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.

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If you think "It's not censorship unless the government does it," I want to change your mind.

It's absolutely true that the First Amendment only prohibits government action to suppress speech based on its content, but the First Amendment is not the last word on censorship.

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Here are some kinds of private speech-suppression that I think most of us can agree are censorship: when the John Birch Society burned mountains of rock records and novels - or when Tipper Gore's PMRC pressured record stores to drop punk, metal and rap albums.

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Or the Comics Code Authority, which signed up all comics publishers and retailers to block comics if they contained anything unfit for small children, which stunted American comics for generations while their European counterparts created entire sophisticated genres.

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Or MPAA ratings, in which a secret group of censors (falsely described as frequently rotated, randomly selected parents - really they're long-serving studio insiders) decides whether movies get NC-17 ratings and thus be blocked from nearly every screen in the country.

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(You can learn more about this from Kirby Dick's unmissable doc, "This Film Is Not Yet Rated," which documents both how the MPAA misleads the public about ratings, and uses them to block LGBTQ

Despite the massive triumphs of the world's largest corporations and most rapacious billionaires during the covid crisis, neoliberalism is in ideological retreat: more people are more critical of the idea that "free markets" can solve big problems than at any time in my life.

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The Democratic nomination race was a fight between the neoliberal wing of the party and the Democratic Socialists, with the candidates representing a spectrum between those two sides (and the odd outlier on either side).

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Supposedly, the party grandees brokered peace between the two main factions, but the left is rightfully suspicious about whether Biden - and Republicans-who-sit-as-Dems like Joe Manchin - will deliver anything beyond symbolic gestures.

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One bright spot: Bernie Sanders is finally chairing the Senate Budget Committee, giving him enormous power over muscular covid relief packages, Medicare expansion, and rolling back Trump and Bush tax-cuts on the

This is where Sanders' long experience in the Senate, and his virtuoso work using its procedures to advance his position, will serve him well. As we saw with McConnell, the ability to wield procedure is a powerful asset in getting stuff done.

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Surveillance companies assure us that they employ safeguards to ensure that their customers aren't abusing their products to engage in unlawful or unethical surveillance. And yet, inevitably, these companies abuse their tools THEMSELVES.

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It's almost as though being the kind of person who dreams of achieving incredible wealthy by spying on people makes you kind of an asshole.

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Like the people at @VerkadaHQ, "a fast-growing Silicon Valley surveillance startup" whose male employees used its own products to sexually harass their female colleagues and received the barest wrist-slaps for

Male Verkada employees maintained a private Slack channel where executives posted photos of female employees - captured with the company's own surveillance tools - and made sexually explicit remarks about them.

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When this came to light, the company's founder and CEO Filip Kaliszan called an all-hands meeting, expressed disappointment in the harassers, and told them that they could either quit...or lose some stock options. They chose the latter and remain employed there to this day.

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When it's railroading time, you get railroads.

When the railroads turn into the personal satrapies of rail-barons, you get trustbusters.

A couple decades ago, it was online service time. We had the users, the telcoms systems, the computers, the modems, so we got platforms.

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We had that, but we lacked something important: effective antimonopoly enforcement. Lax merger laws allowed companies with access to capital markets to buy out or neutralize all their competitors, so we got monopolies.

Right on schedule, we're getting digital trustbusters.

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Now, some people aren't technically sophisticated, but they do understand a lot about competition law. That's how you get meat-and-taters antitrust proposals like @amyklobuchar's #CALERA, which address the structural problems with antitrust

Klobuchar's bill is hugely important. The reason we have monopolies is that we stopped enforcing anti-monopoly law 40 years ago. Monopoly isn't a tech problem, it's everywhere from sneakers to glass bottles to pro wrestling to candy to

Klobuchar's CALERA doesn't just seek to apply antitrust law to tech - it also explicitly restores the pre-Reagan basis for fighting monopolies: we fight monopolies because they concentrate power and corrupt our politics. All monopolies are guilty unless proven otherwise.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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1/x The window we have been targeting for 2 months has officially opened... i Can not imagine a more textbook display of the power of Vanna at expiration as we saw on Friday. The capital building was overrun by an insurrection, but all that that meant was a bigger late day rally.

2/x that ended at ATH on the close. Between Gary the 🦍 & his RVol suppression & his hand off to late day Ivol compression & the Vanna index bid, the 🐻’s never had a chance... but Gary’s getting tired after 2 months battling complacency & Vanna’s 2 week vacation, 1 of her only

3/x 2 week departures of the year (a 5 week OpEx) is quickly approaching on 1/15 morning. That means she’ll be increasingly absent as she prepares for her trip. W/ a $59 1 week straddle & $50 1 day range on Friday, & another $30 overnight drop, it’s hard to see why you wouldn’t

4/x want to take a chance on a little long gamma at this juncture. Especially given the obvious warning signs coming from the steepening of the yield curve, underperformance of the Growth complex, complacency in sentiment & positioning, anecdotal signs of bubbles in BTC & TSLA,

5/x NTM the growing exuberance surrounding a fiscal stimulus deal near $2 Trillion. The wall of worry of 3 months ago is gone. The vaccine is being deployed, the election is resolved, fiscal stimulus was passed & w/2 Georgia 🍑 🍑, ever moar 🚁💰is on the way. But what happened

No one is going to do it for you

A thread...

As a founder, if you won't show up every single day, despite how you are feeling, or how the startup is doing or what the press is writing about you, or your cofounders not working out, or your product failing or your customers shouting

No one is going to do it for you

As a student, if you won't do things that scare you, that make you feel nervous, that challenge you, that intimidate you, that you have always wanted to do but never gathered the courage to

No one is going to do it for you

In your first job, if you are not going to make an effort to know how things have happened before and why, to meet new people, to seek help, to ask for feedback, to be patient with results, to not seek "impact" in the first month itself

No one is going to do it for you

If as a son/daughter you are not going to realize what your parents went through while growing up, that they want the same things from your life that you want for your self, that their path is different but there are reasons why

No one is going to do it for you

10 sales tactics that work:

1/ Stage out the conversation

One conversation is just that: another conversation.

Land a second, and now you’re being “evaluated”.

Don’t try to jam through everything in the first convo.

Do just enough to pique their interest and land that second meeting.

2/ Do your homework

If you’re pitching a customer, use their product,

Read about the company and the person you’re talking to.

Ultimately, this proves that you will do the work to make their lives easier.

It’s so powerful yet so easily overlooked.

3/ Ask about the decision making process

Who is required to make a decision like this?

What would you need to see from me to be able to buy?

How long will it take to make a decision?

These questions give you the roadmap on how to close the deal.

4/ Don’t always demo

Sometimes it’s habit to jump straight into a demo.

If someone wants to talk first, do that.

This could consume a whole first conversation.

Which gives you a great excuse for that second meeting: going thru the demo.