Friday, April 22, 2022

News: April 22

https://d.mirror.xyz/
Mirror.xyz Review An overview of Mirror, the cyptocurrency and blockchain powered digital publishing platform .
Mirror.xyz



Republicans Say, ‘Let Them Eat Hate’ Ohio’s G.O.P. primary has, after all, been a race to the bottom, with candidates seemingly competing to see who can be crasser, who can do the most to dumb down the debate. Vance insists that “what’s happening in Ukraine has nothing to do with our national security” and that we should focus instead on the threat from immigrants crossing our southern border. Josh Mandel, who has been leading in the polls, says that Ohio should be a “pro-God, pro-family, pro-Bitcoin state.” And so on. Any of these candidates would be a terrible senator ......... They’re happy to exploit white working-class resentment, but when it comes to doing anything to improve their supporters’ lives, their implicit slogan is, “Let them eat hate.” ......... The social problems that have festered in 21st-century America — notably large numbers of prime-age males not working and widespread “deaths of despair” from drugs, suicide and alcohol — have if anything fallen most heavily on rural and small-town whites, especially in parts of the heartland that have been left behind as a knowledge-centered economy increasingly favors high-education metropolitan areas. ........ The arithmetic on this claim never worked, and in practice Trump’s trade wars appear to have reduced the number of U.S. manufacturing jobs. ........ I’d say that G.O.P. campaigning in 2022 is all culture war, all the time, except that this would be giving Republicans too much credit. They aren’t fighting a real culture war, a conflict between rival views of what our society should look like; they’re riling up the base against phantasms, threats that don’t even exist. ........ the panic over critical race theory, although this has come to mean just about any mention of the role that slavery and discrimination have played in U.S. history. Florida is even rejecting many math textbooks ........ roughly half of self-identified Republicans believe that “top Democrats are involved in elite child sex-trafficking rings.” .......... yes, undocumented immigrants do exist. But the idea that they pose a major threat to public order is a fantasy; indeed, the evidence suggests that they’re considerably more law-abiding than native-born Americans. ........ making the alleged insecurity of the southern border your signature campaign issue is especially bizarre if you’re running for office in Ohio ......... (Almost 38 percent of the population of New York City, and 45 percent of its work force, is immigrant. It’s not exactly a dystopian hellhole.) ......... czarist-era instigators of pogroms. When the people are suffering, you don’t try to solve their problems; instead, you distract them by giving them someone to hate. ...... the G.O.P. as a whole has turned to hate-based politics. And if you aren’t afraid, you aren’t paying attention. .

How a Recession Might — and Might Not — Happen The U.S. economy is still very strong, with, for example, initial claims for unemployment insurance at their lowest point since 1969. Yet everyone is talking about recession. ......... there is always a chance of a recession in the near future, no matter what the current data look like. ....... The kind of recession we have, if we do have one, will depend on which way the Fed gets it wrong. ........ Inflation is, of course, unacceptably high. Some of this reflects disruptions — supply-chain problems, surging food and energy prices from the war in Ukraine — that are likely to fade away over time. In fact, I’d argue that these temporary factors account for a majority of inflation, which is why just about every major economy is experiencing its highest inflation rate in decades. .......... We’ve become a country in which workers take what they can get, and employers pay what they must. ......... we can close that gap without having a recession simply by slowing growth, while letting potential G.D.P. catch up. As long as inflation isn’t entrenched in expectations and temporary disruptions fade away, closing the gap should bring inflation down to an acceptable rate. ........ we could have an unnecessary recession, one that could develop quite quickly. ......... there is a path through this difficult moment that needn’t involve a recession. ....... the Fed is overreacting to inflation .

Deborah Birx’s Excruciating Story of Donald Trump’s Covid Response “Silent Invasion,” an insider’s look at the Trump administration’s pandemic policies, is earnest and exhaustive, our reviewer says......... The word “coordinator” is an equivocal title under the best of bureaucratic circumstances, let alone in the Trump White House ....... She had said yes to “a job I didn’t seek but felt compelled to accept” ....... Birx had an office in the West Wing but almost no staff, and her only leverage was persuasion. ....... Advanced data-reporting structures and procedures, such as she and her PEPFAR team had helped African nations develop over years, did not exist in the United States ........ Did he propose that Americans drink bleach? It wasn’t clear that he didn’t. ......... “I looked down at my feet and wished for two things: something to kick,” she writes, “and for the floor to open up and swallow me whole.” ......... renting a car (evidently) to make connections and dropping in on governors, universities, public health officials and local media outlets, from Arizona to Florida to New Hampshire; eventually she visited 44 states. ......... the need for more Covid testing, especially “sentinel testing” of young people reporting no symptoms, who nonetheless could be infected and transmitting the virus among their families and communities; more masking by everybody; and more social distancing, especially by avoidance of large indoor gatherings. ......... To presume that vaccines have now solved the problem totally is a mistake .

Are China and the United States on a Collision Course to War? Here is one way the American era could end: China, on a pretext or piqued by some provocation, orchestrates an invasion of Taiwan. Beijing launches a shower of missiles toward Taipei, crippling its American-supplied military, followed by attacks on Okinawa and Guam. More than 200,000 People’s Liberation Army troops climb ashore at 20 different beachheads along the Taiwanese coast. American submarines sink some Chinese ships; still, it’s not enough to slow the onslaught of paratroopers and helicopters. Slowly — then swiftly — the pitched fighting tilts in favor of the Middle Kingdom, altering the military and political balance in East Asia. The result, which ultimately reduces a world superpower to one weakened player among many, comes to be seen by historians as the “American Waterloo.” .......... some reports have shown Washington losing to Beijing as many as 19 straight times in desktop war games simulating a conflict over Taiwan. ............ In a larger sense, Xi has come to believe that the age of American predominance in Asia is over. ....... He has taken to observing with icy understatement that the geopolitical landscape is “undergoing profound changes unseen in a century.” Beijing, Rudd believes, now sees “the time as ripe … to change the nature of the order itself.” .......... how Americans failed utterly to comprehend even the “basic intellectual grammar” that lay beneath the cultures of the region they sought to shape. ........ After leaving office, at age 60 he enrolled at Oxford University to study for a doctorate focusing on understanding Xi’s worldview. .......... Rudd, who has visited China more than 100 times and speaks fluent Mandarin, is one of the few foreign politicians who have had a chance to get to know Xi personally — first as a diplomat when Xi was a junior official in Xiamen, and later when Xi was vice president; on one occasion the two men spent hours conversing in Chinese before a winter fire in Canberra. .......... have left Rudd with a rare feel for China’s cultural flash points. ......... “Our best chance of avoiding war,” Rudd writes, “is to better understand the other side’s strategic thinking and to conceptualize a world where both the U.S. and China are able to competitively coexist, even if in a state of continuing rivalry reinforced by mutual deterrence.” ........ Xi has worked harder than his predecessors to court Russian leaders, flattering Putin by implying that the two countries are peers and bolstering joint military exercises. He has referred to the Russian president as his “best friend”; he calls Putin on his birthday. ........ “recognizes great value in Moscow being prepared to act far more adventurously than China itself” ........ China has been working to reorganize the strategic chessboard. .......... more than $90 billion between 2012 and 2017 into building ports and coast guard hubs along a maritime route through the Arctic known as the Northeast Passage that would cut the voyage from Asia to Europe by more than two weeks and nearly 5,000 miles. ......... The consequences of a full-scale war with China are almost too grave to contemplate. ......... liked to complain that Americans too often think of foreign policy problems as “headaches” for which they can just “take a powder” and make them go away. ........ there will be no wishing away of Xi Jinping and his transformative worldview, at least in the short term. The headache is chronic; Americans will need to use all their ingenuity if they hope to manage the pain. .

The Rise of Authoritarian Capitalism .





‘These Guys Are Very Different’: Inside Andreessen Horowitz’s Rise The VC firm's financial performance is catching up to its powerful public image, thanks to contrarian bets and its operating structure modeled after a Hollywood agency. Now Marc Andreessen is trying to get bigger, faster in a quest to be the J.P. Morgan of venture capital. ........ its partners had placed bigger bets on cryptocurrencies than almost anyone else, and they did so during moments when most investors had soured on the field. ........ With this week’s Coinbase public listing, Andreessen Horowitz generated one of the biggest paper returns from a single-company investment in VC history. Its stake in the cryptocurrency brokerage is worth $10 billion, which is more than half the amount of capital the firm raised from investors in its 12 years of operation. It could generate a similar return from its stake in enterprise software firm Databricks, and it holds billions of dollars’ worth of other cryptocurrency assets ....... Andreessen Horowitz is supercharging the bold VC playbook that brought it to this point. .

What Sequoia Gains by Blowing Up the VC Fund Structure .

The People Determining Twitter’s Fate Now that Elon Musk has put Twitter into play, the company’s fate is likely to be determined by a small circle of people, including a Saudi prince and a Silicon Valley CEO. The group—with shareholders such as Elliott Management’s Jesse Cohn, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, and Silver Lake chief Egon Durban—has a long history with both Musk and Twitter. .



Asian Americans Have Always Lived With Fear their workarounds — the extra steps they have been taking to stay physically safe. ........ Ever since Asians began arriving in the United States, they have been met with hostility and rejection, often sanctioned by state and federal legislation. The sad part is that so little has changed. ......... Back in the ’70s and ’80s, the West feared the growth of Japan; as China became a superpower, Sinophobia rose, too. Since 9/11, Islamophobia and attacks against Sikhs and Hindus have been unrelenting. Now the Covid pandemic and demagogy have brought more waves of hatred. .......

Asians and Asian Americans pay the price of nativist fear.

..... The assailants may also believe that we are weak physically and politically, unwilling to organize, react or speak up. ....... For some, deep down, my ordinary Korean face — small, shallow-set eyes, round nose, high cheekbones, straight dark hair — reminds them of lost wars, prostitutes, spies, refugees, poverty, disease, cheap labor, academic competition, cheaters, sexual competition, oligarchs, toxic parenting, industrialization or a sex or pornography addiction. ....... From my decades of interviewing people, I have learned that nearly every person believes that she is the hero of her story. ....... Then there are those who are self-controlled enough to mute their racist speech, so I will likely never hear a hateful confession from them. Nevertheless, in some small or grand gesture, when they wish, I will be made to feel their deep-seated desire to diminish or eradicate a person like me — the Asian other — the source of their unwanted, violent, shameful feelings. ....... At 53, I am no longer an immigrant girl. Like her, though, I still keep vigil for my elderly parents, sisters, husband, son and our growing family.

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Thursday, April 21, 2022

Elon Musk On Twitter

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Varia Bo

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Denis Nazarov Of Mirror



Denis Nazarov The former Andreessen Horowitz partner is working to build what can be described as a crypto publishing platform, not unlike Medium or Substack. In the new model, readers help fund writers in exchange for NFTs. Mirror.xyz recently raised $10 million from Union Square Ventures, Andresseen Horowitz, and others at a $100 million valuation .

Union Square Ventures Values Crypto Publishing Tool Mirror at $100 Million June 1, 2021 ...... Union Square Ventures, an early backer of the cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, has invested in crypto publishing tool Mirror.xyz at a $100 million valuation ...... The one-year-old startup has raised at least $10 million across two recent seed financings from investors including USV and Andreessen Horowitz ...... Founded by former Andreessen Horowitz crypto partner Denis Nazarov, Mirror resembles Medium, the blogging tool used for essays and newsletters. It goes a step further by providing tools for writers to crowdfund their projects through the sale of non-fungible tokens, the one-of-a-kind digital items verified via the blockchain. Some writers on Mirror, such as USV co-founder Fred Wilson, have said they like the idea that content on a distributed digital ledger can’t be removed by a tech platform. .



Fred Wilson: Mirror
Scaling The Ethereum Ecosystem Hiding all of this complexity for the end-user is definitely one of the big opportunities in web3 right now.

Competing To Win Deals Many of these rules are counter intuitive. But they work well for my partners and me. You might say they will only work for you if you are a top tier investor. That may well be true, but you have to act like a top tier investor to become one. So you might as well play the game that way from the start.

Keeping It Simple The point of these stories is that aha moments come around every so often and you just need to let them grab you and take you to a foundational investment. You don’t need to do much due diligence on these. I did none on Twitter, Coinbase, or Dapper. What I did do is use the products, get in the game, feel the power, and get conviction. ....... We publish our investment memos for the world to see. When you read them you will notice that they are basically an articulation of a big idea, what could happen, and in these cases, what did happen. That’s all. No technical diligence (had we done any on Twitter, we would have passed on it), no financial models, no talking to industry experts. Just an aha moment and an idea of what could happen.

The Benefits Of Venture Capital In Web3 Bitcoin did not have or need venture capital. Ethereum did not have or need venture capital. ...... There are many alternatives to venture capital these days, particularly in web3, but there are few, if any, alternatives that stick with you, when times are tough, when a global pandemic hits and you have weeks of cash left, when everything seems lost and you are at rock bottom. .

A Return To Fundamentals Business models need to be sustainable. Teams need to stick together and ship things. The fundamentals need to be in place for a business to succeed. All the money in the world at eye-popping valuations won’t do that for you....... businesses that focus on the fundamentals will succeed in any market, up or down .

A Blistering Pace In the last two years, the VC business has been operating at a blistering pace, the fastest I’ve witnessed in my 35 years in the business (including the 99/00 era). Whether that is because of the opportunity set or the changing dynamics of fundraising (in-person to zoom, endless capital) we will only know in time. ....... Venture investments take many years to unfold. It is a buy and hold business. It is a invest and help business. It is seeding not harvesting. If you start a marathon with a sprint, you are gonna be puking by mile ten. And that’s my concern right now. .

NFPs The first, and most important, NFP is the founder. The person who originally conceived of the opportunity, recruited the first few team members, scoped (and often built) the first product, brings immense value to the business, mostly around long-term vision, setting the culture and values, and knowing when something is “off.” Retaining the founder’s interest in and involvement with the business is critical. There are times when the founder is bringing more difficulty to the business than value and they should depart. But those situations are to be avoided if possible because of how important a founder is to the business. ....... NFPs are usually individual contributors, not managers. The management function is much easier to replace than a uniquely skilled individual. ........ A classic role for an NFP is the CTO of the business. In this role, the person sets the overall technology direction of the business, makes the hardest technical decisions, builds technology themselves, but does not manage the engineering function. In many companies, the CTO has no direct reports. ......... You can find NFPs in any part of the company. They are not limited to technical functions. You can have an NFP in customer service, finance, legal, marketing, really anywhere. The key is to identify them and recognize them, reward them, compensate them, and retain them. ....... I am seeing more and more companies recognize that simply compensating people on the basis of their management level is incorrect and leads to their best people moving into management, underperforming in that role, and departing. ....... NFPs are pretty rare. Most people are easily replaceable given sufficient time to do a proper search. But there are always a few people who are not replaceable. Identifying them and retaining them should be a key goal of the management of the business. .

Why Web3? And web3 enthusiasts, particularly on Twitter, remind me of missionaries trying to recruit the unwashed to their belief system. ....... The tooling is getting better. It reminds me of the early days of web2 in 2001/2002/2003, when we started USV. That was also a time of great cynicism. We almost did not get our first fund raised. Nobody was buying the story we were telling. But of course, that story turned out to be true. And I am confident this one will too.



Web3/Crypto: Why Bother? The first PCs were worse computers than every existing machine. They had less memory, less storage, slower CPUs, less software, couldn’t multitask, etc. But they were better at one dimension: they were cheap. ......... A blockchain is a worse database. It is slower, requires way more storage and compute, doesn’t have customer support, etc. And yet it has one dimension along which it is radically different. No single entity or small group of entities controls it – something people try to convey, albeit poorly, by saying it is “decentralized.” ......... much of the power held by large companies (and by governments) comes from the fact that they operate and control databases ......... When (now Sir) Tim Berners-Lee invented the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) he unleashed what we now think of as permissionless publishing. Anyone can put up a web page and anyone with a browser can access it. This was an amazing breakthrough, as pretty much all publishing previously had required going through a publisher of some kind, who decided what should and should not be published. ......... As a first approximation all the big powerful internet companies are really database providers. Facebook is a database of people’s profiles, their friend graphs and their status updates. Paypal is a database of people’s account balances. Amazon is a database of SKUs, payment credentials and purchase histories. Google is a database of web pages and query histories. .......... it turned out that permissionless publishing alone was insufficient. We also need permissionless data. .......... pretty much everyone hates their cable company and their electric utility. ....... Web3 can, if properly developed and with the right kind of regulation, provide a meaningful shift in power back to individuals and communities. ....... Web3 will be a platform for innovation that would never come from Facebook, Amazon, Google .







Mirror.xyz
Mirror.xyz Review
Denis @ Mirror
Denis Nazarov @ A16Z
MuckRack
Graeme
Measuring the Success of Mirror Crowdfunding
Investment-backed crypto publishing platform Mirror.xyz aims to change the way writers connect with their audience

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You Are Preethi

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