The CEOs of Apple, Google, Facebook, and Amazon are set to testify before Congress in an antitrust hearing +W H secretly warns 11 cities must act
What is the common denominator ? In a word, I got the CEO story about Amazon, Google, Apple from BUSINESS insider AUSTRALIA, not the USA version of Business insider. I.e. the genesis of both is secrecy for its own sake, which means that the USA is no longer having a free press, but one controlled by Oligarch's who kowtow to Trump or are absorbed by fake drama curated by Trump. As Trump has waged war on freedom of information and gotten 1/3rd the USA to imbibe NONSENSE , the currents of real news and information are being restricted in N. America. This restriction of real news and worse is the hallmark of tyranny and we are well on that slippery slope unless Trump is removed from power. The third story is about COVID 19 cheap tests.
The danger here is that what we could be doing in terms of policy deliberations is being deliberately contaminated by an emerging Trump despotism and that it will take decades to restore information flow.
Trump drama and theatrics published to glorify the rotting essence of Trump's rotting ego is more important than substantial stories and this is how despotisms control their population.
Here is the first of the stories buried by fake Trump Drama
Quote
The CEOs of Apple, Google, Facebook, and Amazon are set to testify before Congress in a historic antitrust hearing next week. Here's what's at stake for each company.
HUGH LANGLEY, AARON HOLMES
JUL 26, 2020, 4:28 AM
Getty/Carsten Koall/Michael Kovac/Business Insider composite
- The tech CEOs of Apple, Google, Amazon, and Facebook will appear before Congress in a first-of-its-kind hearing on Wednesday.
- They will be testifying as part of an antitrust investigation into the dominance of digital platforms that has been running since last June. The CEOs, who will likely appear remotely over video, will have to defend the growing power of their tech companies to sceptical lawmakers.
- Here’s why each CEO has been asked to appear, the types of questions they will likely be asked, and how the day might play out.
- Visit Business Insider’s homepage for more stories.
The CEOs of four tech giants will appear before Congress next week, where they will have to defend their companies’ growing power to sceptical lawmakers.
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Apple CEO Tim Cook, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and Sundar Pichai of Alphabet, which owns Google and YouTube, will testify as part of an ongoing investigation by the House Judiciary’s Antitrust subcommittee into the dominance of digital platforms.
Since June, the subcommittee has held hearings with smaller competitors, which have testified over the alleged monopolistic practices of these giants. Now, all four tech titans will appear together to answer questions based on the committee’s findings.
The hearing is scheduled for Wednesday at noon ET, sources tell Axios, after it was postponed from Monday due to a memorial for the late Rep. John Lewis.
Due to the ongoing global pandemic, the CEOs are expected to appear remotely via video call software. Lawmakers are hoping to get the hearings done in a day, and considering the expanse of issues on the table, that will be no easy task.
Here’s why each CEO has been asked to appear, the types of questions they’re likely to get, and what’s at stake for each company.
REUTERS/Brandon Wade/File Photo
Google is currently the subject of multiple antitrust investigations from numerous state attorneys general, but Wednesday will be the first time since 2018 that we will see CEO Sundar Pichai go before Congress.
Lawmakers will likely be focused on Google’s dominance in the search and advertising market, so expect them to quiz Pichai on whether and how the company has kept a fair playing field.
Bloomberg recently reported that Google’s changes to search have made it more expensive for online businesses to reach customers – expect the committee to probe Google on these sorts of topics as it tries to unpack a vastly complex digital business.
Lawmakers may also interrogate how Google’s digital advertising business has profited from toxic content online. Similarly, they may also ask about hate speech on YouTube, although some of these topics could draw away the focus from antitrust issues.
Finally, it’s possible Google could get asked about China. In fact, it was Rep. David Cicilline of Rhode Island who grilled Pichai on China during the 2018 hearing, and the topic has come up again recently with reports that the company is still trying to find ways into the market.
Congress could also question Google about the antitrust investigations it currently faces from several different states. Earlier this month, Politico reported that California was preparing to launch its own investigation into the company, making it the 49th state to do so.
Apple
Getty Images
To date, Apple has managed to avoid more of the antitrust backlash than some other members on this list, but there’s a growing concern among lawmakers that the company’s App Store – and broader app ecosystem – is hurting developers.
Apple has restrictive rules for App Store developers, including a 15-30% tax on in-app purchases that third parties have long argued is unfair, though Apple says it’s in line with competitors’ rates. Spotify has been one of the most vocal about the subject, and last month Basecamp, developer of the Hey email app, also took its grievances public.
The App Store is Apple’s second-biggest revenue maker after the iPhone, but Apple’s own apps aren’t subject to the same rules as third parties, and it’s long been argued that this gives Apple another unfair advantage over competition.
One particularly murky area is Apple’s approval process for new apps, so expect lawmakers to try to probe some of the secretive behind-the-scenes mechanisms.
How do we know Apple is taking this seriously? It recently commissioned a study defending the 30% cut, which it says is similar to those charged by Google, Amazon, and other. That may be true, but the committee is likely less interested in the comparable size of the revenue share, and more interested in the other ways Apple might be hurting developers.
AP Photo/Andrew Harnik
Facebook is likely to face scrutiny over its past acquisitions, which critics say Facebook has used as a tactic to neutralise competition threats.
The company acquired Giphy earlier this year for $US400 million, which set off antitrust alarm bells – critics said Giphy’s reach across the web could help expand Facebook’s already-massive ad tracking operation.
Facebook has bought a slew of companies large and small in the 16 years since its founding. Its acquisition of Instagram and WhatsApp in 2012 and 2014, respectively, cemented Facebook as a global tech giant. In 2013, Facebook purchased Onavo Mobile, an app that uses AI to identify other companies that could make for good purchases. (Facebook later shut down the app after controversy.)
The Federal Trade Commission is already investigating Facebook over its recent acquisitions.
Lawmakers are also likely to question Facebook’s measures to stop the spread of misinformation and hate speech on its platform, especially amid the COVID-19 pandemic and run-up to the 2020 election. Those questions dominated Zuckerberg’s last congressional testimony, which had been framed as a hearing on Facebook’s cryptocurrency venture.
Facebook has faced prolonged backlash from Democrats for its refusal to fact-check posts and campaign ads from President Donald Trump. Scientists and public health authorities have also decried the spread of COVID-19 misinformation on the platform.
Amazon
REUTERS/Joshua Roberts
Amazon has already garnered heavy scrutiny from antitrust regulators in the past year over its treatment of third-party companies that sell products through its website.
A Wall Street Journal investigation in April found that Amazon frequently used data gleaned from third-party sellers on its site to shape plans to develop its own private label products – that revelation kicked off a sweeping antitrust investigation into the company in the EU.
More recently, dozens of investors and entrepreneurs told The Wall Street Journal that Amazon invested in their companies, gaining access to proprietary information, before launching competitors. Many of the startups were crushed in the process, and said they were unable to compete with Amazon once it launched its own service. Amazon denied the allegations that it used confidential information. “Any legitimate disputes about intellectual property ownership are rightly resolved in the courts,†a spokesperson told Business Insider.
Amazon could also face more topical questions regarding the COVID-19 pandemic, which has caused an unexpected surge in online orders and strained Amazon’s fulfillment centres.
The safety of workers at Amazon warehouses has been a point of contention. Several workers went on strike earlier this year to protest working conditions, and multiple Amazon warehouse workers have since died from the coronavirus. Amazon insists that it has provided ample protective equipment and cleaned its warehouses regularly to reduce transmission.
Wednesday’s hearings will also mark the first time CEO Jeff Bezos has ever testified before Congress in the company’s history. His history of feuding with President Trump and ownership of The Washington Post may also be a topic of questioning.
end of quote
It is a holy SHIT moment when something this consequential is being knocked out of the news feed in N. America. And it is deliberate.
Next, an attempt to control INFORMATION by the White House as a way to enslave dissident cities. And Trump did not want this crucial information out to the voters
National Institute Of Allergy And Infectious Diseases Director Dr. Anthony Fauci looks on during a press conference about the coronavirus outbreak in the press briefing room at the White House on March 17, 2020 in Washington, DC. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
White House secretly warns 11 cities must take "aggressive" action to stop spread of COVID-19
"This is a pandemic. You cannot hide it under the carpet"
JULIA CONLEY
JULY 26, 2020 4:03PM (UTC)
This article originally appeared at Common Dreams. It is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. Feel free to republish and share widely.
Aprivate warning about rising coronavirus cases made to leaders in 11 cities by White House official Dr. Deborah Birx on Wednesday is the latest sign that the Trump administration must end the secrecy surrounding its response to the pandemic, an investigative journalism group said Wednesday.
In an exclusive report about Birx's Wednesday phone call to city officials, the Center for Public Integrity (CPI) revealed that Baltimore, Cleveland, Columbus, Indianapolis, Las Vegas, Miami, Minneapolis, Nashville, New Orleans, Pittsburgh, and St. Louis have all been identified this week as cities where immediate, "aggressive" action is needed to mitigate their coronavirus outbreaks.
All the cities are seeing increases in coronavirus test positivity rates. Birx told officials that as soon as even a slight climb in positivity rates is detected, city leaders must begin mitigation efforts such as contact tracing, closing restaurants, and urging residents to wear masks.
"If you wait another three or four or even five days, you'll start to see a dramatic increase in cases," Birx, the White House's coronavirus response coordinator, said on the call.
According to Vanderbilt University researchers, Nashville's positivity rate has already been going up for several weeks.
Public health experts identified Birx's private call, which was closed to the press, as the latest evidence that the White House is keeping key information about the pandemic from the public—a trend that could continue to weaken the nation's ability to mitigate the spread of Covid-19.
"This is a pandemic. You cannot hide it under the carpet," Bill Hanage, a Harvard epidemiologist, told CPI. "The best way to deal with a crisis or a natural disaster is to be straight with people, to earn their trust, and to give the information they need to make decisions for themselves and their communities."
The call came less than a week after CPI reported on a list of 18 states which the White House had privately identified as being in the pandemic "red zone," meaning they each had more than 100 new coronavirus cases per 100,000 people in the last week.
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Dr. Ashish Jha, director of the Harvard Global Health Institute, wondered why information about "red zone" states is not being disseminated to the public on a regular basis, allowing people to make choices about the amount of contact they have with others while cases are going up.
"The fact that it's not public makes no sense to me," Jha told CPI. "Why are we hiding this information from the American people?"
Neil Ralston, a journalism professor in St. Louis, also asked on Twitter why the White House would want to keep secret the need for aggressive action in his city.
CPI reported that while hundreds of emergency managers and political leaders from the states and cities in question were on the call, Baltimore's health department was not informed of the call. In order to get vital public health information promptly to the public, one epidemiologist told CPI, the White House must look beyond communicating with elected officials.
"It's not just people who are holding office who need to make decisions," Caitlin Rivers of Johns Hopkins University said. "The more that we can provide information to people to keep themselves and their families safe, the better off we'll be."
end of quote
Now for the third story buried by fake Trump drama meant to curate nonsense boviated out in order to satisfy the ego of despot Trump
A quick, cheap test would help stop COVID-19. So why don't we have one?
USA TODAY
One major reason COVID-19 is raging out of control across much of the country: the current system of testing catches only a tiny fraction of people while they are contagious.
It's now clear as many as 40% of people who contract the coronavirus that causes the disease don't know they have it. Others are contagious a few days before they know they're sick. If more people knew when they were infectious, they would likely stay home and not pass on the virus, slowing or even stopping the outbreak.
But the test that's most commonly used to diagnose COVID-19, known as a PCR test, requires analysis in a lab using expensive equipment. With the current surge in cases in Southern and Western states, and a shortage of supplies to run the tests, it routinely takes three to five days – often a week or longer – to return results.
More than 750,000 tests are conducted a day in the United States with more than 50,000 new positives nearly every day this month.
A growing chorus of scientists argue that while PCR may be a good tool in hospitals to identify precisely how much virus a patient is carrying, it's not enough to stop the pandemic.
Instead, people need to know they're contagious when they're contagious, which means they should be tested at least a few times a week.
"That could be one of our most important interventions as we come into the fall to prevent large outbreaks from happening," said Stephen Kissler, a research fellow at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
"I'm on board with (this) thinking," agreed Dr. Benjamin Pinsky, medical director of the clinical virology laboratory at Stanford University. "I think that would be quite useful."
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Someone who tests negative could visit an aging parent or grandparent without worrying about risking their lives. Teachers could walk into their classrooms with confidence, knowing that no one was harboring the virus. The dental chair would get a little less scary.
"We still are not in a circumstance where we have quick turnaround diagnostics the way we need," Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health said in Friday webinar.
Making tests faster, cheaper, easier
A rapid, low-cost diagnostic is technologically feasible and getting closer to reality.
At Massachusetts Institute of Technology, researchers are collaborating with a team at 3M to develop and scale such a test. Before the pandemic, MIT chemical engineer Hadley Sikes had developed prototypes to detect malaria, tuberculosis and dengue.
If one for COVID-19 works, it could deliver results within 10 minutes. All someone would need to do is add a bodily fluid to a specially made piece of paper that changes color to indicate a positive or negative. No formal training or fancy machines needed.
The National Institutes of Health is supporting development of this test and others with money, daily advice and a Shark-Tank-like competition, Sikes said. It's part of a $1.5 billion federal initiative called Radical Acceleration of Diagnostics (or RADx) to speed the pace of diagnostic development.
"The world needs as many useful tests as possible as fast as possible," Sikes said.
Her team's goal is to develop millions of these pregnancy-test like diagnostics every day, first in the United States and then around the world. Although Sikes said she couldn't commit to a specific timeline, theoretically, tens of millions of these tests could be produced in time for the start of school in September.
How much does accuracy matter?
An early review of this type of rapid test showed it accurately identified people with COVID-19 only about half the time. But it was the right half, said Dr. Michael Mina, an assistant professor of epidemiology at Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, who has been leading the effort to develop a fast, frequent testing approach.
This test might miss some people with low levels of virus in their system, but most of those would already be on the road to recovery, with such low levels they'd unlikely be contagious.
Whether you're infectious or not depends on how much virus your body is producing, Sikes said.
As someone is falling ill, the virus reproduces incredibly quickly, so they wouldn't stay at low levels for more than a few hours, Mina said on a recent This Week in Virology podcast. Odds are slim the person would test themselves in that exact window and miss a burgeoning infection.
And even if the test overlooked a few infected people, another test a few days later when they are more infectious would almost certainly be positive, Mina said.
Dave O'Connor, a professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said tests can miss lots of people with low levels of the virus and yet have a profound impact on transmission.
"You'll still have some embers" with a rapid, less accurate test, O'Connor said. But much of the COVID-19 transmission seems to come from super-spreaders – people with extraordinarily high viral loads in a position to infect a lot of other people. "If that's correct, then those are the people you'll need (to identify) to extinguish much of the fire."
And a rapid test taken frequently should be able to do that.
There would still be a role, O'Connor and others said, for PCR testing, in doctor's offices and hospitals, where a precise diagnosis could be crucial for treatment. Other types of tests are also in use or under development, each with strengths and weaknesses, suitable in different contexts, said Stanford's Pinsky, who is developing another type of test, as is O'Connor.
Waiting on regulatory approval
A big hang-up now is that regulators haven't yet signed off on this type of rapid test, out of concern for its accuracy. And companies are not pursuing approval for such tests, because they don't think the FDA will give its okay, Mina said.
"No one is stepping forward because the message they are receiving clearly from the FDA is that the tests must approach the analytical sensitivity of PCR," he said. "But this should not be the criteria. It neglects how the tests are used."
For its part, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration said it has approved six so-called point of care (POC) tests, which return results quickly – though these cannot be done without a lab or a trained professional.
"For accuracy/sensitivity of POC tests, the FDA remains committed to facilitating the availability of reliable, efficient diagnostic tests for COVID-19," according to FDA spokeswoman Nicole Mueller. "The agency considers the level of sensitivity in connection with the potential benefits and potential risks of any diagnostic test when evaluating an (Emergency Use Authorization) request."
Daniel Larremore, a co-author with Mina on the paper reviewing the tests, said regulators may be particularly leery of allowing less sensitive tests because of criticism they faced earlier in the pandemic. To try to relieve a logjam of testing in March, the FDA opened the door to more than 200 antibody tests, later recalling authorization for many that proved useless.
"There may be some scars there from the past decision," said Larremore, a mathematician and assistant professor at the University of Colorado Boulder's Biofrontiers Institute.
The FDA's rules are well intentioned, said O'Connor, but providing the highest quality of data may not be as important when so many people are sick and suffering.
"The enormous burden of cases right here and now and the impact it's going to have on society, especially when schools have a tough time reopening, demands innovation, demands creativity, and demands that the government enable types testing and types of novel approaches that might never be considered under other, non-pandemic situations," he said.
Nate Grubaugh, an assistant professor of epidemiology at Yale University, said it's unlikely enough rapid tests could be made quickly enough to transform the pandemic. And he worries that while each individual test would be low-cost, doing them repeatedly would end up being expensive, creating another disparity between poor and wealthy communities.
Fundamentally, "speed and availability of testing need to go up dramatically across the country," said Grubaugh, who is developing a test that relies on saliva instead of sampling from the upper nose as is done with PCR tests. "It'll be a combination of lots of things that get us there."
Contact Weintraub at kweintraub@usatoday.com
Health and patient safety coverage at USA TODAY is made possible in part by a grant from the Masimo Foundation for Ethics, Innovation and Competition in Healthcare. The Masimo Foundation does not provide editorial input.
End of quote
Control information and the dialogue, and a massive amount of mythology gets generated. This is NOT unique, but has dangerous implications. See a counter part in science
https://www.businessinsider.com.au/animation-reveals-invisible-center-of-solar-system-not-sun-2020-7
quote
A scientist's mesmerising animation shows how our entire solar system orbits an unseen centre — and it's not the sun
MORGAN MCFALL-JOHNSEN
An artist’s concept of our solar system showing a sense of scale and distance.
- Our solar system orbits an invisible point at its centre called the barycenter, from which its mass is evenly distributed.
- Even the sun orbits this point – so the centre of the solar system doesn’t always align with the centre of our star.
- Planetary scientist James O’Donoghue made an animation to show how the sun, Jupiter, and Saturn play tug of war around the solar system’s barycenter.
- Visit Business Insider’s homepage for more stories.
It’s common knowledge that the sun is the centre of the solar system. Around it, the planets orbit – along with a thick belt of asteroids, some meteor fields, and a handful of far-travelling comets.
But that’s not the whole story.
“Instead, everything orbits the solar system centre of mass,†James O’Donoghue, a planetary scientist at the Japanese space agency, JAXA, recently explained on Twitter. “Even the sun.â€
That centre of mass, called the barycenter, is the point of an object at which it can be balanced perfectly, with all its mass distributed evenly on all sides. In our solar system, that point rarely lines up with the centre of the sun.
To demonstrate this, O’Donoghue created the animation below, which shows how the sun, Saturn, and Jupiter play tug-of-war around the barycenter, pulling our star in looping mini-orbits.
In his free time, O’Donoghue makes animations to show how the physics of planets, stars, and the speed of light work.
“The natural thinking is that we orbit the sun’s centre, but that very rarely happens,†he said. “It’s very rare for the solar system’s centre of mass to align with the sun’s centre.â€
The sun’s movement is exaggerated in the video above to make it more visible, but our star does circle millions of kilometers around the barycenter – sometimes passing over it, sometimes straying away from it.
Much of that movement comes from Jupiter’s gravity. The sun makes up 99.8% of the solar system’s mass, but Jupiter contains most of the remaining 1.2%. That mass pulls on the sun ever so gently.
“The sun actually orbits Jupiter slightly,†O’Donoghue said.
Within the solar system, planets and their moons have their own barycenter. Earth and the moon do a simpler dance, with the barycenter remaining inside Earth. O’Donoghue made a video of that, too:
The animation also shows how the Earth and moon will move over the next three years, in 3D. (The distance between Earth and the moon is not to scale.)
Pluto and its moon, Charon, do something similar, but with a unique twist: The barycenter is always outside of Pluto.
So, every planetary system orbits an invisible point, including the star or planet that appears to be at the centre. Barycenters sometimes help astronomers find hidden planets circling other stars, since they can calculate that the system contains mass they can’t see.
“The planets do orbit the sun of course,†O’Donoghue said. “We are just being pedantic about the situation.â€
end of quote
The fact is, that in N. America an uneducated public fixated upon fake Trump despotism hand outs will NOT see such information. Instead, everything is being sucked into worship and fixation upon the psychopathology of dictator Trump. I.e. this story about the unseen center of the Solar System was ALSO not in Business insider, N. America but was prominently displayed in Business insider Australia. Same as the situation of the other three stories
In a word, the free distribution of INFORMATION is being co opted by the Trump despotism. And this is dictatorship DNA of the first rank.
Who is being cheated ? In a word, Trump wants the US Population as superstitious and lied to as the Egypt of Ramses II, who turned a tactical draw and strategic defeat at the battle of Kadesh, in about 1279 BC in Northern Syria into a halograpy of lies by a propaganda ministry which was derisively called in Egypt "the house of lies". This narrowing of information and stupid incantation of fake drama is no different than Pharaoh Ramses II who at the temple of Abu Simbel (also Abu Simbal, Ebsambul or Isambul) where the faker, i.e. the psychotic pharaoh made a strategic defeat of the first magnitude (Kadesh was lost forever to Egypt) into a rousing affirmation of how the Egyptian God Amun allegedly favored Ramses II, whereas Egypt was strategically nixed as a significant player in Fertile Crescent geo politics
Magical thinking as demanded by Trump will in the end bankrupt America. Just as Imperial Egypt never recovered from the chaos and lying of Ramses II.
Andrew Beckwith, PhD