As Elizabeth Warren announced the suspension of her campaign, she talked about a time when someone told her,  there was only two paths to the Democratic presidential nomination; a liberal one led by Bernie Sanders, and a moderate one led by Joe Biden. “I thought that wasn’t right,” Ms. Warren said from the front porch of her house in Cambridge, “But evidently I was wrong.” She had several problems as a candidate, not the least of which was the whole “Pocahontas” thing. She ended up writing a 12-page letter of apology to The Cherokee nation during the campaign, while standing firm on her Native American heritage just a year earlier. She did however, effectively push Michael Bloomberg out of the race by basically beating the crap out of him at the last debate. She was asked who she’s going to support for the eventual Democratic nomination, and she said “, I need some space around this”. People are speculating that she’ll support Joe Biden, but she may not announce support at all until the actual convention. Generally, people think that the supporter of one candidate will automatically line up and vote for the remaining candidate who gets the endorsement from theirs. If that’s the case, it’s certainly hard to see a path for Bernie Sanders to get the Elizabeth Warren supporters after the way the Bernie Bros treated her on Twitter. Look for Biden to get her support whether publicly announced or not.

JNJ pays out

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Legal troubles for Johnson & Johnson (NYSE: JNJ) continue. The legal challenge against JNJ for the presence of asbestos in their powder products continues. Sorry, the “alleged” presence of asbestos. Anyway, now a court is forcing them to pay over 1.7 million to three women in Australia over its pelvic mesh implant products. Pelvic mesh is an insert used to repair damage inside specific areas of the female anatomy. But according to the suit, these three women claimed that they suffered from permanent disability and chronic pain after the surgery. The case is in Australia, and over 1,350 women are part of a class action suit that might also receive compensation based on the ruling for the first three women. You have to be careful with Johnson & Johnson stock when these kinds of things are happening, because even though they sell the Purell brand of hand sanitizer which is doing very well thanks to COVID-19, JNJ has to accrue money for lawsuits and the more lawsuits they lose, the more money they have to accrue. That means lower profits and less money there is to pay dividends.   

What Drives Self -Driving Cars 

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Uber Technologies Inc (NYSE: UBER), who has never really talked about the setup for its self-driving car platform, today published a post laying out the technology that they have been using to test, validate. and deploy AI cars. Until now it’s always been hard to judge the progress of Uber in this particular endeavour of self driving cars, especially with the setback they suffered from the accident in Tempe, AZ in 2018. But now you have a baseline to look at when judging their products and progress. The most important component of their work is called VerCD which is a set of tools and micro services developed for prototyping self driving  vehicles. Uber called the VerCD tools, “ a reliable source of truth for self-driving sensor training data for Uber”. While this post might seem like good news, it’s difficult to look at it as anything but neutral. Uber has not been very transparent in the past and they don’t have a good track record when it comes to self-driving car research. They recently implemented new safeguards but they’re still not the most friendly company when it comes to information.  

How Facebook Spies

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Everybody knows the social media Giants like Facebook spy on us. They send you restaurant recommendations within blocks of where you are, they send an advertisement for a product you’ve never searched but just happened to talk about. Many people think they eavesdrop through the mobile phone microphones to hear what’s going on, but according to researchers who have studied their targeting efforts, listening into your conversations would be Stone Age technology. They claim there’s something much more sinister and sneakier going on and those methods are also extremely hard to detect. Location services provide more relevant and personalized experiences according to Facebook, but according to researchers it’s the key to those personalized ads that show up in your news feed. Facebook can tell if you’re sitting in a bar that plays the same TV show several times a week, and you then get an ad for that TV show in your news feed. Facebook even knows your searches outside of the social network, because it tracks likes on other websites. If you like something on a third-party website, you’ve invited Facebook into your life. Not only does Zuckerberg look creepy, but this tracking stuff is about as creepy as it gets.        

Bernie Bros are Pouting

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There’s no other way to put it, Joe Biden routed Bernie Sanders on Tuesday night. A lot of tears fell into the sleeves of a lot of flannel shirts. That’s what happens when you’re not old enough to have lived through enough disappointment, your 78-year old Democratic socialist falling behind in a primary in a capitalist country is devastating. For example, Marianne Williamson, a former 2020 Democratic candidate who now supports Bernie, said the Democratic Party has launched a mutiny or a “coup” against Sanders. “Jake Tapper referred to the ‘resurrection’ of Joe Biden’s campaign. This was not a resurrection; it was a coup. Russiagate was not a coup. Mueller was not a coup. Impeachment was not a coup. What happened was a coup. And we will push it back,” she said in a tweet that she has since deleted. Carlos Maza, a progressive commentator blamed the media. “It’s easy to blame Warren for this, but the bigger culprit is cable news, which treated South Carolina like a major unexpected comeback for Biden and likely had a huge impact on last-minute voters worried about electability,” he said. So ridiculous. As if people said “oh my, Joe did good in SC, so I better change my mind and not be a socialist!” Idiotic. 

And then there was Cenk Uygur, founder of the far-left YouTube channel The Young Turks, who had a complete meltdown, lashing out at the Democratic “establishment” for Sanders’ butt-kicking on Super Tuesday. They will never get it.