LOS ANGELES, CA – MAY 06: Jonathan Van Ness attends the Netflix FYSee Kick Off Party at Raleigh Studios on May 6, 2018 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Vivien Killilea/Getty Images for Netflix)
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Jonathan Van Ness is sharing his thoughts on the U.S. government’s “botched response” to the monkeypox outbreak.
In a pointed TIME essay published on Monday, the 35-year-old Queer Eye star recalled the moment the nation reported its first official case in May, calling out the government’s reaction.
“Watching the government’s botched response to monkeypox has been surreal, and in many ways, I believe it’s been fueled by homophobia and transphobia,” he said, adding, “When an outbreak affects mainly men who have sex with men, some portion of our elected legislators will have no incentive to act. He thinks it will not touch their constituents, which is obviously messed up because people’s lives are at stake, and there are queer people in all 50 states.”
The reality of the virus hit home for Van Ness when a friend was forced to cancel a trip to New Orleans, where Van Ness is taping Queer Eye, after being exposed to monkeypox.
“I started calling all the political contacts I have, ringing alarm bells about how quickly cases were rising, and pleading with officials to take the virus more seriously.”
RELATED: Monkeypox ‘Not a Sexually Transmitted Infection’ but CDC Warns of Rashes in Genital Area
Likening the government’s reaction to monkeypox to that of the deadly slow response by authorities to the AIDS epidemic, Van Ness said he is “disappointed” in politicians who were in office then and now “like President [Joe] Biden and Speaker [Nancy] Pelosi.”
“Once again, we’re seeing too little action taken until the situation has ballooned out of control. If nothing changes, we’ll continue to experience failures like this response, which has been plagued with too few tests, lack of access to treatments, inadequate vaccine supply, and ambiguous guidance,” he said.
RELATED: Woman with ‘Extremely Painful’ Monkeypox Says She Wasn’t Offered Vaccine or Antiviral Treatments
Van Ness then called out officials for not taking “more proactive steps” to release an easily accessible vaccine after cases “began rising in June.”
“Why is it that we haven’t seen this administration prioritize the rapid procurement of monkeypox vaccines?’ he asked pointing to how, like at the start of the AIDS epidemic, many seem to be considering –– and dismissing –– the virus as something just impacting the LGBTQ+ community.
RELATED VIDEO: Illinois Daycare Worker Tests Positive for Monkeypox, Children Potentially Exposed
The star noted that monkeypox being declared a public health emergency “was a step in the right direction — but it was a day late and a dollar short” before sharing a joke he often tells during his stand-up shows.
“It’s been so funny watching straight people be shocked with the government response during COVID-19, because we’re like, ‘Honey, this is Tuesday,” Van Ness, who discovered he was HIV positive 10 years ago, said. “You thought the government was going to come help you?’ We’re used to this sort of inaction. Monkeypox is like: same day, different virus.”
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Added the star: “I think that tragedy, hope, despair, and resilience all can live next door to each other. But we need to act.”
Stating that “everyone should care about monkeypox” even if they aren’t directly impacted by it, “because we should care about each other,” Van Ness left fans with a reminder that other diseases, such as HIV, still exist, along with the stereotypes around them and the limits to proper health care.
“This isn’t just a monkeypox story. This is a story of how we consistently fail people on the margins. We have to become bold about what we’re willing to witness—and no one should have been willing to witness this outbreak spread for the last two months,” he wrote.”
Monkeypox arrived in the U.S. in May, and it appears as though, despite the last two years of dealing with an epidemic that pretty much shut down the entire country, federal agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) are still falling on their faces in response.
In the two months since the first case of monkeypox was discovered, the U.S. has seen at least 800 more people infected, and that’s likely an undercount due to lack of testing.
Monkeypox is a viral disease spread primarily among humans by close skin-to-skin contact or exchange of bodily fluids. (This includes sex, but to be clear, it’s not just a sexually-transmitted disease.) It starts with symptoms similar to the flu, leading to painful rashes and lesions that can last for weeks. Fortunately, it’s typically not fatal, and there have been no U.S. deaths reported. The virus originated in Africa and spread once to the U.S. in 2003. This latest outbreak spread to Europe and then to the U.S.
The U.S. knows how to treat monkeypox. We have vaccines to prevent it, approved by the FDA in 2019. And yet, here we are watching a virus spread because apparently, the government is unable to effectively operate a program to respond in a timely fashion to an emergency.
NPR reports that the reason the infection rate is likely undercounted is that the CDC was not prepared to roll out testing and vaccinations, even though we’ve known it was coming for some time.
But it gets worse. We have many of the vaccinations we need to stop the spread. We have more than 1 million doses of vaccines sitting in a warehouse in Denmark. Why are they still there after the virus arrived in the U.S. two months ago? Tiresome and now-familiar red tape from the FDA.
New York magazine reports that we’ve gotten 300,000 doses of the drug, Jynneos, from the manufacturer, Bavarian Nordic. Those doses came from facilities in Denmark that had been inspected by the FDA. But then Bavarian Nordic opened a new facility and started stockpiling vaccinations there. In order for those drugs to be shipped to the U.S., the FDA must inspect the facility first. It had not. The company had planned to apply for an inspection in August. Given the situation, they’ve moved up the inspection to the start of July. It’s actually happening right now while the virus spreads across the United States. Only then will those drugs be allowed to be distributed here.
And it gets even dumber. The facility has been inspected by the European Medicines Agency, which determined that is in compliance with both Europe and U.S. standards. But the FDA will not recognize the E.U.’s inspections and insists on its own before allowing the vaccines to be shipped here. An FDA spokesperson told New York magazine that this delay will not affect the availability of the vaccine.
That claim seems not entirely credible, given that New York magazine’s piece opens with an injection of reality: In New York City, clinics ran out of vaccination doses almost immediately when offering them in June. People couldn’t get shots, and the result was that infections spread around via close contact among gay men during Pride festivities.
But to be clear, while monkeypox may be centered in major cities and among gay men, cases have spread across the whole country and have been found in nearly every state and even Puerto Rico. Given the undercounting and lack of testing, it’s probably all over the U.S. by now.
The lack of apparent real urgency by the FDA has been noticed. From New York magazine:
“My impression is that there is very little coordination and leadership across the U.S. government about what’s going on here,” says a former senior U.S. official who has been in touch with the White House over the past few weeks about the monkeypox response. “It feels to me like there’s nobody in charge of this. Who is driving this forward?”
The whole affair seems not unlike what happened with the baby formula crisis, where even as the U.S. was hit with a shortage, FDA regulations made it next to impossible to import perfectly safe formula from Europe. In this case, the culprit is not protectionist policies and tariffs designed to favor U.S. manufacturers. Nevertheless, even in an obvious crisis, the FDA can’t move quickly enough to stop an epidemic that we already have the drugs to prevent.
A leaked trove of confidential files has revealed the inside story of how the tech giant Uber flouted laws, duped police, exploited violence against drivers and secretly lobbied governments during its aggressive global expansion.
The unprecedented leak to the Guardian of more than 124,000 documents – known as the Uber files – lays bare the ethically questionable practices that fuelled the company’s transformation into one of Silicon Valley’s most famous exports.
The leak spans a five-year period when Uber was run by its co-founder Travis Kalanick, who tried to introduce the cab-hailing service into cities around the world by brute force, even if that meant breaching laws and taxi regulations.
During the fierce global backlash, the data shows how Uber tried to shore up support by discreetly courting prime ministers, presidents, billionaires, oligarchs and media barons.
French taxi drivers protesting against private hire services such as Uber. Photograph: Olivier Coret/Rex/Shutterstock
Leaked messages suggest Uber executives were at the same time under no illusions about the company’s law-breaking, with one executive joking they had become “pirates” and another conceding: “We’re just fucking illegal.”
The cache of files, which span 2013 to 2017, includes more than 83,000 emails, iMessages and WhatsApp messages, including often frank and unvarnished communications between Kalanick and his top team of executives.
The Uber files is a global investigation based on a trove of 124,000 documents that were leaked to the Guardian. The data consist of emails, iMessages and WhatsApp exchanges between the Silicon Valley giant’s most senior executives, as well as memos, presentations, notebooks, briefing papers and invoices.
The leaked records cover 40 countries and span 2013 to 2017, the period in which Uber was aggressively expanding across the world. They reveal how the company broke the law, duped police and regulators, exploited violence against drivers and secretly lobbied governments across the world.
To facilitate a global investigation in the public interest, the Guardian shared the data with 180 journalists in 29 countries via the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ). The investigation was managed and led by the Guardian with the ICIJ.
In a statement, Uber said: “We have not and will not make excuses for past behaviour that is clearly not in line with our present values. Instead, we ask the public to judge us by what we’ve done over the last five years and what we will do in the years to come.”
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What are the Uber files?
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The Uber files is a global investigation based on a trove of 124,000 documents that were leaked to the Guardian. The data consist of emails, iMessages and WhatsApp exchanges between the Silicon Valley giant’s most senior executives, as well as memos, presentations, notebooks, briefing papers and invoices.
The leaked records cover 40 countries and span 2013 to 2017, the period in which Uber was aggressively expanding across the world. They reveal how the company broke the law, duped police and regulators, exploited violence against drivers and secretly lobbied governments across the world.
To facilitate a global investigation in the public interest, the Guardian shared the data with 180 journalists in 29 countries via the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ). The investigation was managed and led by the Guardian with the ICIJ.
In a statement, Uber said: “We have not and will not make excuses for past behaviour that is clearly not in line with our present values. Instead, we ask the public to judge us by what we’ve done over the last five years and what we will do in the years to come.”
In one exchange, Kalanick dismissed concerns from other executives that sending Uber drivers to a protest in France put them at risk of violence from angry opponents in the taxi industry. “I think it’s worth it,” he shot back. “Violence guarantee[s] success.”
In a statement, Kalanick’s spokesperson said he “never suggested that Uber should take advantage of violence at the expense of driver safety” and any suggestion he was involved in such activity would be completely false.
The leak also contains texts between Kalanick and Emmanuel Macron, who secretly helped the company in France when he was economy minister, allowing Uber frequent and direct access to him and his staff.
Macron, the French president, appears to have gone to extraordinary lengths to help Uber, even telling the company he had brokered a secret “deal” with its opponents in the French cabinet.
Privately, Uber executives expressed barely disguised disdain for other elected officials who were who were less receptive to the company’s business model.
After the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, who was mayor of Hamburg at the time, pushed back against Uber lobbyists and insisted on paying drivers a minimum wage, an executive told colleagues he was “a real comedian”.
When the then US vice-president, Joe Biden, a supporter of Uber at the time, was late to a meeting with the company at the World Economic Forum at Davos, Kalanick texted a colleague: “I’ve had my people let him know that every minute late he is, is one less minute he will have with me.”
Travis Kalanick
At the intercontinental waiting for Biden
11.37am
… Who is late
11.38am
I’ve had my people let him know that every minute late he is, is one less minute he will have with me
11.38am
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After meeting Kalanick, Biden appears to have amended his prepared speech at Davos to refer to a CEO whose company would give millions of workers “freedom to work as many hours as they wish, manage their own lives as they wish”.
The Guardian led a global investigation into the leaked Uber files, sharing the data with media organisations around the world via the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ). More than 180 journalists at 40 media outlets including Le Monde, Washington Post and the BBC will in the coming days publish a series of investigative reports about the tech giant.
In a statement responding to the leak, Uber admitted to “mistakes and missteps”, but said it had been transformed since 2017 under the leadership of its current chief executive, Dara Khosrowshahi.
“We have not and will not make excuses for past behaviour that is clearly not in line with our present values,” it said. “Instead, we ask the public to judge us by what we’ve done over the last five years and what we will do in the years to come.”
Kalanick’s spokesperson said Uber’s expansion initiatives were “led by over a hundred leaders in dozens of countries around the world and at all times under the direct oversight and with the full approval of Uber’s robust legal, policy and compliance groups”.
‘Embrace the chaos’
The leaked documents pull back the curtains on the methods Uber used to lay the foundations for its empire. One of the world’s largest work platforms, Uber is now a $43bn (£36bn) company, making approximately 19m journeys a day.
The files cover Uber’s operations across 40 countries during a period in which the company became a global behemoth, bulldozing its cab-hailing service into many of the cities in which it still operates today.
An Uber car in Moscow. Photograph: Fifg/Alamy
From Moscow to Johannesburg, bankrolled with unprecedented venture capital funding, Uber heavily subsidised journeys, seducing drivers and passengers on to the app with incentives and pricing models that would not be sustainable.
Uber undercut established taxi and cab markets and put pressure on governments to rewrite laws to help pave the way for an app-based, gig-economy model of work that has since proliferated across the world.
In a bid to quell the fierce backlash against the company and win changes to taxi and labour laws, Uber planned to spend an extraordinary $90m in 2016 on lobbying and public relations, one document suggests.
Its strategy often involved going over the heads of city mayors and transport authorities and straight to the seat of power.
In addition to meeting Biden at Davos, Uber executives met face-to-face with Macron, the Irish prime minister, Enda Kenny, the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and George Osborne, the UK’s chancellor at the time. A note from the meeting portrayed Osborne as a “strong advocate”.
In a statement, Osborne said it was the explicit policy of the government at the time to meet with global tech firms and “persuade them to invest in Britain, and create jobs here”.
While the Davos sitdown with Osborne was declared, the data reveals that six UK Tory cabinet ministers had meetings with Uber that were not disclosed. It is unclear if the meetings should have been declared, exposing confusion around how UK lobbying rules are applied.
Taxis block Whitehall during a protest against a decision to grant Uber a licence to operate in London in 2016. Photograph: Andy Rain/EPA
The documents indicate Uber was adept at finding unofficial routes to power, applying influence through friends or intermediaries, or seeking out encounters with politicians at which aides and officials were not present.
It enlisted the backing of powerful figures in places such as Russia, Italy and Germany by offering them prized financial stakes in the startup and turning them into “strategic investors”.
And in a bid to shape policy debates, it paid prominent academics hundreds of thousands of dollars to produce research that supported the company’s claims about the benefits of its economic model.
Despite a well-financed and dogged lobbying operation, Uber’s efforts had mixed results. In some places Uber succeeded in persuading governments to rewrite laws, with lasting effects. But elsewhere, the company found itself blocked by entrenched taxi industries, outgunned by local cab-hailing rivals or opposed by leftwing politicians who simply refused to budge.
A demonstrator holds a flare during a Paris protest against Uber. Photograph: François Mori/AP
When faced with opposition, Uber sought to turn it to its advantage, seizing upon it to fuel the narrative its technology was disrupting antiquated transport systems, and urging governments to reform their laws.
As Uber launched across India, Kalanick’s top executive in Asia urged managers to focus on driving growth, even when “fires start to burn”. “Know this is a normal part of Uber’s business,” he said. “Embrace the chaos. It means you’re doing something meaningful.”
Kalanick appeared to put that ethos into practice in January 2016, when Uber’s attempts to upend markets in Europe led to angry protests in Belgium, Spain, Italy and France from taxi drivers who feared for their livelihoods.
Amid taxi strikes and riots in Paris, Kalanick ordered French executives to retaliate by encouraging Uber drivers to stage a counter-protest with mass civil disobedience.
Warned that doing so risked putting Uber drivers at risk of attacks from “extreme right thugs” who had infiltrated the taxi protests and were “spoiling for a fight”, Kalanick appeared to urge his team to press ahead regardless. “I think it’s worth it,” he said. “Violence guarantee[s] success. And these guys must be resisted, no? Agreed that right place and time must be thought out.”
The decision to send Uber drivers into potentially volatile protests, despite the risks, was consistent with what one senior former executive told the Guardian was a strategy of “weaponising” drivers, and exploiting violence against them to “keep the controversy burning”.
It was a playbook that, leaked emails suggest, was repeated in Italy, Belgium, Spain, Switzerland and the Netherlands.
When masked men, reported to be angry taxi drivers, turned on Uber drivers with knuckle-dusters and a hammer in Amsterdam in March 2015, Uber staffers sought to turn it to their advantage to win concessions from the Dutch government.
Driver victims were encouraged to file police reports, which were shared with De Telegraaf, the leading Dutch daily newspaper. They “will be published without our fingerprint on the front page tomorrow”, one manager wrote. “We keep the violence narrative going for a few days, before we offer the solution.”
Kalanick’s spokesperson questioned the authenticity of some documents. She said Kalanick “never suggested that Uber should take advantage of violence at the expense of driver safety” and any suggestion that he was involved in such activity would be “completely false”.
Uber’s spokesperson also acknowledged past mistakes in the company’s treatment of drivers but said no one, including Kalanick, wanted violence against Uber drivers. “There is much our former CEO said nearly a decade ago that we would certainly not condone today,” she said. “But one thing we do know and feel strongly about is that no one at Uber has ever been happy about violence against a driver.”
The ‘kill switch’
Uber drivers were undoubtedly the target of vicious assaults and sometimes murders by furious taxi drivers. And the cab-hailing app, in some countries, found itself battling entrenched and monopolised taxi fleets with cosy relationships with city authorities. Uber often characterised its opponents in the regulated taxi markets as operating a “cartel”.
However, privately, Uber executives and staffers appear to have been in little doubt about the often rogue nature of their own operation.
In internal emails, staff referred to Uber’s “other than legal status”, or other forms of active non-compliance with regulations, in countries including Turkey, South Africa, Spain, the Czech Republic, Sweden, France, Germany, and Russia.
One senior executive wrote in an email: “We are not legal in many countries, we should avoid making antagonistic statements.” Commenting on the tactics the company was prepared to deploy to “avoid enforcement”, another executive wrote: “We have officially become pirates.”
Nairi Hourdajian, Uber’s head of global communications, put it even more bluntly in a message to a colleague in 2014, amid efforts to shut the company down in Thailand and India: “Sometimes we have problems because, well, we’re just fucking illegal.” Contacted by the Guardian, Hourdajian declined to comment.
Kalanick’s spokesperson accused reporters of “pressing its false agenda” that he had “directed illegal or improper conduct”.
Uber’s spokesperson said that, when it started, “ridesharing regulations did not exist anywhere in the world” and transport laws were outdated for a smartphone era.
Across the world, police, transport officials and regulatory agencies sought to clamp down on Uber. In some cities, officials downloaded the app and hailed rides so they could crack down on unlicensed taxi journeys, finding Uber drivers and impounding their cars. Uber offices in dozens of countries were repeatedly raided by authorities.
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Against this backdrop, Uber developed sophisticated methods to thwart law enforcement. One was known internally at Uber as a “kill switch”. When an Uber office was raided, executives at the company frantically sent out instructions to IT staff to cut off access to the company’s main data systems, preventing authorities from gathering evidence.
The leaked files suggest the technique, signed off by Uber’s lawyers, was deployed at least 12 times during raids in France, the Netherlands, Belgium, India, Hungary and Romania.
Travis Kalanick speaking to students in Mumbai in 2016. Photograph: Danish Siddiqui/Reuters
Kalanick’s spokesperson said such “kill switch” protocols were common business practice and not designed to obstruct justice. She said the protocols, which did not delete data, were vetted and approved by Uber’s legal department, and the former Uber CEO was never charged in relation to obstruction of justice or a relate offence.
Uber’s spokesperson said its kill switch software “should never have been used to thwart legitimate regulatory action” and it had stopped using the system in 2017, when Khosrowshahi replaced Kalanick as CEO.
Another executive the leaked files suggest was involved in kill switch protocols was Pierre-Dimitri Gore-Coty, who ran Uber’s operations in western Europe. He now runs Uber Eats, and sits on the company’s 11-strong executive team.
Gore-Coty said in a statement he regretted “some of the tactics used to get regulatory reform for ridesharing in the early days”. Looking back, he said: “I was young and inexperienced and too often took direction from superiors with questionable ethics.”
Get in touch
Politicians now also face questions about whether they took direction from Uber executives.
When a French police official in 2015 appeared to ban one of Uber’s services in Marseille, Mark MacGann, Uber’s chief lobbyist in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, turned to Uber’s ally in the French cabinet.
“I will look at this personally,” Macron texted back. “At this point, let’s stay calm.”
Uber files reporting: Harry Davies, Simon Goodley, Felicity Lawrence, Paul Lewis, Lisa O’Carroll, John Collingridge, Johana Bhuiyan, Sam Cutler, Rob Davies, Stephanie Kirchgaessner, Jennifer Rankin, Jon Henley, Rowena Mason, Andrew Roth, Pamela Duncan, Dan Milmo, Mike Safi, David Pegg and Ben Butler.
A section of skin tissue, harvested from a lesion on the skin of a monkey, that had been infected with monkeypox virus, is seen at 50X magnification on day four of rash development in 1968. CDC/Handout via REUTERS
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GENEVA, May 28 (Reuters) – Some prominent infectious disease experts are pushing for faster action from global health authorities to contain a growing monkeypox outbreak that has spread to at least 20 countries.
They are arguing that governments and the World Health Organization should not repeat the early missteps of the COVID-19 pandemic that delayed the detection of cases, helping the virus spread.
While monkeypox is not as transmissible or dangerous as COVID, these scientists say, there needs to be clearer guidance on how a person infected with monkeypox should isolate, more explicit advice on how to protect people who are at risk, and improved testing and contact tracing.
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“If this becomes endemic (in more countries), we will have another nasty disease and many difficult decisions to take,” said Isabelle Eckerle, a professor at the Geneva Centre for Emerging Viral Diseases in Switzerland.
The WHO is considering whether the outbreak should be assessed as a potential public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC), an official told Reuters. A WHO determination that an outbreak constitutes a global health emergency – as it did with COVID or Ebola – would help accelerate research and funding to contain a disease.
“It is always under consideration, but no emergency committee as yet (on monkeypox),” Mike Ryan, director of the WHO’s health emergencies programme, said on the sidelines of the agency’s annual meeting in Geneva.
However, experts say it is unlikely the WHO would reach such a conclusion soon, because monkeypox is a known threat the world has tools to fight. Discussing whether to set up an emergency committee, the body that recommends declaring a PHEIC, is just part of the agency’s routine response, WHO officials said.
Eckerle called for the WHO to encourage countries to put more coordinated and stringent isolation measures in place even without an emergency declaration. She worries that talk of the virus being mild, as well as the availability of vaccines and treatments in some countries, “potentially leads to lazy behaviour from public health authorities.”
NOT THE SAME AS COVID
More than 300 suspected and confirmed cases of monkeypox, a usually mild illness that spreads through close contact, causing flu-like symptoms and a distinctive rash, have been reported this month.
Most have been in Europe rather than in the Central and West African countries where the virus is endemic. No deaths have been reported in the current outbreak.
However, global health officials have expressed alarm over the growing outbreak in non-endemic countries. The WHO has said it expects numbers to rise as surveillance increases.
Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada, wrote on Twitter that monkeypox was different to SARS-CoV-2, the novel coronavirus, but “we are making some of the same mistakes with regard to responding decisively with the tools at hand.”
On Friday, the WHO reiterated that the monkeypox virus is containable with measures including the quick detection and isolation of cases and contact tracing. read more
People who are infected – and in some cases their close contacts – are advised to isolate for 21 days, but it is not clear to what extent people would adhere to such a long time away from work or other commitments. The lab capacity to test for monkeypox is also not yet widely established, said Eckerle, meaning rapid diagnosis can be difficult.
Mass vaccination is not considered necessary but some countries, including Britain and France, are offering vaccines to healthcare workers and close contacts. read more
Other experts say the current response is proportionate and that deeming monkeypox a global health emergency and declaring a PHEIC would be inappropriate at this stage.
“This is reserved for threats with the highest level of risk based on infectivity, severity and international risk of escalation,” said Dale Fisher, chair of the Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network (GOARN) and a professor of medicine in Singapore.
Beyond labels, experts said the most important lesson of the last two years is that preventing pandemics once they have started spreading is too late.
“It is always disappointing when the world wakes up to a new disease only when it hits high-income countries,” said Piero Olliaro, a professor of poverty-related infectious diseases at Oxford University and monkeypox expert.
To prepare for pandemics, “you have to do that where the diseases are now,” he said.
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Reporting by Jennifer Rigby; Aditional reporting by Emma Farge; Editing by Josephine Mason, Michele Gershberg and Daniel Wallis
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
Billionaire Ray Dalio, the founder of the world’s largest hedge fund, Bridgewater Associates, has shared his view on cryptocurrency investing and the future of money. He believes that crypto will be banned by different governments.
Ray Dalio on the Future of Money and Crypto
Bridgewater Associates founder Ray Dalio discussed cryptocurrency regulation and the future of money in an interview with David Rubenstein Thursday.
Dalio currently serves as the Bridgewater Associates chairman and cochief investment officer. His firm’s clients include endowments, governments, foundations, pensions, and sovereign wealth funds.
He was asked, “How do you foresee crypto impacting the world order?” The Bridgewater chairman replied, “I think it’s interesting,” disclosing that he has “a tiny percentage” of his portfolio in crypto.
He explained: “I wanted to diversify but it’s a very vulnerable incident because they can track who is operating on it. It can be tracked.” He added:
It’ll be outlawed, probably by different governments.
In addition, Dalio opined: “In terms of its size, it has issues. So I think too much attention is spent on crypto.”
This was not the first time that the Bridgewater boss warned about governments outlawing cryptocurrencies. In January, he explained that the government outlawed gold and silver in the past, so they could similarly outlaw bitcoin. In September, he said governments could kill bitcoin if it becomes “really successful.”
Dalio further shared with Rubenstein:
I think that we are now in an era where we are going to have different types of money.
“We are going to question money as a medium of exchange but it’s also storehold of wealth,” the billionaire noted. “And we are going to be questioning what are the right storeholds of wealth in value.”
He concluded: “And, you are going to see around the world … the digital version of that take place in many forms … [and] You are going to see other forms of that competition … in the years ahead.”
What do you think about Ray Dalio’s comments? Let us know in the comments section below.
Kevin Helms
A student of Austrian Economics, Kevin found Bitcoin in 2011 and has been an evangelist ever since. His interests lie in Bitcoin security, open-source systems, network effects and the intersection between economics and cryptography.
Image Credits: Shutterstock, Pixabay, Wiki Commons
Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only. It is not a direct offer or solicitation of an offer to buy or sell, or a recommendation or endorsement of any products, services, or companies. Bitcoin.com does not provide investment, tax, legal, or accounting advice. Neither the company nor the author is responsible, directly or indirectly, for any damage or loss caused or alleged to be caused by or in connection with the use of or reliance on any content, goods or services mentioned in this article.
Protesters stormed public buildings in Kazakhstan’s biggest city on Wednesday as security forces struggled to impose control after the government resigned in response to popular anger over a fuel price increase.
An Instagram live stream by a Kazakh blogger showed a fire blazing in the mayor’s office in the city of Almaty, with gunshots audible nearby. Videos posted online also showed the nearby prosecutor’s office burning.
Smoke rises from the city hall building during a protest in Kazakhstan’s capital Almaty, on Wednesday. Yan Blagov / AP
Protesters appeared to have broken through security forces’ cordons even though the latter deployed stun grenades whose explosions could be heard throughout the city centre.
Kazakhstan is a tightly controlled former Soviet republic which cultivates an image of political stability, helping it attract hundreds of billions of dollars of foreign investment in its oil and metals industries.
President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev accepted the government’s resignation on Wednesday, a day after police used tear gas and stun grenades to drive hundreds of protesters out of the main square in Almaty.
Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev ordered the reinstatement of price controls on liquefied petroleum gas, a popular car fuel.Yevgeny Biyatov / AP
On Wednesday a Reuters correspondent saw thousands of protesters pressing ahead towards Almaty city centre, some of them on a large truck, after security forces failed to disperse them with tear gas and flashbang grenades.
Atameken, Kazakhstan’s business lobby group, said its members were reporting cases of attacks on banks, stores and restaurants.
The city health department said 190 people had sought medical help, including 137 police. City authorities urged residents to stay home.
The interior ministry said that government buildings were also attacked in the southern cities of Shymkent and Taraz overnight, with 95 police wounded in clashes. Police have detained more than 200 people.
A video posted online showed police using a water cannon and stun grenades against protesters in front of the mayor’s office in Aktobe, the capital of another western province.
A burned car near the mayor’s office in Almaty, Kazakhstan, on Wednesday. Reuters
Costlier fuel
The protests began after the government lifted price controls on liquefied petroleum gas at the start of the year. Many Kazakhs have converted their cars to run on LPG because of its low cost.
The government said the regulated price was causing losses for producers and needed to be liberalised. The president said it had botched the move.
Speaking to acting cabinet members, Tokayev ordered them and provincial governors to reinstate price controls on LPG, and broaden them to gasoline, diesel and other “socially important” consumer goods.
He also ordered the government to develop a personal bankruptcy law and consider freezing utility prices and subsidising rent payments for poor families.
He said the situation was improving in protest-hit cities and towns, including Almaty and the surrounding province, where the authorities declared a state of emergency.
In addition to replacing the prime minister, Tokayev also appointed a new first deputy head of the National Security Committee who replaced Samat Abish, a nephew of powerful ex-president Nursultan Nazarbayev.
Police officers detain a demonstrator in Almaty on Wednesday.Vladimir Tretyakov / AP
Nazarbayev, 81, a Soviet-era Communist Party boss, ran Kazakhstan for almost 30 years before resigning abruptly in 2019 and backing Tokayev as successor. Nazarbayev retains sweeping powers as the chairman of the security council; he has not convened the council or commented on this week’s violence.
The protests began in the oil-producing western province of Mangistau on Sunday, after LPG prices more than doubled following the lifting of caps.
A source familiar with the situation said some workers at Mangistaumunaigas, a Kazakh-Chinese oil-producing joint venture based in the Mangistau province, were on strike, although this was not affecting output so far.
Tokayev declared the emergency in Almaty and Mangistau and has said that domestic and foreign provocateurs were behind the violence.
Almaty mayor Bakytzhan Sagintayev said the situation in the city was under control and security forces were detaining “provocateurs and extremists”.
A law enforcement officer stands guard during a protest in Almaty, Kazakhstan, on Wednesday.Pavel Mikheyev / Reuters
Kazakhstan’s dollar-denominated sovereign bonds suffered sharp falls with the 2045 issue falling around 3 cents in the dollar and many dropping to levels last seen in 2020, Tradeweb data showed.
Like many emerging and developing economies, Kazakhstan has grappled with rising price pressures in recent years. Inflation was closing in on 9 percent year-on-year late last year — its highest level in more than five years — forcing the central bank to raise interest rates to 9.75 percent.
Some analysts said the protests — the most serious in the country in at least a decade — pointed to more deep rooted issues.
“I think there is an underlying undercurrent of frustrations in Kazakhstan over the lack of democracy,” said Tim Ash, emerging market strategist at BlueBay Asset Management.
“Young, internet savvy Kazakhs, especially in Almaty, likely want similar freedoms as Ukrainians, Georgians, Moldovans, Kyrgyz, and Armenians, who have also vented their frustrations over the years with authoritarian regimes.”
The 16 governments, including France, the United Kingdom, Italy and Germany, said they were aware of “the involvement of the Russian Federation government in providing material support to the deployment of the Wagner group in Mali and call on Russia to revert to a responsible and constructive behavior in the region.”
The Wagner group, a notorious Russian paramilitary company, and associated military contractors have been previously deployed to eastern Ukraine, Syria, Libya, Mozambique and the Central African Republic, according to multiple CNN investigations.
Earlier this week, flight-tracking data showed a Russian Air Force Tu-154 flying to the Malian capital, Bamako, from Benghazi in Libya, where Wagner has had a presence in support of forces led by Khalifa Haftar, a renegade general who leads the self-styled Libyan National Army.
The aircraft belonged to the Russian Air Force 223rd Flight. The Russian Defense Ministry had previously signed a contract, details of which were seen by CNN, with a company owned by Yevgeny Prigozhin for the use of transport aircraft of the 223rd Flight. Prigozhin, an oligarch so close to the Kremlin that he is known as President Vladimir Putin’s “chef,” is thought to be the driving force behind the Wagner group.
The European states said the deployment to Mali “can only further deteriorate the security situation in West Africa.
CNN reported earlier this year on human rights abuses, including arbitrary killings and torture of civilians, by Russian mercenaries in Central African Republic.
Last week, the European Union imposed sanctions against Wagner; eight individuals associated with the group; and three entities connected to it because of what it called “serious human rights abuses, including torture and extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions and killings.”
Mali has faced a long-running jihadi insurgency which has killed thousands of civilians. A UN peacekeeping mission, MINUSMA, has been unable to quell the violence, which has cost the lives of more than 150 of its soldiers.
GLASGOW—More than 190 nations reached a deal at the United Nations summit here that aims to accelerate greenhouse-gas-emissions cuts across the world, but leaves big questions over how governments will follow through in the coming decade to try to avert the worst effects of global warming.
Supporters say the deal—struck Saturday evening after two weeks of negotiations—signals new determination among the world’s governments to shift away from burning fossil fuels, the main source of greenhouse gases that scientists say are causing the earth to warm. The agreement, though, features weaknesses that have hamstrung U.N. climate talks over the decades.
Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak sees bitcoin as mathematical purity, praising its fixed supply. However, he said that governments will never allow it to be out of their control. “If it got to the point where everything is being done in crypto and didn’t pass through governments for observation and taxation and all that, governments would just disallow it,” said the Apple co-founder.
Steve Wozniak Says Governments Will Never Allow Crypto to Be Out of Their Control
Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak talked about cryptocurrency in an interview with Yahoo Finance Friday. He was asked, “Are you a believer in crypto?”
The Apple co-founder replied: “Crypto has an awful lot of promise through the blockchain of different things it can do differently than before in life, right down to elections even. It has a very trustable format that can’t be modified easily with humans in control of it.”
He elaborated, “Look at our U.S. dollars, the government can just create new dollars, and borrow, and borrow.” In contrast, he noted that bitcoin has a fixed supply, emphasizing:
Bitcoin is mathematics, mathematical purity. There can never be another bitcoin created.
“Bitcoin doesn’t even have a creator that we know of. Bitcoin isn’t run by some companies. It’s just mathematical pure. And I believe nature over humans always,” he further described, noting that nature “really doesn’t change much.”
Wozniak was further asked if he believes that crypto will change how we do business.
“Yes, I am in that camp that crypto will be used effectively. We just have so many digital ways to pay for things now, even just to transfer money to people. It goes way back to Paypal, and now we have Apple Pay and Apple Cash. We have Venmo. So we already have other modes than crypto,” he replied.
However, the Apple co-founder opined: “Crypto just has a little bit of anonymity. I don’t know if that’s right that, ‘oh gosh I can do things without people knowing.’ I think that everything that you do in life you should be able to stand up and say, ‘Well this is me doing this transaction.’ And [with] crypto, it’s hard to trace back to who’s doing what. It’s possible though.”
Wozniak continued, “I love it when people like [Twitter CEO] Jack Dorsey talk about how crypto should be the heart of our business dealings.” However, the Apple co-founder warned:
The trouble is governments will never allow it to be out of their control. If it got to the point where everything is being done in crypto and didn’t pass through governments for observation and taxation and all that, governments would just disallow it. They wouldn’t give up their power.
What do you think about Steve Wozniak’s comments? Let us know in the comments section below.
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After facing a whole lot of criticism, Apple has doubled down and defended its plans to launch controversial new tools aimed at identifying and reporting child sex abuse material (or CSAM) on its platforms.
Last week, the company announced several pending updates, outlining them in a blog post entitled “Expanded Protections for Children.” These new features, which will be rolled out later this year with the release of the iOS 15 and iPadOS 15, are designed to use algorithmic scanning to search for and identify child abuse material on user devices. One tool will scan photos on device that have been shared with iCloud for signs of CSAM, while the other feature will scan iMessages sent to and from child accounts in an effort to stop minors from sharing or receiving messages that include sexually explicit images. We did a more detailed run-down on both features and the concerns about them here.
The company barely had time to announce its plans before it was met with a vociferous outcry from civil liberties organizations, who have characterized the proposed changes as well intentioned but ultimately a slipper slope toward a dangerous erosion of personal privacy.
On Monday, Apple published a response to many of the concerns that have been raised. The company specifically denied that its scanning tools might someday be repurposed to hunt for other kinds of material on users’ phones and computers other than CSAM. Critics have worried that a government (ours or someone else’s) could pressure Apple to add or change the new features—to make them, for instance, a broader tool of law enforcement.
However, in a rare instance of a corporation making a firm promise not to do something, Apple said definitively that it would not be expanding the reach of its scanning capabilities. According to the company:
Apple will refuse any such demands [from a government]. Apple’s CSAM detection capability is built solely to detect known CSAM images stored in iCloud Photos that have been identified by experts at NCMEC and other child safety groups. We have faced demands to build and deploy government-mandated changes that degrade the privacy of users before, and have steadfastly refused those demands. We will continue to refuse them in the future.
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During a follow-up Q&A session with reporters on Monday, Apple further clarified that the features are only being launched in the U.S., as of right now. While some concerns have been raised about whether a foreign government could corrupt or subvert these new tools to employ them as a form of surveillance, Apple said Monday that it would be carefully conducting legal evaluations on a country-by-country basis before it releases the tools abroad, to ensure there is no chance of abuse.
Understandably, this whole thing has confused a lot of people, and there are still questions swirling as to how these features will actually work and what that means for your privacy and device autonomy. Here are a couple of points Apple has recently clarified:
Weirdly, iCloud has to be activated for its CSAM detection feature to actually work. There has been some confusion about this point, but essentially Apple is only searching through content that is shared with its cloud system. Critics have pointed out that this would seem to make it exceedingly easy for abusers to elude the informal dragnet that Apple has set up, as all they would have to do to hide CSAM content on their phone would be to opt out of iCloud. Apple said Monday it still believes the system will be effective.
Apple is not loading a database of child porn onto your phone. Another point that the company was forced to clarify on Monday is that it will not, in fact, be downloading actual CSAM onto your device. Instead, it is using a database of “hashes”—digital fingerprints of specific, known child abuse images, which are represented as numerical code. That code will be loaded into the phone’s operating system, which allows for images uploaded to the cloud to be automatically compared against the hashes in the database. If they aren’t an identical match, however, Apple doesn’t care about them.
iCloud won’t just be scanning new photos—it plans to scan all of the photos currently in its cloud system. In addition to scanning photos that will be uploaded to iCloud in the future, Apple also plans to scan all of the photos currently stored on its cloud servers. During Monday’s call with reporters, Apple reiterated that this was the case.
Apple claims the iMessage update does not share any information with Apple or with law enforcement. According to Apple, the updated feature for iMessage does not share any of your personal information with the company, nor does it alert law enforcement. Instead, it merely alerts a parent if their child has sent or received a texted image that Apple’s algorithm has deemed sexual in nature. “Apple never gains access to communications as a result of this feature in Messages. This feature does not share any information with Apple, NCMEC or law enforcement,” the company said. The feature is only available for accounts that have been set up as families in iCloud, the company says.
Despite assurances, privacy advocates and security experts are still not super unimpressed—and some are more than a little alarmed. In particular, on Monday, well-known security expert Matthew Green posited the following hypothetical scenario—which was contentious enough to inspire a minor Twitter argument between Edward Snowden and ex-Facebook security head Alex Stamos in the reply section:
So, suffice it to say, a lot of people still have questions. We’re all in pretty unknown, messy territory here. While it’s impossible to knock the point of Apple’s mission, the power of the technology that it is deploying has caused alarm, to say the least.
