Carol Hymowitz

A sneaker designed for runners who want to move slowly, rather than sprint. An app that helps caregivers keep track of their schedules and communicate easily with their older clients. A company that helps retirees who want to reenter the labor force — and encourages employers to give them a chance.

These are just a few of the existing products and services that MBA students analyzed in a new Stanford Graduate School of Business course, “Longevity: Business Implications and Opportunities.” The course — likely the first given on the subject of the longevity economy at a business school — explored why business executives and entrepreneurs should focus on the 50+ demographic.

“Whether you want to launch a start-up or work for a large established company, the longevity market is a huge and still mostly overlooked opportunity,” said Robert Chess,  a business school lecturer and serial entrepreneur who co-taught the course this winter with Laura Carstensen, director of the Stanford Longevity Center.

Der TagesSpiegel:

The “Bazooka” – this is what Federal Minister for Finances Olaf Scholz (SPD, also Deputy Chancellor) calls the Corona Aid Package, announced on Monday. The cabinet has set aside a sum of €122.5 billion to help individuals and businesses. Solo entrepreneurs and small businesses are set to receive financial aid of €9,000 to €15,000.

Jaron Lanier & E. Glen Weyl:

The spread of the novel coronavirus and the resulting COVID-19 pandemic have provided a powerful test of social and governance systems. Neither of the world’s two leading powers, China and the United States, has been particularly distinguished in responding. In China, an initial bout of political denial allowed the virus to spread for weeks, first domestically and then globally, before a set of forceful measures proved reasonably effective. (The Chinese government also should have been better prepared, given that viruses have jumped from animal hosts to humans within its territory on multiple occasions in the past.) The United States underwent its own bout of political denial before adopting social-distancing policies; even now, its lack of investment in public health leaves it ill-equipped for this sort of emergency.

The response of the bureaucratic and often technophobic European Union may prove even worse: Italy, although far from the epicenter of the outbreak, has four times the per capita rate of cases as China does, and even famously orderly Germany is already at half China’s rate. Nations in other parts of the world, such as information-manipulating Iran, provide worse examples yet.

Taiwan’s success has rested on a fusion of technology, activism, and civic participation. A small but technologically cutting-edge democracy, living in the shadow of the superpower across the strait, Taiwan has in recent years developed one of the world’s most vibrant political cultures by making technology work to democracy’s advantage rather than detriment. This culture of civic technology has proved to be the country’s strongest immune response to the new coronavirus.

TECH FOR DEMOCRACY

The value of Taiwan’s tech-enabled civic culture has become abundantly clear in the current crisis. Bottom-up information sharing, public-private partnerships, “hacktivism” (activism through the building of quick-and-dirty but effective proofs of concept for online public services), and participatory collective action have been central to the country’s success in coordinating a consensual and transparent set of responses to the coronavirus. A recent report from the Stanford University School of Medicine documents 124 distinct interventions that Taiwan implemented with remarkable speed. Many of these interventions bubbled into the public sector through community initiatives, hackathons, and digital deliberation on the vTaiwan digital democracy platform, on which almost half the country’s population participates. (The platform enables large-scale hacktivism, civic deliberation, and scaling up of initiatives in an orderly and largely consensual manner.) A decentralized community of participants used tools such as Slack and HackMD to refine successful projects. (Much of our analysis is based on open interviews through these tools with leaders in the g0v community of civic hackers.)

The HFT Guy:

What’s wrong with AirBnb?

AirBnb is reportedly around 15000 employees with 3 billions in revenues.

They are as large as related conglomerates comprising tens of companies, except AirBnb is a single company running a single website!

They don’t even operate in as many countries or currencies.

Needless to say their strategy has been to burn as much VC cash as possible and hire has many employees as possible. A standard strategy to inflate valuation and raise even more money.

Logan Wroge (Gomez – Schmidt vs Pearson):

Pearson views full-day 4K and incorporating other cultures into classroom curriculum — “outside of one month” — as strategies to close the gap.

Gomez Schmidt sees a new reading curriculum for kindergarten through fifth grade as crucial in improving outcomes, along with “relevant and rigorous” coursework at the middle and high school levels.

(Nicki Vander Meulen and Wayne Strong):

Strong has two main priorities if he joins the board: Putting a “laser focus” on what is causing students to receive out-of-school suspensions and reducing the disproportionate rate of black students who receive those suspensions and ensuring schools are safe for students and teachers.

“If the school climate is such that our kids don’t feel safe, they’re not going to be productive,” the 60-year-old Strong said.

Much more on the April 7, 2020 Madison School Board election, here.

Benjamin Mueller:

“In quite a short period of time, we have become sort of addicted to one source of income,” said Kerry Brown, a professor of Chinese studies at King’s College London. “If the worst case happens and Chinese students don’t want to come here in September, it’s potentially a kind of seismic change.”

In Britain, some Chinese students are fuming that universities did not act more decisively to move classes online and scrap major events like spring balls. In interviews, they said they were weighing the health benefits of wearing a surgical mask with their fear of being racially abused or even attacked, as a student from Singapore was last month in London.

Sarah Thompson:

There is a large network of websites using political content to draw an audience to the sites where some dubious advertising techniques are being employed. All of the content published on these websites is lifted from other sources. Some is current news, some is old – but true – news, published without a byline or date. And many stories are fake-news classics.

But most of what is published is satire stolen from “America’s Last Line of Defense,” a group of websites run by a self-described liberal troll named Christopher Blair. Many people do not recognize the ALLOD-branded watermark left behind on the swiped satire stories. Published without context, these stories mislead many people into believing they are actually new news. Adding to the confusion is the legibility problem – many of the stories have been spun.

Steven Levy:

LARRY BRILLIANT SAYS he doesn’t have a crystal ball. But 14 years ago, Brilliant, the epidemiologist who helped eradicate smallpox,  spoke to a TED audience and described what the next pandemic would look like. At the time, it sounded almost too horrible to take seriously. “A billion people would get sick,” he said. “As many as 165 million people would die. There would be a global recession and depression, and the cost to our economy of $1 to $3 trillion would be far worse for everyone than merely 100 million people dying, because so many more people would lose their jobs and their health care benefits, that the consequences are almost unthinkable.”

Now the unthinkable is here, and Brilliant, the Chairman of the board of Ending Pandemics, is sharing expertise with those on the front lines. We are a long way from 100 million deaths due to the novel coronavirus, but it has turned our world upside down. Brilliant is trying not to say “I told you so” too often. But he did tell us so, not only in talks and writings, but as the senior technical advisor for the pandemic horror film Contagion, now a top streaming selection for the homebound. Besides working with the World Health Organization in the effort to end smallpox, Brilliant, who is now 75, has fought flu, polio, and blindness; once led Google’s nonprofit wing, Google.org; co-founded the conferencing system the Well; and has traveled with the Grateful Dead.

Der Tagespiegel Checkpoint:

Freiburg: First Large German City Under Curfew

“I don’t give a damn about Corona”, said an acquaintance at a recent gathering. That was exactly two weeks and two days ago. It sounded crude and nonchalant but not absurd. Now this is a sentence from another world. The tragedy is that many of the presumed main carriers of the virus –young adults– carry on living by this motto.

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