There are now businesses that sell fake people. On the website Generated.Photos, you can buy a “unique, worry-free” fake person for $2.99, or 1,000 people for $1,000. If you just need a couple of fake people — for characters in a video game, or to make your company website appear more diverse — you can get their photos for free on ThisPersonDoesNotExist.com. New York Times
The furious race to develop a coronavirus vaccine played out against a presidential election, between a pharmaceutical giant and a biotech upstart, with the stakes as high as they could get. New York Times
The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists‘ 2020 investigation, FinCEN Files, shows how big banks have profited from serving shadowy characters even after authorities fined them for earlier failures. ICIJ
The fightback against Big Tech’s feudal lords has begun. The use of data, after all, is now the world’s biggest business. Some $1.4trn of the combined $1.9trn market value of Alphabet (the owner of Google) and Facebook, comes from users’ data and the firms’ mining of it, after stripping out the value of their cash, physical and intangible assets, and accumulated research and development. The Economist
An inside look at how Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos built one of the largest and most influential economic forces in the world — and the cost of Amazon’s convenience. Jeff Bezos is not only the richest man in the world, he has built a business that is without precedent in the history of American capitalism. His power to shape everything from the future of work to the future of commerce to the future of technology is unrivaled. Youtube
Governments are taking a wide range of measures to tackle the COVID-19 outbreak. We aim to track and compare worldwide government responses to the coronavirus rigorously and consistently. Systematic information on which measures governments take, and when, can help us understand the responses in a consistent way, aiding efforts to fight the pandemic. Our team collects information on common policy responses, scores the stringency of such measures, and aggregates these into a Stringency Index. University of Oxford, Blavatnik School of Government
A group representing investors that collectively manage more than US$47tn in assets has demanded the world’s biggest corporate polluters back strategies to reach net-zero emissions and promised to hold them to public account. The Guardian
A report commissioned by federal regulators overseeing the nation’s commodities markets has concluded that climate change threatens U.S. financial markets, as the costs of wildfires, storms, droughts and floods spread through insurance and mortgage markets, pension funds and other financial institutions. New York Times
Last summer, oil and gas-industry groups were lobbying to overturn federal rules on leaks of natural gas, a major contributor to climate change. Their message: The companies had emissions under control. In private, the lobbyists were saying something very different. New York Times
Faced with plunging profits and a climate crisis that threatens fossil fuels, the industry is demanding a trade deal that weakens Kenya’s rules on plastics and on imports of American trash. New York Times
© Stefan P. Schleicher 2024
