Tesla CEO Elon Musk said Monday that the company's factory in Fremont, California is open and has restarted production despite a stay-at-home order issued by Alameda County. TechCrunch reports: Musk said in tweet Monday afternoon that he will "be on the line," a reference to the assembly line at the factory where Tesla makes the Model X, Model S, Model 3 and Model Y. He added "if anyone is arrested, I ask that it only be me." Musk's reopening follows days of public venting on Twitter as well as a lawsuit all aimed at pressuring Alameda County officials to allow the company to reopen its factory. Tesla filed a lawsuit Saturday against Alameda County seeking injunctive relief, an effort to invalidate orders that have prevented the automaker from reopening. Tesla had planned to bring back about 30% of its factory workers Friday as part of its reopening plan, after California Gov. Gavin Newsom issued new guidance that would allow manufacturers to resume operations. However, the governor's guidance included a warning that local governments could keep more restrictive rules in place. Alameda County, along with several other Bay Area counties and cities, last week extended the stay-at-home orders through the end of May. The orders were revised and did ease some of the restrictions. However, it did not lift the order for manufacturing.

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The most anticipated cryptocurrency event of 2020, Bitcoin's (BTC) third halving, has just taken effect. Occurring only once every four years, the latest Bitcoin mining block reward halving just reduced the Bitcoin block reward from 12.5 BTC to 6.25 BTC. Cointelegraph reports: Since the first Bitcoin block was generated back in 2009, there have been three halving events. Taking place once every 210,000 blocks mined, or approximately once every four years, a Bitcoin halving cuts the current miner block reward by 50%. The first Bitcoin halving event took place in 2012, cutting the original block reward from 50 BTC to 25 BTC. The second halving took place in 2016, with the reward dropping from 25 BTC to 12.5 BTC. As Bitcoin's supply is limited to 21 million coins, Bitcoin halving events should continue to take place until the year 2140, or until the 21-millionth BTC. By that time, the block reward should reach 1 satoshi, or the smallest unit of Bitcoin at 0.00000001 BTC. At the time of publication, the number of Bitcoin in circulation amounts to 18.37 million, according to Blockchain.com. As the two previous Bitcoin halvings eventually impacted Bitcoin's price in positive ways, Bitcoin halvings have become the subject of diverse price predictions and speculation. While some crypto players have predicted that the third Bitcoin halving will have no effect on Bitcoin's price, others are confident that the halving will definitely affect the price of the cryptocurrency due to a cut in new Bitcoin supply.

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Twitter announced Monday it will warn users when a tweet contains disputed or misleading information about the coronavirus. From a report: The new rule is the latest in a wave of stricter policies that tech companies are rolling out to confront an outbreak of virus-related misinformation on their sites. Twitter will take a case-by-case approach to how it decides which tweets are labeled and will only remove posts that are harmful, company leaders said Monday. Some tweets will run with a label underneath that directs users to a link with additional information about COVID-19. Other tweets might be covered entirely by a warning label alerting users that "some or all of the content shared in this tweet conflict with guidance from public health experts regarding COVID-19." The new labels will be available in roughly 40 languages and should begin appearing on tweets as soon as today. The warning could apply retroactively to past tweets.

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Controversial trials in which volunteers are intentionally infected with Covid-19 could accelerate vaccine development, according to the World Health Organization, which has released new guidance on how the approach could be ethically justified despite the potential dangers for participants. From a report: So-called challenge trials are a mainstream approach in vaccine development and have been used in malaria, typhoid and flu, but there are treatments available for these diseases if a volunteer becomes severely ill. For Covid-19, a safe dose of the virus has not been established and there are no failsafe treatments if things go wrong. Scientists, however, increasingly agree that such trials should be considered, and the WHO is the latest body to indicate conditional support for the idea. "There's this emerging consensus among everyone who has thought about this seriously," said Prof Nir Eyal, the director of Rutgers University's Center for Population-Level Bioethics in the US.

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U.S. factories are as productive as ever but they've lost the process knowledge needed to retool quickly in a crisis, writes Dan Wang, a Beijing-based technology analyst at Gavekal Dragonomics, in an opinion piece on Bloomberg. From the story: In China, a vast pool of experienced engineers and a culture of nimble manufacturing have allowed companies to quickly shift production to critically needed goods during this crisis. Manufacturers such as BYD Co.(an automaker) and Foxconn (an electronics assembler) have helped to quadruple China's mask production since the beginning of the pandemic. Taiwanese companies, which make machine tools and can draw on deep pools of manufacturing expertise, were reportedly able to increase mask production tenfold. Learning to build again will take more than a resurgence of will, as Marc Andreessen would have it. And the U.S. should think of bolder proposals than sensible but long-proposed tweaks to R&D policies, re-training programs and STEM education. What the U.S. really needs to do is reconstitute its communities of engineering practice. That will require treating manufacturing work, even in low-margin goods, as fundamentally valuable. Technological sophisticates in Silicon Valley would be wise to drop their dismissive attitude towards manufacturing as a "commoditized" activity and treat it as being as valuable as R&D work. And corporate America should start viewing workers not purely as costs to be slashed, but as practitioners keeping alive knowledge essential to the production process. The U.S. government has a crucial role to play. Bills winding through in Congress to re-shore some of the medical supply chain should be only the start. For too long, tax laws have encouraged offshoring; it's time for political leaders to remove the excuse for manufacturers not to bring production back home.

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The William Barr chicken polka. Enjoy!

In a wide-ranging interview with VentureBeat, quantum computing startup IonQ chief executive Peter Chapman talks about quantum computing's future impact on AI and ML. From the interview: The conversation quickly turned to Strong AI, or Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), which does not yet exist. Strong AI is the idea that a machine could one day understand or learn any intellectual task that a human can. "AI in the Strong AI sense, that I have more of an opinion [about], just because I have more experience in that personally," Chapman told VentureBeat. "And there was a really interesting paper that just recently came out talking about how to use a quantum computer to infer the meaning of words in NLP. And I do think that those kinds of things for Strong AI look quite promising. It's actually one of the reasons I joined IonQ. It's because I think that does have some sort of application." [...] "For decades, it was believed that the brain's computational capacity lay in the neuron as a minimal unit," he wrote. "Early efforts by many tried to find a solution using artificial neurons linked together in artificial neural networks with very limited success. This approach was fueled by the thought that the brain is an electrical computer, similar to a classical computer." "However, since then, I believe we now know the brain is not an electrical computer, but an electrochemical one," he added. "Sadly, today's computers do not have the processing power to be able to simulate the chemical interactions across discrete parts of the neuron, such as the dendrites, the axon, and the synapse. And even with Moore's law, they won't next year or even after a million years." Chapman then quoted Richard Feynman, who famously said "Nature isn't classical, dammit, and if you want to make a simulation of nature, you'd better make it quantum mechanical. And by golly, it's a wonderful problem because it doesn't look so easy. Similarly, it's likely Strong AI isn't classical, it's quantum mechanical as well," Chapman said.

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Nintendo announced last week that Animal Crossing: New Horizons has sold over 13.41 million copies in its first six weeks. Animal Crossing: New Horizons is about as far as you can get from a communications super-app geared toward in-app sales or collaboration. From a report: In fact, as a franchise originally made for children, it barely has a proper chat function. But as we watch real-world society grind to a painful halt, many players are now also using this game as an unexpected economic and creative lifeline. Here's the story of how this Nintendo Switch game has become an experimental playground for real-world businesses and creative experiences, letting players find new ways to mirror conventional culture with in-game resources.

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Beginning Monday, 3.4 million high school students will sit down at desks -- and in cars, on bedroom floors and anywhere they can find some quiet -- and take Advanced Placement exams with the hopes of proving mastery of a range of academic subjects. From a report: The tests will look much different than in years past, as the coronavirus pandemic has closed high schools and sent the College Board, which runs the Advanced Placement program, scrambling to create a new format. The tests, in subjects including U.S. history, physics and macroeconomics, historically took three hours to complete. This year, the tests will cover less material and last no more than 45 minutes. To minimize the opportunity for cheating, students globally will take them at the same time, meaning overnight exams for those in Asia. "We definitely did not want to do it this way," said Trevor Packer, senior vice president of the A.P. program and instruction at the College Board. "But when we started to see that schools were closing and many would not open this academic year, we had two options: we would either cancel the exams or find a way to meet students where they are, which is in their home. We heard an overwhelming desire to proceed. We thought we had to go ahead."

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Modern humans began to edge out the Neanderthals in Europe earlier than previously thought.

Bitcoin appears to be running out of steam just before one of the most anticipated milestones among cryptocurrency enthusiasts. From a report: The largest digital token tumbled over the weekend, declining about 13% to around $8,675. It rebounded to about $8,840 as of 10 a.m. in New York trading on Monday. The decline took place ahead of a closely watched technical event known as its halving, when the rewards miners receive for processing transactions will be cut in half as soon as later today. "It's likely that we're going to see increased volatility through May, with the pandemic, ongoing stimulus measures and the halving," Rich Rosenblum, co-head of trading at crypto market maker GSR, said in an email. "The record open interest for futures and options at multiple exchanges adds to this. The market is in a state of information and position overload, exacerbating the potential for volatile moves."

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How about a twist on that. Any paying user gets to forward stories from the site a certain number of times? Not sure about that. It's always so irritating when a friend RTs a story from the WSJ. It just doesn't make sense for me to subscribe. I did at one time, so I know what they do. I just am not that active in business these days. But sometimes the get a great story. Maybe what need are peering arrangements of some kind. You get 50 free articles from the WSJ with a NYT subscription, and vice versa. Maybe those two pubs don't do it. But maybe say Mother Jones and National Review. Kind of like William F. Buckley debating Gore Vidal?

I wonder if any of the news orgs with a paywall have thought about doing what Netflix and Google TV (and perhaps others) do. They let you share your membership with "family members," which really means anyone you want. It might be good marketing.

Another idea: A special deal for bloggers. People can read the stories if they come from my blog. The NYT used to do this. I felt like we had risen above crass commercialism, and were focused on informing people. Here come the lectures on how I don't understand news!

We're not just dying for Trump, we're also dying for CNN.