Welcome to Maxis Prerata, where we take just 10 minutes to get you smarter on the collision of tech, business, and politics.

I'm Jeff Bramack.

On today's show, a big battle over abandoned mergers and robot dogs joined the fight against COVID-19.

But first, America's growing unemployment mess.

So this morning, the U.S. Labor Department reported that

another 4.4 million Americans filed for unemployment benefits. 4.4 million. And for context,

that's almost the equivalent of every single person who works in New York City losing their

job. Now, overall, this means that more than 26 million Americans have filed jobless

claims since the pandemic began.

More than wiping out all the job gains, not just during President Trump's time in office,

but since the entire country emerged from the financial crisis.

The biggest surges last week were in California, Florida, Texas, and Georgia.

But this really isn't regional, and not even trillions of dollars in stimulus seem able to stem the losses.

Now, some have pointed to China as a beacon of hope in terms of some of its job rebounds as

it's reopened its economy. But as Axios as Dionne-Ruboen reports this morning, the Chinese and

U.S. job markets are very different, particularly given our reliance on service sector jobs

that are dependent on U.S.

consumers buying again and often doing so in person. Plus, China's lockdown was much more

geographically isolated, whereas ours is nearly nationwide. The bottom line, this is very, very

bad and likely to get worse before it gets better. So let's go deeper now with Jim Tankersley,

an economics and tax policy reporter

with the New York Times. So Jim, let's just start big picture here. You see this morning's jobless

...