BC BUSINESS
Saved by @Mollyycolllinss

Today's Twitter threads (a Twitter thread).

Inside: Amazon warehouse union gets tech solidarity; and more!

Archived at: https://t.co/KYnbqjE9Ws

#Pluralistic

1/

 Amazon warehouse union gets tech solidarity: #DoItWithRealPower

https://t.co/cby43y3aaU

2/
#15yrsago Mysterious birthday ritual at Poe’s graveside disrupted by rubberneckers https://t.co/16m4DbuG1h

#15yrsago Nutjob offers $100 bounty to UCLA students who wiretap lefty profs https://t.co/47JtauT8Vy

3/
#5yrsago Transreal Cyberpunk! Rudy Rucker and Bruce Sterling’s book of annotated, seminal cyberpunk fiction https://t.co/MTANIei5nB

4/
#5yrsago The Democratic Party’s SOPA-loving, Snowden-hating, Hillary-partisan power-broker has her first-ever primary challenger https://t.co/olMdn1u9Ey

#5yrsago Griefer hacks baby monitor, terrifies toddler with spooky voices https://t.co/m5VspAuXXa

5/
#5yrsago GM’s Dieselgate: mechanics privately admit software update removes crimeware from Opel cars https://t.co/x76nNSrulo

#5yrsago How the standard, high-quality disaster-relief tarpaulin came to be https://t.co/4umhGmlzIz

6/
#5yrsago England’s most senior civil judge rules that Terrorism Act violates human rights https://t.co/z44PWwgg2X

7/
Yesterday's threads: How to leak a Zoom meeting; Pandemics and peak indifference; Planet Money's free Great Gatsby audiobook; Honor MLK day with the Internet Archive; Someone Comes to Town, Part 28; Facebook's community standards; and more!

https://t.co/yirL7Q2V2v

8/
My latest novel is Attack Surface, a sequel to my bestselling Little Brother books. @washingtonpost called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance."

Get signed books from @darkdel: https://t.co/HfWfdx8sIu

9/
I have a (free) new book out! "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism" is an anti-monopolist critique of Big Tech that connects the rise of conspiratorial thinking to the rise of tech monopolies and proposes a way to deal with both:

https://t.co/Us0SPxlcmD

10/
My ebooks and audiobooks (from @torbooks, @HoZ_Books, @mcsweeneys, and others) are for sale all over the net, but I sell 'em too, and when you buy 'em from me, I earn twice as much and you get books with no DRM and no license "agreements."

https://t.co/vpGcSZiPZ2

11/
Upcoming appearances:

* Keynote for https://t.co/Lr61KpUI3e, Jan 22 (US) 23 (Australia) https://t.co/7dfEFubGFn

* Evening with William Gibson, Jan 25, https://t.co/k3fvBdqOK0

* Boskone, 58, Feb 12-15, https://t.co/2LfFssVcZQ

12/
Recent appearances:

* Monocle Reads https://t.co/ENWPDLYVXg

* Hedging Bets on the Future (Motherboard Cyber):
https://t.co/7YeNDAjLfc

* Applying the Pandemic Mindset to Climate Change:
https://t.co/syTXEF1gFz

13/
My first picture book is out! It's called Poesy the Monster Slayer and it's an epic tale of bedtime-refusal, toy-hacking and monster-hunting, illustrated by Matt Rockefeller. It's the monster book I dreamt of reading to my own daughter.

https://t.co/yQLVua4WkB

14/
My first picture book is out! It's called Poesy the Monster Slayer and it's an epic tale of bedtime-refusal, toy-hacking and monster-hunting, illustrated by Matt Rockefeller. It's the monster book I dreamt of reading to my own daughter.

https://t.co/yQLVua4WkB

15/
You can also follow these posts as a daily blog at https://t.co/iSBh8s9m7q: no ads, trackers, or data-collection!

Here's today's edition: https://t.co/KYnbqjE9Ws

16/
If you prefer a newsletter, subscribe to the plura-list, which is also ad- and tracker-free, and is utterly unadorned save a single daily emoji. Today's is "👓". Suggestions solicited for future emojis!

Subscribe here: https://t.co/TwPzz87nAw

17/
Are you trying to wean yourself off Big Tech? Follow these threads on the #fediverse at //twitter.com/[email protected]." target="_blank">@[email protected].

Here's today's edition: https://t.co/jqV10jAOsd

18/
Today's top sources: Clarissa Redwine (https://t.co/NuTBrALSUW).

eof/

More from Cory Doctorow #BLM

Cory Doctorow #BLM
Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow
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.

1/


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).

2/

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.

3/

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.

5/
POLITICS
Cory Doctorow #BLM
Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow
20 years on, #BushVGore is back in our discourse - an election stolen by mobs at the polling places, a media blitz, and a Supreme Court at its most antidemocratic and antimajoritarian.

1/


We remember this as an election that the plutes stole, but it's also an election that the Dems gave to them. That's why we're talk about it now. There will be an attempt to steal next month's election. Will we surrender again?

2/

The last surrender led to a war being fought today by the children of the soldiers who were sent into battle on day one. It led to climate inaction, monopolistic concentration, erosions to our right to vote and to our right to protest.

3/

Thanks to that surrender, voter suppression was expanded and reinforced, leading to the election of a fumbling liar who got to appoint more SCOTUS judges in 3.5 years than all Democratic presidents did in the previous quarter


You may be wondering how the Dems surrendered in 2020. For a detailed account of what surrender looks like, read @rsgexp's @jacobin memoir of her time as an @AFLCIO organizer sent to Florida during the
POLITICS
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Cory Doctorow #BLM
Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow
There are lots of problems with ad-tech:

* being spied on all the time means that the people of the 21st century are less able to be their authentic selves;

* any data that is collected and retained will eventually breach, creating untold harms;

1/


* data-collection enables for discriminatory business practices ("digital redlining");

* the huge, tangled hairball of adtech companies siphons lots (maybe even most) of the money that should go creators and media orgs; and

2/

* anti-adblock demands browsers and devices that thwart their owners' wishes, a capability that can be exploited for even more nefarious purposes;

That's all terrible, but it's also IRONIC, since it appears that, in addition to everything else, ad-tech is a fraud, a bezzle.

3/

Bezzle was John Kenneth Galbraith's term for "the magic interval when a confidence trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the victim does not yet understand that he has lost it." That is, a rotten log that has yet to be turned over.

4/

Bezzles unwind slowly, then all at once. We've had some important peeks under ad-tech's rotten log, and they're increasing in both intensity and velocity. If you follow @Chronotope, you've had a front-row seat to the
INTERNET
Cory Doctorow #BLM
Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow
Today's Twitter threads (a Twitter thread).

Inside: Thinking through Mitch McConnell's plea for comity; Further, on Mitch McConnell and comity; Understanding the aftermath of r/wallstreetbets; and more!

Archived at: https://t.co/1rRmrJa4FK

#Pluralistic

1/


Thinking through Mitch McConnell's plea for comity: A thoughtful analysis.

https://t.co/2T74ykb3Ws

2/


Further, on Mitch McConnell and comity: I thought about it some more.

https://t.co/mTQ225Lr3X

3/


Understanding the aftermath of r/wallstreetbets: Even if there's no angels, there's still a path to glory.

https://t.co/x7BaqUQ0hj

4/


#10yrsago Morrow’s Diviner’s Tale is a tight, literary ghost story https://t.co/XFW0AGFwhI

#10yrsago ATM skimmer that doesn’t require any modifications to the ATM
TRADING
Cory Doctorow #BLM
Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow
We are in an extraordinary moment, but not an entirely unprecedented one. Since the earliest days, societies have had to cope with disasters that wiped out the ability of everyday people to service their debts and thus threatened to destroy their societies.

1/


If you've read U Missouri econ prof Michael Hudson's writings on the subject, you know that for millennia, rulers in these circumstances simply wiped out the debts, declaring a "jubilee" that allowed people to rebuild after disasters rather than being trapped in debt spirals.

2/

In a new essay on @NakedCapitalism called "How an 'Act of God' Pandemic Is Destroying the West: The US Is Saving the Financial Sector, Not the Economy," Hudson reveals the abyss on whose brink we are balanced, and what we must do to pull back from

Hudson's oft-repeated golden rule is "Debts that can't be paid, won't be paid." That is to say: making it harder to declare bankruptcy, or binding debtors over to arbitration or wage-garnishing won't actually get them to pay debts they cannot afford.

4/

This is a very sharp observation in the US context. The 2008 crisis was "solved" by bailing out finance, not people - and so the finance sector was able to lend to consumers to buy things again, while consumer debt mounted to spectacular levels.

5/
ECON

More from Business

Lillian Li
Lillian Li
@lillianmli
1) Let's talk about how Alibaba has achieved the holy grail of big data - a holistic view of the consumer - through a plethora of product offerings and investment.

This is their overarching moat. And Amazon's got nothing on them.

2) To the outsider, Alibaba's product range is confusing af. It's all over the place and there seems to be no core competency they are focusing on.

A few divisions - Taobao (B2C marketplace), Tmall (High-end B2C marketplace), Alibaba (B2B marketplace, Cainiu(logistics)..

3) ...Elema (Food delivery), Autonavi (maps), Youku (streaming) and Feizhu(travel booking)

Also the promotional strategy is weird, In the lead-up to singles day, half the time they were promoting some cat rearing in-app mini game.

Wtf?

4) When we view Alibaba's strategy as working to create a full view of a consumer's life, including their preferences, social network and spending capacity (and ability). Then everything starts to make sense.

4) Whether a consumer buys on Tmall or Taobao tells Ali about their preferences and budget, delivery address for packages and food lets Ali know where they live and where they work (also cross-referenced with property data to infer wealth level + occupation).
BUSINESS , BUSNIESS
Matt Bennett
Matt Bennett
@LongvueMatt
I’m a firm believer that more & more entrepreneurial ‘builders’ will evolve their operating company into a HoldCo

Scaling initial capital light successes (like a service co) & redeploying cash flow into concentrated bets leveraging existing know-how, infrastructure, & expertise

Why?

- lower barriers than ever to building asset light/capital light co's
- existing co infrastructure makes acquiring/building another co easy
- more non-dilutive funding options available
- talented operators/investors can use brand, capital, & know-how to scale meaningfully

But first… what is a HoldCo?

It’s fancy term for “holding company” which is an entity that owns/controls the assets of other different companies

Most HoldCo portfolio companies operate autonomously... with their own team, balance sheets, systems, processes etc.

Major capital allocation decisions are performed at the “TopCo” (ie, primary owners of the HoldCo)

Most HoldCo’s are C-Corps due to structural/tax advantages, but sometimes you see them operate as LLCs

Distributions to shareholders are less common, w/ free cash flow used instead for new acquisitions, spinning up new products/services, or using for existing portfolio co needs
BUSINESS
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Anurag Singh
Anurag Singh
@anuragsingh_as
#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?
BUSINESS , POLICYBAZAAR
Modelio Equity
Modelio Equity
@Modelio_Sthlm
1. A company that has been brewing just outside our Top-5 for some time now is the electroporation (EP) company MaxCyte. Modelio assesses it as one of the best investments to capture the growing gene editing and gene therapy space, especially in allogeneic ex-vivo treatments.

2. We estimate that MaxCyte stands before a huge inflection point that will accelerate both growth and profitability. We have seen signs of the accelerating underlying activity by the fact that they in the last two years have added 9 of their 12 commercial agreements.

3. What makes MaxCyte unique compared to other “pick-and-shovel” businesses is their claim to milestones and royalties, something usually reserved for pharmaceutical companies.

4. As per the January update, MaxCyte has a potential pool of $950m in milestones, and a 2-3% (our estimates) of sales in royalties, that excludes licenses and consumables for the machines.

5. Reviewing the partners' pipelines, we think milestone revenues will unleash themselves in 2021 and beyond as they move further into clinical trials.
BUSINESS
George Yury Revutsky
George Yury Revutsky
@george_revutsky
1/An interesting thing happened tonight. I was scrolling through clubhouse and found WileyCEO, Godfather of Grime (kicked off Twitter in July for antisemitic tweets) speaking. So I tweeted this (and included a screen shot, later deleted as I found out TOS don't allow it ...


2/ ... and several folks also asked me to remove it which I promptly did afterwards).... Coming into the CH room, I fully intended to confront him about how hurtful his comments in July were. But as I listened to the folks in the room, I decided to go a different direction ....

3/ the conversation jumped around, covered many topics and there were between 8-14 people up on stage. But a recurring thread was discussion of racism, bigotry, comparison of it in the US vs UK vs elsewhere.

4/ when I got a chance to speak, I had 5 bullets written down: a) we should harness technology and capitalism to make reparations for what America did to Black people. I gave https://t.co/SlrW8zCd58 (a project a couple friends co-started) as an example) ...

5/ b) capitalism and product know-how and technology can be harnessed for social justice c) historically oppressed minorities need to stick together and lastly, d) "Wiley, how could you say such hurtful things about Jews as a people?" That's what I had ready to say, anyway.
BUSINESS

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William
William
@wimgz
🛠️ OPEN BUSINESS IDEAS 🛠️

Below a list of business/product ideas I had or read about.

They are worthless if they remain ideas and if you don't overcome the challenges in building them, so feel free to copy / tweak / implement them!
👇

Better: use one and make a MVP during the #24hrstartup challenge!

😻 Product Hunt Time
A clock that displays the time it is @ProductHunt
Also displays what you should do and where you should post, at each specific time during your launch

🚧 IndieCrunch - VC free tech news
Techcrunch but only for bootstrapped companies

🎧 Kickstarter for audiobooks
A lot of awesome books are not available as audio.
Crowdfund the money to buy the audio rights + a voice actor
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Suchi Sharma
Suchi Sharma
@Suchi_sharma_
Yantrodharaka Anjaneya Temple, Hampi, Karnataka.

This temple dedicated to pawanputra Hanuman, near the banks of Tungabhadra river was built by dwaita philosopher and rajguru of the Vijayanagar empire, Sri Vyasaraja around +500 years ago.


:It is only in this temple that Hanuman appears in a prayer position. In this image, Bhagwan Hanuman’s crown has been formed by his tail.12 monkeys have been carved around this amulet.


:They represent the 12 days Sri Vyasaraja prayed to Hanuman ji. Each monkey holds the tail of the monkey in front of him but is facing backward. Seed syllables have also been carved around the amulet.


:It is believed that Sri Vyasaraja used to draw a picture of lord Hanuman here on the rocks before offering prayers using charcoal and the sketch disappeared after prayers.This incidence happened for 12 days in a row until he pleaded to bhagwan to appear in front of him.


On the 12th day, Hanuman ji appeared in front of Sri Vyasaraja and blessed him. Hanuman asked Sri Vyasaraja to constrain him in a hexagonal amulet & install him in that place.
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Patrick McKenzie
Patrick McKenzie
@patio11
Some people really benefit from hearing advice that everyone knows, for the same reason we keep schools open despite every subject in them having been taught before.

In that spirit, here's some quick Things Many People Find Too Obvious To Have Told You Already.

Your idea is not valuable, at all. All value is in the execution. You think you are an exception; you are not. You should not insist on an NDA to talk about it; nobody serious will engage in contract review over an idea, and this will mark you as clueless.

Technologists tend to severely underestimate the difficulty and expense of creating software, especially at companies which do not have fully staffed industry leading engineering teams ("because software is so easy there, amirite guys?")

Charge more. Charge more still. Go on.

The press is a lossy and biased compression of events in the actual world, and is singularly consumed with its own rituals, status games, and incentives. The news necessarily fails to capture almost everything which happened yesterday. What it says is important usually isn't.

Companies find it incredibly hard to reliably staff positions with hard-working generalists who operate autonomously and have high risk tolerances. This is not the modal employee, including at places which are justifiably proud of the skill/diligence/etc of their employees.
TECH
Sheetal Rijhwani
Sheetal Rijhwani
@RijhwaniSheetal
How you can filter stocks for Intraday trades - 🧵

As a kid, we would do homework before school the next day - you have to do homework here too. A specific sector performs on a particular day and studying things a day before will help you spot that particular sector. (1/11)

To prepare for the next trading day, you got to check the Index charts of all sectors. You got to keep an eye on a specific Index if you see a few factors:

- If any Index closed exactly at the resistance, you can get a trade on either side on the next day. (2/11)

- If it gave a rejection candle at resistance.

- If any Index closed exactly at support, you can get a trade on either side the following day.

- If there was a bullish signal at the support.

- If any Index gave a breakout or breakdown and then gave a good closing. (3/11)

- If any Index has taken support at 50 or 200 EMA.

Once you spot the Index, look at all the stocks in that particular Index. Pick at least 3-4 stocks from that Index and add them to your watchlist for the next day. It's ideal to check both higher and lower timeframes. (4/11)

What you should do next day? (When I am unable to check Indices and stocks a day before, I sometimes directly start with this process.)

- Start with checking the top gainers/losers list. I observe market from 9:15 to 9:45am to check the sectors performing well on that day.(5/11)
SCREENERS , ALL , INTRADAY STRATEGIES
Jim O'Shaughnessy
Jim O'Shaughnessy
@jposhaughnessy
I’m torn on how to approach the idea of luck. I’m the first to admit that I am one of the luckiest people on the planet. To be born into a prosperous American family in 1960 with smart parents is to start life on third base. The odds against my very existence are astronomical.


I’ve always felt that the luckiest people I know had a talent for recognizing circumstances, not of their own making, that were conducive to a favorable outcome and their ability to quickly take advantage of them.

In other words, dumb luck was just that, it required no awareness on the person’s part, whereas “smart” luck involved awareness followed by action before the circumstances changed.

So, was I “lucky” to be born when I was—nothing I had any control over—and that I came of age just as huge databases and computers were advancing to the point where I could use those tools to write “What Works on Wall Street?” Absolutely.

Was I lucky to start my stock market investments near the peak of interest rates which allowed me to spend the majority of my adult life in a falling rate environment? Yup.
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