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Those who doubt the relevance of government have plenty of fodder of late. The federal government, uniquely positioned to fight a pandemic, has whiffed, egged on by a president who thought a plague wasn’t good for ratings. At the local level, too, the citizenry is stepping in with well-meaning solutions that nevertheless are the job of government.
In San Francisco, for example, local groups provide showers for homeless people and crossing guards for children. A law school had to sue the city to remove tent camps from the troubled Tenderloin—but has done little to shut down the neighborhood’s open-air drug market.
And in an effort to stop smash-and-grab burglaries, one local tech entrepreneur is paying for cameras to spy on thieves. I wrote about E-Loan and Ripple founder Chris Larsen’s efforts in my February feature story on San Francisco. He received star treatment over the weekend in The New York Times from the ever-observant reporter Nellie Bowles.
Larsen is a compelling character in a morality saga for our times. He claims to be privacy-friendly: Facial recognition is off limits, for example. As much as anything, he wants to use technology to deter criminals, to convince them they’ll be punished for robbing homeowners and tourists in a city with a bad record for prosecuting petty crime.
I know Larsen would like to work with the police, who gave him a frosty review in Bowles’s article. No doubt they are cool to him in part because he is trying to do their job.
And that’s my beef, too, with a wealthy citizen trying to do good, with corporations who say that because government has failed, business should step into the void, with a society that looks to philanthropists to solve problems their own elected representatives should be addressing.
Vigilantism, technological or otherwise, is no more the correct solution than phony swamp draining or hollow corporate proclamations. Muscular government—I’ve borrowed this phrase from Anand Giridharadas—that does the bidding of its citizens is.
Adam Lashinsky
This edition of Data Sheet was curated by Aaron Pressman.
NEWSWORTHY
Do as I say not as I do. On Wall Street, when someone makes an erroneous order, say, buying 10,000,000 shares of Tesla instead of 10,000, they call it a "fat finger trade." That's about the only explanation I can offer for Amazon's move on Friday to send all employees an email saying TikTok was banned from their work phones only to rescind the demand hours later, saying the email had been sent "in error." Meanwhile, both the Republican National Committee and its Democratic counterpart, the DNC, have told their staffers to avoid installing TikTok, as has banking giant Wells Fargo.
Get your motor running. Speaking of Wall Street, we've noted recently the rather insane run-up in the stock prices of electric vehicle makers and related companies. Apparently, the VC sector is just as excited. Tesla rival Rivian raised $2.5 billion from a load of the world's largest investors such as Fidelity, BlackRock, T. Rowe Price, and Amazon. Okay, maybe Amazon is not a top investor, but they've pledged to buy 100,000 electric delivery vans from Rivian (and that is not a typo). In the M&A department, chipmaker Analog Devices is buying automotive and data center rival Maxim Integrated Products for $21 billion. And over at the IPO desk, things are staying hot. Digital banking software developer nCino is about to go public at a valuation of about $2.6 billion, while datacenter host Rackspace and Chinese electric vehicle maker Li Auto filed for their debuts a little later on. How are EV stocks doing again?
The next billion. Big Tech is paying more attention to India lately, perhaps thanks to the success of mobile carrier Reliance Jio, which, oh, by the way, grabbed another $100 million of backing, this time from Qualcomm. But the bigger headline from the world's second-largest market is that Google pledged to invest $10 billion in India over the next few years in a mix of equity stakes, partnerships, and operational, infrastructure, and ecosystem projects, the company says. The point of the new Google for India Digitization Fund "is to ensure India not only benefits from the next wave of innovation, but leads it," Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said.
Bug fix. Linus Torvalds, who still helps oversee the open source Linux operating system he created, approved suggestions to remove troubling terminology like "master/slave" from the software. Instead, developers will pick from a list of alternatives such as "primary/secondary" and "host/proxy."
No such thing as a fair fight. Facebook is considering banning political ads, just for the few days before the November election. The idea is to avoid the spread of false information just before voting starts. What does that say about Facebook's influence the whole rest of the year?
FOOD FOR THOUGHT
As we noted last month, Apple's shift away from Intel chips to ARM-based designs of its own could also impact the much larger market for Windows PCs. Although ARM-based Windows gear is a tiny, tiny fraction of that market right now, former Apple and Be exec Jean-Louis Gassée thinks Apple's move will also give Windows on ARM a big boost.
Specifically, what are Dell, HP, Asus, and others going to do if Apple offers materially better laptops and desktops and Microsoft continues to improve Windows on ARM Surface devices? In order to compete, PC manufacturers will have to follow suit, they’ll “go ARM” because, all defensive rhetoric aside, Apple and Microsoft will have made the x86 architecture feel like what it actually is: old.
This won’t happen overnight and there will be an interesting mess of x86 and ARM SoC machines fighting it out in the marketplace. Large organizations need continuity and would balk at the prospect of servicing two kinds of Windows machines and apps. As usual, they’ll downplay Apple’s advantage and curse Microsoft for causing trouble. But if the newer machines are actually better, rogue members within these organizations will sneak in new devices and software; they always do.
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
Global IT spending forecast to fall 7% amid COVID-19 cuts By Jeremy Kahn
Drone industry flies higher as COVID-19 fuels demand for remote services By Aaron Pressman
TikTok is becoming inaccessible in more markets. Tech-savvy users are finding workarounds By Naomi Xu Elegant
The founder of wellness startup Muniq on prioritizing public health concerns over diet trends By Rachel King
Do you trust Big Tech with your personal health data? By Lance Lambert
The best things I’ve bought during quarantine so far By Rachel Schallom
What company leaders can learn from J.K. Rowling’s missteps on gender By Lisa Kenney
(Some of these stories require a subscription to access. Thank you for supporting our journalism.)
BEFORE YOU GO
Wall Street Journal tech columnist Joanna Stern says it's finally time to stop using the Chrome browser from Google and switch to Apple's Safari or Microsoft's Edge. "While Chrome has gobbled up 69% of the desktop-laptop browser market share...its competitors, all with single-digit percentages, have been laser-focused on kicking Chrome square in the blue dot," she notes. I'm on the fence. Better battery life doesn't matter during the pandemic lockdowns and I haven't experienced poor performance due to Chrome. What do you think? Hit us up on email or Twitter and let us know if you're ready to switch.
Aaron Pressman