President Emmanuel Macron’s draft bill walks a fine line balancing the country’s foundational secularism and worries about Islamist terrorism. Amid slumping economies everywhere, Taiwan’s looks surprisingly buoyant; we ask how that might continue after the pandemic. And how managers can best navigate the holiday-party season in a cheerless year.
Liquor legend Brown-Forman is borrowing a movie strategy for its top-shelf-ification of Jack Daniel’s. Stitch Fix stock surged 40% because it’s pulling a move straight outta Netflix. And Uber’s selling its self-driving biz… which completely changes our calendar of when self-driving actually arrives.
$SFIX $BF $UBER
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Teachers unions are catching flack for obstructing a return to in-person school. The president of the American Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten, says teachers want to be in school. The question still is, can it be done safely?
Guest: Randi Weingarten, President of the American Federation of Teachers.
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The story begins with our distant ancestors who used string to fashion the earliest tools. Then, ten thousand years ago, humans began farming not only for food but also for fiber to make cloth. In the intervening millennia, for people everywhere, an inordinate amount of human time and energy went into the growing, harvesting, spinning, weaving, and dying of cloth for garments, bedding, blankets, rugs, hangings, tents, tarps, sails, sacks, and all manner of containers and fittings. Based on investigation and practice, Ms. Postrel explains the artisanal processes and sciences involved.
In addition, this book is about how textiles shaped our society more broadly: labor, trade, tribute, collaboration (and also exploitation), credit, banking, migration (some voluntary, some forced), style and cultural restrictions, all figure into the discussion. The Industrial Revolution that began when steam power replaced human toil in the spinning of thread and the weaving of cloth, changed our world. Cheap, high-quality, cloth became available to people everywhere. In the twentieth century, the advent of plastics, of synthetic fabrics, transformed our world again. All of this, Ms. Postrel achieves in 250 beautifully-written pages, with numerous helpful pictures and diagrams. She also has a blog filled with videos explaining the processes she investigates in the book at https://vpostrel.com/blog.
Virginia Postrel is a journalist, author, and independent scholar. Her books include author of The Substance of Style,The Power of Glamour, and The Future and its Enemies. She is currently a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion and has been a columnist for the Atlantic, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times.
Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of the Early Modern Europe, the Spanish Empire, and the Atlantic World, specializing in sixteenth-century diplomacy and travel.
Andy calls up author and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Laurie Garrett to explore one of the most challenging questions of the day: how will Biden reach Trump supporters on the vital issues of the pandemic? It’s a question that needs an answer.
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As vaccinations kick off in the UK, the approval process is moving forward here in the US as well. The FDA now says Pfizer’s vaccine offers protection within just 10 days of getting the first dose, though efficacy goes up even further after a second one. Authorization is still pending. The US had planned to rely heavily on the AstraZeneca vaccine, having made a deal to buy 300 million doses… but new data indicate the drug isn’t as effective as some of the other options being reviewed.
On his first day, the new district attorney of Los Angeles George Gascón announced a suite of policy reforms that will change how law enforcement is done in the city. Gascón is part of a larger wave of newly-elected progressive DA’s, from places like Austin, Orlando, and New Orleans.
And in headlines: the Army fires or suspends 14 officials at Fort Hood, police raid the home of COVID data scientist Rebekah Jones, and Christopher Nolan is not happy with Warner Bros.
Show Links:
"Blunders Eroded U.S. Confidence in Early Vaccine Front-Runner"
Comedian Rivers Langley is back in his hometown in Alabama for the rest of 2020. Also, there's a global pandemic still happening. This podcast is him catching up with his funny friends; sometimes on the phone, sometimes socially-distanced outside. These are "The Corona Diaries" and this is Episode #110. Our guest today is comedian Dave Stone. You should listen to his podcasts "The Boogie Monster" and "The Stonebergs" and you can follow him on Twitter and Instagram @DaveStoneComedy. Listen to Carter Glascock's new album 'The Crystal Pistol' now streaming on all platforms!
The clock is ticking as Congress attempts to reach bipartisan agreement on a COVID-19 relief bill before Christmas. After multiple failed attempts to agree upon what should be included in a new aid package, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., are trying one more time to pass the package before year's end.
Garrett Bess, vice president of government relations and communications at Heritage Action for America, the grassroots partner organization of The Heritage Foundation, joins the show to break down what you need to know about the proposal and how much it may add to the national debt.
We also discuss these stories:
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton files a lawsuit against Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin as a result of the presidential election.
Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy says he will fire or suspend 14 personnel over sexual harassment and violence, including cases of suicide and homicide.
Joe Biden selects retired Army Gen. Lloyd Austin as secretary of defense.
How ready is your corporate security team to handle AI and ML threats? Many simply don’t have the bandwidth or don’t see it as a priority. That’s where security engineers like Microsoft’s Andrew Marshall step in. In this episode, hosts Nic Fillingham and Natalia Godyla speak with Andrew about just what his team is doing to teach security professionals and policy makers about the dangers of AI and ML attacks, and walks through some of the documentation, available for free online, that can help guide the response. Plus, why he really, really doesn’t want to talk about Windows Vista.
Nic and Natalia then explore what it’s like to hunt down threats with Sam Schwartz, a program manager with Microsoft Threat Experts. She came to Microsoft right out of college and didn’t even know what malware was. Now, she’s helping coordinate a team of threat hunters on the cutting edge of attack prevention.
In This Episode, You Will Learn:
Why data science and security engineering skills don’t necessarily overlap
How attackers are using ML to change decision making
What security teams are doing to protect AI and ML systems
How threat hunters are tracking down the newest security risks
Why Microsoft Threat Experts are focused on human adversaries, not malware
Some Questions We Ask:
What does the ML landscape look like at Microsoft?
How are ML attacks evolving?
What is ‘data poisoning’?
Why do threat hunters need to limit the scope of their work?
What skills do you need to be a security program manager?