God Bless you, Dan. I could kiss you right now -THREAD-

1.31.21 60 Minutes on CBS (shredding China, https://t.co/GO0A4skh92, 23&Me, Gov. Inslee (WA) and more - Watch it.. Not the FULL truth but enough to tell some people "Told ya."

Then Dan posts this vid👇

1/ Thread: "A Silicon Valley Ponzi Scheme"

Thanks to @chamath for laying this out in Social Capital's 2018 annual letter.

I've always appreciated his outspokenness.

2/ The hardest thing for most startups today is the path to market: first finding product-market fit & a way to reach customers, then building a ruthless machine to acquire, monetize & retain them.

3/ Because of this, when the VC industry invests capital into fast growing startups today, the plurality (if not majority) of invested capital will go into user acquisition and ad spending, for better or worse— usually worse.

4/ Todays massive venture-backed advertising, sales, and user acquisition playbook has morphed into one that champions growth at any cost.

This is creating a big bill that will soon come due...

5/ Ad impressions and click-throughs are bid up to outrageous prices by startups flush with venture money, and prospective users demand more and more subsidized products to gain their initial attention.

ANCIENT BHARAT WAS CALLED VISHWAGURU, AND IT REALLY DESERVED IT.

India had a well developed education system centuries before the westerners arrived and called us uncivilized. Education was always given a great importance in Indian civilisation since times immemorial.

Ancient India had the Gurukulas and Ashramas as the epicentres of the knowledge and enlightenment. Bigger Gurukulas served as the centres of higher education called universities. Besides these universities, temples also emerged as the major learning centres.

Studying the Holy Scriptures, character building, personality development, responsibilities towards self,family and society,discipline and preservation of the ancient culture and heritage were the key embodiments of education.

This kind of education system made ancient India, a centre of knowledge all over the world. Many foreign students came to India for education and India was called the 'Vishwaguru'.
Takshshila and Nalanda were the two prominent universities of ancient India.

But were these only Universities of ancient India?The answer is 'No'.Let's learn about these gems of our education system that flourished across ancient India & be proud.

NALANDA UNIVERSITY
This was the oldest university of ancient India.Situated in Nalanda distt. of Bihar...

1) My Stan Lee story happened when I was in 5th grade. I was visiting NYC with my Dad and had read the address for Marvel in the comics I read constantly. I begged my Dad to take me and to his credit he did. And guess what? It was just an office.

2) We were down in the lobby and I was kind of crushed. I don’t know what I expected, The Thing and the Yancy Street Gang to be sitting around smoking cigars? Anyway, my Dad was taking a beat to figure where we were going next and a guy came up to us.

3) He was wearing a white shirt and tie and said to Dad “Is he disappointed because. The Marvel offices were just offices?” My Dad said yes and then the guy who had gray around his temples and a mustache said “hold on a second” and opened one of those office mailboxes with a key.

4) He then handed me a thick stack of EVERY SINGLE MARVEL COMIC COMING OUT THE NEXT MONTH. “Here you go. Keep reading Marvel comics” he said and then walked off. I left in a daze and about 15 minutes later it hit me “Gray around the temples, mustache... That was Stan Lee!”

5) Later when I wrote on the Ant Man movie I told Kevin Feige the story, the year, look of the guy etc and Kevin said “That’s exactly the kind of thing Stan would do and he would have been there then. That was him.” Rest In Peace Stan Lee and thank you for the comics.

1. Let's talk about the effects of #climatechange on the world's forests, with a focus on the northwest of Canada. This is also about electoral #greenwash, and my duty as public servant and right as private Canadian citizen to speak freely about what I know.

2. Why am I compelled to speak? How am I free to speak? The answer is in the federal Values and Ethics Code of Coduct (VECC).

3. It can be career-limiting to criticize government policy when you work for government. Duty of Loyalty is very, very important. However, as VECC makes clear, it is not absolute. In fact SCoC has ruled twice in favour of citizen free speech as a higher ideal. In 1985 and 2001.

4. I am therefore perfectly comfortable showing you the scary things that are happening in the North under a warming climate. A failure to meet global GHG emissions targets is hurting Canada's forests in a way we used to think wouldn't happen for decades.

5. Warming temperatures and rising [CO2] could, in theory, help green the planet with more vigorous tree growth. But that's not what's happening. Don't believe the #greenwash. The positive effects are over and it is warm enough that we are now starting the into the negative.