‘A Litigation Arms Race.’ Why The 2020 Election Could Come Down To The Courts
The litigation landscape
To the extent that it can be simplified, this year’s election-related legal brawls can be distilled into two groups: a push to eliminate expanded mail-in voting policies on the basis that they would produce unprecedented fraud, and a push to ease the restrictions already in place.
The first battle, waged by the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee, has largely failed. Lawsuits on this theme filed in Montana, Nevada, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania were all dismissed because of a lack of evidence. In Pennsylvania, federal Judge J. Nicholas Ranjan, who was appointed by Trump, dismissed the Trump campaign’s case on the grounds that their allegations of fraud were “speculative”—the same word invoked by federal district Judge James C. Mahan, who was nominated by George W. Bush, in dismissing a similar case in Nevada. In Montana, federal district judge Dana Christensen described the Trump campaign’s fraud allegations as “a fiction.”
The second battle—the fight over the weedy regulations governing voting by mail—has had more grist. Democrats have banked key victories in lower courts, while Republicans have gotten at least half a dozen of these decisions either reversed on appeals or put on hold pending further consideration. “It’s not the score at the end of the first quarter that counts, and there is a lot of game left in most of these cases,” says an aide at the Republican National Committee.
Madison Twilight
Geothermal energy is poised for a big breakout
Geothermal power is the perpetual also-ran of renewable energy, chugging along in the background for decades, never quite breaking out of its little niche, forever causing energy experts to say, “Oh, yeah, geothermal … what’s up with that?”
Well, after approximately 15 years of reporting on energy, I finally took the time to do a deep dive into geothermal and I am here to report: This is a great time to start paying attention!
After many years of failure to launch, new companies and technologies have brought geothermal out of its doldrums, to the point that it may finally be ready to scale up and become a major player in clean energy. In fact, if its more enthusiastic backers are correct, geothermal may hold the key to making 100 percent clean electricity available to everyone in the world. And as a bonus, it’s an opportunity for the struggling oil and gas industry to put its capital and skills to work on something that won’t degrade the planet.
Loyalty first: Why tech companies are clamoring to give you credit cards
The battle to own your wallet is on as tech companies find new ways to make more money from their users. In the process, they could reshape the banking industry.
Shopify wants businesses to use its warehouses. Venmo wants to embed itself in everyday life. Razer wants to use its diehard fanbase to grow even more.
Those are among the justifications that tech companies described to Protocol for trying to fill a coveted spot in your wallet with credit and debit cards. All are working to the same end: To make more money per user while also growing those ranks. But as they do so, they’re also embarking on a line of business that stands to reshape the banking sector as we know it.
After Apple kicked off this trend with its titanium Apple Card last year, a flood of other companies have followed suit. Venmo and Razer recently launched cards, and Samsung and Shopify are set to release theirs later this year. EBay told Protocol it’s considering something similar, and Google is also rumored to be making its own plans.
For these tech companies, payments are a “means to an end,” said Jorn Lambert, Mastercard’s chief digital officer. At the heart of it, he says, is consumer fickleness toward digital platforms: While people may swap apps or phones all the time, they tend to be much more loyal to their financial institutions. When a tech company introduces a card or bank account, Lambert said, they get “much more stickiness” with their customers.
“There’s something about being able to build a financial relationship with the customer that allows you to streamline the … transactional activity that you have on the customer,” Marqeta Chief Product Officer Kevin Doerr said. “Once you’ve been able to secure that,” he added, “the ability to stack products on that, to stack services on that … just becomes easier and easier.”
The WeWork Arc
WeWork is an ideal company for a business book. Per my general theory of business books, the ideal recipe for a satisfying narrative about business is:
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A classic Greek tragedy, where the hero is undone by his own hubris, and
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Lots of people with free time to talk to an author, who have a vested interest in telling their side of the story.
WeWork has both. The company’s financial history sounds like an extended roulette session: every year, the company doubled in size, until 2019, when it shrank to almost zero. And the story is tied to the ambition of a single founder, Adam Neumann, whose sales ability and indifference to risk propelled the company to a $47bn valuation and then led to its near-collapse.
WeWork got a lot of media coverage, slowly on the way up and then much more frequently on the way down, and now the story has been told in the just-published Billion Dollar Loser.
One thing the book’s narrative makes clear is that WeWork was not just a creation of the venture capital market of the late 2010s. It was also a creation of the labor and real estate markets of the early 2010s. WeWork’s founders, Adam Neumann and Miguel McKelvey, started a predecessor company called Green Desk in early 2008, leasing office space in a building in Brooklyn and subleasing smaller units. (In a memorable exchange, Neumann pitched this idea as a way for his landlord to get some use out of vacant space. The landlord said “You know nothing about real estate,” and Neumann replied “Your building is empty. What do you know about real estate.”)
Without You
A recent golden hour amuz flight around Camp Randall where the Wisconsin Badgers meet the Fighting Illini Friday evening.
How to hide from a drone – the subtle art of ‘ghosting’ in the age of surveillance
The first thing you can do to hide from a drone is to take advantage of the natural and built environment. It’s possible to wait for bad weather, since smaller devices like those used by local police have a hard time flying in high winds, dense fogs and heavy rains.
Trees, walls, alcoves and tunnels are more reliable than the weather, and they offer shelter from the high-flying drones used by the Department of Homeland Security.
The World Henry Ford Made
Forging Global Fordism: Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, and the Contest over the Industrial Order
Stefan J. Link
Princeton University Press, $39.95 (cloth)
The utopian ideal of globalization has imploded over the past decade. Rising demand in Western countries for greater state control over the economy reflects a range of grievances, from a chronic shortage of well-compensated work to a sense of national decline. In the United States, the dearth of domestic supply chains exposed by the COVID-19 pandemic has only heightened alarm over the acute infrastructural weaknesses decades of outsourced production have created. Post-industrial society, rather than an advanced stage of shared affluence, is not only more unequal but fundamentally insecure. Rich but increasingly oligarchic countries are experiencing what we might call, following scholars of democratization, a dramatic “de-consolidation” of development.