TikTok Is the Superweapon in China’s Cultural Warfare - Bloomberg

TikTok Is the Superweapon in China’s Cultural Warfare - Bloomberg

The U.S. won the Cold War by
exporting its values, and China has a similar plan for Cold War II.

By Niall Ferguson

August 9, 2020, 1:00 PM GMT+1

Niall Ferguson is the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the
Hoover Institution at Stanford University and a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He
was previously a professor of history at Harvard, New York University and
Oxford. He is the founder and managing director of Greenmantle LLC, a New
York-based advisory firm.

I spent half an hour trying to make sense of the endless
feed of video snippets of ordinary people doing daft things with their dogs or
in their kitchens or in the gym. I figured out the viral memes of the moment:
animals dancing to Tono Rosario’s “Kulikitaka,” the suspenseful unveiling of
hunks or hounds to the repeated words, “Please don’t be ugly.” I asked my
eight-year-old son what I should look out for. He recommended the dancing
ferret. I never found it.

Thirty minutes of TikTok left me with just one burning
question: How can this thing be a threat to U.S. national security?

And then I had the epiphany. TikTok is not just China’s revenge for the century of humiliation
between the Opium Wars and Mao’s revolution. It is the opium — a digital fentanyl, to get our kids
stoked for the coming Chinese imperium.

First, the back story — which you’ll need if you, like me,
never got hooked on Facebook, or Instagram, or Snapchat, and still use the
Internet like a very fast version of your university library, and begin emails
with “Dear …”

The year is 2012, and
Zhang Yiming, a Chinese tech entrepreneur who briefly worked at Microsoft,
founds ByteDance Ltd. as a
smartphone-focused content provider. His AI-powered news aggregator Toutiao is
a hit. In November 2017, he pays $1 billion for a lip-synching app called
Musical.ly, which already has a growing user community that tilts young (12 to 24) and female and
is established in the U.S. Zhang then merges Musical.ly with his own
short-video app TikTok, known in China as Douyin.

The thing spreads faster than Covid-19: TikTok now has
800 million monthly active users
around the globe. And it’s far more contagious: Just under half of U.S. teenage
internet users have used TikTok. If it were a pathogen, it would be the Black
Death. But it’s an app, so ByteDance is now worth $100 billion.

So what’s the secret of TikTok’s success? The best answers I’ve seen come from Ben
Thompson, whose Stratechery newsletter
has become essential reading on all the things tech. First, Thompson wrote
last month, the history of analog media already told us that “humans
like pictures more than text, and moving pictures most of all.”
Second, TikTok’s video creation tools are really “accessible and inspiring for
nonprofessional videographers.” Translation: Idiots can use them.

Third, unlike Facebook, TikTok is not a social
network. It’s an AI-based algorithmic
feed that uses all the data it can get about each user to personalize content. “By expanding the
library of available video from those made by your network to any video made by
anyone on the service,” Thompson argues, “Douyin/TikTok leverages the sheer
scale of user-generated content … and relies on its algorithms to ensure that
users are only seeing the cream of the crop.”

In other words, “think of TikTok as being a mobile-first
YouTube,” not Facebook with cool video. It’s “an entertainment entity
predicated on internet assumptions about
abundance, not Hollywood assumptions about scarcity.”

So what’s not to like?
The answer would seem to be quite a lot.

In February, TikTok was fined $5.7 million by the Federal
Trade Commission over allegations that it illegally collected personal
information from children under the age of 13. In April, the app was
temporarily banned in India by the High Court in Madras for carrying child
pornographic content and failing to prevent cyberbullying. (The ban
was swiftly reversed.)

But Zhang’s real headache was elsewhere. Last November, the
Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (known as CFIUS) began a probe into ByteDance’s
acquisition of Musical.ly on the ground that it potentially affected U.S.
national security. Seriously? A teenage video app is a threat to the most
powerful nation-state on the planet? Well, these days CFIUS regards just about
any Chinese investment as a threat — in 2010, it forced the Chinese gaming
firm Beijing Kunlun Tech Co. to sell the gay dating app Grindr.

I’ve written before in this space about Cold War II. Well,
TikTok has become the Sino-American conflict’s latest casualty.

Unlike everything else in America, including Covid-19, Cold
War II is bipartisan. Last October, the Senate minority leader, Democrat Chuck
Schumer, and Republican Senator Tom Cotton jointly called for a
national-security investigation into ByteDance. The issue, they said, is that
as a Chinese entity, ByteDance is subject to China's cybersecurity rules,
which stipulate that it has to share data with the Chinese government.
TikTok admits as much in its privacy policy: “We may share your information
with a parent, subsidiary, or other affiliate of our corporate group.”

Zhang Yiming is a great entrepreneur. Though he is
personally no authoritarian, he is also a political conformist. ByteDance’s first app, Neihan Duanzi
(“inside jokes”), was shut down in 2018 by the National Radio and
Television Administration. Zhang had to apologize that its content had been “incommensurate
with socialist core values.” He solemnly promised that ByteDance would
henceforth “further deepen cooperation”
with the Chinese Communist Party.

Until last month, Zhang’s game plan was voluntary separation
of ByteDance from China. Like other Chinese tech giants, ByteDance is a “variable interest entity” incorporated
in the Cayman Islands, positioning it for an offshore initial public offering
in Hong Kong or New York. ByteDance claims that all American data from
TikTok are stored in U.S. data centers and backed up in Singapore. The
appointment in May of Kevin Mayer, a former Disney executive, as TikTok’s new
chief executive and ByteDance’s chief operating officer, was the clearest
signal yet of where Zhang was headed.

Then, President Donald Trump blew Zhang’s game plan apart.

On June 31, he threatened to ban TikTok in the U.S. On Monday,
when Microsoft appeared set to buy TikTok’s U.S. operations, Trump made the
characteristically unorthodox and probably illegal suggestion that the U.S.
government should get some kind of arrangement fee. “It’s a little bit like the
landlord-tenant,” explained the former real-estate developer from Queens.
“Without a lease, the tenant has nothing. So they pay what is called ‘key
money’ or they pay something.”

Then on Friday, he issued an executive order banning TikTok
in the U.S. in 45 days unless it is sold to a non-Chinese entity. (Tencent
Holdings Ltd’s even more popular messaging app WeChat will also be banned.)

Trump is wrong to ask
for a piece of the action. But he’s right that TikTok needs more than an
American chief executive to continue operating in the U.S. Vacuous though
its content may seem, TikTok poses three distinct
threats.

The first is a good threat: the one it poses to over-mighty,
under-regulated Facebook Inc., which
the Department of Justice should never have allowed to acquire Instagram and
WhatsApp. TikTok has eaten Facebook’s lunch as a platform for video,
prompting Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg to try to rip it off with Reels —
launched on Wednesday — in the same way that Instagram’s Stories ripped off
Snapchat.

Whatever else happens, Reels must not succeed. Nor
should Facebook become the owner of TikTok. Facebook’s enormous and malignant
influence in the American public sphere is a threat not to national security
but to American democracy itself. Its efforts to regulate itself since 2016
have largely been a sham.

The second threat TikTok poses is to children. Like Facebook, like YouTube, like Twitter, TikTok is optimized for user engagement, algorithmically
steering users to content that will hook them via its “For You” page. In
essence, the AI learns what you like and then gives you more of it. And more.
Future historians will marvel that we didn’t give our kids crack cocaine,
but did give them TikTok.

Like crack, TikTok is dangerous. For example, TikTok’s
users, who are still mostly young and female, love lip-sync videos. These have
become a magnet for pedophiles, who
can use the app to send girls sexually explicit messages and even remix videos
and dance along with them using a feature called Duet. Cases of sexual
harassment of minors are easy to find: In February, a 35-year-old Los
Angeles man was arrested on suspicion of initiating “sexual and vulgar”
conversations with at least 21 girls, some as young as nine.

TikTok’s third threat is
geopolitical. For Ben Thompson, who is based in Taiwan, the past year has
been revelatory. Having previously played down the political and ideological
motivations of the Chinese government, he has now come out as New Cold Warrior.
China’s vision of the role of technology is fundamentally different from
the West’s, he argues, and it fully
intends to export its anti-liberal vision to the rest of the world.

“If China is on the offensive against liberalism not only
within its borders but within ours,” he asks, “it is in liberalism’s interest
to cut off a vector that has taken
root precisely because it is so brilliantly engineered to give humans
exactly what they want.”

If you need an update on how the Communist Party is using AI
to build a surveillance state that makes Orwell’s Big Brother seem primeval —
it’s actually more akin to the dystopia
imagined in Yevgeny Zamyatin’s 1924 novel “We” — read Ross Andersen’s
recent essay in the Atlantic, “The Panopticon Is Already Here.”

As Andersen puts it, “In the near future, every person who
enters a public space [in China] could be identified, instantly, by AI matching
them to an ocean of personal data, including their every text communication,
and their body’s one-of-a-kind protein-construction schema. In time, algorithms
will be able to string together data points from a broad range of sources —
travel records, friends and associates, reading habits, purchases — to predict
political resistance before it happens.”

Many of China’s prominent AI startups are the Communist
Party’s “willing commercial partners” in this, which is bad enough. But the
greater concern, as Andersen says, is that all
this technology is for export. Among the countries importing it are Bolivia,
Ecuador, Ethiopia, Kenya, Malaysia, Mauritius, Mongolia, Serbia, Sri Lanka,
Uganda, Venezuela, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

The Chinese response to the American attack on TikTok
gives the game away. On Twitter, Hu Xijin, the editor-in-chief of the
government-controlled Global Times, called the move “open robbery,” accused
Trump of “turning the once great America into a rogue country,” and warned that
“when similar things happen time and again, the U.S. will take steps closer to
its decline.”

Ah yes, our old friend the decline and fall of American
imperialism. And its corollary? In a revealing essay published last April, the
Chinese political theorist Jiang Shigong, a professor at Peking University Law
School, spelled out the imperial nature of China’s ambition. World history, he argued, is the history of
empires, not nation-states, which are a relatively recent phenomenon.
(By the way, this has long been my own view.)

“The history of humanity is surely the history of
competition for imperial hegemony,” Jiang writes, “which has gradually
propelled the form of empires from their original local nature toward the
current tendency toward global empires, and finally toward a single world
empire.”

The globalization of our time, according to Jiang, is the
“single world empire 1.0, the model of world
empire established by England and the United States.” But that
Anglo-American empire is “unravelling”
internally because of “three great
unsolvable problems: the ever-increasing inequality created by the
liberal economy … ineffective governance caused by political liberalism,
and decadence and nihilism created by cultural liberalism.” (Come to
think of it, I agree with this, too.)

Moreover, the Western empire is under external attack from “Russian resistance and Chinese competition.”
This is not a bid to create an alternative Eurasian empire but “a struggle to
become the heart of the world empire.”

If you doubt that China is seeking to take over empire 1.0
and turn it into empire 2.0, based on China’s
illiberal civilization, then you are not paying attention to all the ways
this strategy is being executed.

China has successfully become the workshop of the world, as we used to be. It now has a
Weltpolitik known as One Belt One Road,
a vast infrastructure project that looks a lot like Western imperialism as
described by J.A. Hobson in 1902. China uses the prize of access to its
market to exert pressure on U.S. companies to toe Beijing’s line. It conducts
“influence operations” across the West, including the U.S.

One of the many ways America sought to undermine the Soviet
Union in Cold War I was by waging a “Cultural Cold War.” This was partly about
being seen to beat the Soviets at their own games — chess (Fischer v Spassky);
ballet (Rudolf Nureyev’s defection); ice hockey (the “Miracle on Ice” of 1980).
But it was mainly about corrupting the Soviet people with the irresistible
temptations of American popular culture.

In 1986, the French leftist philosopher and comrade-in-arms
of Che Guevara, Jules Régis Debray, lamented, “There is more power in rock
music, videos, blue jeans, fast food, news networks and TV satellites than in
the entire Red Army.” The French Left sneered at “Coca-colonization.” But
Parisians, too, drank Coke.

Now, however, the tables have been turned. In a debate I
hosted at Stanford in 2018, the tech billionaire Peter Thiel used a memorable
aphorism: “AI is Communist, crypto is libertarian.” TikTok validates the
first half of that. In the late 1960s, during the Cultural Revolution, Chinese
children denounced their parents for rightist deviance. In 2020, during the
Covid-19 lockdown and the Black Lives Matter protests, American teenagers
posted videos of themselves berating their parents for racism. And they did it
on TikTok.

Those inane-seeming words are now lodged in my brain:
“Please don’t be ugly.” But TikTok is
ugly, very ugly. And severing its hotline to Xi Jinping’s imperial panopticon
is the least we can do about it.

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:

Niall Ferguson at nferguson23@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story:

Tobin Harshaw at tharshaw@bloomberg.net

Coronavirus Latest: How Do Covid Tests Work? - Bloomberg

Coronavirus Latest: How Do Covid Tests Work? - Bloomberg

Key to bringing the pandemic under control is testing: to find out where the coronavirus is flaring up, how it’s spreading and where it has already been. There’s been a global rush to ramp up two categories of tests -- those that diagnose people who are currently infected and those that show whether someone has already fought the virus -- and deploy them in various approaches.

1. What kind of coronavirus tests exist?

There are two main types. The first, for diagnosing active infections, typically looks for the presence of the virus in your nose, throat or mouth. The second tests whether you were infected with the virus in the past. Known as an antibody test, this second variety looks for evidence, generally from a blood sample, that your immune system has built up antibodies to fight off the virus.

2. How do diagnostic tests work?

So-called molecular tests look for bits of the virus’s nucleic acids, or its genetic materials, in a sample of secretions. These tests generally require several components, including chemical reagents, small plastic containers, and swabs if the sample is from the nose or throat. Shortages of components, or a lack of trained lab technicians, have limited the test’s availability in many places. Newer versions, using saliva, eliminate the need for a swab, though some studies suggest this approach picks up fewer cases. Molecular tests typically rely on sophisticated equipment, including instruments that perform a process called reverse-transcription polymerase chain reaction, which amplifies the virus’s genetic material enough to study it in detail.

3. How long does it take for results?

There are rapid molecular tests that can churn out results in 30 minutes or less, but they don’t scale very well. Roche Holding AG.’s more-industrialized instruments take a few hours to produce results, but can perform thousands of tests a day -- in optimal situations. However, given the logistics of collecting samples and sending them to labs, many of which are overwhelmed, it’s very common in some places for people to wait several days to more than a week to get their results.

4. Is there a simpler way to diagnose?

Yes. Many public health officials are calling for wider adoption of rapid antigen diagnostic tests, especially in low- and middle-income countries that have relatively few complex laboratories. These tests can be about as simple as those for pregnancy. They detect the presence of viral proteins -- which make up most of the virus’s physical structure -- in someone’s nose or mouth. While typically less reliable than molecular tests, rapid antigen tests can be a lot cheaper, faster and easier to use, allowing for quick scaling-up. Used strategically and often enough, these tests could become powerful tools both in handling individual infections and in guiding public health measures.

5. Why is diagnostic testing so important?

If everyone in the world stopped interacting with everyone else for a couple of weeks, the coronavirus would die out because it wouldn’t be able to infect anyone new. Since that’s not possible, the goal is to reduce spread from person to person as much as possible. To do that effectively, it’s necessary to know who is infected, so that they can be quarantined and so that their recent, close contacts can be identified, quarantined and tested as well. This “contact tracing” slows the spread of the virus, since it lets people know when they’re likely to be spreaders, even if they don’t feel symptoms.

6. How are the tests deployed?

When molecular tests are in very short supply, they should be used above all on people showing symptoms of a coronavirus infection and their close contacts, officials say. Beyond that, the tests can be used to conduct so-called surveillance testing -- when a sample of a community is tested to monitor the state of the outbreak in that population. One way to make tests go further is to use pool testing, in which samples are grouped into one batch and subjected to a single test. If it comes up negative, no further action is taken; only if it’s positive is each person individually tested. This method makes sense only if fewer than about 5% of people in a population are infected at a given time. Otherwise, too many pools test positive, creating even more work.

7. How accurate are diagnostic tests?

While no medical test is perfect, some of the biggest makers of coronavirus tests -- including Roche and Abbott Laboratories -- say theirs are nearly 100% reliable when properly used. But human error is always a possibility when getting a good sample from someone’s nose or throat, keeping it at the right temperature for perhaps a couple of days and using chemicals to extract the virus’s genetic material properly. Also, a false negative is possible if the patient is tested too early or too late in their infection. Early in the pandemic, some rushed-to-market molecular tests proved unreliable. In a study published in February of 1,014 suspected coronavirus cases in a hospital in Wuhan, China, 88% tested positive using CT scans of the chest, versus only 59% using molecular tests. More recently, independent organizations have confirmed the reliability of plenty of molecular tests.

8. How do antibody tests work?

A person infected by a virus summons antibodies specifically designed, like keys for a particular door, to latch onto and neutralize the proteins that form the bulk of the virus. Depending on the virus, these antibodies can linger for months or even years after you recuperate, in case you encounter the virus again. To make antibody tests, developers either grow in a lab -- or buy from a supplier -- copies of proteins that appear naturally on a particular virus. If a person has already fought off the virus, their blood should contain antibodies that will latch onto these proteins that are in the test. For these tests to be useful, they need to be highly specific, so a positive result isn’t triggered by similarly shaped antibodies that once fought off, say, the coronavirus that causes the common cold.

9. Why are antibody tests important?

For policy makers, antibody tests are a powerful tool to understand how widely the virus has spread in a region, which public health measures are working and which aren’t. Such surveillance testing found that in the U.K. as of July, an estimated 7.1% of people had coronavirus antibodies. The figure was measured at 23% in New York City in April. That knowledge could be useful once vaccines are widely available, since it’s believed that 55% to 82% of people in a community will need to have protection before so-called herd immunity can kick in -- the point at which infections eventually stop because so few people are vulnerable.

10. What are the challenges?

It’s still unknown how strong immunity is for people infected with the coronavirus, and early evidence suggests that antibody levels fall quickly. In contrast, a 2007 study showed antibodies to the coronavirus responsible for severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) appear to dissipate after an average of two years. Another report found those generated by infection with the coronavirus behind Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) tend to stick around a bit longer, but not in everyone. Yet neither of those studies demonstrated whether the presence of antibodies was protection against re-infection. When it comes to this pandemic, it isn’t clear what level of antibodies is needed for someone to be protected against Covid-19 again either. Nor is it clear how much T cells, another weapon in the immune system, can provide protection even if antibody levels drop.

11. Are antibody tests reliable?

While many of the earliest antibody tests were essentially worthless, raising big doubts about the technology, there are now plenty that are considered highly reliable. For any such test, a crucial task is to ensure that very few individuals receive a false positive result for coronavirus antibodies, since that might lead them to lower their guard on social distancing.

The Reference Shelf

• Related QuickTakes on the challenges of the coronavirus, future pandemics, the quest for Covid-19 vaccines and better treatments, the seasonality question, how coronavirus spreads and silent spreaders.
• An article in the MIT Technology Review explores the problems with issuing immunity certificates.
• Bloomberg Opinion columnist Michael Lewis on the lab trying to solve the coronavirus test shortage in the U.S.

.

What Did the Roman Emperors Really Look Like? A Novel Blend of AI and Art Conjures Up Eerily Detailed Photographic Portraits | artnet News

What Did the Roman Emperors Really Look Like? A Novel Blend of AI and Art Conjures Up Eerily Detailed Photographic Portraits | artnet News



...Some decisions were research-heavy, he tells Artnet News, explaining that he looked to the emperors’ birthplace and family lineage to guess at the tone of their skin (a subject of some scholarly debate).

Augustus. Courtesy of Daniel Voshart.

In fact, removing the coldness of the emperors’ likenesses required more than turning stone into flesh. 

“It is easy to remove all expression and character from the original when making things photoreal. I tried really hard to keep that,” he says. “Florianus, for example. The bust I was using as source material didn’t have much academic consensus, but I thought the expression was fascinating. It had to be kept. The further an expression is from neutral the harder it is to keep photoreal.”

For previous projects, Voshart has also used machine learning to make portraits of Egyptian mummies and to render a series of figurative clay sculptures created by students at the New York Academy of Art into realistic faces. 

His creations are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the kind of work being done online. Indeed, there are entire threads dedicated to using tools like Artbreeder to bring long-gone figures back to life. A quick scroll of one such thread on Reddit yields impressive, uncanny, and sometimes just plain creepy pictures of figures such as Caesar, Khurshudbanu Natavan, and even the Statue of Liberty.

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child care crisis warnings - btbirkett@gmail.com - Gmail

One VP contender's child care crisis warnings - btbirkett@gmail.com - Gmail

THE PARENTING PUZZLE — Illinois Sen. Tammy Duckworth is one of the finalists for Joe Biden’s vice presidential selection for a lot of reasons: She’s a disabled war veteran, a woman, an Asian-American and Democrats like her record on foreign policy and defense issues.

But she’s also got a unique perspective on the coronavirus crisis: She’s one of the few mothers of young children in the Senate, and is facing the child care and virtual schooling crisis first hand. Duckworth has not been afraid to put her maternal credentials on display — she cast a vote on the Senate floor in 2018 while holding her newborn daughter. (About 41 million U.S. workers between the ages of 18 and 64 were caring for at least one child under the age of 18 in 2018, according to the Brookings Institution.) Duckworth has also sponsored legislation to expand access to child care.

Nightly interviewed Duckworth today to discuss the child care crisis spurred by the pandemic, and we tried to slip in a question about whether she’s moving up or down on Biden’s VP selection list. This conversation has been edited. (Spoiler alert below.)

How are you juggling caring for your young kids with being a Senator?

Listen, I just found out that Chicago public schools is going to back to 100 percent online when we go back to school. Fairfax here in Virginia is the same. Some of the school districts have published what the potential schedule is going to look like and it’s going to be 9 to 3 online education. How does anybody manage that with their children and hold down a job? You can’t even telecommute from home because you are being the teachers assistant. I definitely want our kids to go back to school, but we can’t do it unless we spend the money and send funding out to our school districts so they can afford to make schools safe so our kids can go back to school.

If you could pass a bill in the Senate today to address the child care crisis in the country, what would it contain?

We should be able to let families afford to have child care so they don’t have to quit their jobs. A caring economy is one that would include universal paid family leave, so you can take the time off to take care of your loved ones or to take care of yourself. We should have universal pre-K because we know whether or not a child is enrolled in pre-K or Head Start affects their ability to read by the 4th grade and their performance at the end of 4th grade is predictive of whether or not they are going to graduate high school and go on to college.

Some of your colleagues are grandparents — how receptive have they been to some of these ideas?

This is something that we can work on. I don’t understand why they would not be supportive of a tax credit for the middle class. You don’t have to pay for all of it. If you can provide a credit for up to, say, 50 percent of a family’s child care cost, that means you can actually keep the economy vibrant because those parents would still be working. Free and early education is really critical. When I travel around Illinois, when I say universal pre-K, people understand and are supportive of it no matter where I am, whether I am in the bluest of the blue counties or the reddest of the red counties. There has to be an understanding of the value of taking care of children in our society.

Singapore Startup Seeks to Give Solar Power a Competitive Edge - Bloomberg

Singapore Startup Seeks to Give Solar Power a Competitive Edge - Bloomberg

A Singapore startup is seeking to connect potential buyers and sellers of solar power directly.

Electrify Pte’s platform lets owners of homes and businesses bid and offer rates for specific amounts of electricity. By selling directly to users rather than the grid, solar owners can get more money for their power, while consumers avoid paying a premium for renewable energy.

The platform underscores how cheap solar, with its ability to be installed just about anywhere with a roof, is challenging the decades-old model of power grids that deliver electricity one way from plants to homes. It’s also allowing smaller players to join massive utilities in profiting from differences in electricity prices.

“Power grids are old and designed for centralized generation, but that’s changing,” Martin Lim, the chief executive officer of Electrify, said in an interview.

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Electrify’s marketplace can benefit both those with solar roofs as well as people and businesses who want to support green energy, Lim said. The company is testing the platform with a one-year pilot program in Singapore involving 100 people and businesses.

Homes and businesses in Singapore that have rooftop solar sets that produce excess power can currently sell it back into the grid at near wholesale prices, which is usually well below the retail price most customers pay for their electricity.

Electrify allows them to offer it at a higher rate, Lim said. He currently advises users to price deals around the retail price.

When a consumer and producer agree on a rate, they sign a six-month deal, and Electrify uses meters installed at both sites to determine total sales over the length of the contract.

For buyers, it allows them to say they’re paying for solar power, which is important to some climate-conscious people and a growing number of businesses trying to prove their green credentials.

The arrangement should allow solar owners to increase revenue, which could lead to increased rooftop builds, said Jenny Chase, head of solar analysis for BloombergNEF. However it likely won’t drive a huge expansion, as solar owners prefer long-term contracts to mitigate their investment risks.

Electrify, which attracted a small investment from Tokyo Electric Power Co. in 2018, is partnering with Senoko Energy for its Singapore pilot. The company is also in talks with governments and utilities in places like Australia and Thailand.

The company is currently charging a 5% transaction fee for energy exchanged on its platform during the pilot. It wants to capture a 20% market share of solar energy transacted in Southeast Asia by 2025, and envisions generating around $20 million in annual revenue by that year, Lim said.

Let’s Hire Laid-Off Oil and Gas Workers to Fight Climate Change - Bloomberg

Let’s Hire Laid-Off Oil and Gas Workers to Fight Climate Change - Bloomberg

The bankruptcies have also left scars on the environment, in the form of abandoned oil and gas wells. Some 3 million such sites are scattered across the country, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, and most are leaking copious amounts of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas.

But the U.S. could meet both challenges in one stroke — by paying laid-off energy workers to clean up abandoned wells.

Plugging a single abandoned well can cut its methane emissions by 99%, according to the EPA, and the work requires skills that oil and gas workers already possess.

Eduardo Rodriguez - Goodbye Weak Dollar, Hello Emerging Market Crisis? - btbirkett@gmail.com - Gmail

Goodbye Weak Dollar, Hello Emerging Market Crisis? - btbirkett@gmail.com - Gmail



 there is growing evidence that Covid can lead to ongoing damage to the heart, even in the healthy 20-somethings who would be allowed to take part in such tests. In the U.S., the fact that Eduardo Rodriguez, a well-known baseball pitcher, who is 27 years old and built like an ox, has been forced to abandon the current season with myocarditis following a Covid-19 infection makes clear that this could infect anyone.