Month: April 2020

Enlarge / It's unclear where Jeff Gibbs is going in this scene, but that's also true for the film as a whole. (credit: Planet of the Humans)

Let’s say you want to make a documentary about a complex and important topic. You could spend a lot of time on research—developing a complete picture of things, identifying scientists to interview, and figuring out how to give viewers the context necessary to understand the most nuanced issues. Or, you could just go point your camera at stuff until you have an hour and 40 minutes of footage, lay down a voiceover, upload that baby to YouTube, and call it a day.

Planet of the Humans, a documentary made by Jeff Gibbs and Michael Moore, falls into the latter category.

The topic of the film—released on YouTube just before Earth Day to throw shade on what it views as a corporate takeover of the day—is green energy. But if you’re thinking you might learn something about green energy from a film-length treatment of the topic, think again. The basic formula is this: Gibbs reveals that he once thought renewable sources of energy were fairy-dust perfect, with no environmental impact of any kind, but he learns that there is some impact and so declares that they are as-bad or worse than fossil fuels.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty Images)

Since December 2018, the Epic Games Store has maintained an aggressive weekly campaign of free game giveaways. That campaign changes this week, though not with any plans to stop offering freebies.

Instead, Epic has updated the promotion with its first security-minded rule: if you want to claim EGS giveaways going forward, you'll have to turn on two-factor authentication (2FA).

The news appeared on Tuesday at both the EGS official site and as an automatic alert for EGS users on Windows and Mac. It explained that EGS will "periodically" confirm account credentials with a 2FA notice when a user attempts to claim free games between now and May 21. The company's only explanation for the change came as follows: "We understand that this is a minor inconvenience for some, but we want to provide the best possible solutions to protect your Epic account."

Enlarge / Attorney General William Barr speaks as US President Donald Trump listens during a Coronavirus Task Force news conference on Monday, March 23, 2020. (credit: Getty Images | Bloomberg)

The Trump administration is threatening to sue states and municipalities whose pandemic orders infringe on people's rights or cause "undue interference with the national economy."

"I am directing each of our United States Attorneys to also be on the lookout for state and local directives that could be violating the constitutional rights and civil liberties of individual citizens," US Attorney General William Barr wrote yesterday in a memo to all 94 US attorneys' offices. The Barr memo said that "even in times of emergency, when reasonable and temporary restrictions are placed on rights, the First Amendment and federal statutory law prohibit discrimination against religious institutions and religious believers." The memo is available at The Washington Post website.

Barr's memo is not just aimed at protecting members of religious groups. He continued:

Enlarge / We like to imagine Attorney General Barr is telling Hawley, "Just hold that thought, maybe." (credit: Drew Angerer | Getty Images)

Amazon is already facing a bevy of antitrust probes, both in the United States and overseas. Just about every state, federal, and international regulator with any kind of competition regulation power is investigating the company over some aspect of its business. Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), however, wants to add one more to the pile and is calling on the Justice Department to launch a criminal probe.

"Recent reports suggest that Amazon has engaged in predatory and exclusionary data practices to build and maintain a monopoly," Hawley wrote today in a letter (PDF) to Attorney General William Barr. "These practices are alarming for America's small businesses under ordinary circumstances. But at a time when most small retail businesses must rely on Amazon because of coronavirus-related shutdowns, predatory data practices threaten these businesses' very existence."

The recent report to which Hawley refers is last week's Wall Street Journal exposé, which found that Amazon employees accessed third-party merchants' data as a matter of habit in order to launch their own in-house products and undercut the marketplace vendors who rely on Amazon as a platform.

Enlarge (credit: Ars Technica)

Today's Dealmaster is headlined by a bundle of deals on Fitbit activity trackers. The discounts include the Fitbit Inspire HR, down to $70 from a typical street price of around $95; the Fitbit Charge 3, down to $100 from its usual $125; and the Fitbit Versa 2 smartwatch, down to $149 from its usual $200. The Inspire HR and Charge 3 deals in particular are within a dollar of the lowest prices we've tracked on Amazon to date.

We gave the Versa 2 our Ars Approved badge and recommend the Inspire HR and Charge 3 as the top two options in our fitness-tracker buying guide. We'll direct you to those posts for a more complete picture, but in short, we think the Inspire HR is the best value for most people in this market, as it comes with a quality touchscreen, reliable sleep and exercise tracking (insofar as any devices of this type can be accurate), a light and waterproof design, and a solid five-day battery life at a good price. It's a relatively streamlined tracker for those who don't need to go super in-depth.

The Charge 3 adds a slightly bigger screen, more advanced features like an altimeter for tracking stairs climbed, and a seven-day battery life. We still think it's worthwhile, though it's worth noting that Fitbit recently launched a Charge 4 tracker that includes a built-in GPS—the Charge 3 and Inspire HR use the GPS data from a connected smartphone—a new active minutes tracker, and more smartwatch-style features like Spotify controls and support for Fitbit Pay contactless payments. It costs $150.

Enlarge / Economic downturns mean less of this kind of thing. (credit: huggs2 / Flickr)

Debates about the economic cost of lockdown and whether the lives saved are worth the price show no signs of abating. The arguments continue despite near-consensus among high-profile economists that ending lockdowns in the United States right now would result in more economic damage than returning to business as usual.

As Ars has reported, economists at the University of Wyoming have used US federal agency guidelines on how much a human life is worth to establish that, under a range of realistic scenarios, the value of lives saved by lockdown will far exceed the economic hit. And economists at the Federal Reserve and MIT have questioned the assumption that the economic cost of lockdown would in fact be higher than the economic hit that would be caused by allowing the virus to run rampant. Their analysis found that cities that had more aggressive public health responses to the 1918 flu pandemic fared better economically.

But there's another question being asked: won't a recession also cause loss of life? And how would this loss of life compare to the lives saved from COVID-19 by a lockdown?