Tag: Unity

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Business

Virgin Galactic completes third spaceflight of VSS Unity

Virgin Galactic completes third spaceflight of VSS Unity

Sir Richard Branson stands on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) ahead of Virgin Galactic (SPCE) trading in New York, U.S., October 28, 2019.

Richard Branson Virgin Galactic IPO NYSE

Virgin Galactic took a step closer to completing development of its space tourism system on Saturday, successfully flying its first spaceflight in more than two years.

The company’s spacecraft, named VSS Unity, was carried up to an altitude of about 44,000 feet by a carrier aircraft called VMS Eve. The aircraft then released the spacecraft, which fired its rocket engine and accelerated to more than three times the speed of sound.

After performing a slow backflip in microgravity at the edge of space, Unity returned through the atmosphere in a glide, landing back at the runway of Spaceport America in New Mexico that it took off from earlier.

“Now in space,” the company tweeted during the flight.

Pilots C.J. Sturckow and Dave Mackay flew Unity. The pair have previously flown to space, as well as fellow Virgin Galactic pilots Michael “Sooch” Masucci and Mark Stucky and chief astronaut trainer Beth Moses, who have each been given astronaut wings after the company’s first two spaceflights.

The U.S. officially consider pilots who have flown above 80 kilometers to be astronauts. 

Virgin Galactic pilots walk to the company’s SpaceShipTwo Unity spacecraft, attached to the jet carrier aircraft Eve.

Virgin Galactic

Virgin Galactic’s spacecraft Unity is designed to hold up to six passengers along with the two pilots. The company has about 600 reservations for tickets on future flights, sold at prices between $200,000 and $250,000 each.

The spaceflight is the company’s first since February 2019, and its third to date. Virgin Galactic flew two spaceflight tests from its development facility in California’s Mojave Desert, before moving to its operational base in New Mexico. The company expected to clear some or all of its remaining Federal Aviation Administration milestones with this flight, setting it up to receive a key license needed to conduct regular spaceflights.

Unity also carried NASA-funded payloads on this mission, under the agency’s Flight Opportunities program.

Shares of Virgin Galactic climbed 22% over the past two days of trading after the company announced plans for the spaceflight test, avoiding a possible maintenance issue that threatened to delay the flight.

The spaceflight is one of four remaining for Virgin Galactic to finish development of its SpaceShipTwo rocket system. The second spaceflight test will carry four passengers to test the spacecraft’s cabin, while the third test is planned to fly founder Sir Richard Branson.

The company’s test flight program has been delayed substantially over the past few months. Saturday’s spaceflight was a redo of a December attempt that was cut short by an an electromagnetic interference issue, and the company’s promised beginning of commercial service has been pushed back from mid-2020 to early 2022.

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Categories
Politics

Unity Proves Elusive in Democrats’ Battle for $15

Unity Proves Elusive in Democrats’ Fight for $15

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If the Democrats have a problem, it is with the working class. Their support from non-graduate voters (especially, but not exclusively, white voters) has declined in recent years.

The Republican Party, meanwhile, is finding its own grassroots leaning more than ever towards the white working class. Those voters remain loyal to former President Donald Trump but don’t have much nostalgia for the pro-corporate version of the GOP that existed before him and which many Republican leaders now wish they could return to.

Many Democrats are now anxious to take the opportunity to demonstrate to voters that they have not just become the party of the elites and city dwellers.

When lawmakers on the party’s left pushed for a $ 15 minimum wage to be a top priority this year, Democratic leaders stepped in thinking this might signal the party’s commitment to the working people. Senator Chuck Schumer, the Democratic leader, gave him his firm support, and President Biden included the proposal in his $ 1.9 trillion aid proposal for Covid-19 – along with today’s economic tests and the prolongation of unemployment .

“There should be a national minimum wage of $ 15 an hour,” Biden said last month as he prepared to enter the Oval Office. “Nobody who works 40 hours a week should live below the poverty line.”

Polls show that increasing it to $ 15 an hour is popular: 61 percent of Americans said they support it in a Quinnipiac University poll released earlier this month, including 63 percent of independents and the majority of voters in all major income groups.

But the Democratic Party is still not fully united – and in an evenly divided Senate, Democrats need complete unity. West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin has indicated that he is unwilling to support a hike to $ 15 an hour, which is considered too steep. And Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema said she was against raising the minimum wage through budget reconciliation, which means Democrats would need Republican support if they didn’t get rid of the filibuster (which Sinema also opposes).

“Ultimately, we are still struggling with our 50th vote representing a state that beat Trump by about 40 points,” said Sean McElwee, founder of Data for Progress, a strategy firm that advises top Democrats in Congress from Manchin.

When the Senate MP decided yesterday that a $ 15 increase was not part of a bill passed as part of budget reconciliation – a decision that means it would take at least 60 votes to pass, and therefore by would be dead upon arrival in the Senate – the White House should breathe a sigh of relief. The Covid-19 Aid Act should now move forward without a flat-rate increase in the minimum wage. (Democrats are exploring other partial solutions, including tax incentives for businesses, to get them to raise their own wage floors to $ 15.)

But without a blanket wage increase, say observers in and around the Democratic Party, this problem is unlikely to go away. It remains a top priority for both progressives and democratic leaders like Schumer and Biden, who both objected – at least publicly – to the MP’s announcement.

“The minimum wage is very popular,” said McElwee. “I think if I were Joe Biden I would love to run for re-election because the average worker makes a lot more from being president than before.”

McElwee pointed out that referendums on minimum wages are generally popular in various swing states – far more so than Democratic candidates in the same ballot. In Sinema’s home state of Arizona, voters in 2016 increased the state minimum wage by a majority of 58 percent to $ 12 an hour, despite the state’s support for Trump over Hillary Clinton. In 2020, Florida voted even more firmly to raise its state minimum wage to $ 15, with 61 percent backing it.

“What we saw in Florida is that a minimum wage of $ 15 is over 10 points more popular than democratic elected officials,” McElwee said. “It’s an open and closed case.”

Strategist Simon Rosenberg, whose moderate New Democrat Network often contradicts Data for Progress’ vision for the Democratic Party, said he saw increasing the minimum wage as a profitable problem with voters, including those towards the center. Rosenberg described the apparently unanimous opposition of the Republican legislators as a political “mistake”. But he also noted that Republican-led messaging campaigns have resisted the idea of ​​raising the minimum wage for decades.

“Investing right-wing business interests in demonizing the minimum wage has been one of the most consistent right-wing projects in the last generation,” said Rosenberg, referring to large donors such as Charles Koch. “It’s a touchstone problem.”

This month’s Quinnipiac poll found that a minimum wage of $ 15 remained deeply unpopular, despite its huge popularity with Republicans who opposed it with a 2-to-1 ratio. White people without a college degree, Trump’s base, were more evenly divided: 47 percent for, 51 percent against.

Politically, Manchin’s state is leaning away from him; It had never elected a Republican president as far ahead as it did in 2016 and 2020, so he cannot afford to ignore the impact of the anti-wage messaging campaign on core Republican voters.

Rosenberg said if Democrats were able to polish their brand by passing other key laws for workers and families, it could bode well for a minimum wage increase – even in West Virginia. “I think Joe Manchin wants to be with the Democrats as much as possible and in order to do that he has to go against them on certain things,” he said. “If in six months the Covid package is popular and the economy returns, Manchin will have a lot more leeway.”

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Categories
World News

Snap, Unity warn of impression from Apple iOS 14 IDFA privateness adjustments

Snap, Unity warn of impact from Apple iOS 14 IDFA privacy changes

Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, gives a keynote speech during the European Union’s data protection conference in the EU Parliament on October 24, 2018 in Brussels, Belgium.

Yves Herman | Reuters

Snap and Unity Software, which reported fourth quarter earnings after Thursday’s bell, both warned of the impending impact of Apple’s privacy changes this spring.

To target cellphone ads and measure how effective they are, app developers and other industry players are now often using the Apple Advertiser ID (IDFA), a unique sequence of letters and numbers on each Apple device. However, once a data protection update is released, app makers must ask permission to access a user’s IDFA via a command prompt. A significant proportion of users are expected to say no, which is likely to make targeted advertising less effective.

The changes have become a major controversy for ad-supported companies like Facebook, which are expected to lose revenue from the change. But Facebook is far from being alone.

Unity Software said in its earnings report that the changes to IDFA will affect the way mobile game developers acquire new customers and “how they optimize customer experience for life.”

“While difficult to predict, our predictions are that IDFA changes begin in the spring and will reduce our sales by approximately $ 30 million, or 3% of sales, in 2021,” the company wrote.

In prepared comments on its fourth quarter earnings report, Snap’s chief financial officer Derek Andersen said the Apple changes pose a risk of disrupting demand for their implementation.

“It is not yet clear what the longer-term impact these changes could have on the dynamics of our business, and it may not be clear for a few months or more after the changes are implemented,” he said.

Apple is currently testing the data protection update in a beta version of iOS 14, which is expected to be available to all users in “spring”.

Jeremi Gorman, Snap’s chief business officer, said Snap worked with Apple to prepare for the changes, trained its advertisers, and made long-term investments to use more first-party data for advertising. In addition, the company plans to give advertisers more opportunities to make their products and services available to Snap users directly through Snapchat.

“The reality is that we admire Apple and we believe that they are trying to do what is right for their customers,” she said. “Your focus on privacy is based on our values ​​and the way we built our business from the start.”

She added, “Overall, we feel very well prepared for these changes, but changes to this ecosystem are usually disruptive and the outcome is uncertain.”

Stocks of both companies fell after close on Thursday, with Snap down more than 10% and Unity down more than 15%.

CNBC’s Salvador Rodriguez contributed to the coverage.

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