🌞 Fuzzy Math – August 06 2021

*Stock data as of market close, cryptocurrency data as of 5:00am ET. 

• Markets: The S&P 500 hit a record closing high, with travel and energy stocks lifting the market. Bitcoin surged and Ethereum bounced after it activated a software upgrade known as the “London hard fork.”

Morning Invest Live

MORNING INVEST LIVE

On today's live show: 

New stunning evidence in the Wuhan lab leak theory

When is Trump being reinstated? His followers believe it's sometime in August

And Apple is scanning your photos for child abuse.

Click here to RSVP and start chatting. And I'll see you at 8:30 AM Eastern on our live show.

The Lead: Infrastructure Won't Pay For Its Dinner Bill

credit: getty

The Congressional Budget Office completed its analysis of President Biden’s $1 trillion infrastructure bill and found that it would not “pay for itself” as the White House has been saying. Instead, the bill package would add $256 billion over the next ten years. 

The CBO is a nonpartisan number-crunching outfit. They only analyze the economics of a bill. This information gives the Senate some important things to think about as it continues to hammer out details of amendments and final price tags. 

Not all Senators buy the CBO's analysis so they are moving forward anyway. Some say that they get different math from their own analysis of the bill and their math checks out more favorably for what they want. Interesting. And fuzzy.

The Senate could vote on the package over the weekend. 

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Apple Is Watching For Child Abuse

credit: getty

Apple will now scan photos that are stored on iPhones and in iCloud for child abuse imagery in order to alert law enforcement in criminal investigations, according to a report from the Financial Times. 

The program is called neuralMatch. It was trained using 200,000 images from the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children to recognize what is appropriate and what is not. This is not just your cute toddler in the bath variety of photos. The program will presumably know the difference. 

Well-intentioned or not, privacy experts raised concerns about Apple scanning your photos and handing them off to governments. Apple has notoriously refused to hand over user data to law enforcement in the past. The program will roll out in the United States at first. Google has been doing this with its photo service since 2008.

Climate Change, Jeeves

credit: ap

Catastrophic climate events usually impact the poorest communities the most but this year is different. Climate events are now impacting wealthier people who before were relatively immune. 

The heat dome, the raging forest fires, floods. They are not just wiping out poor disenfranchised neighborhoods. They are impacting the middle and upper class too and climate scientists are trying hard not to say they told us so. 

This is “playing out exactly as we said 20 years ago,” University of Exeter climate scientist Peter Stott told the Associated Press. “What we are seeing in terms of the heat waves and the floods is more extreme than we predicted back then.”  

News By The Numbers

155,000. That is how many outdoor folding chairs were recalled by Dollar General because buyers reported amputated fingers when operating them. 

$1 million. That is how much money a woman won when she bought a lottery ticket to pass the time when her flight was canceled. 

14. That is how many South Park movies Paramount ordered. Comedy Central renewed the show through 2027. The deal was expected to be worth $900 million. 

2.4 million. That is how many dehumidifiers are being recalled by 20 different brands because some have caught fire and caused property damage.   

Coffee The Cancer Crusher

credit: ap

A new study links alcohol to an increased risk of cancer but also links coffee to a decreased risk of cancer. 

Alcohol consumption was found to be a “major risk factor” in 11 types of cancers including breast, CRC, esophageal, head and neck and liver cancer. A related study recently found that alcohol had contributed to at least 4% of current cancer diagnoses. 

But coffee! Coffee was linked to decreased risk of cancer. Just one cup of regular or decaf coffee was shown to protect against liver cancer. The study also showed that eating dairy and multigrain foods lowered the risk of colorectal cancers.

It's Electric

credit: giphy

President Biden has set a target for half of U.S. cars to be electric by the year 2030. This comes by way of an executive order. 

The executive order is nonbinding though. Nothing happens if the U.S. does not meet this goal so the signing ceremony in front of an electric Hummer and Ford F-150 was a lot of theater. The car companies have only committed to 40-50% of their fleet turning electric by 2030 and still say that their participation hinges on federal funding. Translation: Sure, we'll do this – with some government money and tax cuts!  

Missing from the event was Tesla, the company that actually makes the most electric vehicles in the world. 

“Yeah, seems odd that Tesla wasn't invited,” Tesla CEO Elon Musk said in a Tweet.

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