BC BUSINESS
Saved by @SteveeRogerr

The early Disney company had several near-death experiences, some due to exogenous shocks and some self-inflicted (bad labor practices, weird technology choices), and all through it, a power struggle between "Roy people" (finance) and "Walt people" (tech/art).

1/

 After WWII, the company was transformed, with Roy ascendant and financial discipline the order of the day. Walt - who struggled with depression - sought desperately for an escape from the company.

2/
He came up with plans to outfit a train with traveling exhibits that he would drive around the country, putting thousands of miles between him and his brother.

3/
Another plan called for Walt to build an ambitious model train system and transform his role in the company to showing people around his trains.

4/
In 1953, Walt came up with the plan that stuck: a park called "Disneyland" that would be his own fiefdom, a commercial project that would justify the kinds of R&D and experimentation that Walt doted on and Roy looked on as high-risk, potentially ruinous follies.

5/
There was only one problem: Roy wouldn't authorize the company to bankroll it, so Walt had to fly to New York (far from his brother) to court the Wall Street banks and ask them to foot the bill.

6/
Walt worked with legendary artist Herb Ryman to create an eight-page prospectus with a gorgeous painting to accompany it, and had three copies typed up in the Disney company steno pool and he flew to New York with them.

7/
Only one copy of that prospectus exists today. In 2013, it changed hands at auction, with the winning bid going to noted asshole Glenn Beck, who offered no plans to allow study or exhibition of it.

8/
During that process, I came into possession of a high-resolution scan of that document. I made sure that the Imagineering archivist got a copy - they'd never seen it before - and deposited a long-term public archival copy with the @internetarchive.

https://t.co/7LQvTEh60D

9/
It's a strange and curious document, but one striking feature is that it conceptualizes Disneyland as a place you might go to not to ride any rides, but just to walk around and enjoy yourself, soaking in the atmosphere (and buy a tropical bird or fish) (no, really).

10/
Reading that, I thought of Walt, with his anxieties and his fraught relationship with his workers and brother, the factionalism that divided his company and his longing for escape, and that iconic photo of Walt strolling through an empty castle, looking perfectly at peace.

11/
From 1955-1982, Disneyland operated on a ticket system. You paid a low price for admission, and then paid for each ride using ticketbooks that rated the rides from A (boring) to E (main attraction) (the system ended due to competition from nearby Knott's Berry Farm).

12/
That low-priced admission ticket meant that locals could easily afford to slip away to Disneyland, stroll the park, maybe buy some junk food or watch a parade, and go home again.

13/
The advent of unlimited-ride admission created demand for annual passes, and discounts for kids and locals made DL into an after-school hangout. Early Disney message-boards raged with arguments over the Orange County goths who hung around Tomorrowland, smoking and glowering.

14/
Annual passes grew and grew. When I first moved to LA in 2006 for a Fulbright chair at USC, I used to teach my classes then drive to Disneyland with my cheap LA resident's pass. I'd park, get a Fastpass for Space Mountain, ride the Haunted Mansion.

15/
Then I'd write part of the novel I was working on in a quiet bench in New Orleans Square, ride Space Mountain once my Fastpass ripened, then I'd go home for dinner.

Annual Passes grew too successful, selling so well they crowded out vacationers on a once-in-a-lifetime trip.

16/
A series of price-hikes did not dampen Annual Pass sales. While repeated doublings of the price raised a lot of revenue, it also created a large cohort of troublesome customers who felt all that money entitled them to white-glove treatment.

17/
Then came a suite of baroque tiers and restrictions on passes, with blackout dates - which made people entitled, confused and cranky.

Then came the pandemic...and the end of the Annual Pass program altogether.

https://t.co/PrbdFsnS4U

18/
There's lots of reasons that killing the Annual Pass makes sense, but one that's not immediately obvious is that DL is a "happy place" for a lot of people who struggle with the world, like Walt did. Most of us just find a moment of peace in a quiet corner of the park.

19/
But some people exhibit pathological behavior. One family sewed their own Disneyland employee costumes and tried to entrap a ride attendant into an arranged marriage with their daughter!

Most of the problems generated by Annual Passholders aren't that extreme, of course.

20/
But even the smaller problems grow in significance by dint of repetition: the mildly troublesome customer who comes EVERY DAY and makes trouble can quickly grow more than mildly troublesome.

21/
I understand the logic of killing the passes. But I can't help think of Walt, wanting an escape from a bad situation that he'd made worse through his own screw-ups, and then, incredibly, actually pulling it off.

22/
A lot of us have been missing our various happy places since the lockdown, and Disney doubtless anticipates a massive rush when the vaccines have been distributed (they are tapped to be Southern California's largest distribution site).

23/
It feels like someone at Disney thought about just how intense and freaked out some of those returning Annual Passholders were likely to be and decided that the costs (for employees and other visitors) of coping with that outweighed the benefits.

eof/

More from Cory Doctorow #BLM

Cory Doctorow #BLM
Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow
While many Amazon warehouse workers in Europe have unionized, its brutalized, underpaid, routinely maimed US workforce remains tragically unorganized, thanks to the US's weak labor laws that make forming a union far harder than at any time since the Gilded Age.

1/


But all that may be about to change: 6000 warehouse workers in #BHM1, the massive Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, AL, will vote next month on a push to unionize under the

Amazon, like other tech giants, is absolutely reliant on building and maintaining a competitive advantage by exploiting technology to drive wages ever downward while ducking responsibility for harming workers.

3/

Big Tech is pants-wettingly afraid of unionization, and that goes double for any solidarity between high-paid tech workers and misclassified/outsourced warehouse workers and other "unskilled" laborers.

4/

Amazon has gone so far as to hire the Pinkertons, renowned as some of history's most violent anti-worker terrorists, to bust unionization drives in its
BUSINESS
Cory Doctorow #BLM
Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow
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/
HISTORY
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Cory Doctorow #BLM
Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow
Happy Birthday to the queen of the scream queens, Barbara Steele! https://t.co/qnhQvROGVa


Happy Birthday to the queen of the scream queens, Barbara Steele! https://t.co/qnhQvROGVa


Happy Birthday to the queen of the scream queens, Barbara Steele! https://t.co/qnhQvROGVa


Happy Birthday to the queen of the scream queens, Barbara Steele! https://t.co/qnhQvROGVa


Happy Birthday to the queen of the scream queens, Barbara Steele! https://t.co/qnhQvROGVa
HISTORY
Cory Doctorow #BLM
Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow
The Grand Duchy of Luxembourg is a founding member of the EU, but it's also a rogue state, enabling massive corruption throughout the trading bloc; while Cyprus and Malta will sell any corrupt robber-baron EU citizenship, it's Luxembourg that leads in laundering their money.

1/


As the @TaxJusticeNet's @nickshaxson memorably put it, Luxembourg is "a criminal enterprise with a country attached" - a country where corporations are guaranteed "an easy ride on taxes, disclosure, financial regulations, and criminal

2014's #Luxleaks exposed some of the worst corruption, whereby @PwC worked with Luxembourg officials to secure illegal tax benefits for major corporations and the world's richest

Luxleaks lead to a 2018 EU directive that required member states to publish registers of the true owners of the companies they registered.

4/

Luxembourg published theirs in 2019, and @lemondefr partnered with ten media orgs for a year-long analysis of the register, which was published this week: #Openlux. The findings reveal that Luxleaks was just the tip of the
ALL
Cory Doctorow #BLM
Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow
Republican North Dakota legislators have introduced #SB2333, a bill that prohibits large tech companies from locking their users into a single app store or payment processor.

https://t.co/PgyhgOhFAl

1/


While his has implications for Android and other large tech platforms, its most immediate and far-reaching effects with be on Apple, whose Ios platform uses lock-in to monopolize both apps and payments (and another domain, not mentioned in the bill: repairs).

2/

Predictably, this has thrown Apple into a fury, with Apple's privacy chief @erikn telling the SD legislature that Apple uses its monopoly over the app store to protect its users' privacy and

Neuenschwander makes a good, but incomplete, point. To the extent that Apple has the same interests as its users, it uses its app store monopoly to lock out bad apps (to the best of its ability).

4/

But when Apple's interests diverge from its users' interests, the prohibition on sideloading apps actively harms those users' privacy and security. Think of how Apple caved to Chinese state demands to remove working VPNs from the Ios app store to facilitate mass surveillance.

5/
BUSINESS

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\U0001f1ef\U0001f1f5 \U0001f1e9\U0001f1ea JK Trump Supporter Japan\U0001f1fa\U0001f1f8
🇯🇵 🇩🇪 JK Trump Support...
@TTrumpSJapan
🇺🇸#TreasonAgainstAmerica 1/12


🇺🇸#TreasonAgainstAmerica 2/12


🇺🇸#TreasonAgainstAmerica 3/12


🇺🇸#TreasonAgainstAmerica 4/12


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Ramin
Ramin
@MalwareRE
As part of our commitment to keeping our customers/community protected & informed, we are releasing a blog that shines light on transition between Stage 1 and 2 of #Solorigate/#SUNBURST campaign, custom Cobalt Strike loaders, post-exploit. artifacts, IOCs: https://t.co/b0ReHMa63u


Here are some highlights:
The missing link between the Solorigate backdoor and the custom #CobaltStrike loaders observed during the #Solorigate is an Image File Execution Options (IFEO) Debugger registry value created for the legitimate process dllhost.exe (ATT&CK ID: T1546.012).

Once the registry value is created, the attackers wait for the occasional execution of dllhost.exe, which might happen naturally on a system. This execution triggers a process launch of wscript.exe configured to run the VBScript file dropped by the SolarWinds backdoor (Stage 1).


The VBScript in turn runs rundll32.exe, activating the Cobalt Strike loader DLL using a clean parent/child process tree completely disconnected from the SolarWinds process. Finally, the VBScript removes the previously created IFEO value to clean up any traces of execution.

On the custom Cobalt Strike Loaders: we identified several second-stage malware, including TEARDROP, Raindrop, and other custom loaders for the Cobalt Strike beacon. During the lateral movement phase, the custom loader DLLs are dropped mostly in existing Windows sub-directories.
BUSINESS
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We The Inevitable
We The Inevitable
@WeTheInevitable
Former CEO and future former Chairman of ATT RandaII Stephenson fun facts:
>>was chairman of Boy Scouts of America
>>was mentored by CarIos SIim
>>subsequently promoted to CFO of “southwestern bell company” (former name of ATT)
>>quickly resolved $30B in debt
>>is on CFR
😲


https://t.co/wWjV2t3bVB

And he worked for Bush telecoms ? Damn. This is a jackpot

I’m guessing This expIosion wasn’t just some expIosion

https://t.co/s0i05aaWXt

Silver lake


Silver Lake Senior Leadership

https://t.co/YLaUtP8lQa
BUSINESS
Vijay Patel
Vijay Patel
@vijaygajera
Pratik Sinha founder of ALT news is trained comrade! He is working on Communist agenda!

Thread

How many fact check he has done about any left party?No he won’t do it!
He will do fact check of Congress and few other non Left parties just to tell the world that he is unbiased!

Mukul Sinha, father of Pratik Sinha was Comrade and her mother is also comrade. They were active member of left parties!

Mukul Sinha tried to pleased Musl!ms after 2002 Riots with his fake evidence for huge donation from Musl!m Countries.


Mukul Sinha contested Gujarat Assembly elections in 2007 from a Muslim-dominated seat Shahpur in Ahemdabad, but got just 255 (0.44%) votes, losing his deposit. 😂🤣

In 2012, Sinha contested as an independent candidate from Sabarmati in Ahemdabad, and lost again, securing just 1860 (1.23%) votes!🤣🤣

As per affidavit in 2007 he had total movable asset of Rs.23,82,309

But shockingly In 2012 he had huge hike in movable assets! He has Rs.1,08,65,799 movable assets as per affidavit.
(this information are available in affidavit. This is not privet information)
BUSINESS
Romeen Sheth
Romeen Sheth
@RomeenSheth
I love Twitter.

It’s truly the Town Square of the Internet.

But finding the diamond in the rough voices can be tough.

Here are 20 of my favorite people to follow:

1. Alex Lieberman - @businessbarista

Alex writes extensively about the Founder journey.

The cool part is he’s lived everything he talks about - starting from $0 and selling for $75M with hardly any outside capital raised.

My favorite piece:


2. Ryan Breslow - @ryantakesoff

Ryan is a Top 1% founder.

This guy is a machine - he’s built 2 unicorns before the age of 27.

Ryan spells out lessons on fundraising, operating and scaling.

My favorite piece:


3. Jesse Pujji - @jspujji

Jesse is who I think of when I think “bootstrapping.”

He bootstrapped his company to an 8-figure exit and now shares stories about other awesome bootstrappers.

He’s also got great insight into all things growth marketing:


4. Post Market - @Post_Market

Post puts out some of the most thoughtful investment insights on this platform.

It’s refreshing because Post cuts through the hype and goes deep into the business model.

Idk who he/she/it is, but the insights are 💣.
BUSINESS

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I just finished Eric Adler's The Battle of the Classics, and wanted to say something about Joel Christiansen's review linked below. I am not sure what motivates the review (I speculate a bit below), but it gives a very misleading impression of the book. 1/x


The meat of the criticism is that the history Adler gives is insufficiently critical. Adler describes a few figures who had a great influence on how the modern US university was formed. It's certainly critical: it focuses on the social Darwinism of these figures. 2/x

Other insinuations and suggestions in the review seem wildly off the mark, distorted, or inappropriate-- for example, that the book is clickbaity (it is scholarly) or conservative (hardly) or connected to the events at the Capitol (give me a break). 3/x

The core question: in what sense is classics inherently racist? Classics is old. On Adler's account, it begins in ancient Rome and is revived in the Renaissance. Slavery (Christiansen's primary concern) is also very old. Let's say classics is an education for slaveowners. 4/x

It's worth remembering that literacy itself is elite throughout most of this history. Literacy is, then, also the education of slaveowners. We can honor oral and musical traditions without denying that literacy is, generally, good. 5/x
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Remembering Colonel Anil Kaul, VrC (Retd) on his 3rd Death Anniversary.

“It was October 12, 1987, exactly 5:55 pm as I was… coming out of the cupola of my T-72 tank on a steamy evening in an unknown place called Kokkuvil in the Jaffna district of Northern Sri Lanka.+


I froze in that confined space at what I saw. An LTTE militant stood at 60 meters aiming his rocket-propelled gun at my tank.

In a flash he fired. Probably having lost his nerve he aimed too low. The projectile hit the left mudguard of the tank, but for some inexplicable reason+


did not explode. It then hit the side of the main gun and then exploded on top of the turret, all in a fraction of a second. Before I knew, it seemed I had received a straight right punch so to say to my chin. I saw some blood appear on my left hand and there was a sharp drop in+

my eyesight.

Lt Colonel (now Lt Gen) Dalbir Singh, then Commanding Officer of 10 Para Commando, who was standing on the engine deck said to me, “Yaar what a close shave.”

He suddenly saw me and the look on his face told me that something was very very wrong with me. In that+

fraction of a second, as if it was a rewind of my entire life, thoughts raced through my life as to how and when I had landed myself in such a situation…

I asked my gunner to pull out a first field dressing (FFD) which is standard equipment in a first aid box carried in each+
HISTORY
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Vigilant AFA
Vigilant AFA
@AfaVigilant
One fascist to watch in 2021 is Joseph Charles "Oakman" Golinske of SE MI. He's been a Proud Boy for a couple years, but took a break recently from the group and promotes himself through the "Oak Nation" channel on Telegram.


Most people may be familiar with him as the tall guy in the Proud Boys bridge shot, from their August 17, 2019 attack on Portland, which featured an American Guard bus trying (and failing) to bludgeon antifascists with hammers.


He was also with his g/f at the time (Dominique Tota, left of Tarrio), and that's definitely a twitter account folks will want to block/report because he posts on it.


He's been plenty active at the pro-Covid/anti-mask/ReOpen protests in Lansing MI, seen here with Jerry Wayne and an effigy of Gretchen Whitmer, who his militia friends tried to kidnap and publicly execute.


Outside of the Proud Boys, his solo "career" with Oak Nation features the same misogyny, classism and gateway to far-right domestic terrorism the Proud Boys themselves feature. Here's him peddling oxychlorinque and bragging about harassing service workers.
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Jaya_Upadhyaya
Jaya_Upadhyaya
@Jayalko1
ADI SHANKAR AND SRI TOTAKACHARYA

Adi Shankaracharya chose his disciple Totakacharya to be the first head of the Math at Joshimath.
The Narsingh Mandir (Mandir of Sri Narasimha) in Joshimath is one of the 108 Divyadesams and also the home of Badrinath during the winter months.


Totakacharya was earlier a boy named ‘Giri’ and a devout disciple of Adi Shankaracharya. Unlike others, he was not known to be an expert in Shastras but his dedication to his Guru was complete and he used to listen to His discourses with utmost faith and devotion.
@SriRamya21


One morning as Adi Shankara and his disciples were getting ready for the discourse, Giri was delayed. The other disciples urged their Guru to commence the lesson on Bramhsutra Bhashya telling him that Giri would anyway not be able to comprehend its deep meaning.
@RajeAiyer


Adi Shankar responded “नायमात्मा प्रवचनेन लभ्यो न मेधया” – Atman cannot be attained through discourses or mere intellect.
He,then, awakened the supreme knowledge in Giri.
Giri spontaneously composed: श्री शङ्करदेशिकाष्टकम् extolling his Guru’s grace.


Adi Shankaracharya granted sanyasa to Giri and gave him the name Totakacharya.
The story of how Giri became Totakacharya is a great example of the importance of faith and devotion in your Guru and not the mere knowledge of the Shastras.
@DetheEsha
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Nicolas
Nicolas
@necolas
A brief analysis and comparison of the CSS for Twitter's PWA vs Twitter's legacy desktop website. The difference is dramatic and I'll touch on some reasons why.

Legacy site *downloads* ~630 KB CSS per theme and writing direction.

6,769 rules
9,252 selectors
16.7k declarations
3,370 unique declarations
44 media queries
36 unique colors
50 unique background colors
46 unique font sizes
39 unique z-indices

https://t.co/qyl4Bt1i5x


PWA *incrementally generates* ~30 KB CSS that handles all themes and writing directions.

735 rules
740 selectors
757 declarations
730 unique declarations
0 media queries
11 unique colors
32 unique background colors
15 unique font sizes
7 unique z-indices

https://t.co/w7oNG5KUkJ


The legacy site's CSS is what happens when hundreds of people directly write CSS over many years. Specificity wars, redundancy, a house of cards that can't be fixed. The result is extremely inefficient and error-prone styling that punishes users and developers.

The PWA's CSS is generated on-demand by a JS framework that manages styles and outputs "atomic CSS". The framework can enforce strict constraints and perform optimisations, which is why the CSS is so much smaller and safer. Style conflicts and unbounded CSS growth are avoided.
TECH