1/ Marcus Bullock went to prison in the mid-90s at the age of 15.

Today, he's the CEO of Flikshop -- the "Instagram for the Incarcerated", an alternative to the outrageously expensive phone call system.

This is a truly inspirational founder story 👇👇

2/ In 1996, Bullock was living in Maryland. One night, he and a friend carried out an armed carjacking on a man sitting idle in a shopping mall parking lot.

It was the biggest mistake of this life.

3/ Several years prior to hit actions, there was the famed 1989 Central Park "Jogger Case", in which 5 minority youths were (falsely) accused of raping a jogger.

In the aftermath, nearly every state passed new laws that made it easier for courts to try youth as adults.

4/ For the carjacking, Bullock was charged as an adult and served 8 years in prison.

With onerous prison phone charges ($18 / 15 mins), Bullock's mother kept in touch with him by sending a photo or letter every day.

"She saved me," he says of his mom's efforts.

5/ The $1.2B+ prison phone system is dominated by 2 PE-backed firms (Global Tel Link, Securus Tech).

For the right to operate these phones lines, prisons effectively pay kickbacks to state and local government. The highest kickbacks win bids, which drive up costs.

The remix culture of the early 2000s left an indelible impression on me, an enduring delight in the power of whimsy, juxtaposition, virtuosity and ingenuity - and the ability of strangers all over the world to collaborate without any explicit coordination.

1/

The recent Bernie-mittens meme was a sterling example of this, tickling me right to my core, and I just happened on an especially delightful apex example of the form: @ToastedShoes's video of Sanders incorporated into eight AAA

Toasted Shoes got @JoeMashups to create a 3D model of Sanders, then tapped a bunch of different mashup artists to turn the Sanders sprite into playable characters in the games, showing them off in a narrated video.

3/

I'm not much of a fan of video-game streamers' narration, and I confess that I found the video more entertaining without the narration, but to each their own - Shoes was clearly enjoying himself, as were the commenters on the video.

4/

They had a lot to be pleased by.

Sanders as a Sith Lord in Star Wars Battlefront 2:

5/

1/2

Vienna antilockdown protest 31/01/21

Police Remove Helmets In Solidarity With Crowds

(1) Since some people laugh at Cardano project and it's peer review aspect, let me share a story from work for all of you
(2) There is company called Databricks and they open sourced recently a technology called: https://t.co/gpZyKKiMVD . This technology is super important

(3) In BigData delta allows one to perform DELETE and MERGE operations contrary to Hadoop + Hive where this is not possible, seeking through many partitions finding customer data to remove and then rewriting it is not only expensive as an operation but also very dangerous

(4) This promising technology is something that many companies, which have big data turn into as they need to be GDPR compliant.
(5) I was always reading and accepting all details from their website as given and the "truth"

(6) There is however an amazing Principal Developer at our company that found some of the claims from their website as dubious, e.g. ACID claims on such a distributed file system
(7) It turns out this is not the first time this company advertises something that is simply not true

(8) on another occasion this company made untrue claims about Cassandra database and this then became source of disputes e.g by dr. @martinkl - my fave expert in distributed systems
(9) All professional developers also know of course famous Jepsen tests ->

🧵 on Importance of correct indication of colonoscopic surveillance studies (English 🇺🇸🇬🇧)
@KM_Pawlak @KMonkemuller @drkeithsiau @JacquelineChuMD @PerelmansPearls @stevenbollipo @SWexner @DrBloodandGuts @ebtapper @DCharabaty @RashidLui @AdvaniRashmiMD @AtoosaRabiee @DrMohdZein

@GI_Guy @RodriguezParra_ @DrHarryThomas @TennysonMD @AustinChiangMD @KralJan @thomaskroner @alinkmd #GITwitter

1/ The implementation of screening and surveillance programs can reduce the incidence and mortality of

2 / But for these to be effective and to guarantee protection against CCR, they must meet a series of conditions. One of them is the correct indication for endoscopic studies for both screening and surveillance.

3 / According to a recent meta-analysis, the minority of patients who undergo colonoscopies have a correct indication, with less than 50% adherence to the surveillance intervals proposed by scientific

The Presidency is worried by reports of non-compliance with just signed Executive Order that makes mask wearing and observation of social distancing in the public mandatory, appealing to Nigerians to give their maximum cooperation for success of the policy.

President Muhammadu Buhari introduced the order with the best of intentions and not with any motive to punish citizens.

The Presidency appeals to State Governments, traditional rulers and religious leaders to play active roles in the sensitization and enforcement of the Executive Order.

To achieve this, COVID-19 task forces and committees should persuade members of the public to cooperate with the government in achieving compliance and avoid crude methods that may create resistance and resentment, thereby defeating the primary goal of the Executive Order.

The Buhari administration is most reluctant to lockdown the country and continues to emphasize the non-pharmaceutical measures and the only way to avert lockdowns is to observe these measures as put in place by the Presidential Task Force.

As the Qanon prophecies fail and the cult-members struggle to resolve their cognitive dissonance, it's a good time to revisit the history of paranoid, conspiratorial political movements in American history - the "paranoid style" that has dominated since the Revolution.

1/

After all, the very first skirmishes of the US war of independence were based on a conspiracy theory: that the levy on tea was a prelude to a sellout of the colonists to transnational mercantalist interests. US politics have always been conspiratorial.

2/

I found @zacharykarabell's @politico history of the Know Nothing party especially useful, as it tells the story of what happens when surging, paranoid, fractious political movements

The American Party was a secret 19th century organization founded on a conspiracy theory: that Irish immigrants were secretly planning a takeover of the US on behalf of the Pope.

4/

When I was starting out as a grad student, I remember being frustrated with analysis problems where it didn't use DIRECTLY the things we spent so much time proving in class.

As an example, let's look at a standard real analysis problem:

(1/23)

The problem looks like it can be done using the dominated convergence theorem.

This is an important theorem and is used in a lot of places outside a grad real analysis class. A student would go through a lot of buildup leading to this theorem.

(2/23)

Now, let's see whether the conditions for DCT are satisfied.

First, for fixed 00 as n->infinity.

So we have a.e. convergence of the integrand in [0,1].

To the student, this builds a stronger case to use DCT to solve the problem.

(3/23)

Finding an integrable dominating function is where the problem starts.

It would seem NATURAL (at least for me) to bound it with:

p.s. it feels "natural" to me because it is reminiscent of squeeze theorem problems, math students encounter in calculus.

(4/23)

However, 1/x^n is not integrable in (0,1) and hence cannot be (further) dominated by an integrable function.

So, what I would do is since I know it converges a.e. to 1, maybe it converges uniformly to 1?

This leads me into a BAD detour.

(5/23)

Why is anyone surprised #BidenLied ?

Had the media actually done their damn jobs, you would know Joe Biden makes Donald Trump look like Honest Abe.

Don’t believe me? Let’s stroll... 👇🏽

Joe Biden claimed he was shot at in Iraq (he wasn’t)

#BidenLied about his wife and daughter being killed by a drunk driver for political purposes, several

#BidenLied about confronting Slobodan

Joe Biden claimed to be against the three strike rule his racist legislation enacted (he wasn’t #BidenLied

“I went to law school on a full academic scholarship...and ended up in the top half of my class." (Total bullshit #BidenLied

"It is day eight in a depot in Lymm just outside Warrington, Cheshire and a lorry carrying frozen carrots and mixed herbs is still waiting for clearance to board a ferry from Birkenhead to Belfast".
"because the paperwork for a single pallet of carrots is missing key information"

**Guardian Report**

Hundreds of miles away in Lisburn in Northern Ireland, the haulage firm’s operations team have had no luck in persuading the British supplier that the carrots that were ordered on 27 December are now, in the third week in January, classed as an export

and must be accompanied by a litany of documents and certificates before the trailer can be cleared to board the ferry at Birkenhead.
Another supplier on the lorry had been struggling with the documentation requiring it to supply what is known as an “Incoterms”, which determines

who pays the duty in any tariff but also establishes a specific record as to who is the importer. But that was resolved on day seven.
Then there was also the supplier who had provided a commodity code that was two digits short. A simple key stroke mistake could be difference

between the lorry getting the red or the green light for entry to NI.
“It took half a day yesterday for me to clear the supply chain. I’ve got one more issue to go,” says the visibly stressed operations man simultaneously dealing with a sheaf of about 30 documents for

@jay_21_ So far...

(1) Shorts must always be very small. Max 1.5-2.0% for large cap structural decliners. 20-40bps for frauds and promotes.

(2) No hero shorts.

(3) Wait for things to crack before putting a position on in any type of size (which for a short, is still very small). $700 to $0 and $200 to $0 are both 100% returns.

(4) Must be willing to cover aggressively if going against you. After cracking, need to be willing to add on the way down (particularly for promotes or frauds).

What if someone invaded my home, tortured and killed me? What would I want to happen?

I would want that person captured, tried and punished. But I would want one of my colleagues at the Bar to represent my murderer and I would want them to do the best job they could. /1

What if they had been motivated by something I had written?
Same answer.

By my politics or religion?
Same answer.

By my sex, race or sexual orientation?
Same answer.
/2

There are some who think that barristers defending cab rank over the past couple of days are arrogant and detached from reality. I disagree. I believe in a right to representation precisely because I *don't* think that the justice should bend to my interests. /3

Nor do I think it is detached from reality. We have seen many real world regimes experiment with fixing the system by denying representation. Right now there are regimes whose response to lawyers acting for victims of oppression is to arrest the lawyers. /4

Lawyers support a right to representation not because they live in a parallel universe of high principle but because they know what happens in this one when certain principles are abandoned. /5

1. If baffles me that with so many attorneys on Twitter none spot the issue. Trump's entire team quits ten days before one of the historic trials of all time. That only happens under one circumstance that I know. DC applies version of the ABA Model rules of Professional Conduct.