BC BUSINESS
Saved by @Mollyycolllinss

2018 was almost the year we won the #RightToRepair.

Instead, 2018 turned out to be the year we lost #R2R: 20 bills defeated in 20 state houses, and it was mostly @apple's fault.

1/

 Apple has a problem. As CEO Tim Cook warned his investors at the conclusion of his company's repair-killing lobbying spree, Apple's profits depend on people throwing away their devices, not fixing them.

https://t.co/joaNMGPaXs

2/
By monopolizing repairs, Apple doesn't just get to gouge you on parts and service - the real action is in pronouncing your device DOA, beyond repair. Then you have to buy another one.

3/
Other companies lobbied hard against R2R: John Deere, GM, and other monopolists backed Apple's play. But Apple wrote the playbook, coming up with risible bullshit like claims that blocking independent repair is essential to protecting privacy.

https://t.co/bkCZKBbXht

4/
Apple's anti-repair FUD got picked up and amplified by Big Car in 2020, when they spent millions fighting an automotive R2R ballot initiative in Massachusetts, claiming that letting independent mechanics at your car would lead to your actual MURDER.

https://t.co/Byh6VLuRKp

5/
2018 is the year we lost Right to Repair, but 2021 might be the year we win it. We're only a month in and 14 states are already debating R2R legislation, with more to come. The @RepairCoalition and @uspirg are leading the fight, buoyed by massive R2R successes in the EU.

6/
Independent repair isn't just fair and it isn't just good for the planet - it's also good for the nation and its economy. The average US family loses $330/year thanks to anti-repair practices, a $40b drag on the American economy.

7/
Repair creates local jobs for SMEs whose earnings - from helping their neighbors - are taxed (not hidden in offshore tax-havens) and contribute to their communities. These are on-shore, dignified tech jobs - not slave labor in Xinjiang or coerced labor in a Foxconn plant.

8/
Repair diverts ewaste from landfills. Each kiloton of ewaste creates <1 landfill jobs, or 15 recyling jobs.

But that same kiloton of ewaste creates 200 local repair jobs.

https://t.co/EGgWMWNQkS

9/
Repair creates a secondary market for low-cost devices that find their way into the hands of people on the wrong side of the digital divide - a divide that got starker and more consequential during the pandemic, and will only get more important in years to come.

10/
Speaking of the pandemic: anti-repair laws meant that when PB840 ventilators (the most common ventilator, sold by the monopolist Medtronic, which benefits from the largest-ever tax-avoidance "reverse takeover" in corporate history) broke, they couldn't be legally fixed.

11/
Instead, desperate med-tech people turned to a lone Polish hacker who built Medtronic defeat devices into old guitar-pedals and clock radios to get around the anti-repair measures in the ventilators that hospitals had bought and paid for.

https://t.co/czRntbpDzy

12/
R2R is a fight for justice. For the right to decide who fixes your stuff. For the right to set up shop and help your neighbors. For self-reliance and resiliency over profits. For on-shore small businesses over multinational cheaters.

13/
Once again, a wave of R2R laws is sweeping the nation. The monopolists who profiteered off our misery during the pandemic will once again turn out to stop them. PIRG and the Repair Coalition need our support - as do their coalition allies like @EFF.

eof/

More from Cory Doctorow #BLM

Cory Doctorow #BLM
Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow
There is no shortage of takes about what's going on with Gamestop (and other surging stocks), Robinhood and Reddit's r/wallstreetbets, many of them contradictory - at least on the face of them. But I think it's possible for most of these takes to be right. Here's how.

1/


First you need to understand the underlying mechanics of the story. Stock markets are fundamentally a way of making bets, including bets on the outcome of other peoples' bets, and bets on the outcomes of THOSE bets.

2/

All this complexity creates lots of exploitable opportunities. Some of these opportunities are considered legitimate and are given respectable names like "arbitrage." Others are considered illegitimate, and are called disreputable things like "stock manipulation."

3/

A hypothetical Martian observing all this through a telescope could not tell you which kinds of bets were honest and which were dishonest, because the difference isn't about any objective standard, but rather, about power.

4/

The strategies of powerful people are legit, while the strategies of their would-be dethroners are not legit. Sometimes, even outright frauds are OK if they're done by people with enough power.

5/
TRADING , STOCK MKT
Cory Doctorow #BLM
Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow
Today's Twitter threads (a Twitter thread).

Inside: Stop saying "it's not censorship if it's not the government"; Trump's swamp gators find corporate refuge; and more!

Archived at: https://t.co/7JMcAbaULj

#Pluralistic

1/


Monday night, I'll be helping William Gibson launch the paperback edition of his novel AGENCY at a Strand Bookstore videoconference. Come say hi!

https://t.co/k3fvBdqOK0

2/


Stop saying "it's not censorship if it's not the government": I didn't expect the Spanish Inquisition.

https://t.co/7I0MpCTez5

3/


Trump's swamp gators find corporate refuge: The Swamped project.

https://t.co/MUJyIOr2iw

4/


#15yrsago A-Hole bill would make a secret technology into the law of the land https://t.co/57bJaM1Byr

#15yrsago Hollywood’s MP loses the election — hit the road, Sam! https://t.co/12ssYpV46B

#15yrsago How William Gibson discovered science fiction https://t.co/MYR0go37nW

5/
TRUMP
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Cory Doctorow
Cory Doctorow
@doctorow
It's been eight years since @aaronsw took his own life. Aaron had been charged with 13 felonies under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (#CFAA) for violating the terms of service on the @JSTOR database of scholarly articles.

1/


Prosecutors Stephen Heymann and Carmen Ortiz didn't dispute that Aaron was allowed to access the articles he retrieved. Rather, they said that the WAY he accessed them (using a script instead of clicking on links) was a terms-of-service violation and hence a crime.

2/

In other words: any business could conjure a felony out of thin air by making you click through an unreadable garbage-novella of legalese proscribing the use of a service they granted you access to. Violate any of those terms and you face a prison sentence.

3/

This isn't law as we know it, it's Felony Contempt of Business Model, and the most alarming thing was that this interpretation of the CFAA wasn't completely ridiculous, given how badly drafted that law is.

4/

Ronald Reagan signed CFAA into law. Fed prosecutors had been seeking broad authority to punish "hacking" and had drawn up an absurdly broad definition of cybercrime that would give them latitude to go after anyone they didn't like.

5/
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Cory Doctorow #BLM
Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow
Today's Twitter threads (a Twitter thread).

Inside: Mexican indigenous telco wins spectrum fight; How apps steal your location; Understanding /r/wallstreetbets; Knowledge is why you build your own apps; and more!

Archived at: https://t.co/6BOyhL3tEj

#Pluralistic

1/


Join me this afternoon for the launch of the print edition of my 2020 book HOW TO DESTROY SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM!

https://t.co/8Op6IEocPB

2/


Mexican indigenous telco wins spectrum fight: First Nations treaties do not sign away electromagnetic franchises.

https://t.co/BBsxXuGQe3

3/


How apps steal your location: A deep dive into the murky depths of surveillance markets.

https://t.co/mV7u2FYylT

4/


Understanding /r/wallstreetbets: More than a bull run, a symbiosis of a market maker and market destroyers.

https://t.co/7zr1N4vkjV

5/
TRADING
Cory Doctorow #BLM
Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow
The pandemic has afforded all of us a refresher course on the five stages of grief, a theoretical and controversial framework for describing how people cope with tragedy: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.

https://t.co/nqPmjCvyab

1/


A far slower-moving unfolding of these stages can be seen in the reactions of the super-wealthy to the breakdown in neoliberal orthodoxy, the tale that says that inequality results from meritocracy, and makes us all better

Denial came out in the "rationalist" view: the world is better off than ever - richer, less violent, healthier, and any discontent you feel with your plummeting fortunes and the contracting possibilities for your kids is just your tunnel vision. Lack of perspective.

3/

But the Great Financial Crisis and Occupy triggered the anger of the elites: violent suppression of protests, the "Doom Boom" in new luxury bunkers, Howard Schultz's insistence that "billionaire" is a slur (he says we should call him a "person of wealth").

4/

The pandemic - and the "K-shaped recovery"- has revealed the existential threat inequality poses for our species, between price-gouging, fraud, profiteering, flouting health directives, and coercing the poor and vulnerable into risking their lives to keep the economy afloat.

5/
SOCIETY

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Zikhona Valela
Zikhona Valela
@valavoosh
Should we go into the details of these 125 years?


SA is built on the exploitation of labour. That labour has functioned on alcohol unfortunately. Very few people consume liquor purely for enjoyment unfortunately. When SAB opened its doors 1895 workers were paid in alcohol- the dop/tot system. 2 years into SAB's establishment

The Prohibition Act is introduced. This means black people are barred from buying your wines, beer etc. So SAB's products are exclusively for white people. But during this period beer brewing by Black women is the norm. Ayinxilisi ncam ke this type of beer. Apparently it had some

Nutritious elements to it. Now some of the context around drinking culture during this time is migrant labour to the mines, further land dispossession, the Anglo-Boer Wars, Rhodes corruption (our first state capture commission if you will) which leads to his resignation.

This context plays a role in how our cities and small towns are constructed, how they lead to the confinement and surveillance yabantu. Traditional beer brewing is identified as a threat because buy now mining bosses have identified that there's money to be made here.
BUSINESS
John Cutler
John Cutler
@johncutlefish
the product manager is responsible for the product's success...

simple. But....wait....

1/n There are many $ successful products that are terrible for humans (both inside/outside a company). Is that success?

2/n Conversely, what about "great products" that end up being "not successful" ?

Did the product manager do their job? Where does their role begin and end?

3/n Success over the lifespan of the product? next quarter? until they leave? while company exists?

There are many ways that short term success can come at the expense of mid/long term impact

4/n Success can mean very different things depending on the stage of the company, and the maturity of the product.

In an early startup, company/product are inexorably linked. In a more established company "the product" may be one of a dozen bets, most which will fail.

5/n What if a company has very low product aspirations?

What if it doesn't believe that their products can be a source of differentiated, sustainable mid/long term growth?

Is the role responsible for success *insofar as success is defined*? Something else? Who decides/defines?
BUSINESS
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Carlos E. Perez
Carlos E. Perez
@IntuitMachine
The interview with CNBC of @chamath is a much watch because there is so much insight hidden underneath.

There are many things that caught my attention. The one thing was the abstraction that hedge fund strategies are all 'momentum' plays. What it seems to imply is that the marshaling of resources at an opportune time drives the future behavior of a stock.

From basic physics, we know that momentum is mass times velocity. So any 'momentum' tactic employs the variation of mass, velocity or both. Wrt stocks, mass is money and velocity is speed of trade.

We cannot argue that there are benefits of scale associated with having more money. Also, high-frequency trading has shown the value of high-speed trading. So in an abstract sense, market manipulation can involve a kind of momentum play.

The objective of stock trading is to buy a financial instrument at a low price and sell it at a higher price. The purpose of a momentum play is to front-run the decision process of other traders such that one acquires the assets before a decision is made.
BUSINESS
Andrew John Rainnie \U0001f3f4\U000e0067\U000e0062\U000e0073\U000e0063\U000e0074\U000e007f #amwriting
Andrew John Rainnie 🏴󠁧...
@AndrewRainnie
Over the last week, I've been blocked by various people, including an MSP, for allegedly being a conspiracy theorist, trying to sow division within @theSNP and #indy ranks.

Nothing could be further from the truth. I want independence for Scotland, plain and simple.

But I still have the right to challenge people if I think something is wrong, legally or morally, as recent events within the SNP seem to be.

But anyway, I'm not talking about that. Today I'm looking at the @NowScotlandNow logo.

I'm not a fan. Just to be clear, I want Scottish Independence. But the logo for the new organisation, unfortunately, doesn't work as well as the previous YES ones. It's a mix of the colour and the font used, which presumably is referencing Charlies Rennie Mackintosh.


The italics and thin font means it doesn't stand out. Plus, I associate Mackintosh more with Glasgow than Scotland as a whole. So I took some of the elements of the last two and looked at alternative fonts (that are all free BTW)

This font is called ChuckFive. It's big, bold and brash and you can read it a mile off.
BUSINESS
Judd Legum
Judd Legum
@JuddLegum
1. If you turn on CNBC, you'll hear a narrative that reckless retail investors from Reddit are destabilizing the stock market by driving up prices for GameStop and other stocks.

This is BS.

Follow along if interested.

2. Market instability was created by hedge funds and other "sophisticated" investors that SHORTED MORE GAMESTOP STOCK THAN WAS EVEN AVAILABLE FOR SALE

Retail investors are exploiting instability created by the hedge funds

They didn't start the

3. The primary "victim" of the retail investors, hedge fund mogul Gabe Plotkin, worked SAC until 2013.

What happened in 2013? SAC pleaded guilty to insider trading and paid a $1.3 billion fine.

Plotkin then left to start his own firm.

4. Plotkin made massive returns by doing a lot more shorting than most hedge funds & no one complained

But this week he was bailed out by his old boss, SAC founder Steve Cohen, and another hedge fund mogul, Citadel's Ken Griffin to the tune of

5. Cohen & Griffin now own a significant piece of Plotkin's firm. So they have an interest in Plotkin navigating out of his current predicament. They also may have exposure themselves.

This is where things get
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신념의사나이...
@Belposto_korea
What does Gold- Backed mean?
The Chinese Elders have been accumulating gold for hundreds of years. They are gold-rich. Some of their gold was loaned to the Central Banking System so that it could fund the rebuilding of Europe after the many war-torn years from World Wars I and II

BTW they never returned it but used it to start their financial empire to enslave humanity. This is the Central Bank Banking System./2

Maybe this is why one of the conditions to use their gold for the QFS is the demise and full disclosure of the Central Bank banking system before the RV can take place./3

The Elders have caves of hidden gold and are now using it to gold-back the currencies in the QFS for every country in the world. It is important to understand that the QFS and the money it is about to release is all brand-new currency./4

It was designed by the Alliance to fund the new financial system that will reset all Currencies of the world to Gold-Backed currency./5
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Suhas S. Hardutt
Suhas S. Hardutt
@HarduttSuhas
THE BATTLE OF TALIKOTA and the destruction of Vijaynagar (Hampi)
26 January 1565

A tale of valor, deception and decimation.

A grim reminder that if we fail to protect our heritage, it will eventually crumble under the onslaught of "forces of anarchy".
(Elaborate thread)


This decisive battle was fought between the Vijayanagara empire and the Deccan sultanates resulting in a rout of Vijayanagara and ending the last major medieval era Hindu kingdom in south India.(1)

The seeds of 1565 encounter were sown more than 250 years earlier when the forces of the Delhi Sultanate, during the time of Alauddin Khilji and later Md Bin Tughlaq swept through southern India in an expansion spree.(2)

By middle of the 14th century, facing rebellions, Tughlaq withdrew to Delhi, leaving behind 2 empires, Bahmani, which ruled the Deccan from Kalaburagi, and Vijayanagara, which ruled most south India with its capital at Vijayanagar.(3)

The Raichur Doab, between the Krishna and Tungabhadra rivers, existed as a natural boundary between these two kingdoms, with wars often breaking out over control of this territory.(4)
HISTORY
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Noah Smith
Noah Smith
@Noahpinion
Remember: Just because an idea is old doesn't mean it's good.

Knowing whether old ideas are more likely to be good requires understanding whether conditions have changed in important ways.

Horse archery was an amazing method of warfare for over a thousand years...then people invented guns, and suddenly this great idea that had stood the test of time became obsolete.

Then again, when underlying conditions don't change much, tried-and-true approaches are probably better.

"Learning the lessons of history" usually just means assuming ergodicity and stationarity in an informal time-series model...

(end)
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Pegasus of Dharma
Pegasus of Dharma
@HarduttSuhas
The BATTLE OF PAVAN KHIND (13 July 1660)

300 MARATHAS against 10000+ ADIL SHAHI TROOPS

A Sparta style last man stand at a mountain pass which ensured Shivaji Maharaj's safety.

Valour, loyalty and sacrifice!


Baji Prabhu Deshpande was one of the most able lieutenants of Shivaji. He sacrificed his life defending Shivaji in a heroic last stand known as the "Battle of Pavan Khind" in which his force was hugely outnumbered.(1)

In this battle he became a martyr, but managed to halt the enemy forces for several hours, which secured Shivaji’s safety and victory on another front. Without this heroic last stand Shivaji’s glorious career may have been cut short.(2)


Baji Prabhu was senior to Shivaji. In the beginning he opposed Shivaji being from a rival Maratha clan, but realised that Shivaji stood for national resurgence. Henceforth he became a friend and loyal supporter of Shivaji.(3)

In 1660, Shivaji was trapped in the fort of Panhala, under siege and vastly outnumbered by an Adilshahi army led by general Siddhi Jauhar.(4)
HISTORY
Jim O'Shaughnessy
Jim O'Shaughnessy
@jposhaughnessy
I’m torn on how to approach the idea of luck. I’m the first to admit that I am one of the luckiest people on the planet. To be born into a prosperous American family in 1960 with smart parents is to start life on third base. The odds against my very existence are astronomical.


I’ve always felt that the luckiest people I know had a talent for recognizing circumstances, not of their own making, that were conducive to a favorable outcome and their ability to quickly take advantage of them.

In other words, dumb luck was just that, it required no awareness on the person’s part, whereas “smart” luck involved awareness followed by action before the circumstances changed.

So, was I “lucky” to be born when I was—nothing I had any control over—and that I came of age just as huge databases and computers were advancing to the point where I could use those tools to write “What Works on Wall Street?” Absolutely.

Was I lucky to start my stock market investments near the peak of interest rates which allowed me to spend the majority of my adult life in a falling rate environment? Yup.
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