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. .

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Alex Milligan: Bootstrapping

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Friday, April 29, 2022

Elon Musk: Fragile White Male

Elon Musk is smart. Elon Musk is hardworking. Elon Musk is an iconic tech entrepreneur. But I don't think he is worth 300 billion dollars. The equity formula where a Satya Nadela takes a 200 billion dollar company from Steve Ballmer and turns it into a trillion dollar company, but Bill Gates gets to keep all the money is a sham.

I am for a wealth tax.

Elon Musk does not even own a house. He does not want to own a house. But let's be generous and give him a housing allowance of 10 million dollars. You can get a mansion for that kind of money in Texas. Texas is no Park Avenue. For food, and clothes, 10 and 10. Ticket to Mars, another 10. Miscellaneous, since my imagination fails me, 60, for a total of 100 million. And another 900 million so he may launch a foundation at some point.

Who needs more than a billion dollars to live on?

I understand you need voting rights. You don't want to end up in Jack Dorsey's position where Board members bully you around. But that is what forking is for. As soon as your net worth goes north of a billion, there is a hard fork. The stock splits into two. We The People get all the money, you keep all the voting power. That's what I am talking about.

I would like a better Twitter. Who doesn't? But I have this nagging feeling we could have taken clean drinking water to every human soul with a few billion donated to Charity: Water. Or a piece of legislation funded by the wealth tax. We could have ended homelessness for the full check. Too many veterans are homeless.

I can't believe Elon Musk spent 44 billion dollars just to be able to bring Donald Trump back on the platform. Where are your priorities, Elon?

If Elon Musk brings Donald Trump onto Twitter, Tesla shareholders should revolt!

That man Trump belongs in jail. Democracy gives you many rights, but it does not give you the right to engage in violent insurrection to bring down that very democracy. That is a no no. People go to war for liberty. Enforcing laws is a small thing to ask.

I think Elon Musk is very smart, very hardworking, very innovative, but also very white male. His being a white dude is not at all irrelevant to his success. I think that might be 90% of the mixture. He thinks it is more like 19%. That is why he spent about 19% of his big fortune to take over a platform to let the crazies out, to borrow a phrase from John McCain, the last of the Mohicans, or decent Republicans.

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Musk Reveals His Political Leanings, And It's Dangerous



Free Speech And Just Society
Should Elon Musk Be Owning All Of Twitter?
Marc Andreessen Is A Dud When It Comes To Politics
The Masses, Not Mars

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Thursday, April 28, 2022

Musk's Twitter



Elon Musk Got Twitter Because He Gets Twitter The man loves Twitter.

He tweets as if he had been raised by the blue bird and the fail whale.

.......... Musk, Time’s 2021 person of the year ........ So what is Twitter built to do? It’s built to gamify conversation. ........ it does that “by offering immediate, vivid and quantified evaluations of one’s conversational success. ........ these gamelike features are responsible for much of Twitter’s psychological wallop. Twitter is addictive, in part, because it feels so good to watch those numbers go up and up.” ........ games are pleasurable in part because they simplify the complexity of life. They render the rules clear, the score visible. ........ Twitter takes the rich, numerous and subtle values that we bring to communication and quantifies our success through follower counts, likes and retweets. Slowly, what Twitter rewards becomes what we do. ........ We become what the game wants us to be, or we lose. And that’s what’s happening to some of the most important people and industries and conversations on the planet right now. ........ Many of Twitter’s power users are political, media, entertainment and technology elites. They — we! — are particularly susceptible to a gamified discourse on the topics we obsess over. It’s hard to make political change. It’s hard to create great journalism. It’s hard to fill the ever-yawning need for validation. It’s hard to dent the arc of technological progress. Twitter offers the instant, constant simulation of doing exactly that. The feedback is immediate. The opportunities are infinite. ........ Twitter is a power drill, or at least it feels like one. ......... To log off is to miss much that matters, in industries where knowing what matters is essential. ......... It shapes real life by shaping what the media covers. ........ Attention is currency, and Twitter is the most important market for attention that there is. ......... There is a reason that Donald Trump, with his preternatural gift for making people look at him, was Twitter’s most natural and successful user. And he shows how the platform can shape the lives of those who never use it. From 2017 to 2021, the White House was occupied by what was, in effect, a Twitter account with a cardiovascular system, and the whole world bore the consequences. ........... He co-founded OpenAI, the most public-spirited of the big artificial intelligence shops. ....... Much of this has been built on the back of public subsidies, government contracts, loan guarantees and tax credits ....... He’s the best argument in the modern era that the government and the private sector can do together what neither can achieve apart. ........ A platform that heaps rewards on those who behave cruelly, or even just recklessly, is a dangerous thing. ......... Twitter rewards decent people for acting indecently. ......... “Bill Gates = boner killer” is a viral hit. The easiest way to rack up points is to worsen the discourse. ....... He’s proposed an edit button, an open-source algorithm, cracking down on bots and doing … something … to secure free speech. ....... Musk “will strive to keep Twitter the same level of bad, and in the same kinds of ways, as it always has been, because, to Musk, Twitter is not actually bad at all.” ......... Musk reveals what he wants Twitter to be by how he acts on it. You shall know him by his tweets. He wants it to be what it is, or even more anarchic than that. ......... What will it be like to work at Twitter when the boss is using his account to go to war with the Securities and Exchange Commission or fight a tax bill he dislikes? Unless Musk changes his behavior radically, and implausibly, I suspect his ownership will heighten Twitter’s contradictions to an unbearable level. What would follow isn’t the collapse of the platform but the right-sizing of its influence. ........... Musk is already Twitter’s ultimate player. Now he’s buying the arcade. Everything people love or hate about it will become his fault. Everything he does that people love or hate will be held against the platform. He will be Twitter. He will have won the game. And nothing loses its luster quite like a game that has been beaten. .

Musk’s Twitter: Weed Memes. Editable Tweets. And the Return of Trump. The honest answer when it comes to Musk — superhero to some, supervillain to others — is, “Who knows?” ....... Editable tweets? Very likely. Fewer spam bots? Maybe. Twitter’s comely San Francisco headquarters building as a homeless shelter? Doubtful. An end of 4/20 weed jokes? Hard no. The man just negotiated a complex financial transaction that began with a built-in marijuana wisecrack. ........... The soon-to-be social media honcho is inclined to lift the permanent tweeting ban imposed last year on Donald Trump. ....... He’d already made clear that he is sympathetic to the notion, long before this deal. ........ When Twitter finally did toss Trump off the platform in the aftermath of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol for inciting violence (after many years of Twitter turning the other cheek to a bevy of lesser violations), Musk took issue with the decision. ......... Make no mistake about how valuable Trump has been to Twitter, or how dependent the former president was on the platform to reach his base. It was the central font for his repeated lies, but also a testing ground for his thinking about matters of global significance, musings that other presidents have conducted in private. It’s hard to imagine Trumpism, as it’s understood today, without Twitter or Twitter without Trumpism, ban or no. ......... In a twist, Trump told Fox News on Monday that he would not return to Twitter, even if allowed. “I am going to stay in Truth,” he said, referring to the moribund Truth Social site he pushed out. It’s

a sad violin of a site

, with technologists fleeing the premises as fast as the app drops on the download charts. A business even less impressive than Trump Steaks or Trump water, or Trump University — now that’s really saying something. .......... a free speech-touting Twitter will probably run Truth Social and the others out of business. ........ and did I mention how much the kids love TikTok? ...... My suggestion is to make a strong ally of Twitter co-founder and recently departed C.E.O. Jack Dorsey, who was sidelined by activist investors. .





Elon Musk Is a Problem Masquerading as a Solution Twitter has a disinformation problem — fake news about Covid vaccines, climate and more running buck wild across the platform. Mr. Musk has shown himself to be a highly capable peddler of dubious claims, whether putting out misleading financial information or calling the British diver who helped rescue trapped schoolboys in Thailand a “pedo guy.” ......... Twitter has a racism problem. Time and again, it has failed to consequentially answer the pleas of users of color to address the bigotry and harassment that are endemic for them. ........ The agency recently described one of Tesla’s plants as “a racially segregated workplace” rife with slurs as well as discrimination “in job assignments, discipline, pay and promotion.” ........ Twitter has a bullying and harassment problem, and the subtler but related challenge of bringing out the worst, not the best, in all of us. ......... Though you might think that having more than $250 billion, according to Forbes, and wanting to solve the problems of Earth and space would fully occupy someone, he seems to have a compulsive need to belittle people and burp out his least-considered impulses and stoke bullying by his legions of admirers in a way that both reflects and shapes how Twitter is. .........

The arsonists routinely cosplay as firefighters.

........ Mark Zuckerberg of Meta (né Facebook) was as responsible as any American for letting hate speech and disinformation run amok on his platforms in the run-up to the 2020 elections, only to donate — with his wife, Priscilla Chan — $300 million to help secure that election from the forces he had helped unleash. Google, having helped shred local news gathering around the country with its massive market power in online advertising, turned around and promised to donate $15 million to the Support Local News campaign. ......... and engaging in the troll baiting that can be a powerful means of making journalists and other interrogators and critics fear the mob pile-ons that could result from writing critically about his interests. ........ In his vision, what we may, with help from the philosopher Isaiah Berlin, call negative freedom of speech, the freedom to speak without restraint by powerful authorities, is the only freedom of speech. And so freeing Nazis to Nazi, misogynists to bully and harass and doxx and brigade women, even former president Donald Trump to possibly get his Twitter account back — this cutting of restraints becomes the whole of the project. ........ there is also what we may call positive freedom of speech: affirmative steps to create conditions that allow all people to feel and be free to say what they think. ........ Legally speaking, all American women or people of color or both who were ever talked over in a meeting or denied a book contract or not hired to give their opinion on television enjoy the protections of the First Amendment. The constitutional protection of speech does not, on its own, engender a society in which the chance to be heard is truly abundant and free and equitably distributed. ......... When it comes to speech, what has often kept a great many people from speaking isn’t censorship but the lack of a platform. ........ when it became a cesspit of hate and harassment for women and people of color in particular, it began to offer a miserable bargain: You can be free to say what you wish, but your life can be made unrelentingly painful if you so dare. ......... The “censorship” that Mr. Musk performatively deplores consists of efforts to rectify these very real problems of harassment and abuse. Twitter has taken modest but wildly inadequate steps to improve safety on the platform. ....... positive freedom of speech — the creation of a safe and non-life-ruining environment for the airing of thoughts. ........ in a moment of proto-fascism on the political right, his priority seems to be to undam the flood of bile and bigotry and bullying and disinformation. ....... The country already faces the very real prospect, starting at noon on Jan. 20, 2025, of a descent toward racist authoritarianism and a protracted slide away from liberal democracy. If your idea of what the country needs in this moment is less clamping down on hate and lies and more rightists gone wild, whew. ......... The plutocrats have already rigged the economy. That’s just the first step. Then you take some of the spoils and reinvest it in buying even more political influence, so that political inequality can help keep economic inequality yawning. You buy up media or social media platforms and thus can help rig the discourse in your favor, taking control of the tools used by regular people to fight back. You venture, as Mr. Musk did, to a TED conference and, without much pushback, brand yourself as a kind of public intellectual, a thought leader, a visionary, and thereby in many people’s minds you became a sage, not a robber baron. ......... We’re going to have to legislate real guardrails — perhaps like those created by the European Union’s Digital Services Act — on social media platforms that are too big to entrust democracy to. We’re going to have to build nonprofit alternatives to the platforms and see if they can become meaningful venues. ......... a society that outsources the tending of its social interactions to people who behave like sociopaths is a society asking not for freedom but for tyranny. .

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Sita: A Novel About Women Spanning Five Generations And Two Geographies (CrowdFund)

Sita: A Novel About Women Spanning Five Generations And Two Geographies (CrowdFund)





Explaining The Blockchain
Should Elon Musk Be Owning All Of Twitter?
Go Putin Go
A DAO To Topple Putin By Christmas
Reimagining Banking, Reimagining The State
Tackling The Biggest Global Problems With The Blockchain
Unbundling The Blockchain Promise
Postulates And Axioms On The Blockchain
2016: The Year I Came To Know I Am God
Marc Andreessen Is A Dud When It Comes To Politics
2016: The Year I Came To Know
The Masses, Not Mars
The Size Of The Problem








Top 10 Women In Tech 2021
The 10 most influential women in tech right now
17 Female Venture Capitalists Changing the Future of Work
Revealed: The VCs who’ve backed the most female founders
60+ Top VC Funds Investing in Female Founders – The Definitive List for 2022
Top Female VC Crypto Investors
10 Top Women CEOs
List of women CEOs of Fortune 500 companies

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Wednesday, April 27, 2022

News: April 27

Jack Dorsey on Musk’s Twitter takeover: ‘Elon is the singular solution I trust’ "I trust his mission to extend the light of consciousness,” Dorsey said........ “Twitter as a company has always been my sole issue and my biggest regret. It has been owned by Wall Street and the ad model. Taking it back from Wall Street is the correct first step. .



Elon Musk Wants to Authenticate Every Twitter User. Crypto Twitter Should Take Notice Twitter’s soon-to-be owner says he wants to “authenticate” all humans, but did not say what that actually means. .



The Elusive Politics of Elon Musk The billionaire in pursuit of Twitter has often been described as a libertarian, but he has not shrunk from government help when it has been good for business. ........ Mr. Musk, 50, who was born in South Africa and only became an American citizen in 2002, expresses views that don’t fit neatly into this country’s binary, left-right political framework. ...... There is not much consistency in the miscellany of his public statements or his profuse Twitter commentary — except that they often align with his business interests. ....... He has railed against federal subsidies but his companies have benefited from billions of dollars in tax breaks and other incentives from federal, state and local governments. He has strenuously opposed unionization, criticizing the Biden administration for proposing a tax credit for electric vehicles produced by union workers. ......... He is the co-founder of an electric car manufacturer, Tesla, who quit former President Donald J. Trump’s business councils after the administration pulled out of the Paris climate accord. But he recently ran afoul of environmentalists for calling for an immediate increase in domestic oil and gas production, though it would not be helpful to his own businesses in electric cars and solar energy. ....... He is an avowed enthusiast for the First Amendment. But he has tried to force a journalist to testify in a defamation lawsuit against him, and he has often had outsize reactions to criticism. Four years ago, he floated a plan to create a website to rate the credibility of reporters, calling it Pravda, in an odd nod to the Soviet Union’s propaganda publication. (Nothing much came of it.) And a venture capitalist wrote at length about Mr. Musk canceling his order for a new Tesla after the investor complained about a Tesla event. ........ Mr. Musk said he was a registered independent when he lived in California, the state he famously and loudly left for Texas because he said its business climate had grown too inhospitable. He has described himself as “politically moderate” but added, “Doesn’t mean I’m moderate about all issues.” ....... it is Mr. Musk’s firmly held belief that in a functioning democracy, it is anyone’s right to say “whatever stupid thing you want.” This person, who spoke anonymously to not violate Mr. Musk’s trust, added dryly, “Which he occasionally does.” ......... “Elon Musk seems to be our last hope,” declared Tucker Carlson of Fox News. ......... He has given to both Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, and Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat. ...... When Mr. Abbott last year defended a strict anti-abortion law that made the procedure virtually illegal in Texas by citing Mr. Musk’s support — “Elon consistently tells me that he likes the social policies in the state of Texas,” the governor said — Mr. Musk pushed back. ....... Few issues have raised his ire as much as the coronavirus restrictions, which impeded Tesla’s manufacturing operations in California and nudged him closer to his decision last year to move the company’s headquarters to Texas. ....... Tesla still has its main manufacturing plant in the San Francisco Bay Area suburb of Fremont, Calif., and a large office in Palo Alto. ........ Over the course of the pandemic, Mr. Musk’s outbursts flared dramatically as he lashed out at state and local governments over stay-at-home orders. He initially defied local regulations that shut down his Tesla factory in Fremont. He described the lockdowns as “forcibly imprisoning people in their homes” and posted a libertarian-tinged rallying cry to Twitter: “FREE AMERICA NOW.” He threatened to sue Alameda County for the shutdowns before relenting. ....... Mr. Musk expressed dismay over his belief that the pandemic had brought out irrational fears in many Americans. “It has diminished my faith in humanity, this whole thing,” he said. ........ But given Mr. Musk’s largely nondenominational political philosophy, some on the right were less sanguine. Ann Coulter, a frequent presence on Twitter, said that the billionaire entrepreneur struck her as “mostly apolitical” and “mostly about promoting himself.” .



Donald Trump’s Newest Problem: Elon Musk Mr. Musk’s plan for a Twitter takeover adds to the problems facing the former president’s nascent Truth Social network....... Elon Musk’s plan for a potential hostile takeover of Twitter is the latest challenge for Trump Media & Technology Group’s flagship Truth Social app, which Mr. Trump has positioned as Twitter’s freewheeling conservative counterpart. ........ his ideas for easing Twitter’s rules would further sap the appeal of Mr. Trump’s beleaguered start-up as it faces a regulatory investigation that could decide its future. ........ Trump Media would face a murkier future. After a flurry of downloads when Truth Social was launched, interest has dropped sharply. Sensor Tower, an app insights company, said the app was downloaded an estimated 41,000 times in the last full week of March, down 95 percent from the same period the previous month. ........ Truth Social, which is available only on Apple devices, has 1.3 million installs ....... The sagging engagement extends to Mr. Trump, who only recently hit the one million follower mark, a sliver of the 89 million he once had on Twitter. He has published just one post on Truth Social, a February message telling his followers to “Get Ready!”



Selling Twitter to Elon Musk Is Good for Investors. What About the Public? The company’s decision to sell seems to have been based purely on the financials, with little if any regard for other stakeholders. ........ Twitter is “the digital town square, where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated,” a triumphant Elon Musk proclaimed in announcing his deal to buy the social media platform. ....... In other words, Twitter is no ordinary corporation. It serves as something akin to a public utility, a unique global means of communication. ......... Mr. Musk is a polarizing figure. He is a world-changing entrepreneur, responsible for companies, like PayPal and Tesla, that have revolutionized enormous industries. He has used his considerable influence — he has 85 million Twitter followers — to inveigh against what he sees as a censorious liberal culture in technology and media. ......... it’s not as if Twitter, in its current cacophonous state, is some utopia of mild-mannered civic discourse.



How a railway line made the Adani family richer by Rs 5,000 crore In 2015, an entity controlled by Gautam and Rajesh Adani acquired Sarguja Rail Corridor for Rs 58 crore, now sold to Adani Ports for Rs 5,000 crore in shares. .

Food, Fertilizer and the Future .

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