Google workers have announced their intention to form a union, under the auspices of @CWAUnion Local 1440. The union is called @AlphabetWorkers (Google maintains the legal and accounting fiction that it is a division of a holding company called "Alphabet").

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

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

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

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

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

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2022 is shaping up to be a bloodbath. The Trump census cooked the numbers to advantage Republicans, and GOP statehouses are poised to redistrict in ways that will hand potentially permanent minority rule to the GOP in Congress.

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There's a potential way out: #HR1, an omnibus bill of electoral reforms that would create durable, structural protections for voting rights and a level playing field for campaigning.

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To get a sense of how urgent the looming crisis is - and of how important HR1 is - listen to @ryangrim interviewing @schwarz and Rep @JohnSarbanes [D-MD] on this week's

In theory, HR1 could be blasted through - Dems control the Senate, Congress, and the White House, and the future of the party depends on it, but I'm far from confident that they'll find the discipline and political will to make it happen.

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The Democrats keep squandering their majorities and wasting opportunities to make real change - changes that are must-haves, not nice-to-haves; changes needed to head off existential threats to the nation itself.

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One of the most Monkey's Paw things about my life is my relationship to books. When I was a teenager, I read all the way through the school and public libraries, spent everything I had on books, and still couldn't get enough and dreamt of more.

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Today, as a reviewer, I have more books than I can possibly read, huge, teetering mountains of books that I'm desperate to read, far beyond my ability to ever get through them. Periodically, I declare "book bankruptcy," sweep away the backlog and start over.

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Even then, my eyes are bigger than my stomach: I keep back a few books that I can't bear to part with and promise myself I'll read them someday. Usually I don't, but I just did, and boy did I ever make the right call with @TheUniverse's BROAD

I have read a LOT of histories of computing, and I had a front row seat for a lot of the events depicted in this book - people I worked with, people I worked against - and yet I was surprised over and over again with details and perspectives I'd never encountered.

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For example, for some reason, my ninth grade computer science course included lengthy readings on ENIAC, Univac, the Mark I and the Mark II, but none of those mentioned that they were all programmed exclusively or primarily by women.

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#PolicybazaarIPO Long thread: There is monetary printing by RBI, there is lending by banks & finally there is the Indian IPO. “Foreign owned” company with ~1 Bn investment is selling “Indian” unicorn to “savvy” Indians for $ 6.2 Bn. Want to know how this printing works? Let’s go-

The basics: Rs 6017 Cr being raised by new shares (Rs 3750) & re-selling (Rs 2267). Face value Rs 2 offered at Rs ~1000 per share is one of a kind. Who decides the price? Examine the valuation ladder below.
With ~$ 150 Mn invested till 2017, we see $ 525 Mn rushes in after 2018

So, a company valued $1 Bn in 2018 & $ 1.5 Bn in 2019 by key investors like Tencent, suddenly “needs money” in March 2021. Falcon Edge “invests” all of $ 75 Mn in March at valuation of $ 2.65 Bn.
Enter IPO bankers a couple of months later & they value the company at $ 6.2 Bn

Why does PolicyBazaar need $ 75 Mn just 6 months before IPO & give away 2.5 times in returns? And it doesn’t even use that money as the B/S reflects appx Rs 1000 Cr in cash lying around.
What kind of a favor is that? Why do they need US investment bank for this just before IPO?

Notice 50% rise in shareholding of promotors here & a 1: 500 bonus share issue. After all, how do you print money & still keep share price at “reasonable” Rs 1000?
Without bonus issue in June 2021, each share would have costed Rs 50,000. Heard of circular valuation?

1. If you turn on CNBC, you'll hear a narrative that reckless retail investors from Reddit are destabilizing the stock market by driving up prices for GameStop and other stocks.

This is BS.

Follow along if interested.

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

Retail investors are exploiting instability created by the hedge funds

They didn't start the

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

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

Plotkin then left to start his own firm.

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

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

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

This is where things get

Lunchtime update from the Grenfell Tower Inquiry:

President of Arconic's French arm accepts customers were 'deliberately and dishonestly misled' over fire classification of cladding panels, as he is asked about email saying failed fire test must be kept 'VERY CONFIDENTIAL'

The most interesting point of this morning's evidence came right at the end of the session when Claude Schmidt was grilled about an email his colleague Claude Wehrle sent regarding the serious failure of polyethylene-cored ACM panels when bent into a cassette form in March 2010

Remember: Arconic in 2004/5 tested its ACM PE panel when bent into cassette and when bolted to a wall with rivets. The cassette version failed spectacularly, burning 10 times as fast. But Arconic dismissed this as a 'rogue result' and drew no distinction in its marketing...

... simply presenting the panel as a 'Class B' (the rating for the rivetted panel, and the required standard for many European countries). Skip forward to 2010, and this email chain.

Mr Wehrle, the firm's senior technical member of staff is told about a trend in Spain and Portugal where clients are demanding more fire resistant panels, and warned that with this type of panel "our prices are no longer in the market"

Good news everyone, Jay Hoag gave us the simple 5 point playbook for finding Magical Companies in consumer technology.

1. product offers combo of value, convenience, selection
2. there's tremendous engagement
3. a virtuous cycle
4. tremendous execution
5. kinda crazy leader

Obviously Jay Hoag on ILTB is as self recommending as it gets