Not taxing the rich, GameStop’s pivot, internet outage explainer

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Here’s what you need to know

Joe Biden begins his first overseas trip. The US president and first lady Jill Biden will land in the UK later today, and will meet this week with prime minister Boris Johnson, G7 leaders, and the queen.

The World Bank raised its global growth forecast to 5.6% in 2021. Recovery in China and the US drove the rosier prediction, but unequal access to vaccines will hold back the developing world. Despite India’s brutal second wave, the World Bank now pegs the country’s growth at 8.3% this year.

The US Senate passed a $250 billion bill to counter China. A quarter of the money will go toward funding semiconductor advancements, while the remainder will broadly shore up US tech innovation and secure supply chains.

The richest Americans rarely pay federal income tax. A ProPublica investigation found billionaires like Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett, and Elon Musk take advantage of the tax code to contribute little to none of their personal earnings.

A US casino giant faces a $12 billion lawsuit in Macau. Las Vegas Sands allegedly breached its contract with former partner Asian American Entertainment Corporation for a casino license, which is soon set to expire.

Nigerians took legal action over the government’s Twitter ban. Rights groups and citizens approached a community court set up under a regional economic bloc to seek an interim injunction.

Cinderella must go to the ball. Andrew Lloyd Webber plans to open his West End theaters with previews of the musical, and is willing to risk arrest if the UK government delays the full reopening set for June 21.

Tesla’s China deliveries are growing again. After a lackluster April, the company’s shipments increased 29% in May, but a spate of bad publicity could still slow retail sales.

What to watch for

GameStop’s meme-fueled rise faces another test today as the company behind the fanfare reports its quarterly earnings. Infused with an enormous amount of capital, and under the gaze of a skeptical world, the company will try to prove it’s worth its bizarre $300 stock price.

Ye olde brick-and-mortar video game shoppe is trying to get with the times—and fast. It’s betting big on a new thing called e-commerce, funding its pivot with recent stock offerings that netted $551 million.

But GameStop has been reluctant to cash in on its newfound success, issuing only 3.5 million new shares of stock while fellow meme craze AMC Entertainment has issued more than 100 million new shares since the trading frenzy began in January. That’s seen the movie theater chain surpass GameStop in market capitalization while, somehow, its stock price continues to rise.

The memelords have delivered GameStop to glory. Can it seize the day?

Charting quick-service dining in India

Quick-service restaurants (QSR) are proving to be pandemic-proof in India, where takeaway is quickly gaining more acceptance. This is good news for companies like Devyani International, the biggest Indian franchise of US-based fast-food conglomerate Yum! Brands. It’s IPO hasn’t even been approved yet, but it’s already being heralded as a success.

After all, Devyani International is hitting the market at a time when Indian share indices are close to their lifetime highs, and other QSRs like Burger King India have had big IPO successes in recent months. While KFC and Pizza Hut stores have made up a big slice of Devyani International’s revenue, the company has said that there’s still a chance Covid-19 could end up eating away at its profits in the future.

Breaking: The Internet

Large parts of the internet—including Quartz!—collapsed on Tuesday when servers belonging to a cloud computing service provider named Fastly went down for more than half an hour. Fastly and other similar companies perform a crucial service: offering users just-cached versions of web pages from a server close to them, instead of forcing them to wait (milliseconds) longer to access the originals of these pages stored on servers much further away.

We used that 30 minutes to brush up on our internet outage knowledge. Here’s a quick lexicon:

Error 503: The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) code issued by a server when it can’t handle a request made by a user because it is down or overloaded.

Varnish cache: A proxy server that helps users access HTTP websites faster. Varnish is the web-acceleration software that Fastly is built on.

Guru meditation: Fastly’s tongue-in-cheek twist on “guru meditation,” an error message popularized by a 1980s computer company called Amiga. Its “Joyboard” was a foot-controlled joystick. When the system crashed, Amiga engineers would relieve their frustrations by sitting cross-legged on the Joyboard, trying to be as still and balanced as a yogic guru.

Is it too risky to rely on just a few providers for our digital access? Not necessarily. Their companies’ servers are spread out around the world, which diversifies the ecosystem rather than concentrates it. And these kinds of outages are relatively rare. When they happen, they don’t last long. In fact, if you think about it, it’s sort of astonishing that the internet stays up as much as it does.

✦ If you found yourself panicking about Quartz’s brief disappearance, it might be time to consider a membership. Try it for free and access all of our journalism, workshops, emails, and more—as long as the internet’s working.

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(Psst.☝️ We took the last story out from behind our paywall to make sure you don’t miss it.)

Surprising discoveries

Anyone could have edited The Verge during the Fastly outage. The news site swapped in a Google doc for its homepage but forgot to change the permissions.

A woman got back the wallet she lost in 1975. The contents included a Grateful Dead concert ticket, poetry, and forgotten snapshots.

An award-winning landmine-sniffing rat is retiring. Magawa helped clear more than 225,000 square meters (55 acres) of land in Cambodia during his five-year career.

Australia has a new largest dinosaur. The recently discovered species, nicknamed “the southern titan,” would have been 6.5 m (21 ft) tall and 30 m (98 ft) long.

A Miami Beach condo is the most expensive home bought with cryptocurrency. How many pizzas could you buy with that $22.5 million?

Our best wishes for a productive day. Please send any news, comments, 46-year-old concert tickets, and suggested edits to Quartz’s homepage to hi@qz.com. Get the most out of Quartz by downloading our iOS app and becoming a member. Today’s Daily Brief was brought to you by Sumnima Lama, Tripti Lahiri, Niharika Sharma, Annabelle Timsit, Samanth Subramanian, Scott Nover, Susan Howson, and Liz Webber.