#Thiel One Step in Front of Another

[snellblogs]

CANADA ROAD  3

Aug 21 23

Between Goderich and Kincardine,

Lake Huron

Great Lakes

Ontario

Sunset 60 minutes ago

Today it was so rough with the waves and the wind that I just went in, fell over and couldn’t even begin to swim.  When the wind gets up, it gets harder to swim but the waves are lovely.  There was a walk along the dirt track here in between the cottages, with trees lining our way both sides of the road, hiding for the most part the dwellings either side of the road.  There were seven of us straggling along with the children at the front.  We found the creek that leads inland to the gorge.  There was a fairy garden, a flower garden and a friendly dog whose owner had lost his white cat.  We looked, but didn’t find her. 

We took the stairs down to the beach and walked back up the beach to our part of the beach.  There were decks and boat launches, chairs, bars, all kinds of wooden structure, all facing the lake, which feels like a sea, so vast into the distance, turquoise water.  There were our familiar seats facing out to sea waiting for us to sit and look.

We visited the Point Clark Lighthouse, after driving on the Main 21 Bluewater Highway, between miles and miles of green fields with crops like corn and potatoes.  The Lighthouse had a museum set in the windy point.  The museum documents he story of the generations of Lighthouse Keepers and their families, illustrated with old photographs. 

We could climb the old lighthouse tower, white and red, saving lives on the lakr.  There is an area of shoals off the coast here that the Lighthouse, and thus prevents ships from running aground.  The water is only five feet deep out in the channel. 

The Lighthouse system is still needed for shipping.  Originally eleven were required but only six were ever built.  Today they are automated but previously needed buckets of oil to keep running which had to be carried up the stairs in the dark without a hand rail.

The day was sunny and the flowers at the foot of the lighthouse were in full bloom on the shore and the traditional houses had wonderful displays of flowers all over the peninsula.

Sun set tonight happened as the sun slid gradually to the skyline through stripes of cloud, grey against fiery red, until below our sight. Goodnight!

www.lynnepearl.com

[rewritingthestars]

So uh, i might have written an entire fic of neil as ironman? Oops??

Part 1 of 3

Desert surrounds them on both sides of the cruiser. Neil stares blankly at the seat in front of him, not bothering to look up. Romero’s presence is a silent threat next to him, watching him out of the corner of his eye. The American soldiers tasked with escorting them seem uneasy in their tension, sharing looks between themselves and at Neil.

Neil’s sure he wasn't what they expected. A billionaire kid genius that's made every weapon that they ever touched gives the impression of someone much more imposing than Neil. Not that Neil cares particularly for his reputation. It’s been tainted since the moment he was born.

The silence finally breaks when a missile soars into the cruiser in front of them, exploding half the vehicle and throwing the rest of the debris in front of them.

One of the two soldiers screams, “Get down!” Before another blast rocks their cruiser, sending Neil into the door with a hard crack. The telltale ringing of explosions and gunshots fill his ears and he blinks harshly to get a grasp on his surroundings.

Romero grabs him by the arm and drags him out of the vehicle, throwing him to the ground and shooting randomly in the direction of their attackers. Three shots hit Romero, his bulletproof vest only taking two of the hits, the other going right through his skull.

Neil stares dazedly at Romero’s corpse uncomprehendingly, before the adrenaline finally kicks in and tells him to run. He stumbles to his feet, blasts and bullets still flying through the air, crouching low and running to large pieces of metal for cover.

He hides behind the remains of a car door, clenching his hands over his ears uselessly to stop the ringing, before a heavy black cylinder lands at his feet and neil only has half a moment to feel resigned to his fate, the large white letters spelling WESNINSKI mocking him as he prepares to die by his own creation.

————

“Its my company.” Neil hisses out, clenching his fists so hard his fingernails dig blood.

Lola smiles wickedly, her bright red lipstick only adding to the image of a monster, her eyes bright with joy.

“Oh, but Junior,” She says with false sadness, ”You're only nineteen, and just oh, so upset over your daddy's death. What kind of mother would I be to let you take up such a large responsibility?”

“You're not my mother!” Neil yells, ”And we both know that bastard never treated me like a son. I am more than capable of running Wesninski, it’s my name, my tech, my knowledge that's even gotten this damn company this far-“

Lola tsks, shaking her head dramatically, ”Of course Nathaniel, I know that, but the board won't understand that. I worry they just won't be able to see past your horrific breakdown.”

Neil’s blood runs cold, and he takes a step back to the door he’s now sure is locked, feeling panic swell inside him. ”What breakdown.”

Lola’s smile widens, her manic laughter piercing his ears, and Neil runs to the door, slamming his hand on the screen next to it. The hand scanner pressed underneath his palm flashes red, and Neil feels Lola’s hands dig into his shoulder blades before a needle pierces his neck.

——-

Neil wakes up surrounding by dark, pain filtering his system inside and out. An uncomfortable pressure weighs down on his sternum, and he moves his hand to push it off. Metal scratches underneath his fingernails and Neil gasps at the pain the comes when he tries to push it off. His eyes snap open, looking down hurriedly to see a metal disk protruding from his chest, bile rising in his throat as his eyes following the wires from it to what looks like a car battery. Panic and sickness push to the surface and he's stumbling, feet swinging over the metal slab that he's on, his heart racing and eyes flickering frantically around.

“Stop moving around for god’s sakes, do you know how much goddamn time and energy it took to keep you alive?!” A voice shouts out, and neil flinches back, turning around to see a grimly looking woman with her arms crossed, a stern look on her face like that of a disapproving mother.

“What is this, where am I?” Neil demands quickly, panic still pulsing through his veins as he tenses for a fight he couldn't possibly win.

“Nice to meet you too kid, I’m Shahrazad,” the woman mocks, ”I only created the thing that's stopping shrapnel from tearing your heart to pieces, no big deal.”

Neil stills for a moment, taking a quick breath to center himself, taking another look at the machine connected to him. “A magnet.” Neil says absently, tracing the crude craftsmanship.

“Yes,” Shahrazad says, “An electromagnet that saved your life.”

“Oh.” Neil says,” Thank you.”

Shahrazad scoffs, ”Well of course, anything for the great Nathaniel Wesninski.”

Neil flinches at his full name, and Shahrazad's eyes soften slightly.

She looks away, ”You're in a Ten Rings base. This is a hostage situation.”

Neil frowns, ”Wh-“

The only door in the cave like room rattles, and Shahrazad stiffens.

”Get up,” she hisses, and then pulls at him to move, ”Get up, if you want to live you will do as I say.”

Standing is unsteady and excruciatingly painful, but Neil’s use to pain and he's use to pretending he isn't in any, so he straightens up and raises his hands in tangent with Shahrazad.

Large bulky men walk through the door, all carrying weapons and dangerous glares. The first man through is the only one wearing a smile and he grins large and wide at Neil.

”Nathaniel Wesninski, America’s favorite mass murderer,” The man says in farsi, ”It's an honor.”

Shahrazad unnecessarily translates, and Neil lets her. Farsi is his fourth fluent language and Neil is internally grateful he picked farsi over russian in college.

“I have an. Appreciation, let's call it, for your talents. Your weapons are rather useful for my cause, but there's one in particular that catches my eye.”

Neil would like to believe these men stole his weapons somehow, would like to believe Lola wouldn't sell his tech to terrorist groups, but he cant find it in himself to be surprised if she did. The man pulls out a blurry photo that couldn't have been taken too long ago, and Neil feels dread well up inside him as he realizes what he wants.

“You will build me Jericho,” The man says cheerfully, ”Because if you don’t, you will die here.”

———

“-thiel Wesninski, son and successor of Nathan Wesninski, comes out of rehab today. The child prodigy that helped his father build what is today, a very successful multi-billion dollar company, has been institutionalized since his mental breakdown after his father's tragic passing. Rumors have been going around that Wesninski is thinking of taking over his father's company despite his grief. Is it a good idea for such a young, troubled man to take over a large company? Or would it be better for Lola Wesninski, Nathan's second wife, to take the reins while Nathaniel recovers? Next up is-“

“Jarvis, turn off the tv,” Neil says loudly.

“As you wish sir,” The voice says from the walls, the tv shutting off soundly.

“I told you to stop calling me that,” Neil mumbles to himself, concentrating on the blueprints in front of him and frowning.

Lola cheerfully calls it Jericho. Neil calls it the worst damn thing he's ever created. If Neil was selfless enough he'd burn every hard drive related to the machine and shoot himself in the head. But Neil has always looked out for himself foremost, and he can't bring himself to destroy the monster he's created. It would be suicide, and though he shouldn't be worth even one life, his self preservation doesn't seem to care when Lola’s the one holding the trigger.

“Brilliant,” Lola says brightly. ”Your best work yet.”

——-

“He's not going to let you go,” Shahrazad says.

Neil snorts over a pile of metal, ”No shit.”  

Sharazad has been cold with him since he agreed to build Jericho. She translates when he asks for materials but that's the extent of her friendliness.

She's been watching him take apart his own missiles and weapons for hours, getting more irritated as time goes on.

“Do you even care that you’re selling mass destructive tools to psychopaths? Do you care about how many lives, how much blood your creations spill? Are you so young and naive you don't understand the repercussions of your actions?”

Neil grits his teeth, trying to focus on removing the palladium, trying to concentrate on his badly thought out ideas and his even more flawed plans. He knows they're watching his every move through the cameras, knows the moment he finishes they'll kill him, knows the hastily made electromagnet won't last for much longer. Yet images of dead bodies and shrapnel won't leave his head and he puts down the pliers.

“My father has been making me make tools to kill other people since I was eight years old.” Neil says quietly in farsi, and Shahrazad falls silent. “When I was old enough to realize what I was doing I told him I never wanted to invent another thing again. He took one of my prototypes and shot me with it. He told me I could either hurt other people, or he could hurt me.”

Neil resumes his work, ”When he died I tried to take over and ended up being tortured for six months. No matter what I do, I will always be someone’s means to killing someone else.” Neil pulls the small strip of metal out and pushes the rest of the junk aside.

Shahrazad is quiet for a moment but it doesn't last. “Bullshit.” She says harshly, ”It’s your name, your inventions, your legacy. There is no more time to be a child, you must stick up for yourself and your beliefs or you will always be nothing more than a tool. Get over yourself and fight like everyone else does.”

Neil stares at her wide eyed for a moment, and then grins something grim. ”I’m trying. Will you help me?”

She glowers for another moment then grins right back at him her smile full of bared teeth. ”What do you have in mind?”

———-

Neil finds him in his kitchen, scrolling through his phone and not bothering to look up when Neil walks in.

Neil blinks, staring at the stranger and wondering if he should be worried or not. He isn’t, but that’s more so due to dissociation than familiarity.

“Um,” Neil says stupidly, ”Can I help you?”

The man raises a brow, finally looking up from his phone to stare blankly at Neil. He doesn't speak but he stands up, moving closer to Neil as if to inspect him.

“I thought you were suppose to look like your father.” The man says boredly, and Neil stiffens.

“Excuse me?”

“You’re not even close.” He says. “Andrew Minyard, Foxhole reporter, my boss wanted me to interview the broken billionaire. I can't say I’m impressed.”

“Fuck you.” Neil says, instinctually, ”How the hell did you even get in here?”

“For a supposed technological genius, your security is embarrassingly easy to crack.”

“This is breaking and entering. I could have you arrested.”

Andrew sorts,”If you were going to call the cops you would have done so the moment you saw a stranger in your house.”

“How did you know I wouldn’t call them?”

“I didn’t,” Andrew says simply, “But now I do.” And then he walks away, to the door, as if he got what he needed. Before Andrew opens the door he says, ”So prodigy, are you going to live up to your name sake, or are you going to step out of a dead man’s shadow?”

Andrew looks at him over his shoulder, ”I have a feeling we’ll all be unsurprisingly disappointed with your answer.” And goes, leaving Neil with just his anger and a sudden urge to prove the world wrong.

——-

“This plan is terrible.” Shahrazad says plainly, and not even Neil’s pride can argue with her.

“Do you have a better one?” Neil snaps, and she looks at him unimpressed.

“This will kill you.” She says.

Neil shrugs. “It could, but it could also save us.”

Shahrazad shakes her head, ”You're insane.”

“That is the general consensus, yes.”

Shahrazad sighs, and it’s almost fond. “This will not be pleasant.”

Neil smiles ruthlessly. “When is anything ever pleasant?” He says, and Shahrazad rips out the magnet in his chest.

———

Neil wakes up to the press of a body behind him and sighs. This is the third time Andrew has ended in his bed and probably won’t be the last.

Neil doesnt know how it started. Andrew is irritating and cryptic and obnoxious, but he’s also funny and smart and he doesn’t put up with Neil’s shit.

When they first started fooling around Andrew pressed his hands into Neil’s scars and didn’t flinch away, and for whatever reason that was enough.

“You’re thinking too loud.” Andrew mutters behind him, the arm he has around Neil’s waist tightening. Neil shifts slightly, wanting to relax in Andrew’s embrace but knowing he shouldn’t.

“You should leave.” Neil says, and Andrew stiffens.

“Why.” He says in a voice Neil hates, the one were his emotions are hidden and indistinguishable. Neil rolls around and looks at him. This close he can see Andrews’ freckles, the way the morning light touches his cheekbones, and Neil wants him so awful it hurts.

“If she finds out about you she’ll hurt you.” Neil says quietly, and Andrew’s eyes become sharp with anger.

“Why are you so afraid of her?” He demands, sitting up,” What does she have over you?”

“Everything.” Neil says honestly. “Everything but you.”

[singularityhacker]

Front-Running Defi Regulation

Last week was big for crypto. The Coinbase IPO happened and the whole world seemed to wake up in recognition of crypto as an asset class. While this is a major step in the legitimization of the space, some even calling it crypto’s 'Netscape moment’, I want to take the opportunity to highlight the dangers of crypto going mainstream. 

The United States is woefully behind in the crypto economy in every conceivable measure. For Bitcoin PoW blockchain, the U.S. represents a mere 7% of the global hash rate while China represents approx. 65%. This has lead thinkers like Peter Thiel to suggest that Bitcoin could in fact be a Chinese financial weapon against the U.S. and to unambiguously state that it specifically threatens the dollar.

Secondly, the U.S. government is frighteningly slow to even understand what crypto is or what it has produced in decentralized finance (Defi). This is clearly seen in the recent Bankless interview with SEC commission Hester Peirce when she talks about Defi barely being on the radar of her fellow commissioners and that they are just now waking up to Bitcoin. 

Lastly, the U.S. is behind the curve on crypto regulation. If you spent any time in the space you will be familiar with popups at every turn telling you that U.S. customers are not able to use this exchange or Defi product due to regulatory restrictions.

“BitMEX, Bybit, FTX and Binance are four of the top coveted exchanges that ban U.S. persons from their platform, as stated in their terms and conditions… Kraken even has a separate futures trading platform, which oddly, U.S. customers are barred from using.” - Crypto Exchanges Barring US Citizens Is Heartbreaking And Frustrating

Given this deficit in understanding and an anticipated growing sense of diminished control, I fear any major market downswing could trigger sweeping regulation. Many people are predicting crypto regulation on the horizon regardless of any downturn. The World Economic Forum’s head of blockchain and digital assets, Sheila Warren, just told Bloomberg that a “dramatic” round of regulation was about to befall Bitcoin and the wider cryptocurrency space.

“We’re going to see another round of pretty dramatic attempts at regulating this space. As there’s more and more activity in these spaces there’s more and more demand signal for regulators to get engaged and involved.” - Cointelegraph

The writing on the wall seems to be exceedingly clear and it indicates that the feds are coming for Defi. Combined with the US having printed 40% of its money supply just last year potentially conducting the scariest financial experiment in history, Defi has the potential to be an enticing scapegoat to any undesirable economic consequences. The heavy-handed regulation will be presented as being for our own good and motivated to "protect" citizens. 

This is what people need to fully understand and take in is that Defi is not merely an augmentation to traditional finance, it's a repudiation of it. It's a Wikipedia to Britannica, an Amazon to Borders, and a Netflix to Blockbuster. 

How does knowing any of this help you? As a blockchain developer/user, you can prioritize the following protocol characteristics to stay ahead of the idiocracy soon to flow from governments desperate to maintain control of your economic life:

Availability

If the front end of your application is hosted on AWS  and your domain is registered with GoDaddy then your decentralized and censorship-resistant submarine might as well have a screen door on it. To guarantee availability to end-users means employing censorship-resistant technologies like IPFS and ENS.

Governance

Make no mistake about it. when the regulatory guns come out, they will be squarely targeted at At those who are building and managing these products, and if you are in a position where you can update protocols then you will be legally compelled to do so. A trustless system is not trustless if the founders have to be trusted to not update the protocol at the behest of another. This means on-chain governance.

Anonymity

Even assuming that there is no attack vector at the protocol level, this does not mean that the blockchain creators are safe from attack by governments. If their identity is known, they are fully exposed to the threat of personal liability. This could mean their personal assets are confiscated or they're held criminally liable for building and releasing the product. Just ask Arthur Hayes. I believe anonymity will be shown to be as important for founders as it has been emphasized as a feature for users.

PoS Consensus

We need to move away from Proof of Work (PoW) to Proof of Stake (PoS) as soon as possible and it's not just about scalability and speed of transactions. Physical mining represents a very real physical vulnerability because governments can dramatically lower the cost of a 51% attack simply by seizing control of the mining physical infrastructure required to drive PoW. That dramatically changes in the move to PoS because there is no physical infrastructure per se. What's more, it also increases anonymity by removing miner IP addresses from the equation and provides greater resiliency in the face of power loss.

Building the decentralized trustless system requires a constant obsession with thinking about how users can be attacked and exploited. The same passion that exists behind decentralization will exist on the side of governments who wish to control and exploit it for power. This conflict is unprecedented for several reasons. Firstly, the servers running the code do not reside in any physical country and, secondly, all parties involved are involved voluntarily so it can’t be construed as an issue of theft or exploitation. These reasons alone will inevitably cause people to rightly question what grounds a government has to control this space but, I'm convinced, that will not deter them from claiming that right. The only way to front-run the impending clash of worldviews is with the same principles that have driven this entire movement, that being an absolute insistence on unmitigated trustlessness and decentralization. 

One of the very interesting projects I see taking the above characteristics extremely seriously is DFOhub. They advocate the use of decentralized flexible organizations (DFOs) and speak of startups without founders. I personally feel that they're extremely ahead of the curve and that time will show the great value of the thinkers and projects exploring and expanding the boundaries of this space. 

[incomplete-nano-stash]

Welcome to Technasia Ch 9

              The morning sun made the street glisten ever so slightly, reflecting off of the dewy residue that covered everything. For Tuck, this was always her favorite time of day, because the entire place looked polished, like a fine gemstone, much as she had always been taught to regard her home city and nation. There was not much joy in her thoughts, though, as she made her way down the street back to her shop.

              The cape was starting to get annoying. It got in the way of positively everything, including her arm. It created a parachute effect whenever a gust of wind got caught in it, dragging her either backward or forward. The badge of office, while decorative and useful in keeping the cape together, was big and clunky, not what Tuck would ideally use as her regular dress. Through all the hardships of her new regal attire, though, she managed to find her way back to the front door of her shop, pushing her key into the lock.

              “Hey!”

              A voice caught Tuck’s attention. She looked back and forth, up and down the street. It was sparsely populated this early, as not many shops opened early enough for people to be out. She looked for the source of the voice.

              “Over here, Tuck! Hey!”

              She finally caught the source of the voice. The waving, smallish form of Princess Hanna called out to her. Slightly unsure of what to do, Tuck waved back at the other Princess.

              “Princess Hanna, good morning.” Tuck continued waving. Much to her chagrin, though, Princess Hanna approached eagerly, nearly skipping.

              “So this is where your shop is? I’ve passed by here so many times and never noticed it.” Princess Hanna smiled up at Tuck.

              “Um … well yeah, it was my dad’s shop initially, I just took it over a month ago.” Tuck turned the key. “What are you doing out and about this morning, anyway?”

              “It’s so exciting, come on, let me show you!” Princess Hanna grabbed Tuck’s hand and dragged her down the street, over to where Princess Hanna had been standing. “Look, look! Right here.”

              Tuck turned and looked where Princess Hanna pointed. Sticking out of the ground, between cobbles of the walkway, a white and purple flower stretched upward, seeking sunlight. Princess Hanna crouched down on all fours and gazed lovingly at the flower.

              “It’s pretty,” Tuck commented at last.

              “Pretty? That doesn’t cover it, this is damned beautiful!” Princess Hanna stroked the petals gently. “This is the first Cypripedium reginae I’ve seen growing in the wild, like, ever. I’ve been growing them in my greenhouse at the Central Palace, but I’ve not seen one out and about.”

              Princess Hanna’s enthusiasm was contagious. “Wow,” Tuck reacted. “You’re really passionate about flowers, aren’t you?”

              Princess Hanna smiled up at Tuck. “About as much as you are about machines.” She stroked her chin. “Say, can you help me with something? I’d like to collect this as a sample, but I can’t get it with the cobbles in the way. Would you mind …?” Princess Hanna awkwardly pointed at Tuck’s metal arm.

              “Huh?” Tuck took a moment to process what the Princess was asking. “Oh … I suppose I could try.” Tuck knelt down next to Princess Hanna, her metallic fingers wrapping around one of the smooth stones that made up the walkway. Closing her eyes, she concentrated her thoughts on her arm, trying to order it to lift the stone.

              Slowly, her elbow bent, and her hand with the smooth rock in it lifted up. Tuck quickly set it to the side before she lost control, then set about lifting the next cobblestone. She repeated the operation until four cobblestones had been lifted out of the way. Princess Hanna reached into the pocket of her dress, pulling out a small spade, which she used to dig up the roots of the orchid.

              “What are you going to do with it now?” Tuck asked as she stood back up.

              Princess Hanna had a guile-less grin on her face. “I’m bringing this back to the greenhouse. I needed new breeding stock for mine, and this is just what I need to get some variance and save the species. Thank you!” Princess Hanna patted Tuck on her arm, leaving a muddy handprint on Tuck’s tunic.

              “Anytime, Hanna,” Tuck responded, with a slight lack of enthusiasm. Princess Hanna continued down the street, while Tuck returned to her shop, only to have another unexpected visitor waiting for her.

              “You know it’s not safe to leave your key in the lock, right?” Princess Ramia leaned against the storefront, arms crossed in a confrontational manner.

              “It’s a fairly quiet neighborhood,” Tuck responded. “Come on inside, I need to finish up a couple of customer orders before my life gets dominated by Princess-dom.” She pushed open the door, motioning for Princess Ramia to join her inside.

              Inside the workshop, the light coming in from the windows was not nearly enough to provide enough light for Tuck’s work. She turned a knob next to the door, pulling out a small sparking device from her pocket. Holding it up to a nearby light fixture, she struck a spark, lighting the lamp and every other lamp connected to the knob. She made her way to the back of the workshop, to where four work tables sat in a square formation, half-completed gadgets sitting on each one.

              Princess Ramia looked around the humble place. A bed on the nearby wall caught her attention. “You live here too?”

              Tuck nodded. “It’s easier to get to work if you’re already at work. Dad did it the same way, why shouldn’t I uphold the family tradition?” She unhooked her hand from her metal arm, replacing it with a tool which combined six different tools, between which she could select for the job at hand. Focusing her attention on a lump of metal and gears in front of her, she selected a screwdriver from her multi-tool and attended to the device. “Is there something I can help you with, Ramia?”

              Princess Ramia sat down on a nearby stool. “Well, I just remembered what I wanted to talk with you about last night. I hope you don’t mind, but it’s about the Establishment Day parade.”

              Tuck felt her stomach jump. She looked up at Princess Ramia. “What about it?”

              Princess Ramia took a deep breath. “You were very quickly up at the coach, ready to defend us. How did you know there was an attack?”

              Tuck took a deep breath to calm her nerves. The memory was still raw. She closed her eyes. “I heard something strange. Not at all like the coach, or the crowd.”

              She suddenly turned toward an open wall, lifting her metal arm toward it. Her forearm shot out from the rest of the device, the screwdriver striking the plaster of the opposite wall and digging into a small crack. The move startled Princess Ramia, and she reached for her crossbow reflexively.

              “Did you hear the little puff of air before my arm shot off?” Tuck grabbed the tether with her regular hand, yanking hard to free the screwdriver from the wall before retracting her arm back to herself.

              Princess Ramia swallowed. “I heard it, sounded like a voice shushing.”

              “Exactly. I heard that sound over the crowd. That’s how I knew there was … well, something coming. I had no idea it was spears. I didn’t think it would be a weapon like that, I always associated the sound with what I use it for.” Tuck stroked her chin. “Come to think of it, there was another sound, a metal sound right before it. Didn’t sound right.”

              Princess Ramia stood up. “Could you reproduce the events? If we put you out there, would you be able to point out where the sound was coming from?”

              Tuck shrugged. “I suppose I can give you a general idea of where the sound came from.”

              The two Princesses walked outside. Tuck led the way, bringing Princess Ramia to the place where she had been standing for the parade, a task made easier because the street was more torn up than it was anywhere else because of the panicked rush of the Royal Corps coach after the attack.

              “I was right here,” Tuck motioned to the curb. “I was standing and waving to you guys.” She turned toward the street, closing her eyes.

              Princess Ramia pulled out a notebook, writing down furiously. “Okay, and then what?”

              Tuck tightened her closed eyes. She didn’t want to, but she relived the assassination, every detail, Mrs. Thiele standing close to her cheering, the crowds pushing and mulling around. Then the sound. The grinding gears. Tuck’s eyes flew open. She turned abruptly to her left and raised her metal arm, pointing across the street.

              “There! The sound came from that direction.”

              Princess Ramia followed where Tuck was pointing, scribbling in her notebook. “Okay … let’s see, this is a commercial district, so … we have what should be shops across the way.” She drew diagrams into the notebook. “Judging by the trajectory the spears were flying from, had to be a second floor …”

              The two Princesses looked back toward the buildings Tuck had pointed toward. Two of them had upper levels. Princess Ramia stole a look at Tuck. “Let’s talk to the owners.”

              The two Princess crossed the street, making their way to the first of the two possible locations. Tuck knocked on the door. An older man waddled up to the other side, cracking the door slightly. “We’re not open … oh, Tuck! Er, Princess Imogen, Your Highness!” He opened the door all the way, bowing to the two Princesses.

              “It’s okay, George, you don’t need to worry about standing on ceremony with me.” Tuck put a hand on George’s shoulder.

              “He does with me, Imogen.” Princess Ramia made her way to the forefront. “What is your name, sir?”

              George stuttered, but found his words. “It’s Lorenzen, Your Highness, George Lorenzen. Please, come in.”

              Tuck and Princess Ramia stepped into the building, in which George had set up a tidy little shop selling clocks. For Tuck it was highly comfortable, as she had visited her neighbor numerous times in the past and they had shared shop talk frequently, but Princess Ramia approached the place with high suspicion.

              “What is it you do here, Master Lorenzen?” Princess Ramia idly tapped at the winding chain of a cuckoo clock.

              “I sell and repair clocks, Your Highness,” George offered. “Would you be interested in anything today?”

              Tuck tried to shush George. “Maybe later. We’re in the middle of something.”

              “Were you watching the Establishment Day parade the other day, Master Lorenzen?”

              Both Tuck and George turned nervously toward Princess Ramia. George cleared his throat before answering. “I was, Your Highness, and I saw what happened. Such a shame about Princess Giana.”

              “We’ll see how much shame, Master Lorenzen.” Princess Ramia looked up at the ceiling and reached for a small rope. “This leads to your attic, am I correct?”

              George nodded. “It’s my supply room, yes.”

              Princess Ramia pulled down on the rope, which swung a small door with a ladder down. Before anyone could react she was climbing the ladder. Tuck was quickly behind her, with George standing at the foot of it.

              “May I ask, Your Highnesses, what you’re looking for?”

              Tuck turned down slightly. “We need to check out the attic real fast, George. We’ll be out soon. You can go ahead and open up while we’re up here if you need to.”

              George shuffled nervously back and forth. Tuck continued to climb the ladder until she was in the attic completely with Princess Ramia.

              The Princess of Law suddenly sneezed. “Stupid dust.” She waved her hand in front of her face, hoping to clear a path for her to move through without catching any more in her nose, and made her way into the depths of the attic. Tuck reached into her satchel, finding another attachment for her metal arm and quickly swapping out the multitool.

              Princess Ramia jumped slightly backward as a shaft of light illuminated the path ahead of her. She turned and saw Tuck, holding her metal arm straight out, a light emanating from the end. “Thought this would come in handy,” the gadgeteer offered.

              “Good idea. Let’s search around. Start by the window.” Princess Ramia motioned toward the sole source of any natural light in the place, as both she and Tuck carefully waded through crates of spare parts to reach the window.

              There was no evidence of any weapon. Princess Ramia ran her fingertips along the windowsill. “Some rutting here, but nothing out of the ordinary.” She bent down to examine the sill closer. “This might be recent.” She pulled out a hand slate and tapped the button on the side.

              “Ramia, come see this!” Tuck was crouching three feet from the window, holding a metal piece in her hand. Princess Ramia came over to see what Tuck had found.

              “Looks like a gear from a clock,” Princess Ramia offered. “Nothing out of the ordinary in a clockmaker’s shop.”

              Tuck ran her light along the edge of the gear. “Remember I told you I heard a metallic sound?” She showed the gear to Princess Ramia. “Look, this cog’s damaged. Probably didn’t seat right with the driving gear.”

              The light revealed some of the teeth of the gear were chewed up, revealing shinier metal than the rest of it. Tuck shone her light along the floor, and found another chewed cog, bringing it back over to Princess Ramia.

              “Think this is part of our machine?” Princess Ramia narrowed her eyes at the two machinery pieces.

              “I don’t doubt it one bit,” Tuck responded. “This is what I heard grind. And this gear design, it’s not one typically seen in Technasia.” She swallowed hard. “This is a Litigian design gear. The fact it failed so spectacularly kind of confirms this.”

              Princess Ramia stood upright. Tuck almost joined her, but she heard the air gust again. She moved her arm, trying to deflect any attack coming, but could not intercept the spear flying into the window as it struck Princess Ramia in the shoulder, knocking her over. Tuck rushed to the window, seeing a shadowy figure running down the street.

              “Hey! HEY!” Tuck without thinking jumped out of the window, her metal arm pointed toward the fleeing figure. Her forearm shot off from her body, hurtling toward the suspect and clocking them on the back of the head, sending the attacker to the cobbles. Tuck felt one of her knees buckle as she hit the street, but kept running toward the fallen figure, eventually kneeling down to keep them from escaping.

              Princess Ramia came out of George’s shop, assisted by the clockmaker, and made her way over to where Tuck knelt on the suspect. “Who is he?”

              “I don’t know,” Tuck responded. “I just need some help because he’s wrestling with me.”

              Princess Ramia pulled a small pair of shackles out of the pocket of her coat and locked the attacker’s wrists in them. The two Princesses pulled the figure to his feet, pulling off his hood. Both Princesses took in a loud gasp.

              The man had a very mangled face, to the point of not being recognizable as human. One eye had apparently been gouged out at some point. His mouth was sewn shut. He whimpered in fear.

              “Damn,” Princess Ramia cursed. “I know this. He’s one of the Darkland Assassin Guild.” She shook her head. “We won’t find out anything from him.”

              Tuck gave Princess Ramia a confused look. “Darkland who? I don’t understand.”

              Princess Ramia sighed deeply. “The Darkland Assassin Guild, hired killers who guarantee silence. Their members take a vow of silence and have any identifying traits removed. Things like major facial features. And to reinforce the vow of silence, their mouths are sewn shut with a failsafe that if the stitches are removed they will be poisoned.”

              Tuck nodded, only half-understanding. Her attention turned back to where the assassin had been standing, where she noticed a machine standing on the sidewalk, pointed toward the window of George’s attic. As she retracted her arm, she made her way to the device. “Princess Ramia, I’m going to need this taken back to the Central Palace. Can we get that set up?”

[jam2289]

Explorations in Business - Part 7 of ?

Sales ads, letters, and calls, oh my.

Today is an extension of my quest to find my messaging.

A common sales strategy is the before-after-bridge. This is easy to see in diet and exercise sales. "Here's the person when they were fat. Here's the person skinny. Here's how they did it. Buy this product."

In the last article when I was working out the negative and positive revelation I did almost the same thing. It could be changed a little bit. "Here's the day I had to quit a job because I couldn't handle the pain of talking on a phone. Here's the day I gave four speeches at a Harry Potter festival. Rewiring my brain to change how I perceive pain was a key. Here's how to do it. Schedule a consultation now."

Something that sounds similar is Lisa Manyan's challenge-solution-invitation. The words do change what I think of though. "When you're in pain you have a serious problem to solve, but it's hard to solve a problem because you can't think clearly. Manage your pain by rewiring your brain through meditation, then you can think about how to approach and solve your underlying health issues. Join me and schedule your consultation today."

Julie Boswell proposes this formula: who it's for-what they're problem is-why other methods won't work-how I found what does work-how to get it. I like that approach. I might adapt it to focus on me and see if that's less pretentious, ironically. Here was my problem-what didn't work for me-how I found what did work. I'm just going to throw something out here and see how it goes and move on, I'll probably circle back around to this approach. "Fellow chronic pain sufferers-tired of saying what you can't do because of your pain-drugs and doctors don't work because they don't rewire your brain-tear filled days in front of a monk led me to a better solution-click on this calendar and schedule your first consultation today, sessions are 200 dollars per hour, but the first session is only 20 dollars." Maybe something like that.

Another simple formula is problem-promise-proof. "Your pain stops you from living your life. I can show you how to manage your pain without drugs by rewiring your brain. I went from not being able to do this, to being able to do this."

The billionaire Peter Thiel says that to have a successful company you just need one successful sales funnel that sells one product. That minimal system is all I'm working on right now, although I'll let other ideas mull around in the background of my mind.

What am I really trying to do for people here? I'm trying to empower them. To increase their capability to pursue meaning. Oooh, that aligns nicely with some of my foundational beliefs and focus in life. To provide a means to meaning.

I'm really just trying to remove an obstacle for people, the annoying way that intense chronic pain pulls your attention away so insistently that you can't function in life. This reminds me of an approach mentioned in "Systemantics".

- - - - - - -

Briefly, Catalytic Managership is based on the premise that trying to make something happen is too ambitious and usually fails, resulting in a great deal of wasted effort and lowered morale. It is, however, sometimes possible to remove obstacles in the way of something happening. A great deal may then occur with little effort on the part of the manager, who nevertheless gets a large part of the credit. The situation is similar to that of a lumberjack who picks out the key log from a logjam, or the chemist who adds the final pinch of reagent to an unstable mixture.

- - - - - - -

I think that also goes with a great sentiment that I encountered in a sales book by Pierce Brooks; help people whether they buy or not. I want to do that, that makes me feel better.

Dan Sullivan has some good guiding questions.

Who do you want to be a hero to? I want to be a hero to people who were active, who did a lot of stuff, who really lived, but who are now hindered by chronic pain that they have tried to manage, but things have failed so far, and they are disenfranchised with the options offered by the medical industry. Wow, I didn't expect that to come out that long or that easily.

What keeps them awake at 3am, good and bad? The bad thing that keeps them awake at 3am is pain and ache. The good thing that keeps them awake at 3am is the potential for some kind of cure that could restore their health and their function.

What do you want to be an enemy to? That's a harder one to answer. It seems like it might be something abstract, like being limited from achieving the creative, experiential, and attitudinal values that you're meant to achieve. Maybe my enemy is hindered thought processes. Maybe... I'm not sure. I hate having limited experience. I'm not sure that really works though. I might have to come back to define my enemy.

There will need to be a couple of steps that I have to sell. I will need people to click on ads. Then, I'll need to sell people on signing up for the initial interview. In that I'll need to sell people on buying additional sessions. There might be a need for another step in there, something like a recorded webinar or video. At each step you're trying to sell the next step. That's important to keep in mind.

Mike Dillard recommends offering three products: a lower cost front end product, a higher cost product, and a recurring revenue product. I'm not doing that right off the bat obviously. But it's something to keep in mind for later. Here's his sales letter formula: identify target audience-identify urgent pain/desire-offer unique solution in story of my same problem and how I found the solution-remove risk and address questions and objections-call to action-bonus for acting now-second call to action-third party credibility. That seems pretty darn solid to me.

Dan Kennedy talks about the three ways that you can target people: geographically, demographically, or by association. Specific health and disease groups seem like the reasonable way to do it, because with geographics or demographics I'm probably just taking a shotgun approach.

Ries and Trout have great info about positioning. Relating the new to the old can be powerful. What am I really competing against? I don't think it's actually meditation instructors, I think it's probably drugs. "Stop relying on painkillers, learn to rely on yourself again." Something like that maybe. "Meditation to rewire your brain - less of a hassle than painkillers." Ideas to think about.

They talk about how pride of origin is important. I need to fall in love with my own story, which I think I can do.

Strong positions are built on major achievements. So far I have my own achievements. Last weekend I rode a horse for the first time since the Africa ordeal. Joining the high IQ society after recovering from brain damage and memory issues. Riding motorcycles, alligator wrestling, giving speeches, etc. When I actually help some people then I'll need to collect their achievements in their testimonials.

Who should not use my brand? That's a good question. People who aren't committed are wasting their money and my time. People who don't really have a chronic pain issue, just a minor temporary thing. People who like painkillers and doctors, we just won't align with our approaches. People who weren't active before.

Can you be the first in something? I feel like this is probably no. Nothing comes to mind. Maybe if I work with a specific organization and I'm the first person to use meditation to help a certain group rewire their brains to manage pain? Maybe. The medial industry has targeted most of these groups with their recent mindfulness push over the last few years, so I'm assuming that everything from cancer patients to veterans have already been done. Maybe if I do something extreme like going into the field to help.

Mark Joyner offers some good insights. By requiring a small amount of money down you both reduce the perceived risk for the customer, and have them make a commitment.

I will actually have limited slots available for consultation times, so there's real scarcity.

He has a three step formula for business success: 1) create the irresistible offer, 2) present it to a thirsty crowd, 3) sell them a second glass.

The irresistible offer is something that seems to be hard to define, other than that it's an offer that's compelling and hard to turn down. Maybe something like, "Change your perception of pain, reclaim your life." "Change your perception of pain, change your life." I'm not sure that qualifies or not.

Jay Kubassek asks a good question: Why do I really want to go into business? I want to go into business to provide the fuel for everything else that I want to do in life: write fiction and philosophy, ride a motorcycle across the country, etc. I think that aligns well with this business, where I'm helping people to reclaim the ability to function in life to do these types of things.

Neil Rackham talks about the steps to a sale: recognition of need, evaluation of options, resolution of concerns, implementation. "Pain takes over your life and stops you from living. You can try to ignore it but it won't work, you can take drugs but that causes more problems than it solves, or you can rewire your brain through meditation. What if it doesn't work? What if it does? Is it worth the chance? What's the downside? 'I don't want to put any time or money into it.' Then you cannot possibly solve the problem. Schedule your session here."

Frank Kern covers a ton of info in this little book called "Convert". The customer needs to have a good experience before the sale. That goes right with my idea of helping them in some way whether they buy or not. The ideal position is as a celebrity/authority. I guess arranging some kind of event, probably a speaking event, could help with both of those.

How do you want to be introduced to an audience? I've always struggled with this one. I've written articles on the struggles of making an author bio. What if instead of an audience I just thought of a one person introduction that was focused around the business? "Jeff had this crazy adventure in Africa where he almost died. Then he had a bone in his brainstem that caused all sorts of issues. He couldn't focus because of pain, and then he found out how to rewire his brain through meditation so he could function again. Now he's back to doing adventures." I don't think that's very good, I'll probably have to work on that.

What's my magic power? I help people rewire their brains to perceive pain differently so that they can reclaim their lives.

What's my superhero identity? Jeff Martin is the meaning of life guy. I like that, although it seems abstract. Jeff Martin is the rewire your brain guy. I'm not sure that works. Jeff Martin is the change your perception of pain guy. Maybe.

What do you stand for? I stand for the real pursuit of true value in the face of all obstacles, including chronic pain.

What do you stand against? I hate the idea of being dependent on drugs that also distort your mind. Not that they worked for me anyway.

Let's see how these things go together the way Kern recommends.

Jeff Martin is known as the most sought after coach for changing people's perception of pain in the alternative health marketplace. He is famous for joining a high IQ society after recovering from brain damage, encouraging people to overcome their chronic pain in their pursuit of true value and meaning in life, and doing all of it without resorting to painkillers.

I don't really like it.

What do you want them to think about you before they meet you? I want them to think of me as serious and exploratory. A searcher for answers and meaning through books and adventures.

Kern includes a lot of other interesting insights. You want to be magnetic to the clients that you want, and repulsive to the people that you don't want. Your income is proportional to your goodwill in the industry. There are two ways to increase profits: optimize your conversion process, or increase your price. There are two reasons that people don't buy: they don't want it, or they don't trust you. To buy from you they have to know you, like you, trust you, and want your stuff. A one-on-one conversation is the best way to close. Educating establishes authority. Motivating and inspiring helps to retain your position and create loyalty.

Daniel Coyle has a book about establishing a culture that probably doesn't really apply to my marketing, but probably does to the delivery of my product. I'm trying to transform people. Here are some key takeaways. I care about you. We have high standards here. I believe you can reach those standards. Life is bigger than your problem. Whatever you were before, it's different now because you're here. Overcommunicate expectations. Are we about appearing strong, or learning together? Listeners make people feel safe and supported, take a helping and cooperative stance, occasionally ask questions that challenge assumptions, and occasionally offer suggestions of alternative paths. It might be good to have a briefing and debriefing method for sessions. Tell and retell the story. Select people based on emotional capabilities.

If I'm collecting people's info then I might end up making warm calls. Grant Cardone has a method for that. Let's take a stab at it and see how it might go.

- - - - - - -

This is Jeff with MeditateWithJeff.com.

The reason I'm calling is that you entered your information on my website last night expressing an interest in having a consultation to learn how to use meditation to change your perception of pain.

To be sure I'm not wasting your time let me ask you:

(Do you qualify?)

(What are your main issues?)

(Why have you not done this already?)

(If I could deliver even half of what I have promised would it be worth it to you?)

Other than yourself, who would be involved with this decision?

Would you make time to meet me later?

Do you have a pencil handy? Write this down.

Would there be any reason you wouldn't be able to show up?

- - - - - - -

There can be more to that as far as skill goes, but it's a good place to start. The qualification and issue questions would obviously be specific.

There are a number of other people whose information I might circle back to at some point, like Frank Bettger, Jordan Belfort, Jason Hornung, Sam Ovens, Eugene Schwartz, and Brendon Burchard. For instance, Belfort's technique called looping where he tries to close and if it doesn't work he dives into a story to build credibility is perfect. I could start with my stories and expand to client stories as an infinite growing list of social proof. Expanding the perception of subjective experience across time and space while being consistent is how we arrive at objective truth. So, 100 clients telling their story in a simple before-after-bridge format would be immensely powerful.

Alright, that's a lot of stuff to process. I have to figure out what to go with and turn this into a sales website. I'll let it settle for the night.

________________________________________________

You can find more of what I'm doing at http://www.JeffreyAlexanderMartin.com

[culturallynumb]

Elon: A dreamer, a doer, an architect of the 21st century

By David Sharp

At 46 years old, Elon Musk is just getting warmed up.

Musk has achieved a staggering amount in such a short space of time. His résumé extends far beyond simply being 'The Tesla Guy'. Like Amazon's Jeff Bezos, he gained notoriety in the 1990s as a mover and shaker in the tech scene, first with Zip2, a "city guide" service that had contracts with newspapers such as the New York Times (which was later acquired by Compaq) and then with X.com (a pioneering online payment company which merged with PayPal).

While the Jeff Bezos comparisons were apt during the 1990s, at the turn of the century, Musk seems destined towards becoming a Steve Jobs-meets-Tony Stark-like visionary.

SpaceX, and the Colonisation of Mars

After Compaq bought Zip2 and X.com merged with PayPal, Elon Musk's ambitions only gained momentum: the dreams only got bigger - by orders of magnitude. First up was 'Mars Oasis', a bold (and barely feasible) idea, telling WIRED "The idea was to send a small greenhouse to the surface of Mars, packed with dehydrated nutrient gel that could be hydrated on landing. You’d wind up with this great photograph of green plants and red background—the first life on Mars, as far as we know, and the farthest that life’s ever traveled. It would be a great money shot, plus you’d get a lot of engineering data about what it takes to maintain a little greenhouse and keep plants alive on Mars."

This otherworldly compulsion had monumental challenges along the way, though. Musk continues "I suddenly understood that my whole premise behind the Mars Oasis idea was flawed. The real reason we weren’t going to Mars wasn’t a lack of national will; it was that we didn’t have cheap enough rocket technology to get there...Rocket technology had not materially improved since the ’60s—arguably it had gone backward! We decided to reverse that trend."

The research for his 'Mars Oasis' concept set about a line of inquiry that diverted Musk away from his initial idea and, serendipitously, towards SpaceX. He had provided himself with his own crash course on the logistics and challenges of space exploration, and he had lit another fire under himself to drag space travel into the 21st century.

Today, SpaceX's innovation has slashed the cost of space travel, and it made it the dominant front runner in the field, with 2017 being a banner year for the company, following numerous successful launches (and rocket 'reuses').

A profile of Elon Musk in GQ highlighted that, at the heart of SpaceX, a fundamental driving force behind what SpaceX does - beyond merely the human exploration of Mars - is the potential and desire for humans to colonise Mars (which could significantly reduce the chances of a human extinction event). On this topic, Musk is attributed as saying: "You back up your hard drive.... Maybe we should back up life, too?"

Revolutionising Cars and Energy with Tesla

In conjunction to running SpaceX, Elon Musk is the CEO of Tesla, which has a relatively short history, despite its seismic impact on the auto industry, which is chronicled by TechCrunch in its "A Brief History of Tesla" piece.

Musk heralded Tesla and helped gain financial backing after Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning founded the in 2003. The company unveiled its Roadster in 2006, after signing a production deal with Lotus. After a shaky and unprofitable start, Tesla gained headway in the auto industry following the launch of its Model S, as well as a $465m loan from the US government and a strategic partnership with Daimler AG.

But, after a rocky developmental phase, under Musk's guidance, Tesla has completely disrupted the market. In April 2017, Quartz reported that Tesla "which saw its value surpass Nissan in February, is on a tear. After stumbling in late February, Tesla’s stock has rebounded and the company is now taking on the biggest car makers well ahead of schedule. Shares in the 14-year-old Tesla closed up more than 7% on Monday, giving it a market cap of $48.6 billion, 7% higher than that of 113-year-old Ford."

In 2016, Tesla completed the $2.6bn purchase of SolarCity, a US solar energy giant, which would further leverage Tesla's vision of drivers sustainably charging electric vehicles from their homes through solar technology. From August 2016 onwards, Tesla's acquisition of SolarCity also separated the company from its competition in another key sense: Tesla wasn't just a car company anymore.

In a 2017 address, Elon Musk gave his vision of the future, and remained bullish about the continued rise of the electric car, self driving technology, and the adoption of shared autonomous vehicles (saying "it's just a question of when"). Musk also predicted that Tesla would eventually disrupt fossil fuel consumption because of its increased efforts with solar and lithium-ion battery production.

Reinventing Transport with Hyperloop and The Boring Company

Musk has also shown a passion to explore new means of public and inter-city transport with Hyperloop and The Boring Company. With these two ventures, he is aiming to combat long commutes across vast expanses of land, and also finite road space within built up areas. Firstly, Hyperloop claims it "will reinvent transportation to eliminate the barriers of distance and time. Hyperloop One will move people and goods, and unlock unprecedented value for governments, businesses, and consumers." Simply put, Hyperloop will bring its own brand of ultra-high speed trains.

As it pertains to cars, if Elon Musk has his way, the future of travel is not a Jetsonsesque flying car, but a conventional car that utilises underground links, which would decongest deadlocked roads in heavily populated cities such as Los Angeles. This is the sole initiative of The Boring Company, which takes a "3D" approach to car travel, whereby, below the top surface, cars can be lowered underground by elevators and attached to a platform resembling a sled, which will carry the car to its destination. What's more there could be numerous underground levels implemented, leading it to be a multi-story network underneath the world's major cities.

Much criticism has been focused on these two ventures, with questions being asked regarding the financial viability of undertaking the projects, as well as other hurdles associated with negotiating and being granted building permission from state to state. Both ventures are at a relatively early stage at present, so their success remains to be seen.

But progress is being made. Hyperloop One recently successfully trailed a test track in Nevada, and Musk has also claimed that he has reached a verbal agreement with the government to commence a Washington-to-New York Hyperloop (which will take just 30 minutes to travel).

The Most Significant Technology Ever Created

His non-profit, OpenAI, which, aims to develop "artificial general intelligence" (or AGI) which could exponentially impact medicine, and limitless other fields. The organisation describes the development of AGI as "the most significant technology ever created by humans." As well as Elon Musk and Sam Altman, OpenAI has serious backing, from individuals such as Reid Hoffman and Peter Thiel, along with numerous corporate sponsors, including Amazon and Microsoft.

Like OpenAI, Google has also pursued AGI, as opposed to just AI, which gives computers the ability to learn in the same way that humans do. As The Guardian reports, AGI development allows computers to acquire skills - which bridges a significant gap between human a computer intelligence.

After OpenAI released its Universe software, and has continued to reveal more on its methodology, including the use of reinforced learning. TechCrunch wrote "Every parent’s worst nightmare is a student spending more time playing video games and surfing the web than studying for school. But the team over at OpenAI believes that a “fun parent” approach could actually bring us all one step closer to the elusive generalized intelligence. Its new tool, Universe, was created to train and measure AI frameworks with video games, applications and websites."

Brain Implants, Telepathy, and Beyond

In addition to OpenAI, Musk's Neuralink, founded in 2016, is a neurotechnology company "developing ultra high bandwidth brain-machine interfaces to connect humans and computers." The company is reportedly focused towards medical endeavours, but its long-term goals seem generally open-ended.

WIRED reported that "the firm's goal is to turn cloud-based AI into an extension of the human brain. The company will aim to create (and bring to market) a product that can help those with severe brain injuries. It's product, which will be developed within the next four years will eventually lead humans to be able to communicate by 'consensual telepathy'."

With radical technological upheaval that is brought about by ventures such as Neuralink, pessimism - and even hysteria - are likely to follow. As Musk revealed more about Neuralink, lively debate among critics and advocates of brain implant technology began to boil over - a debate on RT featured a news anchor fielding questions and concerns about Neuralink to technology experts. However, until hard evidence and greater detail about Neurolink's technology (and the benefits and flaws of its application) is presented, the debate is subject to theory and bias, which is difficult to draw conclusions on.

Elon Musk: A Polarising Presence

Elon Musk, his vision for the future and his journey to turn his dreams into a reality is a remarkable, mind-blowing story so far. The industries that he has entered and endeavoured to pioneer are incredibly wide-ranging - to the extent that it is barely conceivable that this is the work of just one person. He has thrown serious financial and intellectual weight behind his various undertakings that he will undoubtedly leave his mark on the 21st century. His habit of dreaming out loud has brought much skepticism regarding his ability to deliver on his numerous bold promises, and yet he continues to dream and, more importantly, do.

[newstwitter-blog]

New Post has been published on News Twitter

New Post has been published on http://www.news-twitter.com/2017/02/07/ny-times-tech-opposition-to-trump-propelled-by-employees-not-executives-10/

Ny Times: Tech Opposition to Trump Propelled by Employees, Not Executives

It is an improvised and complicated strategy. The companies are among the richest and most popular of American brands, which means they have a good deal of leverage. Yet they are also uniquely vulnerable — not only to presidential postings on Twitter and executive orders, but to the sentiments of their customers and employees, some of whom have more radical ideas in mind.

OPEN Document

Document: Tech Industry’s Filing Against Travel Ban

Many of the companies initially placed their bets on engagement after an upbeat meeting with the president-elect in December. That modest approach, which even the most risk-averse executive can endorse, showed its limits last week. After widespread customer defections, Travis Kalanick, the chief executive of Uber, was forced to step down from one of the administration’s advisory councils.

“People voted with their feet, and Travis listened,” said Dave McClure, who runs the 500 Startups incubator and started the Nerdz 4 Hillary group that tried to raise the $100,000. “We need to hold the other tech leaders accountable in the same way.”

Resistance, Mr. McClure said, begins at home.

“You don’t have a voice with the president if you didn’t vote for him,” he said. “But employees and customers have a voice with the tech companies. Silicon Valley should be demonstrating at the front doors of Google, Facebook and Twitter to make sure they share our values.”

Several factors are propelling Silicon Valley to the front lines of opposition to Mr. Trump. Some have been widely noted: The companies are often founded by and run by immigrants, which made the executive order on immigration offensive and a threat to their way of doing business. Tech companies frequently stress the importance of talent from other countries to their businesses.

Less remarked on has been the political homogeneity of tech workers. “It’s not like you have 60 percent of the employees on one side and 40 percent on the other,” said Ken Shotts, a professor of political economy at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. “They all have the same leanings.”

Mr. Trump does have some support in Silicon Valley, most notably the venture capitalist Peter Thiel.

Yet another factor pushing the companies is the perennially tight job market in technology. Executives cannot afford to alienate a large bloc of workers. Beyond this, there is the mythology of Silicon Valley, which holds that the work being done there is building a better future. Google’s former slogan “Don’t be evil” is the most forceful expression of this.

Continue reading the main story

“If you go around making a lot of statements about your exalted role in society, at some point your employees might just make you follow through,” Mr. Shotts said.

Photo

Satya Nadella, the chief executive of Microsoft. Seventy-six of the company’s employees were affected by Mr. Trump’s ban. Credit Divyakant Solanki/European Pressphoto Agency

Since the executive order was issued, the companies have struggled to keep on the same page with their employees. Microsoft, for instance, initially made relatively muted comments that mostly celebrated immigration. Twenty-four hours later, it was much blunter, calling the order “misguided and a fundamental step backwards,” and saying it would create “much collateral damage to the country’s reputation and values.”

At an all-hands meeting at the beginning of the week with the chief executive, Satya Nadella, who was born in India, Microsoft employees expressed their concern. The company did not file a formal declaration supporting Washington State’s effort to block the order the way Amazon and Expedia did, but its public comments assisted the effort, Bob Ferguson, the state attorney general, said.

The immigration battle is in Microsoft’s self-interest. Seventy-six of its employees were affected by the order, the company said.

Some in Silicon Valley have more expansive hopes for the tech companies there.

“In 2016, we saw how technology could be used to polarize ourselves to extreme levels,” said Mr. Altman of Y Combinator. “The most important thing we could do is figure out how to use technology to depolarize the nation.”

Mr. McClure of 500 Startups said it was ridiculous “for the chief executives of the valley to suggest things like hate speech and bullying speech aren’t solvable problems. Google has been solving the problem of spam for the last 10 years. No reason they can’t fix the monetization of fake news.”

Perhaps the companies just need a little push. On Sunday night, the Super Bowl was in overtime and a dreary winter rain was falling in San Francisco. That was not enough to deter more than 100 tech workers from showing up for a meeting of a new group, Tech Solidarity, that hopes to tackle some of these issues from the bottom up.

Maciej Ceglowski, the organizer, canvassed the crowd. How many of you are immigrants? How many work for big tech companies? How many work for big tech companies that attended the Trump tech summit in December? In each case, numerous hands went up. Under the rules of the meeting, participants were not identified.

Lives Rewritten With the Stroke of a Pen

When President Trump signed his executive order on immigration, he upended the fates of people who had waited for years to get into the U.S. Here are portraits of those affected by the ban.

It was a very geeky event. Much of it was a fund-raiser for three legal aid groups that have been working to assist travelers caught in the ban. The speaker for the Council of American-Islamic Relations was asked what she needed. She replied that she was having trouble with her customer relationship management software.

Continue reading the main story

“I’ve actually been pretty obsessed with C.R.M.s lately,” said a woman in the audience, volunteering to help.

Mr. Ceglowski is a software engineer who runs the one-man start-up Pinboard. He was visiting the United States in 1981 with his mother when martial law was declared in their native Poland. He is now an American citizen.

Best-known in tech circles as a caustic critic of the large tech companies and their attitude to issues like privacy, he took on the activist mantle shortly after Mr. Trump was elected. Since then, Tech Solidarity has held rallies in Portland, Ore.; New York; Seattle; Boston; and other cities.

He talked about Facebook’s chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, the author of “Lean In,” which asks women, “What would you do if you weren’t afraid?” Mr. Ceglowski noted that Ms. Sandberg found time to go see Mr. Trump, but not to go to the women’s march on Washington. The crowd laughed. Ms. Sandberg has said that she had a personal obligation that kept her from the march.

When Facebook employees did their own protest last week, he pointed out, it was done in secret so no one knew about it.

“We have to protest in public,” he said. The event raised $30,000 for the legal aid groups.

“It looked like two-thirds of the room were newcomers,” Mr. Ceglowski said after the event was over. Unlike the great Silicon Valley companies, which seemed to blossom overnight, he said he knew progress here would be slow. But he was hopeful that some of the attendees were previously apolitical folk who had taken their first steps to engagement.

“I want pressure from below to counterbalance the pressure management is already feeling from above,” he said. “We have to make sure we’re pushing at least as hard as Trump is.”

Continue reading the main story

This post has been harvested from the source link, and News-Twitter has no responsibility on its content. Source link

[snellblogs]

WRITING DOGS IN FICTION Blog by Lynne Pearl

WRITING DOGS IN FICTION

Blog by Lynne Pearl April 8 21

When I was growing up I had a golden labrador called 'Prince' and we walked Devon come rain or shine from childhood right through to adulthood.  He was my loyal companion so of course, I put him in a book too.

When I write fiction I often give my  heroes a dog to accompany them on their adventures and their journeys and for me that always works.  A dog is the perfect companion for a writer, they give the  hero someone to talk to, so they do not feel so alone in the tasks they have to accomplish and the dog is not afraid where your average hero may be....quoted from 'Thiel One Foot in Front of the Other'....

He went down the three steps leading to the kitchen to find Heap, the family dog.  Heap shambled out from the gloom of a dark corner. He pushed his head against Thiel’s hand so that they were joined.  They had grown up together and knew one anothers' trials intimately.  Thiel knew how hard it was for an animal of noble heart though ugly demeanour to refrain from growling  ...

As Thiel knew Heap’s desire to bite in anger, so Heap knew through the touch of Thiel’s hand tonight deep unhappiness.  The intricacies of reason he could read from the touch ...

Young man and dog pushed the door and went outside to the back garden beyond.  It was nearly dark as they made their way around the side of the house to reach the Kurton road unseen from any windows...So the companions slipped through the hedge at the bottom of the vegetable garden and jumped soundlessly onto the road below.  

Bent double below the height of the hedge and keeping in its shadow, Thiel loped along the road, followed by Heap padding through the grass at the roadside.  His tall, boney frame with its' fronds of long hair was moving with an energy seldom used.  The road curved slowly out of sight  of the house and Thiel walked upright again.  Heap joined him in the middle of the road.  It was dark  now and stars had begun to come out...  (from 'Thiel: One Step in Front of the Other.')

POETRY ABOUT DOGS

Then there's writing poetry about dogs, they fit in there too, for me.  The image of the dog just seems to be the perfect ift for so much.  Like this :

TAMAR HOUSE SIGN

Washing on the line, Pink blanket, black T shirt, Dogs in the yard wondering, Beige short hair, Alsatian face, English sheepdog, head through gate, Inquiring of passing bus, Who? And where do you go? On the lane to Launceston, Waiting for the passing cars. ...

So that is what I say in 'Road Trip, River Voice', when I am travelling between Canada and Britain and back again.

Lynne Pearl, author, 'Road Trip River Voices' https://www.amazon.co.uk/Road-Trip-River-Voices-Liminal-ebook/dp/B00HAG1Q2I 

Thiel:One Foot In Front of Another. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Thiel-One-Foot-Front-Other-ebook/dp/B00GLNTCR2  

On Good Reads https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/7796332.Lynne_Pearl Available from Amazon

[shirlleycoyle]

The Proto-Communist Plan to Resurrect Everyone Who Ever Lived

Is there anything that can be done to escape the death cult we seem trapped in?

One of the more radical visions for how to organize human society begins with a simple goal: let’s resurrect everyone who has ever lived. Nikolai Fedorov, a nineteenth-century librarian and Russian Orthodoxy philosopher, went so far as to call this project “the common task” of humanity, calling for the living to be rejuvenated, the dead to be resurrected, and space to be colonized specifically to house them. From the 1860s to the 1930s, Fedorov’s influence was present throughout the culture—he influenced a generation of Marxists ahead of the Russian Revolution, as well as literary writers like Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky, whose novel, The Brothers Karamazov, directly engaged with Federov's ideas about resurrection.

After his death, Federov’s acolytes consolidated his ideas into a single text, A Philosophy of the Common Task, and created Cosmism, the movement based on his anti-death eschatology. Federov left the technical details to those who would someday create the prerequisite technology, but this did not stop his disciples: Alexander Bogdanov, who founded the Bolsheviks with Lenin, was an early pioneer of blood transfusions in hopes of rejuvenating humanity; Konstantin Tsiolkvosky, an astrophysicist who was the progenitor of Russia's space program, sought to colonize space to house the resurrected dead; and Alexander Chizhevsky, a biophysicist who sought to map out the effects of solar activity on Earth life and behavior, thought his research might help design the ideal society for the dead to return to.

The vast majority of cosmists were, by the 1930s, either murdered or purged by Stalin, muting the influence of their ambitious project but also leaving us with an incomplete body of work about what type of society resurrection requires or will result in, and whether that would—as some cosmists believe now—bring us closer to the liberation of the species. Now, I think it is obvious that—despite what today’s transhumanists might tell you—we are in no position, now or anytime soon, to resurrect anyone let alone bring back to life the untold billions that have existed across human history and past it into the eons before civilization’s dawn.

To be clear, I think cosmism is absolute madness, but I also find it fascinating. With an introduction to Cosmism and its implications, maybe we can further explore the arbitrary and calculated parts of our social and political order that prioritize capital instead of humanity, often for sinister ends.

**

What? Who gets resurrected? And how?

At its core, the Common Task calls for the subordination of all social relations, productive forces, and civilization itself to the single-minded goal of achieving immortality for the living and resurrection for the dead. Cosmists see this as a necessarily universal project for either everyone or no one at all. That constraint means that their fundamental overhaul of society must go a step further in securing a place where evil or ill-intentioned people can’t hurt anyone, but also where immortality is freely accessible for everyone.

It’s hard to imagine how that world—where resources are pooled together for this project, where humans cannot hurt one another, and where immortality is free—is compatible with the accumulation and exploitation that sit at the heart of capitalism. The crisis heightened by coronavirus should make painfully clear to us all that, as J.W. Mason—an economist at CUNY—recently put it, we have “a system organized around the threat of withholding people's subsistence,” and it "will deeply resist measures to guarantee it, even when the particular circumstances make that necessary for the survival of the system itself." Universal immortality, already an optimistic vision, simply cannot happen in a system that relies on perpetual commodification.

Take one small front of the original cosmist project: blood transfusions. In the 1920s, after being pushed out of the Bolshevik party, Bogdanov focused on experimenting with blood transfusions to create a rejuvenation process for humans (there’s little evidence they do this). He tried and failed to set up blood banks across the Soviet Union for the universal rejuvenation of the public, dying from complications of a transfusion himself. Today, young blood is offered for transfusion by industrious start-ups, largely to wealthy and eccentric clients—most notably (and allegedly) Peter Thiel.

In a book of conversations on cosmism published in 2017 titled Art Without Death, the first dialogue between Anton Vidokle and Hito Steyerl, living artists and writers in Berlin, drives home this same point. Vidokle tells Steyerl that he believes “Death is capital quite literally, because everything we accumulate—food, energy, raw material, etc.—these are all products of death.” For him, it is no surprise we’re in a capitalist death cult given that he sees value as created through perpetual acts of extraction or exhaustion.

Steyerl echoes these concerns in the conversation, comparing the resurrected dead to artificial general intelligences (AGIs), which oligarch billionaires warn pose an existential threat to humanity. Both groups anticipate fundamental reorganizations of human society, but capitalists diverge sharply from cosmists in that their reorganization necessitates more extraction, more exhaustion, and more death. In their conversation, Steyerl tells Vidokle:

Within the AGI Debate, several ‘solutions’ have been suggested: first to program the AGI so it will not harm humans, or, on the alt-right/fascist end of the spectrum, to just accelerate extreme capitalism’s tendency to exterminate humans and resurrect rich people as some sort of high-net-worth robot race.

These eugenicist ideas are already being implemented: cryogenics and blood transfusions for the rich get the headlines, but the breakdown of healthcare in particular—and sustenance in general—for poor people is literally shortening the lives of millions … In the present reactionary backlash, oligarchic and neoreactionary eugenics are in full swing, with few attempts being made to contain or limit the impact on the living. The consequences of this are clear: the focus needs to be on the living first and foremost. Because if we don’t sort out society—create noncapitalist abundance and so forth—the dead cannot be resurrected safely (or, by extension, AGI cannot be implemented without exterminating humankind or only preserving its most privileged parts).

One of the major problems of today’s transhumanist movement is that we are currently unable to equally distribute even basic life-extension technology such as nutrition, medicine, and medical care. At least initially, transhumanists’ vision of a world in which people live forever is one in which the rich live forever, using the wealth they’ve built by extracting value from the poor. Today’s transhumanism exists largely within a capitalist framework, and the country’s foremost transhumanist, Zoltan Istvan, a Libertarian candidate for president, is currently campaigning on a platform that shutdown orders intended to preserve human life during the coronavirus pandemic are overblown and are causing irrevocable damage to the capitalist economy (Istvan has in the past written extensively for Motherboard, and has also in the past advocated for the abolition of money).

Cosmists were clear in explaining what resurrection would look like in their idealized version of society, even though they were thin on what the technological details would be. Some argue we must not only restructure our civilization, but our bodies so that we can acquire regenerative abilities, alter our metabolic activity so food or shelter are optional, and thus “overcome the natural, social, sexual, and other limitations of the species” as Arseny Zhilyaev puts it in a later conversation within the book.

Zhilyaev also invokes Federov’s conception of a universal museum, a “radicalized, expanded, and more inclusive version of the museums we have now” as the site of resurrection. In our world, the closest example of this universal museum is the digital world “which also doubles as an enormous data collector used for anything from commerce to government surveillance.” The prospect of being resurrected because of government/corporate surveillance records or Mormon genealogy databases is “sinister” at best, but Zhilyaev’s argument—and the larger one advanced by other cosmists—is that our world is already full of and defined by absurd and oppressive institutions that are hostile to our collective interests, yet still manage to thrive. The options for our digital world’s development have been defined by advertisers, state authorities, telecom companies, deep-pocketed investors, and the like—what might it look like if we decided to focus instead on literally any other task?

All this brings us to the question of where the immortal and resurrected would go. The answer, for cosmists, is space. In the cosmist vision, space colonization must happen so that we can properly honor our ethical responsibility to take care of the resurrected by housing them on museum planets. If the universal museum looks like a digital world emancipated from the demands of capital returns, then the museum planet is a space saved from the whims of our knock-off Willy Wonkas—the Elon Musks and Jeff Bezos of the world. I am not saying it is a good or fair idea to segregate resurrected dead people to museum planets in space, but this is what cosmists suggested, and it’s a quainter, more peaceful vision for space than what today’s capitalists believe we should do.

For Musk, Mars and other future worlds will become colonies that require space mortgages, are used for resource extraction, or, in some cases, be used as landing spots for the rich once we have completely destroyed the Earth. Bezos, the world’s richest man, says we will have "gigantic chip factories in space” where heavy industry is kept off-planet. Beyond Earth, Bezos anticipates humanity will be contained to O'Neill cylinder space colonies. One might stop and consider the fact that while the cosmist vision calls for improving human civilization on Earth before resurrecting the dead and colonizing space, the capitalist vision sees space as the next frontier to colonize and extract stupendous returns from—trillions of dollars of resource extraction is the goal. Even in space, they cannot imagine humanity without the same growth that demands the sort of material extraction and environmental degradation already despoiling the world. Better to export it to another place (another country, planet, etc.) than fix the underlying system.

Why?

Ostensibly, the “why” behind cosmism is a belief that we have an ethical responsibility to resurrect the dead, much like we have one to care for the sick or infirm. At a deeper level, however, cosmists not only see noncapitalist abundance as a virtue in of itself, but believe the process of realizing it would offer chances to challenge deep-seated assumptions about humanity that might aid political and cultural forms hostile to the better future cosmists seek.

Vidokle tells Steyerl in their conversation that he sees the path towards resurrection involving expanding the rights of the dead in ways that undermine certain political and cultural forms,

“The dead … don’t have any rights in our society: they don’t communicate, consume, or vote and so they are not political subjects. Their remains are removed further and further from the cities, where most of the living reside. Culturally, the dead are now largely pathetical comical figures: zombies in movies,” he said. “Financial capitalism does not care about the dead because they do not produce or consume. Fascism only uses them as a mythical proof of sacrifice. Communism is also indifferent to the dead because only the generation that achieves communism will benefit from it; everyone who died on the way gets nothing.”

In another part of their conversation, Steyerl suggests that failing to pursue the cosmist project might cede ground to the right-wing accelerationism already killing millions:

There is another aspect to this: the maintenance and reproduction of life is of course a very gendered technology—and control of this is on a social battleground. Reactionaries try to grab control over life’s production and reproduction by any means: religious, economic, legal, and scientific. This affects women’s rights on the one hand, and, on the other, it spawns fantasies of reproduction wrested from female control: in labs, via genetic engineering, etc.

In other words, the failure to imagine and pursue some alternative to this oligarchic project has real-world consequences that not only kill human beings, but undermine the collective agency of the majority of humanity. In order for this narrow minority to rejuvenate and resurrect themselves in a way that preserves their own privilege and power, they will have to sharply curtail the rights and agency of almost every other human being in every other sphere of society.

Elena Shaposhnikova, another artist who appears later in the book, wonders whether the end of death—or the arrival of a project promising to abolish it—might help us better imagine and pursue lives beyond capitalism:

“It seems to me that most of us tend to sublimate our current life conditions and all its problems, tragedies, and inequalities, and project this into future scenarios,” she said. “So while it’s easy to imagine and represent life in a society without money and with intergalactic travel, the plot invariably defaults to essentialist conflicts of power, heroism, betrayal, revenge, or something along these lines.”

In a conversation with Shaposhnikova, Zhilyaev offers that cosmism might help fight the general fear of socialism as he understands it:

According to Marx, or even Lenin, socialism as a goal is associated with something else—with opportunities of unlimited plurality and playful creativity, wider than those offered by capitalism. … the universal museum producing eternal life and resurrection for all as the last necessary step for establishing social justice.

In the conversations that this book, cosmism emerges not simply as an ambition to resurrect the dead but to create, for the first time in human history, a civilization committed to egalitarianism and justice. So committed, in fact, that no part of the human experience—including death—would escape the frenzied wake of our restructuring.

It’s a nice thought, and something worth thinking about. Ours is not that world but in fact, one that is committed, above all else, to capital accumulation. There will be no resurrection for the dead—there isn’t even healthcare for most of the living, after all. Even in the Citadel of Capital, the heart of the World Empire, the belly of the beast, the richest country in human history, most are expected to fend for themselves as massive wealth transfers drain the public treasuries that might’ve funded some measure of protection from the pandemic, the economic meltdown, and every disaster lurking just out of sight. And yet, for all our plumage, our death cult still holds true to Adam Smith's observation in The Wealth of Nations: "All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind."

The Proto-Communist Plan to Resurrect Everyone Who Ever Lived syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

[simonconsultancypage]

Wisconsin Become First State to Mandate Disclosure of Litigation Funding Arrangements

As the use of third-party litigation funding has become more widespread, one issue that has been debated is whether or not the existence and details of a funding arrangement must be disclosed to the adversarial parties. As I have noted in prior posts, courts have struggled with the question of whether or not funding arrangements must be disclosed under existing discovery rules. A number of proposals providing for mandatory disclosure of litigation funding arrangements have been proposed. Now, Wisconsin has become the first state to adopt a provision requiring the disclosure of litigation funding arrangements. The state’s action is just the latest step in what seems to be a general move toward requiring disclosure.

  Litigation funding is a mechanism to provide litigants with the financial means to pursue litigation, or even the financial means to defend litigation. In exchange for the financing, the borrower agrees to give the funders a portion of any settlement, judgment or fee awards. The practice is well-established in Australia and Canada, as well as in the U.K. Litigation funding is still relatively new in the U.S, but the industry is growing rapidly.

  As discussed in a March 21, 2018 Wall Street Journal article entitled “Lawsuit Funding, Long Hidden in the Shadows, Faces Calls for More Sunlight” (here), both the financiers and the borrowers have generally tried to keep their arrangements confidential. However, as the article notes, “as litigation funding in the U.S. has spread to more courthouses and transformed into a billion-dollar business, plaintiffs and their faceless financiers are confronting calls for more transparency.”

  As the Journal article details, courts have wrestled with the question whether litigants must disclose details of litigation financing in the ordinary course of discovery. However, at least one federal district court has instituted a requirement — the first of its type — specifying the automatic disclosure of third-party funding agreements in proposed class action lawsuits. As discussed here, on January 23, 2017, the Northern District of California amended its Standing Order to require disclosure of third party funding arrangements in class action lawsuits.

  There is also a current proposal pending that would revise the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure to require disclosure of third-party funding arrangements. As James Beck notes in a post on his Drug and Device Law Blog (here), the Advisory Committee on Rules of Civil Procedure has introduced a change to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure that would provide for mandatory initial disclosure of “any agreement under which any person, other than an attorney permitted to charge a contingent fee representing a party, has a right to receive compensation that is contingent on, and sourced from, any proceeds of the civil action, by settlement, judgment or otherwise.” The Committee is expected to take up the proposal later this year.  As I noted in a prior post, there have been a variety of Congressional initiatives on this subject in recent years as well.

  As a recent memo from the Skadden law firm (here) put it, even though “the tide of legislative and judicial opinion seems to be turning toward disclosure,” for now it seems as if the issue will be addressed on a jurisdiction by jurisdiction basis.

  Now, at least one state has instituted a statutory provision requiring the disclosure of litigation funding arrangements. On Tuesday, April 3, 2018, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker signed into law Wisconsin Act 235 specifying that in civil actions in Wisconsin’s state courts litigation funding agreements must be disclosed. According to Ben Hancock’s April 4, 2018 article in The National Law Journal (here), the Wisconsin statute “appears to be the first law of its kind in the United States, and comes amid a continued push by litigation finance opponents to increase transparency in the industry.”

  The relevant statutory provision specifies that even without first requiring a discovery request, a litigant must provide to other parties “ any agreement under which any person … has a right to receive compensation that is contingent on and sourced from any proceeds of the civil action, by settlement, judgment or otherwise.” The provision does not apply to lawyer contingency fee arrangements.

  The U.S. Chamber of Commerce Institute for Legal Reform issued an April 3, 2018 press release hailing the “groundbreaking” enactment of the legislation, which the Institute had supported. The National Law Journal article to which I linked above quotes Institute President Lisa Rickard as saying “It’s our hope that other states will follow suit,” although she also noted that she is not aware of any other states where similar legislation is pending.

  The National Law Journal article also contains comments from a representative of Burford Capital, the largest litigation funding firm, “downplaying the likelihood that Wisconsin law could spur the adopting of similar transparency laws elsewhere,” and as saying that “we view this as an accidental outlier that is likely to change in due course once Wisconsin businesses realize that their legislators just overreached.”

  The advocates for requiring mandatory disclosure of funding arrangements say that litigants have a right to know if another party stands to benefit financially from the successful prosecution or settlement of a case. This particular point of view receiving a great deal of attention in connection with Hulk Hogan’s privacy litigation against Internet scandal site Gawker, that was funded by Silicon Valley mogul Peter Thiel. As discussed here, the news about Thiel’s financial involvement produced a cascade of commentary about litigation funding, which in turn has arguably put the litigation industry on the defensive.

  Litigation funders, by contrast, argue that mandatory disclosure requirements will invite expensive and lengthy discovery battles, and that the disclosure of funding documents could reveal information relating to assessments of the case’s strengths and weaknesses. They also argue that the funding arrangements are irrelevant to the merits of the case.

  As litigation funding becomes increasingly prevalent, and in particular, as questions about litigation funding continue to arise, calls for regulation and disclosure are likely to continue. Questions surrounding mandatory disclosure requirements, among other issues, will continue, as will more general questions involving the regulation of third-party litigation funding.

  As I have emphasized in the past, I am not necessarily advocating steps to regulate litigation finance, but I do think the time has come for a debate on these issues, particularly with respect to mandatory disclosure. Indeed, I think it arguably would be in the interest of the firms currently in the litigation funding vanguard to get out in front on these issues, to try to bring about a level and type of regulation and disclosure that is acceptable to them.

    The post Wisconsin Become First State to Mandate Disclosure of Litigation Funding Arrangements appeared first on The D&O Diary.

Wisconsin Become First State to Mandate Disclosure of Litigation Funding Arrangements published first on http://simonconsultancypage.tumblr.com/

[lawfultruth]

Wisconsin Become First State to Mandate Disclosure of Litigation Funding Arrangements

As the use of third-party litigation funding has become more widespread, one issue that has been debated is whether or not the existence and details of a funding arrangement must be disclosed to the adversarial parties. As I have noted in prior posts, courts have struggled with the question of whether or not funding arrangements must be disclosed under existing discovery rules. A number of proposals providing for mandatory disclosure of litigation funding arrangements have been proposed. Now, Wisconsin has become the first state to adopt a provision requiring the disclosure of litigation funding arrangements. The state’s action is just the latest step in what seems to be a general move toward requiring disclosure.

  Litigation funding is a mechanism to provide litigants with the financial means to pursue litigation, or even the financial means to defend litigation. In exchange for the financing, the borrower agrees to give the funders a portion of any settlement, judgment or fee awards. The practice is well-established in Australia and Canada, as well as in the U.K. Litigation funding is still relatively new in the U.S, but the industry is growing rapidly.

  As discussed in a March 21, 2018 Wall Street Journal article entitled “Lawsuit Funding, Long Hidden in the Shadows, Faces Calls for More Sunlight” (here), both the financiers and the borrowers have generally tried to keep their arrangements confidential. However, as the article notes, “as litigation funding in the U.S. has spread to more courthouses and transformed into a billion-dollar business, plaintiffs and their faceless financiers are confronting calls for more transparency.”

  As the Journal article details, courts have wrestled with the question whether litigants must disclose details of litigation financing in the ordinary course of discovery. However, at least one federal district court has instituted a requirement — the first of its type — specifying the automatic disclosure of third-party funding agreements in proposed class action lawsuits. As discussed here, on January 23, 2017, the Northern District of California amended its Standing Order to require disclosure of third party funding arrangements in class action lawsuits.

  There is also a current proposal pending that would revise the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure to require disclosure of third-party funding arrangements. As James Beck notes in a post on his Drug and Device Law Blog (here), the Advisory Committee on Rules of Civil Procedure has introduced a change to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure that would provide for mandatory initial disclosure of “any agreement under which any person, other than an attorney permitted to charge a contingent fee representing a party, has a right to receive compensation that is contingent on, and sourced from, any proceeds of the civil action, by settlement, judgment or otherwise.” The Committee is expected to take up the proposal later this year.  As I noted in a prior post, there have been a variety of Congressional initiatives on this subject in recent years as well.

  As a recent memo from the Skadden law firm (here) put it, even though “the tide of legislative and judicial opinion seems to be turning toward disclosure,” for now it seems as if the issue will be addressed on a jurisdiction by jurisdiction basis.

  Now, at least one state has instituted a statutory provision requiring the disclosure of litigation funding arrangements. On Tuesday, April 3, 2018, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker signed into law Wisconsin Act 235 specifying that in civil actions in Wisconsin’s state courts litigation funding agreements must be disclosed. According to Ben Hancock’s April 4, 2018 article in The National Law Journal (here), the Wisconsin statute “appears to be the first law of its kind in the United States, and comes amid a continued push by litigation finance opponents to increase transparency in the industry.”

  The relevant statutory provision specifies that even without first requiring a discovery request, a litigant must provide to other parties “ any agreement under which any person … has a right to receive compensation that is contingent on and sourced from any proceeds of the civil action, by settlement, judgment or otherwise.” The provision does not apply to lawyer contingency fee arrangements.

  The U.S. Chamber of Commerce Institute for Legal Reform issued an April 3, 2018 press release hailing the “groundbreaking” enactment of the legislation, which the Institute had supported. The National Law Journal article to which I linked above quotes Institute President Lisa Rickard as saying “It’s our hope that other states will follow suit,” although she also noted that she is not aware of any other states where similar legislation is pending.

  The National Law Journal article also contains comments from a representative of Burford Capital, the largest litigation funding firm, “downplaying the likelihood that Wisconsin law could spur the adopting of similar transparency laws elsewhere,” and as saying that “we view this as an accidental outlier that is likely to change in due course once Wisconsin businesses realize that their legislators just overreached.”

  The advocates for requiring mandatory disclosure of funding arrangements say that litigants have a right to know if another party stands to benefit financially from the successful prosecution or settlement of a case. This particular point of view receiving a great deal of attention in connection with Hulk Hogan’s privacy litigation against Internet scandal site Gawker, that was funded by Silicon Valley mogul Peter Thiel. As discussed here, the news about Thiel’s financial involvement produced a cascade of commentary about litigation funding, which in turn has arguably put the litigation industry on the defensive.

  Litigation funders, by contrast, argue that mandatory disclosure requirements will invite expensive and lengthy discovery battles, and that the disclosure of funding documents could reveal information relating to assessments of the case’s strengths and weaknesses. They also argue that the funding arrangements are irrelevant to the merits of the case.

  As litigation funding becomes increasingly prevalent, and in particular, as questions about litigation funding continue to arise, calls for regulation and disclosure are likely to continue. Questions surrounding mandatory disclosure requirements, among other issues, will continue, as will more general questions involving the regulation of third-party litigation funding.

  As I have emphasized in the past, I am not necessarily advocating steps to regulate litigation finance, but I do think the time has come for a debate on these issues, particularly with respect to mandatory disclosure. Indeed, I think it arguably would be in the interest of the firms currently in the litigation funding vanguard to get out in front on these issues, to try to bring about a level and type of regulation and disclosure that is acceptable to them.

    The post Wisconsin Become First State to Mandate Disclosure of Litigation Funding Arrangements appeared first on The D&O Diary.

Wisconsin Become First State to Mandate Disclosure of Litigation Funding Arrangements syndicated from https://ronenkurzfeldweb.wordpress.com/

[armourinsurancebrokers-blog]

Tesla Unveils Electric Transport Truck

ELON MUSK HAS always dreamed big, and tonight he showed off his biggest reverie yet: the fully electric Tesla Semi. Powered by a massive battery and capable of hauling 80,000 pounds, it can ramble 500 miles between charges. It’ll even drive itself—on the highway, at least.1

And Musk promises production will start in 2019.

The big rig, which Musk unveiled at SpaceX’s Hawthorne, California headquarters Thursday night, is just the latest step in his mission to make humanity forget about planet-killing fossil fuels and embrace the gospel of electric power.

That is, of course, if he can convince the trucking industry it’s time for a new way of moving stuff around—and if he can actually make the thing.

The Truck for the Job Musk believes that going after the big boys is the best way to have a real impact on climate change. In the five years since Tesla started producing its Model S sedan, it has sold about 200,000 cars. The US has more than 250 million passenger cars on the road, making the impact of this, roughly, zero. Even if Tesla scales up production of its “affordable” Model 3 sedan, it will still be a very long time before the Silicon Valley automaker can change the way humanity moves about enough for any dip in emissions to register as more than a blip.

Trucks offer a more effective way to do that, because they are particularly toxic. “Heavy-duty vehicles make up a small fraction of the vehicles on the road, but a large fraction of their emissions,” says Jimmy O’Dea, who studies clean vehicles at the Union of Concerned Scientists. In California, that category (which includes buses as well as trucks) accounts for 7 percent of total vehicles, but produces 20 percent of transportation-related greenhouse gas emissions and a third of all NOx emissions (those are the ones linked to asthma attacks and respiratory illnesses).

Every truck you move with electricity instead of diesel has an outsize effect on the health of the planet and everything living on it. 18-wheelers are the ultimate force multiplier.

Musk has done the math. And while lots of players are moving into electric trucking space, none have the star power of Tesla, the kind of clout that makes the whole country pay attention. From the outside, the carbon fiber cab is all smooth lines. Aerodynamics are a real big deal when it comes to fuel economy and making every electron count, and Tesla promises the Semi will cut through the wind more efficiently than some sports cars.

Look inside the cab of the Semi, and there’s no doubt Tesla knows how to (re) design a vehicle. Like the famed McLaren F1 sports car (Musk owned one until he crashed it while driving around with Peter Thiel), the driver’s seat is now in the middle of the cab. (There’s a jump seat behind it, to the right.) Because it didn’t need to build around a bulky diesel engine, Tesla made the nose of the cab a vertical slab, and the main seat is so far forward, you can see the ground just in front of the vehicle. In a design touch that recognizes that truckers are human beings, there are overhead bins for storing stuff, and at least four cup holders.

The cab is about 6’6” tall, so most anybody can stand up inside. The suicide doors stretch from the bottom to the top of the cab, making access extra easy. The human in charge gets two 15-inch touchscreens, one on either side, to handle navigation, data logging (for hours of service and the like), and blind spot monitoring. The only button in sight operates the hazard lights, everything else is done via one of the screens, or the two stalks coming off the three-spoke steering wheel.

Tesla piled on the safety-related bits, too. The battery is reinforced to keep it from exploding or catching fire or whatnot in the event of a crash, the reinforced windshield glass shouldn’t chip or crack, and onboard sensors will look for the signs of jackknifing and adjust power to the individual wheels to keep everything in line.

And of course, the truck gets the Enhanced Autopilot features that let it drive itself on the highway, staying in its lane and a safe distance from neighboring vehicles. That means radars built into the front of the vehicle, and cameras all over the place, including in a pair of fin-like protrusions on the upper rear bit of the cab.

The battery—whose size Tesla declined to disclose—takes up a space about three feet high, and stretches from the front wheels to the second pair. Behind the cab sit four electric motors, the same kind that power the Model 3, two dedicated to each axle. Extrapolating from an EPA document that says a single Model 3 motor generates 258 horsepower, that gives the Semi 1,032 ponies, twice what you get in most diesel trucks of this size. But in trucks, it’s the torque that really matters—another figure Tesla won’t reveal—but electric motors are champions when it comes to accelerating from a stop.

The Job for the Truck That’s all great, but Musk still has to sell the thing. And while selling things has never been his problem (half a million people have reserved the Model 3, after all, and thousands of people ordered one before they had seen the prototype, had the specs, or knew the final price) truckers are a more difficult audience. Plenty of companies are open to new solutions, says Anne Goodchild, who runs the University of Washington’s Supply Chain Transportation and Logistics Center. But they’re not big on experimenting. “There are few who will be eager to be testing that out on their day-to-day operations,” she says.

These are not early adopters; they do not go for cool. They go for total cost of ownership, which accounts for everything from upfront cost to fuel to maintenance to downtime. “We have to provide a product that in essence allows them to make money,” says Darren Gosbee, the head of advanced powertrain engineering at Navistar, a truck and bus manufacturer.

Tesla’s big rig should have an advantage in fuel costs (electricity is pretty much always cheaper than dino juice) and maintenance, but downtime could prove a problem. Musk promises chargers that can add 400 miles of range in 30 minutes, but that sort of fast fill-up power requires specialized infrastructure. Even if Musk can get those stations built at enough points around the country to make a few routes workable, drivers will spend more time stopped than they would in a diesel-powered semi, and that’s a disadvantage.

Perhaps the biggest question here is why Tesla is going after the long-haul market. When it comes to battery-powered big rigs, Gosbee says, “the worst application is one that basically sits at 65 mph and just drives.” Going across states or the entire country demands sprawling charging infrastructure, and highway cruising eviscerates the advantage you get from regenerative braking.

“Your best application is a vehicle that doesn’t travel a great deal of distance and has an awful lot of stop-start maneuvers,” Gosbee says. Meaning trucks that wander cities, making deliveries and pickups. These wouldn’t benefit from the current, highway-focused iteration of Tesla’s self-driving tech, but they have lots of benefits for electric propulsion: They don’t go that far, they can charge at the same place every night, they stop constantly to can recoup lots of energy, and the diesel trucks doing that work now do their polluting where the most people live.

Yet Musk promises economics over which truckers should salivate. On 100-mile routes, the Tesla Semi will cost just $1.26 per mile to operate, compared to $1.51 for diesel trucks, he promises. How he figured those numbers isn't exactly clear—and he didn't say how much the truck itself would cost, so it's hard to know how long it might take to amortize the (likely) hefty price tag.

Heavy Load But wait, you say. You’ve been following the Adventures of Elon lately, and you have another question: How on Earth does this man think now is the right time to start building an entirely new kind of vehicle, for an entirely foreign industry to the one he knows? Production of the Model 3—the $35,000 sedan that marks Tesla’s attempt to become a real automaker—is months behind schedule. The company’s stock has slid south in recent months, and in the meantime it is facing lawsuits over alleged sexism and racism. Is now really the time for a truck?

Maybe not, but that’s never stopped Musk from doing anything. This is the man trying to move humanity to Mars, start intercity rocket travel, avert the robot apocalypse, destroy traffic with networks of tunnels, and pack everybody into tubes where they zoom about at supersonic speeds. At the same time. Throwing a few trucks on the pile doesn’t make a huge difference. And if he can pull it off, he’ll be one lumbering step closer to saving us all.

Article from Wired.com - ALEX DAVIES TRANSPORTATION

[mindthump]

Reid Hoffman: To Successfully Grow A Business, You Must 'Expect Chaos' http://ift.tt/2omxhKE

Dan Lewis has been wrestling with one of the most common, and critical, bottlenecks that bedevil every tech startup seeking to scale fast: How can his company staff up quickly enough to cope with expected growth without blowing through cash unsustainably? Lewis is the CEO and co-founder of Convoy, an on-demand trucking startup headquartered in Seattle, so the first idea he had felt obvious. He should open up a second office in a city that’s way cheaper than Seattle.

But he just wasn’t sure. Which is why, on a Friday evening in early March, he’d trekked down to Silicon Valley to meet a man known to have answers to quandaries like this: Reid Hoffman.

The two men sit down at the Sand Hill Road offices of Greylock Partners. Greylock, where Hoffman is a partner, led a round of financing for Convoy in early 2016. Hoffman now sits on the company’s board. “So what shall we talk about today?” he asks. “Customers, or recruiting?” 

“Recruiting,” Lewis answers.

Lewis dives into the details of his problem, and Hoffman settles into a posture that looks well-used. He steeples his hands in front of his chin, fingertips almost touching his lips, elbows splayed sharply to the left and right. His eyes might be half-closed, but his body language is benevolent; he could not possibly be more attentive.

And when Lewis is done, Hoffman has plenty to say. If Convoy does pursue a second office, they’d better make sure direct flights are available from the new city back to Seattle. Requiring execs to regularly make multiple-stop cross-country journeys plays hell with company culture. It’s a minor point, but one you might never think of unless you’d been there yourself. 

But splitting up corporate teams may be premature, Hoffman adds. It runs the risk of disrupting “the learning loop” -- that all-important, constantly iterating process in which a startup figures out how best to do whatever it’s doing by observing itself in action and making the necessary course adjustments.

Lewis nods. You can see him writing those words down in his mind: the learning loop. This, after all, is the effect Hoffman has on people. It’s why the 49-year-old billionaire co-founder of LinkedIn, veteran of PayPal and venture capitalist is widely considered something of a seer in Silicon Valley, who can distill complex ideas down to important truisms. It’s why he’s now expanding into media with a podcast called Masters of Scale; each episode explores his often counterintuitive theories on how businesses can grow, such as “the only way to scale is to do things that don’t scale,” and includes conversations with friends such as Sheryl Sandberg and Bill Gates. (It runs for 10 weeks, starting May 3.) For founders wrestling with big, sticky questions about their companies’ promise and direction, a few words from Hoffman can go a long way. A conversation can go even further.

That’s why Lewis and his cofounder chose Greylock as their lead investor. “Reid can go into the weeds and say, ‘Here is how to think of an onboarding experience for a product, here’s how to think of a marketplace, here’s how to think of a recruiting growth strategy,” Lewis says later. Another beneficiary of Hoffman’s capital and wisdom, Kiva president Premal Shah, concurs: “Reid gets in the foxhole with you.”

But for Hoffman, getting into weeds and foxholes isn’t just about helping the individuals he’s invested in. It’s about something greater -- something that, he hopes, will push all entrepreneurs to grow their companies strongly and smartly. It’s about nurturing an adaptable mindset suitable for navigating a confusing, chaotic world. All in the hope of making that world better for everyone. 

Born in Palo Alto, raised in Berkeley, educated at Stanford and Oxford, Reid Hoffman is a very smart guy. He originally wanted to be a philosopher, but he also wanted to have a concrete impact on the world, and eventually he concluded that abstract reasoning in academia wasn’t going to give him the scale to get him or the world to where it needed to be. In the mid-’90s in Silicon Valley, the lure of the digital revolution was irresistible. He got the lay of the land from gigs at Apple and Fujitsu and, in 1997, started his first company, a primitive social networking operation called SocialNet.

SocialNet failed, but Hoffman recalls the experience as invaluable. After SocialNet, Hoffman joined his college friend Peter Thiel on the board at PayPal, where he soon became the COO and then executive vice president. eBay’s subsequent purchase of PayPal in 2002 for $1.5 billion made Hoffman a multimillionaire. He began investing in startups and co-founded LinkedIn in 2003. He joined Greylock in 2009. In 2016, Microsoft purchased LinkedIn for a whopping $26 billion. (Hoffman joined Microsoft’s board of directors in March.) Among the startups he has helped mentor: Airbnb. Mozilla. Zynga. Groupon. Greylock declined to provide details on Hoffman’s current net worth, but after the sale of LinkedIn concluded, Forbes calculated it at $3.7 billion. 

But a funny thing happened on the way to billionaire-dom. Reid Hoffman, capitalist par excellence, ended up becoming a philosopher anyway. He has written two books -- The Startup of You and The Alliance -- and is working on a third, Blitzscaling, which is an adaptation of a course he taught last year at Stanford with Greylock partner John Lilly. All three drop heavy doses of knowledge on how to form the proper entrepreneurial mindset. Hoffman’s philosophy is based on the principle that entrepreneurialism is a force for good. He is convinced that in the long run, more Silicon Valley-style innovation will lead to greater prosperity and more jobs. “The world’s better off the more Silicon Valleys there are,” he says, “and the more scaled companies there are.”

So how do you scale a company?

That’s where it gets interesting.

“Entrepreneurship is throwing yourself off a cliff and assembling an airplane on the way down.” -Reid Hoffman

Premal Shah first met Reid Hoffman at PayPal. In 2006, after Shah joined Kiva, a nonprofit that crowdsources microloans to people around the world, he recalls chasing Hoffman down in a parking lot hoping to get his one-time colleague to invest in the nonprofit. Before Shah could utter a word, Hoffman said, “The answer to your question is yes.”

Hoffman not only invested but also joined the board -- and has stayed there ever since. Kiva’s innovative technology platform helps would-be entrepreneurs across the world get funding. That meshes perfectly with Hoffman’s desire to encourage entrepreneurial productivity -- and he believes big platforms can connect people in important ways. 

Related: 5 Things the Best Leaders Do Every Day

Plus, even nonprofits need to scale. Shah remembers back in 2012, when Hoffman began hammering that point in board meetings. Kiva was doing reasonably well by nonprofit standards, distributing millions of dollars, but Hoffman wasn’t satisfied. During one meeting, Hoffman observed that “one of the problems with Kiva is that you actually have to pay money to participate.”

There’s a joke in here: Only in Silicon Valley, land of hyperinflated values for companies that make zero profit, would a hugely successful businessman and venture capitalist point out that the act of charging customers could be construed as a bad business model. But there was method to this particular bit of madness. No one has to pay to use LinkedIn or Facebook or Gmail, which is why the masses will give them a shot. When a curious person arrived at Kiva, though, the only thing to do was give money -- and even if you were reasonably confident that your $25 loan to a motorcycle repairwoman in Uganda would eventually be paid back, you still had to get past that initial credit card plunge. There was friction in the system. 

Hoffman came up with a new strategy, a “freemium” model in which Kiva would just plop down a pile of cash and let its users decide where to loan it. And he put his own money down: $1 million to test the theory that Kiva could bootstrap its growth by jump-starting loaning activity. 

“We said, ‘Hey, lend out Reid Hoffman’s money. Do good for free,’” recalls Shah. “We just wanted to see what would happen.”

What happened is that 50,000 people joined Kiva in one month (a huge jump over the normal 10,000) and then those new members ended up loaning out an additional three million of their own dollars. Hoffman made back most of his donation, while setting an example that was quickly followed by Google and Hewlett-Packard, who established similar philanthropic programs for all their employees. 

The Kiva example nicely illustrates some themes that Hoffman has stressed. Take chances, learn from your experiences, be ready to pivot. But it also sheds light on why Hoffman is currently so focused on the question of scale. It’s not enough to just have a good idea and get a little traction. Real change requires a more ambitious canvas. 

“People are still very focused on the startup story: Risk-taking founders, with a bold idea, some capital and a network supportive environment, go out and take the shot on goal,” says Hoffman. “But the problem is, this is no longer the truth about what makes Silicon Valley so special. There are lots of places that have technical universities, venture capital, bright young talent and even relatively risk-taking cultures, because everyone has realized, oh, wow, taking that risk actually can be valuable. But what they haven’t realized is that that’s only the first step; that what is really critical for making these companies go is scale.” 

So what’s the second step toward getting to scale?

“Expect chaos,” he says.

The intro theme to the Masters of Scale podcast plunges the listener into an anarchic audio landscape. Short clips from scores of interviews conducted by Hoffman come flying at your ears from all directions, while vaguely martial music builds to a crescendo in the background. The effect is slightly ominous. The message comes through loud and clear: Building a new company is an exercise in surfing chaos. 

In one early episode, Hoffman interviews Mariam Naficy, another entrepreneur who, like Hoffman, has started two successful companies, the cosmetics supply website Eve.com and Minted, an online design marketplace. Minted’s initial plan was to market name-brand stationery, but when customer demand for independently designed works and art spiked instead, the company was forced to completely change its model. As the two discuss that moment in the show, Hoffman observes that, as a general rule, “your customers are always a bottomless well of surprises.” And unless you can quickly figure out what those surprises mean, you are doomed. 

After I listen to the episode, I ask Hoffman how entrepreneurs can possibly keep up. He says they should focus on three main things: their ability to scale customer acquisition, ability to grow their company’s size and “delivery of the value proposition to the customer.” If there is no one around to answer the phones when demand for your services takes off, you can crash even more quickly than you rise. 

But beneath all the operational aspects involved in scaling a company lies something more fundamental. Hoffman believes a successful entrepreneur must be flexible, ready to adapt and willing to accept that although the future is essentially unknowable, there is always something new to find out. 

“One of the first things that you learn when you are trying to do scale at speed,” says Hoffman, “is to focus on your learning loops.”

The simplest way to define “learning loop” is as a process in which your goals are constantly modified by experience. One of the worst mistakes a startup entrepreneur can make is to stick blindly to plan A when market realities are telling you it is way past time to go to plan B. Hoffman has done a lot of thinking about pragmatic ways to enhance learning loop efficiency.

It’s all about “OODA,” he explains.

I look blank.

“Observe, orient, decide, act. It’s fighter pilot terminology,” says Hoffman. “If you have the faster OODA loop in a dogfight, you live. The other person dies. In Silicon Valley, the OODA loop of your decision-making is effectively what differentiates your ability to succeed.”

The critical point Hoffman is always trying to get across -- in his books, his podcasts, his interviews with journalists and his mentoring sessions with company founders -- is that no one really knows what is going to happen next. Rare indeed is the business plan that survives contact with reality intact. 

Examples from his own career come readily to mind. 

Exhibit A: PayPal.

PayPal, says Hoffman, spent two years perfecting a technology that allowed PalmPilot users to make mobile payments. As a sideline, it also worked out a simple system for making payments via email; at the time, the company thought of that as a patch for when a PalmPilot user and a non-PalmPilot user wanted to split the bill for a meal.

The service launched, and after a week, says Hoffman, executives discovered that almost no one was making mobile transactions with their PalmPilot. But there was a hubbub of activity on eBay of people using the email payment feature to pay for their bids. As Hoffman remembers, there was some preliminary discussion of whether or not the company should quash the eBay activity; some saw it as an unlooked-for distraction from their primary business plan. 

“We have all this PalmPilot technology,” says Hoffman, “and this is the thing that makes us cool, and then, at the end of the week, we’re like, No no, these are our customers; it’s actually, in fact, the email payments on eBay that matter!”

Related: 7 Reasons You Need a Mentor for Entrepreneurial Success

Today, when company founders are seeking Greylock’s funding, Hoffman and his partners will look for signs of learning loop capacity. They want to see whether the founder can adjust and adapt on the fly when presented with new information or advice. Greylock is fine with funding a company that might not have the clearest idea of how it will make money. But funding an entrepreneur who is too rigid -- who can’t go with the flow of whatever the market dictates -- is an absolute nonstarter.

Hoffman (of course) has a name for the mindset of the successful entrepreneur. He calls it permanent beta. There is no such thing as a permanently finished product, even inside your own head; everything is always a work in progress. “It’s basically feeling that you always need to be learning,” he says. “That you know things but don’t know the whole game, and you are alert to how the game is changing.”

He dives into this in more detail in The Startup of You:

The conditions in which entrepreneurs start and grow companies are the conditions we all now live in when fashioning a career. You never know what’s going to happen next. Information is limited. Resources are tight. Competition is fierce. The world is changing. And the amount of time you spend at any one job is shrinking. This means you need to be adapting all the time. And if you fail to adapt, no one -- not your employer, not the government -- is going to catch you when you fall.

Everyone, in other words, needs to be their own fighter pilot.

“It’s an intense amount of work, and you are going to have to move fast,” he says. “You’ve probably heard me say that entrepreneurship is throwing yourself off a cliff and assembling an airplane on the way down. Well, the ground is coming, and you have to be comfortable cooperating while you are fearful of vertigo. Even if you are energized by it, the easiest way to be able to function well in that environment is to be something of an adrenaline junkie.”

But what if you’re not an adrenaline junkie?

As a lover of philosophy, Hoffman may appreciate that he’s creating something of a paradox. In interviews and across his books, he repeatedly points out that the qualities of successful startup founders are also the qualities that can help anyone inside any career. We live in an era of destabilization, he argues. Nothing anywhere is predictable, which means we’re all better off living in permanent beta.

And yet: Isn’t it fair to say that the disruption caused by Silicon Valley startups -- and to some degree, by Hoffman himself -- is itself a source of at least some of the destabilization? What are people who aren’t adrenaline junkies and don’t feel comfortable jumping off cliffs supposed to do when their jobs disappear because a new app has upended yet another industry?

“I think most people don’t react well to uncertainty,” he concedes, when I put this to him. “And that is part of the reason you have fear and the renewed rise of strongman politics around the world.” 

But is Silicon Valley culpable for all the negative things in the world? 

Hoffman isn’t sold on that. While our ever-changing economy may be difficult today, it’s not at all clear that it’s a permanent condition. And while he acknowledges that the negative job impact of developments like self-driving cars and trucks “will be one of the very big bumps along the way,” he doesn’t believe that artificially intelligent robots will take all our jobs. New conditions create new opportunities -- the openings that entrepreneurs will use to build companies that scale, become important and help everyone around them. Education is a good example, he says. What if, he suggests, instead of packing dozens of students into classrooms or hundreds into lecture halls, we could move to a system where there was a teacher for every three students? That becomes a sector with more jobs, not fewer.

“There are a lot of professions that could actually grow as work is redistributed,” he suggests. “During the agrarian-to-industrial revolution there was obviously turbulence in the middle, too, but the long-term story was good.”  Making sure that the long-term story has as happy an ending as possible is Reid Hoffman’s goal, a point underlined by his activism, his philanthropy and his decision to spend as much time as he can sharing his ideas and experience to help companies grow while the ground shifts beneath their feet. And that’s what Hoffman, the philosopher king of entrepreneurs, has dedicated himself to doing. Here’s the upgrade path, he says. Here’s how you tweak your learning loop. Expect chaos, he says, and then go from there. 

Related:

[ketchupandlightning-blog]

Rassenkrieg: The Edge

The Pepes had us surrounded.  You ever heard of the battle of Alesia?  Caesar in Gaul, a couple years before he returned and killed the Republic.  Caesar was besieging a Gallic town, had them surrounded, but then a relief army arrived and the Romans, in turn, got surrounded.  So you had a two-level siege, Gauls inside and Romans in the inner ring and Gauls again on the outside.  Strawberry Hill in Golden Gate Park was like that, except with land and water.  Golden Gate Park is mostly land, as it would have to be to support barbecues, dog walkers, drug users, the standard denizens of San Francisco.  But in the middle of it there is an annular lake, and the center of that lake is an island called Strawberry Hill.  We were on the hill, and the Pepes were on the other side of the moat, and maybe the rest of San Francisco could be convinced to surround the Pepes.

Pepes in San Francisco!?  Pepes in San Francisco.  I don't know what kind of image you have of San Francisco, but it probably ain't true anymore.  They hadn't exactly announced themselves as Pepes, at least not until it came down to brass tacks, but they were there.  @jack recruited them by the dozen, and Peter Thiel donned the Frog as soon as SHTF, and although San Francisco was deep blue in the electoral sense, a lot of the residents had nicely arranged front "yards" with lovely succulents, and, well, the Hammer and Sickle didn't really appeal to them so much, ya know?  It was a confused situation, as everywhere else in America in the Year of Our Lord Zero.  Mostly they stayed out of it, content to walk their dogs as the militias fought it out in the streets.  

The fog was rolling in overhead, orange against the the city lights, and the cypress trees rustled in the wind.  I lit a joint and looked over at Turtle Hill, now the primary Asian OP out there in the Sunset District.  They were our best hope.  The Sunset and the Richmond had fallen out over various sectarian/national disputes, and the defacto state was to leave the park as a neutral zone, to avoid stepping on each others' toes.  That had left it open for us to occupy, but it also meant that there was as yet no help from our fractious comrades, and so when the Pepes took the Haight and advanced up the Panhandle, we had to take refuge.

We had sent a courier, slipped across the lake and into the Inner Sunset, to try to make contact and convince the Chinese/Korean/Vietnamese coalition to light up the fucking incel white nationalists mucking up the park.  That was 10 hours ago.  Maybe he got caught.  Maybe he deserted, took the next ferry across the Bay, back to civilization.  Or maybe he was filling himself with pho at Kevin's, the fucking bastard.  I hadn't had Kevin's since before the war.  We'll see, I guess.

"Captain!"

'Good evening, lieutenant.  What is it?'

"Beg to report, the, uh, scout has returned sir."

'Excellent!  Send him up.'

"Yes sir!"

He snapped a salute and jogged back down the hill.  I took another puff and looked over at the remnants of the bridge's South Tower, with a ragged red banner fluttering in the wind.

Sergeant Ang had been at Yelp.  Front-end, Angular specialist.  Joined up after the Stripe acquisition, no beef with the new masters but he cashed out some options and heard The Call.  A tad materialistic, his belt-shoes-watch were always on point, but heart was in the right place.  After he got his girl set up with a Bay view he promptly came down to the recruitment office.  Smart, savvy.  Probably destined for the upper echelons of the intelligence service, if he stuck with it.  Damn good scout.  The Chinese who dominated the high command would like him, would listen to what he had to say.

"What's that I smell?"  He sauntered up, got a bit closer.  Took a big sniff.  "That's dank, Cap.  Seriously dank.  Where'd you get that shit, you order a drone from the fishtank over on Shattuck?"

'You sound thirsty, Sergeant.'  I passed him the j.  He took a big hit.  Then another.  He exhaled, and I looked him in the eye.  He took another, a half hit, not enough for me to justifiably get upset about, although I flipped a fuckin table in my chest cavity.  He stuck his hand out.

"It took a long time, dude.  First off, the Pepes are patrolling in those fucking swans, so I had to cross over under the lake.  Got myself a bamboo reed and creeped across the bed - it's only four feet deep, you know? - had to sit and think about my life choices as the fuckin Nazi waterfowl glided overhead."

My anger bedgrudgingly subsided and I handed him back the joint.

"But heck, they're fucking idiots anyway, I got down to the strip and basically cleaned Sheng Kee's out of their purple bean buns."

'Didn't happen to bring any back, did you?'

His face fell.  "Oh shit, man.  Yeah, I totally packed you some pork bulgogi."

A beat.

"But, like, the negotiation took pretty long, and they wouldn't let me leave until I had satisfactorily demonstrated that I wasn't a MAGA chud spy."

"And, like, they had a microwave there in the basement."

I flicked the roach with great force down the hill to the water, hoping it would light one of their fucking hats on fire.

'Jesus dude.  Do you at least have good news for the reinforcements?'

"Yes!  General Hu was very receptive.  He and General Park are, shall we say, on strained interpersonal terms.  He wants to demonstrate some aggressiveness and convince the West Side that General Park is a fucking cuck."

'Is General Park a fucking cuck?'

"I don't know man, he's got his hands full with the bridge situation, I don't think he pays much attention to us.  He might be RP'd as shit as far as I know."

'So Hu's down?'

"No one's down, sir, as far as I know, we're at full strength."

'No, goddamnit, I mean is General Hu willing to relieve us?'

"Yes sir!  He said he'll gather his forces together in the next few days and move on the transverse."

'And you belive him?'

"Yeah, I think so.  They haven't had much action out here, even the rank and file are itching to see the elephant, as it were.  Want to count some coup, make their granddads proud."

I exhaled.  'Well alright then.  Guess we'll just have to wait and see.'

"So what, you got another joint, Cap?"

'Come ON, Ang, you didn't score ANYTHING on the other side?'

He guffawed, reached down and pulled a pair of medicine vials out of his pocket.  "Hahaha, Cap.  Your fuckin eyes damn near popped out of your head."

[newstwitter-blog]

New Post has been published on News Twitter

New Post has been published on http://www.news-twitter.com/2017/02/07/ny-times-tech-opposition-to-trump-propelled-by-employees-not-executives-9/

Ny Times: Tech Opposition to Trump Propelled by Employees, Not Executives

It is an improvised and complicated strategy. The companies are among the richest and most popular of American brands, which means they have a good deal of leverage. Yet they are also uniquely vulnerable — not only to presidential postings on Twitter and executive orders, but to the sentiments of their customers and employees, some of whom have more radical ideas in mind.

OPEN Document

Document: Tech Industry’s Filing Against Travel Ban

Many of the companies initially placed their bets on engagement after an upbeat meeting with the president-elect in December. That modest approach, which even the most risk-averse executive can endorse, showed its limits last week. After widespread customer defections, Travis Kalanick, the chief executive of Uber, was forced to step down from one of the administration’s advisory councils.

“People voted with their feet, and Travis listened,” said Dave McClure, who runs the 500 Startups incubator and started the Nerdz 4 Hillary group that tried to raise the $100,000. “We need to hold the other tech leaders accountable in the same way.”

Resistance, Mr. McClure said, begins at home.

“You don’t have a voice with the president if you didn’t vote for him,” he said. “But employees and customers have a voice with the tech companies. Silicon Valley should be demonstrating at the front doors of Google, Facebook and Twitter to make sure they share our values.”

Several factors are propelling Silicon Valley to the front lines of opposition to Mr. Trump. Some have been widely noted: The companies are often founded by and run by immigrants, which made the executive order on immigration offensive and a threat to their way of doing business. Tech companies frequently stress the importance of talent from other countries to their businesses.

Less remarked on has been the political homogeneity of tech workers. “It’s not like you have 60 percent of the employees on one side and 40 percent on the other,” said Ken Shotts, a professor of political economy at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. “They all have the same leanings.”

Mr. Trump does have some support in Silicon Valley, most notably the venture capitalist Peter Thiel.

Yet another factor pushing the companies is the perennially tight job market in technology. Executives cannot afford to alienate a large bloc of workers. Beyond this, there is the mythology of Silicon Valley, which holds that the work being done there is building a better future. Google’s former slogan “Don’t be evil” is the most forceful expression of this.

Continue reading the main story

“If you go around making a lot of statements about your exalted role in society, at some point your employees might just make you follow through,” Mr. Shotts said.

Photo

Satya Nadella, the chief executive of Microsoft. Seventy-six of the company’s employees were affected by Mr. Trump’s ban. Credit Divyakant Solanki/European Pressphoto Agency

Since the executive order was issued, the companies have struggled to keep on the same page with their employees. Microsoft, for instance, initially made relatively muted comments that mostly celebrated immigration. Twenty-four hours later, it was much blunter, calling the order “misguided and a fundamental step backwards,” and saying it would create “much collateral damage to the country’s reputation and values.”

At an all-hands meeting at the beginning of the week with the chief executive, Satya Nadella, who was born in India, Microsoft employees expressed their concern. The company did not file a formal declaration supporting Washington State’s effort to block the order the way Amazon and Expedia did, but its public comments assisted the effort, Bob Ferguson, the state attorney general, said.

The immigration battle is in Microsoft’s self-interest. Seventy-six of its employees were affected by the order, the company said.

Some in Silicon Valley have more expansive hopes for the tech companies there.

“In 2016, we saw how technology could be used to polarize ourselves to extreme levels,” said Mr. Altman of Y Combinator. “The most important thing we could do is figure out how to use technology to depolarize the nation.”

Mr. McClure of 500 Startups said it was ridiculous “for the chief executives of the valley to suggest things like hate speech and bullying speech aren’t solvable problems. Google has been solving the problem of spam for the last 10 years. No reason they can’t fix the monetization of fake news.”

Perhaps the companies just need a little push. On Sunday night, the Super Bowl was in overtime and a dreary winter rain was falling in San Francisco. That was not enough to deter more than 100 tech workers from showing up for a meeting of a new group, Tech Solidarity, that hopes to tackle some of these issues from the bottom up.

Maciej Ceglowski, the organizer, canvassed the crowd. How many of you are immigrants? How many work for big tech companies? How many work for big tech companies that attended the Trump tech summit in December? In each case, numerous hands went up. Under the rules of the meeting, participants were not identified.

Lives Rewritten With the Stroke of a Pen

When President Trump signed his executive order on immigration, he upended the fates of people who had waited for years to get into the U.S. Here are portraits of those affected by the ban.

It was a very geeky event. Much of it was a fund-raiser for three legal aid groups that have been working to assist travelers caught in the ban. The speaker for the Council of American-Islamic Relations was asked what she needed. She replied that she was having trouble with her customer relationship management software.

Continue reading the main story

“I’ve actually been pretty obsessed with C.R.M.s lately,” said a woman in the audience, volunteering to help.

Mr. Ceglowski is a software engineer who runs the one-man start-up Pinboard. He was visiting the United States in 1981 with his mother when martial law was declared in their native Poland. He is now an American citizen.

Best-known in tech circles as a caustic critic of the large tech companies and their attitude to issues like privacy, he took on the activist mantle shortly after Mr. Trump was elected. Since then, Tech Solidarity has held rallies in Portland, Ore.; New York; Seattle; Boston; and other cities.

He talked about Facebook’s chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, the author of “Lean In,” which asks women, “What would you do if you weren’t afraid?” Mr. Ceglowski noted that Ms. Sandberg found time to go see Mr. Trump, but not to go to the women’s march on Washington. The crowd laughed. Ms. Sandberg has said that she had a personal obligation that kept her from the march.

When Facebook employees did their own protest last week, he pointed out, it was done in secret so no one knew about it.

“We have to protest in public,” he said. The event raised $30,000 for the legal aid groups.

“It looked like two-thirds of the room were newcomers,” Mr. Ceglowski said after the event was over. Unlike the great Silicon Valley companies, which seemed to blossom overnight, he said he knew progress here would be slow. But he was hopeful that some of the attendees were previously apolitical folk who had taken their first steps to engagement.

“I want pressure from below to counterbalance the pressure management is already feeling from above,” he said. “We have to make sure we’re pushing at least as hard as Trump is.”

Continue reading the main story

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New Post has been published on News Twitter

New Post has been published on http://www.news-twitter.com/2017/02/07/ny-times-tech-opposition-to-trump-propelled-by-employees-not-executives-8/

Ny Times: Tech Opposition to Trump Propelled by Employees, Not Executives

It is an improvised and complicated strategy. The companies are among the richest and most popular of American brands, which means they have a good deal of leverage. Yet they are also uniquely vulnerable — not only to presidential postings on Twitter and executive orders, but to the sentiments of their customers and employees, some of whom have more radical ideas in mind.

OPEN Document

Document: Tech Industry’s Filing Against Travel Ban

Many of the companies initially placed their bets on engagement after an upbeat meeting with the president-elect in December. That modest approach, which even the most risk-averse executive can endorse, showed its limits last week. After widespread customer defections, Travis Kalanick, the chief executive of Uber, was forced to step down from one of the administration’s advisory councils.

“People voted with their feet, and Travis listened,” said Dave McClure, who runs the 500 Startups incubator and started the Nerdz 4 Hillary group that tried to raise the $100,000. “We need to hold the other tech leaders accountable in the same way.”

Resistance, Mr. McClure said, begins at home.

“You don’t have a voice with the president if you didn’t vote for him,” he said. “But employees and customers have a voice with the tech companies. Silicon Valley should be demonstrating at the front doors of Google, Facebook and Twitter to make sure they share our values.”

Several factors are propelling Silicon Valley to the front lines of opposition to Mr. Trump. Some have been widely noted: The companies are often founded by and run by immigrants, which made the executive order on immigration offensive and a threat to their way of doing business. Tech companies frequently stress the importance of talent from other countries to their businesses.

Less remarked on has been the political homogeneity of tech workers. “It’s not like you have 60 percent of the employees on one side and 40 percent on the other,” said Ken Shotts, a professor of political economy at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. “They all have the same leanings.”

Mr. Trump does have some support in Silicon Valley, most notably the venture capitalist Peter Thiel.

Yet another factor pushing the companies is the perennially tight job market in technology. Executives cannot afford to alienate a large bloc of workers. Beyond this, there is the mythology of Silicon Valley, which holds that the work being done there is building a better future. Google’s former slogan “Don’t be evil” is the most forceful expression of this.

Continue reading the main story

“If you go around making a lot of statements about your exalted role in society, at some point your employees might just make you follow through,” Mr. Shotts said.

Photo

Satya Nadella, the chief executive of Microsoft. Seventy-six of the company’s employees were affected by Mr. Trump’s ban. Credit Divyakant Solanki/European Pressphoto Agency

Since the executive order was issued, the companies have struggled to keep on the same page with their employees. Microsoft, for instance, initially made relatively muted comments that mostly celebrated immigration. Twenty-four hours later, it was much blunter, calling the order “misguided and a fundamental step backwards,” and saying it would create “much collateral damage to the country’s reputation and values.”

At an all-hands meeting at the beginning of the week with the chief executive, Satya Nadella, who was born in India, Microsoft employees expressed their concern. The company did not file a formal declaration supporting Washington State’s effort to block the order the way Amazon and Expedia did, but its public comments assisted the effort, Bob Ferguson, the state attorney general, said.

The immigration battle is in Microsoft’s self-interest. Seventy-six of its employees were affected by the order, the company said.

Some in Silicon Valley have more expansive hopes for the tech companies there.

“In 2016, we saw how technology could be used to polarize ourselves to extreme levels,” said Mr. Altman of Y Combinator. “The most important thing we could do is figure out how to use technology to depolarize the nation.”

Mr. McClure of 500 Startups said it was ridiculous “for the chief executives of the valley to suggest things like hate speech and bullying speech aren’t solvable problems. Google has been solving the problem of spam for the last 10 years. No reason they can’t fix the monetization of fake news.”

Perhaps the companies just need a little push. On Sunday night, the Super Bowl was in overtime and a dreary winter rain was falling in San Francisco. That was not enough to deter more than 100 tech workers from showing up for a meeting of a new group, Tech Solidarity, that hopes to tackle some of these issues from the bottom up.

Maciej Ceglowski, the organizer, canvassed the crowd. How many of you are immigrants? How many work for big tech companies? How many work for big tech companies that attended the Trump tech summit in December? In each case, numerous hands went up. Under the rules of the meeting, participants were not identified.

Lives Rewritten With the Stroke of a Pen

When President Trump signed his executive order on immigration, he upended the fates of people who had waited for years to get into the U.S. Here are portraits of those affected by the ban.

It was a very geeky event. Much of it was a fund-raiser for three legal aid groups that have been working to assist travelers caught in the ban. The speaker for the Council of American-Islamic Relations was asked what she needed. She replied that she was having trouble with her customer relationship management software.

Continue reading the main story

“I’ve actually been pretty obsessed with C.R.M.s lately,” said a woman in the audience, volunteering to help.

Mr. Ceglowski is a software engineer who runs the one-man start-up Pinboard. He was visiting the United States in 1981 with his mother when martial law was declared in their native Poland. He is now an American citizen.

Best-known in tech circles as a caustic critic of the large tech companies and their attitude to issues like privacy, he took on the activist mantle shortly after Mr. Trump was elected. Since then, Tech Solidarity has held rallies in Portland, Ore.; New York; Seattle; Boston; and other cities.

He talked about Facebook’s chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, the author of “Lean In,” which asks women, “What would you do if you weren’t afraid?” Mr. Ceglowski noted that Ms. Sandberg found time to go see Mr. Trump, but not to go to the women’s march on Washington. The crowd laughed. Ms. Sandberg has said that she had a personal obligation that kept her from the march.

When Facebook employees did their own protest last week, he pointed out, it was done in secret so no one knew about it.

“We have to protest in public,” he said. The event raised $30,000 for the legal aid groups.

“It looked like two-thirds of the room were newcomers,” Mr. Ceglowski said after the event was over. Unlike the great Silicon Valley companies, which seemed to blossom overnight, he said he knew progress here would be slow. But he was hopeful that some of the attendees were previously apolitical folk who had taken their first steps to engagement.

“I want pressure from below to counterbalance the pressure management is already feeling from above,” he said. “We have to make sure we’re pushing at least as hard as Trump is.”

Continue reading the main story

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