Thursday, November 21, 2019

The Organization of American States Has Deceived the Public, Terribly, on the Bolivian Election [feedly]

The Organization of American States Has Deceived the Public, Terribly, on the Bolivian Election
http://cepr.net/publications/op-eds-columns/the-organization-of-american-states-has-deceived-the-public-terribly-on-the-bolivian-election

Mark Weisbrot
MarketWatch, November 19, 2019

See article on original site

What is the difference between an outright lie — stating something as a fact while knowing that it is false — and a deliberate material representation that accomplishes the same end? Here is an example that really pushes the boundary between the two, to the point where the distinction practically vanishes. And the consequences are quite serious; this misrepresentation (or lie) has already played a major role in a military coup in Bolivia last Sunday. This military coup overthrew the government of President Evo Morales before his current term was finished — a term to which nobody disputes that he was democratically elected in 2014. More violent repression and even a civil war could follow.

The Organization of American States (OAS) sent an Electoral Observation Mission to Bolivia, entrusted with monitoring the October 20 national election there. The day after the election, before all the votes were even counted, the mission put out a press release announcing its "deep concern and surprise at the drastic and hard-to-explain change in the trend of the preliminary results…"

Here is what the OAS was referring to: there is an unofficial "quick count" of the voting results that involves contractors who upload results at intervals, as the tally sheets are available. At 7:40 pm on election day, they had reported about 84 percent of the votes and then stopped reporting for 23 hours (more on that below). When they resumed reporting results at 95 percent of votes counted, Morales's lead had increased from 7.9 percent before the interruption to just over 10 percent.

This margin was important because in order to win without a second-round runoff, a candidate needs either an absolute majority, or at least 40 percent plus a 10 point margin over the second place finisher. This margin — which grew to 10.6 percent when all the votes were counted in the official count — reelected Morales without a second round.

Now, if you had any experience with elections or maybe even arithmetic, what is the first thing you would want to know about the votes that came in after the interruption? You might ask, were people in those areas any different from people in the average precinct in the first 84 percent? And was the change in Morales's margin sudden, or was it a gradual trend that continued as more vote tally sheets were reported? You might even want to ask these questions before expressing "deep concern and surprise" about what happened, especially in a politically very polarized situation that was already turning violent.

weisbrot bolivia 2019 11

A look at that data shows that  the change in Morales's lead was actually gradual and continuous, and started rising many hours before the break in reporting of the quick count. You can see that in a graph of the results. Why did it happen? The answer is simple and not that uncommon: the people in later-reporting areas were more pro-MAS (Morales's party, the Movement Toward Socialism) than those in areas that reported earlier. Hence the gradual and continuous rise in Morales's lead, in which the votes after the interruption put him over the top.

The OAS has published two press releases, one preliminary report, and one preliminary audit on the election. How many of these contained the disparagement of the election results implied by the "deep concern and surprise" quoted above? Three. How many contained anything about the difference between the percentage of MAS/Morales voters in areas with later returns versus earlier? Zero.

As it turns out, the interruption in the quick count was not a sign of foul play either. The quick count is separate from the official count, and has no legal status to determine the results. It's never been intended or promised to be a complete count; in prior elections it did not even near 84 percent. It's just a quick series of snapshots, done by contractors, to provide early results before the official count is done. It makes sense that the electoral authorities might not want two sets of voting results, which are inherently different, coming out at the same time in a violently polarized political situation.

For those who like numbers better than graphs: Morales's margin in the first 84 percent of votes was 7.9 percent, as noted. If we look at the remaining 16 percent of precincts, and we ask, what is Morales's pre-interruption margin in the areas where these later-reporting precincts were located? That margin is about 22 percent. Again, a simple explanation of how his margin increased as it did with later returns.

For a more powerful statistical analysis, we can project the remaining (and thus total) vote count on the basis of the first 84 percent reported. And — no surprise here — Morales's projected final margin based on the first 84 percent of votes turns out to be slightly more than 10 percent.

It is difficult, almost impossible, to believe that this OAS mission, or those above them in the OAS Department of Electoral Cooperation and Observation, felt "deep concern and surprise" and yet were too incompetent to even look at this data. That is why I would say that they lied at least three times: in the first press release, the preliminary report, and the preliminary audit. And that is why I would regard with great skepticism the allegations presented in their preliminary audit, and further publications — unless these can be verified by independent investigators from publicly available data.

And the OAS isn't all that independent at the moment, with the Trump administration actively promoting this military coup, and Washington having more right-wing allies in the OAS than they did just a few years ago. Not to mention that the US supplies 60 percent of its budget. But the OAS has horribly abused its mandate in election monitoring before, helping to reverse election results as the US and its allies wanted: most destructively, in 2000 in Haiti; and also in the same country in 2011.

More evidence: in the last three weeks, the OAS has refused to answer questions from journalists, on the record, about their statements or reports since the election. Maybe they are afraid that a curious reporter would ask questions like these: Is there a difference between the political preferences of people who live in later-reporting areas as compared to earlier ones? Doesn't this explain how Morales's lead rose to more than 10 percent as votes from more pro-Morales areas came in? Did you even look at this question?

Since I am an economist, I believe in incentives: I am offering a $500 reward for the first journalist who can get a substantive answer to these questions from an OAS official, on the record. Even if turns out to be a lie.


Mark Weisbrot is Co-Director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, D.C. He is also the author of "Failed: What the 'Experts' Got Wrong About the Global Economy" (2015, Oxford University Press). You can subscribe to his columns here.


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Wednesday, November 20, 2019

Latina workers have to work nearly 11 months into 2019 to be paid the same as white non-Hispanic men in 2018 [feedly]

Latina workers have to work nearly 11 months into 2019 to be paid the same as white non-Hispanic men in 2018
https://www.epi.org/blog/latina-pay-gap-2019/

November 20 is Latina Equal Pay Day, the day that marks how long into 2019 a Latina would have to work in order to be paid the same wages her white male counterpart was paid last year. That's nearly 11 months longer, meaning that Latina workers had to work all of 2018 and then this far—to November 20!—into 2019 to get paid the same as white non-Hispanic men did in 2018. Put another way, a Latina would have to be in the workforce for 57 years to earn what a non-Hispanic white man would earn after 30 years in the workforce. Unfortunately, Hispanic women are subject to a double pay gap—an ethnic pay gap and a gender pay gap. And, this pay gap widened over previous year when it "only" took until November 1 for Hispanic women catch up to non-Hispanic men.

The date November 20 is based on the finding that Hispanic women workers are paid 53 cents on the white non-Hispanic male dollar, using the 2017 March Current Population Survey for median annual earnings for full-time, year-round workers. We get similar results when we look at average hourly wages for all workers (not just full-time workers) using the monthly Current Population Survey Outgoing Rotation Group for 2018—which show Hispanic women workers being paid 56 cents on the white male dollar.

This gap narrows—but not dramatically—when we control for education, years of experience, and location by regression-adjusting the differences between workers. Using this method, we find that, on average, Latina workers are paid only 66 cents on the dollar relative to white non-Hispanic men.

The wage gap between Latina workers and white non-Hispanic male workers persists across the wage distribution, within occupations, and among those with the same amount of education. Figure A shows average wages for Hispanic women and white non-Hispanic men at different levels of educational attainment. At every level of education, white non-Hispanic men are paid more than Hispanic women. What's also clear from the data is that further education does not close their sizable wage gaps with white non-Hispanic men. As Hispanic women increase their educational attainment, their pay gap with white men generally increases. The largest dollar gap (more than $18 an hour), occurs for workers with more than a college degree. Even Hispanic women with an advanced degree earn less than white men who only have a bachelor's degree. That statistic bears repeating: white non-Hispanic men with only a college degree are paid, on average, $6.81 more than Latinas with an advanced degree!

Figure A

Much of these differences are grounded in the presence of occupational segregation. Latina workers are far more likely to be found in certain low-wage professions than white men are (and less common in high-wage professions). But, even in professions with more Latina workers, they still are paid less on average than their white male colleagues. Figure B shows the average wages of Hispanic women and white non-Hispanic men in the 10 most common occupations for Latinas. In every one of them, white men, on average, are paid more than their Latina counterparts.

Figure B

Since Hispanic women continue to be over-represented in low-wage jobs, policies that lift wages at the bottom will have a significant impact on their wages. An increase of the federal minimum wage to $15 by 2025 would affect nearly one in three Latina workers.

While some (incorrectly) argue that Latinas are choosing lower-paid professions, further education isn't a panacea, as shown in Figure A. Regardless of their level of educational attainment or their occupation, Latinas are paid less than their white male counterparts. Additional EPI research on the Hispanic-white wage gap includes analysis of immigrant status and country of origin. Looking at only full-time workers in a regression framework, Marie T. Mora and Alberto Dávila find that Latina workers are paid 67 percent on the white non-Hispanic male dollar (a 33 percent pay penalty). Accounting for immigrant status, the pay penalty improves slightly to 30 percent and is wider among first generation immigrants (39 percent) than second (29 percent) or third or higher generation (31 percent).

No matter how you slice the data, it is clear that there is a lot of work to be done to improve the standard of living for Latinas and their families. More educational attainment and access to better quality education would certainly help to improve the Latinas' chances to move up the job ladder and get better paid jobs. However, this is not the whole story, since even after controlling for education, the wage gap remains very large. Offering and facilitating access to occupations that are higher paid will also move Latinas up the occupational ladder. Here too, however, we find that even within the same occupations, Latinas fare worse. Lastly, it is important to strengthen workplace protections, like equal pay for equal work provisions, so that those women who do have the same education, the same occupation and are equally qualified in the workplace are not paid less or driven away from moving up to these higher paid positions


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Tuesday, November 19, 2019

Krugman: Doing the Health Care Two-Step [feedly]

  PK endorses Warren 2 stage on health care. Reason given: voters who are happy with private health care can't be lost in battle to beat Rs. I think Bernie and M4A has a workable response to that -- enrolling labor into a central representative role guiding the transition to m4a could be a means of doing labor law reform and health care reform together. But I have not heard him articulate that. He is staying on message at the macro level. Lets see how that holds up. Plus, and alternate billionaire faction directly entering the race is going to change the conversation. PK is always smart.


Doing the Health Care Two-Step

Paul Krugman

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/18/opinion/medicare-for-all.html


text only:

Recent state elections — the Democratic landslide in Virginia, followed by Democratic gubernatorial victories in Kentucky and Louisiana — have been bad news for Donald Trump.

Among other things, the election results vindicate polls indicating that Trump is historically unpopular. All of these races were in part referendums on Trump, who put a lot of effort into backing his preferred candidates. And in each case voters gave him a clear thumbs down.

Beyond offering a verdict on Trump, however, I'd argue that the state elections offered some guidance on an issue that has divided Democrats, namely health care. What the results suggested to me was the virtue of medium-size reform: incremental enough to have a good chance of being enacted, big enough to provide tangible benefits that voters don't want taken away.

Remember, there was a third governor's race, in Mississippi, in which the G.O.P. held on. True, Mississippi is a very red state, which Trump won by 18 points in 2016. But Louisiana and Kentucky are or were, if anything, even redder, with Trump margins of 20 and 30 points respectively. So what made the difference?



Personalities surely mattered. Louisiana's re-elected John Bel Edwards was widely liked, Kentucky's defeated Matt Bevin widely disliked. Demography probably also mattered. Urban and especially suburban voters have turned hard against Trump, but rural voters haven't, at least so far — and Mississippi is one of the few states left with a majority-rural population.

But there's another difference among the three states. Kentucky and Louisiana took advantage of the Affordable Care Act to expand Medicaid, leading to steep drops in the number of uninsured residents; Mississippi hasn't. This meant that voting Democratic in Kentucky and Louisiana meant voting to preserve past policy success, while the same vote in Mississippi was at best about hope for future reform — a much less powerful motivator.



Back in 2010, as Obamacare was about to squeak through Congress, Nancy Pelosi famously declared, "We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it." This line was willfully misrepresented by Republicans (and some reporters who should have known better) as an admission that there was something underhanded about the way the legislation was enacted. What she meant, however, was that voters wouldn't fully appreciate the A.C.A. until they experienced its benefits in real life.

It took years to get there, but in the end Pelosi was proved right, as health care became a winning issue for Democrats. In the 2018 midterms and in subsequent state elections, voters punished politicians whom they suspected of wanting to undermine key achievements like protection for pre-existing conditions and, yes, Medicaid expansion.

And this political reality has arguably set the stage for further action. At this point, as far as I can tell, all of the contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination are calling for a significant expansion of the government's role in health care, although they differ about how far and how fast to go.



Which brings me to the latest development in intra-Democratic policy disputes: Elizabeth Warren's proposal for a two-step approach to health reform. Her idea is to start with actions — some requiring no legislation at all, others requiring only a simple Senate majority — that would greatly expand health insurance coverage. These actions would, if successful, deliver tangible benefits to millions.

They would not, however, amount to the full Bernie, eliminating private insurance and going full single-payer. Warren still says that this is her eventual intention, and has laid out a plan to pay for such a system. But any legislative push would wait three years, giving time for voters to see the benefits of the initial changes.

Sanders supporters are, predictably, crying betrayal. For them it's all or nothing: a commitment to single-payer has to be in the legislation from Day 1.

The trouble with such demands, aside from the strong probability that proposing elimination of private insurance would be a liability in the general election, is that such legislation would almost certainly fail to pass even a Democratic Senate. So all or nothing would, in practice, mean nothing.

But is Warren giving up on Medicare for All? After all, what she's offering isn't really a transition plan in the usual sense, since there's no guarantee that Step 2 would ever happen.

The lesson I take from the politics of Obamacare, however, is that successful health reform, even if incomplete, creates the preconditions for further reform. What looks impossible now might look very different once tens of millions of additional people have actual experience with expanded Medicare, and can compare it with private insurance.

Although I've long argued against making Medicare for All a purity test, there is a good case for eventually going single-payer. But the only way that's going to happen is via something like Warren's approach: initial reforms that deliver concrete benefits, and maybe provide a steppingstone to something even bigger.

PAUL KRUGMAN'S NEWSLETTER Get a better understanding of the economy — and an even deeper look at what's on Paul's mind. Sign up here.
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Adam Smith: From Human Nature to Human Society [feedly]

Adam Smith: From Human Nature to Human Society
https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/11/adam-smith-from-human-nature-to-human-society.html


From Human Nature to Human Society: Hence the key importance of the human cultural invention of money in forming our large-scale human society: money means that any one of us can make a short-term one-shot exchange relationship with any other one of us, someone who we may well never see again. Money, you see, is manufactured trust, and it allows us to extend our societal division of labor to encompass, indirectly, nearly everybody else in the world.

For example, consider the 30-foot bronze statue of Athene Promakhos—Athena Fighting-in-Front—that the council and people of Athens had cast and installed on the Acropolis around -450. The Greek geographer Pausanias wrote that anyone approaching Athens by sea by day could see her gleaming helmet and the tip of her spear as soon as they had rounded Sounion Head at the southern tip of Attika. 70 tons of bronze supposedly went into the statue, which survived until 1204—63 tons of copper, 7 tons of tin. Copper was abundant. But where in the -5th century were the artisans of Athens to find 7 tons of tin? The historian Herodotos states that he could find nobody in Athens who knew where the tin was coming from: all anyone could say was that the ships had picked up the tin, already mined, in Sicily, and that they thought it came from "tin islands" in the ocean on the other side of Europe. But he could find nobody who would claim to have actually seen these tin islands, or this ocean on the other side of Europe. So he doubted the stories.

The answer, of course, was that the tin was in Cornwall, at the southwestern tip of the island of Britain. The societal division of labor, as governed by the market, was a mechanism that "knew" that 7 tons of tin needed to be mined in Cornwall and then shipped, probably via the English Channel-Seine-portage-Rhone-Mediterranean route, to Athens via Sicily. And so it happened. But, apparently, nobody anywhere in the value chain knew its entire extent. The market knew things that no human individual knew. And this was almost 2.5 millennia ago: the market knows much, much, much more now.

Language, weak dominance, gift exchange, and money have enabled us to progress from perhaps 10,000 of us 70,000 years ago living at a global average living standard of perhaps three 3.5 dollars a day to today's world-girdling societal division of labor now 7.5 billion strong, with a global average standard of living no about $35 a day. We are now, collectively, on average, at least 10 times as well-off and 750,000 times as numerous as we were 70,000 years ago back in the environment of evolutionary adaptation when we last passed through a Darwinian bottleneck


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Should We Have Billionaires? [feedly]

Dean Baker on Billionaires: there's sloganeering. Then there's economics.

Should We Have Billionaires?
http://cepr.net/publications/op-eds-columns/should-we-have-billionaires

Dean Baker
Truthout, November 18, 2019

See article on original site

The Democratic presidential campaign has taken a strange twist in recent days, with candidates being asked whether we should have billionaires. While there may be some grand philosophical questions at stake here, I will stick to more mundane economic ones. The real question is: How do you want the economy to work?

The basic story is that if we have a market economy, some people can get very rich. If we buy the right-wing story, the superrich got their money from their great contribution to society. If we look at it with clearer eyes, the superrich got their money because we structured the economy in a way that allowed them to get super rich.

In some cases, that can mean that they had important innovations that made large numbers of people better off. While many of us have complaints about how Steve Jobs ran Apple (e.g., exploitative labor practices in China and anti-poaching agreements with competitors for workers in the U.S.), he did produce products that people really wanted to buy. People really like iPhones, so in that sense, Jobs did contribute to making society better off.

By contrast, it is very hard to see the contributions that many of the superrich have made to improve society. The largest share of the superrich are in finance. Some of these wealthy financial types specialize in buying or selling stocks or commodities a short time ahead of the market, thereby pocketing large profits.

It's pretty hard to see the contribution to society in this story. Their actions mean, for example, that GE's stock price may adjust to new information about its profits five or 10 minutes earlier than might otherwise have been the case. The benefit to the economy from this faster adjustment is essentially zero. These high rollers' profits come at the expense of ordinary traders who are less informed.

Michael Bloomberg — who ranks among the top 10 billionaires, with more than $50 billion — had the genius to provide these traders with servers that give them necessary information faster than anyone else. If society is better off from this innovation, it is hard to see how.

Other financial industry billionaires got their money through private equity funds, whose main advantage seems to be carrying through activities that publicly traded companies would be too embarrassed to do. Their latest cash cow is surprise medical billing, where a variety of businesses owned by private equity funds interject themselves into the medical process and hand patients huge bills.

Beyond finance, we find many billionaires in the tech sector. These are people who would have considerably less money with shorter and weaker patent and copyright enforcement. Some, like Bill Gates, would have much less money if antitrust laws were still enforced. Mark Zuckerberg would have much less money if Facebook were subject to the same libel laws as print and broadcast media.

The Walton family of the Walmart empire collectively has close to $200 billion in assets. They would have considerably less if minimum-wage laws had kept pace with productivity growth, and the Federal Reserve had done a better job of keeping the economy close to full employment so that workers had more bargaining power.

We can go down the list and find major policy failings that allowed many, if not most, of these billionaires to make their billions. While these billionaires may all have been smart and hard working, what allowed them to get such vast fortunes was a failure of public policy to organize the market efficiently. (This is essentially the point of my book, Rigged.)

While it is easy to identify many of the failures that have allowed for extreme wealth, there is still the question of whether a Steve Jobs-type may still get incredibly rich in a context where we have structured the economy efficiently. In my view, it is certainly a possibility and not one that we need to spend a lot of time worrying about.

There is no doubt that we want progressive taxation, but this does have its limits. A very high tax rate is an invitation to avoidance and evasion. If we have a 90 percent marginal tax rate, we are effectively paying rich people 90 cents to hide a dollar of income; or, to make the numbers more realistic, we are paying them $90 million to hide $100 million of income.

That is virtually guaranteed to get us a huge tax avoidance industry. That is a complete waste from an economic standpoint. Also, insofar as the rich succeed (and they will often succeed, in spite of our super-sleuth IRS agents), it undermines respect for the income tax more generally. There is a limit to how high we should make our tax rates.

There is the argument that the rich are able to use their wealth to buy political power. This is a real concern, but it is unlikely to be addressed by various progressive taxes. Even people with hundreds of millions can use their wealth to exercise inordinate political power.

Rather than focusing on trying to prevent the superrich from influencing public opinion (the issue goes way beyond campaign contributions — it is also owning media outlets, think tanks and funding university programs), a more practical focus would be to ensure that the rest of us can have a voice. This would mean some sort of individual tax credit (e.g., $200 per person) to be used to support the newspaper, think tank, or whatever form of expression, intellectual or political work the person wants.

That won't guarantee that there will be enough money to support whatever venture some of us might like, but it will ensure that the non-rich collectively have plenty of money to support progressive politics. Our energies are likely to be better spent ensuring that the non-rich have an effective voice than playing a whack-a-mole game to limit the voice of the superrich.

Long and short, I have no opinion on whether there should be billionaires. My opinion is that we have more important things to worry about.


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Monday, November 18, 2019

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Saturday, November 16, 2019

Facebook is quietly setting the stage for an unprecedented new chapter in its business (FB) [feedly]

Interesting rundown on FB changing  business model.


Facebook is quietly setting the stage for an unprecedented new chapter in its business (FB)
https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-doubles-down-payments-presents-huge-opportunity-2019-11?utm_source=feedly&utm_medium=webfeeds

Erin Scott/Reuters

  • Facebook is doubling down on its payments and ecommerce business.
  • An array of newly announced or planned products could help it grab a slice of a hugely lucrative industry and bring in tens of billions in revenues.
  • And the move will help Facebook diversify away from its controversial (but profitable) advertising business at a time of unprecedented uncertainty and scrutiny for the company.

Facebook wants to get inside your wallet.

The Silicon Valley social networking giant is doubling down on its consumer payments and finance infrastructure, and on Tuesday announced Facebook Pay — a unified payments app for making payments across its ecosystem of apps. And more ambitiously, it is still plowing ahead with Libra, its plan for a new cryptocurrency, even in the face of significant political and regulatory opposition.

The $555 billion company's escalating efforts in the financial sphere highlight how the company is in the midst of an unprecedented push to diversify beyond its core lucrative advertising business.

Why? The simple answer is that the business opportunity for Facebook is massive.

The company pulls in billions in profit every quarter off the strength of its advertising business, but Western markets are increasingly saturated, while emerging economies where Facebook is still growing monetize at lower rates. By investing in ecommerce and payments, Facebook gains an opportunity to cash in on its existing audiences in all-new ways.

We're already seeing a glimpse of this with Facebook's push to add shopping options to its photo-sharing app Instagram. It's still early days for the effort, but Deutsche Bank analysts have predicted that it could generate $10 billion in additional revenue for Facebook by 2021.

But payments has another benefit: It's also (in theory) less controversial than advertising.

Notwithstanding concerns from lawmakers about Libra's potential impact on US national sovereignty, doubling down into financial-related products gives Facebook a toehold in a space that is less politically sensitive than ads have proved to be over the past few years.

Facebook continues to be in the midst of a firestorm of controversy over whether it should be running political ads on its platform (it says it should, asserting free speech reasons, while rival Twitter has taken the opposite view), and there is ongoing discussion about the fundamental ethics of hyper-targeted online advertising. Meanwhile, ad fraud is a perennial concern for Facebook and the rest of the online advertising industry.

The payments and ecommerce world has its own unique headaches, of course, and it's very unlikely that advertising will stop comprising a major part of Facebook's business in two, five, or even 10 years. But this diversification puts the company on a stronger and more stable footing as it navigates an unparalleled number of known and unknown challenges in the years ahead — from antitrust arguments to concerns about how it handles user data to content policy controversies and beyond.

In the third quarter of 2019, Facebook pulled in $17.65 billion in revenue. $17.38 billion of that came from advertising; just $269 million came from payments and all "other fees," a catch-all category that includes sales of the company's Oculus VR headset as well as fees from app developers who use the social network's existing payments infrastructure.

If Facebook can make its overall payments and ecommerce business even a quarter as successful as its ads business, that's an extra $17 billion-plus in revenue every year.

FB

Do you work at Facebook, or a company that interacts with it? Contact this reporter via encrypted messaging app Signal at +1 (650) 636-6268 using a non-work phone, email at rprice@businessinsider.com, Telegram or WeChat at robaeprice, or Twitter DM at @robaeprice. (PR pitches by email only, please.)

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