Liberty

Perseus acquisition in the US, consolidating two competitors: https://www.tune.com/blog/new-ownership-expands-tunes-market-position/ "LinkedIn shows 166 employees" h/t @pearnick

The President who didn't fill the US seat at the WHO, and who now claims the US has less influence than China at the WHO? The one who loudly praised the Chinese handling of the virus on Twitter in late January? Who ignored US Intelligence warnings about the virus? And now blames the WHO as part of a CYA compaign that includes blaming the governors for the US's stay-at-home response at a time when the Federal guidelines recommended stay-at-home? Right... nice to see all of that. Trump taking on corruption is the most laughable idea I've ever heard. It's like OJ Simpson saying he's going to find the murderer... Anyone who seriously believes that, I have a bridge to sell them. Trump is looking for someone to blame for his shortcomings and incompetence, as usual, and the WHO is just one of the latest victims. We've seen how Trump has handled the past few months. There's no reason at all to believe that whatever anyone else would have said earlier that he'd have been one iota more competent at the time, or that he'd even have listened. Other competent leaders have acted well with a lot fewer resources and the same public info as the president of the richest, most advanced, with the best intelligence gathering agencies and scientific and medical facilities in the world. No organization is perfect, so Trump can always find a flaw in WHO/NATO/whatever and then pretend that this flaw is the reason for all his mistakes, but that's just passing the buck and moral cowardice. You think other presidents had perfect organizations and perfect intelligence when they acted?

Best of luck!

Sucks for the podcast ecosystem generally, but good for Spot. Too bad their podcast player kind of sucks. Can't believe the speed settings aren't more granular (goes from 1.5 to 2) and there's no dynamic silence trimming... I also hear it sometimes loses where you are and starts over. Sounds like a RealPlayer experience... Surprised they haven't been better about that since they obviously are focusing on podcasting a lot.

Andy Slavitt thread about the state of COVID19 around the US:

Sarah Cooper doing Trump’s I take HCC speech: Also, The Lancet fact-correcting Trump's letter to the WHO:

Possible vitamin D link: https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-growing-evidence-on-vitamin-d-and-covid Also: Also, sad situation in Brazil right now: https://www.wsj.com/articles/brazils-nurses-are-dying-as-covid-19-overwhelms-hospitals-11589843694

This is good: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-05-19/covid-patients-testing-positive-after-recovery-aren-t-infectious Also good:

It's the old: Don't try to play chess against a pigeon...

Different buyers can do different things with those assets. Big difference if Amazon buys it or if, say, Sears buys it.

Oh really, now Bill Clinton's accusers aren't women? It's the particular woman that they don't believe, not all women. Isn't Harvey Weinstein a huge democrat? Crosby too, I'd guess. Didn't they also cancel that senator comedia and Louis CK and a bunch of other lefties?

That's the worst you can say about Obama? Man, he must've been a total angel. No, you said give an example. I did. Does this game ever end? I'm telling you your example is really really really unimpressive. He didn't denounce a group. Wow. Most corrupt president ever. Anyway, this is irrelevant to Coronavirus, Trump is the one in charge and on-topic when looking at how this crisis is being handled.

That's the worst you can say about Obama? Man, he must've been a total angel.

Can't ever admit wrong: Funny thing is, there's a high chance he's not even taking it, because you can never fully believe what he says.

Hold on, so that means Trumpers should thank Democrats for their great achievement of electing Trump. And if Trumpers are unhappy about Trump being elected and blame it on Democrats, hey, there's two great ways to fix it: Trumpers have the Senate. They also have an election in November. But hey just vote Trump! Give idiocracy a second chance! Electrolytes against Covid! Take the argument to its logical conclusion, and German jews are to blame for Hitler's rise to power, because they weren't able to stop him. Trumper logic, QED. You are not wrong: German jews were actually blamed for Hitler's rise to power.

Hold on, so that means Trumpers should thank Democrats for their great achievement of electing Trump. And if Trumpers are unhappy about Trump being elected and blame it on Democrats, hey, there's two great ways to fix it: Trumpers have the Senate. They also have an election in November. But hey just vote Trump! Give idiocracy a second chance! Electrolytes against Covid! Take the argument to its logical conclusion, and German jews are to blame for Hitler's rise to power, because they weren't able to stop him. Trumper logic, QED.

If Obama's rhetoric got this much under your skin but you're fine with Trump, you're a weird one-way snowflake. I notice you never give concrete examples of what you're talking about, because hey, fact-checking may ruin the illusion or show that it's peccadillos compared to Trump. As for you making stuff up, yeah, Obama's admin wasn't particularly corrupt. Probably less than average, while Trump is off the charts bonkers.

Trump had like 3 million fewer votes than Clinton, who as a woman and a non-charistmatic politician after 8 years of one party in power had a tremendous headwind. Trump had billions in free media exposure because the media loved his antics so much (he's a TV personality after all), and then Comey came a week before election... And back then to most people who didn't pay attention, Trump was a successful businessman and manager and competent guy -- they didn't know this was just a character he plays on TV and not the real him, hopefully now they know -- and they thought he'd become presidential and stop the craziness once in office (the Pivot). So Trump won by a few tens of thousands of votes in a few swing states. He definitely wouldn't have won without Comey or Russia and his social media advantage (a lot easier to attract lots of attention when you have no shame and don't care about facts, so you can say whatever you want), and whatever else aligned to make him squeak through. He got super lucky. If you read the Woodward book, Trump himself didn't think he'd win, he didn't even prepare a transition team and didn't want to spend any money on that. Contrary to what he says, he didn't win in a landslide or whatever, and his inauguration crowd wasn't bigger than Obama's (how petty is he?), there's a natural pendulum swing after 8 years of a party in power, when the incumbent can't run again, etc. So yeah, people voted for him as a protest vote or because they were angry, or because they thought he was entertaining. Sure. Now he blew everything up, Washington is more corrupt than ever, with nepotism rampant, lobbyists running the show, a scandal or crisis every week, the debt and deficit ballooned more than ever, almost all his entourage now in prison or fired... and those people aren't better off, so joke's on them.

I see some people have learned their lessons from the sociopath in chief. Gaslight to the very end, take no responsibility for anything, take all credit for whatever works, blame others for whatever doesn't work. Change the (fictional) narrative as events unfold so you always rewrite history with your side on the right side. Now Trump is the democrats' fault!! Trump is 100% the responsibility of the Republican party and will be until the end of time. He's their nominee, their president, and all those in positions of power within the party that initially opposed him either switched to enable him or remained silent while he trampled everything the party claimed it stood for. Even Romney could barely muster a little courage and only briefly. It's abundantly clear that any bad normal politician that I would normally complain about would still be 1000x better than Trump just by having normal human cognition and a modicum of competence and shame. The normal bad politicians may be 50,000th down my list of leaders I'd pick, but when you compare against someone who's 300,000,000th down the list, they look downright great. That's quite the feat!

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/18/havens-dr-atul-gawande-coronavirus-spread-can-be-slowed-if-60percent-of-people-wear-masks.html

https://www.protocol.com/oculus-vr-interview Interview with Jason Rubin, Facebook's vice president for special gaming initiatives

Acquisition in Spain by TSS: https://www.totalspecificsolutions.com/about-us/transaction-updates?tid=57 "65 employees 250+ customers 35 years" h/t @pearnick

WTH is going on there?

Impressive keynote. Ampere arch is really impressive: Interesting piece on the DGX A100: https://www.nextplatform.com/2020/05/14/ampere-dgx-servers-pack-a-wallop-including-amd-epyc-cpus/ More here: https://www.nextplatform.com/2020/05/14/nvidia-unifies-ai-compute-with-ampere-gpu/

https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019/advice-for-public/when-and-how-to-use-masks "If you are healthy, you only need to wear a mask if you are taking care of a person with COVID-19. Wear a mask if you are coughing or sneezing." -WHO still has this on their website. Not my opinion to be clear. Yeah, that was a lie (likely with the good intention of stopping a run on scarce PPE in the early days). Now do Trump’s lies instead of cherry picking. He’s in charge in the US, not the WHO. No other competent countries have been stopped by this.. because they’re trying to defeat the virus rather than look for others to blame. Did you forget the Surgeon Generals tweet "Seriously people - STOP BUYING MASKS!'. That is actually surgeon general of USA, not WHO. Even as recent as April 2nd Dr. Fauci was struggling to support using masks. (Dr. Fauci also works for US govt, not WHO) https://www.facebook.com/cnn/videos/213806963020721/ But Japanese, Koreans, Taiwanese...etc started using masks from January. I can understand if many people who were told for several months to not wear a mask and put in lockdown and suddenly told all you had to do is wear a mask might be little bit not convinced. Yeah, you're making my point. The US response has been incompetent, in good part because of the war on experts from the Trump admin and putting cronies in charge based on loyalty rather than competence, and not listening to the competent people or allowing them to run things (Fauci, etc) because the honcho can't share the spotlight or be contradicted or stay focused on anything long enough to understand it and follow through with a plan. And everybody made early mistakes, the point is to correct them fast and copy from those that are doing well and have a plan that makes sense based on the best science and data, to use all tools at your disposal, to communicate clearly to the population with a unified message and not to politicize a health issue, etc. It's worth throwing the kitchen sink at it because the cost of he pandemic is so high that anything that shortens it or reduces intensity pays for itself a million times over, as Taiwan and South Kore and New Zealand and Honk Kong are finding out. The US has been doing the opposite of all this, which is why 4% of world population had 30%+ of deaths and the curve hasn't been crushed, but rather is just slowly melting (and could restart after a few weeks of re-opening).