On My Radar: Shilling & Rosenberg on Deflation - CMG

On My Radar: Shilling & Rosenberg on Deflation - CMGj



 from  Shilling

...

• Gary sees an L-shaped recovery with a downward-sloping lower leg. We are getting an agonizing reappraisal now.
• A rally in bonds preceded stocks in January this year and it wasn’t until Feb.19 that stocks keeled over. Bonds were anticipating the recession, and he thinks the recent rally in bonds is telling a similar story.
• Gary believes the rally in bonds is foretelling of a coming 40 to 50% decline in the S&P.

The Great Financial Crisis affected just a few people. Mortgage and housing and took out a few big banks. This event is much greater than that. This will overwhelm everyone, everywhere. The monetary stimulus is small in terms of overall economic impact.

from David Rosenberg

•  If you look at industrials, consumer cyclicals, and financials, they are down 23% from their pre-recession peak.
• Anybody long those stocks would be asking, “What sort of bull market are people talking about?”

...we are in a depression...You find that corporations are using the words, cash conservation, balance-sheet strength, etc. This is about survival of a business. 

...

• When you have excess supply around the world, you get deflation.
• Unless we cut off imports, we are going to continue to see excess supply

if you are an unaccredited investor and unable to access private investments, there are still ways to “explore.” We’ve recently added ARK Invest Disruptive Technology Portfolio – a high-conviction top-ten stock ideas strategy to our TAMP platform. It will be volatile but I believe the rewards in ten years will outpace the S&P 500 Index. There are no guarantees, of course.

How a secretive Pentagon agency seeded the ground for a rapid coronavirus cure - The Washington Post

How a secretive Pentagon agency seeded the ground for a rapid coronavirus cure - The Washington Post



By 2019, a project DARPA funded at the Massachusetts-based company Moderna demonstrated in a Phase 1 clinical trial that RNA could indeed deliver an antibody to humans and provide protection against the mosquito-borne virus chikungunya. It was an affirmation of Wattendorf’s bet that came after years of DARPA funding the effort.

China's Xi Jinping Could Make Same Mistakes as Kaiser Wilhelm II - Bloomberg

China's Xi Jinping Could Make Same Mistakes as Kaiser Wilhelm II - Bloomberg

Xi Jinping Could Make
the Same Mistakes as Kaiser Wilhelm II

U.S.-China tensions look eerily like the rivalry between
Britain and Germany before World War I. Let’s hope it doesn’t end the same way.

By Andreas Kluth

July 29, 2020, 5:00 AM GMT+1

Andreas Kluth is a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. He was
previously editor in chief of Handelsblatt Global and a writer for the
Economist. He's the author of "Hannibal and Me."

Animosity between China and the U.S. was already bad when
the year started, and it just keeps getting worse. Whether the two powers are
hurling accusations over Covid-19, shutting each other’s consulates, rattling
sabers in the South China Sea, escalating their trade war, or simply vilifying
each other in speeches, they appear headed for ever more bitter clashes.

Some say this is a
new Cold War. But that label doesn’t quite fit, because nothing about the
standoff seems frozen, and the rest of the world is not (or not yet) split into
opposing camps. This is a different kind of rivalry — one that will touch every
aspect of global politics, economics, technology and finance as it heats up,
and could one day end in a hot war.

Scholars call this kind of conflict spiral a “Thucydides trap.” It’s the apparent
tendency, throughout history, toward war whenever a rising nation challenges
an incumbent power. The label comes from the ancient Greek historian who so
perceptively chronicled the complex Peloponnesian War, which he believed was
ultimately caused by the rise of Athens and the fear this provoked in Sparta.

But in the case of the U.S. and China, there’s a much better
analogy, as these historians and economists have described. It is the struggle
between the British Empire and the
up-and-coming German Empire after its unification in 1871.

That era, like ours, was one of industrial and
technological revolution and uneasy globalization. Like the U.S., Britain
was a democracy that largely believed in free markets. And as the U.S. has done
since World War II — at least, until the presidency of Donald Trump — the U.K.
chaperoned an international order regulating trade and finance, overseeing the
so-called Pax Britannica.

On the opposing side, resembling China today, was Germany,
an autocratic state that held a grudge for being late to industrialize
and was bent on overtaking the leader, with state-directed and nationalist
economic policies. Also like China today, Germany did this in part by
pilfering patents and technologies, and aggressively pushing alternatives
to its rival’s standards.

One race back then, for example, was for the dominant
standard in radio communications.
The Brits used and backed the technology pioneered by the Italian inventor
Guglielmo Marconi. The Germans, at
the behest of Kaiser Wilhelm II, did everything to develop and spread their own
standard, from a company called Telefunken,
which Britain resisted at every turn but was unable to squelch. The
analogue today would be 5G telecoms networks, and America’s global campaign to
exclude the main Chinese supplier, Huawei Technologies Co.

In both eras, the challenger feared being geographically
encircled and sought to break out with huge and geopolitically motivated
infrastructure projects. Germany, looking east, tried to build the Berlin-Baghdad railway for access to
the Indian Ocean that bypassed the British navy. China, looking west, has the
Belt and Road Initiative, a plan to link ports, sea lanes, rail lines and
information systems across Eurasia and Africa. Germany’s project was halted by
World War I; China’s is running into opposition from some countries along the
route.

These rivalries initially escalated without causing military
conflict. The U.K. then, like the U.S. now, levied punitive tariffs that
achieved little, and tried other things short of shooting. Diplomatically, it
helped that Germany in the 19th century and China more recently at first
had leaders sophisticated enough to make their own countries stronger
without risking an all-out conflagration.

In the first case, this was Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, who masterminded Germany’s
rise under two Kaisers until he was fired by the third, Wilhelm II, a vain and insecure character who felt as threatened
by “experts” as Trump does today. Bismarck’s analogue in China was Deng
Xiaoping, who as “paramount leader” oversaw China’s industrialization, but
without openly antagonizing the Americans. Under one of his successors, Hu
Jintao, this policy of avoiding the Thucydides trap — and specifically the
Anglo-German precedent which Beijing had studied in depth — became official
doctrine under the label “peaceful rise.”

But eventually the zeitgeist changed. Wilhelm II, a cousin
of King George V, on one hand admired and envied everything English and on the
other projected a crude and jingoistic militarism, changing uniforms several
times a day. Chinese President Xi Jinping esteems the U.S. enough to send his
daughter (under a pseudonym) to get a degree from Harvard University. But his
foreign policy is known as “wolf warrior diplomacy,” after a buffoonish
film about Chinese studs kicking Western butts.

Trump, who is
Wilhelmine in his narcissism and strategic myopia, has certainly
made the situation worse. But even a victory by Joe Biden in November may not
suffice to alter the fundamental dynamic of the Thucydides trap. As Germany
under Wilhelm II bullied, postured and provoked, China under Xi is cracking
down ever harder on Hong Kong and the Uighurs in Xinjiang, clashing with
neighbors from the Himalayas to the South China Sea, and menacing Taiwan.

History, of course, is not doomed to repeat. And yet, people
in Beijing, Washington and other capitals would do well to reread it, lest our
generation also “sleepwalk” into a world war. By 1914, as today, the international system had become too complex
for the antagonists to grasp. And then a fuse was lit in Bosnia, a place
many Germans and Brits couldn’t have found on a map. In our time, it may happen
on the log of a computer that’s been hacked by an enemy, or on an uninhabited
rock in the South China Sea.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the
editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

To contact the author of this story:

Andreas Kluth at akluth1@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story:

James Boxell at jboxell@bloomberg.net

Opinion | How Fox News may be destroying Trump’s reelection hopes - The Washington Post

Opinion | How Fox News may be destroying Trump’s reelection hopes - The Washington Post

Lisbon Airbnb: Portugal Pushes Affordable Housing Plan

Lisbon Airbnb: Portugal Pushes Affordable Housing Plan

Airbnb Hosts Resist Lisbon’s Plan to
Free Up Housing

By Hayley Warren and Henrique Almeida

July 28, 2020

Lisbon City Council is introducing measures to turn
Airbnb-style homes into affordable housing. But with many short-term rental
owners holding out for tourism to return, the city’s new program has yet to
attract many owners.

Under the so-called “Safe
Rent” program, Lisbon is offering to pay as much as three years of rent
up front to lure property owners—many of whom have seen their rental income
evaporate due to coronavirus-related travel restrictions—to switch their short-term
rental units into long-term lets for locals. Property owners may earn a maximum
of 1,000 euros a month ($1,170) for a
four-bedroom apartment in the city center, plus a little extra if they
leave their furniture behind, and their rental income will be exempt from
taxes, according to the rules of the program.

“Many short-term property owners have delayed a decision to
switch to long-term renting because they were waiting for reservations to pick
up in the summer,” said Eduardo Miranda, head of the Association of Local
Accommodation in Portugal, or ALEP. “This hasn’t happened yet and many of these
owners may be considering other alternatives at the moment, including the safe
rent program in Lisbon.”

One of the main reasons why property owners aren’t switching
to longer term rentals even though reservations of short-term rentals in Lisbon
in the second quarter have fallen to less than 10% of the level of bookings in
the same period last year is that they
may be obliged to pay hefty taxes when they transfer their property from a
short-term rental to a long-term let, according to Miranda.

“The short-term rental market had a very important role in
enabling the city of Lisbon to respond to the rising tourist demand,” said
Fernando Medina, the mayor of Lisbon, in a televised interview on July 7. “It
also had a big role in rehabilitating
the city,” he said. Reforms in recent years have brought investment and a
boost to the property market, giving incentive for landlords to convert
run-down buildings into short-term holiday listings hosted by companies such as
Airbnb. According to the Lisbon City Council, there are about 25,000 apartments registered as short-term
rentals, accounting for about 8% of the total. However, in some historic
neighborhoods, short term rentals account for more than 20% of housing units,
prompting the Lisbon City Council in 2019 to suspend new short term rental
licenses in certain areas.

Airbnb Land

Note: Map shows crowd-sourced neighbourhood descriptions by
Hoodmaps

Sources: InsideAirbnb, Lisbon city council, OpenStreetMap

Portugal’s capital city is also looking to renovate and
convert vacant public buildings into safe, affordable homes and accelerate the
speed of construction permit approvals to make it easier for residents to live
in the center.

For decades, properties across Lisbon were falling apart due to strict government-enforced rent
controls that deterred landlords from making improvements. Along with
high tax rates targeting the housing market, it often just didn’t seem worth
selling a property. All that began to change after Portugal sought a bailout in
2011 and decided to scrap rent
controls and offer resident permits in the form of a golden visa to attract
wealthy foreign residents and property investors. At the time, about 12,000
buildings were in poor condition or in ruins, nearly 20% of the total,
according to city council estimates. The program, which is still in place,
allows non-Europeans who pay at least 500,000 euros for a property in Portugal
to qualify for a resident permit.

Earlier this year, Portuguese Prime Minister Antonio Costa
announced plans to scrap the golden visa program in Lisbon and the northern
city of Porto in a bid to end speculation in the real estate market. Other
European cities like Budapest, Paris, Amsterdam and Madrid are also imposing
stricter terms on such rentals in order to reclaim urban neighborhoods from
tourists. Berlin has opted for more extreme measures, freezing rents for five
years in a bid to stay affordable.

The property boom that began after Portugal completed the
bailout program in 2014 has turned Lisbon into one of Western Europe’s hottest
markets, with a rise in short-term rentals catering to tourists. Derelict
buildings like this one in Alfama—the city’s historical neighborhood—were converted
to luxury hotels.

In 2019 Lisbon was named Europe’s leading city break
destination at the World Travel Awards. Tourism accounts for one in every five
jobs in Portugal and 16.5% of gross
domestic product, according to the World Travel & Tourism Council. But
there are signs of overtourism—since 2016 Portugal has welcomed more tourists
than residents (16.3 million / 10.3 million in 2019).

The success of the capital has driven house prices up by 64% in the first quarter of the year compared with
the first quarter of 2017, according to the National Statistics Institute,
outpacing wage growth. However, there are signs that the housing market is
cooling. Rent prices in Lisbon fell 6.9% in the second quarter from the
previous quarter, according to Confidencial Imobiliario. That’s the biggest
drop since Confidencial Imobilario started collecting data on Lisbon’s rental
property market in 2010. Home prices in
Portugal are expected to drop 2.5% this year due to the economic effects of
the Covid-19 pandemic, according to S&P Global Ratings.

Property Prices Have Far Outpaced Wages

Home-ownership has become increasingly unaffordable for
locals

The improvements to the city have come at a high social
price. “As rental and property prices increased, many locals left the city
center,” said Romao Lavadinho, president of the Association for Lisbon Tenants.
Lisbon’s Alfama district, a historic neighborhood with narrow cobbled streets,
was the subject of a comprehensive survey by researchers Agustin Cocola-Gant
and Ana Gago from Universities of Lisbon and Porto between 2015 and 2017.
Today, Alfama is often pointed out as an example of the consequences of
overtourism in Lisbon.

Prior to the financial crisis, tourism was still an emerging
industry and there were no hotels or holiday rentals in the neighborhood. By
2016, the proliferation of short-term rentals had changed this once
working-class residential place into a popular tourist area. Over the two-year
study period, the share of housing stock occupied by short-term rentals had
increased from 16% to 25% with 150 flats sold.

More than half of the 21 apartment blocks sold were
converted entirely to short-term lets. The researchers found no instance of any
of the 130 apartments rehabilitated during the period having entered the
long-term residential market.

The Four Types of Airbnb Owners

Alfama study found 78% of listings were buy-to-let in 2016

17%

Local landlords who ceased renting to tenants and listed
their flats on Airbnb

4%

Homeowners that moved to different areas of Lisbon and
rented their flat in Alfama to visitors

78%

Buy-to-let investors

34% Individual

44% Corporate

<1%

Residents sharing their homes

Source: Airbnb, buy-to-let investment and tourism-driven
displacement

The touristic use of housing stock severely reduces the
supply of apartments available for long-term occupation to such an extent that
people are unable to find units offered in the private rental market. While the
decision to sell the family flat may be voluntary, there is evidence to suggest
that homeowners selling their flats in tourist areas do so less to take
advantage of better opportunities, and more so with resignation, because
tourism disruptions affected their health and daily well-being.

While rising property and rental prices have pushed some of
Lisbon’s residents to the outskirts, it also left hundreds of low-income
families stuck in makeshift shanty towns and decrepit buildings far from the
glitzy condominiums in the city center.

Pandemic Exposes Plight of Portugal’s African Migrants

To make things worse, social
housing accounts for just 2% of the stock of rental units in Portugal,
compared with 20% in Austria, 17% in the U.K., 14% in France and 4% in Spain.
A recent outbreak of new coronavirus infections in some of these poorer
neighborhoods has brought to light some of the social disparities in the city,
which has been made worse due to the recent housing boom.

Medina, the mayor of Lisbon, hopes his “Safe Rent” program
will provide 1,000 new homes for residents to return to the city center. “The
government has said it is available to double that number if there is enough
interest from the property owners of short-term rentals,” said Medina. “Our aim
is to provide affordable housing and support property owners who, realistically
speaking, won’t have a great deal of demand for their units in the near
future.”

So far, the Lisbon City Council, which plans to sublet these
units to locals at a lower price, has approved 177 property owners interested
in joining the program. For Carla Costa Reis, who manages a Facebook page with
more than 70,000 members about the short-term rental market in Portugal, the
reason why many property owners aren’t joining the program is because they
don’t trust the Lisbon City Council.

According to data from Airbnb, Portugal was the country with
the 10th greatest economic impact on a list of 30 countries which was headed by
the U.S., followed by France and Spain. Airbnb also claims users of the
platform in Portugal generated 2.3 billion euros in direct economic impact
during 2018, and around 10 million euros of tourist tax to the Lisbon chamber.

But now tourism in
Portugal has come to a halt. A recent spike in new coronavirus cases in
Lisbon and Portugal’s controversial exclusion from the U.K.’s air bridge
program means that the owners of some of these short-term rentals may have to
wait longer for their bookings to pick up. According to the National Statistics
Institute, the tourist accommodation sector registered just 150,000 guests
for the month of May, a 95% decrease
from a year earlier. Revenue
from accommodation declined by 97% to
11 million euros.

The share of nights that Airbnb listings in Lisbon are
booked over the next 90 days has risen to 17.8%, according to AllTheRooms
Analytics, which could be a promising sign of a slow recovery for hosts.
However future bookings are still 60% below July 2019 levels.

 “It’s not about the
price. If you consider the tax breaks, some property owners that are in a more
fragile situation could effectively consider the rents that are being
proposed,” said Costa Reis, who is also the founder of Turisma, a Lisbon-based company that manages short-term rentals.
“The fundamental problem has to do with a lack of trust. There hasn’t been one
serious measure to tackle the housing problem in Lisbon that doesn’t include
attempts to push the short-term rental market against the wall through
containment zones for short-term rentals or higher taxes.”

With assistance from Shelley Robinson, Feargus O’Sullivan,
Jack Sidders, Joao Lima, and Nikki Ekstein

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L.P. All Rights Reserved

Mask Advocates Cite Plane Transmission Study in Call for Mandate - Bloomberg

Mask Advocates Cite Plane Transmission Study in Call for Mandate - Bloomberg

Mask Advocates Cite Plane
Transmission Study in Call for Mandate

By Alan Levin

 Study documents
Chinese man who became infected on jet

The 44-year-old man was chatting with his wife and son on a
flight from Singapore to China earlier this year when he let his guard down,
allowing his face mask to slip below his nose.

That lapse appears to have been how he became infected with
Covid-19.

The case, cited in a recently published study of an outbreak
among passengers on a January flight, is one of the first to document a
probable transmission on an airliner and is reviving calls for government
rules requiring masks. It comes as safety concerns raise questions about
whether passengers will return in sufficient numbers to keep airline companies
from collapsing.

Lawmakers and airline
unions -- which have sought more rigorous standards for months as
infections surge across the nation and reports circulate of passengers skirting
existing rules -- said the study adds new weight to their demands.

“This report seems to confirm the tragic consequences of the
Trump administration’s abject failure to protect passengers by mandating
masks,” said Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat. “Wearing
masks, like requiring seat belts or banning smoking, is absolutely fundamental
to protecting passengers and crew during these unprecedented times.”

The head of a union representing flight attendants -- the
workers most exposed to passengers and who are called on to enforce airline
mask directives -- called the lack of action “inexcusable.”

 “This new study
underscores the urgent need for a single national policy that would mandate
that masks be worn, and worn properly, on all commercial flights,” said Julie
Hedrick, president of the Association of Professional Flight Attendants at
American Airlines Group Inc.

All major U.S. airlines now require passengers to cover
their faces, but advocates for a federal mask requirement say it would make
enforcement easier, potentially making violations a crime. It would also set a
more uniform standard, they say. The Department of Transportation earlier this
month released a 44-page set of guidelines for airlines and airports that urges
mask usage, but officials have repeatedly said they don’t favor legal
requirements.

The airline industry is facing a crisis as passenger counts,
which plummeted to about 5% of pre-pandemic levels in April, started coming
back but stalled in recent weeks at about 25%, according to
Transportation Security Administration data. Companies have warned of possibly
tens of thousands of layoffs once restrictions tied to initial federal aid
expire on Sept. 30.

“The Department of Transportation and FAA have been clear
that passengers should wear face coverings while traveling by air, for their
own protection and the protection of those around them,” the Federal Aviation
Administration said in a statement.

The trade group for large carriers, Airlines for America,
said: “U.S. airlines are continuing to take extraordinary measures as part of a
multilayered approach to help protect the health and well-being of the
traveling public and employees.”

Air travel presents unique risks for contracting the virus
because conditions are so crowded. Research has shown airborne diseases such as
Covid-19 can be transmitted on planes, but risks aren’t well quantified.

Most Documented

The Jan. 24 flight from Singapore to Hangzhou, China is the
most thoroughly documented case of a likely passenger-to-passenger infection of
Covid-19 to date.

About 100 of the 335 passengers had recently traveled to
Wuhan, China, where the disease erupted originally, and a handful exhibited
symptoms. As a result, everyone was quarantined for at least two weeks. They
were questioned in detail by infectious disease experts. The peer-reviewed
results of the study were published online July 6 by the journal Travel
Medicine and Infectious Disease.

The team in China concluded that one man most likely became
infected by fellow passengers after ruling out other possible contacts and
noting the timing of when he became ill.

For an
hour of the flight, he went to talk with his wife and son, who were in a
different row.

“While
he talked, he reported that he did not wear his mask tightly, and his nose was
outside of mask,” the authors wrote.

Two
people adjacent to him in the same row and two more across the aisle in the row
directly behind tested positive for Covid-19, including one was already showing
symptoms, the study found.

Wuhan Infections

Ashok Srinivasan, a computer science professor at the
University of West Florida who specializes in modeling disease transmission and
has studied airline travel, said the paper highlights the importance of masks
in preventing the spread of the coronavirus in crowded environments.

“I think it is important to wear the mask all the time,”
Srinivasan said.

The study’s authors said the 15 other passengers who got
Covid-19 were infected while in Wuhan or by close contacts with family members
or others.

The aircraft, a Boeing Co. 787-9, is equipped with filters that remove the virus from
recirculated air and that may have lowered the chances that others became
infected, the authors said. All modern jetliners have such filters.

U.S. Lawmakers

The study acknowledged the researchers couldn’t completely
rule out whether the man had been infected elsewhere, but said the evidence
suggests “he probably acquired SARS-CoV-2 infection during the flight.”.

The leaders of two House committees overseeing
transportation policy have inserted language requiring the government to adopt
strict mask standards into separate bills. The bills have yet to be taken up by
the Senate.

Representative Peter DeFazio, the chairman of the
Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, called the study “intriguing,” but
said enough doubt remains that the FAA should conduct its own research.

“That’s why I’ve repeatedly pressed the FAA to not only
commission its own study to better understand how the virus travels within the
airplane cabin, but also to mandate masks,” DeFazio, an Oregon Democrat, said
in a statement.

Representative David Price, the North Carolina Democrat who
heads the Appropriations Committee panel overseeing transportation spending,
said in an interview that a federally
mandated mask rule is needed to set “an example for the entire country.”

Khan Academy | Free Online Courses, Lessons & Practice

Khan Academy | Free Online Courses, Lessons & Practice

Khan Academy | Free Online Courses, Lessons & Practice

Khan Academy | Free Online Courses, Lessons & Practice

Silicon Valley Bets Big on Microschools and Pods - Bloomberg

Silicon Valley Bets Big on Microschools and Pods - Bloomberg

Microschool Bandwagon

With schools in limbo, startups see a big market in helping parents organize learning pods and tutoring groups. Will some kids get left behind?

By 

Laura Bliss

July 23, 2020, 7:43 PM GMT+1

When San Francisco Unified School District announced that fall classes would be virtual earlier this month, Jill Gilbert worried about her five-year-old son. He’d been having depressive episodes since he left preschool at the start of the pandemic, and she feared they’d only worsen if he entered kindergarten without peers. A single mom, she also wasn’t sure how she’d juggle remote schooling for such a young child with her full-time, work-from-home job. So she turned to the Internet for help.

There she found CareVillage, an online platform that aims to match families to share the Covid-19 child care load by sharing playdates, nannies, tutors, and other resources with households. Gilbert filled out the website’s brief descriptive survey, describing what she was looking for and rating herself a “5” on a 1-5 scale of how seriously she’s working to avoid infection. A nearby family with a five-year-old son was sent to her as a match: They hoped to form what the company calls a “SchoolPod” — that is, a pact to pool costs, space, and responsibilities for instructing their kids, while hewing to the same anti-virus precautions. 

“What my son needed most desperately is not being away from other children,” Gilbert said. “For tons of parents, the idea of having a group where kids can develop some relationships that are going to stick, and do it safely — that’s what is coming to mind.”

It is also what is coming to market. As working parents in the U.S. stare down another semester of classroom-free chaos, tech companies are hustling to fill what seems to be a bottomless demand for child-minding solutions, with platforms for pod-seeking families, daycare providers, and options to form what are sometimes known as “microschools.” The loose umbrella term refers to what are generally very small clusters of students, led by parents or educators following pedagogies and operational structures as an alternative to public education. Known for smaller class sizes, flexible schedules, and alternative learning methods, pre-Covid examples of microschools range from Montessori-style programs that equip a handful of students with personalized curricula from infancy to middle school, to outdoor “forest schools” where kindergarteners learn through exploration at parks and beaches. 

Interest in this model has been growing in the U.S. for years, with some of the most vocal boosters coming from school choice and homeschooling advocates, as well as tech circles eager to turn their disruptive energy on public education (see the free online course platform Khan Academy, or WeGrow, the now-shuttered educational arm that co-working company WeWork launched in 2018). Microschools have also been an area of interest for right-leaning and Libertarian political groups such as the Heritage Foundation and the Reason Foundation. U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, an ardent school choice advocate, is also a fan of the model. On Tuesday she tweeted her support for legislation that would provide $5 billion in tax credits for families opting for homeschooling or private school, proposed by Republican Senators Lamar Alexander and Tim Scott. The pandemic has dramatically boosted the profile and appeal of microschooling, as desperate parents scramble for options amid long-term closures of in-person instruction: Google search interest for the term “microschool” has grown fourfold since early July, around the time many major U.S. school districts were announcing their plans to stay virtual for fall. 

CareVillage is hoping to ride that wave. The self-funded startup was launched in late June by Michael Beckmann and Eline van der Gaast, a San Francisco couple with an infant daughter and roots in the tech world. Within days of their family-matching site going live, more than 100 families — mostly in the Bay Area — signed up, and their numbers have been growing daily, Beckmann said. While the platform is free for parents, Beckmann believes it could eventually be monetized, perhaps through training instructors and facilitating payments. 

“My basic intuition is that if I solve a real problem for people, I can find a way to capture some value out of that,” he said. “Right now, I’m just focused on solving this huge issue.” 

The scale of the school crisis can be partly measured by the dozens of U.S.-based Facebook groups where parents and educators are frantically assembling themselves into modern-day one-room schoolhouses. Drained by juggling households responsibilities and the myriad challenges of remote learning from the spring, some members are trying to create child care co-ops or playdate pods, while others wish to transform backyards and garages into educational spaces and split the cost of hiring a nanny or tutor to lead them. Several purveyors of “ed-tech” are using these parent forums to advertise their products and services, and are adapting to meet new demands.  

One of those players is Winnie, a Yelp-like search platform founded in 2016 that lists about 200,000 child care centers and pre-kindergartens nationally. This week it launched a search function that enables its providers to signal whether they accept school-aged children, and helps parents find them. CEO and founder Sara Mauskopf said that in a survey of Winnie providers, about 75% of respondents were licensed and willing to accept older kids. 

She expects they’ll offer a range of services: For kids in higher grades, “some of these providers might just have a quiet space with an internet connection, some might have a lot of resources to support kids in distance learning, others might be just reserving space just for school-aged kids so that they can be involved with this demo,” Mauskopf said. “We want to allow for parents to see what providers are doing in order to differentiate their options.” 

As they do for younger students, instructors and caregivers will set different price points, with extra services and options for parents who are able to pay more. A San Francisco-based search turned up providers mostly offering programs for $1,200 to $2,500 per month; many programs in lower-cost cities in other parts of the country seemed to be priced at about 30% to 50% of that range. Most of the recent demand has come from dual-income families with both parents working from home, Mauskopf said.

“I don’t believe we’re going to individualize our way out of this problem.”

There are still other options. Wonderschool, a platform that specializes in helping pre-K and daycare instructors create early child care centers — guiding them through state licensing requirements, marketing, enrollment, and payments — opened up its school-creation software for parents and teachers of K-12 students seeking to create microschools. While Wonderschool already had a few programs serving older students on its platform, they mostly rely on their own curriculum, or follow online educational content from companies such as Prenda and Outschool. Now it can accommodate students following the curriculum from their existing school —  something that many pod-seeking parents are keen to do. Weekdays, which offers a similar software to help educators set up microschools, also recently launched a service to help parents match with each other and find open slots in affiliated programs. 

“We’re looking for ways to support the current movement,” said Wonderschool’s CEO and founder Chris Bennett. “I’m very concerned about how this time will set back a generation of children. I hope that kids who get access to the right supports from teachers, tutors, and people working on this full time — I think those kids will have a significant advantage compared to kids who aren’t getting this.”

That’s precisely the fear that many microschooling critics are now voicing. Educational policy experts warn of profound social equity implications as well-off parents rush to pod themselves off from public school systems, leaving behind families that lack disposable income, can’t access broadband Internet, or live in crowded homes unsuitable for sharing child care responsibilities. Microschools also threaten to widen racial gaps: Research on school voucher programs and charter schools has also shown that, when given the choice, families tend to self-segregate by income and race.

“Even in more diverse school settings and districts, my hunch is that you’ll have increasing segregation in those pods,” said Katy Bulkley, a professor of education at Montclair State University who studies school choice and privatization. “It’s hard to envision a scenario in which that does not increase inequities, rather than even holding steady” —  an all-too-familiar pattern in a pandemic that has exacerbated racial and economic inequalities in health care, labor and housing, among others. 

Bulkley said that she hopes to see school districts getting involved — they could lead pod formation and help guide where these groups ultimately assemble as a way to help overcome the discriminatory effects of self-selection as well as provide some regulatory oversight. Shauna Causey, the CEO and founder of Weekdays, said that she has been in contact with administrators at Seattle Public Schools, discussing the possibility of a public-private partnership to test that idea there. On Thursday, San Francisco officials announced plans to open 40 "learning hubs" where groups of children from low-income households can be helped with distance-learning needs; they expect to serve as many as 6,000 students. 

Janelle Scott, a professor in the graduate school of education and African American studies at University of California, Berkeley who researches educational disparities, said that she is sympathetic to all parents, school districts, and students trying to survive a chaotic situation. Yet she echoed Bulkley’s concerns that pods and microschools are likely to widen existing gaps in achievement and school funding, particularly in communities of color that have been hardest hit with coronavirus infections and deaths. She lays blame on the lack of federal guidance and support for the education system. 

“We’ve taken away any deep collective approach to this,” she said. “Without rigorous public policy support, people are going to turn to what is closest to them in crisis. But I don’t believe we’re going to individualize our way out of this problem.” 

Yet investors have been keen to propel the burgeoning ed-tech sector, and the pandemic has provided a powerful new incentive. The firm Reach Capital has been investing in learning and instruction technology since 2015, when it debuted with a $53 million fund. It has since raised an additional $82 million, which it poured into startups including Winnie and Outschool. Wayee Chu, a general partner at Reach, has witnessed a recent swell of interest in the space among other investors now that billions of households globally have been forced to try remote education. “Parents around the world have now had a window into their child’s learning (and with varied results and success),” she wrote in an email.  

Chu and every ed-tech CEO — as well as every parent and teacher — interviewed for this article acknowledged the potential negative impacts for students that don’t receive the supplemental benefits of pod-time during the upcoming semester. Many executives also pointed to the school choice vouchers available to low-income families in many states, and said that they are looking for other ways to close achievement gaps and increase the diversity of students they reach. The pandemic has clearly created a less-than-ideal state of learning for everybody, Chu said. But she sees more microschools coming: “I do think the trend is inevitable, as parents are now looking to take learning in their own hands,” she wrote. 

Not everyone is sure. Scott has doubts that the tens of thousands of parents posting on Facebook will ultimately all take the leap of faith to put their children in someone else’s care, especially as a pandemic surges to new heights of infectious danger. 

Indeed, Gilbert is currently unsure if she’ll be joining her proposed SchoolPod. It helped her to know that there were like-minded parents out there —  her CareVillage match family rated themselves a “4” — but she is waiting to see who else is in her son’s new class before picking her partners. She’s holding out to find the best match for her son’s social needs, as well as for their health. It is a fraught and stressful situation all around.  

“Trust is the hardest part of all of this,” Gilbert said. “We want to trust the people we're getting together with. You want to find people that feel the same way as you do.”

OK Boomer: Coronavirus Is Turning Millennials Into Socialists - Bloomberg

OK Boomer: Coronavirus Is Turning Millennials Into Socialists - Bloomberg

OK Boomer, We’re Gonna Socialize You

The pandemic is turning Millennials into socialists. We must
make them a better offer.

By Andreas Kluth

July 25, 2020, 6:00 AM GMT+1

Millennials deserve it too.

Millennials deserve it too. Photographer: Spencer
Platt/Getty Images North America

Andreas Kluth is a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. He was
previously editor in chief of Handelsblatt Global and a writer for the
Economist. He's the author of "Hannibal and Me."

Read more opinion

Follow @andreaskluth on Twitter

Everything about SARS-CoV-2 seems unfair. It afflicts the
poor worse than the rich, and Blacks more than Whites. It also disrupts — and
potentially derails — the lives of people in some generations more than others.
There’s social and political dynamite in this inequity. One likely effect is to
make several developed countries swerve left politically, toward some
bowdlerized form of “socialism.”

The generational effects of Covid-19 may seem
counterintuitive. Medically, the virus is most life-threatening to the
so-called “silent generation” of people in their late 70s, 80s or 90s. But
economically, the coronavirus has left these lives relatively unscathed. Their
careers have been had, their retirement savings — if they had any — had already
been turned into annuities. The Silents as a group are not the pandemic’s
biggest economic losers.

Nor is the generation just behind them, the infamous Baby
Boomers now in their late 50s, 60s or early 70s. They’ve raised their children
and don’t have the stress of home-schooling them during lockdowns. Most are
still earning and saving or are just entering retirement with relatively
generous pensions. Best of all, they’ve been politically in control for so
long, they’ve molded entire welfare and tax systems to their advantage.

My own cohort, the Generation X of people in their 40s and
early 50s, will also be fine overall. Yes, we’re currently traversing the nadir
of the so-called U-curve of lifetime well-being, as we feel the midlife stress
of caring simultaneously for elderly parents and vulnerable children — the same
ones who nowadays share our home offices to Zoom with their teachers. But that
aside, we Xers had a fair shot at building our careers in the booming 90s and —
following the blip of the dotcom bust — the aughts. We’re less worried about
ourselves than about the long-term effects of school closures on our children,
called Generation Z.

So it’s really the folks in their 20s and 30s, the
generation between X and Z, we should spare a thought for. Logically, they
should be called Generation Y, but because they came of age near a round-number
year they’re the Millennials. And boy, do they keep getting shafted.

It started with the financial crash of 2008, which hit just
as the Millennials were hoping to enter the job market and start their careers.
Suddenly, all the good jobs were gone, and they were more likely to be and stay
unemployed than the older generations.

Studies show that even a decade after the crash, all but the most educated Millennials were
earning and saving less than Xers or Boomers did at the same age. Lower
entry-level salaries can have consequences (“wage scars”) that last an entire life time. This precarious outlook
is probably one reason why Millennials had already been delaying marriage and
children longer than preceding generations did, and are more likely to still be
living with (gasp) their parents.

And then this coronavirus showed up, causing a downturn
that’s making the “Great Recession” of 2008 seem almost mild. After that
previous labor-market trauma, a lot of Millennials took whatever gigs they
could find — as bartenders, baristas, waiters or contract workers. But these
are exactly the types of jobs that fell away during the lockdowns and may not
come back soon.

So Millennials have a
right to be frustrated. But what makes many of them irate is watching
the older generations milk the system at their expense, through what some
economists call “Boomer socialism.”

Consider the generous
but unsustainable public pensions going to Boomers in most developed
countries, which are paid for largely by Millennials and Xers. In the
U.S., there’s also health care
that’s universal and public for the old (called Medicare) but often
unavailable or unaffordable for the young. In many countries, the Boomers
have also bid up house prices beyond the reach of Millennials, in part with tax
breaks for mortgage interest that disproportionately benefit older taxpayers.
Oh, and there’s the mountain of
student-loan debt bearing down on many American Millennials.

This distress, coupled with the hypocrisy of Boomers who
claim to oppose big government while enjoying it in so many ways, explains why
Millennials have been trending left and even embracing the loaded word
“socialism.” It’s these fed-up young
voters who boosted the campaigns of lefty Boomer populists like Bernie
Sanders in the U.S. and Jeremy Corbyn in the U.K.

Whether Millennials actually use the word “socialism”
properly — as government ownership of the means of production — is moot. More
likely, they simply want better public
policy that addresses their specific problems. Even then, however, they
often fall prey to political snake oil such as rent controls or wealth taxes.

The better path for policymakers across the West is to offer
more pragmatic, but still sufficiently bold, alternatives. And as I’ve argued,
this means reviving classical liberalism — not in the American sense of “left”
but in the European sense of “freedom.”

Health
care, for example, can be provided publicly, privately or in a mixed system
like Germany’s; but it should always be universal. Pension reform is a
no-brainer. So is tax simplification that cuts loopholes for Boomers, thus
broadening the base without necessarily raising rates. And yes, we should keep
studying the idea, still never properly tried, of a Universal Basic Income —
not to expand, but to replace the welfare state.

It would be tragic if we survived the pandemic only to find
ourselves living in true socialism, which in practice has always robbed
societies of prosperity and individuals of freedom. To avoid that fate, all
generations should offer Millennials a fairer — a liberal — deal.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the
editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

To contact the author of this story:

Andreas Kluth at akluth1@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story:

Nicole Torres at ntorres51@bloomberg.net

NYC Weather Forecast: Excessive Heat New Normal in Climate Change - Bloomberg

NYC Weather Forecast: Excessive Heat New Normal in Climate Change - Bloomberg



The
water off Long Island is 76.3 degrees Fahrenheit and nearly 73 degrees in
Massachusetts Bay

New York’s Sweltering Heat Is the New Normal for Climate
Change

Odds are high 2020 will wind up among top five warmest years
ever.

By Brian K Sullivan

July 23, 2020, 6:52 PM GMT+1

New Yorkers sweating through this month’s heat wave can
blame the oceans—a cool patch of water off the Pacific coast of Peru, more than
3,500 miles away (5,632 kilometers), and near-record warmth offshore in the
Atlantic. The cause and effect is a reminder that climate change’s toll is
coming due.

The cold water across the equatorial Pacific is locking in place
two high pressure systems — reservoirs of heat — at either end of the
continent.   These weather patterns, also
called ridges, promote heat and dry out the land beneath them. At the same
time, the Atlantic Ocean is feeding its warmth onto the land, adding to heat
that is already fixed across the U.S.

“Once you get a dome of heat like that it is very tough to
get rid of it,” said Jim Rouiller, lead meteorologist at the Energy Weather
Group LLC. “The weather models may chop it up, but it’s resilient, you might
get two days of normal but we rebound again.

The first half of 2020 was already quite hot—just 0.05
degree Celsius lower than the record set in 2016, according to the National
Centers for Environmental Information in Asheville, North Carolina. The odds
are high 2020 will end up in the top five warmest years ever.

In the last 30 days, 97 all-time warm records were set
around the U.S. with no low temperature marks being posted. In the previous 12
months, 179 warmest records were set to just 12 lows.

The heat in the year’s first half has already had
consequences. It pushed waters in the Gulf of Mexico to record highs in spring,
leading Florida to experience summer-like temperatures in April. It has also
fueled the Atlantic along the U.S. East Coast to warmer-than-normal levels, a
condition made worse in recent weeks as temperatures have soared across North
America. Many daily heat records that fell in the last week were near the
coastline, surprising some meteorologists.

Right now the Atlantic is quite hot. The water off Long Island is 76.3 degrees
Fahrenheit and nearly 73 degrees in Massachusetts Bay, according to
the U.S. National Data Buoy Center.

“Once a heatwave gets established, it tends to perpetuate
itself because the soil gets drier and drier, which allows it to get hotter and
hotter,” said Jennifer Francis, a researcher at the Woods Hole Research Center.

This is where climate
change is making things worse, she said. As the planet warms, the
contrast between the heat at the equator and the cold at the pole decreases.
That saps the strength of the jet
stream, which otherwise would serve to defuse the heat. The result is a
circular river of winds too weak to move these big ridges of hot air across
continents. Hence, the dome of heat stays stuck for weeks or months.

“Heatwaves are getting hotter, pure and simple,” Francis
said. “It’s one of the most direct symptoms of global warming.”

The intense heat raises the possibility for drought, which
adds to the potential for temperatures to rise even more. Without moisture in
the soil, the sun’s energy is focused on heating the air and not evaporating
water, which just drives up temperatures even more. The cool Pacific water
that’s helping produce the heat is close to becoming what’s known as a La Nina,
which can cause droughts and floods worldwide.

There are silver linings. In the Midwestern crop belt,
blasts of rain during the past few weeks should help alleviate the drought
conditions that have crept up in states including Nebraska, Iowa, Indiana and
Ohio. The rainfall, combined with sweltering heat, should be a boon for crops
like corn, which typically go through the yield-setting pollination phase in
July.

Matt Bennett, a farmer in central Illinois and commodity
analyst at AgMarket.Net, planted his crops in April, earlier than usual,
because of the warm temperatures. “Hot and wet is what you want,” he said.

— With assistance by Michael Hirtzer