2K (HD) or 4K (UHD): Which to Buy?

2K or 4K? The salesperson is going to tell you 4K. The salesperson is wrong!

Here’s why:

• If the screen is smaller than 55” you just won’t see the difference. (You’re probably OK under 65” too.)
• There is almost no 4K content to watch, and what is available isn’t worth it.
• No major sports league (or network) has committed to 4K production.
• Your cable set-top box cannot handle 4K, nor will it ever.
• Your Internet Service Provider probably cannot provide you with enough bandwidth to watch 4K over-the-top (OTT) without increasing your monthly fees. You need a minimum of 25 Mbps down.
• By the time there is enough 4K content to get your attention, the set you buy today will need to be replaced.
• Amazing 2K sets are super cheap.

4K Is Getting Cheaper, but Not as Cheap as 2K

In order to find a raison d’être, the biggest TV manufacturers are all focusing their energies on Ultra-HD (“UHD” or “4K”) sets. This is awesome! Except that very few consumers have a reason to purchase one. There’s almost nothing to watch in 4K. This year, 4K sets will be bigger, thinner, and cheaper – prices are in a free-fall, with several good choices below the $1,000 threshold. Samsung leads in the United States, as its TV sales hit $1 billion monthly this past October. The company delivers over half of all UHD sets in North America. But Samsung is also the leader in 2K sets – and as cheap as 4K sets are, 2K sets are even cheaper – and close to 100 percent of the content you care about is available in 2K.

Picture Quality

Sets under 55” really don’t benefit from 4K technology (some say you can’t really see a difference with sets under 65”). That said, the feature battle between manufacturers focuses on four key areas: pixel resolution, frame rate, color gamut, and dynamic range. Wide Color Gamut (WCG) specifies the total number of colors a screen can display. Many sets claim the feature, but there is no agreed-upon standard. High Dynamic Range (HDR) is a feature that, in layman’s terms, offers blacker blacks and whiter whites. There are competing standards for this specification as well. LG, which is investing $8.7 billion in a new plant, offers organic light-emitting diode (OLED) technology, which does feature an exceptional HDR image. Even so, for the foreseeable future, engineers and techs will argue about what HDR and WCG really mean.

Bandwidth

You can get into a videophile argument about SUHD (Samsung’s version of breathtaking picture quality) or Quantum Dots (a technology that gives other manufacturers a chance to make breathtaking pictures) or OLED or WCG or HDR or some other spec if you like. But the real story today (late December 2015) is super-simple. It doesn’t matter what the set can display if the content you like to watch isn’t available in that format – and today, unfortunately, delivery of 4K content requires more bandwidth than is available in 80 percent of US households. Most industry professionals suggest you need 30 Mbps down to enjoy 4K content; Netflix recommends 25 Mbps for its customers.

Earlier this year, I moderated a panel at an LG OLED event that featured some 4K luminaries including Matt Lloyd, the cinematographer for Daredevil. He brought along some 4K clips from the show. This was a video experience that could not be consumed anywhere else. The pictures were beautifully shot. Dark. Ominous. Truly amazing. The black levels of OLED combined with the color space created a premium experience that is only available on a 4K OLED television screen OTT from Netflix via a fast (25 Mbps or higher) broadband connection. You can’t experience this kind of video quality on a 2K screen or in a movie theater. But, to be clear, 80 percent of American households can’t experience it at all. Blu-ray discs are supposed to make a minor comeback in 2016 with 4K capabilities. I’m sure you can’t wait to purchase another collection of physical media – oh, wait, yes you can.

What to Buy?

If I were going to take advantage of the post-holiday, pre–Super Bowl sales going on now, I’d get the biggest 2K set with the fastest refresh rate I could afford. Videophiles and self-described tech experts may disagree, but I’d much rather have a full-featured, very large, state-of-the-art 2K set than a smaller, practically useless 4K set.

There will be a time for 4K. In practice, the industry will end-of-life 2K sets fairly soon (all 4K sets can play 2K content). 4K content will eventually become available, and one day the NFL will produce and broadcast games in 4K (or will they skip straight to 8K or VR or something else entirely?). Until then, go get yourself a really big, all-singing, all-dancing 2K set and enjoy it. It will last you quite a while.

Humans Are Slamming Into Driverless Cars and Exposing a Key Flaw (BusinessWeek)

The self-driving car, that cutting-edge creation that’s supposed to lead to a world without accidents, is achieving the exact opposite right now: The vehicles have racked up a crash rate double that of those with human drivers.

The glitch?

They obey the law all the time, as in, without exception. This may sound like the right way to program a robot to drive a car, but good luck trying to merge onto a chaotic, jam-packed highway with traffic flying along well above the speed limit. It tends not to work out well. As the accidents have piled up -- all minor scrape-ups for now -- the arguments among programmers at places like Google Inc. and Carnegie Mellon University are heating up: Should they teach the cars how to commit infractions from time to time to stay out of trouble?

“It’s a constant debate inside our group,” said Raj Rajkumar, co-director of the General Motors-Carnegie Mellon Autonomous Driving Collaborative Research Lab in Pittsburgh. 

“And we have basically decided to stick to the speed limit. But when you go out and drive the speed limit on the highway, pretty much everybody on the road is just zipping past you. And I would be one of those people.”

Last year, Rajkumar offered test drives to members of Congress in his lab’s self-driving Cadillac SRX sport utility vehicle. The Caddy performed perfectly, except when it had to merge onto I-395 South and swing across three lanes of traffic in 150 yards (137 meters) to head toward the Pentagon. The car’s cameras and laser sensors detected traffic in a 360-degree view but didn’t know how to trust that drivers would make room in the ceaseless flow, so the human minder had to take control to complete the maneuver.

“We end up being cautious,” Rajkumar said. “We don’t want to get into an accident because that would be front-page news. People expect more of autonomous cars.”

Not at Fault

Turns out, though, their accident rates are twice as high as for regular cars, according to a study by the University of Michigan’s Transportation Research Institute in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Driverless vehicles have never been at fault, the study found: They’re usually hit from behind in slow-speed crashes by inattentive or aggressive humans unaccustomed to machine motorists that always follow the rules and proceed with caution.

“It’s a dilemma that needs to be addressed,” Rajkumar said.

It’s similar to the thorny ethical issues driverless car creators are wrestling with over how to program them to make life-or-death decisions in an accident. For example, should an autonomous vehicle sacrifice its occupant by swerving off a cliff to avoid killing a school bus full of children?

California is urging caution in the deployment of driverless cars. It published proposed rules this week that would require a human always to be ready to take the wheel and also compel companies creating the cars to file monthly reports on their behavior. Google -- which developed a model with no steering wheel or gas pedal -- said it is “gravely disappointed” in the proposed rules, which could set the standard for autonomous-car regulations nationwide.

Fast Track

Google is on a fast track. It plans to make its self-driving-cars unit a stand-alone business next year and eventually offer a ride-for-hire service, according to a person briefed on the company’s strategy.

Google cars have been in 17 minor crashes in 2 million miles (3.2 million kilometers) of testing and account for most of the reported accidents, according to the Michigan study. That’s partly because the company is testing mainly in California, where accidents involving driverless cars must be reported.

The most recent reported incident was Nov. 2 in Mountain View, California, Google’s headquarters, when a self-driving Google Lexus SUV attempted to turn right on a red light. It came to a full stop, activated its turn signal and began creeping slowly into the intersection to get a better look, according to a report the company posted online. Another car stopped behind it and also began rolling forward, rear-ending the SUV at 4 mph. There were no injuries and only minor damage to both vehicles.

Robot-Car Stop

Ten days later, a Mountain View motorcycle cop noticed traffic stacking up behind a Google car going 24 miles an hour in a busy 35 mph zone. He zoomed over and became the first officer to stop a robot car. He didn’t issue a ticket -- who would he give it to? -- but he warned the two engineers on board about creating a hazard.

“The right thing would have been for this car to pull over, let the traffic go and then pull back on the roadway,” said Sergeant Saul Jaeger, head of the police department’s traffic-enforcement unit. “I like it when people err on the side of caution. But can something be too cautious? Yeah.”

While Google rejects the notion that its careful cars cause crashes, “we err on the conservative side,” said Dmitri Dolgov, principal engineer of the program. “They’re a little bit like a cautious student driver or a grandma.”

More Aggressive

Google is working to make the vehicles more “aggressive” like humans -- law-abiding, safe humans -- so they “can naturally fit into the traffic flow, and other people understand what we’re doing and why we’re doing it,” Dolgov said. “Driving is a social game.”

Google has already programmed its cars to behave in more familiar ways, such as inching forward at a four-way stop to signal they’re going next. But autonomous models still surprise human drivers with their quick reflexes, coming to an abrupt halt, for example, when they sense a pedestrian near the edge of a sidewalk who might step into traffic.

“These vehicles are either stopping in a situation or slowing down when a human driver might not,” said Brandon Schoettle, co-author of the Michigan study. “They’re a little faster to react, taking drivers behind them off guard.”

That could account for the prevalence of slow-speed, rear-end crashes, he added.

Behave Differently

“They do behave differently,” said Egil Juliussen, senior director at consultant IHS Technology and author of a study on how Google leads development of autonomous technology. “It’s a problem that I’m sure Google is working on, but how to solve it is not clear.”

One approach is to teach the vehicles when it’s OK to break the rules, such as crossing a double yellow line to avoid a bicyclist or road workers.

“It’s a sticky area,” Schoettle said. “If you program them to not follow the law, how much do you let them break the law?”

Initially, crashes may rise as more robot autos share the road, but injuries should diminish because most accidents will be minor, Schoettle said.

“There’s a learning curve for everybody,” said Jaeger, of the Mountain View Police, which interacts more with driverless cars than any other law-enforcement unit. “Computers are learning, the programmers are learning and the people are learning to get used to these things.”

What's Zuckerberg Worth Without 99% of His Fortune? (BusinessWeek)

In an open letter to their newborn daughter Maxima, Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan have shared plans to donate 99 percent of Zuckerberg's Facebook shares over the course of his life. With a current value of $45 billion, it's setting new philanthropy standards. 

Not only is Zuckerberg young to be taking on such an effort, but he's also organizing his effort in a new way. The shares will flow to the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, which is structured as a limited liability corporation. That means it can do more than donate charitable causes. It can invest in for-profit businesses, lobby, and make political donations.

Facebook has assured investors that Zuckerberg won't give more than $1 billion annually for at least the next three years, so he'll control the social network for the forseeable future. And even when his shares are transferred, he won't be poor. One percent of his shares -- what he plans to keep -- are currently worth about $450 million. And that doesn't include the cash and real estate.

Here's How Much the U.S. Middle Class Has Changed in 45 Years (BusinessWeek)

They're now outnumbered by the richest and poorest

U.S. Middle Class No Longer the Majority

In the age of rising income inequality, the task of preserving America’s middle class has been taken on by politicians across the ideological spectrum. A new report from Pew Research Center shows just how much the economic fortunes of this group have changed since the 1970s. 

In every decade since then, the percentage of adults living in middle-income households has fallen, according to Pew, which is based in Washington. The share now stands at 50 percent, compared with 61 percent in 1971.

This matters because  the "state of the American middle class is at the heart of the economic platforms of many presidential candidates ahead of the 2016 election," Pew researchers Rakesh Kochhar and Richard Fry wrote in their report. Meanwhile "a flurry of new research points to the potential of a larger middle class to provide the economic boost sought by many advanced economies."

Pew defines a middle-class household as one having income that is two-thirds to double that of the overall median household income. A family of three, for instance, would need to have a minimum income of $41,869 to qualify as middle-income.

Here’s more data on how America’s middle class has morphed over the last few decades: 

They're no longer the majority

Being a member of the middle-class has long been treated as an American badge of honor. However middle-income households have lost their majority status in the U.S, with the size of their counterparts on opposite ends of the income spectrum overtaking them in number.

Some 120.8 million adult Americans lived in middle-class households this year, according to Pew. That’s slightly less than the combined number of upper-income adults (51 million) and those at the lower tier (70.3 million).

Their income gains are smaller

While households across the spectrum have seen higher earnings over the past several decades, upper-income households have seen their pay rise the most.

The median income of those families was $174,625 in 2014, up 47 percent since 1970, Pew data show. That compares with a 34 percent gain for the middle class and a 28 percent increase for the poorest households.

Households of all income levels got hit hard during the recession, resulting in earnings declines between 2000 and 2014.

Blacks are least likely to be middle-income

Blacks are less likely to be part of the middle class than any other racial or ethnic group, the Pew report finds. Some 45 percent of black adults were in the middle-income tier, down 1 percentage point from 1971.

One positive note is that blacks are the only major racial group to see a decline over that time frame in their share of adults who are low-income, which is down to 43 percent from 48 percent. Still, that percentage is the highest of the ethnic groups, alongside Hispanics.

White Americans are the only racial group where a majority is in the middle class, though their share fell to 52 percent this year from 63 percent in 1971.

Their piece of the pie is shrinking

The middle class holds 43 percent of U.S. aggregate income, the smallest share in Pew’s data back to 1970.

Almost half of aggregate earnings in the U.S. is now commanded by the wealthiest families, who are "are on the verge of holding more in total income than all other households combined," Kochhar and Fry wrote. "This shift is partly because upper-income households constitute a rising share of the population and partly because their incomes are increasing more rapidly than those of other tiers."

Yahoo's Mayer Bets Impatient Investors Will Give Her More Time

• Starboard Value waits in wings with possible proxy fight
• Board offers support but there's no guarantee her job is safe

Now Marissa Mayer is really testing investors’ patience.

After watching her spend three years struggling to turn around Yahoo! Inc., Wall Street woke up on Wednesday to learn that Mayer was abandoning a long-anticipated plan to sell a $30 billion stake in Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. Though the decision was made to avoid a potentially large tax hit, Mayer said the new strategy would take more than a year to get done -- meaning more distraction for a management team struggling to catch up with Google and Facebook.

“It’s a tough company to turn around,” said Colin Gillis, an analyst with BGC Partners. “But flip-flopping on plans last-minute certainly is not going to endear this management team to certain shareholders.”

The board has expressed support for the CEO, and Mayer says she’s committed to Yahoo. Even so, there’s no guarantee she’ll survive the year. Starboard Value, the hedge fund that pushed Mayer to reverse the Alibaba plan, didn’t get everything it wanted and will almost certainly step up pressure for a sale of the main search and display advertising businesses. Yahoo’s battered stock, already down almost a third this year, fell as much as 4.9 percent on Wednesday.

Starboard, which in recent weeks has threatened to mount a proxy fight for board control, declined to comment.

Multiple Strategies

No one says Mayer had an easy task when she was poached from Google to turn around Yahoo in 2012. The pioneering Web company had veered from one strategy to another. One year it was a media company; the next a Google wannabe.

Mayer set to work improving Yahoo’s e-mail and media products as well as the mobile experience. She landed high-profile hires, closed big-name acquisitions and focused the company on more cutting-edge technologies. Analysts credit Mayer for improving Yahoo’s mobile, video and social offerings but say these new growth drivers aren’t offsetting declines in the legacy desktop business.

In an interview, Mayer acknowledged her job was far from done, but said the company has made progress.

“We built ourselves a future,” she said. “My deep belief in the company and where it should be in the world is what keeps me going. And I’m absolutely very committed.”

‘Crazy Week’

Yahoo Chairman Maynard Webb, a former EBay Inc. executive, said the board remains committed to the management team.

“I have never worked with anybody -- and I’ve worked with a lot of superstars -- that’s more committed, that works harder,” he said in an interview. “We went through a crazy week of preparation for our board meeting -- over Thanksgiving -- and she worked night and day.”

But Mayer may be trying to do the impossible. Yahoo’s share of U.S. digital advertising spending is forecast to fall to 3.5 percent in 2017, from 11.5 percent in 2009, according to EMarketer Inc. Revenue peaked at $5.4 billion in 2008, and is projected to slip 8 percent this year to $4.04 billion, minus revenue passed on to partner sites.

As a result, Yahoo may not be viable as a standalone company. Already, Verizon has expressed interest in possibly acquiring Yahoo. And it won’t be the only one.

“I think we’re reaching the end-game in Yahoo,” said Aswath Damodaran, a finance professor at New York University. “Mayer needs to start thinking about her future. What happens with Mayer is in her hands.”

Porsche Is Building a Tesla Competitor (BusinessWeek)

• Board approves production of battery-powered sports car
• First purely electric Porsche to come out at end of decade

Porsche committed to making its first all-electric vehicle, taking on Tesla Motors Inc. with a model that’s set to accelerate faster than the German company’s 911 sports car and recharge in 15 minutes.

Porsche green-lighted a 1 billion-euro ($1.09 billion) project to produce the battery-powered sports car, which will be manufactured near division headquarters in Stuttgart and create 1,000 jobs, the Volkswagen AG unit said Friday in a statement. The model, based on the low-slung Mission E concept unveiled in September at the Frankfurt auto show, will enter showrooms at the end of the decade, it said.

“With Mission E, we are making a clear statement about the future of the brand,” Chairman Wolfgang Porsche said in the statement. “Even in a greatly changing motoring world, Porsche will maintain its front-row position with this fascinating sports car.”

The step is part of efforts by Volkswagen, Europe’s largest automaker, to move beyond a scandal over rigged car-emissions tests. Chief Executive Officer Matthias Mueller, who ran Porsche until late September, has vowed to accelerate and widen development of electric cars amid a reorganization that delegates more decision-making to the Volkswagen group’s brands and regional units.

While global sales of all-electric vehicles have yet to take off, manufacturers are positioning themselves for any growth in demand stemming from tighter environmental rules. Tesla CEO Elon Musk said in a presentation at a Paris conference on climate change this week that regulators need to take action to discourage carbon emissions.

Porsche caused a stir at the Frankfurt show with the four-seat Mission E electric sports-car concept, whose acceleration to 100 kilometers (62 miles) per hour in less than 3.5 seconds beats the 911’s 4.2 seconds to reach that speed. The new electric vehicle will complement a lineup comprising the 911, the smaller Cayman sports car, the Boxster roadster, the four-door Panamera coupe and the Cayenne and Macan sport utility vehicles. Porsche’s high-performance 918 Spyder, a plug-in hybrid supercar, has been sold out as production was limited to safeguard exclusivity.

The division is set to sell more than 200,000 vehicles for the first time this year, driven by demand for the $52,600 compact Macan. Palo Alto, California-based Tesla, maker of the battery-powered Model S sedan and Model X SUV, is targeting 50,000 to 55,000 deliveries in 2015.

The 600-horsepower Mission E will be designed to drive more than 500 kilometers before needing a recharge, Porsche said. The battery can reach 80 percent of capacity in about 15 minutes, about half the time needed to recharge Tesla’s Model S, which has a version capable of traveling as far as 528 kilometers.

Apple Puts Live TV Service ‘On Hold’, CBS CEO Moonves Says

• Network chief sees `skinny bundle' gaining favor with viewers
• Tech giant is expected to move ahead with television efforts

Apple Inc. has pressed pause on its planned live TV service, CBS Corp. Chief Executive Officer Les Moonves said Tuesday.

“They’ve had conversations on it and I think they pressed the hold button,” Moonves said at the Business Insider Ignition conference in New York. “They were looking for a service.”

The service, which would be delivered via the Internet, was viewed as an alternative to a traditional cable or satellite package. Cupertino, California-based Apple has been in discussions with broadcasters for months.

Apple is one of several companies seeking to offer an alternative to the traditional TV bundle that costs the average U.S. household about $85 a month. Dish Network Corp. this year introduced Sling TV, a $20 package of two-dozen channels. Verizon Communications Inc. has also begun offering a so-called skinny bundle, where customers can choose from among a menu of channels.

Tom Neumayr, a spokesman for Apple, didn’t immediately return a call seeking comment. Apple in August pushed back plans to introduce the service to 2016 from this year, Bloomberg reported at the time.

Moonves, who leads the most-watched U.S. TV network, expects skinny bundles to gain in popularity and detailed the type of service Apple envisions.

“This will happen,” he said. “It has four major networks and 10 cable networks, let’s say, and the price point will be in the $30s, $30 to $35, $40 maybe. People will not be spending money on channels they don’t want to watch."

English Edition of the Enrique V Iglesias Book

Google will send you to accelerated pages on mobile starting next year

Google noted in a blog post that its Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) project, aimed at hosting and delivering fast-loading content to mobile devices from numerous publishers, is set to debut for users early next year.

The company said that in the six weeks since its announcement, more than 4,500 developers have begun following the open-source AMP project on GitHub. The code repository has also seen 250 pull requests in this time, along with user-driven discussions about new features.

In addition, the company announced today that ad networks Outbrain, AOL, OpenX, DoubleClick and AdSense have signed on to develop ads in line with Google’s new framework.

To recap, AMP is a new framework focused on building lightweight pages, which can optionally work in tandem with Google’s caching infrastructure around the globe to provide those pages much faster to mobile devices.

The project, which launched its technical preview in October, has already garnered support from major publishers like BBC, The Economist, BuzzFeed, The Guardian, Huffington Post and Mashable. In one example, AMP cut The New York Times’ load time from three seconds to less than 500 milliseconds.

The Next Web is part of Google’s Digital News Initiative and is actively building a lightweight AMP-enabled version of our site which will work with the launch in search results next year.

It's So Bad in Brazil That Olympians Will Have to Pay for Their Own AC (BusinessWeek)

• Hampered by economic crisis, Rio 2016 will cut $520 million
• Organizers say no changes to what broadcasters were promised

The Brazilian economic crisis has finally hit the 2016 Olympics. Following a new round of cost-cutting by the Rio 2016 organizers, athletes will be asked to pay for the air conditioning in their dorm rooms. Stadium backdrops will be stripped to their bare essentials. Fancy cars and gourmet food for VIPs are out.

"The goal here is to organize games without public funding and to organize games that make sense from an economic point of view," Rio 2016 spokesman Mario Andrada said in an interview.

That economic focus has changed radically in the six years since Rio was awarded the Games – South America’s first. At the time, Brazil’s government pledged $700 million toward any budgetary overrun. Then the economy tanked. Unemployment has soared, and the local currency, the real, has lost one-third of its value against the dollar in the last year.

Now, with costs that ran up to 2 billion reais ($520 million) over budget and the public commitment in doubt, the organizers must stick firmly to the 7.4 billion reais they expect to earn from sponsorships, ticket sales, and a grant from the International Olympic Committee. Final decisions on what to pare back and how much should be finalized by next week, Andrada said.

By the time the Games begin, the committee plans to have 500 fewer paid staff than the 5,000 it originally expected. The deepest cuts will probably come from operational areas like catering, transportation and cleaning services.

Shifting the cost for air conditioning and other amenities from the host city to each nation’s Olympic committee – or to the athletes themselves – is a big deal, said Nick Symmonds, a two-time Olympic runner.

“The world wants to tune in and watch the world’s greatest athletes compete at the absolute highest level," Symmonds said. "If you don’t provide them with good food, a good place to sleep and comfortable temperature, they won’t be able to recover and bring the A-plus product that the world is demanding. To cut the budget on athletes’ hospitality and comfort, that’s just going to cheapen the games.”

Andrada said air conditioning is an “absolute necessity” in some areas, though not bedrooms. The 17-day event, which kicks off on Aug. 5, takes place in Rio’s winter, and the average daytime temperature is in the mid-20s Celsius (mid-70s Farenheit). Some days are much hotter, though, with highs last August creeping into the mid-90s.

Others worry that the cuts will further underscore the chasm between athletes from wealthy countries and those from poorer ones. (Already some top athletes, including the NBA players who join the USA Basketball squad, choose luxury hotels over accommodations in the Olympic Village.) Those who can afford extra for air conditioning or who travel with laptops or iPads (the host committee has scrapped plans to provide TVs in individual bedrooms) will have it; others may not.

“Some people aren’t going to put up with it because they don’t have to, some will have to because perhaps there is no alternative,” said Rick Burton, the former marketing director for the U.S. Olympic Committee. “Is the IOC going to feel obligated to step in and raise the standards so that everyone is treated equally? Or is it going to be a statement, that this is the best this host country can do?”

An IOC spokeswoman called the adjustments in spending part of "a normal process" for Games organizers at this stage. "The IOC is working closely with the Rio team to make sure that it achieves its budgetary objectives while delivering great Games for all participants," she wrote in an e-mail.

For the hundreds of millions of people who watch the Olympics on television or online, all of the cost-cutting should be invisible. Organizers have assured broadcast partners that there will be no changes to what they were promised, and there are also no plans to scale down any of the competition specific infrastructure.

"As long as we don’t compromise the games, the quality of the competitions, the experience of the public; we have to look for efficiencies,” Andrada said. And while the process "hasn’t been painful so far, it will be painful from now on, because we need to finish the process."

Preparing Rio to become the first South American Olympic host has been bumpy. Massive public protests over the country’s spending priorities in 2013, ahead of last year’s soccer World Cup, jolted local politicians and Brazil President Dilma Rousseff’s government. That led to squabbling over who should pay what for the Olympics, which has a total price tag of almost 39 billion reais ($10.2 billion), and criticism from the IOC over delays at key projects.