My guess: Twitter will reject the offer, he will short the stocks he already owns and use the billions in proceeds to build something new.

This wasn't an attempt to influence policy. It was a trap.

Production of semi-conductors is political. Whoever controls that market has access to the firmware controlling every device on Earth.

China would love to see that industry under their umbrella.

So we're back to Peter Thiel's concerns about digital journalism exploiting the Internet without limits.

Same story, different cast, now we call it cancel culture.

Amazing where this conversation started and where it ended. On the one hand, if Silicon Valley VCs had the power to do something about it, they would have. Market forces drive the worst excesses of digital journalism, the need for attention is essential to their business model. In most cases, distribution and persistence are more important than accuracy.

OTOH, this somehow morphed into a discussion about criticism of VC capital. That tells you just about everything you need to know about journalistic ethics right there, any form of introspection is seen as an attack that gets quickly derailed. Examining this with a critical eye and pushing for fundamental changes goes against their business interests. And journalists are fiercely protective of this model.

This problem isn't going away. An ad-supported business model driven by attention will seek it in the most efficient manner. There are no new channels for finding customers willing to pay for quality content, the opportunity for that was shut down a long time ago and the people pushing for it were exiled from the industry.

Google just scaled back their diversity and inclusion programs to appear more palatable to conservatives. And American Edge is about to become a thing, Google has been dumping money into it too.

Forgive me for having some optimism, but there's a chance antitrust might be enforced this time around. Google would not take any action unless they felt threatened. Peter Thiel's accusations of CCP influence left a big impression on a lot of lawmakers, my sense is they may allow this to proceed simply to continue doing business with overseas markets.

I'm pretty neutral on Google right now but believe they could do with a haircut given their overt claims about political influence over the last few years. They occupy a unique position in the global communications infrastructure and maybe someone should be looking at how big they are allowed to grow.

Crowdfunding has lost some of its lustre. Kickstarter had a lot of promise, not sure if there's a simple explanation for why it's failing.

The problem with relying on wisdom of the crowds is what happens when motivated, organized groups control the outcome of a project. Giving on-platform preferential treatment to projects of a certain type, exerting peer pressure over creators / participants through social media campaigns, expelling creators from the platform while finger pointing over why - these steps changed the nature of the site. Instead of giving creators a tool to measure attitudes through transactions, it became a way of managing attitudes by controlling the projects people are allowed to see.

Consumer interest in crowdfunding revolved around the promise of getting products that are unique and worthwhile, ones that might not have fit into a traditional corporate profit model. In a way, we're seeing that principle in action as people turn to other platforms to find backers. But the hard part about Kickstarter failing is the prominence of the brand - the name had become a verb for a while, I don't hear that any more. I can see some ways in which Kickstarter hurt crowdfunding in general by making people more suspicious of one another, making them ask if using a given platform will attract the 'right' audience.

We'll see if they can recover. The site just doesn't give me a good feeling anymore, they want to pick and choose winners for me. Not sure that was the point...

Yeah, that's an interesting take. There's a little more to it, the business model is frail.

Comic Books (floppies, not digital editions or graphic novels) have been sold exclusively through comic book stores since the 1990s. Diamond is the single distributor who services all comic book shops.

Most comic book shops have been seeing declining revenues for a while now. Go into one, chances are new comics are going to account for the smallest amount of shelf space. Magnets, figurines, t-shirts, posters, back issues and other stuff make up the majority of sales at comic book shops. To give you a sense of how the industry has contracted, there were about 4,000 comic book shops in the North America and Europe in 2014, in 2012 there are about 1,800. And people are not moving to digital, digital accounts for about 10% of total comic sales.

The risk is to the distribution model, there may not be shops when this is all over. For the Publisher -> Distributor -> Retail model to work, shops need to make big enough margins to weather a bad month or two. The problem is they have been having bad years, many owners are not in a financial position to deal with the lost sales over this period.

Without the shops, there's no one to distribute to. Without the distributor, the publishers have to find new ways to get their comics into the hands of consumers. This creates problems. On the one hand, consumer behavior does not change overnight, sales channels take time to develop.

On the other hand, independent publishers - not Marvel and not DC - will need to work out deals with other distributors to get into places that will sell their comics. The beauty of Diamond was they would deal with anyone. That's not true of other publishers, some of who won't deal with small-volume publishers.

To answer the question, how much will coronavirus damage comic books - small publishers will suffer greatly, anyone without a large existing audience is probably out of business. The Big 2 will cut their lines down to 40 titles a month, there just won't be enough shelf space to support a larger set of comics. A lot of comic book shops are already out of business, so they will need to find new places to sell their books. It remains to be seen if consumers will transition to buying comics at Walmart / Target / supermarkets.

A secondary effect of all the comic book shop closures is backissues. Many shops make their margins on backissue sales on the Internet. Going out of business means there's going to be an excess of supply, as retailers take over each other's catalogs. This is going to drive down prices on eBay, which will be the final nail in the coffin for a lot of comic book shops. So expect to see another round of closures starting around November.

A tertiary effect of comic book shop closures is an excess of talent. There are a lot of creatives working in comics, artists mostly get paid by the page. There's going to be price competition for very talented artists accustomed to making a (relatively) high page rate, the people who stay in the industry will need to adjust to lower rates. Compensation has always been incentivized, where artists make more for creating books that sell more. Expect to see a lot more of that going forward, maybe the average page rate for a penciller will be around $200 with a nickel for each copy sold over 40,000.

The problem is no one has any money. Comics may be a billion dollar industry, but that's because they've been increasing prices, not circulation. Marvel and DC are going to run into some challenges moving into a boutique retailer model simply because the Walmarts of the world want to sell mass-market publications. They're not going to make the same margins they made with Diamond, not sure anyone wants to be paying $10+ for their comics. So there's a limit to how well the industry can scale back up to pre-covid-19 levels.

My neighbor is a physical therapist at a hospital. Since the outbreak started, her job's been repurposed, she works in a triage tent and gets medicine for patients.

She has 3 kids and takes HCQ, None of the doctors or nurses at her hospital have gotten sick, they're all taking it too.

That's enough for me. Really do not care what anyone else has to say.

Somehow this drug has become politicized, it's hard to read an article like the OP and know if they are talking about it as a cure or a treatment for secondary effects.

The main thing this virus has exposed is a lack of critical thinking when it comes to healthcare journalism, public health projections, policy discussions, and the like.

Depends on the gravity of the situation.

The DOJ recently arrested a former Google engineer on his way to China with the Google Search Algorithm on a thumb drive. He's looking at a long stretch because there's a huge economic cost to that kind of stuff getting away from us.

A few punks grabbing their co-workers calendars to harass them at doctor's appointments, let them become someone else's problem. What's the economic cost? Zero. What's the personal cost to the victim? Probably zero if they don't have to deal with these people anymore.

IANAL, but that memo is pretty descriptive. It details acts that include direct insubordination, sharing personal information about employees outside the company, attempts to correct the problem over time, and other actions that would be a big red flag to many employers.

If Google is lying, the people fired have cause to sue. The memo itself probably limits the job prospects for everyone involved. I suspect they could get their case taken on contingency, given who the employer is.

The penalty for defamation is an award sufficient to compel the defendant never to do this again. In Google's case, a few hundred million is a rounding error. The award could be billions.

Google knows this. I'm pretty sure they would not take that risk. But you're right, companies do stupid stuff every day and this would not be the first time they fired someone under controversial circumstances. Damore's lawsuit continues to make its way through the courts.

For me, I find it less likely Google just made stuff up and more likely they took a set of determined, well-documented steps to address problematic behavior. The reality is probably somewhere in the middle.

Even then, assuming half of what the memo says is true, these people are stalkers and have no business with access to PII or personal information.

The people Google fired are stalkers. Period. The fact they were involved in labor disputes means nothing.

They took personal information about other employees and shared it outside the company. The information was used to harass people within Google, especially managers and people involved in personnel decisions.

Google's memo was clear and specific about having multiple meetings with these people telling them to stop stealing personal information and sharing it outside the company. They did it anyway.

Companies don't make statements like that unless it happened. This is Google - you think they don't have physical evidence to back up their claims?

Yeah, this new feature doesn't seem to have much to do with the problem - Google trying to influence elections.

Where this probably leads is a new way of brigading certain channels and ensuring they don't appear in recommendations at all because "users don't want them."

Will filter out CNN, Fox, MSNBC, The Hill, and all major studios the moment this becomes available.

Honestly, this is just a mercy rule.

It's not fair when the lead actress tanks the work of the 200+ other creative people who actually made it.

Everyone knows a significant portion of the audience will never see it, and the media is using them to generate outrage to maximize the remaining viewership.

None.

Linux is what it is as a result of the environment through which it arose.

There are no incredible ideas that went unnoticed because someone chose not to participate. There are very few original ideas about kernel development to begin with, inspiration comes mostly from hardware-side innovations that need to be incorporated. The idea that some meek, solitary genius would be the only one to notice is ridiculous.

Harlan Williams is still alive.