Facebook has weathered many storms, but the latest are coming for its core

Facebook in the age of COVID-19: Pandemic wiping out the smaller businesses that buy the most Facebook ads, as big advertisers’ boycott pressures the social media platform to stop running political ads that would be a big boon in the coming months


Published: July 23, 2020 By Jon Swartz

MARKETWATCH PHOTO ILLUSTRATION/ISTOCKPHOTO

The coronavirus pandemic sent users to Facebook Inc.’s social-networking, messaging and live-streaming platforms in record numbers, but little else has gone right for Mark Zuckerberg’s company amid COVID-19’s spread.

Facebook FB, -3.03% is in the jaws of a world-wide advertising boycott, faces withering criticism of its hands-off policy toward President Donald Trump’s missives on its platform, and a deepening investigation of its business practices by federal regulators. Zuckerberg will testify at a Congressional antitrust subcommittee hearing July 27. Amid all of that, the social-media giant is bracing for a rare down quarter when it reports second-quarter earnings results on July 29.

Facebook should have experience with this kind of drama: The company has faced chaos before in the wake of the 2016 presidential election, and has continued to rack up record revenue, share prices and market valuations, but the twin storms of COVID-19 and social unrest are both aiming for Facebook’s core business, advertising.

More than 1,000 companies from Coca-Cola Co. KO, -0.41% to Verizon Communications Inc. VZ, +0.17% are boycotting Facebook ads because of hate speech on its platforms amid a larger social protest movement across the U.S. and around the world. While large advertisers publicly proclaim they will not use Facebook, small- and medium-size businesses — which account for three-fourths of Facebook’s advertising revenue —— are facing the most extreme damage from the pandemic and cutting their ad spending in response.

See also: Here are the major brands that have pulled ads from Facebook

If there is a silver lining, it could be the hundreds of millions of dollars in political ads Facebook should collect between now and the Nov. 3 general election. In last year’s third-quarter earnings call, Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg estimated ads from politicians to be “less than 0.5% of our revenue next year.” This would be about $400 million, based on FactSet analysts’ forecast of $77.4 billion in revenue in 2020.

But that very notion — especially after the allegations of misleading information on Facebook played out during the 2016 election — is a pillar of the July boycott. Unless Facebook seriously cleans up this area, some major brands are likely to extend their pause in advertising on the platform, according to analysts and advertising experts.

Nearly three of four Americans (72%) do not want political campaigns to be able to micro-target them through digital ads, according to a recent poll from the Knight Foundation/Gallup. A majority (59%) believe online political ads should display who paid for them, how much, and who they target. And 20% favor an outright ban on digital election campaign ads.

The immediate impact of the boycott, as measured by what Facebook’s top 100 advertisers spent in the U.S. on July 1, was significant. They spent $11.2 million this year, down 18% from $13.8 million on July 1, 2019, according to research firm Pathmatics Inc.

The biggest blow came with the absence of The Walt Disney Co. DIS, -0.76% , Facebook’s top U.S. advertiser for the first six months of 2020. Disney spent about $210 million on Facebook ads for Disney+ in the U.S. in the first half of this year, Pathmatics estimates. From June 25-30, Disney spent $1.41 million. Another major ad customer, Starbucks Corp. SBUX, -2.43% , spent about $1.2 million on Facebook from June 25-30, before starting its boycott.

Read more: The Facebook ad boycott could pay off for companies more than advertising on Facebook

And yet, Facebook has been able to easily weather the storm because its top 100 advertisers account for less than 20% of revenue, and its top-50 make up just 6%, according to Ad Age magazine. The top 100 advertisers accounted for about 15% of daily U.S. revenue in 2019, based on data from Pathmatics. More significantly, 76% of ad sales come from some 8 million paying customers, many of whom are medium- and small-sized businesses that are coping with a major economic downturn. Some 160 million businesses have a presence on Facebook, the company confirmed.

“Given Facebook’s high auction density, we believe there are plenty of other advertisers who will step in take advantage of (potentially) lower-priced inventory,” J.P. Morgan analyst Doug Anmuth said in a July 15 note.

Business in the age of COVID-19: Read how other large companies will be affected by the coronavirus

Jefferies analyst Brent Thill expects the ban to be temporary as ad spending escalates in the second half of 2020. More than 100 U.S. brands and agencies plan to increase their digital budgets more than 25% year-over-year in the third quarter, according to an IAB survey in June. Conversely, in a March survey, the advertisers said they would reduce digital ad budgets by 20% in May and June.

“We do not expect a V-shaped recovery in ad demand, but we believe there is substantial evidence indicating digital advertising is more resilient than traditional channels like linear TV,” Thill wrote in a July 13 note. For Q2, he modeled average ad spending would decline 2% year-over-year, with growth in Q3 (9%) and Q4 (18%).

“We anticipate the share shift to digital advertising to accelerate in 2020,” Thill said. The long-term trend favors Facebook and Alphabet’s Google GOOGL, -3.07% GOOG, -3.36% over Twitter Inc. TWTR, +4.06% and Snap Inc. SNAP, -5.30% , he said.

Digital advertising will increase its share of the overall advertising market in the U.S. this year to 60% from 55%, according to eMarketer analyst Nicole Perrin. She expects digital to grow nearly 2% this year — a fraction of the 17% she predicted before COVID-19 — while television ad spending will decline 15% and print will dive 25%.

See also: Facebook is both benefiting and battered by the coronavirus impact
What the numbers are saying

Revenue: Analysts on average expect Facebook to report $17.3 billion in second-quarter revenue, according to FactSet, down from $20.57 billion expected at the end of 2019. Monthly active users, a key indicator of Facebook’s growth and advertising appeal, are projected at 2.62 billion by FactSet, up 8% from the 2.41 billion reported a year ago.

Earnings: Average analyst expectations from FactSet are for earnings of $1.39 a share, down from $2.13 a share at the beginning of the year.

Stock movement: Through Wednesday, shares are up 13% in 2020, with most of the gains coming since mid-March and outbreak of COVID-19. At a market value of about $685 billion, Facebook lags behind rival Alphabet but significantly ahead of Twitter and Snap. The broader S&P 500 index SPX, -1.23% is up 0.2% this year.
What the company is saying

July 4: Zuckerberg says he’s not worried about the boycott and has no intention of changing company policy, according to a new report. “We’re not gonna change our policies or approach on anything because of a threat to a small percent of our revenue, or to any percent of our revenue,” he said, according to The Information, which cited a transcript of remarks Zuckerberg gave at an employees-only virtual town hall.

June 28: Zuckerberg implemented policy changes during a virtual town hall meeting as more major advertisers joined a boycott of the platform and shares sank. Zuckerberg announced several steps to eliminate hateful content in ads, tamp down on false claims leading to the 2020 elections, and make progress on racial justice. He added Facebook will hide or block content considered hateful or that could harm voting, with no exception for politicians, as Twitter has done to President Trump and others. Zuckerberg had previously spoken out against Twitter’s approach.

April 29: Facebook reported better-than-expected quarterly revenue but missed on earnings. Still, the company managed to double its profit from a year ago, sending its shares up 10% in after-hours trading. Facebook warned its business “has been impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic and, like all companies, we are facing a period of unprecedented uncertainty in our business outlook.”
What analysts are saying

• “About two-thirds of agencies and brands surveyed say Facebook/Instagram offers the best ROI with nearly one-third pointing to Google/YouTube as their best performing platform.” — Loop Capital Markets analyst Rob Sanderson, maintaining a buy rating on Facebook shares, while raising its price target to $265 from $215, on July 20.

• “FB remains one of our best ideas we continue to like it into 2Q earnings. Industry discussions checks suggest the online ad market has rebounded well since bottoming in April, w/FB benefiting from: 1) its large base of 8M+ advertisers; 2) heavy exposure to performance-based/DR ads; 3) strong user engagement scale; 4) proven ROI; 5) lower exposure to travel (LSD-MSD %).” — J.P. Morgan analyst Doug Anmuth, on raising his rating to overweight and price target to $290 from $245, on July 15.

• “We do not expect a V-shaped recovery in ad demand, but we believe there is substantial evidence indicating digital advertising is more resilient than traditional channels like linear TV… In 2020, we expect digital’s share of total spend to expand by 400bps to 54%, as advertisers value the flexibility, measurability, and surging usage of platforms like FB, GOOG, and SNAP.” – Jefferies analyst Brent Thill, on maintaining a buy rating and raising Facebook’s price target to $285 from $250, on July 13.

This article is part of a series tracking the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on major businesses, and will be updated. It was originally published on April 6.

Abigail Disney ‘confused’ by Disney reopening its Florida theme parks — and she still wants to be taxed more

The Disney heiress continued calling for a wealth tax to support COVID-19 relief

Published: July 16, 2020 By Nicole Lyn Pesce

Abigail Disney calls for a wealth tax and calls out Walt Disney reopening theme parks during the pandemic. GETTY IMAGES

Abigail Disney isn’t ready to be Disney World’s guest just yet.

The Walt Disney Co. DIS, -0.76% heiress, who does not have an operating role in the company, told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Thursday that she’s “confused” about why Disney has reopened some of its Florida theme parks even as coronavirus cases surge in the Sunshine State.

What’s more, just days after the Orlando area parks reopened, Hong Kong Disneyland announced it will shut down again following a spike in coronavirus cases there.

Disney, the granddaughter of Disney co-founder Roy Disney, admitted that she’s not looking at the same information that park operators have probably considered in making the decision to reopen some parks.

Related:‘The beginning of a horror movie’? Disney World slammed as doors reopen amid spiking coronavirus cases

“But given what I do know … from reading newspapers and so forth, I’m confused about how they think they can possibly protect their guests and their employees,” she said on the Comcast-owned CMCS, 1.81% news program. “I certainly know people who work there who are very uncomfortable, who have conditions like asthma and diabetes that put you at high risk, who are literally deciding whether they want to go back to work or buy food.”

Disney parks chairman Josh D’Amaro recently told CNBC that the company feels “really good” about the safety precautions it put in place.

Abigail Disney is no stranger to blasting the company that shares her name. Earlier in the pandemic, she attacked it for moving to furlough more than 100,000 workers due to the COVID-19 pandemic while still retaining some executive bonuses.

She has also said that former Disney CEO Bob Iger was overpaid, stating “Jesus Christ himself isn’t worth 500 times his median worker’s pay.”

Related:Abigail Disney attacks Disney’s decision to furlough workers: ‘What the actual f—?’

Disney also doubled-down on her recent open letter with the “Millionaires for Humanity” to increase taxes on wealthy individuals like herself to help fund COVID-19 relief. On Monday, Disney joined dozens of millionaires across the world, including Ben & Jerry’s co-founder Jerry Greenfield, former BlackRock managing director Morris Pearl, in asking governments to “raise taxes on people like us. Immediately. Substantially. Permanently.”

Read more:Tax us: Abigail Disney among 83 millionaires begging for higher taxes for coronavirus relief

Disney said that the effective tax rate for wealthy Americans has dropped from around 50% to 23% in the past 40 years, or roughly what the middle class pays. “I would be happy to go back to the 50%,” she said. “If that’s not politically feasible, let’s talk about 40 [percent], but we need to recognize that there are people in this country who are so wealthy that a 40% tax rate would do nothing to erode the quality of their life.

“It’s time for us to cough up a little bit more,” she said.

The tax windfall could be key to helping the 13.6 million people and counting who have been infected with COVID-19 worldwide, she argued, as well as the tens of millions who have lost their jobs as the pandemic has disrupted large sections of the economy. In fact, she says doing this before the pandemic could have cushioned the coronavirus’ blow.

“If we had invested more in our health systems, if we had invested more in making sure the low-income and middle-income workers had, for instance, some savings or owned their homes or anything that ensures a life that’s secure, we would be doing so much better,” she said.

“But you saw how quickly those lines formed at the food pantries. Millions and millions of people who work full time in this country did not have enough money laid by to ensure that they had enough to eat for the next week, much less however long this is gonna last,” she added.

Rule change for how hospitals report coronavirus data to government comes under fire

‘This decision raises more questions than answers,’ said one policy expert


Published: July 18, 2020 Jaimy Lee

CDC Director Dr. Robert R. Redfield GETTY IMAGES

A federal dashboard that provides information to the public about COVID-19 data that is provided by hospitals has not been updated since a rapidly implemented rule for how hospitals report that kind of data was put into place.

The new rule, issued July 10 by the Department of Health and Human Services, went into effect July 15. The last set of data is from July 14. Rather than send COVID-19-related data to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, as has been done since March, hospitals, hospital laboratories, and other acute-care facilities have been told to submit that information to a portal operated by TeleTracking Technologies Inc., a privately held data company.

Health officials say the new process will reduce “confusion and duplication of reporting,” create more flexibility with what data is collected during the pandemic, and better allocate medications such as Gilead Sciences Inc.’s GILD, -0.90% remdesivir. (The terms of the experimental drug’s emergency use authorization from the Food and Drug Administration requires that the medication is allocated by the federal government.)

The decision prompted the National Governors Association to ask the Trump administration to delay the rule by 30 days. “Governors are requesting a 30-day delay of these new requirements, in order for hospitals to learn a new system, as they continue to deal with this pandemic,” the organization said Thursday. “In addition, governors urge the administration to make this information publicly available.”

CDC Director Dr. Robert Redfield told reporters on Wednesday that “no one is taking access or data away from CDC.”

But health experts are questioning the viability of having hospitals change their data-reporting systems at the same time that they are struggling to care for growing numbers of COVID-19 patients, and asked if the decision has political motivations.

See:Maryland’s Republican governor slams Trump’s handling of coronavirus pandemic

“It’s quite important given how politicized this can be,” said Jen Kates, senior vice president and director of global health and HIV policy at the Kaiser Family Foundation. “This decision raises more questions than answers.”

There are two questions about the reporting change, she said: How will the new reporting rule improve the process of data collection? And will that data be made public to researchers and the public going forward?

The coronavirus pandemic in the U.S. is worsening by the day, with more than half of U.S. states now considered COVID-19 “hot spots,” based on case count increases over 14 days and high or growing positivity rates, according to the KFF. The rise in cases is in contrast to how countries in Europe and Asia have handled the pandemics within their borders.

The U.S. has reported about one-quarter of the world’s coronavirus cases (3.49 million) and deaths (137,420), according to data aggregated by the Johns Hopkins University.

See also:Walmart, Target, Best Buy now require customers to wear face coverings at its stores

The Johns Hopkins University and The COVID Tracking Project — which operate two commonly cited public sources of COVID-19 data in the U.S. — both say they don’t expect to be affected by the change in data collection. The JHU site sources some data from the project, which focuses on state-level data and was built by journalists at The Atlantic.

“We support more transparency and hope all the HHS data will be released,” The COVID Tracking Project tweeted Wednesday. “That said, there’s a reason we built a process to capture national numbers that doesn’t rely on our national government.”

Sen. Kamala Harris, a Democrat from California, agreed.



The data submitted to the federal government by hospitals incRule change for how hospitals report coronavirus data to government comes under fire

Published: July 18, 2020 at 11:16 a.m. ET

By Jaimy Lee

104

‘This decision raises more questions than answers,’ said one policy expert




CDC Director Dr. Robert R. Redfield GETTY IMAGES

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GILD

-0.90%

A federal dashboard that provides information to the public about COVID-19 data that is provided by hospitals has not been updated since a rapidly implemented rule for how hospitals report that kind of data was put into place.




The new rule, issued July 10 by the Department of Health and Human Services, went into effect July 15. The last set of data is from July 14. Rather than send COVID-19-related data to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, as has been done since March, hospitals, hospital laboratories, and other acute-care facilities have been told to submit that information to a portal operated by TeleTracking Technologies Inc., a privately held data company.




Health officials say the new process will reduce “confusion and duplication of reporting,” create more flexibility with what data is collected during the pandemic, and better allocate medications such as Gilead Sciences Inc.’s GILD, -0.90% remdesivir. (The terms of the experimental drug’s emergency use authorization from the Food and Drug Administration requires that the medication is allocated by the federal government.)




Read: Global COVID-19 cases climb to 13.6 million after record one-day tally of 230,400 new infections




The decision prompted the National Governors Association to ask the Trump administration to delay the rule by 30 days. “Governors are requesting a 30-day delay of these new requirements, in order for hospitals to learn a new system, as they continue to deal with this pandemic,” the organization said Thursday. “In addition, governors urge the administration to make this information publicly available.”




CDC Director Dr. Robert Redfield told reporters on Wednesday that “no one is taking access or data away from CDC.”




But health experts are questioning the viability of having hospitals change their data-reporting systems at the same time that they are struggling to care for growing numbers of COVID-19 patients, and asked if the decision has political motivations.




See:Maryland’s Republican governor slams Trump’s handling of coronavirus pandemic




“It’s quite important given how politicized this can be,” said Jen Kates, senior vice president and director of global health and HIV policy at the Kaiser Family Foundation. “This decision raises more questions than answers.”




There are two questions about the reporting change, she said: How will the new reporting rule improve the process of data collection? And will that data be made public to researchers and the public going forward?




The coronavirus pandemic in the U.S. is worsening by the day, with more than half of U.S. states now considered COVID-19 “hot spots,” based on case count increases over 14 days and high or growing positivity rates, according to the KFF. The rise in cases is in contrast to how countries in Europe and Asia have handled the pandemics within their borders.




The U.S. has reported about one-quarter of the world’s coronavirus cases (3.49 million) and deaths (137,420), according to data aggregated by the Johns Hopkins University.




See also:Walmart, Target, Best Buy now require customers to wear face coverings at its stores




The Johns Hopkins University and The COVID Tracking Project — which operate two commonly cited public sources of COVID-19 data in the U.S. — both say they don’t expect to be affected by the change in data collection. The JHU site sources some data from the project, which focuses on state-level data and was built by journalists at The Atlantic.




“We support more transparency and hope all the HHS data will be released,” The COVID Tracking Project tweeted Wednesday. “That said, there’s a reason we built a process to capture national numbers that doesn’t rely on our national government.”




Sen. Kamala Harris, a Democrat from California, agreed.




The data submitted to the federal government by hospitals includes important indicators such as intensive care unit bed capacity, the total number of mechanical ventilators in a facility, and the total number of hospitalized, suspected or confirmed positive COVID patients being treated in their facilities.




At least one online dashboard operated by the CDC sharing hospital bed capacity at the state level was taken down on Thursday and then reinstated, with a disclaimer noting that the most recent data is from July 14, the day before the rule went into effect.ludes important indicators such as intensive care unit bed capacity, the total number of mechanical ventilators in a facility, and the total number of hospitalized, suspected or confirmed positive COVID patients being treated in their facilities.

At least one online dashboard operated by the CDC sharing hospital bed capacity at the state level was taken down on Thursday and then reinstated, with a disclaimer noting that the most recent data is from July 14, the day before the rule went into effect.

A $5 billion ‘shadow debt’ market is helping keep for-profit colleges afloat, new report charges

These risky loan products can have interest rates as high as 35%, according to a report by the Student Borrower Protection Center.

USURY BY ANY OTHER NAME

Published: July 20, 2020 By Jillian Berman

A new report highlights the $5 billion 'shadow' student debt market. (Photo by Robyn Beck / AFP)

Roughly 44 million Americans are coping with $1.6 trillion in student-loans, but that staggering figure likely underestimates the debt borrowers are taking on to finance their education, a new report suggests.


Over the past decade, students have borrowed more than $5 billion through an opaque web of companies to pay for training at for-profit schools, the Student Borrower Protection Center, an advocacy group, found. These products, which aren’t traditional federal or private student loans, often carry high interest rates and other risks for borrowers, according to the SBPC.

In addition, by providing financing to students, this shadow credit system, as the SBPC dubs it, helps to keep programs training students for careers in fields like trucking and cosmetology in business — even when they’re prohibitively expensive for many and don’t provide graduates with a credential that’s valuable in the labor market.

“This whole cottage industry is allowed to prey on and rip off the most vulnerable borrowers in our country,” said Seth Frotman, the executive director of the Student Borrower Protection Center. “These players are key cogs in the larger student-debt crisis, but also critical components of what allows predatory schools to thrive.”


The ‘shadow credit system’ has grown since the Great Recession

Though typically out of the public and regulatory eye, these products have taken on a more prominent role in the student finance landscape since the Great Recession, according to the SBPC’s report. In the past, for-profit colleges relied on traditional, private lenders to provide loans to students, which were bundled together and sold to investors. Often these loans were made to students with little regard for whether they would be able to repay them.

In the years since the financial crisis, traditional, private lenders have dramatically reduced their involvement in the student-loan market broadly. These so-called shadow lenders stepped in to fill the void for students financing career training at for-profit colleges, according to the report.

These companies work with schools in three key ways, the report found. The first is as an exclusive partner for students needing financing. In some cases that can mean developing a product for a specific program or helping a school lend to its students. The second is by offering an independent credit product that in some cases schools will promote through their website or financial aid materials.

The third is servicing or collecting on debt students owe to schools for tuition. In these cases, students will enroll in a course without paying anything up front, but wind up owing this money with interest. Some of the companies highlighted in the SBPC report work with schools to service and collect this debt, they found.

Steve Gunderson, the chief executive officer of Career Education Colleges & Universities, a trade group representing for-profit colleges, took issue with the report and, in particular, its 10-year scope. He said that by including the practices of large schools that have since shut down, such as Corinthian Colleges and ITT Technical Institute, the report “tries to find sins of the past and use them to define and describe the sector today.”


“A multi-generation, family-owned school in a community is going to do whatever they can to help the students,” he said. If the easiest option is to loan money directly to students, “they’re going to do it with the best of intentions even if they don’t have what you and I call the best of procedures.”


Interest rates as high as 35%

The products highlighted by SBPC are offered by at least 12 distinct companies and carry a variety of risks for borrowers, the report found. In some cases, interest rates are as high as 35%. In others, they carry fees that aren’t typical of federal and private student loan products.

But they’re not just costly; these products put borrowers at risk in other ways. One lender, TFC Tuition Financing, advertises to nursing schools interested in its loan program that a borrower’s certification can be taken away in the event of default, the report found. TFC did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the report.

In addition, some products require that borrowers be rejected by another lender before being approved; others advertise that they can provide financing without a credit check or underwriting.

Meanwhile for the colleges, the products allow a means to sidestep regulation, the report found. For schools that rely on federal financial aid, these products can help them comply with the 90/10 regulation, a rule that requires colleges receiving federal financial aid to get at least 10% of their funds from a source other than the government’s student loan program. By working with these opaque lenders, schools can create their own lending programs that students can use to finance tuition, which don’t count toward the 90% limit on federal financial aid financing.

For programs that aren’t accredited, and therefore can’t participate in the federal student loan program, these products provide a source of financing for students who wouldn’t otherwise be able to afford the programs and a source of revenue for the schools.

The report urges governments at various levels to take a closer look at these companies, including by requiring them to register with state regulators and by creating a federal registry of all nonbank financial services firms, including those highlighted in the report.

NASA’s Juno spacecraft captures the first images of Ganymede’s icy north pole

It provides the first infrared mapping of the massive moon's northern frontier.

BYAMIT MALEWAR JULY 24, 2020

The north pole of Ganymede can be seen in center of this annotated image taken by the JIRAM infrared imager aboard NASA's Juno spacecraft on Dec. 26, 2019. The thick line is 0-degrees longitude. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/ASI/INAF/JIRAM


The planet Jupiter has a total of 79 identified moons orbiting around it. The largest of these is Ganymede, which was discovered by Galileo Galilei in 1610. Ganymede is the ninth-largest object in the solar system and is larger even than the planet Mercury.

Although it was found a long time ago, there was not enough technology to see it in detail until recently. Now for the first time, the Jovian Infrared Auroral Mapper (JIRAM) instrument of NASA’s Juno spacecraft snapped the first images of Ganymede’s northern frontier. The images, captured during a Jupiter flyby on December 26, 2019, provide the first infrared mapping of the north pole of the massive moon.
These images the JIRAM instrument aboard NASA’s Juno spacecraft provide the first infrared mapping of Ganymede’s northern frontier. Frozen water molecules detected at both poles have no appreciable order to their arrangement and a different infrared signature than ice at the equator. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/ASI/INAF/JIRAM
Ganymede consists primarily of water ice. It is also the only moon in the solar system with its own magnetic field. Through the images, it was possible to notice an unusual form of ice that exists at the pole, a type that we don’t encounter on Earth. According to NASA, on Earth, the magnetic field provides a pathway for charged particles from the Sun, or plasma, to enter our atmosphere and create aurora seen in the polar regions.

However, as Ganymede has no atmosphere to impede their progress, the surface at its poles is constantly being bombarded by plasma from Jupiter’s gigantic magnetosphere. The bombardment has a dramatic effect on Ganymede’s ice.

Juno found that the ice near both poles of Ganymedean is in amorphous form, that is, it is not a crystalline structure, but a supercooled liquid. In fact, frozen water molecules detected at both poles have no appreciable order to their arrangement, and the amorphous ice has a different infrared signature than the crystalline ice found at Ganymede’s equator.

Analyzing and understanding these structures will provide further clues to understand the evolution of the 79 Jovian moons from the time of their formation to the present day. Jovian is a term that refers to the Jupiter family, which includes Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune.

At the time surrounding its closest approach of Ganymede – at about 62,000 miles (100,000 kilometers) – JIRAM collected 300 infrared images of the surface, with a spatial resolution of 14 miles (23 kilometers) per pixel.

“The JIRAM data shows the ice at and surrounding Ganymede’s north pole has been modified by the precipitation of plasma,” said Alessandro Mura, a Juno co-investigator at the National Institute for Astrophysics in Rome. “It is a phenomenon that we have been able to learn about for the first time with Juno because we are able to see the north pole in its entirety.”

In addition, Juno’s discoveries are preparing the next Jupiter mission. The Juno probe is, for now, the only one to explore the natural satellite that, however, should change soon. The European Space Agency‘s Jupiter ICy moons Explorer mission is scheduled to begin a 3 1/2-year exploration of Jupiter’s giant magnetosphere, turbulent atmosphere, and its icy moons Ganymede, Callisto, and Europa beginning in 2030.

China braces for impact after mass flooding at Three Gorges Dam
By
Elizabeth Shim
(0)

An aerial view of the Guanyin Temple in Hubei Province in the middle of the flooded Yangtze River in Ezhou, China on Sunday. The temple was first built in 1345 and was partly submerged under the latest round of flooding last week. Photo by Peng Nian/EPA-EFE

July 23 (UPI) -- A second round of mass flooding in several provinces across China is expected to increase the risk of natural disasters as torrential rains have affected 45 million people in the country and at least 142 people have died or gone missing, according to local authorities.

China's ministry of water resources said at 8 p.m. Wednesday a key section of the Yangtze River and other areas had risen above flood level. The ministry also said 93 rivers have exceeded their flood limit levels and that they are monitoring the Three Gorges reservoir, located in the upstream part of the Yangtze River.

China's ministry of emergency management said this week more than 4,500 people in Jiangxi, Anhui, Hubei and other provinces have been displaced due to floods, and at least 35,000 homes have collapsed, bringing direct damage close to $23 billion.

Chinese state media reports indicate Chinese leader Xi Jinping has yet to visit the disaster zones despite heavy rains since June. In the absence of more transparent information on the flooding, Chinese users of social media have begun uploading images of downpours sweeping up excavators and other large machinery at construction sites.

Last week, as floodwaters rose to high levels, human rights activist Jennifer Zeng uploaded a video showing a 700-year-old temple engulfed in water from the overflowing Yangtze River, Taiwan News reported.

The Guanyin Temple in Hubei Province survived the floods, according to the report.

According to Taiwan News, China may have experienced "displacement, seepage and deformation" of the Three Gorges Dam that spans the Yangtze River in Hubei province.

A Xinhua reporter stated on Friday three lower flood gates of the hydropower complex opened to let out "huge streams of water," Taiwan News said.

Chinese residents downstream are suspecting more water from the dam have been released but authorities are not disclosing the developments, according to the report.

UFO DAY WAS EARLIER THIS MONTH

Explosive UFO Report In NYT Mentions 'Off-World Vehicles Not Made On This Earth'

Pentagon consultant makes bombshell revelation to the New York Times.


By Ed Mazza, HuffPost US

The New York Times is reporting that the Pentagon’s secretive UFO unit is going to make some of its findings public.

And the newspaper said one consultant to the agency has briefed Defense Department officials of some highly unusual discoveries ― including items retrieved from “off-world vehicles not made on this Earth.” 

The Times said that while the Pentagon has claimed that it disbanded its UFO office, that department has in reality simply changed names and moved, and a Senate committee report suggests it will be expected to make some information public every six months. 

The main goal isn’t alien spaceships, but rather something much closer to home: to see if confounding sightings ― including some by the military ― are actually advanced technology from rival nations. 

The Times report also hints at possible artifacts from UFO crashes, citing former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.). 

“After looking into this, I came to the conclusion that there were reports — some were substantive, some not so substantive — that there were actual materials that the government and the private sector had in their possession,” he told the newspaper.

Astrophysicist Eric W. Davis, who has been a subcontractor and consultant for the Pentagon, told the newspaper he briefed the Defense Department in March about the “off-world vehicles not made on this Earth.” 

He said he has examined some of the materials and concluded “we couldn’t make it ourselves.”

Read the full Times report here.

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) also indicated that he was concerned that supposed UFOs could be advanced tech from foreign nations.

“We have things flying over our military bases and places where we’re conducting military exercises, and we don’t know what it is, and it isn’t ours,” Rubio, who is acting chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told CBS4 in Miami last week. 

He added: 

“I would say that, frankly, that if it’s something from outside this planet, that might actually be better than the fact that we’ve seen some technological leap on behalf of the Chinese or the Russians or some other adversary that allows them to conduct this sort of activity.”

He said the objects in these sightings “exhibit, potentially, technologies that you don’t have at your own disposal” making them a national security risk. 

The military’s encounters with possible UFOs have come under intense interest in recent years since several videos were leaked in 2017 showing encounters with fast-moving objects including one given the nickname “Tic Tac” because it looked like one of the candies.

This object, still not publicly identified, dropped from 60,000 feet to just 50 feet in a matter of seconds:

“The part that drew our attention was how it wasn’t behaving within the normal laws of physics,” pilot Chad Underwood told New York magazine last year. 

Underwood filmed the “Tic Tac” encounter.

The military has since confirmed that the footage is real, and formally declassified it in spring, but has said little else about it. 

The Navy told UFO researcher Christian Lambright in a Freedom of Information Act request that that releasing more information “would cause exceptionally grave damage to the National Security of the United States.”

To The Stars Academy, a company cofounded by former Blink 182 frontman Tom DeLonge which has worked to reveal UFO information and helped expose the 2017 videos, celebrated the newest developments. 

“TTSA welcomes the increase in transparency and is steadfast in our mission to educate policy makers and support continued interest and engagement on this topic,” the organization said via Facebook. 






Collective freakout occurs after New York Times report on ‘off-world vehicles not made on this earth’
July 23, 2020 By Bob Brigham

Users on Twitter had a great deal of commentary to offer after a bombshell New York Times report on UFOs.

“Despite Pentagon statements that it disbanded a once-covert program to investigate unidentified flying objects, the effort remains underway — renamed and tucked inside the Office of Naval Intelligence, where officials continue to study mystifying encounters between military pilots and unidentified aerial vehicles,” the newspaper reported.





“Pentagon officials will not discuss the program, which is not classified but deals with classified matters. Yet it appeared last month in a Senate committee report outlining spending on the nation’s intelligence agencies for the coming year. The report said the program, the Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon Task Force, was ‘to standardize collection and reporting’ on sightings of unexplained aerial vehicles, and was to report at least some of its findings to the public every six months,” The Times explained. “For more than a decade, the Pentagon program has been conducting classified briefings for congressional committees, aerospace company executives and other government officials, according to interviews with program participants and unclassified briefing documents.”

The newspaper interviewed former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), who secured funding for the program.

“After looking into this, I came to the conclusion that there were reports — some were substantive, some not so substantive — that there were actual materials that the government and the private sector had in their possession,” Reid said.

The newspaper also interviewed astrophysicist Eric W. Davis, who worked as a subcontractor or consultant for the Pentagon U.F.O. program since 2007.

Davis said that as recently as March he briefed a Defense Department agency on “off-world vehicles not made on this earth.”


Here’s some of what people were saying about the new report:

Alien invasion could be like the one good thing to happen in 2020 let’s not jinx it https://t.co/JxeczUQrWk
— Taylor Lorenz (@TaylorLorenz) July 24, 2020


hypothesis: aliens are currently debating whether we are more likely to destroy ourselves if they contact us or if left to our own devices, and they are testing the waters to see if we panic https://t.co/2ojRRM6c5y
— ryan cooper (@ryanlcooper) July 24, 2020


Here's the long-awaited New York Times article on UFOs, moving the ball further down the field. We've come a long way since 2017, when the official position of the US government was that nobody was interested in UFOs and nobody was investigating.
https://t.co/Jyzeil6dHs
— Nick Pope (@nickpopemod) July 23, 2020

I like how the New York Times now regularly publishes articles suggesting that the earth is being visited by space aliens & no one really cares because other stuff is going on. pic.twitter.com/5Z5KawyNHe
— Jeet Heer (@HeerJeet) July 24, 2020

Can the aliens stop messing around and just come down here and take over https://t.co/9Fq53rPwuo
— Rosie Gray (@RosieGray) July 24, 2020


See, the only thing that could make 2020 even better at this point is a full-scale alien invasion. https://t.co/MEa0Wpxnzz pic.twitter.com/kHUI1lAiF7
— Jonah Bennett (@BennettJonah) July 23, 2020



Oh hell yeah. https://t.co/KnCenyL43g pic.twitter.com/pz7T5EZ06w
— Michael Shane (@michaelbshane) July 24, 2020

Nothing important, just an on the record confirmation of alien shit in the New York Times. https://t.co/jERQAeIVPF pic.twitter.com/bWpPxU3ESs
— Jeffrey Billman (@jeffreybillman) July 24, 2020

The Truth Is Out There https://t.co/jI3YSVd0oi
— Jillian Jorgensen (@Jill_Jorgensen) July 24, 2020

come through on this one, 2020, and all will be forgiven https://t.co/8bIUSdaUFu
— Tom Lee (@tjl) July 24, 2020

Despite my Mulder instincts I can't shake my deep suspicion of the motives of defence contractors briefing here. https://t.co/moJn61R6Kh
— Ben Judah (@b_judah) July 24, 2020

Trump not tweeting about UFOs and Area 51 often is one of the more mystifying parts of his term: No Longer in Shadows, Pentagon’s U.F.O. Unit Will Make Some Findings Public https://t.co/VQJo6vISRm
— Adrian Carrasquillo (@Carrasquillo) July 24, 2020

My only thing on this: if Donald Trump knew there were UFOs, do you think he could keep that a secret? https://t.co/gaim2hYVdB
— Adam Smith (@asmith83) July 24, 2020

NO FOURTH INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION FOR INTEL 
Opinion: Intel admits another defeat with unprecedented manufacturing issues

Chip giant admits it may partner with foundry in the future, calling into question its long industry-leading manufacturing prowess

Published: July 23, 2020 By Therese Poletti

Intel headquarters in Santa Clara, Calif. GETTY IMAGES


An old saying in the semiconductor industry, attributed to Advanced Micro Devices Inc. co-founder Jerry Sanders, was “real men have fabs.”

That saying — along with its dated, sexist phrasing — is now officially no longer true, as semiconductor giant Intel Corp. INTC, -1.06% admitted Thursday that it could actually partner with another semiconductor foundry to help with its next-generation manufacturing technology, as it announced a delay in its next process technology for future chips.

That was a huge admission of defeat for one of Silicon Valley’s most iconic companies. Intel is one of the last remaining semiconductor companies that still uses its own fabrication plants (also called fabs) to manufacture most of its chips. These plants now cost many billions of dollars as they develop increasingly microscopic transistors aimed at increasing computer processing speeds. Intel currently farms out a small percentage, around 20%, of chips or chipsets to other contractors, but manufactures the bulk of its processors in its own factories around the world.

On Thursday, Intel’s huge earnings beat was overshadowed by the news of a delay in its next-generation manufacturing process that would move the chip maker to a 7-nanometer process. The news was an echo of many delays and problems with moving to the 10-nanometer process a couple of years ago, now finally in use for the company’s chips for PCs and servers.



See also: An obscure court ruling could play havoc with tech companies’ earnings

“We will continue to invest in our future process technology roadmap, but we will be pragmatic and objective in deploying the process technology that delivers the most predictability and performance for our customers, whether that be on our process, external foundry process, or a combination of both,” Intel Chief Executive Robert Swan told analysts on the company’s conference call.


This is the second time in the past two years that the company has had issues advancing its world-class manufacturing to the next level, while its rival Advanced Micro Devices Inc. AMD, -3.59% was first to market selling chips developed by its foundry partner using a 7-nanometer manufacturing process two years ago.

Intel still leads U.S. semiconductor companies in revenue and market share in the sale of chips, but investors are looking at both AMD and Nvidia Corp. NVDA, -2.96% as the momentum leaders. On Wednesday, AMD’s share price shot past Intel’s for the first time ever, and Nvidia’s market cap of $257 billion was close to Intel’s $258 billion on Thursday. Those positions are headed for a more drastic flip on Friday, as Intel shares fell 10% in after-hours trading, while AMD stock shot more than 7% higher. A fall of that magnitude would cost Intel more than $25 billion in market cap.

Nearly every question on the call was about the company’s delay of 7-nanometer process, and Intel executives highlighted the contingency plan of working with another foundry not as a sign of weakness, but as a sign of strength.

“That gives us much more flexibility to make the decisions, where it’s the most effective way to build our products to deliver that annual cadence of leadership for our customers, and we feel pretty good about where we are, though we’re not happy,” Swan said. “I’m not pleased with our 7-nanometer process performance, but as we sit here today, six months through the year, our people are safe.”


More from Therese: IBM outlook remains cloudy at best as new CEO fails to plot the way forward

Intel has always been very aggressive in how it seeks to ramp up its next-generation process technology, which ultimately dictates how many transistors can fit on a single wafer. The smaller the process node, the more transistors, and therefore more processing power. But as semiconductors get increasingly miniscule, companies are hitting up against the laws of physics to make them; one single strand of human hair is approximately 80,000 to 100,000 nanometers wide.

“For a long time we just relied on process shrinks to make everything faster, more powerful,” said Kevin Krewell, an analyst with Tirias Research. “But now packaging and architecture design are more critical to advancing the industry, not just process nodes.”

Moore’s Law, the guiding dictum of the chip industry created by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, observed that the number of transistors approximately doubled on a chip about every two years, increasing the power of computers. But this observation has been increasingly difficult to continue in the past few years, as it becomes more and more difficult to add more and more transistors.

“This puts some glitches into it,” Krewell said when asked if Moore’s Law is dead.

Read: This Wall Street analyst turned his Twitter feed into ‘Sell-Side Stories with Stacy’

When it lagged behind on its 10-nanometer process, Intel was able to tweak its chips via architecture changes at the software level and other changes to stay competitive with AMD and Nvidia, Krewell said. The company can do that again with the current process technology, but this time, the company has a deadline to develop a 7-nanometer part for the Aurora supercomputer currently under construction. Intel has a graphic processor, code-named Ponte Vecchio, due in 2021, that will compete with Nvidia’s Tesla chip. Swan told analysts that it has always planned to have some components for Ponte Vecchio made outside.

“A delay on 7-nanometer would hurt that product,” Krewell said. “They need to get Ponte Vecchio up and running in time.”

Even if Intel manages to catch up to that deadline, one thing is certain right now: The perception of Intel as a great semiconductor manufacturer may now be at its end.

IT'S NOT INEQUALITY IT'S CLASS WAR

From nanny services to ‘private educators,’ wealthy parents are paying up to $100 an hour for ‘teaching pods’ during the pandemic

 The pandemic had already exposed education’s inequality — now families are paying to privately educate students this fall.

July 23, 2020 By Jillian Berman

A teacher addresses her pupils at a primary school in France in May 2020. In the U.S. many large school systems will continue to be partially or fully remote this fall, prompting parents who can afford it to come up with their own arrangements. (Photo by MEHDI FEDOUACH / AFP)

With major school districts across the country offering limited in-person instruction this fall, parents who can afford it are scrambling to find ways to avoid another semester of balancing Zoom lessons with conference calls.

An entire industry is mobilizing to help them.

From nanny agencies, to tutoring companies to teacher placement services, a variety of businesses are hiring extra staff and launching new websites and program offerings to meet the demand from parents.

In some cases, families are seeking a teacher who can provide in-person instruction to supplement what their children are learning virtually from their schools. In other cases, parents are hoping that these businesses will help them replace school entirely.

The desire for these services is easy to understand. For many students and parents, the remote learning that schools cobbled together quickly in the spring was inadequate and hard to manage. In addition, by learning on Zoom and other platforms, students are missing out the interactions with friends and teachers that can be key to their socialization and development. And finally, for many parents, having their children in the house when they would normally be at school has made it nearly impossible to focus on work.

But these are challenges that parents across the country share and, given the funds and space required for these arrangements, only relatively well-off families can make a very private in-home school work. That dynamic has implications for educational equity at a time when educators and experts were already concerned that the gap between students with access to various devices, high speed internet, and parents who are at home to supervise — and those without those advantages.
A service providing ‘private educators’ went from a handful of requests a year to 30 per day

“It’s a big investment,” Katie Provinziano, the managing director of Westside Nannies, said of hiring an in-home teacher, or private educator, as they’re known. Beverly Hills-based Westside places nannies, newborn care specialists and private educators with families.


‘It’s a big investment. ‘— Katie Provinziano, the managing director of Westside Nannies

Provinziano’s company takes parents through the whole process of hiring an in-home teacher. They recruit, thoroughly vet and provide families with candidates and then coordinate interviews and help families through the process of actually hiring the educator.


The families pay the educator they hire between $30 and $60 an hour, or roughly between $60,000 and $125,000 per year if the teacher were to work 40 hours per week, which is not always the case. The teacher’s exact wages depend upon their level of experience and what families are asking of them. Parents also pay Westside a fee equivalent to 25% of the educator’s estimated annual pay.

Demand for the service has been so high that the company hired two more recruiters to help meet it, Provinziano said.

“Before COVID, we would place private educators a handful of times a year,” Provinziano said. Usually it was for musicians going on a world tour or parents shooting a film on location who wanted to bring their kids and make sure they still received schooling. Now, on a recent day, the company had 30 phone consultations about placing teachers with families.

“It’s really honestly exploded, we are busier than we have ever been,” Provinziano said.

The families calling her company are mainly interested in four buckets of services: Hiring a private educator to essentially home school their children — “turning a guesthouse, basement or playroom into a classroom,” she said — for the year; hiring an educator to travel with the family during this period when many aren’t tied to the location of their office; about 40% of calls are asking about hiring an educator to teach a small pod of students; and then some want to hire a nanny who is interested in and passionate about education to help supervise the online instruction students are receiving from their schools.
A private teacher can cost $80,000 to $120,000 a year — plus a placement fee

Claudia Kahn has had a business placing chefs, nannies and other domestic workers for more than thirty years, working in New York City, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Over the past few weeks she has placed educators for the first time. Since the pandemic ramped up in March, about 40 teachers — more than typical — have applied to her service as nanny candidates.

In the past three weeks, she’s received inquiries from six families asking for private educators and has placed three. “I’m not an expert,” she said. “I’m trying to learn as much as I can about what their needs are.”

Her clients are putting together pods and backyard school rooms. “One put three families together from their private school and that family is setting up a school period,” she said. The teachers she places earn between $80,000 and $100,000 per year and Kahn’s agency charges a fee of 20% of their contract.


‘One put three families together from their private school and that family is setting up a school period.’— Claudia Khan

Outside Washington, D.C., Ann Dolin, the founder and president of Education Connections Tutoring, was originally only planning to offer virtual support to families this fall. She created three separate programs to supplement the hodge-podge arrangements that some local school systems had initially announced, like a choice between a couple of days per week of in-school instruction or four days per week of virtual schooling.

They include: a virtual tutor for a pod at a cost of $45 to $75 per hour depending on the number of students; virtual one-on-one tutoring at a cost of $90 to $100 per student, depending on grade level; and a case manager to work with a parent or caregiver overseeing a student’s schooling at a cost of $100 per weekly session.

Already, she’d had to hire another office staff person to help field calls from inquiring parents.

But after Fairfax County Public Schools and Montgomery County Public Schools, two large local school systems, announced this week that they’d start virtually this fall, Dolin decided to offer an in-person option. It will be either one-on-one instruction or instruction for a household of siblings. Families will need to sign up for a minimum of six hours a week. Her inbox was flooded in the hours after the announcements, she said. Her company has already vetted 20 tutors and are ready to hire them in the event demand is beyond their current staffing, Dolin said. “We’re going to place ads for additional tutors, we see the demand as so significant that we’re going to need a lot more help,” she said.
‘I’d rather us supplement school than substitute school’

In New York City, Matthew Brown of Brownstone Tutors said he’s been reaching out to more tutors as he prepares to help families with pod arrangements. Ideally, pods would come to the company already formed, but he’s also willing to match people based on age and location. In the past week, he said he’s spoken to five or six different parents about the pod idea.

“Usual interest in a pod is zero,” he said.

Brown’s company will work with the families to match them with tutors and develop the schedule and structure of the program. “It can be as full service as you want,” he said. “I’d rather us supplement school than substitute school.”

Swing Education, a company that connects substitute teachers with public school districts, launched a new service, called Bubbles, to meet families’ demand for at-home teachers. The company put up the landing page for Bubbles on Friday and by the following Monday it was receiving dozens of inquiries per day. Swing is matching educators with families in California, Arizona, Texas, New Jersey and D.C.


‘My co-founders have asked me point blank why we didn’t come up with it sooner.’— Mike Teng, Swing’s chief executive officer

“My co-founders have asked me point blank why we didn’t come up with it sooner,” said Mike Teng, Swing’s chief executive officer. Once the Los Angeles Unified School District and the San Diego Unified School District announced they’d be offering remote instruction in the fall, “I started seeing the writing on the wall,” Teng said: The majority of their business, which is in California, would be going virtual.

“Then we immediately had parents reaching out within really a one or two day period,” he said.

The typical request his company has received is from parents who have already found a family they plan to partner with and they want a teacher to help support the virtual instruction students are receiving in school. The cost of the services will likely range from $1,500 to $2,500 per month, Teng said. Some families have asked if they can hire a teacher to fully replace a child’s schooling.

Teng said he’s trying to make sure that his company captures this demand safely and ethically. They’re typically asking families to commit to at least 25 hours per week so that teachers don’t need to go from bubble to bubble to make ends meet. In addition, they want to make sure they’re providing adequate support to teachers, who are in a dynamic where they might not have a ton of power — entering a relatively affluent person’s home.

In these arrangements, the teachers are also employees of Swing, so that if public health guidance changes and they can no longer work with families in person, they can make rightful claims on unemployment benefits. Teng said Swing is also in discussions with companies about subsidizing the service for their employees and for teachers with children in grade school and high school.

“Myself and most of Swing Education’s team came to this problem because we want to support equity in education and the current environment exacerbates, not helps,” he said.
‘This is not a failure of individual parents’ decision-making’

Some parents have been thinking about how government infrastructure could help prevent a privatized pod system from increasing already wide gulfs between haves and have-nots in education. Miriam Posner, an assistant professor at UCLA’s Graduate School of Education and Information Science, drafted a letter on Saturday to officials in her school district in Culver City, California, asking them to “investigate a creative solution for addressing the reality parents are faced with.”

“The key issue, to our minds, is that while school is fully online, the district must provide some solution for working parents who need childcare and instructional support, and that solution should not exacerbate inequalities or rely on private individuals to make private arrangements,” the letter reads.

One possible solution she offered in the letter: The district could organize the pods and provide them with aides who could work with classroom teachers to keep students on-task.

Posner, the parent of a seven-year-old, said she began hearing discussion of private pods about two weeks ago. They recently reached a “fever pitch” where spreadsheets were circulating so that parents could affiliate with one another. The idea had been bothering her for a while, and after listening to an obituary for Georgia congressman and civil rights icon John Lewis, she thought: “If I say I admire him and can’t do this very one minor thing, then how can I look at myself in the mirror?” She drafted the letter.

“This is not a failure of individual parents’ decision-making, it’s the failure of our institutions to adequately provide for our students,” she said. “The energy and money that right now is being routed to these individual private solutions is much better spent being collectivized and distributed equally among the parents in the district.”
Some tutoring services don’t want to endanger their employees

In some cases, that energy and money devoted to finding these services combined with the logistical and safety challenges surrounding them has put businesses in a tough spot. “That’s sort of the big question now,” said Amy Hayutin Contreras, a partner at tutoring services provider Hayutin & Associates, of whether to offer some kind of in-person instruction. “There’s a lot of pressure from families to offer that, yet we don’t want to pressure our own employees to provide it.”

Under typical circumstances, Santa Monica-based Hayutin provides a variety of tutoring services and also works with families to facilitate one-on-one schooling arrangements for their children. Hayutin is still offering its suite of services virtually.

The company surveyed its staffers to get a sense of whether they’d be interested in providing in-person instruction if families hired them for a relatively significant number of hours. “Sixty percent said absolutely not and 40% said I’d be willing to entertain that — I’m open to the discussion,” said Matt Hayutin, the company’s founder.

Even if the company were to offer in-person services in the fall, there’s not an insignificant chance that health guidelines could change, given the trajectory of the virus in the Los Angeles area, putting those arrangements at risk, they said.

“What does that do to families if we even entertain this new model, this backyard model?” Hayutin said. “What happens if that gets shut down over and over? How does that work for the children? How does that work for our employees? And why even bother?”


About the Author

Jillian Berman
Jillian Berman covers student debt and millennial finance. You can follow her on Twitter @JillianBerman.

Outside the Box
Opinion: Why Trump’s moves to limit immigration hurts U.S. companies and American jobs

Many H-1B visa recipients become long-term contributors to the U.S.

Published: July 23, 2020 By Bilal Baloch
There has never been a point in U.S. history when immigration did not translate to economic growth.

The Trump administration, at the urging of many U.S. states and universities, has rescinded its plan to strip foreign students of their U.S. visas. This was not the first time the president has taken shortsighted action against immigrants in an effort to “protect American jobs” — and it likely won’t be the last. This administration, along with the large swath of Americans who support protectionist policies, need to recognize that international students and H-1B workers are vital for the U.S. to remain competitive in the global economy.

Many H-1B visa recipients become long-term contributors to the U.S., leading research, building communities, and growing companies. At my own firm, GlobalWonks, Co-Founder and CEO Cenk Sidar came to the U.S. from Turkey as an international student and went on to build a tech tool to help businesses navigate volatile markets. There are countless stories just like ours — companies built by immigrants that employ Americans and propel the country forward.

Immigrants offer significant advantages to their companies. In our modern, globalized economy, business is borderless — new markets open up to U.S. industries every year. As a result, U.S.-based businesses such as GlobalWonks benefit from workers who are globally minded, understand other cultures and economies, and have pre-existing relationships in other countries. Such diversity has been an enormous boon to American companies, leading to better reputations and higher profits.

Without highly-skilled, qualified immigrants, American businesses would suffer. American companies have to contend with a growing number of foreign technology firms; if the U.S. restricts access to top talent, we are effectively asking American firms to continue the fight with one hand tied behind their back. Nearly half of all international students are studying STEM, and research has shown that H-1B workers fill employment gaps in many STEM occupations and expand job opportunities for all. In our modern economy, STEM graduates are essential — they fuel technological innovation and cross-sector growth.

Read: Canada’s appeal to tech startups grows in wake of Trump suspending H-1B visas

Also: What I learned as an immigrant CEO in the Deep South

These powerful arguments — which are made too infrequently and too subtly — are often overpowered by a narrow, “America First” perspective. In reality, the U.S. benefits from the fees that foreign students pay and the contributions they later make as employees, from taxes to intellectual property. What’s more, America needs the diplomatic currency that robust immigration creates. Research shows positive selection into the U.S. can strengthen democratic institutions abroad and build social, political, and cultural relations between the U.S. and reverse migrants’ home countries. Consequently, crucial geopolitical alliances, trade relationships, and international markets have been shaped by CEOs, diplomats, and investors who quite literally were made in America.

A society is strengthened by diversity, not weakened by it.

Such narrowness and derisive language about immigrants plagues the U.S. While living along the U.S.-Mexico border for two years where my wife, a U.S. diplomat, was stationed, I saw firsthand that these claims verged on being baseless. But I understand the fears that motivate short-sighted policy changes and attitudes. We are in the midst of a global pandemic, one that has led to record-high unemployment rates and crippled the U.S. economy. The worry is that the more people we allow in, the less likely our families, friends, and neighbors are to get high-paying jobs that assure them a higher quality of life.

To those who make such claims, I would say this: There has never been a point in U.S. history when immigration did not translate to economic growth. Openness is America's heritage. As a country built by immigrants, the U.S. has an opportunity and an obligation to elevate its citizens and prepare them to lead the world, rather than closing itself off. To millions of people around the world, including myself, America is a beacon, representing some of the best jobs and academic opportunities in the world. That is something to own and celebrate.

The U.S. needs to promote cohesion among people of all backgrounds and recognize that a society is strengthened by diversity, not weakened by it. The research on this fact is resolute. It’s vital that Americans reverse this insular trend before it is too late. Over the last few years, we have seen applications for early voluntary departure among international students and workers skyrocket, while international applications to U.S. undergraduate and graduate programs have declined. Without these vital, skilled individuals, American companies and its economy will both suffer.

Bilal Baloch is co-founder and COO of GlobalWonks. He is a non-resident fellow at the Johns Hopkins SAIS Foreign Policy Institute. Follow him on Twitter.

More: Trump’s visa restrictions are already pushing American jobs overseas

Plus: The U.S. will suffer a generational loss of talent and expertise if it sends foreign students home