Best case scenario, this is bad optics. Worst case (and probably accurate), this is disgraceful.
Speaker of the house Nancy Pelosi is taking some heat for showing off a freezer full of ice cream at a time 20 million people have applied for unemployment benefits. Pelosi appeared Monday on an episode of “The Late Late Show” with James Corden from her Napa Valley mansion. Asked by the host to “share something from her home,” Pelosi walked over to two massive built-in refrigerators (estimated at around $24K) and slid open a freezer drawer.
“We just got it stocked before Easter Sunday because we were…” the speaker paused in the interview with Corden, then continued “…shall we say, enjoying.” It sounded like she was going to say , having family over, and caught herself but there is no way to know if that’s true. and of course that would be violating social distancing guidelines.
There were at least 14 pints of $10 a pint ice cream in that freezer, yet there is very little money left in the small business loan program. So between her two refrigerators and the ice cream inside of them, that’s $25K. Of course the speaker should be allowed to enjoy ice cream and her wealth is her own to spend as she likes, but as the Speaker of the House of Represenatives, it would have been much more appropriate to see a desk full of potential bills to help the American people that it would be seeing her smiling eating a dove bar, while people suffer.
I will never understand why we as Americans keep voting the same people in, who clearly have no idea what regular Americans go through. Spread the word, replace them all regardless of party. If you’ve been in the House or the Senate for more than three terms, you should be voted out in November.
Gilead is winning
Gilead Sciences, Inc. (NASDAQ: GILD) seems to winning the race for the cure for COVID-19 . Gilead shares jumped by 16.41% in after-hours trading after STAT news reported that a Chicago hospital treating coronavirus patients with Remdesivir, were seeing them recovering rapidly from severe symptoms. The publication cited a video it obtained where the trial results were being talked about.
“This is obviously good news. Of course, we’ve heard a few other pieces of good news like this recently and they didn’t pan-out as well as people had hoped,” said Matt Maley, chief market strategist at Miller Tabak, in an email. “The big question is whether it’s going to be enough to help the economy ‘re-open’ more quickly than people are thinking right now.”
“To me, the critical issue is employment,” Maley added. “If the economy can bounce back quickly enough to take the unemployment rate back into the low-single digits quickly, that’s going to be very bullish.” Other studies have shown Remdesivir to be an effective treatment against the coronavirus. However, they have been smaller in scale.
“An effective treatment is a huge deal and would create a path to open the economy and resume normal ‘social activities’ way sooner than a vaccine,” said Tom Lee, head of research at Fundstrat Global Advisors. “A treatment is safer and more scalable because it is only given to people who need to be treated.”
Greenland’s Ice Sheet is Shrinking
Climate change…it’s a real thing, whether or not our carbon footprints as humans is the reason it exists, is a legitimate debate. But even if it is, the earth is a big girl, she can handle our crap. But she, like all things, evolves and changes as she ages. There’s nothing we can do to stop it, but we too can evolve and migrate as things change.
Greenland is home to the second largest ice sheet in the world. It covers about 80% of the island and that number has been dropping and will continue to drop. Last year alone Greenland and its massive sheet lost around 600 billion tons of water which lifted the sea level around 1.5 millimeters.
It may not seem like much, but if the entire sheet were to melt it would raise global sea levels as much as 23 feet and if all the ice were to melt in the world the levels would rise to about 216 feet. You can definitely kiss your beachfront homes goodbye.
We can’t blame the record melt entirely on warmer temperatures. Scientists have also confirmed climate change has triggered more frequent atmospheric circulation patterns as well.
Do you think humans are solely responisble for climate chage? Reply to the email and tell us what you think.
Uber’s Driverless A.I. May Predict Traffic
We all know the end game for Uber Technologies Inc (NYSE: UBER) is driverless cars. Being able to transport people and packages from point A to point B safely and quickly is the Holy Grail for this 11-year-old rideshare company.
And the COVID-19 outbreak has only heightened the need for this technology as people try to avoid human contact now and potentially in the future, as much as possible.
Now In a paper published on the preprint server Arxiv.org this week, researchers at Uber’s Advanced Technologies Group (ATG) propose an AI technique to improve autonomous vehicles’ traffic movement predictions. This potentially new tech goes directly to the driverless technologies that Uber is developing, which must be able to detect, track, and anticipate surrounding car movements in order to safely drive public roads. Without the ability to predict the decisions other drivers on the road might make, vehicles can’t be fully “driverless”, so why invest the capital, just keep using drivers.
We all remember 2 years ago, when an Uber self-driving prototype hit and killed a pedestrian in Tempe, Arizona. The reason given for the accident, was because the vehicle failed to detect and avoid the victim. ATG’s research promises to advance the state of the art by boosting the precision of the A.I. predictions. They could certainly make the AI overly cautious. In other words, don’t move if anything is near you at all, but that obviously is impractical and would hurt the efficiency of the transport. This would not work in a market that still has Lyft (NASDAQ: LYFT). If they can pull this off, UBER will dominant the business and the stock will soar.
Dog steals set of false teeth and wears them perfectly
Ben Campbell, from Michigan, decided comically large teeth were just what he needed to cheer himself up, and perhaps hoped a few funny selfies could lift the spirits of others too. He didn’t know how lifted his spirts were going to be by those teeth and his little dog.
When Ben, who works as a psychologist, left the teeth unattended on the table, Thomas the Yorkshire terrier made his move. Thomas grabbed the pair of teeth probably intending to chew the crap out of them, but first, he had to make his getaway. The joy comes in the way Thomas grabbed the teeth.
He bit down on the back side so the false teeth ended up looking like his human teeth. He carried them around the house in his mouth. Tiny Thomas was left with an oversized, beaming smile with teeth as white and straight as he could ever possibly dreamed of.
Ben decided to film his attempts at retrieving the teeth, which only made Thomas more determined to keep them – and he looked absolutely delighted with himself. Ben’s laughing on the video was a joy in and of itself and considering why he bough the teeth in the first place. Mission accomplished.