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2020-04-08 -

Everyone is breathing a sigh of relief. Everyone in my family, that is. We are about to take some holiday, spend some time taking friends round the sights of Washington DC and then visit a national park. Now these attractions will stay open for business.

I am sure many Americans share this sense of relief - that their government has not shut down, and for more serious reasons than mere avoidance of holiday season disappointment.

There's little doubt that it would have made America look rather ridiculous and people would have blamed politicians as a class.

But who are the winners and losers?

The Republican leader, Speaker John Boehner, is a clear winner. Had there been a shutdown, his party would have suffered, and his authority would have been damaged. He negotiated skilfully between the Democrats and his own ardent members and won a deal that many independents will welcome as sensible and necessary.

For the Tea Party movement, too, it is a success. They have made their agenda Washington's agenda. They have stiffened the steel in their leadership's spine to hold our for deeper cuts. But if they complain that this is not enough, or that they've been betrayed, they will look petulant and fall into a Democrat trap - that of looking and sounding like extremists.

The social conservatives, for a time insisting on a rather incoherent anti-abortion policies tacked onto the budget ("fungible money" doesn't make it into a soundbite), risked disaster for their party.

They appeal to a minority in the country and look politically irresponsible - a danger to their party's electability and the purity of the Tea Party's economic and constitutional messages.

The Democrats as a whole don't come off well. They look like realists, but they've given a lot of ground. These cuts will hurt their natural supporters and undermine plans and projects dear to their hearts. The tactics were quite skilful but I can't see the strategy .

President Obama has made the best of a bad job. He has tried to celebrate the agreement as the American virtue of compromise in action. He made himself look like an honest broker, standing for sensible compromise, rather than the deeply involved player that he is. He did a good job of making a shutdown sound really scary, and so pushing the Republicans towards a deal. But once again he looks like a skilful chairman, rather than a leader. The cuts he has had to accept will, I imagine, undermine important parts of his programme.

With bigger battles ahead, over the 2012 budget, the debt ceiling and the deficit, President Obama has yet to explain how he will fund hope and pay for change. By welcoming the deal, as he must, he has embraced a pared-down vision, accepted something smaller and meaner than he offered in 2008.

It was obvious this blow was coming after last year's elections, but it is a serious blow to the presidency nonetheless.

I'll be back in a couple of weeks.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Syed Shah usually buys and sells stocks and currencies through his Interactive Brokers account, but he couldn't resist trying his hand at some oil trading on April 20, the day prices plunged below zero for the first time ever. The day trader, working from his house in a Toronto suburb, figured he couldn't lose as he spent $2,400 snapping up crude at $3.30 a barrel, and then 50 cents. Then came what looked like the deal of a lifetime: buying 212 futures contracts on West Texas Intermediate for an astonishing penny each. What he didn't know was oil's first trip into negative pricing had broken Interactive Brokers Group Inc. Its software couldn't cope with that pesky minus sign, even though it was always technically possible -- though this was an outlandish idea before the pandemic -- for the crude market to go upside down. Crude was actually around negative $3.70 a barrel when Shah's screen had it at 1 cent. Interactive Brokers never displayed a subzero price to him as oil kept diving to end the day at minus $37.63 a barrel. At midnight, Shah got the devastating news: he owed Interactive Brokers $9 million. He'd started the day with $77,000 in his account. To be clear, investors who were long those oil contracts had a brutal day, regardless of what brokerage they had their account in. What set Interactive Brokers apart, though, is that its customers were flying blind, unable to see that prices had turned negative, or in other cases locked into their investments and blocked from trading. Compounding the problem, and a big reason why Shah lost an unbelievable amount in a few hours, is that the negative numbers also blew up the model Interactive Brokers used to calculate the amount of margin -- aka collateral -- that customers needed to secure their accounts. "It's a $113 million mistake on our part," said Thomas Peterffy, the chairman and founder of Interactive Brokers, in an interview Wednesday. Customers will be made whole, Peterffy said. "We will rebate from our own funds to our customers who were locked in with a long position during the time the price was negative any losses they suffered below zero."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Uber lost $2.9 billion in the first quarter as its overseas investments were hammered by the coronavirus pandemic, but the company is looking to its growing food delivery business and aggressive cost-cutting to ease the pain. Tech Xplore reports: The ride-hailing giant said Thursday it is offloading Jump, its bike and scooter business, to Lime, a company in which it is investing $85 million. Jump had been losing about $60 million a quarter. "While our Rides business has been hit hard by the ongoing pandemic, we have taken quick action to preserve the strength of our balance sheet, focus additional resources on Uber Eats, and prepare us for any recovery scenario," said CEO Dara Khosrowshahi in a statement. "Along with the surge in food delivery, we are encouraged by the early signs we are seeing in markets that are beginning to open back up." On Wednesday, San Francisco-based Uber said it was cutting 3,700 full-time workers, or about 14% of its workforce, as people avoiding contagion either stay indoors or try to limit contact with others. Its main U.S. rival Lyft announced last month it would lay off 982 people, or 17% of its workforce because of plummeting demand. Careem, Uber's subsidiary in the Middle East, cut its workforce by 31%. Uber brought in $3.54 billion in revenue in the first quarter, up 14% from the same time last year. Revenue in its Eats meal delivery business grew 53% as customers shuttered at home opted to order in. Gross bookings grew 8% to $15.8 billion, with 54% growth in the food delivery business and a 3% decline in rides, on a constant currency basis. The report adds that rides were down 80% globally during the month of April. "But rides have been increasing for the past three weeks and bookings in large cities across Georgia and Texas, two states that started re-opening, are up 43% and 50% respectively from their lowest points," the report says.

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IT services provider Cognizant said in an earnings call this week that a ransomware incident that took place last month in April 2020 will negatively impact its Q2 revenue. ZDNet reports: "While we anticipate that the revenue impact related to this issue will be largely resolved by the middle of the quarter, we do anticipate the revenue and corresponding margin impact to be in the range of $50 million to $70 million for the quarter," said Karen McLoughlin, Cognizant Chief Financial Officer in an earnings call yesterday. McLoughlin also expects the incident to incur additional and unforeseen legal, consulting, and other costs associated with the investigation, service restoration, and remediation of the breach. The Cognizant CFO says the company has now fully recovered from the ransomware infection and restored the majority of its services. Speaking on the ransomware attack, Cognizant CEO Brian Humphries said the incident only impacted its internal network, but not customer systems. More precisely, Humphries said the ransomware incident impacted (1) Cognizant's select system supporting employees' work from home setups and (2) the provisioning of laptops that Cognizant was using to support its work from home capabilities during the COVID-19 pandemic. Humphries said staff moved quickly to take down all impacted systems, which impacted Cognizant's billing system for a period of time. Some customer services were taken down as a precaution.

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• Elon Musk says Tesla may leave its Palo Alto headquarters and Fremont, California factory. 
• In a tweet Saturday morning, the chief executive continued his outrage against shelter-in-place orders that have forced most non-essential businesses to close. 
• Last week, Musk likened the rules to fascism, and urged leaders to "give people their goddamn freedom back." 
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

After a week of decrying coronavirus shelter-in-place orders that have left Tesla's main factory shuttered and unable to produce vehicles, Elon Musk says the company may move its factory out of the state.

"Tesla is filing a lawsuit against Alameda County immediately," the chief executive said on Twitter Saturday morning. "The unelected & ignorant 'Interim Health Officer' of Alameda is acting contrary to the Governor, the President, our Constitutional freedoms & just plain common sense!"

That was followed up with a threat to move Tesla's headquarters outside the state.

"Frankly, this is the final straw," he replied. "Tesla will now move its HQ and future programs to Texas/Nevada immediately. If we even retain Fremont manufacturing activity at all, it will be dependent on how Tesla is treated in the future. Tesla is the last carmaker left in CA."

It wasn't immediately clear if a suit had yet been filed, or in which court Tesla will file the lawsuit. Most state and federal courts are closed on weekends and do not allow filing. In a subsequent Tweet, Musk alsourged shareholders to file a class action suit for damages caused by shutdown. 

Tesla's press relations department did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Alameda County did not immediately respond to a request for comment. 

Alameda County — the East Bay locale which includes Fremont, California, and Tesla's gigafactory about 30 miles southeast of San Francisco — extended its shelter-in-place order on April 29 "until further notice." Local authorities have not allowed Tesla to reopen the factory, and all manufacturing remains prohibited under the order.

The San Francisco Chronicle reported that Tesla was planning to resume some manufacturing operations at the factory as soon as last Wednesday, May 6. Local officials said it did not have permission to do so.

"Right now, the same health order is in place so nothing has changed," Fremont Police Department spokeswoman Geneva Bosques told Business Insider at the time. "Operating the assembly line was determined early on to be a violation."

Last week, following Tesla's first-quarter earnings announcement, Musk decried the shutdowns as a substantial risk to the company's financials.

"Frankly, I would call it forcible imprisoning of people in their homes against all of, their constitutional rights, in my opinion," he said on a conference call. "It's breaking people's freedoms in ways that are horrible and wrong and not why they came to America or built this country. What the f---. Excuse me. Outrage. Outrage."

"If somebody wants to stay in their house, that's great and they should be able to," he continued. "But to say they cannot leave their house and that they will be arrested if they do, that's fascist. That is not democratic — this is not freedom. Give people back their goddamn freedom."

Some states, including Texas, Georgia, and others, have begun to slowly allow certain businesses to re-open in recent weeks.

Musk praised counties neighboring Alameda, like San Joaquin for what he said were more "reasonable" responses. In a podcast released May 7, he told Joe Rogan that the company had learned from the coronavirus in China, where it briefly forced Tesla to close its Shanghai factory — a claim he repeated on Twitter Saturday. 

"Our castings foundry and other faculties in San Joaquin have been working 24/7 this entire time with no ill effects. Same with Giga Nevada," Musk said. "Tesla knows far more about what needs to be done to be safe through our Tesla China factory experience than an (unelected) interim junior official in Alameda County." 

As Musk began to complain about factory shutdowns in April, workers at Tesla's Fremont factory told Business Insider that the comments made them anxious.

"I'm for going back to work, but only if it is safe for me, my family, coworkers," said one production employee. "I don't feel like I'm being forced to stay home or that my freedom has been taken away. It's for the good of California."

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