This year’s UCI season was demolished due to COVID-19 like most other sports. All of the big monuments, classics, and at least 1 Grand Tour (Giro) were postponed. Milan—San Remo, Dauphiné, Paris—Roubaix, and a bunch of others all happening in the fall, if at all this year.

Originally the Tour de France was in that bunch. It normally runs around the fourth of July and Bastille Day, but was pushed with the season nominally continuing in August. Now the UCI and race organizers decided to try something new, running the race in Zwift, a cycling fitness game with real tracks...

Tyler Cowen’s recent piece in Bloomberg makes the case that technology is helping, not hurting the cause of containing the pandemic. The openness of the web was certainly instrumental in forcing transparency on the part of the Chinese government.

Scientific information about the coronavirus has spread around the world remarkably quickly, mostly because of the internet. The virus has been identified, sequenced, and tracked online, and researchers around the world are working on possible fixes. The possibility that the failed ebola drug remdesivir may help protect against the virus is now well known and the drug is being deployed....

I don’t follow international markets closely enough to keep up with this, but interesting to see this take on Hong Kong’s relative stagnation in recent years, especially as compared to other nearby mainland China cities like Shenzhen and Guangzhou:

Despite the transformation the global economy has undergone, Hong Kong’s business landscape remains largely unchanged – the preserve of a small body of property developers and conglomerates, most of them tycoon-owned, who rose to prominence long before the handover. Indeed, one of the most striking things of the city’s history for nearly three decades has been its failure to produce...

At the recent WWDC, Apple announced an overhaul to their Maps product, including millions of miles of fresh data from their vehicle fleet, along with a new Street View-like feature called “Look Around”. Even though it’s exciting to see them invest in mapping, it seems like a bridge too far to ever catch the quality of Google Maps. Om Malik compares the relative positions between the two to that of Bing to Google in search. Apple is approaching Maps as an application first, when really maps are about data:

Why do I think Google Maps will continue to trump...

This piece from Barry Ritholtz does a good job breaking down the real background behind the Amazon NYC HQ issues, how they were attracted and why they bailed:

The heart of the opposition to Amazon was how much the city and state bent the existing rules to offer a very generous package. The arguments are pretty clear: On the one side, net net the deal works to the city’s benefit, and $3 billion is not all that much.

The other side is less pragmatic and more philosophical. It is the same issue I have with taxpayers subsidizing Football stadiums....