Coronavirus News (223)

 So You Think New York Is Dead? It's Not. 

Schools Can Reopen, Germany Finds, but Expect a ‘Roller Coaster’ With nations determined to return to in-person learning, many will have trouble matching Germany’s formula: fast and free testing, robust contact tracing and low community spread.   

Can Tesla Maintain Its Momentum? Tesla’s stock has risen nearly tenfold over the past year to current levels of $2,000, making it the most valuable automobile company and Musk the fourth-richest man on the planet. Those gains have come on the back of four consecutive quarters of profits amid a pandemic; meeting delivery targets for cars; expanding manufacturing capacity globally; mastering storage battery technology to lower costs; and advancing the technologies for electric vehicles (EVs) and AVs, the next big promises for automakers............  Tesla has managed to check “all the boxes that analysts or investors or people like me who are observing Tesla have put in front of ourselves,” Kapoor said. “That is a great fairytale as far as Tesla and Elon Musk are concerned.” ..........  Over the next 10 to 15 years, the “vast majority” of the cars will be electric, and many of them will be fully autonomous ...........  unveiled a new electric pickup Cybertruck “that pulled science fiction into reality” ..........  “Tesla needs to play the game of scale,” now that it has earned its technology leadership spurs, especially in battery technology. Scaling up will make it “harder and harder for other players to catch up,” he noted. Chipmaker Intel did the same in the 1970s and 1980s, when it started with a manufacturing base out of California and scaled up with factories and plants across the globe. ............  “Waymo could do what Google did to the smartphone industry, with the launch of the Android and eventually giving an operating system to smartphone manufacturers for free.” ............  “If it can create an autonomous [vehicle] operating system, and it starts giving it to these established automakers, Tesla has a real competition on their hands.” ............  “This would be along the lines of what Microsoft has so successfully done with the transition to cloud or what Nestle did with the transition to premium coffee,” he wrote in the CNN op-ed. “Or will [established firms] continue to hold back and pursue piecemeal strategies that are more reminiscent of what Kodak did with digital photography or Nokia with smartphones?”