Biden Drops Out, The Box Office, & A Big Budget Screw-Up

July 22, 2024

Hello, readers – happy Monday! Did anything exciting happen over the weekend? Today, we’ll be talking about Biden dropping out, that global tech outage, China and the Philippines, Israel’s potential new law, the box office, the Secret Service drama, and NASA’s pretty substantial screw-up.

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“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something – your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.” – Steve Jobs

Biden Bows Out

(“Thank You Joe” sign by Justin Sullivan via Getty Images)

It’s official: on Sunday, President Joe Biden announced the end of his reelection campaign and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris to replace him as the Democratic nominee. It’s currently unclear who exactly the Democrats will rally behind – while Biden and the Clintons threw what’s left of their political clout behind Harris, other big names (including one Barack Obama) didn’t immediately endorse any prospective candidate.

“It has been the greatest honor of my life to serve as your President,” Biden wrote in the letter announcing his withdrawal from the presidential race, adding in a second post, “My very first decision as the party nominee in 2020 was to pick Kamala Harris as my Vice President. And it’s been the best decision I’ve made. Today I want to offer my full support and endorsement for Kamala to be the nominee of our party this year.”

Biden’s decision marks the end of a tumultuous few weeks for the Democratic Party sparked by his concerning performance in this election’s first presidential debate. Now, though, you can bet that the party will be making headlines for another few weeks as the machine churns out its candidate. The Democratic National Convention, where the party will officially select its presidential nominee, will be held from August 19 to August 22 in Chicago.

The Update That Brought The World Down

While Biden’s historic decision to drop out of the 2024 presidential election is snagging headlines right now, the world was subject to another momentous event on Friday that’s still causing problems into this week. The “event” was a combination of two massive tech mishaps that led to computer system outages worldwide. The first issue occurred on Thursday night, when Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform experienced massive outages. Then, on Friday morning, security software company CrowdStrike pushed a broken software update, which forced Windows computers into an unusable state. The incident is estimated to have delayed over 5,000 flights worldwide, costing the economy at least $1 billion.

As CrowdStrike is one of the biggest cybersecurity firms in the world, the outage touched about 8.5 million Windows devices worldwide, forcing Windows computers into the dreaded “blue screen of death.” The company is still dealing with the impact of the bugged update, which has impacted many critical devices and servers that are hard for engineers to fix.

How can a computer crash cost the economy so much money? If you want an answer, all you have to do is look to the airline industry — the outage disrupted the computers that airlines use to schedule and track flights, delaying tens of thousands of flights and canceling over 10,000 between Friday and Sunday. Thousands of passengers were stranded at airports, and airlines are still struggling to get their services up and running — although we doubt airport staff will have a fun time even when their computers are working.

Sea-ing Eye To Eye (Kind Of)

(South China Sea by Yang Jie via Getty Images)

The Philippines and China have slightly de-escalated their conflict over a couple of rocky outcroppings in the South China Sea. Over the weekend, the two countries “reached an understanding on the provisional arrangement” to allow the Philippines to run resupply missions to a beached naval landing ship on the Second Thomas Shoal.
“Both sides continue to recognize the need to de-escalate the situation in the South China Sea and manage differences through dialogue and consultation and agree that the agreement will not prejudice each other’s positions in the South China Sea,” said the Philippines’ foreign ministry in a statement on Sunday. The ship that requires the resupply missions was deliberately beached by the Philippines Navy on the shoal in the South China Sea to justify Manila’s claims to the area, though China has recently begun challenging those claims through increasingly forceful means.

McCarthyism In The Middle East

While China and the Philippines might have decided to play nice over the weekend, Israel took the chance to get a bit more aggressive in its war with Hamas. On Saturday, the IDF launched missile strikes at the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza. The strikes reportedly killed 13 people, following up on a deadly IDF strike on a U.N. school located in the same camp last weekend.
Israel continued down its warpath internally, as well. In the wake of widespread protests against the Netanyahu regime, the country’s national union of students and sitting education minister Yoav Kisch have backed draft legislation that would limit academic speech. It would create a government-appointed committee with the power to fire any academic staff it determines to have engaged in “support for terror.” The legislation has received backlash from politicians and scholars, who say it unfairly singles out academia when the country already has wide-ranging laws against criticizing the war in Gaza.

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Spinning Up Some Cash

The box office has been somewhat underwhelming over the last few years, partly due to the pandemic but not entirely. Luckily, Inside Out 2 and Despicable Me 4 have helped (partially) resuscitate it, but this weekend saw one of the biggest recent box offices for films that aren’t intended for children. Twisters, the sequel to the 1996 film Twister, made $80.5 million in ticket sales from 4,151 theaters in North America.
That’s about $30 million more than analysts expected initially and makes for the biggest opening of a live-action movie this summer. “This is just further evidence that when you create something that’s compelling and interesting and has broad appeal, that all across the country people will show up,” said Michael O’Leary, the president and CEO of the National Association of Theatre Owners.

Will Cheatle Get Chucked?

Kimberly Cheatle, who is, at least for now, the director of the Secret Service, is facing growing calls to resign in the wake of the assassination attempt on President Trump. That was only made worse when the agency admitted that it had refused to grant some of the Trump campaign’s requests for added security at his events.
Cheatle will testify today in front of Congress about the ongoing investigation into the assassination attempt. While Cheatle still plans to stay on in her position, she acknowledged, “The buck stops with me. I am the director of the Secret Service.” Cheatle is only the second woman ever to head up the Secret Service.

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When The Moon Hits Your Eye That’s A $450 Million Pie

You’ve probably made a few bad investments in your lifetime. But whether those mistakes were buying a random stock only for it to plummet the next day or buying a lemon from a shady dealership, you can rest assured that the brilliant minds at NASA have thrown away way, way more money than you. Last week, NASA announced that it would be shutting down its VIPER moon rover program. The decision means that the $450 million the agency spent to build the rover is a total loss.
Even worse, the rover has already been built – NASA will try to shop it around for use by international partners or U.S. private companies, but the agency will be forced to scrap the rover for parts if it can’t hammer out a deal. “Decisions like this are never easy, and we haven’t made this one, in any way, lightly. In this case, the projected remaining expenses for VIPER would have resulted in either having to cancel or disrupt many other missions in our Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) line,” said the head of NASA’s science mission directorate.
VIPER was originally built as part of NASA’s Artemis program, which plans to place human astronauts on the moon within a couple of years. The four-wheeled, golf cart-sized rover would have used its onboard drills and scientific instruments to learn more about the lunar surface and search for water deposits. Unfortunately, its budget ended up ballooning from $433 million to over $609 million, with two years’ worth of delays.

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