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The European Commission decision to fine Google $4.3 billion should help app developers come up with new apps that respect user privacy. Google has built up a huge base of data on users that enables it to dominate the market. The hope is that a new generation of apps will enforce users rights and ensure "privacy by design," create the transparency in functioning that is missing with Android. The Facebook scandal on privacy rights led to a shift in attitudes towards Android and the nature of its lack of transparency.

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About 80% of Ballmer's money ($150 billion -former Microsoft CEO) is in Microsoft stock and 20% in index funds. He tried investing in stocks, Colgate Palmolive at advice of Jim Cramer a college buddy. Then tried diversifying. Tried money managers and found it difficult to find ones that outperform. So he dumped them all. His approach was shaped by Warren Buffet who says put it in S&P shaped index fund. He says-  Keep it Simple. Keep it Simple. We are financially blessed. What I seek says Ballmer is not to have anxiety, not to have to spend a lot of time, where we are blessed enough if we make 7%, the standard S&P return in the long run. He had luck listening to the right people and his loyalty to the company.  When Balmer left office as CEO in 2014 Microsoft market capitalization was $300 million. Ten years later it is $3 trillion with work on cloud computing and AI. Microsoft gained 29%  each year in that period including dividends, the S&P 13% with dividends, endowments 8%. As investor non-investor Ballmer now exceeds $150 billion and is No. 9. Most investments are in one trick ponies Google for example or in two trick ponies Apple, Amazon or Microsoft. One trick pony means they milk it, and milk it, and milk it. Three trick ponies not many you can find. ...

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Tech is not going to fix this, say software experts from tech companies. Google and Apple's efforts in coming up with an app have fizzled out, says this report in thee WSJ. Has the U.S. lost precious time in waiting for an app by tech companies to be developed, instead of doing what India and Britain have done. India introduced its own app Aarogya Setu app from the Indian government. Britain had the National Health Service develop its app. India acted quickly. Is an app needed or essential? Germany decided that contact tracing based on Asian country experience was mainly about human contact tracers with skills to make the phone calls. All they needed was a centralized database on a computer and a phone. Germany set up teams at offices in each district in Germany and quickly plodded ahead even if all the offices were not fully staffed. In fact a third of the offices needed more people and resources. Yet the speed of action is something like 80 to 90% of the contact tracing effort when the team has the skill set to call. This is because clusters of infections do not wait - they spread. There is simply no time to waste. The German effort has produced the best results so far of any country of this size- Germany has 85 million people. The reproduction ratio is at 1.13 and Germany remains vigilant. It is the first country to reopen in Europe, and is methodically doing the right actions, much that the world can and should learn from. Contact tracing teams worked round the clock in the early days, they are still hard at work today, using their human skills to talk to people and find out who they were in contact with, calling the contacts in turn, at each step working to isolate where needed with followup calls from the state health departments. ...

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Fake news ads on Google Search are a couple of the hard to believe results Hiroko Tabuchi finds in one of his searches using the words "climate change." One ad says "Global Warming Hoax." More alarming is the way the Google algorithm and a person's search history is used by Google to send that person what he likes or approves. So that a NYT reporter's account may show a different ad on Search for "climate change" - mostly positive ones from Environmental Defense Fund. Tabuchi says some of the ads calling climate change false are still appearing on Google even after the New York Times alerted Google about the problem.  A perceptive observer would find that that this is exactly how Search can end up reinforcing people and dividing them into different camps hostile to each other. More significantly it might make people resistant to even hear another person with different ideas, a problem we face today in American democracy. ...

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Priceline surged in a tech boom of two decades ago before coming down. It has regenerated itself through its 2005 acquisition of Amsterdam based portal Booking.com, followed by acquiring booking site Agoda and travel search engine Kayak. This has helped the stock rise in the last decade. Over 90% of its revenue comes from outside the U.S., even though its original model of naming a price for a booking is gone.  Booking.com is making an attempt to penetrate the Chinese travel market with a series of acquisitions starting with online travel agency Ctrip.com. Ctrip.com is established but recent acquisitions are burning cash. There is skepticism about these acquisitions as Chinese company share prices are seen as inflated similar to the stock booms that went bust in the U.S. Booking.com invested heavily in online advertising primarily through Google. Yet though western customers use search engines to find and book travel, in China customers go directly to Ctrip or apps like Meituan to book trips. To get people to book Chinese travel companies offer large discounts, a model that may not be right for Booking.com. The effort is to add to Ctrip customer base the middle to lower income customers from Didi ride sharing app and the Meituan app, through its partnerships with these companies. The experience of other travel sites such as Expedia in the Chinese market is poor, with price wars and Expedia selling its majority stake to Didi Chuxing. Expedia's CEO at the time calls it "the wild, wild east" because of the intense competition. About 130 million Chinese travelled overseas in 2017, up 7%, and spending $115 billion. ...

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In comparison to industrial companies digital companies such as Google and Apple have more room to find gaps in the U.S. tax system which was designed for the industrial period. Apple paid a tax rate of 9.8% in 2011 on its global profits in 2011 of $34.2 billion, a total of $3.3 billion. Wal-Mart for instance paid a tax rate of 24%, on its booked profits of $24.4 billion, a total of $5.9 billion. The issue is significant because of the large U.S. deficit and spending cuts by local and state governments for essential services, especially in California, where Apple is located. Apple is able to avoid state taxes on some of its profits by locating an office in Reno, Nevada. Nevada has zero corporate taxes, California's corporate tax rate is 8.84%. In the current fiscal year Apple is expected to earn $45.6 billion which if taxed at the rates companies paid in the 1950's - 30% in the 1950's compared to 6.6% in 2009 for corporate tax receipts according to a New York Times report- would enable the state of California to avoids some of the sharp cuts in funding to community colleges such as De Anza College only minutes away from Apple, Google and H-P. De Anza College's president says he simply cannot understand this, how the whole psychology of corporations and the public itself has changed over the years, to where a college where one of the Apple co-founders Steve Wozniak got his education in 1969-74, is now struggling to survive with funding cuts. The California college system of the 1950's and 1960's was funded by other companies tax dollars creating the educational resources which helped create todays companies- one generations responsibilities transferred to another generation that has failed to understand what this is about....

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Theresa May becomes the only candidate for leadership of the Conservative Party after Ms Leadsom withdraws from the race. No leadership vote will no take place with Conservative Party members and no early general election is planned. May is expected to become prime minister of Britain by July 12, replacing David Cameron. Her theme is for "one Britain" and to do away with the rising inequality and gap between London and the rest of the country, which was part of the anxiety of voters who voted 52% for Brexit on issues of immigration burden on social and health services, national sovereignty, and a sense of ordinary people being neglected by elites in both parties. May will invoke Article 50 to leave the European Union and begin a 2 year period of negotiations only after she has developed a clear negotiating strategy. Kenneth Clarke, a Conservative Party cabinet minister called May a "bloody difficult woman," but this did not affect May, who said Mr Juncker of the EU was the one who would find this out in negotiations.  What is significant for Britain is May's moderate position coupled with a clear goal for removing some of the causes of the inequity in British society, which is needed for Britain to remain united. She called on companies like Amazon, Google and others to pay their fair share of taxes, and made clear her intent to strengthen the mechanisms for controlling executive pay. Also part of this strategy will be a more effective immigration control policy, which she did not implement vigorously as Home Secretary in the Cameron government, partly because of constraints set by EU membership. May made clear her agenda going forward by saying: "There is a growing divide between a more prosperous older generation and a struggling younger generation. And there is a gaping chasm between wealthy London and the rest of the country."  Changes May is supporting are to make executive pay rules to become binding not just advisory, and for employees and consumers to gain seats on company boards.  ...

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Comments by Eric Schmidt CEO of Google in an interview with the NYT's Helft. Important points emerging from the interview. Google he says does not know how long this crisis will last. Response not to waste money means less hiring and more careful expense reviews, and more focus. Managers are very very sensitive to important aspects of its culture, so such perks will continue which make it fun to work at the company for employees. And he says careful investment inthe future. "If you tighten too much, you eliminate future innovation, and then you set yourself up for a really bad outcome five or ten years" down the road. And here is the most important point he makes in advising the Obama administration. Do not take up the economy first, and let energy come in afterwards, deal with all the major problems at once, especially energy, which are part of the problem and the opportunity for the economy. For instance as the auto industry shrinks these job losses can be filled with jobs making parts for renewable energy like wind turbines and blades, like solar energy generation parts. This is actually happening already, government could speed things up by mandates for renewable energy and by help to companies through incentives. See the link to this in the NYT about companies in places like Newton, Iowa where lost jobs at Maytag are being replaced by renewable energy jobs. And several million jobs can be generated in energy to make up losses in auto jobs in the midwest. These parts of the Obama plan may have come up through conversations with Schmidt and other advocates of this, and by seeing what is already happening as reported by the NYT in the link. It makes Obama look like a farsighted genius, but its just sharp observation and careful listening. Pickens is already advertising this on television for his wind farms in Texas. It is not only Google's thinking, as Schmidt says, but good common sense and some ballpark estimates that would tell one that it would save sending 1 trillion dollars to Middle East and other nations that is needed for investment at home in the U.S.. Schmidt's calculations are that this amount could be saved in 22 years through renewable energy, plug-in hybrids and other innovative technologies. ...

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Robert Lighthizer, U.S. Trade Representative, makes a passionate plea for the dignity of work in America, the founding principle for the society of opportunity that America has been and the reason it was settled by immigrants from Europe over 200 years. He points out that trade policy is not about geopolitics or about efficiency as others perceive, it is about what kind of society we want to live in. Is it about a society of opportunity? This is the foundation on which this American continent was settled by settlers from Britain and Europe, and the basis of the growth over two hundred years till the last four decades. From 2000 and China's entry into the World Trade Organization under president Clinton to 2016 the U.S. manufacturing base has shrunk with the loss of five million jobs, two million jobs lost to China in the period 1999-2011 alone. And 350,000 automobile manufacturing jobs to Mexico since 1994, one third of all U.S. automobile jobs. Without the initiative and hard work of Mr. Lighthizer both American workers and Mexican workers would be stuck in low paying jobs. The USMCA he negotiated changed all that by giving Mexican workers fair wages and American workers and manufacturing the opportunity for revival.  This view was also expressed by Intel founder Andy Grove, a founder of one of the first pioneer companies in Silicon Valley. Grove asked the question after seeing the outsourcing of production out of America and the condition of the American worker- he said for him it was about what kind of society he wanted to live in. It was all about the dignity of the American worker long ignored by economists who live in a world of theory and the elite that has lived for so long apart from the places where the fabric of American workers and working life was torn apart. It was a question that touched Andy Grove's heart just as it does for Robert Lighthizer and others who are fighting to make America a society of opportunity for the American worker and opportunity for the American people, for dignity in America. It also charts a new course for the French worker, the British worker, the Indian worker, as other countries learn from the American experience. We have covered Grove and Lighthizer from the early days of their leadership and wise reminders to the people of what America is and stands for. Lighthizer points out one huge error that makes the thinking of these economists and elite that have not listened for so long, more than a bit crazy, reckless and callous. He says there about half of 250 million adults who lack a college diploma in America. Historically manufacturing has provided stable well paying employment. Even if with investment in education they were taught to write software code, there aren't enough jobs for them. The combined total of jobs at Apple Google, Facebook and Netflix is 300,000 jobs. Never has so much been at stake for so many and defended by so few. ...

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Ajit Singh , president of Google for Work, shares insights he has gained over the years with the NYT's Adam Bryant. He says coaching with a positive attitude and offering advice in a positive way as things happen, so that it doesn't sound like mere criticism, is important. This is actually received enthusiastically if done correctly because people believe you are helping them succeed. Communicating with your team and others is also very important, to provide inspiration and meaning for work, and requires careful thought. In his work he concentrates on a few things as its not possible to everything well.

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What is the difference between South Korea and the U.S., Europe in the handling of coronavirus? It is tracking and testing.  President Trump and health adviser Dr. Fauci, see South Korea as the successful model to be followed in controlling the coronavirus. What has happened till now it is accepted with shortage of basic medical supplies and equipment, stress on hospital systems, are merely mitigation actions. South Korea was prepared for the coronavirus crisis because of the MERS and other epidemics, and failures resulting in corrective actions. Labs were centralized and better equipped for testing and tracking the infected. One of the key tools is testing. President Trump says the goal is for the U.S. to exceed and far surpass tests per capita in South Korea. Five million tests are planned by the end of April in the U.S. Where the U.S. falls short is in use of multipronged digital tracking using data from people's use of mobile phones, credit card usage, and use of apps designed to separate infected people from others. South Korea is a democracy with a population of 52 million people, about the size of France. People who were student activists in the democratization era in South Korea say the use of digital technology is a need today. We have to adapt in emergency situation they say. Ki Mo-ran, epidemiologist, and adviser to South Korean government says this is a key part lacking in the European and U.S. efforts to control coronavirus. She says in South Korea we know the patient's contacts, where he goes and stays, so we don't have to lock down everybody. Without digital tracking one cannot know which place is contaminated, which place is clean, so that there can be a lockdown of just that area and not the whole country, says Ki Mo-ran. She asks the question- is one person's privacy more important than the lives of a family or other people who are affected. Is it OK to lockdown every child in the country in a home as in Spain for over a month so that particular people's privacy is respected? These are serious questions for western society, are they exceptions or is democracy not just a western idea but equally cherished in Asian societies, people talk about Confucianism in China and the Asian culture forgetting that the biggest democracies are quite large and functioning well in India in addition to South Korea, Taiwan Indonesia, Malaysia, Bangladesh and Japan, far larger in area and population than China. The French government has chosen the app TraceTogether as the least intrusive one adaptable to France for use there. The U.S. is having Google and Apple develop one of its own. India will be developing one of its own. The NYT raises the question will it be watered down so much in France or in the U.S. and UK to be less effective than the  dire need for an alternative to lockdowns? ...

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Goggle's Eric Schmidt speaks at the annual meeting of the Newspaper Association of America on the issues raised by Google News use of newspaper content. He says it is unlikely that Google would buy the content behind a pay wall for a subscription and make it available to users for free. Under the current arrangement only AP is paid for content. Newspapers can choose not to be part of the Google Search but choose to get traffic from Google Search to their websites, and from Google News to their websites, which they monetize through advertising. Schmidt provided as one solution publishers creating more personalized news products that could be effectively delivered on the Web, on mobile phones and on the iPad.