“Google’s revenue-sharing deal with Apple was a major part of the trial because Apple is believed to get the bulk of what Google pays out in those agreements. Having a default search placement on Apple devices, which make up roughly half of the smartphone market in the US, is extremely important to Google. We’ve known for years that Google pays Apple for that default placement — this also stops Apple from developing its own search engine — but that’s about it. While Google tried to keep virtually everything about the deal away from the public, we still got a few new details.
In an apparent slip-up, Google’s own witness in the waning days of the trial told us how much of Google’s ad revenue Apple gets: 36 percent for searches done on its Safari browser. The monetary value of that 36 percent is still a mystery. Judge Mehta did not disclose how big Apple’s slice of the $26.3 billion pie is, allowing the DOJ only to say it’s “more than $10 billion.” But the New York Times, citing internal Google sources, put it at $18 billion.”
“We didn’t just find out some of Google’s secrets; a few things about Apple came out, too. Apple’s senior vice president John Giannandrea testified that his company talked to Microsoft about buying Bing in 2018. Apple ultimately decided against it, but not before using the possibility as leverage in its search default negotiations with Google, something Microsoft is still pretty sore about. Apple executive Eddy Cue testified that the company chooses Google to be the default search because it believes Google is the best for its users. But speaking of Bing …”
“Multiple Microsoft executives, including CEO Satya Nadella, testified that Microsoft really, really wanted to make Bing the default search on Apple devices, to the point where it was willing to lose billions of dollars a year for the privilege. Samsung and Verizon, the trial also revealed, essentially refused to even negotiate with Microsoft over changing their search defaults to Bing. Perhaps they were thinking of Mozilla’s experience switching from Google to Yahoo. Mozilla CEO Mitchell Baker testified that Yahoo offered more money and fewer ads, so Mozilla’s Firefox browser switched the default from Google to Yahoo in 2014. Mozilla switched back to Google a few years later, which Baker attributed to Google’s search being better for its users, echoing the point that Google emphasized in its defense.”
https://www.vox.com/technology/2023/11/16/23962967/google-search-antitrust-trial-what-we-learned
“Experts say the public’s disinterest in the latest Covid shots is likely a combination of poor messaging from authorities, a diminishing fear about a virus that three years ago was wholly unknown, and the political polarization of the pandemic itself. But whatever the reasons, that vaccine ambivalence still poses a health threat.
Elderly people and very young infants continue to have a higher chance than the rest of the population that they will be hospitalized with Covid-19. Vaccination rates have fallen off for the former group, who are also most likely to die from an infection, and they were never strong to begin with for the latter”
…
“The known unknowns for the future, which could spur another round of investment and interest in updated Covid-19 vaccines, are biological. The virus has been evolving and will continue to evolve and could, in theory, reach a point where the current vaccines are ineffectual.
The other question mark is inside of us. The reason many people still enjoy protection from serious illness is because our body’s T-cells are familiar with the virus and can activate when they detect it. They may not be able to stop an infection entirely (that is the role of antibodies, which are quicker to fade) but they can stamp out the virus before a person becomes too sick.
What we don’t know today is how long our T cells’ memory will last, and how durable that immunity really is. The only way to find out is for more time to pass.”
https://www.vox.com/policy/2023/11/17/23964294/covid-19-vaccine-2023-us-vaccination-rates
“Since 1975, politicians have built huge portions of the American safety net — like the child tax credit (CTC) — around the idea that excluding the poorest Americans from government assistance will motivate them to climb out of deep poverty on their own and get a job.
This long-standing bipartisan consensus is manifest in the twin ideas of work and income requirements. Work requirements are simple: You either have a job or you don’t, and that binary is what determines whether you’re eligible for a handful of welfare programs.
Income requirements are a little wonkier. They stipulate that anyone without any income will receive no benefits. Only after earned income surpasses a specified level do benefits begin kicking in — which is where we get another dry name: “phase-ins.””
…
“The consensus excluding the poorest Americans from some forms of government assistance through phase-ins held until President Joe Biden’s 2021 American Rescue Plan. Its anti-poverty centerpiece was to cut phase-ins from the existing CTC and crank up the payment, creating what’s known as the expanded CTC.
The results were historic. Over the course of 2021, child poverty was cut nearly in half, and the long-running fear at the heart of the American welfare system — that unconditional aid would discourage work — never came to pass.
Then, to the dismay of advocates and recipients alike, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) blocked the Democratic Party’s effort to make the expansion permanent, fearing, among other familiar concerns like the cost, that recipients would just buy drugs (the data shows that recipients spent the money on food, clothes, utilities, rent, and education). Come 2022, phase-ins returned to the CTC, approximately 3.7 million children were immediately thrust back into poverty in January, and the rest of the year saw the sharpest rise in the history of recorded child poverty rates.”
…
“Now that we have real-world evidence from a nationwide, year-long experiment, the expanded CTC’s success should ignite efforts to roll back phase-ins across the board. That also means cutting them from the CTC’s sister program, the earned income tax credit (EITC), which phases in as a supplement to wages for low-income Americans and helps about 31 million Americans.
The expanded CTC is estimated to have reduced child poverty rates anywhere from 29 percent to 43 percent, with the vast majority of that drop attributable to removing phase-ins. Extending that success to include the EITC would cut child poverty by an estimated 64 percent.”
…
“Winship was unsurprised that his fears of parents choosing to work less didn’t show up during the expanded CTC. It only lasted for one year and was recognized all the while as a temporary program. “These kinds of behavioral effects take time to set in,” he writes. In the long-term, after a decade or a generation of the program being in place, that’s when he would expect to see, as Oren Cass, executive director of the conservative think-tank American Compass, put it, “communities in which labor-force dropout is widespread and widely accepted.””
…
“Long-term speculation, however, can go both ways. The generational impacts of unconditional transfers could just as well lead to long-term investments in education and skills training, support entrepreneurship, and actually raise productivity and economic activity in the long run, all of which would boost, instead of wipe out, poverty reduction.
In 2018, researchers from Washington University in St. Louis estimated that childhood poverty costs the US $1.03 trillion per year, or 5.4 percent of the GDP. They found that every dollar spent on reducing child poverty would save the public 7 dollars from the economic costs of poverty.
Results from basic income pilots across the US also stand in contrast to Winship’s concern. “Our moms get the guaranteed income and not only do they continue to work, they level up their work,” Nyandoro, who runs the nation’s longest-running guaranteed income program, told me. “They’re able to move from jobs to careers. They’re able to go back to school. They’re able to get out of debt.”
The most recent evidence in favor of phase-ins Winship cites is a 2021 paper by a group of economists from the University of Chicago, led by Kevin Corinth and Bruce Meyer. It predicted that making the CTC expansion permanent would spark a 1.5-million-person exodus from the labor force. As analysts were quick to point out, however, the paper is based on a model that already assumes unconditional cash reduces work. Predicting work disincentives using a model that already assumes them tells us nothing about whether the assumption itself is tethered to reality.
Corinth and Meyer have since responded to criticism of their work disincentive assumptions, arguing that they fall well within the range used in other studies. These academic debates will continue, but in the meantime, where should the burden of proof lie?
Eliminating phase-ins from the CTC was a massive anti-poverty success and had no short-term negative employment effects. Recipients spent the extra few hundred bucks on necessities, from food and clothing to shelter and utilities. Even small businesses voiced their support on the grounds that it would boost spending and entrepreneurship.
On the other hand, a minority of skeptics retain speculative concerns that a few generations down the line, newfound consequences might overshadow these benefits.”
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23965898/child-poverty-expanded-child-tax-credit-economy-welfare-phase-ins
“Hernán Stuchi, a 29-year-old food delivery driver in greater Buenos Aires, grew up as a left-wing activist. During this year’s presidential election in Argentina, he told Vox he would make a starkly different choice, and back Javier Milei, a far-right libertarian trumpeting socially conservative culture war issues and explosive proposals to reshape Argentine society.
“It was a kind of innocence,” he said in October, discussing his previous support for left-wing leaders. “It’s not like us poor people ever stopped being poor.”
At the polls this fall, Stuchi was far from alone.
Milei shocked the country when he topped Argentina’s two main political forces in primary elections in August. Now, he’s defeated Sergio Massa, a left-wing establishment candidate, in a runoff election. According to provisional results, he won about 55 percent of the vote. A main fount of that support is, surprisingly, young people — and young men in particular.
Ahead of a previous round of voting in October, polls indicated almost 50 percent of voters 29 and younger backed Milei, the wild-haired outsider and self-described “anarcho-capitalist” who inveighs against traditional politicians, branding them as members of a “caste” that must be done away with. (His campaign slogan, “que se vayan todos,” or “get rid of them all,” carries echoes of the Trumpian “drain the swamp.”) A win by Milei’s ascendant campaign in Argentina in some ways serves as yet another indicator of the far right’s rise across the Americas and around the world. But young voters’ support sets Milei apart from the far-right stars he is often compared with, including Trump and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, both of whom were shut out by young voters in their recent reelection bids.
With over 100 percent inflation crushing Argentine pocketbooks, Milei’s proposed solution is a radical plan to abolish the central bank and dollarize the economy by replacing the Argentine peso with the US dollar — a move untested by countries of Argentina’s scale. He has voiced support for other extreme positions, including liberalizing gun ownership and individuals’ freedom to sell their organs. He denies human-caused climate change and opposes abortion. At rallies, he can often be seen wielding a chainsaw, symbolizing his plan to slash public spending and unravel Argentina’s generous safety nets. In Milei’s view, the state should largely limit itself to homeland security: To that end, he has pledged to axe the ministries of education; environment; and women, gender, and diversity, among others.”
https://www.vox.com/world-politics/2023/10/21/23925549/argentina-election-javier-milei-right-youth
“Universal health care remains an unrealized dream for the United States. But in some parts of the country, the dream has drawn closer to a reality in the 13 years since the Affordable Care Act passed.
Overall, the number of uninsured Americans has fallen from 46.5 million in 2010, the year President Barack Obama signed his signature health care law, to about 26 million today. The US health system still has plenty of flaws — beyond the 8 percent of the population who are uninsured, far higher than in peer countries, many of the people who technically have health insurance still find it difficult to cover their share of their medical bills. Nevertheless, more people enjoy some financial protection against health care expenses than in any previous period in US history.
The country is inching toward universal coverage. If everybody who qualified for either the ACA’s financial assistance or its Medicaid expansion were successfully enrolled in the program, we would get closer still: More than half of the uninsured are technically eligible for government health care aid.
Particularly in the last few years, it has been the states, using the tools made available by them by the ACA, that have been chipping away most aggressively at the number of uninsured.
Today, 10 states have an uninsured rate below 5 percent — not quite universal coverage, but getting close. Other states may be hovering around the national average, but that still represents a dramatic improvement from the pre-ACA reality: In New Mexico, for instance, 23 percent of its population was uninsured in 2010; now just 8 percent is.
Their success indicates that, even without another major federal health care reform effort, it is possible to reduce the number of uninsured in the United States. If states are more aggressive about using all of the tools available to them under the ACA, the country could continue to bring down the number of uninsured people within its borders.
The law gave states discretion to build upon its basic structure. Many received approval from the federal government to create programs that lower premiums; some also offer state subsidies in addition to the federal assistance to reduce the cost of coverage, including for people who are not eligible for federal aid, such as undocumented immigrants. A few states are even offering new state-run health plans that will compete with private offerings.”
https://www.vox.com/policy/23972827/us-aca-enrollment-universal-health-insurance
“in 2023, there were several natural forces converging on top of human-caused warming pushing up temperatures around the world. For example, in addition to heating caused by greenhouse gasses from burning fossil fuels, temperature cycles in the Atlantic Ocean and the El Niño pattern in the Pacific Ocean converged in their hot phases this year.
However, such a record-breaking year presents a vivid example of the conditions that may soon become typical in a warmer world, or even on the cooler end of possibilities. And for people concerned about the devastating effects of climate change, it’s ramping up the urgency to keep greenhouse gasses in check.”
https://www.vox.com/23969523/climate-change-cop28-paris-1-5-c-uae-2023-record-warm
“In survey after survey, large majorities of respondents say both that the economy is terrible and that Biden is doing a bad job managing it. For months, American economists and policy wonks have expressed puzzlement about these results, pointing to strong GDP growth, low unemployment, the lack of a recession in the US, and cooling inflation rates.
But after a two-year period featuring the highest inflation in decades, prices are still a whole lot higher than they were four years ago — and voters seem not to have forgiven that just yet. (This has been a global phenomenon, worse in Europe than in the US, that could be dragging down many incumbents.) And governments’ chief inflation-fighting tool, high interest rates, may also be painful to many people, making it harder to get credit. Stock markets have stagnated or fallen since early 2022 (after many years of continuous upward expansion in the US). Some Americans could also see their incomes taking a hit due to the expiration of generous pandemic aid.”
https://www.vox.com/2024-elections/23949102/biden-polls-2024-losing-old-economy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pidScubXHEo