What I'm Reading 4/4/2020 - Sleazes Being Sleazy? OR Smart Business People Making the Most of a Situation? You Decide!

NYTimes - How Tech’s Lobbyists Are Using the Pandemic to Make Gains -

Last month, lobbying groups representing advertising giants like Google and Facebook asked California’s attorney general to wait to enforce the state’s new online privacy rules given the coronavirus ripping around the world.

In Washington, lobbyists representing cloud computing giants like Amazon pushed for more money to help federal employees work remotely.

And Uber began reframing a longtime campaign to avoid classifying its drivers as full-time employees through the urgency of a mounting public health crisis.

The coronavirus has created an opportunity for tech companies and their lobbying operations to quietly push for long-held goals in the frantic political and economic environment created by the outbreak.

CNN - How to make your own face mask 

The Verge - Tech supply chains are still a complete mess -

On Friday morning, analysts at S&P’s Panjiva Research laid out a grim picture, with US sea imports from China (which includes most of the electronics you buy) down more than 50 percent in the first three weeks of March, a result of the countrywide lockdown in China. At the same time, the subcontracting companies that actually build the hardware (the most famous is Foxconn, but of course there are a lot of them) are thinking about getting out of China entirely, at least as much as they can. Wistron Corp, which does a lot of work for Apple, boasted last week that it could move as much as half of its business outside Chinese borders within a year.

It’s a huge sea change for tech manufacturing, and while it has been building for a long time, it’s going to be a lot faster and messier because of the pandemic. It also means that, while these companies are scrambling for labor and parts, they’re also going to be scrambling to stand up a whole new set of factories.

NYTimes - Can an Old Vaccine Stop the New Coronavirus? -

The Bacillus Calmette-Guerin vaccine is still widely used in the developing world, where scientists have found that it does more than prevent TB. The vaccine prevents infant deaths from a variety of causes, and sharply reduces the incidence of respiratory infections.

The vaccine seems to “train” the immune system to recognize and respond to a variety of infections, including viruses, bacteria and parasites, experts say. There is little evidence yet that the vaccine will blunt infection with the coronavirus, but a series of clinical trials may answer the question in just months.