What we’re reading (7/3)
“What A Tech Breakup Could Mean For You” (Wall Street Journal). “Will my iPhone really become less secure, as Apple has claimed? Would the selection we’ve grown accustomed to on Amazon shrink, as the company has intimated? Would Facebook being forced to sell off Instagram and WhatsApp break those services, as Facebook would have us believe? And would the quality of Google search be degraded by its inability to feature its own services, such as Google Maps and YouTube videos, in results? Or, as the companies’ critics would have it, will life be better for users, competitors and society if all those things come to pass?”
“Hacking Wall Street” (DealBook). “Bank executives, security experts and federal officials have been planning for potentially devastating cyberattacks against the financial industry for at least a decade. But the issue has grown more urgent in recent years because of an increase in nation-state cyberattacks against critical infrastructure, such as the cyberattacks by Russia that took out part of Ukraine’s electric grid and the WannaCry worm linked to North Korea that hit the hospital and shipping industries. The Federal Reserve Chairman, Jerome Powell, recently told ‘60 Minutes’ that “the risk that we keep our eyes on the most now is cyber risk.”
“Attack Of The COVID Zombies” (Project Syndicate). “In both the United States and the European Union, corporate bankruptcies have declined during the 15 months of the pandemic, despite the severe accompanying recession. That decline is a result of rich-country governments – in their understandable desire to soften the pandemic’s economic blow – extending every possible safety net to firms. Often, however, they did so without even trying to separate those with good economic prospects from those with none.”
“Jeff Bezos Says Work-Life Balance Is A ‘Debilitating Phrase.’ He Wants Amazon Workers To View Their Career And Lives As A ‘Circle.’” (Business Insider). “Amazon founder Jeff Bezos isn't a fan of the phrase ‘work-life balance.’ […] at an April 2018 event hosted by Insider's parent company, Bezos said new Amazon employees shouldn't view work and life as a balancing act. Instead, Bezos said that it's more productive to view them as two integrated parts.”
“The ‘Juice Man’ And The Drug Scandal That Rocked Horse Racing” (Bloomberg). “The Jockey Club had pushed for reforms to address trackside deaths, but Janney was convinced that die-hards were staying away for another reason: the sport’s inability to curb doping. ‘People I trusted were becoming increasingly suspect of the results,’ Janney says. Trainers told him they were seeing horses become winners overnight. ‘Suddenly you’d have a horse that never got tired,’ he says. ‘As the others slowed down, they never did.’”
