Preschool in japan. There is such a conversation about universal prek, that is something that is not possible in japan. Why . Ellen there is this big shortage of women in the workplace and the Prime Minister is hoping to get more women actually working, and more women would like to work but there is a huge childcare issue. There are not enough Nursery Schools and the Nursery Schools are just sort of mired in regulation, and the teachers are paid very poorly so the teachers are constantly dealing with paperwork, etc. They do not want to do it anymore so they are trying to recruit more teachers and they in fact are building more nurseries schools, but it is tough to make it all come together. David high yield investment programs, something i have not heard of before, talk about about that. Ellen they are online programs that invest in various things and promise really outrageous returns. Really many of them are ponzi schemes so they are paying old investors with new investors money. A lot of investors know that in their whole idea is, im going to put my money in and try to get my returns out the for the whole thing collapses, but they are essentially oldtime ponzis with a twist of being online. David amazing gamesmanship of when to get out. He says, if i were not doing this somebody else would. Ellen there are all kinds of sites that support, they are aggregators, they provide support for these online site so it is a whole industry around them. As usual there are people who think they can outsmart the market. David the cover story is about Persistent Surveillance Systems that is surveilling baltimore, not 24 7 but many hours. Ellen monte heard about the company and this guy had been in the military, created a system where you flew over parts of iraq and were able to figure out who was setting off these roads that bombs. When he left the military he wanted to try to sell it to state or local governments and has been trying to do that for several years. He ended up giving baltimore a sixmonth try and the advantage is well you do not see faces, you can follow these little dots that are people theoretically who are fleeing crimes, etc. David interesting tension in the piece between these municipalities and citizens and privacy advocates who say this is too much. Ellen there has sort of been this uproar where people are saying, you are violating my right. You should have at least told us we were being spied on. It has become kind of a big deal and the Police Department say they want to continue doing it because they can follow these. You do not see the persons face but can follow their form as they flee a crime. David i spoke to monte reel. What is it looking for . Monte it is a technology that this guy, the founder of persistent surveillance technologies, created originally to try to track people who were planting roadside bombs in iraq. He was with the military when he developed the technology. The way he described it, it is like google earth with tivo capability. It is this array of cameras that attached to the bottom of a plane and they fly over a city in a circle essentially. The plane will stay up for hours and hours at a time, up to 10 hours a day. Those cameras are capturing an image of an area that is 30 square miles, so it is one enormous image. And analysts on the ground can look at the image which is updated every second, and they can zoom in on particular areas. For example, if any crime or incident is reported at a certain location they can go down to that location, zoom in, and then using that tivo like capability they can rewind and go forward in time for when that in the event occurred, or go backwards. The investigative possibilities this opens is, say there was a shooting at a corner in the city. Police can figure out what time that shooting occurred, go back into the footage and look at that particular corner, and they can identify for example a vehicle that drove up to that corner at that time. And then going backwards they can rewind and basically tell where that vehicle came from, or they can go forward in time and say where the vehicle went. So for police or military investigating incidents like that, it can be a valuable tool in determining where suspects came from and went to. David reading this that felt like a show like csi realized where investigators are able to zoom in and follow something maybe not realtime but shortly thereafter. This has been implemented in a number of cities, in los angeles and baltimore roast recently. Talk about the way it has been received in baltimore where crime has been an issue for some time. Monte it was used on a shortterm trial basis in other cities, for example in Los Angeles County only for about nine days. Baltimore is the first city where it has been used on anything near a longterm basis. It was started in january and it has not been publicized. This has been a program that has not been debated publicly. The funding for this came from a private donor so there were no public funds expended so there were no public hearings held to debate the program. It has been done very quietly and baltimore since january. They took a couple of weeks off but for about eight months, this has been happening. The program has been, basically it has been in existence, in operation but out of the public eye. David how do you create a cover that captures the scope of that story . I asked rob vargas. Rob it is not what they see that from the same perspective so we had a couple of great aerial shots of baltimore. It is all about aerial surveillance, and from there it was about coming up with a good cover line. David talk about it. Rob this kind of surveillance is constant and originally it was not being done with peoples knowledge. I think one of the editors came up with a line, it is not spying, it is always watching. This is happening around the clock and that is not something that most people are used to hearing about. We just came up with a deck uncovering baltimores secret Security Program which has not been something in the public. David new roles may be taking the wind out of Renewable Energy projects, and making a red state blue, the shifting Political Landscape in georgia. David welcome back to bloomberg businessweek. I am david gura. You can listen to us on the radio on and 1130 in new york, and 1200 in boston. In the politics and policy section, stormy skies could be on the way for renewables. There has been so much enthusiasm from the Obama Administration about new solar and wind projects. Why havent they materialized to the degree i assume the administration would have wanted . Jennifer it came on public lands for the administration came and said, we wwant to make public land a great place to site wind. Many of these are still in the process of the developed. The Environmental Review process for these projects is a lengthy one. It can take 18 months to get through a required Environmental Review and permit could take a while to obtain. They still have to go through years of scrutiny. David the administration seems to be aware of this, and has proposed a way of cutting through that red tape. What do they propose . Jennifer the proposed rule is designed to speed up the process, the permitting process by basically frontloading a lot of the environmental analysis that developers end up having to undergo after they get a lease or rightofway to develop a project. The idea is that at the interior department, regulators would in concert with wind and Solar Developers, decide on prime real estate saying these are areas that have really strong wind or intense sunlight, but are also relatively free of environmental conflicts. They do not have a lot of danger that endangered animals running around or clear Environmental Issues that could create real problems down the road. The idea is to frontload that environmental work and then subject these projects to competitive leasing instead of the current process, which is a firstcome firstserved approach where developers are racing to get to the agencies. The tracks would be sold at a competitive lease sale, and auction much like the way oil and gas rights are sold on public land today. The federal government probably would see more money coming in. This is taxpayer land so that is something they are excited about, but it also means that these projects probably would be moving through the pipeline quicker. David you mentioned oil and gas drilling, something that has gone on for some time and you have a corpus of rules that center on that. When you look at regulations for wind and solar, is there an argument to be made that they have not caught up yet like to have for oil and gas . Jennifer for the bureau of land management, it is really with wind and solar working with an old regime. Wind and Solar Developers get now when they get a right to develop public land is a rightofway, a rightofway authorization, the kind of permit or authorization used for ditches or pipelines. By contrast, oil and Gas Developers are getting actual leases that have more firm rates that cannot be changed as frequently. The terms are more locked in. They have been working with an old regime and trying to adapt it for this 21st century energy, and this is evidence that the administration thinks that needs to be changed. David democrats have georgia on their minds. I spoke with Margaret Newkirk about whether it could go blue this november. The rumors of georgia turning blue have been going since 2008. What is the difference for democrats . Margaret they have been talking about this for a long time and it has not come true. The big difference this year is probably donald trump and the idea that he is losing some of his republican and galvanizing the democrats face without helping them much. They have also been working to reach out to the new minority voters they have been unable to turn into actual voters, the growing population. David bearing that in mind that this is about donald trump, how much confidence does it give democrats there would be a measurable effect . Is somebody else runs again they may have a shot of winning democratic votes again. Margaret political experts are still saying the real switch in georgia is going to be in 2020, and it remains to be seen whether this will accelerate it. They are opening offices all around the state for the first time in years trying to cement that in. They really want to win the Governors Office in 2018 so that they can have a veto on any redistricting map that comes out of republican legislature. But it remains to be seen. The general consensus is that 2020 is the magic year. David what would a democrat learned from that race, the fact that she did not win . Margaret i have heard to things and one is that she did not get enough white vote but the other is they are still having this problem turning out the population, that they are trying to reach this new demographic shift that they think will put them in power. I talked to one legislator. She had 1040 Asian American voters and only 10 voted. Those are bad turnout numbers. David up next, blockchain technology. Enthusiasts say it could destroy our corporate hierarchies. Nasa is using technology that is so old you would not even want it in your cell phone. David welcome back to bloomberg businessweek. Im david gura. We take a deep dive into the Technology Behind it point. Bitcoin. At the risk of embarrassing myself, what is blockchain . Peter it is a chain of blocks. David now i do feel embarrassed. Peter each block is a bunch of data recording other data and it sits out there in the ether, not just on one person server. It exists in mirror image all across the internet so it is secure by the very fact that it is shared. There is nobody in control who can mess with the digit and change them around. It is also cryptography, guarantees it cannot be easily modified. You have to really put a lot of effort into securing this stuff so the idea is that it creates trust. If something exists on a blockchain, as i said in the article, it is true with a capital t. David this is the skeleton around which bitcoin is built. Peter bitcoin is fascinating by itself but i think what is more fascinating is the technology underlying it, blockchain. It has more uses than just a Digital Currency and i would argue it could even be the beginning of sort of the disintegration of the corporation as we know it. David spell that out for us because what you described is a very egalitarian sounding system. If there are any number of companies, investors lining up to harvest this technology, how do you square that . Peter because there are various transition periods, you plug it into your existing business. It makes a bank run more efficiently because they can have a better idea of the reliability of their customers and they can do transactions other banks, in a reliable way. What im talking about is 10, 20 years down the line to a point where corporations start to not need to exist in the form they exist today. Right now, why does a company exist . This goes back to 1937. The theory is it is too hard to do transactions at an armslength basis, searching, contracting, and coordinating. He would rather do it in where you can use a command and control system. You have a boss who tells you, i want you on tv this time, this place, and you do it because you are getting paid versus printing in an outside person who has to be brought along, have to do a separate contract. What blockchain does is extend what the internet has already started to do, which is allow more transactions to be done in that armslength way in a very simple, low friction way. David why is the International Space station running on chips that are more than 30 years old . Ian king has that story. Ian you would assume anyone who watches science programs on tv or Science Fiction that there is something incredible going on here, that nasa has invested massive resources and this but in reality, not so much. Something that might have gone in your laptop in 1985 if you have a laptop is running that. David nothing less than a pentium 386 . Ian there was not even pentium. It was just a 386. David why is nasa still using technology that is decades old . Ian that is at the heart of the question that we addressed. Everybody with a laptop or smartphone once the leading edge, the best performance they can get and they will not tolerate a second delay. Nasa has a completely different set of priorities. This is a terrifying and difficult environment, the worst in the universe for human beings as well as electronics. Everything we send out has got to be rock solid. That procurement cycle, their attitude is completely different. Everything is built around safety and nothing can go wrong. David safety and reliability, you mentioned the roughness of the universe on the space station. What are the challenges that nasa faces . Ian the primary one is radiation. It is basically creating Small Nuclear reactions in the cells of your skin. Arguably for semiconductors, it is even worse. That is micro electronic switches that thrive on changing very small voltages to represent ones and zeros. If you bombard them by radiation, it effectively reduces their properties and it breaks down the materials. It gives them their ability to count and record data. David nazi gravediggers, world war ii memorabilia is getting more expensive. Why collectors are going right to the source. Why wine collectors are seeing red. David welcome to bloomberg businessweek. The rise of something known as relic tourism and voice control, how companies are trying to get you to talk to your phone. The former ceo of Weight Watchers has a new venture. All of that ahead on bloomberg businessweek. David we are here with the editor in chief of bloomberg businessweek, ellen powell. In the Small Business section, essentially food halls popping up in london. What are they doing . Ellen it is a Company Called london union that is about 18 months old. They are setting up kind of like food trucks but they are food halls. In new york we have smorgasbord but in other parts of the world there are other kinds of market. Theyent his no food have a twist, they are open at night so what kind of has a party like atmosphere. You can try out pizza, try out crusty duck with cheese. David what do these pieces look spaces look like . The margins are good. They are kind of spartanly appointed. What do they look like . Ellen empty warehouses. They are kind of like barebones. The first one i think was founded in east london and was called dalston yard. They got an old warehouse and they brought in food stalls. It is sort of like a fair, kind of. David in the features section, an amazing piece about a guy who set up a wine shop in the bay area and a website, and began to attract a lot of attention for the prices he was charging. Before we get into what he ended up doing, how did he become so successful . Ellen he was offering prearrival wine so you can buy it before it was shipped. And often he would let you store it in his warehouses for free, and the prices were always good , and so he attracted people who were actually collecting expensive wine. And they would buy ahead of time and what they slowly started finding was that the deliveries were slower and slower. Eventually, it turned out that he was not really buying all the wine he said he was, and he was filling orders as people want to wanted deliveries rather than prebuying. No one could really understand how his prices could be so low. They were low because he was not on the up and up. David ultimately this becomes a legal case. How did that happen . Ellen people were spending huge sums of money and at the end, customers were so angry that at david hundreds of thousands of dollars. Ellen yes. And at someone came into the one point shop and said to the salespeople, he owes me wine, i am taking this now, you call the police. David no one called, right . Ellen no one called. David another piece that is extraordinary is about a group of volunteers in latvia who roamed the countryside exhuming bodies of people who died in world war ii and reburying them. Talk about what they are up to and the attention they face from attention he from people face collecting world war ii memorabilia. Ellen a lot of german soldi