Month: November 2020

Enlarge / Headquarters of ride-sharing technology company Uber in the South of Market (SoMa) neighborhood of San Francisco on October 13, 2017. (credit: Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images)

California voters decisively approved a ballot measure Tuesday allowing ride-hail services like Uber and Lyft to treat their drivers as independent contractors, not employees. With 72 percent of the vote counted, Proposition 22 is winning by a 58-percent to 42-percent margin. That's a big enough lead for the Associated Press to project its passage.

Uber's stock rose 14 percent in Wednesday trading. Lyft is up 12 percent.

The measure had heavy financial backing from Uber, Lyft, and other "gig economy" companies that employ large numbers of drivers. They funded both signature gathering and an expensive ad blitz to convince voters to support it.

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  Atlas V on SLC-41 after being scrubbed due to an unexpected system response from remotely commanded ground-system liquid-oxygen valves. [credit: Trevor Mahlmann for Ars ]

Update 6:15pm EST: A ground-systems issue got United Launch Alliance again. Prior to the opening of the Atlas V launch window on Wednesday evening, an issue related to ground-system liquid-oxygen valves could not be solved in time for a launch attempt from Florida.

The company will now stand down for 48 hours to address the issue, which would allow for SpaceX to attempt a launch of a GPS III satellite for the Space Force on Thursday.

Original post 11:25am EST: United Launch Alliance returns to one of its two main pads at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station Wednesday to try to break a string of recent launch scrubs due to various issues, mostly related to ground systems.

Enlarge / Election workers count absentee ballots for the 2020 general election at TCF Center on November 4, 2020 in Detroit, Michigan. (credit: Getty Images | Jeff Kowalsky)

As President Trump falsely claimed that he has won re-election despite the fact that votes are still being counted, Twitter and Facebook took steps to counter Trump's attempts to spread misinformation.

"Once President Trump began making premature claims of victory, we started running notifications on Facebook and Instagram that votes are still being counted and a winner is not projected," Facebook said. "We're also automatically applying labels to both candidates' posts with this information."

Trump gave a speech in which he claimed "we did win this election" and called the continued counting of legally cast votes "a major fraud on our nation." He said he will take the election to the Supreme Court and that "we want all voting to stop."