Avert your eyes! My Sunday morning look at incompetency, corruption and policy failures:
• The age of the Silicon Valley ‘moonshot’ is over:Big Tech’s cost-cutting and layoffs are another nail in the coffin for the industry’s most ambitious and costly projects. (Washington Post)
• Rupert Murdoch’s deposition in $1.6 billion defamation case is ‘a nightmare’ for Fox News, legal experts say: First Amendment scholars say defamation case against Fox News is “unusually strong.” (Grid) see also Fox stars privately bashed election fraud claims the network pushed (Axios) see also What Fox News Hosts Said Privately vs. Publicly About Voter Fraud (New York Times)
• The covid response showed the U.S. how to solve childhood hunger. Why are we backtracking? Special pandemic aid programs pushed child hunger to historic lows, even as schools and businesses closed — and many U.S. kids could now face a “hunger cliff” as these covid-era measures end. (Grid)
• A Basic iPhone Feature Helps Criminals Steal Your Entire Digital Life: The passcode that unlocks your phone can give thieves access to your money and data; ‘it’s like a treasure box’ (Wall Street Journal)
• This “Climate-Friendly” Fuel Comes With an Astronomical Cancer Risk: Almost half of products cleared so far under the new federal biofuels program are not in fact biofuels — and the EPA acknowledges that the plastic-based ones may present an “unreasonable risk” to human health or the environment. (ProPublica)
• The man who launched the vaccine wars: Andrew Wakefield is still trying to fool the medical establishment. (UnHerd)
• The Everyday People Spreading Political Propaganda Online for Fun and/or Profit: Most of these individual digital propagandists’ bot accounts take advantage of online anonymity (although some—especially those seeking ad revenue—did automate social media profiles that used their real names). They all depend to some degree on bots, sockpuppets, or other automated features of the web, including trending and recommendation algorithms. And definitionally, they all engaged in at least some inherently political work. The influencers are not those who use bots simply to sell regular commercial products, they are all using digital tools to sell political ideas. (Slate)
• ‘They should be charged’: Thousands of nurses obtained fake diplomas and provided care without proper training: More than 7,600 aspiring nurses cheated the health care system and obtained fraudulent nursing degrees from three South Florida nursing schools, according to federal authorities, in a scheme health care professionals say could undermine trust in the profession. “I’m in South Florida. It’s a hotbed of fraud, whether it’s identity fraud, or PPP fraud, and health care fraud, but this is something that we have not seen before,” (Yahoo)
• Inside the Dissident Fringe, Where the New Right Meets the Far Left, and Everyone’s Bracing For Apocalypse: Preppers, techies, hippies, and yuppies are converging on the American West, the safest place to “exit” a society gone haywire. (Vanity Fair)
• Russell Wilson’s first year with Broncos: ‘Too much influence,’ too few wins in disorganized disaster: Seven months earlier, in February 2022, Wilson punctuated his growing frustration with Carroll and general manager John Schneider by making the most fateful power play in the history of the franchise. (The Athletic)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with Dr. Maria Vassalou, chief investment officer of multi-asset solutions at Goldman Sachs Asset Management. She was a Professor of Finance at Columbia Business School where her academic research led her to establish many of the investment principles she employs today. At Columbia, she did consulting work for numerous institutions before joining Soros Capital Management and S.A.C. Capital Advisors.
Tuition Revenue Has Fallen at 61% of Colleges During the Pandemic
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
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