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Good morning. On today’s docket:
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A 360° view of the ProPublica tax reports.
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It’s hot outside. Like, real hot.
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Something in Florida blew up. Kinda.
Onward. 👇
⏰🚀 Ready, Set, Go: Today’s newsletter takes 4.30 minutes to read. (With the 360° view: 6.98 minutes.)
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🍩 Daily Sprinkle
“The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance—it is the illusion of knowledge.”
–Aphorism publicized by Daniel J. Boorstin (1914-2004), American historian and 12th Librarian of the U.S. Congress.
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👇📰 Quick Bits
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☀️ It’s Getting Hot In Here…
More than 50M Americans across eight states in the South and West have been under heat warnings and watches over the past three days (most recently 46M people on Wednesday).
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Dozens of daily records were broken Monday and Tuesday, ranging from California’s central and inland valleys to as far north as Montana and Wyoming.
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California’s grid operator issued a heat bulletin on Tuesday urging residents to conserve energy due to “an abnormally strong ridge of heat,” one day after Texas’ grid operator issued a similar statement.
More: When all is said and done, 110M Americans will have experienced highs above 90 degrees, and 20M above 100 degrees.
From Axios: "The West is currently experiencing its most intense and expansive drought of the 21st Century, and the heat wave and drought are reinforcing one another."
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✈️ Sisterhood of the Traveling DONUT
Tripadvisor launched Tripadvisor Plus, a travel subscription service where consumers can pay $99 per year to gain access to discounted tickets, tours, attractions, and hotel stays, as well as personalized travel advice.
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The company estimates its member-only hotel discounts and perks alone will save you an average of $350 per stay.
The announcement comes just as travel is picking back up across the U.S.:
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The TSA screened nearly 2.1M airport travelers on Sunday, the most since the pandemic began (but still down from over 2.6M screened on the same day in 2019).
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The CEO of American Express said U.S. travel bookings in May were 95% of what they were in May 2019.
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EU ambassadors on Wednesday agreed to add the U.S. and several other countries to the bloc’s approved travel list (meaning EU governments will gradually lift restrictions on non-essential travel, but can still impose certain conditions on travelers, such as quarantines).
What This Means For You: You may be able to book a trip to Italy very soon. Or Spain. Who knows, maybe even France, Germany, and Belgium, too.
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🦠 COVID in U.S. December 2019, Study Finds
The COVID-19 virus infected people across five U.S. states as early as December 2019 or early 2020, according to a new government study published Tuesday in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases.
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Scientists analyzed blood samples taken for a National Institutes of Health research program, identifying COVID-19 antibodies in seven individuals who were infected with the virus days or weeks before the first cases were confirmed in their area.
All told, they found evidence of COVID-19 in nine out of 24,079 participants whose blood samples were taken between January 2, 2020, and March 18, 2020.
More: The researchers said antibodies found in the samples appear about two weeks after a person has been infected, meaning the earliest samples with COVID-19 antibodies - dating to January 7 & 8 - came from people infected in late December 2019. The WHO declared a pandemic on March 11, 2020.
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📸 Pic of the Day
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Image: YouTube |
Florida Power & Light imploded the towering chimney stack of its last coal-fired generating plant on Wednesday.
Watch it happen.
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🗣👂 Dose of Discussion
🧾 The ProPublica Tax Reports
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ProPublica on Wednesday published the latest in a series of stories based on the private tax data of some of the U.S.’ richest citizens.
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ProPublica says it obtained the data from “an anonymous source” who provided the nonprofit newsroom with “large amounts of information on the ultrawealthy, everything from the taxes they paid to the income they reported to the profits from their stock trades.”
🤿 A deeper dive…
The first report, released last Tuesday, revealed how billionaires like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Warren Buffett use legal means to “pay little in income tax compared to their massive wealth – sometimes nothing at all.”
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The latest report says Tali Farhadian Weinstein, the leading candidate for Manhattan District Attorney, and her husband, hedge fund manager Boaz Weinstein, “paid virtually no federal income taxes in four of six recent years” – again, by using legal measures.
⏭️ What’s Next?
In testimony before the Senate Finance Committee yesterday, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen called the disclosure of confidential taxpayer data to ProPublica a “very serious situation.”
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She said the issue had been referred to the Treasury inspector general, the IRS inspector general, the FBI, and federal prosecutors in Washington, D.C., and promised to keep Congress updated on the investigations.
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📣🗣💬 This Week’s Poll Responses
Background: In Friday's Dose of Discussion, we reported on the recent Consumer Price Index increase (the most widely used measure of inflation).
Yes – "We are on fixed income and the rising prices mean more restrictions as to what we can do or buy. Also worried for our children and grandchildren as it is getting harder for them to get by and stretch their income to not only provide food and shelter but allow their kids to do things to help them learn and get experiences in different areas."
No – "We can do this in large part due to the massive amount of US debt held by other countries, which is in the form of US dollars. So long as the dollar is the de facto global currency, foreign countries will continue to hold it in high value, as it makes the debt they hold worth more. These countries include the EU, Japan, China, UK, and many others."
Unsure – "I think there may or may not be need for concern, but there is not enough data yet."
+Note on Sample Size: We received 527 responses. 👏🥳 Some may have been lightly edited for grammar or clarity.
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🤗 Daily Dose of Positive
💉🐝 What The Buzz Is About
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Image: James Webb
As beekeepers continue to report bees dying off, one student at Cornell University decided to take a novel approach to one of the multiple threats bees face.
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Twenty-seven year old James Webb developed a ‘vaccine for bees’ to provide protection against pesticides.
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He recently co-authored a study in the journal Nature Food that found his ‘vaccine’ was 100% effective against lethal amounts of pesticide.
James is now leading a startup called Beemunity that is bringing a product to market.
Dig in.
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🛸🌄📲 Calling from the Future…
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🚗 Behind The Wheel…
Image: Andrew J. Hawkins / The Verge
Austin Russell, CEO of autonomous vehicle sensor company Luminar, dreams of building an “uncrashable car” - a self-driving vehicle capable of avoiding any collision.
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According to Russell, existing safety systems in self-driving cars are “surprisingly bad” – in part, because automakers tend to test their autonomous driving systems in unrealistically perfect conditions: sunny weather with stationary obstacles.
Enter Luminar: Russell’s company is in the process of developing a better system of lidar - a laser sensor essential to self-driving systems that uses near-infrared light to detect objects.
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The company’s lidar employs unusually long waves of laser light to detect small and low-reflective objects in a vehicle’s path at a range of up to 500 meters.
Luminar’s sensors are set to be embedded in Volvo vehicles produced in late 2022.
Dig in.
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💡 Dose of Knowledge
🥬 The Sound of Speed
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What vegetable grows fast enough that you can hear it?
A) Bush bean
B) Rhubarb
C) Radish
D) Carrot
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(keep scrolling for the answer) |
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🍩 Share the DONUT
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Access exclusive rewards and even an all-expenses-paid round trip to Austin, TX, just for sharing this newsletter.
Simply:
1. Copy your unique referral link.👇
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3. Watch the rewards roll in.
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Ambassador Rewards and Progress → |
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💡 Dose of Knowledge Answer
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B) Rhubarb
When rhubarb plants undergo the method of “forcing” - being moved into a heated shed in the winter with no sunlight - all of the plant’s energy from the summer sunlight stored in its roots is concentrated on making the stalk larger, rather than making leaves.
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This “forcing,” which is commonly done in England, is so successful that you can actually hear the rhubarb plants growing within the sheds.
Listen here.
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