Monday, May 02, 2022

News: May 2

Airbnb's unmatched WFH policy? . Airbnb just announced that its approximately 6,000 employees can work remotely from any location — without taking a pay cut. ...... It's also hoping that its new policy will start a trend of so-called digital nomads being able to work from any of its long-term rental properties across the world. .



Northern Data's Bitcoin Mining Fleet Adds 21,000 ASIC Rigs, Firm Holds $168M in Crypto Assets The newly added machines increased the company’s hashrate from 2 exahash per second in February to 3.95 EH/s by the end of March.



Twitter really isn’t the digital town square, but it might as well be the newsroom coffee counter Just 23 percent of American adults use Twitter, far below the 81 percent on YouTube, the 69 percent on Facebook or even the 31 percent on Pinterest and the 28 percent on LinkedIn. ........ realize how Twitter could also empower distributed abuse), its self-promotional possibilities (which can turn self-destructive when editors fall for bad-faith campaigns to attack journalists who fail to perform like story-sharing automatons on Twitter), and for the way its brevity allows us the chance to pretend we’re headline writers for New York tabloid newspapers. ........ it’s become a valuable online substitute for the work chit-chat that once took place at a newsroom coffee counter–or, after work, at a nearby bar. ......



The Countdown Memorandum Doubling down on the future of American industry ......... The most successful technology companies of our time—Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Apple—have all been around for decades, and this is not a result of the personal computing or internet revolution alone. ....... Rather than participate in individual technological revolutions, generation-defining businesses instead leverage evolutionary thinking to grow over decades and transcend multiple revolutions. Evolutions entail lasting but accelerating change. ....... the audacity and intention to monopolize an industry; the willingness to continually reinvest profits into research and development; the open-mindedness necessary to undergo self-reinvention in response to changing technological and societal tailwinds; and an incisive vision, birthed from strong leadership and a powerful culture. ........ Two years prior to the launch of the iPhone, Apple was primarily a personal computer company. Apple was also barely one of the 100 most valuable companies in the world. As an example of self-reinvention, it is now worth well over thirty times more just fifteen years later, with personal computers (i.e., Macs) now being the least revenue-generating vertical of its core business. Almost every product Apple has launched in these fifteen years has since become a category-defining piece of hardware that exerts monopolistic market pressure, from the iPad to the Apple Watch to AirPods. ........... Apple has only been able to rapidly develop these product lines off of the decades of physical, technological, and cultural infrastructure it had already established, thanks to its evolutionary thinking. Each new product was developed with the wisdom gained from previous ones. .......... Leveraging these ideas will accelerate progress in both yet-to-be-disrupted multi-trillion dollar physical industries like construction and energy and ones already undergoing so-called revolutions, like aerospace, defense, cybersecurity, and manufacturing. .

Alex Milligan: Bootstrapping