#APP Local & State Politics

[petnews2day]

N.C. author takes readers inside the Westminister Dog Show

New Post has been published on https://petn.ws/08qNL

N.C. author takes readers inside the Westminister Dog Show

This week’s episode takes a break from politics to talk dogs. North Carolina-based journalist and author Tommy Tomlinson joins host Tim Boyum to talk about his new book “Dogland.” It’s an inside look at the world of the Westminster Dog Show through the eyes of a dog and his handler. Tomlinson also explores the relationship […]

See full article at https://petn.ws/08qNL #DogNews #APPLocalStatePolitics, #APPPodcasts, #APPTyingItTogetherWithTimBoyum, #CentralNC, #Charlotte, #Coastal, #Mountain, #News, #NorthCarolina, #OnlyOnSpectrum, #Politics, #SpectrumNewsStaff, #Triad, #TyingItTogetherWithTimBoyum

[reportwire]

Judge deems DeSantis' 'Stop Woke' law unconstitutional

Judge deems DeSantis’ ‘Stop Woke’ law unconstitutional

2022-08-29 09:42:00 A federal judge has ruled that a portion of the “Stop Woke Act” championed by Gov. Ron DeSantis, is unconstitutional. What You Need To Know Experts say there are two parts to the law One part appliies to discussing racism and it’s history in the workplace, while the other addresses issues of racism in public schools A local law professor says that it appears only part of…

[don-lichterman]

Civic groups call for COVID review panel with teeth

Civic groups call for COVID review panel with teeth

Good-government organizations and a think tank on Tuesday urged Gov. Kathy Hochul on Tuesday go further with her plans to have New York review the state government’s response to the pandemic and create a commission with subpoena power.  The move could lead to a more robust investigation of the state’s pandemic policies as the governor has taken the initial steps toward having an independent…

[mostlysignssomeportents]

This day in history

Today (May 20) at 3:15PM, I’ll be at the GAITHERSBURG Book Festival with my novel Red Team Blues; then on Monday (May 22), I’m keynoting Public Knowledge’s Emerging Tech conference in DC.

On Tuesday (May 23), I’ll be in TORONTO for a book launch that’s part of WEPFest, a benefit for the West End Phoenix, onstage with Dave Bidini (The Rheostatics), Ron Diebert (Citizen Lab) and the whistleblower Dr Nancy Olivieri.

#20yrsago William Gibson on the future of media https://web.archive.org/web/20030503081410/www.williamgibsonbooks.com/archive/2003_05_01_archive.asp

#15yrsago We need a privacy bill of rights https://www.wired.com/2008/05/securitymatters-0515/

#15yrsago Steamy tell-all memoir by a Disneyland “Jack Sparrow” https://web.archive.org/web/20080525200648/https://www.lamag.com/featuredarticle.aspx/?id=7016

#15yrsago Oregon to hold hearings on whether its laws are copyrighted https://public.resource.org/oregon/

#15yrsago China’s surveillance state https://web.archive.org/web/20080517165418/https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/20797485/chinas_allseeing_eye/print

#10yrsago Unknown mathematician makes historical breakthrough in prime theory https://www.wired.com/2013/05/twin-primes/

#10yrsago What UK education czar Michael Gove doesn’t understand about creativity https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/may/17/to-encourage-creativity-mr-gove-understand

#10yrsago Accused identity thief nailed by food-porn Instagram photo https://www.techdirt.com/2013/05/20/criminal-nabbed-his-own-food-porn/

#10yrsago Utah wants to tax power consumed by the NSA’s massive, illegal data-processing facility https://archive.sltrib.com/article.php?id=56304956&itype=CMSID

#10yrsago Book review: information security for lawyers https://books.slashdot.org/story/13/05/20/1313205/book-review-locked-down-information-security-for-lawyers

#10yrsago When America issued dogtags to kids to help identify their nuke-blasted corpses https://gizmodo.com/that-time-american-school-kids-were-given-dog-tags-beca-508802138

#10yrsago Whatever happened to crack babies? https://web.archive.org/web/20130904231440/https://www.retroreport.org/crack-babies-a-tale-from-the-drug-wars/

#10yrsago Internet of Things and surveillance https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/05/the_eyes_and_ea.html

#10yrsago Profile of math-inspired 3D printing sculptor Bathsheba Grossman https://www.shapeways.com/blog/archives/2075-designer-spotlight-bathsheba-grossman-2.html

#5yrsago Explaining marine invertebrate reproductive strategies to the lobster-obsessed Jordan Peterson https://twitter.com/baileys/status/997646354414522368

#5yrsago Supreme Court rules that employers can make signing away your right to sue them in a class a condition of employment https://www.cnn.com/2018/05/21/politics/supreme-court-nlra-arbitration-gorsuch/index.html

#5yrsago New York high school will use CCTV and facial recognition to enforce discipline https://web.archive.org/web/20180521033340/http://uschnews.com/lockport-schools-turn-to-state-of-the-art-technology-to-beef-up-security-the-buffalo-news/

#5yrsago High school students who will not smile in the hallways are sent to mandatory counselling, while bullying is rampant https://www.ldnews.com/story/news/local/2018/05/15/n-lebanon-students-told-smile-while-bullying-gets-ignored/606180002/

#5yrsago The Vatican dunks on the finance industry and its “amoral culture” https://press.vatican.va/content/salastampa/en/bollettino/pubblico/2018/05/17/180517a.html

#5yrsago Ahead of national elections, India’s authoritarian ruling party loses a key regional battle https://web.archive.org/web/20180520035216/http://www.atimes.com/article/huge-setback-for-modi-as-bjp-fails-floor-test-in-karnataka/

#5yrsago Britain’s hardline prohibitionist drugs minister is married to a weed grower https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/drugs-minister-victoria-atkins-hypocrisy-cannabis-paul-kenward-british-sugar-a8356056.html

#5yrsago App that let parents spy on teens stored thousands of kids’ Apple ID passwords and usernames on an unsecured server https://www.zdnet.com/article/teen-phone-monitoring-app-leaks-thousands-of-users-data/

Catch me on tour with Red Team Blues in Toronto, DC, Gaithersburg, Oxford, Hay, Manchester, Nottingham, London, and Berlin!

[narcbrain]

Corey Johnson Feels ‘Tremendous Relief’ Skipping Mayor Race Metropolis Council Speaker Corey Johnson explained to NY1 he is sensation huge relief given that dropping his options for a mayoral operate and becoming upfront about his melancholy.

[reportwire]

North Carolina reacts to ban on abortions past 20 weeks

North Carolina reacts to ban on abortions past 20 weeks

RALEIGH, N.C. —  Abortion rights activists are once again fighting for reproductive rights in North Carolina. A federal judge ruled Wednesday that abortions are no longer legal after 20 weeks of pregnancy. What You Need To Know A judge ruled Wednesday that abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy are illegal in North Carolina, except for urgent medical emergencies Abortion rights activists say the…

[don-lichterman]

In NY-10, Latinos and AAPI could have more representation

In NY-10, Latinos and AAPI could have more representation

Representation matters. And several candidates see the open 10th Congressional District seat as a critical opportunity to help racially diversify Capitol Hill. “Building Latino power at a critical moment starts in NY-10,” Carlina Rivera said, a City Council member. “Asian Americans are obviously the most underrepresented group in politics and we are also the most and fastest growing ethnic…

[stoweboyd]

Work Futures Daily - AI is Everywhere

But there is no agreement on the impact of AI-driven automation

2018-04-03 Beacon NY — AI is finding it's way into every conceivable niche it seems. Australian conservationists are employing drones to track sharks, and emplying AI to identify Great White and other large and toothy sharks. The goal is to head off dangerous interactions with the giant beasts. Simialr projects are going on in Cape Town and California, too.

Meanwhile, Equinix is predicting customer churn with AI, in the section below.

Has AI intruded into your work or extracurricular activities? Let me know, if so, here.

…

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On Artificial Intelligence For Customer Prediction

Data center company Equinix has created an app to determine the likelihood of customer churn for its clients:

For its prediction model, a team of Equinix data scientists looked at roughly 70 attributes that could contribute to customer churn, such as how many times a customer logs into a customer portal or placed an order over a certain time period, or whether power consumption increased or decreased. Using a deep neural network, the team built a model that predicts the likelihood of customer churn over a 30-, 60- or 90-day period and says whether each customer is a high, medium or low churn risk.

[…]

In its first iteration, it predicted churn with 50% to 60% accuracy when compared to actual churn data. After months of testing and refining, it now is close to 90% accuracy.

The model runs about once every two weeks and provides and spits out the probability that each customer account might churn, along with potential reasons why. That information is fed into the company’s Salesforce.com Inc. system so sales reps can see it while working with Equinix’s roughly 9,800 customers.

“Before, customers would churn because they didn’t hear from reps,” Mr. Wagle said. “That behavior is changing.”

Just as important for a skeptical user community, they had to provide a raitonale for the churn prediction:

The biggest challenge was figuring out how to explain the model’s decision-making process.

[...]

Now, alongside the risk score, a table shows sales reps reasons that might explain the risk, such as a decrease in power consumption or an extended period without using the customer portal.

Notably, Equinix declined to explain how the technical team derived the rationale from the neural network used.

On Predicting the Impact of Automation

There seems to be little convergence on estimates for the impact of AI and Automation on jobs. The MIT Technology Review has collated a table:

Predictions are all over the place, no convergence, not even on the fundamental question of whether more jobs will be created versus destroyed.

Erin Winick of MIT Technology Review states,

In short, although these predictions are made by dozens of global experts in economics and technology, no one seems to be on the same page. There is really only one meaningful conclusion: we have no idea how many jobs will actually be lost to the march of technological progress.

On Unions

Unions are having a real resurgence in the US, as a bottom-up radicalization of teachers, long denied pay wage increases and confronted by attempts to cut benefits, have walked out, often surprising — or turning against — their union 'leaders'.

Dana Goldstein reported on 2 April,

Thousands of teachers in Oklahoma and Kentucky walked off the job Monday morning, shutting down school districts as they protested cuts in pay, benefits and school funding in a movement that has spread rapidly since igniting in West Virginia this year.

In Oklahoma City, protesting teachers ringed the Capitol, chanting, “No funding, no future!” Katrina Ruff, a local teacher, carried a sign that read, “Thanks to West Virginia.”

“They gave us the guts to stand up for ourselves,” she said.

The walkouts and rallies in Republican-dominated states, mainly organized by ordinary teachers on Facebook, have caught lawmakers and sometimes the teachers’ own labor unions flat-footed. And they are occurring in states and districts with important midterm races in November, suggesting that thousands of teachers, with their pent-up rage over years of pay freezes and budget cuts, are set to become a powerful political force this fall.

The next red state to join the protest movement could be Arizona, where there is an open Senate seat and where thousands of teachers gathered in Phoenix last week to demand a 20 percent pay raise and more funding for schools.

The growing fervor suggests that labor activism has taken on a new, grass-roots form.

[...]

Lily Eskelsen García, president of the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers’ union, called the movement an “education spring.”

“This is the civics lesson of our time,” she said. “The politicians on both sides of the aisle are rubbing the sleep out of their eyes.”

Note that this is taking place in states where the teachers' unions are barred by law from compelling workers to pay dues, weakening them financially.

…

Meanwhile, in France, Emmanuel Macron's efforts to strip benefits from railway workers has led to the long-anticipated protests:

A strike at railway operator SNCF began Monday evening and will run through Thursday morning, with only one in every eight long-distance trains running and one-in-five shorter regional trips due to depart on Tuesday. Roughly half of RER commuter trains to Paris are running. Eurostar, which runs service between London and Paris, canceled five trains today in each direction, or about one-third of the trains it would run on a normal Tuesday.

Unions say half of SNCF workers are striking, including 77 percent of train drivers. SNCF advised passengers to postpone trips, and television stations showed footage of near empty train stations.

[...]

The strikes are the latest in a series of disruptions that started last month and also involve energy and garbage collection companies, as well as students protesting changes at state-backed universities. Demonstrations across the country have already caused severe disruption in commuter trains and school shutdowns.

Labor unions plan their biggest protest against changes at SNCF, the indebted national railroad, where Macron plans to deny future hires the job security, early retirement and special pensions of existing workers, while opening up train lines to competition. There are 36 days of strikes planned at the train operator over the coming months.

Taking on the railway company’s 74,000 workers will be tough for Macron, after he pushed through a liberalization of France’s labor code and cut taxes on capital in his first year in office. Next, he’s planning to overhaul jobless benefits, simplify France’s retirement systems and streamline parliamentary procedures.

France is deeply divided: 46% say the strike is justified, 53% say it isn't. With the work stoppages likely to be two days out of every five, those numbers could shift: but which way?

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[truthblockchain]

CBDC May Help Bust Economic Sanctions

In just the past three days, central bank digital currencies have been reported to be a means to bust economic sanctions, tools to strengthen local monetary policy and marginally worse versions of payment tech we already have.

The global CBDC conversation really got going in earnest after the Facebook-incubated Libra Consortium was announced to the world, which sparked regulatory backlash and calls for national digital currency experiments. In a recent International Monetary Fund (IMF) report, it’s clear Libra is still front of mind for many central bankers.

In a hypothetical scenario, IMF researchers describe a bait-and-switch where “Big Techs” advertise a corporate-run but fiat-backed stablecoin, only to de-peg them later on: becoming something of a stateless currency unto their own. This is clearly undesirable for central bankers, who wish to exert granular control over monetary policy.

Even before the pandemic-led economic crisis, the global economy was cooling. Global productivity, wage growth, inflation and GDP stagnated in the 2010s, leaving most central banks without the “ammunition” to stimulate sufficiently. With many financial chiefs, like Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell and Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey, eschewing long-standing central bank political independence to call for a coordination of monetary and fiscal policy.

While CBDCs are seen as a panacea, the IMF thinks it could expand central banks’ toolbox, providing new ways to deal with old problems. For instance, CBDCs could allow central banks lower policy rates “below the effective lower bound,” letting them exert better control over their economies.

Still, initial reports back from the world’s most advanced CBDC experiment in China have been wanting. Early still to see how a “digital yuan” might be used for state economic programming, the first trial has painted a scene where people are uninterested in using the novel currency.

The city of Shenzhen and the People’s Bank of China launched a “red envelope” lottery earlier this month, giving away 20 million of the digital yuan (worth around $1.5 million) to locals. Many found the play-money inconvenient and similar to existing payments apps like Alipay.

“It’s especially important to offer convenience and other benefits to promote the use of digital yuan,” a senior economist at PwC China told Reuters. It’s just another bind for the central banks.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.coindesk.com/filecoin-strike-bitcoin-fees-fall-coinbase-censorship%3famp=1

[reportwire]

Florida's political dividing line: Touring I-4 in 2022

Florida’s political dividing line: Touring I-4 in 2022

Republicans dominate Tallahassee, and most of Florida’s electoral map is red, but bright blue Democratic population centers have kept the state — as a whole — reliably purple. Sharp divisions between the parties and their supporters traditionally play out along our so-called “I-4 corridor,” where candidates for all levels of state and federal office focus lots of their time and money. So,…

[don-lichterman]

Monkeypox an 'imminent threat' to public health

Monkeypox an ‘imminent threat’ to public health

New York Health Commissioner Dr. Mary Bassett on Thursday declared monkeypox an imminent threat to public health in the state amid a rise in cases.  The declaration was made as New York received an additional 110,000 doses of the monkeypox vaccine from the federal government and as advocates and lawmakers have raised concerns with the public health officials’ initial response. Local health…

[usasharenews]

Voters, N.C. board: Cawthorn candidate challenge should remain

Voters, N.C. board: Cawthorn candidate challenge should remain

RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — A formal effort to evaluate whether North Carolina Rep. Madison Cawthorn should be disqualified as a candidate because of his involvement in the January 2021 rally that preceded the U.S. Capitol riot should be allowed to continue, voters and election officials told a federal judge. Nearly a dozen North Carolina voters had filed a candidate challenge last month against the…

[tech-latest-blog]

Facebook is presenting its revamped news tab in the US today, reports TechCrunch, and the dispatch will comprise of a submitted local news segment to name some subjects, comprising of a George Floyd-specific segment since Tuesday. The tab can simply be found on your smartphone today just by tapping the hamburger menu, clicking "see more," and figuring out a bunch of different areas. It was previously evaluated starting last October, and Facebook expressed at the time it would be paying the publishers who are included.

In an online FAQ detailing the structure of the latest Facebook News, the business details its editorial strategy, comprising of which publishers it decides to promote and what metrics it uses to pick one story from one source over another. To do as such, the business is utilizing a human group and verifying sources through a effect called the News PageIndex "The team is transparent about the following guidelines and will make curatorial choices independently, not at the direction of Facebook, publishers or advertisers," the FAQ examines. "They will apply the same guidelines and criteria to our coverage about Facebook as we would to any other company or industry."

Facebook Revamped its News Section and Launches in the US Focusing on the Local Sources

Facebook states to ensure as one of its partnered publishers, those publishers require to have a sufficient audience and in like manner pass the business' stability prerequisites, in spite of the fact that the FAQ doesn't clarify where the line in the middle of objectional and good material is. Facebook states it will depend on its current outsider fact-checkers, precisely the same ones who presently help it review COVID-19 material and other fragile disciplines, and precisely the same limited quantities tools it uses to watch out for misleading content, sensational material, and copyright-infringing item.

"Facebook is endeavoring indeed at the news, anyway its history with news coverage is very intricate"

Yet, it remains to be seen to what level Facebook will endeavor to make this editorially curated and paid coordinated effort program a greater concentration inside the business and exactly the amount it will need to cut news organizations in on the money related advantages. Any page is fit today of distributing news short articles and having really those short articles promoted by the News Feed, either normally or through paying Facebook to build the scope of the post.

Facebook's relationship with the news administration is profoundly made intricate and stressed by prominent debates throughout the years alongside the platform's consistent issues directing false data, political decision thinking, and brutal perils and different sorts of hate speech. CEO Mark Zuckerberg considers his platform as a bastion for online complimentary speech; his dismissal to remove President Donald Trump's fierce dangers versus protests a month ago is current proof of the business' presently trustworthy hardline position.

However, Facebook's ads assistance and its algorithmic News Feed have really both added to money-related fights in the standard news market, the slow passing of local news, and the general news literacy of Americans and individuals of different countries around the globe who have entirely depended on uncontrolled and insufficiently directed socials media for details. Keeping that in mind, Facebook is, in any event, endeavoring to make local news a pillar of its news section; the business expresses its collaborated with innumerable local media sources for the segment.

Be that as it may, by and by, the area is essentially the most up to date in an assortment of fruitless endeavors throughout the years to endeavor to join forces with the news coverage showcase. Those incorporate its Google AMP rival Instant Articles and its enormous push for introductory video that brought about mass cutbacks at computerized media business after the business siphoned up measurements and at last moved a long way from concentrating on posts from colossal media pages.

At that point, there was the Trending Topics chaos of 2016, in which Facebook was involved in harboring an enemy of preservationist inclination in the short articles it promoted on its site. The occurring banter and definitive elimination of the Trending Topics work squeezed Zuckerberg to remove his business from editorial decision-making. That, thus, cleared the technique for moderate and far-right media organizations and individuals to begin controlling the platform with incendiary short articles and posts, paranoid fears, and other dicey material that video games Facebook's calculations and reliably circulates virally. Precisely the same techniques are utilized by abroad material farms, foreign disturbing projects, and different groups Facebook now joins as "coordinated inauthentic behavior".

Read more:

Facebook’s Dark Mode is About to Release Soon

Facebook’s ‘Manage Activity’ tool will let You Delete Your Awkward School Days Posts

Facebook Launches its New Experimental App ‘CatchUp’

via TechLatest

[iol247]

I’ve read the plans to reopen the economy. They’re scary.

There is no plan to return to normal.

By Ezra Klein on April 10, 2020 8:20 am

Over the past few days, I’ve been reading the major plans for what comes after social distancing. You can read them, too. There’s one from the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, the left-leaning Center for American Progress, Harvard University’s Safra Center for Ethics, and Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Romer.

I thought, perhaps naively, that reading them would be a comfort — at least then I’d be able to imagine the path back to normal. But it wasn’t. In different ways, all these plans say the same thing: Even if you can imagine the herculean political, social, and economic changes necessary to manage our way through this crisis effectively, there is no normal for the foreseeable future. Until there’s a vaccine, the United States either needs economically ruinous levels of social distancing, a digital surveillance state of shocking size and scope, or a mass testing apparatus of even more shocking size and intrusiveness.

The AEI, CAP, and Harvard plans aren’t identical, but they’re similar. All of them feature a period of national lockdown — in which extreme social distancing is deployed to “flatten the curve” and health and testing capacity is surged to “raise the line.” That’s phase one. Phase two triggers after a set period (45 days for CAP, three months for Harvard) or, in the AEI plan, after 14 days of falling cases and a series of health supply markers.

All of them then imagine a phase two, which relaxes — but does not end — social distancing while implementing testing and surveillance on a mass scale. This is where you must begin imagining the almost unimaginable.

The CAP and Harvard plans both foresee a digital pandemic surveillance state in which virtually every American downloads an app to their phone that geotracks their movements, so if they come into contact with anyone who later is found to have Covid-19, they can be alerted and a period of social quarantine can begin. Similarly, people would scan QR codes when boarding mass transit or entering other high-risk public areas. And GPS tracking could be used to enforce quarantine on those who test positive with the disease, as is being done in Taiwan.

To state the obvious: The technological and political obstacles are massive. While similar efforts have borne fruit in Singapore and South Korea, the US is a very different country, with a more mistrustful, individualistic culture. Already, polling shows that 70 percent of Republicans, and 46 percent of Democrats, strongly oppose using cellphone data to enforce quarantine orders.

The CAP plan tries to answer these concerns, but in trying to imagine an answer, it shows the difficulty of the task. It’s worth quoting the CAP proposal at length:

The entity that hosts the data must be a trusted, nonprofit organization—not private technology companies or the federal government. The app could be developed for a purely public health nonprofit entity such as the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials (ASTHO)—an organization that represents state health officials—which would host the data. Congress or foundations could provide funding to develop and operate the technology. States licensing the app could provide ongoing operational funding to ASTHO, provided states receive federal funding for this purpose.

• Additional protections must include the following:

• The amount of data needed and shared must be minimized

• This system must be transparent

• Data must be collected, secured, and stored within the United States

• Data must be automatically deleted after every 45 days

• The sharing of data with the federal government, except for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), must be prohibited

• The sharing of data with state and local government agencies that are not public health agencies must be prohibited

• The sharing of data with third parties and the sale of data must be prohibited

• Any data shared publicly must be anonymized

As a condition of receiving a COVID-19 test in the future, individuals may be required to download the app, which would include their test result. For others, the app would be voluntary, although the vast majority of people could be expected to download it to see if there are cases in their neighborhood or near their workplace.

I’m not here to say that this, or anything else, is impossible. But it is light-years beyond the kind of political leadership and public-private coordination we’ve seen thus far. Who is going to spearhead the effort? President Donald Trump? House Speaker Nancy Pelosi? Bill Gates? Who is trusted enough, in this country in this moment, to shape this? And even if they could pass it, can we build it, and do so quickly? Force adherence to it, and quickly? Are we really going to deny tests to anyone who refuses to download the surveillance app? And what about communities with less digital savvy?

The alternative to mass surveillance is mass testing. Romer’s proposal is to deploy testing on a scale no one else is contemplating — 22 million tests per day — so that the entire country is being tested every 14 days, and anyone who tests positive can be quickly quarantined. He shows, in a series of useful simulations, that even if the test has a high false-negative rate, the retesting is sufficient to keep the virus contained, and thus the country can return to normalcy rapidly. Of the various plans, this one seems likeliest to permit a true and rapid economic recovery.

But it is hard to imagine a testing effort of this scale, too. So far, America is struggling to get into the millions of tests per week. This plan requires tens of millions per day. Most experts I’ve spoken to doubt that’s realistic anytime soon, though some believe it’s possible, eventually. So far, we’ve added testing capacity largely by repurposing existing labs and platforms. To add more, we need to build more labs, more machines, more tests. And there are already shortages of reagents, swabs, and health workers.

But even if those constraints could be overcome, how are these 22 million daily tests going to be administered? By whom? How do we enforce compliance? If you refuse to get tested, are you fined? Jailed? Cut off from government benefits? Would the Supreme Court consider a proposal like this constitutional?

The AEI proposal is the closest thing to a middle path between these plans. It’s more testing, but nothing approaching Romer’s hopes. It’s more contact tracing, but it doesn’t envision an IT-driven panopticon. But precisely for that reason, what it’s really describing is a yo-yo between extreme lockdown and lighter forms of social distancing, continuing until a vaccine is reached.

This, too, requires some imagination. Will governors who’ve finally, at great effort, reopened parts of their economies really keep throwing them back into lockdown every time ICUs begin to fill? Will Trump have the stomach to push the country back into quarantine after he’s lifted social distancing guidelines? What if unemployment is 17 percent, and his approval rating is at 38 percent?

And even if the political hurdles could be cleared, it’s obvious, reading the AEI proposal, that there’ll be no “V-shaped recovery” of the economy. Scott Gottlieb, the former FDA commissioner who helped craft the plan, says he thinks something like 80 percent of the economy will return — that may sound like a lot, but it’s an economic collapse of Great Depression proportions.

I don’t want anyone to mistake this as an argument for surrendering to the disease. As unlikely as these futures may be, I think the do-nothing argument is even less plausible: It imagines that we simply let a highly lethal virus kill perhaps millions of Americans, hospitalize tens of millions more, and crush the health system, while the rest of us go about our daily economic and social business. That is, in my view, far less likely than the construction of a huge digital surveillance state. I care about my privacy, but not nearly so much as I care about my mother.

My point isn’t to criticize these plans when I have nothing better to offer. Indeed, my point isn’t to criticize them at all. It’s simply to note that these aren’t plans for returning to anything even approaching normal. They either envision life under a surveillance and testing state of dystopian (but perhaps necessary!) proportions, or they envision a long period of economic and public health pain, as we wrestle the disease down only to see it roar back, as seems to be happening in Singapore.

What’s even scarier to consider is that the debate between these plans is far beyond the political debate we’re actually having. As of now, the White House has neither chosen nor begun executing on a plan of its own. That’s a terrible abdication of leadership, but reading through the various proposals, you can see why it’s happened. Imagine you’re the president of the United States in an election year. Which of these futures, with all its costs and risks and pain, would you want to try and sell to the American people?

One final takeaway from all this: If there is literally anything more we can possibly do to accelerate the development of vaccines or therapeutics, we should do it.

Update: After I published this piece, Apple and Google jointly announced a project to embed voluntary contact tracing functionality in their phones, and make the data interoperable across iOS and Android. Read my colleagues at Recode and the Verge for more on that (and here’s some smart analysis from Casey Newton). And Danielle Allen, the head of Harvard’s Safra Center, wrote to tell me that they’ll have a more detailed plan coming next week, and it will differ in some ways from the papers they’ve released so far.

https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/2020/4/10/21215494/coronavirus-plans-social-distancing-economy-recession-depression-unemployment?__twitter_impression=true

[sheminecrafts]

Whether or not the Trump administration bans TikTok, it’s already helping Facebook

On Tuesday, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said that the U.S. is “looking at” banning Chinese social media apps, including the Chinese-owned company TikTok, comparing it to other Chinese companies like Huawei and ZTE that have been deemed national security threats by the current administration. “With respect to Chinese apps on people’s cell phones, I can assure you that the United States will get this one right, too,” Pompeo said.

The fear is the app could be used to surveil or influence Americans, or else that TikTok parent ByteDance could be made to provide the Chinese government with TikTok’s data on its U.S.-based users — of which there are at least 165 million. India, calling TikTok a “threat to sovereignty and integrity,” decided to ban the app late last week, saying it had similar concerns.

Though security experts disagree over how concerned the U.S. should be about TikTok, the move would would undoubtedly hobble what has become one of the fastest-growing social media businesses on the planet, with 800 million monthly active users worldwide, half of whom are under age 24. In the meantime, the mere suggestion of a ban is proving a boon to TikTok’s biggest rival, Facebook — and notably at a time when the U.S. company faces growing scrutiny over its decision not to take action on multiple controversial posts from Donald Trump.

The threat is already prompting some to speculate that Pompeo’s warning was politically motivated. In a new interview with Axios, for example, L.A.-based talent manager John Shahidi observes that TikTok users have said they were partially responsible for a Trump rally in Oklahoma two weeks ago that failed to deliver huge crowds.

Shahidi — whose agency currently oversees nine “channels” on TikTok that collectively enjoy than 100 million followers — doesn’t doubt the two are related. “I’m on TikTok a lot,” Shahidi says, and “there are no Trump supporters, no official Trump account; no one who is from his team is on TikTok.” Is it “just coincidence that we’re heading toward [the election], and the one app that doesn’t support him — with everything happening in the world — we’re going to talk about taking down TikTok?” he adds.

A shifting landscape

Either way, TikTok influencers are more actively promoting their other social media channels, including Facebook’s Instagram, to their followers as a kind of contingency plan. Soon to join them is rising social media star Pierson Wodzynski, a 21-year-old who ran track in high school and was taking a break from studying communications in college when, in January, a friend invited her to participate in a show on AwesomenessTV, a YouTube channel that has more than 8 million subscribers.

The show’s set-up centered around nabbing a date with social media star Brent Rivera, who has 13 million YouTube subscribers, 19.8 million Instagram followers, and more than 30 million TikTok fans. But afterward, Wodzynski found herself with the L.A.-based talent agency that Rivera cofounded two years ago called Amp Studios and in recent months, aided by special guest appearances by Rivera, she has built a substantial fanbase herself, with 500,000 subscribers on YouTube, 455,000 Instagram followers, and a stunning 4.1 million fans on TikTok.

Wodzynski says her followers seem to like the comedy bits she develops, such a recent series on the “things that go wrong when you’re running late,” and another on the “Appdashians,” wherein each character she plays is a different social media company. (Notably, Facebook is the old grandmother character.)  Says Wodzynski, who comes across as both confident and affable, “I’m so unbelievably myself [on social media], it’s crazy.”

Little wonder that she’s concerned about the TikTok’s future in the U.S. Partly, she simply enjoys it. (“It’s just a great app to escape, and it’s so different, with a vast music library and editing software that other apps don’t have.”) But it’s also the source of most of her income, she says, explaining that she helps promote the brands with which Amp Studios works, including Chipotle. (“A lot of times, it’s me dancing to a popular song and holding the product, or developing a creative advertisement so it looks enjoyable.”)

Wodzynski says she is “ready for anything,” and that if the U.S. bans the platform, she trusts it will do so for legitimate reasons. Besides, she says, “There are many other roads to take your content.”

It’s a sentiment that’s echoed by Max Levine, who cofounded Amp with Rivera, and who advises all of the firm’s talent to diversify across social platforms. “Diversify is a good mantra for life,” says Levine, who learned this lesson early when Vine — the once-popular video app that Twitter acquired, then subsequently shut down — “fizzled and died.”

Land and expand

Levine points to early Vine stars like Logan Paul and Rivera himself who “were smart and focused on building platforms on Instagram and YouTube” and who not only emerged unscathed when Vine was shuttered but whose popularity ballooned afterward. He says that Amp’s clients have always “promoted other socials on TikTok,” and that he’d prefer that they not start becoming too aggressive on this front. “I think if every other TikTok mentions [a call to action], it could be a lot.”

Yet it’s starting to happen, and with the threat of a ban in the air, Wodzynski — who says she saw her view count go down with India’s recent ban of TikTok — isn’t immune to the impulse. “Actually, later today I will be posting something on Tiktok about this whole banning thing and reminding people that if they want to follow my Instagram and Youtube that ‘this is what I post there,'” she says.

“I do that pretty regularly, but I’m going to step it up in more in the coming days and weeks.”

In the meantime, Facebook will be ready. Yesterday in India, Instagram rolled out a video-sharing feature called Reels to fill the void left by TikTok that sounds very much like a clone. The in-app tool invites users to record 15-second videos set to music and audio, then upload them to their stories.

As CNN notes, Facebook began testing the feature in Brazil last November. The feature is now available in France and Germany, too.

Indeed, though Tiktok was not India’s sole target  — it also indefinitely banned 58 other apps and services provided by Chinese-based firms, including Tencent’s WeChat — the country’s government enjoys a good relationship with Facebook, which recently nabbed a 10% stake in local telecom giant Jio Platforms. In fact, in February, before a trip to India, Donald Trump talked about Facebook and the ranking that both he and India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi enjoy on the platform.

He said Modi is “number two” on Facebook in terms of followers, and that he is number one as told to him directly by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

As reported in the Economic Times, Trump said at the time: “I’m going to India next week, and we’re talking about — you know, they have 1.5 billion people. And Prime Minister Modi is number two on Facebook, number two. Think of that. You know who number one is? Trump. You believe that? Number one. I just found out.”

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On Tuesday, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said that the U.S. is “looking at” banning Chinese social media apps, including the Chinese-owned company TikTok, comparing it to other Chinese companies like Huawei and ZTE that have been deemed national security threats by the current administration. “With respect to Chinese apps on people’s cell phones, I can assure you that the United States will get this one right, too,” Pompeo said.

The fear is the app could be used to surveil or influence Americans, or else that TikTok parent ByteDance could be made to provide the Chinese government with TikTok’s data on its U.S.-based users — of which there are at least 165 million. India, calling TikTok a “threat to sovereignty and integrity,” decided to ban the app late last week, saying it had similar concerns.

Though security experts disagree over how concerned the U.S. should be about TikTok, the move would would undoubtedly hobble what has become one of the fastest-growing social media businesses on the planet, with 800 million monthly active users worldwide, half of whom are under age 24. In the meantime, the mere suggestion of a ban is proving a boon to TikTok’s biggest rival, Facebook — and notably at a time when the U.S. company faces growing scrutiny over its decision not to take action on multiple controversial posts from Donald Trump.

The threat is already prompting some to speculate that Pompeo’s warning was politically motivated. In a new interview with Axios, for example, L.A.-based talent manager John Shahidi observes that TikTok users have said they were partially responsible for a Trump rally in Oklahoma two weeks ago that failed to deliver huge crowds.

Shahidi — whose agency currently oversees nine “channels” on TikTok that collectively enjoy than 100 million followers — doesn’t doubt the two are related. “I’m on TikTok a lot,” Shahidi says, and “there are no Trump supporters, no official Trump account; no one who is from his team is on TikTok.” Is it “just coincidence that we’re heading toward [the election], and the one app that doesn’t support him — with everything happening in the world — we’re going to talk about taking down TikTok?” he adds.

A shifting landscape

Either way, TikTok influencers are more actively promoting their other social media channels, including Facebook’s Instagram, to their followers as a kind of contingency plan. Soon to join them is rising social media star Pierson Wodzynski, a 21-year-old who ran track in high school and was taking a break from studying communications in college when, in January, a friend invited her to participate in a show on AwesomenessTV, a YouTube channel that has more than 8 million subscribers.

The show’s set-up centered around nabbing a date with social media star Brent Rivera, who has 13 million YouTube subscribers, 19.8 million Instagram followers, and more than 30 million TikTok fans. But afterward, Wodzynski found herself with the L.A.-based talent agency that Rivera cofounded two years ago called Amp Studios and in recent months, aided by special guest appearances by Rivera, she has built a substantial fanbase herself, with 500,000 subscribers on YouTube, 455,000 Instagram followers, and a stunning 4.1 million fans on TikTok.

Wodzynski says her followers seem to like the comedy bits she develops, such a recent series on the “things that go wrong when you’re running late,” and another on the “Appdashians,” wherein each character she plays is a different social media company. (Notably, Facebook is the old grandmother character.)  Says Wodzynski, who comes across as both confident and affable, “I’m so unbelievably myself [on social media], it’s crazy.”

Little wonder that she’s concerned about the TikTok’s future in the U.S. Partly, she simply enjoys it. (“It’s just a great app to escape, and it’s so different, with a vast music library and editing software that other apps don’t have.”) But it’s also the source of most of her income, she says, explaining that she helps promote the brands with which Amp Studios works, including Chipotle. (“A lot of times, it’s me dancing to a popular song and holding the product, or developing a creative advertisement so it looks enjoyable.”)

Wodzynski says she is “ready for anything,” and that if the U.S. bans the platform, she trusts it will do so for legitimate reasons. Besides, she says, “There are many other roads to take your content.”

It’s a sentiment that’s echoed by Max Levine, who cofounded Amp with Rivera, and who advises all of the firm’s talent to diversify across social platforms. “Diversify is a good mantra for life,” says Levine, who learned this lesson early when Vine — the once-popular video app that Twitter acquired, then subsequently shut down — “fizzled and died.”

Land and expand

Levine points to early Vine stars like Logan Paul and Rivera himself who “were smart and focused on building platforms on Instagram and YouTube” and who not only emerged unscathed when Vine was shuttered but whose popularity ballooned afterward. He says that Amp’s clients have always “promoted other socials on TikTok,” and that he’d prefer that they not start becoming too aggressive on this front. “I think if every other TikTok mentions [a call to action], it could be a lot.”

Yet it’s starting to happen, and with the threat of a ban in the air, Wodzynski — who says she saw her view count go down with India’s recent ban of TikTok — isn’t immune to the impulse. “Actually, later today I will be posting something on Tiktok about this whole banning thing and reminding people that if they want to follow my Instagram and Youtube that ‘this is what I post there,'” she says.

“I do that pretty regularly, but I’m going to step it up in more in the coming days and weeks.”

In the meantime, Facebook will be ready. Yesterday in India, Instagram rolled out a video-sharing feature called Reels to fill the void left by TikTok that sounds very much like a clone. The in-app tool invites users to record 15-second videos set to music and audio, then upload them to their stories.

As CNN notes, Facebook began testing the feature in Brazil last November. The feature is now available in France and Germany, too.

Indeed, though Tiktok was not India’s sole target  — it also indefinitely banned 58 other apps and services provided by Chinese-based firms, including Tencent’s WeChat — the country’s government enjoys a good relationship with Facebook, which recently nabbed a 10% stake in local telecom giant Jio Platforms. In fact, in February, before a trip to India, Donald Trump talked about Facebook and the ranking that both he and India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi enjoy on the platform.

He said Modi is “number two” on Facebook in terms of followers, and that he is number one as told to him directly by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

As reported in the Economic Times, Trump said at the time: “I’m going to India next week, and we’re talking about — you know, they have 1.5 billion people. And Prime Minister Modi is number two on Facebook, number two. Think of that. You know who number one is? Trump. You believe that? Number one. I just found out.”

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