George Floyd’s death at the hands of police officers in Minneapolis was a murder plain and simple. A group of weak, scared, criminal police officers took a man’s life. By all accounts, it was just over a counterfeit $20 bill, but even if he had resisted arrest and done things worse than that, the police are supposed to be better. Public servants are supposed to be better.
But that doesn’t excuse damage to property belonging to people who did not murder George Floyd. It does not excuse njury to officers across the country who not only did not murder George Floyd, but may not have ever murdered anyone and have spent their lives helping people who do nothing more than call an ask for help.
And it certainly doesn’t excuse the ineffectual and disgusting mayor of Minneapolis, Jacob Frey, who made a decision to evacuate the 3rd Precinct and let rioters not only take the building over and steal from the building, but burn it to the ground. Frey said he made the decision to sacrifice the building and call off officers as rioters moved in. He told reporters early Friday morning that the decision came down to safety for both officers and members of the public. “Brick and mortar is not as important as life,” Frey said.
He’s right , but the optics of a crowd taking over a police precinct , looting it and burning it to the ground will be felt for decades. A police station is a symbol of safety and protection for many people. Understanding that it is also a symbol of fear for some, the demoralisation of your police force, allowed by the person who is supposed to be the commander in chief of that force, cuts those officers deep. Jacob Frey’s political career is over And good riddance.
Riots and the Economy
Fires raged, looters emptied stores and people were injured or killed across the country during another night of violent protests over the death of George Floyd allegedly at the hands of Minneapolis police. The property damage, the looting, and the fear of personal injury will all effect the economy, just as we are coming out of the Pandemic lockdown.
It is not hard to imagine that rioting directly damages property values and economic activity. When people smash windows, steal things, or set buildings and property on fire, that all has direct economic costs. Moreover, if people are rioting they are not working, and even those who are not involved in the disturbances are affected – they cannot get to work, shop or otherwise carry on with business as usual. Some studies have suggested that the LA riots in 1992 ultimately cost the city nearly $4 billion in taxable sales and over $125 million in direct sales tax revenue – that in addition to $1 billion in property damage and the loss of many lives.
Riots are also a disincentive for business owners to locate their operations in riot-prone areas. Who in their right mind builds a factory someplace where they fear there is some reasonable risk that it will be burnt to the ground? Riots are bad for property values, as people do not want to live in those areas and many property owners are hesitant to rebuild or repair in the aftermath (some parts of Washington, D.C. for instance, still carried the scars of riots in 1968 decades later). Riots also appear to be bad for employment – businesses are not going to put valuable capital at risk like that, so they will locate their operations in safer places. The risk of pandemics in the future are higher in congested areas and so are the risks of riots. So the incentive for people to move further from the city has now become greater.
Hopefully these riots are short-lived, but the damage has already been done to this point. 19 if the riot stops soon, at least the economic damage may be limited. Stocks could dive if they continue.
Pfizer Head Says COVID-19 Vaccine By October
Pharmaceutical company executives said Thursday that one or several COVID-19 vaccines could begin rolling out before 2021, but warned they would need to make an estimated 15 billion doses would be needed to halt the pandemic.
Albert Bourla, head of Pfizer Inc (NYSE: PFE), said that his company believed a vaccine could be ready before the end of the year. Pfizer is conducting clinical trials with German firm Biontech on several possible vaccines in Europe and the United States. “If things go well, and the stars are aligned, we will have enough evidence of safety and efficacy so that we can… have a vaccine around the end of October,” he said.
It can take years for a new vaccine to be licensed for general use, but in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, experimental vaccines shown to be safe and effective against the novel coronavirus could win approval for emergency use.
Once a working vaccine is developed, one of the biggest obstacles to putting out the amount needed could be, surprisingly, that there are not enough glass vials to store the doses in.
“There are not enough vials in the world,” Pascal Soriot, Chief executive officer of pharmaceutical multinational company AstraZeneca, said. He adding that AstraZeneca, like a number of other firms, was looking into the possibility of putting multiple doses in each vial.
Also, pharma company chiefs flatly rejected any suggestion that intellectual property rights should be waived on vaccine research. “IP is absolutely fundamental to our industry,” GSK chief Emma Walmsley said.
Soriot meanwhile pointed out that pharmaceutical companies are currently investing billions of dollars with little chance of recuperating the costs.
“If you don’t protect IP, then essentially there is no incentive for anybody to innovate,” he said.
SWEPCO Wind Farm Approved
Chinese internet giant Baidu Inc. (NASDAQ: BIDU) has unveiled a new toolkit for quantum machine learning, known as Paddle Quantum. The toolkit, newly open-sourced Wednesday, comes with several quantum computing applications and is meant to be used by developers to build and train quantum neural network models
Paddle Quantum, available now on GitHub, is comprised of a set of quantum machine learning toolkits. Baidu said Paddle Quantum can be used to support quantum circuit models and general quantum computing research. For example, it can be used to simplify the implementation of a promising quantum algorithm, by 50%.
“Researchers in the quantum field can use the Paddle Quantum to develop quantum artificial intelligence, and deep-learning enthusiasts have a shortcut to learning quantum computing,” said Duan Runyao, director of Baidu’s Institute for Quantum Computing.
Constellation Research Inc. analyst Holger Mueller told SiliconANGLE that Baidu’s newest toolkit is a sign of maturation of the quantum computing market, where the battle has moved away from hardware architecture to software, platforms and frameworks.
“It’s good to see vendors like Baidu open source their frameworks, which are a huge help for enterprises to build quantum-powered next-generation applications,” Mueller said. “As with all open source projects, adoption matter and we have to see how widely Paddle is being used in a few months.”
Baidu stock has to worry about potential new restrictions of Chinese companies listing on American exchanges, but short of that, the stock looks strong.
Unicorn Cheer to End the Lockdown
Handshakes with new acquaintances and hugs from loved ones feel like something of a relic amid the COVID-19 pandemic. But one grandmother found a fun, colorful way to greet her grandkids.
Maureen Sweeney strapped on a colorful unicorn costume to greet her grandkids Rylan and Lincoln in New Jersey. Hugh Dillon, her son, captured footage of the May 24th reunion, with Sweeney trotting down the street before her kin run up with an enthusiastic hello.
The grandma only lives a few blocks away from the grandchildren, but it was the first time they had hugged since March 17, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The clip of the colorful reunion has been viewed over 2,000 times on Instagram with many users expressing how they were touched by the colorful reunion.
“Grandmom will always find a way to get things done,” wrote one Instagram user. “Thanks you so much for sharing this beautiful moment,” wrote another. “Cried tears of joy.”