BREAKING! Exit poll for #BavariaElection has #AfD only at 4th place, well after Greens, who are real winners. Some quick observations on #LtwBayern

1. CSU +AfD together have ca. 1% less than CSU alone had in 2013!

2. SPD + Greens have about 1% less than they had in 2013 too!

3. Key take-away: little changes in terms of blocks, or even smaller parties, but right has gone largely far right and center-left has gone more left.

4. Aggregate electoral volatility is not always good indicator for individual electoral volatility, but it seems fair to assume most CSU defected to AfD and most SPD defected to Greens.

People keep calling Trump a "populist", but the GOP remains committed to the policy of starve the beast: cut taxes for the wealthy, then use deficits as an excuse to cut programs that serve the middle class and poor 1/

The Trump tax cut -- mainly for corporations and the wealthy -- has cut revenues by >1% of GDP. That's significantly more than the cost of the Affordable Care Act, which has insured 20 million people 2/

But who is the beast that's supposed to be starved? Mainly it's older Americans, because that's where the money is. When people like Ryan say "entitlement reform", that basically means cuts to Social Security and Medicare. 3/

Which makes it remarkable that polling shows older people much more favorable to the GOP than younger people; it's often said that Trump's base is working-class whites, but you could also say that it's old whites 4/

One way to read this is that it's about racism/culture: older whites much less socially liberal than younger. But it's also a measure of gullibility: I suspect a lot of Fox-watchers really believe Rs are defending Medicare against D attacks 5/

This is my news, and I still can't quite believe it's real:

✨ WE SOLD MY SPACE OPERA TRILOGY TO @DelReyBooks ✨

It's Star Wars meets The Road to El Dorado. It's star pilots and space princes and sick stunts and slick tricks. It's everything I love, and it's coming Spring 2020

It has been a long-ass journey for these books. I mean, two and a half years doesn't seem THAT long comparatively, but... I started working on this project at the beginning of 2016.

And a LOT has happened since then. 🙃

In these books, I carved a joyous space for myself that carried me through the past two years. They're ambitious, rambunctious tricksters, all of them, and I love them dearly.

And then there's sub. Which for this book was a few weeks shy of a yearlong process. I've talked a little about this before, but nearly every rejection we got went like "This is an amazing book! I love everything about it! But YA sci-fi just doesn't do well, so it's a pass."

It was crushing - I tried not to let it be crushing, I didn't need any more crushing in 2017/2018 - but it was, nevertheless, to be reminded that the kind of work you love so dearly won't ever have value in the eyes of "the market."

Now that Google+ has been shuttered, I should air my dirty laundry on how awful the project and exec team was.

I'm still pissed about the bait and switch they pulled by telling me I'd be working on Chrome, then putting me on this god forsaken piece of shit on day one.

This will be a super slow burn that goes back many years. I’ll continue to add to over the next couple of days. I’ll preface it with a bunch of backstory and explain what I had left behind, which made me more unhappy about the culture I had come into.

I spent most of my early career working for two radical sister non-profit orgs. I was the only designer working on
anywhere from 4-5 different products at the same time. All centered around activism and used by millions of people.

It’s how I cut my teeth. Learned to be the designer that I am today. Most importantly, the people I worked for are imho some of the greatest people on the planet. Highly intelligent, empathetic, caring, and true role models for a young me. I adore them.

You might not know who they are, but if you’re reading this then you have definitely seen their work. Maybe OpenCongress, or Miro, or maybe Amara which is Vimeo’s partner transcription service. Definitely Fight for the Future, our internet defenders, which was shortly after me.

THREAD: Former Polish Foreign Minister & Oxford-educated Anglophile @sikorskiradek published a book on his time in government and there are some tasty bits about UK's EU policy, Global Britain theories, Brexit, EU-USSR comparisons and his dealings with British ministers.

[1/17]

Sikorski recalls that an unnamed UK's Europe Minister was the only minister in his seven years in office who attempted forcing Poland to make a specific decision by threatening to block its efforts elsewhere - but he failed and never followed up on the threat

[2/17]

Sikorski also describes a pre-accession meeting with a senior UK politician who later was a minister in Cameron government who excitedly told him that 'together we
(Poland and the UK) can destroy the Brussels empire'.

[3/17]

He ironically notes that Poland and the UK teamed up once before - in the 30s - and Poland (in a free translation) 'didn't end up particularly well' - a reference to perceived lack of sufficient UK support after invasion on Poland in Sept 1939

[4/17]

Sikorski adds that Brits 'generally know little about Poland' & 'Polish history is completely absent from UK history books'

'We got to be cautious when they praise us, because it means they either want to use us or play to stereotypes that are not necessarily flattering'

[5/17]

Procrastination Hack:

When you procrastinate, you are focusing too much on the big tasks.

Stop.

Flip it.

Focus on the small tasks & build up.

Ex: instead of focusing on getting the entire blog done, do 1 paragraph.

You will strangely want to complete another paragraph...

Bonus Hack: Song

Have one song that gets you hyped up.

Promise yourself after playing the song 2-3 times, you will immediately begin.

No questions asked.

Begin.

The song amps up your emotions & you approach the task with energy.

Bonus Hack: Game

Turn mundane tasks into a game.

Use your creativity.

If you’re a gamer, break tasks into levels & kill each boss.

If you like music, reward yourself with a song after each completion.

Challenge: Aim to do some pushups or pullups after each crossed off goal.

My storytelling newsletter will give you practical tips to level up your mind & level up you life.

To stay ahead of the game, sign up for free here :

THREAD: I'm looking at a Huawei P20 from China, let see what can I found

The 1st app I reversed is an app called Decision

Look at the name of the files contains in the assets folder:
- airport_china.txt
- city_china.txt
- cityinfo.db
- parkinglot_china.txt
- railwayinfo.db
- trainInfo.db
- trainstation.db

Interesting, no?

For example, the trainstation database contains:
- address
- name
- latitude
- longitude
- city

In the manifest of this application, there is a GeoReceiver

Some of the most remarkable lost artefacts from the ancient world were the titanic wrecks of the Nemi ships.

In their 1st century heyday they held gardens, palaces & baths in a floating wonderland. But barely a decade after their recovery, they were lost forever.

For centuries, the fishermen who sailed in the placid waters of Lake Nemi, 30km south of Rome, knew a secret.

It was said that the rotting timbers of a gigantic ancient wreck lurked below the water's quiet surface.

(📷 Kleuske; Google)

But the lake was tiny, with an area only 1.6km².

And with no other body of water connected to it, what would a vessel of that size be doing there?

(🖌️Lake Nemi, George Inness, 1872)

Still, the stories about the gigantic ship persisted. Fishermen even used grappling hooks to bring up ancient artefacts from the supposed wreck to sell.

In 1446 a young Cardinal & nephew of the Pope, Prospero Colonna, decided to investigate the rumours.

Sailing over the vast wreck, Colonna confirmed that it did indeed exist, a sprawling lattice of wooden beams just visible at a depth of 18.3 meters (60 ft).

His men tried to tear off planks with hooks, but didn't succeed in bringing up anything else.

(🖌️Joseph Wright, 1790)

1/ Thank you @jack for these words of wisdom. Posting because these should go broader than just me.

2/

3/

4/

🎨 The symbolism of colours with Michel Pastoureau #thread in #colour

🔵 Blue

🌊 Quiet,
🐑 Conformism,
🕵️ Discretion

🔴 Red

🔥 Fire and blood,
❤️👹Love and hell,
🤑 Prideful, full of ambition & power-hungry,
🤕 Lack of professionalism,
💰 Sign of power

⚪ White

✨ Purity,
🧒 Innocence,
👶☠Life and death,
🔱 Divine,
🛁 Cleanliness,
❄️ Cold

🍏 Green

👿 Hidden danger,
📉 Instability,
⚡🌿Ecology

I became financially independent in 2008 at age 27. Or as my Father likes to say, I retired. Yeah right. It’s more like you exchange security for total insecurity.

I get asked a lot about how much capital you need to become a full-time investor. That answer will be different for everyone. It’s a personal decision. I was single with no kids living in Lancaster, PA. It was a great time to make that decision.

I would say a much better question is how much pain can you endure.

Can you sustain a 30-40-50% drawdown while also drawing it down to pay bills?

How would this affect you emotionally, psychologically?

Would two or three bad years in a row cripple you?

At what point would your investment strategy start to crumble by these emotions?

At what point does my advantage of “focus on the long-term” shift to “this next quarter needs to be good” or else..

Am I mentally prepared to perhaps go to my wife and tell her I failed and can’t support us anymore? That I need to get a job, that she needs to get a job.

1/ A really scarce commodity : the great non-executive director. What we get versus what we’d like...

2/ what we normally get - a bunch of high level comments at board meetings only and vague moral support for the founders.

3/ what we’d really like - firstly someone who cares as deeply about the success of the business as the others around the table, and anticipates issues and dynamically maps out opportunities

4/ a real independent sounding board for the founder - too often they are the VC’s pet or uncritically endorse whatever the founders say or want to do - not being independent thinkers at all

5/ NED have a unique position - they don’t have any form of conflict between their role as investor / board member or shareholder / manager — this is a great vantage point from which to have REAL impact

1/ On Bitcoin and similar protocols....

Decentralization and cryptography are vectors to disrupt the economics of violence.

Centralizable power is a lure too impossible to resist and this creates incentives for using violence to attain it.

2/ This has given rise to the mega-nation-state.

And so, we fight for control of this central power so we can use violence to show others how ‘correct’ our own world-view is.

But as @balajis says “No amount of violence can solve a math equation.”

3/ And in this fact we can begin to replace violence with security.

Because, for a universe sufficiently complex to create us, factoring must be more difficult than multiplying.

And because of this, cryptography is possible.

4/ And because of this it is possible to secure information mathematically such that no amount of violence can break it.

By combining decentralization with cryptography, we have a system for information that is resistant to violence.

Security over violence.

My friends @robwalling and @einarvollset just launched TinySeed, an accelerator for software companies where a successful outcome is a healthy, sustainable business rather than attempting to ride the rocketship trajectory. https://t.co/LSHqZNcVid

I have some thoughts:

As somebody who bootstrapped ~4 companies, I feel like I had to make some clearly suboptimal decisions early in them for lack of what is, in hindsight, not all that much money. But there's a huge gap in the product space for investment options.

It's weird: you can get $25k from Amex trivially, and angels are very willing to write a check for that much, but you have to make representations about your goals/ambitions/market/etc which don't really apply to everyone.

And so you see the traditional angel/VC ecosystem fund companies where honestly the returns are probably not there, and this is knowable pretty early, but the chase of them will wreck what could have been a perfectly happy business.

(To make the math work for traditional VCs the company has to at least have a market-appropriate shot of $100 million a year. There are a lot more $10 million a year companies than $100 million a year companies. That is *not* a bad terminal outcome for founders/employees.)

Aus gegebem Anlass. Rebecca Solnit sagt über victim blaming und darüber, dass Frauen gerne als psychisch krank dargestellt werden, wenn sie sich gegen einen gewalttätigen Mann wehren, dass es einfacher ist, eine Frau den Wölfen zum Fraß vorzuwerfen als eine ganze Kultur."

Dazu möchte ich noch aus dem aktuellen Tätigkeitsbericht der Wiener Interventionsstelle gegen Gewalt in der Familie zitieren. 2017 wurden in Österreich 18.860 Opfer häuslicher Gewalt von Gewaltschutzzentren und Interventionsstellen betreut.

83 Prozent der Opfer waren Frauen und Mädchen, 88 Prozent der Gefährder waren männlich. Die Dunkelziffer ist hoch. Schätzungen zufolge ist jede fünfte Frau in Österreich ab ihrem 15. Lebensjahr von körperlicher und/oder sexualisierter Gewalt betroffen.

Entscheidungen, wie jene, einen prominenten Beschuldigten zum Interview zu bitten, in dem er lang und breit darüber reden darf, wie schlecht es ihm aufgrund der selbstverständlich falschen Vorwürfe geht, weil bitch is crazy, wirken sich auf diese Zahlen aus.

Als Journalstin, die sich mit dem Thema häusliche Gewalt auseinandersetzt, mit Organisationen und Betroffenen, machen mich diese Interviews gelinge gesagt fassungslos. Den Verantwortlichen sollte klar sein, was sie damit anrichten.

10 years ago today, I had the idea for an app I thought was interesting. I called it Bump, and sent this email to Andy Huibers.

Here’s a thread with some memories and lessons learned in the last 10 years.

First lesson: Persistence matters. Email I sent him two days later.

Andy would later teach me an old Dutch proverb that translates as “No you have. Yes you may get.”

and I were in b-school, so we entered Bump into the business plan competition. Despite not having a real business plan, we placed 1st.

(Also the last time I wore a suit for work)

We then moved out to the Bay Area for @ycombinator. With a team of 5 and $16k, we got to 2M users.

Lesson: You can achieve a lot with just a few people and a little money.

During YC, Apple decided to put us in an international TV commmercial! Our servers melted, but @polvi and team came over and saved our butts.

Lesson 1: You have to be good, and lucky.
Lesson 2: The YC network is 💯