Maybe we should be like Larry

The collapse of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX has been all over the news.

Cryptocurrency exchange FTX, which has filed for US bankruptcy court protection, said it owes its 50 biggest creditors nearly $3.1 billion.

The exchange owes about $1.45 billion to its top ten creditors, it said in a court filing on Saturday, without naming them.

FTX and its affiliates filed for bankruptcy in Delaware on Nov. 11 in one of the highest-profile crypto blowups, leaving an estimated 1 million customers and other investors facing total losses in the billions of dollars.

What seems to have happened is a lot like an old-fashioned bank run where too many depositors wanted their money back at the same time, exhausting the cash reserves of the company. But in the case of actual banks, they are regulated by the government and there are systems in place to assist individual banks weather such runs and protect depositors. In the unregulated crypto-world where they prided themselves on being independent of government entanglements, there are no such safeguards

The company has filed for bankruptcy and Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of FTX, has ben pushed out of the company and is now in the Bahamas.

The collapse of FTX has given a new lease of life for the ad the company aired during the last Super Bowl featuring Larry David.

The case for more public toilets

It is curious that given that although going to the bathroom is a basic human function, society does not make it easier for people to do so when they are out of their homes. Some activists are trying to change that, by criticizing the statement by Starbucks CEO suggesting that they might close their bathrooms to non-customers.

“Let the people go!” an activist group is telling Starbucks after the coffee chain’s boss threatened to close down its bathrooms.

The American Restroom Association is marking World Toilet Day on 19 November, an awareness-raising day started by the United Nations to celebrate toilets and advocate for proper sanitation systems, by calling on Starbucks to keep its restrooms open to the public.
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While Starbucks has not officially changed its bathroom policy after Schultz’s comments, the American Restroom Association (ARA), which advocates for safe and well-designed public restrooms, notes that some Starbucks locations have closed their restrooms to the public.
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The trolling of Musk goes on

I might as well join the pile on of trolling of Elon Musk. A prankster calling themselves a ‘projection activist’ projected a rolling caption with insults onto the Twitter headquarters in San Francisco.

This prank was no doubt timed to coincide with Musk’s statement that he would be in the building over the weekend to meet personally with the remaining engineers in the company who were commanded to come there at short notice.

It is not clear what would be accomplished by such meetings. There is no way that Musk could properly gauge the quality of a person by seeing a few lines of code during a brief meeting, especially since Twitter is not like any of the companies he already runs and has an entirely different culture. It seems like Musk is jerking people around just because he can. It is a petty tyrant move whose only result is likely to make even more people quit.

There is an old saying that people do not leave bad jobs, they leave bad managers. And, boy, is Musk a lousy manager, at least as far as Twitter is concerned.. How the other companies he runs have survived so far beats me.

Goodbye, Twitter. Hello … Mastodon?

Social media sites start out as places where people can meet and interact online and form communities of like-minded people. These are all noble goals and these sites still do serve those goals. But over time, as these platforms become larger and larger, like Twitter and Facebook became, they grow toxic. It seems like that negative spiral is an inevitable consequence of the relentless logic that arises from their dependence on advertising revenue that leads to a Catch-22. To attract advertisers, they need a large user base and for those users to spend a lot of time on the site. That results in the companies creating algorithms that encourage so-called ‘virality’ where large numbers are drawn to some hot topic. This in turn encourages mean and vicious hot takes because that is what seems to get the attention of many people and so pretty soon it is nasty people who dominate the platform and this alienates advertisers who do not want to be associated with hateful content, and they leave.

Some disgruntled users of Twitter have been looking for another home and one that is getting some attention is another platform called Mastodon. This is a decentralized federated network run by volunteers, quite different to the behemoths of the other social media with their centralized management and operational structure and massive servers that are expensive to run. It is not ad-based and is specifically designed to discourage virality and to encourage small groups of like minded people to engage in more meaningful conversations with one another.
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The Twitter soap opera goes on

Although I am the most minimal of users on the platform and would be unaffected if the company went under, I continue to be fascinated by the way Twitter continues to lurch from one crisis to another under the erratic leadership of its new owner Elon Musk, as he tries desperately to recover from what seems like a disastrous investment.

He seems to think that people work best under edicts and threats. In his latest move, he told employees that he only wanted people who were “extremely hardcore” and be “willing to work long hours at high intensity” to build what he calls Twitter 2.0. That could be seen as a hyperbolic motivating speech, like football coaches asking players to give 110%, except that Musk followed up by giving them an ultimatum that they had to sign such a pledge by Thursday or they would be fired. That is just insulting.

Such a management style is the opposite tack that leaders should take in a time of uncertainty, noted Ben Wigert, director of research and strategy of workplace management at Gallup. Poor leadership provides an opportunity for employees to quit, especially when the job market remains tight, as it currently is.

“Saying ‘work harder,’ especially coming out of a pandemic, is tone deaf and it’s hard to undo that damage to your culture,” Wigert said. 

Musk’s implication that Twitter workers aren’t doing their jobs does not “reflect a strong employer brand and culture,” he added. “They don’t reflect that inspiring organization you want to work for.”

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The greed and savagery of the British monarchy

On the latest episode of his show Last Week Tonight, John Oliver takes a close look at the British royal family and takes apart the arguments given by those who think that the institution should continue. He also exposes the evasiveness and lack of responsibility taken by them for the horrors, including slavery, committed in their name over the centuries that enriched them and the UK so immensely. He walks us through the gruesome history of how the monarchy acquired their lands and wealth and then passed it down to their descendants. To add insult to injury, they also are exempt from paying most inheritance taxes, so that these layabouts can live a life of luxury on money that they have not worked for.

McCarthy is in for a tough time if he becomes Speaker

The Republicans finally received a majority in the House of Representatives, getting 218 seats to the 211 for the Democrats in the 435 member body, with six races still to be called. In the outgoing body, they had 213 seats. Republican minority leader McCarthy had predicted that his party could pick up at least 60 seats but they fell far short.

So what can we expect for the next two years now that Republicans control the House? We can for sure expect a lot of symbolic actions and grandstanding. Less certain is what legislation they will actually get through. Anything that Democrats do not like could be blocked in the Senate where the Democrats have retained control and even vetoed by the president if necessary.

The first question is who Congress will elect as Speaker. This is an important position since “The Speaker is simultaneously the House’s presiding officer, party leader, and the institution’s administrative head, among other duties.” They are the person controlling the agenda that decides what legislation is brought to the House floor for debate and voting. So come January 3rd when the new Congress takes office, any Democratic agenda items are pretty much dead, which means that they have about three weeks to do whatever they think they must do.
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The verdict is in: Trump’s big announcement was boring

The general consensus about Trump’s speech announcing that he is running again was that it was long and boring. It did not help that he had telegraphed what he was going to say a long time ago. It also did not help that much of it was mostly a rehash of the speech he has been giving at rallies. The difference was that he was very low energy. This may have been deliberate in that he was trying to appear ‘presidential’ and reading from a teleprompter, which is not something that he does well. Or it may be because the audience was not the raucous crowds at his rallies that he seems to relish speaking to.

Even Fox News cut away from the speech and Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post had at the bottom of its front page the single line “Florida man makes announcement”. That must sting.

In contrast, the late night talk shows reviewing the speech were pretty funny.

Here is Jimmy Kimmel.

Here is Seth Meyers.

Someone should tell Jeff Bezos that charity begins at home

The founder of Amazon Jeff Bezos has said that he plans to give the majority of his wealth of $124 billion to charity, telling CNN “that he will devote the bulk of his wealth to fighting climate change and supporting people who can unify humanity in the face of deep social and political divisions.” He did not say when and how much and to whom he will give money away, so frankly I am going to wait and see if he actually follows through.

But here’s an idea. Why doesn’t he start by paying his workers decent wages and benefits and provide them with decent working conditions so that they are not forced to urinate in bottles because of the pace of work?

Amazon has apologised to a US politician for falsely denying that drivers are, at times, forced to urinate in plastic bottles.

Mark Pocan, a Democrat from Wisconsin, referenced Amazon making “workers urinate in water bottles” in a tweet.

The official Amazon Twitter account then replied: “If that were true, nobody would work for us.”

The company has now apologised after evidence emerged of drivers having to urinate in bottles.
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Mr Pocan rejected the apology on Saturday, tweeting: “Sigh. This is not about me, this is about your workers – who you don’t treat with enough respect or dignity. Start by acknowledging the inadequate working conditions you’ve created for ALL your workers, then fix that for everyone and finally, let them unionise without interference.”

Also, why not pay his house staff a decent wage and give them decent conditions so that they are not forced to sue him?
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