commitment model would also seem to represent special risks if Canoo’s products disappoint or consumers prove flighty.
Canoo says its second vehicle will be an urban commercial delivery vehicle, coming in 2023.
Canoo will go public using an unusual but increasingly popular method. Instead of an initial public offering of new Canoo shares, the car company will be acquired by a so-called Special Purpose Acquisition Company (SPAC), Hennessy Capital Acquisition Corp IV, which has raised funds for the purpose. The merged company will be known as Canoo Inc. and trade on the Nasdaq stock market.
The SPAC public listing method has already been used this year by electric-vehicle startups Nikola and Fisker. Broadly, an SPAC listing is faster than a traditional IPO, and the electric-vehicle market in particular has entered a phase where speed to market appears to be of the essence. Tesla, the pioneer of the category, has experienced wild stock growth over the past 12 months, culminating in the expectation that it will join the S&P 500. Other EV makers appear eager to draft on that success.
Canoo was founded just two years ago, but it’s hardly a team of novices. The company was founded after executives fled the chaos at Chinese-owned EV startup Faraday Future. Its executive team includes veterans from BMW, and Canoo announced earlier this year that it would partner with Hyundai to produce its vehicles.


fortune--2020-08-18--Despite Warren Buffett’s selloff, bank stocks look like great buys in this market

To grasp why beaten-down value stocks look like the place to be in this super-pricey market, just compare the bargain bank stocks to the high-flying S&P 500.
Given today’s valuations, the overall big-cap market can’t hand you a strong future return without working wonders. Banks, by contrast, just need to go from garnering the lowest of low expectations, to posting profits that are mediocre by past standards. Looking at banks and the glamour-tech- dominated S&P side by side provides a case study in how what’s cheap is most likely to win the recovery. (For more, see “The champ’s big comeback: Why beaten-down value stocks are poised to thrive.”)
It’s somewhat surprising, then, that Warren Buffett, the greatest “value” investor of all time, just dumped a huge chunk of his holdings in what looks like one of the market’s cheapest pockets, commercial banks. It’s possible that the Berkshire Hathaway chairman turned negative on this longtime favorite because he foresees a long, rocky recession caused by COVID-19. Such a recession would swamp the stalwarts with wave after wave of defaults on credit card, small business, and commercial real estate loans, not to mention the threat of more credit losses from such ravaged big corporate sectors as airlines, hotels, and commercial real estate.
In its 13F filing for the second quarter, posted on Aug. 8, Berkshire disclosed that it had sold large portions of its holdings in five commercial banks during the quarter. Buffett shed 26% of his shares in Wells Fargo and a stunning 62% in JPMorgan Chase, as well as stakes in U.S. Bancorp, M&T, and PNC, for a total of $6.7 billion.
Keep in mind that Buffett remains a big owner of bank stocks. He kept all of his 925 million shares in Bank of America, a $22 billion investment that’s Berkshire’s largest after Apple. Still, given his big sale, it’s natural to question whether the Great Lockdown is posing such a dire threat to the lenders’ futures that you risk poor returns even at what looks like steep discounts. The best view: Prices are so low that the banks are providing one of the best “margins for safety,” ironically one of Buffett’s favorite metrics, of any group of stocks. Even if a lot of things go wrong, the banks can still deliver for investors. By comparison, the S&P 500 is teetering at such rarefied heights that a sudden blast of bad news could send it toppling.
How banks became a bargain
The beauty of banks is that they were cheap at the peak of the market, and the pounding from COVID-19 has made them a whole lot cheaper. By comparison, the S&P 500 was richly priced before the outbreak, and it’s just as expensive now—more so if you assume the recession will depress profits for a couple of years. On Aug. 17, the index closed at 3382, within a whisper of the all-time high of 3386 set on February 19.
By comparison, the big banks haven’t come close to regaining their February levels––and if you’re hunting for deals, that’s a good thing. Around Valentine’s Day, the combined market capitalization of the five commercial banks with the highest valuations—J.P. Morgan, Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, and U.S. Bancorp—was $1.177 trillion. To be conservative, I compared that value not to their 2019 earnings––which were higher––but their average profits from 2017 through last year. By that metric, their “normalized” annual GAAP net earnings, after preferred dividends, over three years were $94.6 billion. Hence, the five had an overall price/earnings ratio of 12.44.
Since then, the group has lost one-third of its value as its total market cap shrank to $792 billion. As a result, its P/E based on those “normalized” profits dropped from 12.4 to 8.4.
Let’s compare that dive to the course of the overall S&P 500. For normalized profits, we’ll use the $139.40 in earnings per share that the 500 posted for 2019, an all-time record. At the market peak in February, the S&P’s P/E was a lofty 24.3, or almost exactly twice the multiple for the banks.
Today, the S&P’s 35% resurgence from the March lows has planted the flag at the previous summit, and restored the 24-plus P/E. So now, the market multiple is almost three times the combined P/E for our five banks.
Of course, the banks’s earnings have suffered a big hit, dropping to a combined $6.7 billion for the first half of 2020 or $13.4 billion on an annual basis, a fall of 85% from the three-year norm. That’s a lot more than the substantial 37% hit the analysts polled by S&P are expecting by Q3 for the overall S&P.
The beauty of low (earnings) expectations
What matters is what the banks need to do from here to provide gains that, in all probability, will beat the overall market. Let’s forecast only a partial comeback for the banks, combined with continuing skepticism about their future. We’ll also assume that the economy returns to 2019 levels of GDP by the end of 2021— in other words, back to even.
But we’ll posit that the banks don’t rebound nearly as fast. Let’s assume that in 18 months or so, their profits return to just 75% of the 2017–2019 average of $94.6 billion—or to $71 billion. We’ll also assume that their P/E is only 13, which is around half the current market multiple. In that case, their combined market cap would rise from today’s $792 billion to $923 billion. That’s a gain of 16.5% over less than a year and a half, or 11% annualized.
How is the S&P likely to fare? We’ll make our projections for the overall large-cap market a lot more optimistic. We’ll assume that profits regain their 2019 level along with national income. That’s a stretch, because to get there, companies would need to roar back from COVID-19 and return to their highest earnings-per-share ever, on margins on sales that are at least 20% above the averages of the pre-pandemic decade.
Even if that happens and the S&P’s multiple stays steady at 24.3, the S&P would deliver no gain from where it is today. You’d just get a puny dividend yield in the 1.5%-a-year range.
A P/E of over 24 will be hard to sustain, since it’s well above the long-term average and means that even at high levels of EPS, investors would expect more big jumps in profits. To get a more reasonable, measured forecast, I like to use my what I call the “Tully-20” rule. It assumes that the P/E will revert to 20 when GDP goes back to 2019 levels, which is still a formidable number.
If the P/E does return to 20, then the S&P would need to earn $170 a share just to maintain its current level of 3385 (3385 divided by 20). That’s over one-fifth above its record EPS in the flush times of 2019. On the other hand, if Tully-20 reigns and earnings go back to $140, a much more probable picture, then the S&P would retreat to 2800 (20 times $140). That would mean the S&P would fall 17% in the next 18 months or so.
The S&P would need a great performance to earn $140 again by the end of 2021, and still flatline at a 23-plus P/E. Or it could perform a near miracle at a more reasonable multiple of 20 and still deliver a zero capital gain. And the chance of a big drop is high.
Just compare those hurdles with what the banks must accomplish to beat the odds. A lousy P/E of 13 combined with profits 25% below the three-year average gets you a 17% gain by the end of 2021 (and over 10% on an annual basis).
Big banks are a proxy for the economy, more so now because they’re far better capitalized than in the Great Recession. It’s hard to imagine a recovery where the banks don’t rebound in lockstep with the rest of American business. If that script plays out, they’ll do much better than our 17% over the next year and a half. Investors think that banks are dogs that can barely waddle. If they just manage to stroll, they’ll rank among the market’s big winners.


fortune--2020-08-18--Does ‘the customer is always right’ mean ignoring racism?

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You’ve most certainly heard this motto: “The customer is always right.” Heck, startups have taken the practice to even greater heights.
But what’s a company to do when a customer behaves in a way that is racist—for example, applying blackface with makeup while in store?
In the case of Glossier, the $1.2 billion makeup startup, former employees are now speaking out and accusing the company of not doing enough to address such racial microaggressions from customers. They told my colleague Emma Hinchliffe that the business created “a culture of deference to the customer at the cost of all else.”
In the blackface incident, managers did not confront the customers directly, but later told Black associates to “take a break,” according to employees interviewed by Emma. That incident is among multiple examples of racial microaggression that a number of ex-employees say they experienced at the hands of customers, but allege management never addressed directly with them.
Racial inequality has been front and center in recent months, with many companies acknowledging that current standards are inadequate. Glossier too joined in on the chorus, committing $1 million to support causes related to racial justice. But the former employees say they hope to see changes in-house first before the startup looks outside. “We’re not trying to cancel Glossier,” they said.
Glossier, for its part, apologized on Instagram yesterday, and released new policies it plans to enact following an open letter from over 50 ex-employees who were laid off after Glossier closed its physical stores. Read more.
BIG BIG TECH NEWS: Amazon.com is in “preliminary talks” to invest in Rackspace Technology, a cloud services provider, per sources cited by Reuters. Rackspace, which trades on the Nasdaq and is backed by Apollo Global Management, is currently valued at about $3.8 billion. Read more.
The news comes after Google invested in another Apollo-backed company, home security firm ADT, earlier this month.
Meanwhile, although Microsoft is the frontrunner to acquire the U.S. operations of social media company TikTok, Oracle has reportedly also thrown its name into the ring.
Lucinda Shen
Twitter: @shenlucinda
Email: lucinda.shen@fortune.com
VENTURE DEALS
- Robinhood, the popular stock trading app, raised $200 million in Series G funding from D1 Capital Partners. The startup is now valued at $11.2 billion. Read more.
- Keeper Security, a Chicago-based cybersecurity platform, raised $60 million in funding.first funding from Insight Partners.
- Attabotics, a Canadian 3D robotics supply chain company, raised $50 million in Series C funding. Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan Board led the round and was joined by investors including Honeywell.
- Tango Therapeutics, a Cambridge, Mass.-based biotechnology company focused on targeted cancer therapies, raised $50 million in funding. Casdin Capital led the round and was joined by investors including Boxer Capital, Cormorant Asset Management, and Gilead Sciences.
- Aerin Medical, an Austin-based maker of non-invasive medical procedures for nasal conditions, raised $48 million in funding. Questa Capital led the round and was joined by investors including OrbiMed and CK Group. Read more.
- Weee!, a Fremont, Calif.-based Asian groceries delivery startup, raised $35 million in Series D funding led by DST Global. Read more.
- Dutchie, a Bend, Ore.-based ecommerce solution for cannabis dispensaries, raised $35 million in Series B funding. Investors include Casa Verde Capital, Thirty Five Ventures, Thrive Capital, Gron Ventures, and Former Starbucks Chairman and CEO, Howard Schultz.
- Seated, a New York-based restaurant rewards platform raised $30 million in funding and acquired digital event booking platform VenueBook. Insight Partners led the round and was joined by investors including Craft Ventures, Greycroft, and Rho Capital Partners,
- SpyCloud, an Austin-based anti-fraud platform, raised $30 million in Series C funding. Centana Growth Partners led the round and was joined by investors including M12, Altos Ventures, Silverton Partners, and March Capital Partners.
- Movable Ink, a New York-based brand personalization company, raised $30 million in Series C funding from Contour Venture Partners, Intel Capital and Silver Lake.
- Bridge Connector, a Nashville-based interoperability company for health care, raised $25.5 million in Series B funding. Axioma Ventures led the round and was joined by investors including Jeff Vinick.
- PowerPollen, a Ankeny, Iowa-based agricultural pollination startup, raised $13 million in Series B funding. Ag Ventures Alliance led the round and was joined by investors including Iowa Corn Growers Association. Read more.
- Hiretual, a Mountain View, Calif.-based AI recruitment software maker, raised $13 million in Series B funding. Oceanpine Capital led the round.
- Lana, a Madrid-based fintech for underbanked population in Latin America, raised $12 million in Series A funding. Base10 Partners led the round and was joined by investors including Cabify and VC Cathay Innovation.
- Cyware, a New York-based cybersecurity startup, raised $10 million in Series A funding. Prelude Fund and Tanium led the round and was joined by investors including Emerald Development Managers and Great Road Holdings.
- Claimsforce, a Hamburg-based insurtech company, raised €7 million ($8.3 million) in Series A funding. Notion Capital led the round and was joined by investors including Fly Ventures, Point Nine, and La Famiglia.
- Lemon Perfect, a Lemon Grove, Calif.-based cold-pressed lemon water brand, raised $6.6 million in funding. Investors included Beechwood Capital, The Big Squeeze, Goat Rodeo Capital, LivWell Ventures, Melitas Ventures, R3 Venture Partners, the RCV Frontline Fund, the Stage 1 Fund, and Skyview Capital.
- HelloTeam, a Boston-based performance management and employee engagement platform, raised $3.5 million in seed funding. Underscore VC led the round and was joined by investors including Osage Venture Partners and Ventureforgood.
- Warmly, a San Francisco-based CRM system startup, raised $2.1 million in seed funding. NFX led the round and was joined by investors including Y Combinator, Matchstick Ventures, Scribble Ventures, Sequoia Capital, and 20VC. Read more.
- Spenmo, a Singapore-based fintech founded by former Grab executive Mohandass Kalaichelvan, raised $2 million in seed funding. Investors include Y Combinator, Rocket Internet, Iterative Capital and angel investors from XA Network. Read more.
- The Nudge, a San Francisco-based SMS-based planner, raised $2 million from Lightspeed Venture Partners and NextView Ventures.
- Birdie, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based technology company for CPG market research, raised $1.6 million in seed funding. ASTELLA led the round.
PRIVATE EQUITY
- Rusmar, a subsidiary of a Palo Duro Capital portfolio company, acquired NCM Odor Control, a Broadheadsville, Pa.-based odor neutralizers and perimeter control systems. Financial terms weren't disclosed.
- Bain Capital won a deal to acquire Nichiigakkan Co. (T: 9792), a Japanese nursing home operator, for $1.2 billion after Baring Private Equity Asia (BPEA) made a counter offer valuing it at $1.4 billion.
- Capital Waste Services, backed by Kinderhook Industries, acquired Superior Sanitation, a South Carolina-based residential waste collection company. Financial terms weren't disclosed.
- Apollo Global Management and Big Lots called off takeover talks after the latter agreed to sell and lease some of distribution centers to Oak Street Real Estate Capital, per Bloomberg. Read more.
- Supply Chain Services, a portfolio company of Sole Source Capital, acquired Dasco Label, a Blaine, Minn.-based provider of custom labels, imprinting, serialization, and barcoding services. Financial terms weren't disclosed.
OTHERS
- Sanofi acquired Principia Biopharma, a late-stage biopharmaceutical company, for $3.4 billion.
- Diageo will acquire Aviation Gin, the spirits maker from Ryan Reynolds, for up to $610 million over a 10-year period. Read more.
IPOS
- one, a tech-focused blank check company founded by Eventbrite Co-Founder Kevin Hartz, raised $200 million in an IPO of 20 million units priced at $10.00 apiece. Read more.
- Academy Sports + Outdoors, a Houston-based sports retailer, filed confidentially for an IPO. KKR backs the firm. Read more.
- Canoo Holdings, a maker of electric vehicles, agreed to go public via merger with Hennessy Capital Acquisition Corp. IV (NASDAQ: HCAC), a SPAC. the merger is valued at about $2.4 billion.
- Starboard Value Acquisition Corp., a blank check company formed by Starboard Value, filed to raise $300 million in an IPO of 30 million units at a price of $10.00 per unit. Read more.
EXIT
- American Express (NYSE: AXP) agreed to acquire Kabbage, an Atlanta, Ga.-based financial technology company providing loans to small businesses. Financial terms weren't disclosed.
- Reliance Industries is in talks to buy Urban Ladder, an online furniture retailer backed by Sequoia Capital India, and Milkbasket, a milk delivery firm backed by Blume Ventures, the Times of India newspaper reported. Read more.
F+FS
- Lightspeed Venture Partners closed its third India-focused fund with $275 million in commitments.
- Berkshire Partners is seeking $6.5 billion for its tenth mid-market fund, per the Wall Street Journal. Read more.
- Sixth Street Partners raised another $10 billion for its flagship private capital fund for a total of $22.5 billion, per the Wall Street Journal. Read more.
PEOPLE
- Bessemer Venture Partners promoted Connor Watumull to vice president.


fortune--2020-08-18--Can A.I. understand poetry?

Can A.I. understand poetry?

This is the web version of Eye on A.I., Fortune’s weekly newsletter covering artificial intelligence and business. To get it delivered weekly to your in-box, sign up here.
Back in January, I wrote a big story for Fortune about the ongoing revolution in natural language processing. These are A.I. systems that can manipulate and, to some degree, “understand” language.
Language processing is now entering a kind of golden age, in which once impossible tasks are increasingly within reach. These new systems are already starting to transform how businesses operate—and they stand poised to do so in a much bigger way in the coming years.
This summer has seen some startling examples of what these methods can accomplish. The most discussed breakthrough has been OpenAI’s GPT-3, which can generate long passages of coherent prose from a human-written prompt of just a line or two. In many cases, what the system generates is indistinguishable from human-written text.
GPT-3 is, for the moment, still something of a party trick—it is difficult to control, for instance, whether what the system generates is factually accurate, or to filter out racist or misogynistic ideas that it might have picked up from its large training set (which included not only the complete works of Shakespeare, but such repositories of human virtue as Reddit). But some companies are starting to build real products around it: One is creating a system that will generate complete emails from just a few bullet points. And a legal technology firm is experimenting with GPT-3 to see if it can aid in litigation discovery and compliance.
Another San Francisco A.I. company, Primer, creates software that helps analyze documents. It counts a number of U.S. intelligence agencies among its customers. Today it unveils a website, Primer Labs, that showcases three NLP systems it built in the past year and allows anyone to upload any text to play around with the tech.
I had interviewed John Bohannon, Primer’s Director of Science, back in December for that feature about NLP. Last week, I caught up with him again by Zoom. Bohannon told me things have only accelerated since we first talked.
He describes what is happening in NLP as “an industrial revolution,” where it is now becoming possible to string together multiple NLP tools—much the same way a mechanical engineer might combine boilers, flywheels, conveyor belts and presses—to create systems that can do real work in real businesses. And building these systems is getting easier and easier. “What used to take months,” he says, “now takes a week.”
Bohannon gave me early access to Primer Labs to let me experiment on texts of my own choosing.
The first tool: question-answering.
Upload any document and you can then ask questions in natural language to prompt the system to find an answer in the text. The system also suggests questions that you might want to ask.
The software was fantastic at answering a series of questions about a simple news story on Joe Biden’s selection of Kamala Harris as his veep pick.
However, when I uploaded a 2012 Securities and Exchange Commission filing from the pharmaceutical giant Merck that runs to 159 pages and about 100,000 words, its performance was hit-and-miss. When I asked it what Merck’s sales were in 2011, it returned the correct answer: $48 billion. But when I asked it what the company’s operating profit was, I received a message that the software “was having trouble answering that particular question.” And when I asked it what the company’s revenue recognition policies were, I received the inaccurate but hilarious reply that “non-GAAP EPS is the company’s revenue recognition policies.”
The next Primer tool: “named entity recognition.”
This is the task of identifying all the proper names in a document and figuring out which pronouns in the text refer to which people or which organizations. This task is relatively easy—if time-consuming—for humans, but it’s historically stumped computers. It is a good example of a skill that is now within software’s grasp thanks to the NLP revolution. In benchmark tests Primer has published, its system has outperformed similar software created by Google and Facebook.
I tried to stump Primer’s software by giving it a passage about the 19th-century French authors George Sand and Victor Hugo. I was hoping that the fact Sand is the male nom de plume of a female writer (her real name was Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin) would confuse the system when it had to decide whether the pronoun “he” belonged to Sand or Hugo. But, to my surprise, the system performed flawlessly, understanding that every “he” in the passage referred to Hugo while “she” referred to Sands.
The final and perhaps most difficult task Primer Labs’ tools perform: summarization.
Accurately summarizing long documents is difficult for humans too. And gauging how useful a summary is can be highly subjective. But Primer came up with a clever way to automatically judge summary quality based on BERT, a very large language model that Google created and has made freely available. BERT is what is known as a “masked language model,” because its training consists of learning how to correctly guess what a hidden word in a text is. Primer’s BLANC judges summaries by assessing how much better BERT performs in this fill-in-the-blank game after having accessed the summary. The better BERT does, the better the summary. Thanks to BLANC, Primer was able to train a summarization tool that can generate pretty fluent summaries.
I fed Primer’s summarization tool a feature story I wrote for Fortune’s August/September double-issue about how AstraZeneca has managed to leap ahead of its Big Pharma rivals in the quest for a COVID-19 vaccine. I was impressed at how well the software did in abstracting the lengthy article. It captured key points about AstraZeneca’s corporate turnaround as well as the importance of a COVID-19 vaccine.
But the system is still far from perfect. Another part of the tool tries to reduce the text to just a handful of key bullet points instead of whole paragraphs. Here the results were strangely off-base: The software fixated on factual information from an anecdote at the beginning of the article that was not essential, and yet missed crucial points contained further down in the body of the piece.
For a laugh, I fed the system T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Bohannon had warned me that the software would struggle to summarize more creative writing, particularly poetry, and the results were not pretty. Other than the fact that “the women come and go, speaking of Michelangelo,” the system wasn’t really sure what was happening. A lot of high school students could probably sympathize. But no English teacher would give Primer’s results high marks. (Interestingly, GPT-3 isn’t half bad at writing poetry. But that doesn’t mean it has any real understanding of what it’s writing.)
Then again, poetry is probably not the most pressing business case for Primer’s products. Summarization is a huge potential market. In 1995, the average daily reading requirement of a U.S. intelligence analyst assigned to follow the events in one country was just 20,000 words (or about the equivalent of two New Yorker longreads). By 2016, the same analyst’s daily reading load was estimated at 200,000 words—more than the most capable speed reader could possibly skim in 24 hours. This phenomenon is affecting analysts in finance and law too, and is a huge issue for people in the sciences trying to keep up with the explosion in published research. (In fact, to help out during the pandemic, Primer has created a site that summarizes each day’s new research papers on COVID-19.)
So the NLP revolution has arrived not a moment too soon. Automated tools that help condense and summarize and extract information from written text are becoming more and more essential. Today’s NLP isn’t perfect—but it is getting good enough to make a difference.
And with that, here’s the rest of this week’s A.I. news.
Jeremy Kahn
@jeremyakahn
jeremy.kahn@fortune.com
This story has been updated to correct the year in which U.S. intelligence analysts’ average daily reading load was 20,000 words. It was 1995 not 1956.
A.I. IN THE NEWS
Police use of facial recognition is illegal, British court says. An appellate level court in the U.K. has said that police use of facial recognition technology violates privacy, data protection and equality laws in a stunning blow to further deployment of the technology in the country. British police have been ramping up their use of facial recognition systems, despite civil rights complaints. But in a landmark case brought by civil liberties campaigner Ed Bridges, who said Welsh police captured and analyzed his image without permission, the court ruled the way police were using the technology violated multiple laws. The Welsh police said they would not appeal the ruling. My Fortune colleague David Meyer has more on the case and its implications here.
White House unveils investment plan for A.I. and quantum tech. The Trump Administration announced its budget proposal for non-defense artificial intelligence and quantum information technology investment. The administration proposes upping the total spend by about 30% to $2.2 billion in fiscal year 2021, including $1.5 billion for A.I. and $699 million for quantum information science, according to a story in The Wall Street Journal. The funding includes money to set up new A.I. research centers under the auspices of the National Science Foundation, Department of Agriculture and other agencies. While a hefty increase, the amounts pale beside the multi-billion dollar figures the Chinese government is pouring into A.I. each year. The proposed spending, announced Friday, must now be passed by Congress, which can modify the amounts.
"A Level" fiasco in the U.K. is another example of biased algorithms. For the past week, the U.K. has been consumed with news about the British government's mishandling of this year's award of student grades. This year, due to COVID-19, the country's A Level exams were cancelled. Instead, the government used a complex algorithm to assign A Level grades to students, based in part on grades given by their teachers, but also, critically, taking into account the past A Level performance of other students from that same school. Britain has a highly unequal education system—any algorithm that took into account historical school performance was likely to lower the results for students from disadvantaged backgrounds while boosting the grades of students from elite private schools. Which is exactly what happened. After a week of public outcry, the British government was forced to reverse course on Monday and restore all the grades that the algorithm had downgraded. You can read more about the fracas in this New York Times story. And, as ever, David Meyer has a good take on what the story tells us about our algorithmically mediated future in Fortune's CEO Daily newsletter.
Clearview plans to defend face-scraping as free speech. Controversial facial recognition startup Clearview has hired one of America's most prominent First Amendment lawyers, Floyd Abrams, to represent it against a bevy of lawsuits alleging it violated people's privacy rights or various state laws governing the harvesting and processing of biometric data, The New York Times reported. The 84-year-old Abrams has argued 14 cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, including successfully representing The New York Times in the 1971 Pentagon Papers case, which established a newspaper's right to publish classified information. In reference to Clearview, Abrams told The Times that while privacy rights were important, "where there is a direct clash between privacy claims and well-established First Amendment norms, what would otherwise be appropriate manners of protecting privacy have to give way before the constitutional limitations imposed by the First Amendment.”
British government plans automated drones to surveil its coasts. The British government has awarded a $1.3 million contract to the U.K. subsidiary of Israel's Elbit Systems to develop unmanned drones that can keep watch on the nation's coastlines, according to Wired. The new push comes as a growing number of illegal migrants and asylum seekers have sought to enter the U.K. by crossing the English Channel on small boats from France, prompting a major effort to curtail the traffic from the government. The drones would also help in search and rescue and other surveillance operations. A number of drones Elbit makes can operate fully autonomously, and the company also sells computer vision software that can automatically detect small vessels and other objects in the water from the drone's video feeds.
EYE ON A.I. TALENT
London-based global law firm Linklaters has appointed Shilpa Bhandarkar as chief executive officer of its "Nakhoda" legal artificial intelligence platform. Bhandarkar had previously helped develop the technology as Linklater's Global Head of Innovation at the firm. Greg Jackson, former head of strategy for the firm, has been named to a new role as Global Head of Strategy, Innovation and Efficiency.
San Francisco-based robotics and A.I. company Kindred has named Marin Tchakarov its chief executive officer and president, according to a company press release. Tchakarov had previously served as the company's chief operating officer and chief financial officer.
Quantiful.ai, a company based in Auckland, New Zealand that uses A.I. to help companies forecast demand, has appointed Rebecca Kemp as chief product officer for its prediction platform, QU, according to a story in NBR. Kemp was previously a senior product manager at road tolling and services firm ERoad.
EYE ON A.I. RESEARCH
Finding the tax dodgers. Researchers from the University of Mannheim in Germany and the Center for European Economic Research have proposed a way to automatically find companies that may be using aggressive tax avoidance strategies.
In a paper published on the research repository arxiv.org, they propose creating a "knowledge graph" that maps all of a company's known corporate relationships, plus information such as its headquarters address and the names of its directors, into a statistical pattern. Doing this for about 1.5 million companies, the researchers show how they are able to search this graph for certain patterns that closely match firms known to have engaged in certain aggressive tax strategies, such as the so-called "Dutch sandwich" and "Double Irish" that Google used for years to reduce its international tax bill.
The academics note that in the future, it might be possible to train a machine learning system to automatically detect companies that are likely engaged in aggressive tax strategies, as well as find outliers—unusual patterns in the knowledge graph—that could warrant further investigation by tax justice researchers.
FORTUNE ON A.I.
Semiconductors are a weapon in the U.S.-China trade war. Can this chipmaker serve both sides?—by Eamon Barrett
Facebook and NYU researchers discover a way to speed up MRI scans—by Jeremy Kahn
Hateful posts on Facebook and Instagram soar—by Danielle Abril
Why this military museum is using a chatbot during COVID-19—by Jonathan Vanian
U.K. facial-recognition pilots broke privacy, data protection, and equality laws, court rules—by David Meyer
Johnson & Johnson just invested in a telemedicine startup. Here’s why—by Jonathan Vanian
Kamala Harris could be the best thing that ever happened to Big Tech—by Jeff John Roberts
BRAIN FOOD
We've sometimes written here about deploying A.I. in creative areas, such as composing music or, like GPT-3, writing original prose or poetry (of a kind). And researchers have talked about A.I. having "imagination" in the case of deep learning systems that have to project possible actions into the future and choose among the scenarios it deems most likely to maximize a certain reward.
In a paper published this week, Philippe Esling, a professor of mathematics and computer science at the Sorbonne, in Paris, and Ninon Davis, a graduate student, delve into the evolving definitions of creativity and the history of using software towards creative ends. They argue that using A.I. systems to create novel content on their own is problematic: The systems are always limited by the data they've been trained on and whatever optimization function guides that training. They lack any sense of artistic intent and so can't really evaluate the quality of anything they generate. What's worse, many approaches toward A.I. creativity will actually lead, over time, to the production of increasingly conformist works—the exact opposite of what creative processes should be trying to do.
While that assessment is depressing, Esling and Davis say A.I. still has great potential as tools for enhancing human creativity, noting recent advances in using music-generating A.I. systems to co-create compositions alongside human musicians.


fortune--2020-08-18--What makes the latest coronavirus testing process, developed by Yale, so promising

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Diagnostic tests are, well, weird.
For the coronavirus, you may have to get a swab shoved up your nose to sense an active infection. Or down your throat. Or both. Or, depending on the exact kind of test you’re taking, maybe you could just spit into a vial and call it a day.
The latter is clearly the most convenient option. And thanks to a pioneering technology from the Yale School of Public Health, it may become an increasingly common method of COVID testing as schools begin to reopen.
Yale has been granted Food and Drug Administration (FDA) emergency authorization for a type of saliva-based COVID-19 test called SalivaDirect. This decidedly non-invasive diagnostic simply requires a spit sample that can be collected in a sterile container. It’s a rapid response test, meaning that results can be delivered in just hours.
But this particular system comes with several other advantages. SalivaDirect isn’t the first saliva-based coronavirus test. In fact, it’s the fifth to win FDA authorization. What does set it apart from its predecessors is lower reliance on materials such as reagents and for extra steps in the testing process, including one called nucleic acid extraction.
Without the need for a swab or the materials involved in other kinds of tests, such a saliva-based test could help address the major supply chain bottlenecks that have inflated testing turnaround times for COVID.
“Providing this type of flexibility for processing saliva samples to test for COVID-19 infection is groundbreaking in terms of efficiency and avoiding shortages of crucial test components like reagents,” said FDA commissioner Stephen Hahn in a statement.
Adoption could become broad-based as the process for this test doesn’t require proprietary materials. Theoretically, the test could be conducted in most commercial labs and across a spectrum of machines.
“This test gained authorization today by FDA’s device center,” wrote former FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb in a tweet. “Among its many compelling attributes, it doesn’t require complex steps for extracting viral RNA; so it won’t rely on reagents that’ve been in short supply and constrained the testing supply chain.”
Another twist: The test was largely validated by testing on NBA players and staff, who are currently in a bubble in Disney World in order to finish out the 2020 basketball season.
Supply chain issues aside, the SalivaDirect testing process has another practical, and human, benefit—allowing health care workers to stay separated from patients and thus reducing their potential exposure to the coronavirus.


fortune--2020-08-18--As COVID-19 rates rise, France will require most people to wear masks at work

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Most workers in France will soon have to wear masks in the workplace from Sept. 1 under proposals unveiled Tuesday by the country’s labor ministry.
The move is intended to encourage companies to resume their normal economic activities while keeping employees safe. It follows advice issued Friday by the country’s High Council of Public Health, which was reacting to the increasing scientific consensus that the novel coronavirus is spread through the air. Masks reduce the risk of infected people spreading the virus.
In a Tuesday statement, the labor ministry said masks would need to become de rigueur in companies’ enclosed and shared spaces, except where there is just one person working alone.
The ministry said remote working was still the recommended practice, because of how it limits the spread of infection in the workplace and on public transport.
“The protection of workers’ health and the continuity of our economic activity are at stake,” said Élisabeth Borne, the French labor minister, in a statement. Laurent Pietraszewski, her secretary of state, said the ministry would now work with stakeholders to figure out how to implement the new rules.
France is experiencing a growing wave of COVID-19 infections. Over the weekend, it recorded more than 3,000 new cases each day.
According to health authorities, workplaces were the source for a quarter of the infection clusters reported since the lifting of heavy lockdown. The government is now desperate to avoid needing to reimpose such strict measures as those that were lifted in May, following the initial lockdown period.
Last week, French Prime Minister Jean Castex warned the public: “If we don’t act collectively, we expose ourselves to the heightened risk that the rebound in the epidemic becomes hard to control.”
The recognition of COVID-19 as an airborne disease has led to a gradual increase in mask mandates. Many European countries have for months required people to wear masks in shops and on public transport, but Italy, for example, has just ordered people to wear masks at night in public areas where groups might form.
Still, it is unusual to see masks mandated in offices.
French labor unions have been pushing for such a move. Amazon’s French workers went on strike in May, and one complaint was the lack of masks in the workplace.
The unions have demanded better workplace protections in place by next month, when schools are scheduled to reopen and workers will be returning from their treasured summer vacations—another notable vector for the spread of the virus.
“The best thing we can do to prepare for the start of the school year is to reassure employees that, collectively, we are taking precautions to prevent the spread of the virus,” said Borne in her ministry’s statement.
Fortune has asked the ministry what enforcement measures there will be, but had not received a reply at the time of writing.
France’s General Confederation of Labour, one of the country’s largest unions, gave the ministry’s announcement a cautious welcome. “Wearing a mask is an individual protection solution,” it said in a statement, “but [it] cannot be the only one.”


fortune--2020-08-18--Boeing is preparing additional layoffs with new buyouts

Boeing is preparing to offer buyouts to employees for a second time this year as the virus-stricken planemaker extends its workforce cuts beyond the original 10% target unveiled in April.
The “voluntary layoff” will be offered largely to staffers in the company’s commercial airplanes unit, services division, and corporate operation, Chief Executive Officer Dave Calhoun said Monday in a message to employees that was seen by Bloomberg News. More details will be made available to workers beginning Aug. 24.
“I truly wish the current market demand could support the size of our workforce,” Calhoun said. “Unfortunately, layoffs are a hard but necessary step to align to our new reality, preserve liquidity and position ourselves for the eventual return to growth.”
Boeing and European rival Airbus have moved to slow production, shrink payroll, and pare other costs as the coronavirus pandemic causes demand for air travel and new jetliners to collapse. The U.S. manufacturer, which is also trying to return its grounded 737 Max to service after two fatal accidents, anticipates “a significantly smaller marketplace over the next three years,” Calhoun said.
The shares was little changed at $171.72 at 9:42 a.m. Tuesday in New York. Boeing tumbled 47% this year through Monday, the largest drop on the Dow Jones Industrial Average.
The Chicago-based aerospace giant has been evaluating its workforce as it completes the initial reduction announced earlier this year. In addition to about 19,000 cuts already in the pipeline, Boeing is hiring around 3,000 employees in its defense and space division, whose government contracts have become a primary source of revenue. The net impact was set to cause a drop of about 10% of the company payroll.
As Boeing pushes to make painful additional cuts, the company is also “engaging in a full-scale enterprise transformation effort, evaluating every aspect of our business for opportunities to improve,” Calhoun said.
The planemaker announced last month that it was ending production of the 747 jumbo jet and studying whether to consolidate production of the 787 Dreamliner, which is manufactured in South Carolina and Washington state. The moves cast uncertainty over the future of the Everett, Washington, campus—the company’s largest outpost.


fortune--2020-08-18--Samsung Note20 Ultra review: Why this big phone works for the COVID era

Small phones have gotten larger and large phones are becoming enormous. But that trend made the new Samsung Galaxy Note20 Ultra that I’ve been using for the past few weeks particularly useful in our locked-down pandemic times.
The $1,300 Note20 Ultra comes with a ginormous 6.9-inch screen and a built-in stylus. The device’s baby brother, the Note20, costs $1,000 and has a 6.7-inch screen and a stylus. The new phones are available for preorder with delivery on Aug. 21.
Both of the new phones are bigger by a few tenths of an inch and pricier by $50 to $200 than last year’s Note lineup.
In another difference, this year’s new phones are both compatible with superfast 5G Internet. That may account for some of the price difference.
These days, like many people, I don’t get out as much as last year. So the larger size of the Note20 Ultra wasn’t as much of a hassle. And it weighs only 208 grams, or 7.3 ounces—18 grams less than an iPhone 11 Pro Max with its 6.5-inch screen. Trapped in the house for much of the day with three teenagers at home, the bigger and brighter screen—one of the best I’ve seen on any phone—came in handy for watching Netflix or playing Civilization Revolution when the TVs and larger-screen computers in the house were already occupied.
Taking notes
But that’s also true of Samsung’s more mainstream flagship phone, the Galaxy S20 Ultra that debuted in February. That $1,400 behemoth comes with a similar 6.9-inch screen. The Note20 Ultra is slightly cheaper, but the main appeal is the built-in stylus and the ability to write and draw directly on the phone’s screen.
The included S Pen has lots of neat tricks. Just pull it out of its hiding place on the bottom of the phone and click the end button. When your phone is asleep, you can write notes in white on the blackened screen. Pop the S pen when the phone is already unlocked and you get a choice of eight apps including simple ones like notes and more complex ones like augmented-reality doodling on live videos. You can also customize which apps are listed on that menu.
One of the best features of modern gadgets like the Note20 Ultra is converting my squiggly, messy handwriting into typed text, a trick I first got addicted to when I was trying the Google Pixel Slate two years ago. To convert a handwritten note to text on the Note20, you just click on the writing-to-text icon and the Note app displays in a box on screen what it thinks you’ve written. You can choose whether to replace your handwriting with the text or just copy the text to paste into another app. You can also call up the keyboard to correct the Note20’s conversion of your handwriting if the technology made any mistakes.
And I had to correct the conversions a fair bit. Samsung’s handwriting-to-text software doesn’t seem to be as accurate or speedy as what’s available on Google’s tablets and Chromebooks. And, by the way, Apple is adding a similar feature to its upcoming iOS 14 software, so the competition will only heat up.
Super-zooming camera
Like most other flagship smartphones these days, the Note20 Ultra is packed with cameras. There is a 10-megapixel selfie camera on the front and three cameras on the back. The regular camera has a dazzling 108 megapixels and is designed, theoretically, to provide sharper images, while the ultrawide and 5X telephoto lens both have 12 megapixel sensors.
The headline photography feature, like the previous Galaxy S20 Ultra, is the use of a so-called periscope zoom for the telephoto lens. The lens is placed sideways inside the phone to avoid sticking too far from the back. To bring the image into the lens, the phone has a prism to reflect light into the lens at an angle, like a submarine’s periscope. Samsung says the lens can magnify images 5X optically and 50X using software tricks.
Pictures taken with the Samsung Galaxy Note20 Ultra with zero, 10X, and 50X magnification.
That’s a slight downgrade from the similar lens in the S20 Ultra, which had 10X and 100X zooming capabilities. But as Fortune found in testing that phone, the 100X digital zoom was difficult to use because even the slightest jolt of the hand made it hard to focus on the intended subject. And the resulting pictures often had obvious smudging and blockiness.
The Note20 Ultra’s 50X mode is still a little difficult to use, but Samsung has improved its software to make it easier to focus. And the pictures, while still somewhat grainy, are generally better than the S20’s 100X images. The zoom is also handy for using as always available binoculars. Sitting in the passenger seat of my car, it was fun to use the Note20’s zoom to read tiny writing on bumper stickers across the road or to do some digital birdwatching in the backyard.
Slicker design
The Note20 Ultra also has another feature that’s better than the S20—its appearance. The S20 featured rounded corners and a bulbous rectangular camera bump on the back. But the Note20’s more boxy, squared-off design is more appealing. And the camera bump, while still prominent, is almost Apple-like in its elegance, with a metallic ring visible highlighting each lens.
Then again, with the pandemic, who really stares at other people’s phones anymore? Maybe the slicker design will be more appreciated once the outbreak is over.
But until then, the Note20 Ultra still has a lot to offer: a big, bright screen for videos, a handy pen for drawing and note taking, plus a fab zoom lens.


fortune--2020-08-18--China just issued its first COVID vaccine patent. What it means for the vaccine race

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On Sunday, the Chinese vaccine maker Cansino said that government regulators approved its patent application for a COVID-19 vaccine, marking the first and only patent that Chinese authorities have granted for a COVID-19 vaccine so far.
Cansino told the Chinese state media the Global Times that the patent confirms the safety and efficacy of its leading candidate, Ad5-nCoV, which the biotech firm is developing in partnership with the Academy of Military Medical Sciences, a research institute under China’s People’s Liberation Army.
But that patent doesn’t mean the vaccine is ready for widespread use. Cansino’s candidate still must complete its phase III clinical trials and then be approved in a separate ‘marketing approval’ process in China that deems it safe and effective for widespread use, says Bryan Mercurio a law professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong who specializes in pharmaceutical law.
Cansino did not return Fortune‘s request for comment.
Investors viewed the patent as a vote of confidence from Beijing, with the company’s stock jumping 14% on the Hong Kong stock exchange on Monday. Securing a patent is an important—if unofficial—step in bringing a vaccine to market. In this regard, Cansino has a leg up on its peers, even as it trails in the clinical testing of its candidate.
Cansino pulled out front in the vaccine race in March, when it became only the second vaccine globally to receive approval to conduct human trials.
Gary Rieschel, an early Cansino investor and founding partner of Qiming Ventures Partners, told Fortune earlier this year that Cansino was able to leverage its experiences in developing an Ebola vaccine and its relationships with the government to accelerate its pursuit of a COVID-19 vaccine.
“The key with Cansino was that the Chinese government approached them in January and wanted them to help in working on [a COVID-19 vaccine],” said Rieschel. “[Cansino] clearly has a platform and an approach that can handle multiple different viral families in terms of looking at vaccines.”
In June, China approved its use for members of the Chinese military.
In recent months, however, Cansino’s peers have pushed ahead in launching phase III trials that test vaccines in thousands of human volunteers. At the same time, some of Cansino’s own plans have stalled.
In May, Canada announced it would partner with Cansino to conduct phase I and II trials, but as of early August, Canada had yet to receive the shipment. Canadian authorities told Fortune that the supplies were being held in Chinese customs, and experts believe that Chinese authorities may be delaying the shipment for political reasons.
As of Aug. 13, the World Health Organization reported that three other Chinese vaccine makers had raced ahead of Cansino by launching phase III trials.
Cansino now seems to be catching up. Reuters reports that Cansino’s first phase III trials began last Friday in Russia, and Saudi Arabia announced on August 9 that it would partner with Cansino to launch phase III trials to test the vaccine on roughly 5,000 of its citizens.
Cansino is also in talks with Brazil, Mexico, and Chile to conduct similar phase III trials.
In getting the patent, Cansino had to demonstrate that its candidate qualifies as an invention, meaning that it was able to show a new “inventive step” and “utility,” says Mercurio. All of China’s other leading vaccine makers have similarly filed for patents, Mercurio says, and more patent approvals may be forthcoming.
If and when Cansino’s leading candidate passes phase III clinical trials, it will move to the marketing approval process.
On average, Mercurio says, it usually takes drugs seven to 12 years to receive marketing approval from Chinese authorities, a process that is likely to be fast-tracked in this instance given the push to rapidly develop a vaccine for COVID-19.
“It is entirely normal” for a vaccine to receive a patent at this early stage in clinical trials, says Mercurio. “What is rare is the speed at which the clinical trials are being conducted.”
The patenting and market approval processes are entirely separate, meaning that having a patent is not required for marketing approval, but the two processes generally go hand-in-hand.
“Almost all drugs are granted patents before they start clinical trials and marketing approval,” says Li Yahong, an expert in patent and pharmaceutical law at the University of Hong Kong. In addition to protecting intellectual property, a patent helps vaccine makers secure funding for expensive research and additional trials. “Without a patent, no sensible capital will invest” in a vaccine, she says.
The patent does not guarantee that Cansino’s vaccine will ultimately prove successful.
“China has strong biotech and pharmaceutical sectors that will support the eventual development of a COVID-19 vaccine,” says Nicholas Thomas, a professor in global health governance at the City University of Hong Kong. “But, even with this advantage [of the patent], it can be expected that not all candidates will make it through the final phase of development.”


fortune--2020-08-18--Depression symptoms among the employed in the U.K. have more than doubled since the start of the pan

Depression symptoms among the employed in the U.K. have more than doubled since the start of the pandemic

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Feeling down? You’re not the only one.
A troubling new report from the U.K. government’s statistics agency suggests the number of people who likely have depression has doubled compared to before the pandemic.
The report from the U.K.’s Office for National Statistics surveyed a representative group of Britons age 16 and older in June and found that one in five reported symptoms of moderate to severe depression, up from one in 10 respondents before the pandemic began.
Psychologists and other mental health experts polled by the U.K.’s Science Media Centre said they were not surprised by the results, but they warned that the mental health fallout of the pandemic and the economic crisis were likely just beginning.
“This is deeply troubling. We should not simply accept this as [the] ‘new norm,'” said Simon Wessely, Regius Professor of psychiatry at King’s College London. “It is new but anything but normal.”
The impact has been particularly extreme on groups that already reported higher-than-average rates of depression even before the pandemic: women, those who were financially vulnerable, and the disabled, the report said. But it also flagged a sharp jump in depression in adults under 40; around a third of respondents under 40 showed signs of depression.
One in four women reported symptoms, but women were more likely to report symptoms of depression both before and during the pandemic. One in three people who could not meet an unexpected cost of GBP 850 ($1,122) reported moderate to severe symptoms, as did one in three people with a disability.
While people who were jobless were far more likely than those with jobs to report heightened symptoms of depression—about one in four people—the survey suggested that being unemployed is just as hard on your mood now as it was pre-pandemic. Meanwhile, the number of survey respondents who were working and reported depression symptoms more than doubled from before the pandemic, to nearly one in five.
The mental health impact of the pandemic, lockdowns and economic crisis have been tracked in other countries as well. A U.S. Census Survey recently suggested up to one in three Americans are showing signs of depression.
Charley Baker, associate professor of mental health at the University of Nottingham, noted that it’s important to avoid “pathologizing” what may be reasonable responses to the uncertainty and fear of the pandemic.
“At the same time we need clear investing in services at primary and secondary level to ensure that those who begin to struggle more with their mood and anxiety get the additional support they need,” she added. “Perhaps we—all of us—need to reach in to proactively support people, rather than expecting people to reach out when this may be even more challenging than when in non-COVID times.”
Others warned that the deepening economic crisis, which in the U.K. includes the end of a furlough program that prevented more than 9 million Britons from being officially laid off in the midst of lockdown, was likely only to worsen the crisis.
“The most worrying aspect of these results in my view is that given the financial problems many are now experiencing, an increasing inability to pay bills is likely to lead to ever increasing levels of depression and anxiety,” said Elaine Fox, director of the Oxford Centre for Emotions at the University of Oxford.
“These economic factors are likely to play an important role in the nations mental health in the coming months and years.”


fortune--2020-08-18--3 ‘Ellen DeGeneres Show’ producers exit in the midst of workplace complaints

Three producers of “The Ellen DeGeneres Show” have exited amid allegations of a dysfunctional workplace that harbored misbehavior including sexual misconduct and racially insensitive remarks.
Executive producers Ed Glavin and Kevin Leman and co-executive producer Jonathan Norman have “parted ways” with the long-running daytime series, a spokesperson for producer Warner Bros. said in a statement Monday.
An internal company investigation of claims about the show was prompted by a BuzzFeed News report in July based on 36 interviews with ex-staffers, who complained about or said they witnessed improper and unfair treatment.
Most of the allegations were tied to executive producers and senior managers, including Glavin, Leman and Norman, BuzzFeed News said. The people making the claims against them were not identified.
A representative for Leman didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment Monday. Representatives for Glavin and Norman couldn’t immediately be found.
In statements to BuzzFeed News after the July 30 story was published online, Leman denied “any kind of sexual impropriety” and Norman said he categorically denied the accusations.
DeGeneres informed staff of the shakeup Monday in a video conference call, according to Variety, which first reported the development. She said she found claims about the show’s environment to be “heartbreaking,” the trade publication said, citing unidentified sources.
The comedian and host had sent a memo to her staff after last month’s BuzzFeed article, recalling her early promise of ensuring a workplace where “everyone would be treated with respect.” Something changed, she said, “and for that, I am sorry.”
The show debuted in 2003.
In a separate July statement, Warner Bros. said parent company WarnerMedia’s investigation revealed what it called “some flaws in the show’s daily management.”
Although not all of the allegations were corroborated, the studio said it was “disappointed that the primary findings of the investigation indicated some deficiencies related to the show’s day-to-day management.”
No details were specified at the time, and Warner Bros. had no further comment Monday beyond confirming the producers’ departures.


fortune--2020-08-18--Will Uber and Lyft shut down in California?

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.
Good morning, Data Sheet readers. Tech writer Danielle Abril here filling in for Adam.
Uber and Lyft may temporarily shut down their ride-hailing services in California as soon as this week.
The move depends on whether a state judge grants them an appeal or more time to reclassify their drivers from contractors to employees, as has been required by law since January. If they lose or if no ruling is made by Thursday, the services said they would go dark in the state until they have the systems in place to pay and track drivers as employees. The services say they’re not ready for the switch, even though they’ve had almost a year to prepare.
“At first I thought this was an empty threat,” said Mark Shmulik, an analyst at brokerage firm AB Bernstein. “But assuming appeals court says ‘no’, I actually do believe Uber and Lyft will shut down temporarily in California.”
This wouldn’t be the first time the ride-hailing giants have halted services based on regional regulatory issues. Both companies spent much of their early years fighting taxi lobbyists and trying to explain to city governments why they should be allowed to operate under different rules.
Historically speaking, that strategy has served Uber and Lyft well.
Uber and Lyft left Austin in 2016 after the city rejected a proposal that would have allowed the services to perform their own background checks on drivers. But one year later, after the public complained to get the services back, the state overrode local regulations in favor of Uber and Lyft.
But the fight in California may not mirror previous battles.
First, the state is already well familiar with Uber and Lyft, which began operating in California in 2010 and 2012, respectively. This debate focuses specifically on driver pay and benefits, not on whether the services are useful for consumers. And on this particular issue, it’s unclear whether consumers side with the companies, Shmulik said.
So what happens if the judge rules against Uber and Lyft?
Uber and Lyft will heavily lean on voters to pass Proposition 22, the November ballot initiative backed by the companies that would improve some working conditions for drivers but keep them as contractors. Meanwhile, a temporary shutdown may help the companies twofold. It could drum up support for Prop 22 from voters inconvenienced by the pause, and it could save the companies money at a time when ridership is down. Both companies are losing money every quarter.
“Shutting down in a pandemic, when you have 30% or 40% the volume—you won’t lose too much,” Shmulik said.
If voters don’t pass Prop 22, Uber and Lyft likely would pull out of rural areas, which typically have low demand, and raise prices in the state’s urban areas to offset the extra costs. Uber may also try to push more drivers to work for both its rides and food delivery services to reduce costs, Shmulik said.
Though the California judge’s decision will only impact ride-hailing services, delivery service DoorDash is watching closely from the wings. Last week, San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin singled out DoorDash in a preliminary injunction similar to the one filed by California Attorney General Xavier Becerra against the ride-hailing giants. The judge’s decision on the requested injunction is expected on Oct. 5.
Uber and Lyft are used to big legal regulatory battles. But they may have met their match in the state of California.
Danielle Abril
@DanielleDigest
danielle.abril@fortune.com
This edition of Data Sheet was curated by Aaron Pressman.
NEWSWORTHY
Strong opinions, loosely held. I'm not sure I've ever been wrong about a tech business analysis quite so quickly, but the notion that the Epic Games versus Apple legal battle will be stuck in legal limbo for years, as I wrote yesterday, looks pretty unlikely now. That's because on Monday, Epic disclosed that Apple is taking further steps to ice out the gamemaker on iPhones. In addition to kicking Epic's Fortnite game out of its app store, as it did last week, Apple plans to terminate Epic's development account, which will kill the use of the company's popular Unreal Engine software by thousands of other game developers. Epic filed a motion for a preliminary injunction to block the move.
I'm telling you, it's getting mighty crowded. The "tick tock" story on the insane TikTok sale process is going to be a doozy. After rumored interest from Microsoft and Twitter, the latest possible suitor interested in buying my kids' favorite app of the moment is Oracle. President Trump has ordered TikTok's current Chinese owner, ByteDance, to sell the app in 90 days from Aug. 14. Meanwhile, Trump is tightening the screws on another Chinese company, Huawei, by closing some loopholes that allowed chipmakers to continue supplying the telecom giant. Analysts say chances are rising for Chinese retaliation against a company like Apple.
Saved by the bell. A few years ago, one of the hot IPO sectors was fintech startups making online loans, but most of the companies have struggled mightily since. So there was probably no chance that SoftBank-backed Kabbage could exit to the public markets. Instead, on Monday, American Express decided to buy Kabbage's tech and workforce, though not its loan portfolio, at a price rumored to be under $1 billion. Then again, some fintech startups are doing just fine, thank you very much. One of the winners of the pandemic (just Google the "boredom market hypothesis"), online brokerage Robinhood, raised $200 million more of private backing in a deal valuing the company at over $11 billion.
Won't quit skating 'til I'm physically unable. Speaking of once and former hot IPO sectors, EV startup Canoo is going public via a special purpose acquisition company called Hennessy Capital Acquisition Corp. IV. Canoo co-founder and CEO Ulrich Kranz is a BMW refugee who struck out on his own to develop a modular "skateboard" platform for electric vehicles that can be used for his own designs and sold to other carmakers. Canoo gets $600 million out of the deal, but better hurry. Some other once-hot EV stocks like Nikola and Workhouse Group have started sinking.
Rebundling the unbundled bundle. A few developments in the streaming wars: Verizon rejiggered its mix of free offerings, so customers on its newest unlimited plans will get Hulu and ESPN+ free in addition to Disney+. Fewer plans get Apple Music free, however. And Apple said it would offer a bundle of its own: Apple TV+, Showtime, and CBS All Access for $10 a month. Buying the three a la carte currently costs $26 a month.
FOOD FOR THOUGHT
I don't know if former T-Mobile CEO John Legere, who sometimes refers to himself as Batman, has seen the research, but creating an alter ego may provide psychological benefits. Writer David Robson, in a piece for the BBC's Worklife series, explores how thinking of yourself as a separate entity can boost confidence.
Although the embodiment of a fictional persona may seem like a gimmick for pop stars, new research suggests there may be some real psychological benefits to the strategy. Adopting an alter ego is an extreme form of ‘self-distancing’, which involves taking a step back from our immediate feelings to allow us to view a situation more dispassionately.
“Self-distancing gives us a little bit of extra space to think rationally about the situation,” says Rachel White, assistant professor of psychology at Hamilton College in New York State. It allows us to rein in undesirable feelings like anxiety, increases our perseverance on challenging tasks, and boosts our self-control.
ON THE MOVE
Pinterest added its first Black board member, media executive Andrea Wishom, who is president of Skywalker Holdings LLC...Tera Randall is the new VP of communications at Epic Games. She formerly worked at Niantic and Facebook. Not sure she'll have much to do this week...Former Tivo CEO Dave Shull gets the top job at videoconferencing supplier Poly. Shull takes over from interim CEO and chairman Robert Hagerty...Brad Porter, VP of robotics at Amazon, is leaving the company after 13 years. He'll join an undisclosed A.I. startup, Business Insider reports.
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
The U.S. Postal Service is seeking a patent for voting by phone By Jeff John Roberts
SoftBank lends WeWork $1.1 billion By Lucinda Shen
‘It’s clicks versus bricks’: Why tech stocks won’t be fading anytime soon By Rey Mashayekhi
Land O’Lakes CEO Beth Ford on the importance of improving rural access to technology By McKenna Moore
Admit it: You miss being stuck in traffic By Joe Mathews
Americans don’t trust contact tracing apps. Here’s how we can fix that By Sarah Kreps, Nina McMurry, and Baobao Zhang
Diageo’s purchase of Ryan Reynolds–backed Aviation Gin is a turning point for the flooded celebrity-branded liquor market By Rachel King
(Some of these stories require a subscription to access.Thank you for supporting our journalism.)
BEFORE YOU GO
A week after the National September 11 Memorial & Museum in New York City cancelled its upcoming "Tribute in Light" to memorialize the 9/11 attacks, the annual light display is back on. The museum's budget has been crushed by the lack of visitors during the COVID-19 pandemic. But New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo says the state can safely provide staff needed to put on the display, which projects two blue towers of light into the sky where the World Trade Center's twin towers once stood. As Mordicai Gerstein wrote in his amazing children's book The Man Who Walked Between the Towers: "In memory, as if imprinted on the sky, the towers are still there."
Aaron Pressman/Fortune
Aaron Pressman
@ampressman
aaron.pressman@fortune.com