Netizen: pakistan

Showing posts with label pakistan. Show all posts

Wednesday, November 27, 2024

Saturday, May 13, 2023

Monday, March 13, 2023

13: News Bulletin

The US Treasury, Federal Reserve, and the FDIC say all Silicon Valley Bank depositors will be “fully” protected, and their money will be available on March 13
HSBC plans to acquire Silicon Valley Bank UK for £1, citing “strategic sense for our business”; as of March 10, SVB UK had ~£5.5B loans and ~£6.7B deposits
Having perfected the art of using hype to move markets, VCs managed to hype their own rumors to collapse SVB, accidentally slaying a much loved accomplice
SVB draws support from 500+ VCs, including General Catalyst and Sequoia, while 5,000+ founders and CEOs sign a Y Combinator petition asking US Congress to act
Sources: long before its collapse, SVB remained technologically stagnant, including failing to integrate Stripe's tech and biometric authentication on mobile

CNN wins its first Oscar for Navalny, in the documentary feature film category, about Russian dissident Alexei Navalny and commissioned by CNN Films and HBO Max
New York shuts down Signature Bank as US regulators cite a “systemic risk exception” like for SVB, announcing all of Signature's depositors will be “made whole”
The closure of SVB, Silvergate, Silvergate Exchange Network, and Signature adds stress to a troubled crypto industry; fiat conversion costs may rise by 20%-40%
Signature closing means its real-time payment platform Signet can no longer serve crypto clients, a blow after SEN closed; BTC jumps ~7% and USDC regains peg
As AI explodes, humanity must accelerate its adaptation or reach a collective, enforceable decision to slow the development of these technologies

A YouTuber who went viral as a toddler says she resents her family for monetizing her childhood, as some influencer parents take their children off social media
Netflix wins six Oscars, including the Best International Feature Film for All Quiet on the Western Front and the Best Animated Feature Film for Pinocchio
A developer runs Meta's 13B LLaMA model, considered to be competitive with GPT-3, on his laptop, showing local language models are feasible on consumer hardware
Meta plans to block Canadians' ability to view or share written and broadcast news on Facebook and Instagram if the country passes its proposed Online News Act
A look at the unprecedented level of executive turnover at Apple, which lost 11 key people, most just below Senior Vice President, since the second half of 2022

Twitter is in decline and less stable under Elon Musk, echoing LiveJournal and Tumblr falling apart under new ownership that didn't understand their communities
Worried that cloud giants offer concentrated hacking targets, the US plans to regulate the security practices of Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Oracle, and others
An interview with Gowalla co-founder and CEO Josh Williams as he re-launches his location-based social networking app at SXSW, 14 years after its debut

The first 6 founder deep dives are live!

Intentionally have an even split of men and women

I'm sharing their stories, how they started and grew their companies, and lessons we can all learn from them

Each takes 20-25 hours of research and writing

Who should be next? pic.twitter.com/LaRWCAff9I
— Justin Gordon (@justingordon212) March 13, 2023

Definitely something we've thought about. Need a few more features like outbound wires, multi-user support etc.

Non-fractional reserve "banking" is definitely looking more attractive right now.

What are the key features you'd want?
— Brian Armstrong (@brian_armstrong) March 13, 2023

Our defence editor chooses seven good books on spying
— The Economist (@TheEconomist) January 26, 2023

Now that a bank run is avoided, we can finally get back to inflation destroying our economy.
— Douglas A. Boneparth (@dougboneparth) March 13, 2023

A lawsuit was filed against the father of Masha Moskaleva to restrict his parental rights & put her in an orphanage because she drew an anti-war picture in school & her father was arrested for making anti-war statements on social media.
Alexei Moskalev faces up to 3 years in jail pic.twitter.com/08TxZTUY3G
— Mikhail Khodorkovsky (English) (@mbk_center) March 13, 2023

Staffers of internet service provider companies work tangled bundles of overhead cables at Kalanki-Sitapaila section of the Ring Road on Sunday.

Photo by: @Sayami pic.twitter.com/EDvo9zbRuR
— The Kathmandu Post (@kathmandupost) March 13, 2023

I average 3,000 reps of calisthenics each morning. Yet each day: I emphasize something a little different. One day heavy on squats. Another heavy on push-ups. Another big on burpees. In this way? 1) Workouts are never boring. And 2) They keep your body guessing & growing. TRY IT.
— Jeff Sekerak (@jeffsekerak) March 13, 2023

Delaying hard decisions kill startups.

Feature not working? Sunlight it.

Employee not working out? Let em go.

Go to market not working? Fix it.

If something is not working please do what you know you have to do as a founder because you don't have forever.
— Andrew Gazdecki (@agazdecki) March 13, 2023

Too small to fail is the new too big to fail.
— Jeff Jarvis (@jeffjarvis) March 13, 2023

The Fed may or may not realize it but it has created a two-tier banking system:

1. Tier 1: Systemically Important Banks. These are the "too big to fail" biggest banks. If you have money there, it's a true deposit. You can't lose it.

2. Tier 2: Everyone Else. If you have money… https://t.co/RFTF9kjeUS
— David Sacks (@DavidSacks) March 12, 2023

Pairs well with our two tiered judicial system, our two tiered education system and our two tiered legal system.
— Shelby Varney 𝝅 (@nyxxiana) March 12, 2023

Saturday, November 29, 2014

Monday, October 13, 2014

Trade Agreements Bring Peace

English: Red (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

India and Pakistan, take heed.

Network Theory Reveals The Hidden Link Between Trade And Military Alliances That Leads to Conflict-Free Stability

There was a time when historians focused largely on events as the be all and end all of history. But in recent years, there has been a growing understanding that a complex network of links, alliances, trade agreements and so on play a hugely important role in creating an environment in which conflict (or peace) can spread. ..... “The pressure to economize on alliances conflicts with stability against the formation of new alliances, which leads to instability and would suggest chaotic dynamics,” they say. “This instability provides insights into the constantly shifting structures and recurring wars that occurred throughout the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries.” ...... Between 1820 and 1959, there were 10 times as many wars per year on average between each possible pair of countries than between 1960 and 2000 ..... it is the formation of trade links between countries that has created the stability that has prevented wars. ..... there has been a rapid increase in global trade since World War II, not least because of the advent of container shipping in the 1960s. ..... trade provides a reason to maintain an alliance .... these economic considerations reduce the incentive to attack another country since trade will be disrupted ......... a rich family of stable networks ...... the initiating event is a poor predictor of the eventual size of an epidemic, fashion or war.

Saturday, December 22, 2012

"I Am The Motherfucker Who Found The House. Sir."

I saw Zero Dark Thirty last night at a movie theater near Times Square. The inside CIA work was intriguing to watch, although I had already read about it. The actual operation I had sucked the details out of in the 2-3 days right after it happened. That is the power of Open Intel. It is a technical term. Publicly available information counts for a lot these days. I predicted this movie. They are going to make a movie out of this, I said. They did. And a good one too.

So I did not come out having learned details about the operation I did not know. I came out feeling the movie was a statement on gender. Islamists are the most rabidly sexist people on earth today, perhaps. It is poetic justice then that Osama Bin Laden, the ultimate Islamist, was felled by a woman. The CIA can go on and on about teamwork, but this work was out of the box thinking, and the woman does get immense credit. She found the needle in a haystack.

The CIA is a man's world. DC is a man's world. Still. The movie shows.

That is not to discount the role of the guys who actually carried out the operation. Job well done. The action beats action movies. Actually the guys who carried out the job came across as the least sexist of all guys in the movie. Excellent analyst meet excellent operatives. Good match.

I am on record at this blog - in 2007, also earlier - saying Bin Laden is not in a cave, he is in some big city. I was thinking Karachi. I was wrong. But he was not in a cave.

You also come out really admiring the people who run the US government. And by that I mean bureaucrats, faceless bureaucrats who run the machinery, people who get demonized by small government ideologues. There are a lot of very qualified professionals doing very good work in there.

But it has been wrong of the CIA to refuse this woman her well deserved promotion. Some day she should be CIA Director.

The Bin Laden Operation
Bin Laden: Dead
Bin Laden Was In A Huge House
Did Pakistan Know Where Bin Laden Was?
Where Is Bin Laden?
Barack Said In 2007 He Would Do This
What Obama Said On Pakistan

Acting C.I.A. Director Criticizes ‘Zero Dark Thirty’
Review: 'Zero Dark Thirty' is utterly gripping
Review: 'Zero Dark Thirty' is massive, meticulous
'Zero Dark Thirty' review: Jessica Chastain shines in nail-biting thriller