Tag: Twitter

Categories
Learning by Proxy

Learning by Proxy | Twitter – Innovation – Portland

Last week has been strange. Twitter was hacked – next level! There is a lot of other undercurrents, I plan to cover some of it next week.

There is a lot for this week to unpack. India is spiking with COVID, it will be long before we return to any semblance of normalcy. In the meantime, India seems to only have time to discuss Rajasthan politics!

Let us dive in.

Foxed! 

It would not be an understatement to say that Fox News created Donald Trump. Trump would have remained a nobody but for the support that Rupert Murdoch provided Trump. All of the rest of the conservative media put together does that exude the influence over Republicans that Fox does. It is also not a secret that the hand that makes you can break you!

The Republicans are fed up with Trump. I am sure some of them are even cursing themselves for not have voted to have him impeached in February. Mitch McConnell is the most hatable Republican I have known. The Kentucky senator is one of the biggest supporters of Trump. Even he said, his support for Dr Fauci was Absolute. Trump has been running a campaign against the one person in the White House who is an expert in epidemics. 

Trump is threatening to not sign the next stimulus bill if payroll tax cuts are not approved as a part of it. 

Last weekend, Chris Wallace of Fox News called out Trump on his lies and grilled him good. Could this be a change of stance on the part of Fox News? If Fox turns on Trump, Trump will get destroyed.

Wallace unveiled the results of a Fox News poll that showed Trump losing by eight points to the presumptive Democratic nominee, Joe Biden. Trump was also behind Biden on the response to the pandemic, on race relations and the economy. He trails in other polls too.

Source: The Guardian

Twitter Hack

Twitter got hacked last week. The hacker(s) used social engineering to gain access to an internal tool that allowed the hackers to reset password to verified accounts. Amongst others, they hacked the accounts of Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Barack Obama, Apple and others. The hackers asked the followers to transfer bitcoins to a wallet and said they would double the sum. The world we live in – some thought this was for real – and made the transfer!

If you remember Elon Musk had to step down from the board of Tesla for having tweeted that he was going to get the Saudi’s to purchase Tesla and take it private. The punishment did not fit the crime, it should have been worse. Still, the privileged boy wept about it. 

Donald Trump is used to making one policy announcement after the next using Twitter. Also, given how one crazy thing after the other is uttered by Trump; who is anyone going to disbelieve if he proclaimed war?

New York Times spoke to those who perpetrated the hack. It is incredible.

The hacker who received the message, using the screen name “lol,” decided over the next 24 hours that Kirk did not actually work for Twitter because he was too willing to damage the company. But Kirk did have access to Twitter’s most sensitive tools, which allowed him to take control of almost any Twitter account, including those of former President Barack Obama, Joseph R. Biden Jr., Elon Musk and many other celebrities.

Source: New York Times

More to the point, this is about the power tech companies have amassed. A private company getting hacked should not result in a stock-market meltdown or trigger a war. No private organisation should have this kind of power. You need to be hacking the government to cause nations to go to war, not some micro-blogging site.

There is a rule almost globally which does not allow a person to lie on an ad. This Wikipedia article only covers the laws in English speaking countries, but most countries have them. Somehow, this has not been applied to online advertising at all! 

Similarly, there should be a law on what political leaders can use such platforms to state. Should probably apply to all people in positions of power.

—

Turns out – it was an inside job!

Destroying Innovation

Think back to any startup that has had a sensible product which is actually capable of profitability, founded over the past 10 years. (Not WeWork, Theranos types) WhatsApp, Instagram, Siri, Zappos, Github – Do you know what is common amongst all of them?

Acquired!

I had written a white-paper a couple of years ago about the lack of an acquisition eco-system in India. This had resulted in many VCs not being able to exit their investments and make money because it’s either IPO or death. Someone I respect, told me I was wrong.

Silicon Valley technology companies do not let any company flourish. Armed with their bags of cash, they go in entice the VCs to force a sell-out. The founders have no say often. WhatsApp is the perfect example of a founder who was so upset with the way the product was being pushed post-acquisition. Brian Acton left a Billion dollars worth of Facebook stock on the table and walked away. 

Big tech’s buying spree is already being scrutinized by the US Federal Trade Commission, the EU, and Australia’s Competition and Consumer Commission. On Monday, the US Congress is up: Apple’s Tim Cook, Alphabet’s Sundar Pichai, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg are all scheduled to appear before the House Judiciary Antitrust Subcommittee.

These four companies’ US acquisitions alone have channelled $86 billion into the pockets of entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, early employees, and other startup investors. Billion-dollar buyouts motivate more tech founders to get started, but they can deter entrepreneurship as well. Albert Wenger, a managing partner at Union Square Ventures, has warned that the big tech companies have a “kill zone” around them, meaning startups that operate too closely to their businesses have no chance of success.

Source: Quartz

Facebook would not have been facebook if WhatsApp and Instagram had existed as competitors. Mark Zuckerberg would not be as arrogant.

Portland Street = Tiananmen Square

When the west wishes to deride China they always will bring up the picture of the one man that stood in front of the tank in Tiananmen Square.

Man in front of the tank

You tend to become what you hate the most, they say. America is having its Tiananmen moment. Not only that, but they are also having the worst of everything in recent history happen altogether! Federal Agents who have no business in local law enforcement have been sent out to Portland, Oregon to put down protests that have been ongoing for the past 60 days. This is also a leaf from Hitler’s playbook. Hitler had the Gestapo which was above the SS and had over-riding powers.

A woman sat naked with a mask and cap, defying the agents on Portland Street.

Woman of Portland

Tiananmen Square happened before the Internet and that image has endured. Imagine how long this one will.

A woman wearing nothing but a black face mask and a stocking cap strode toward a dozen heavily armed agents attired in camouflage fatigues, lined up across a downtown Portland street. The agents, dispatched by the Trump administration over vociferous objections of state and city officials, are part of a force that has fired projectiles at and detained activists protesting nightly since the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police May 25.

Source: Los Angeles Times

GPT 3

A few years ago, Elon Musk, the AI alarmist created an organisation that would work on the cutting edge of AI and create tools that would keep AI from being used for wrong. The organisation – OpenAI – has been publishing a whole host of algorithms and papers. The latest algorithm to be published is GPT 3 short for Generative Pre-training Transformer. It is a random sentence generator. It is fed with 175 Billion parameters OR everything written on the internet. That is a lot of data to be feeding on.

Ben Evans had once written a piece where he had compared a Machine Learning Algorithm to a dog. You know the dog did something but you do not know what it was thinking. 

Same with GPT 3. It is producing results that have left people mind-blown. If you can read the entire internet, you are bound to produce something useful. Not only that, but it is also programmable to interpret. Here are a few examples. 

Not only English it can also work on other languages – to the extent that there is data on the internet. 

Just when it starts to look like this is magic and AI can defeat humans it runs into something evolution has perfected. The brain.

While it seems this approach may lead directly to a general AI that can understand, reason and converse like a human, OpenAI warns that they may have run into fundamental scaling up problems, with GPT-3 requiring several thousand petaflop/s-days of compute, compared to tens of petaflop/s-days for the full GPT-2. It seems while we are closer, the breakthrough that will make all our jobs obsolete is still some distance away.

Source: Forbes

The human brain is the most power-efficient computer this world has seen. To run any algorithm with just as many processes simultaneously tremendous energy and compute power has to be available.

E-Commerce

Flipkart is seen as the company that brought e-commerce to India. They were constantly in pursuit of higher Gross Merchandise Value (GMV) because that was seen as the number connected to the valuation of the company. When Tiger Global came to India with the thesis – India is the next China, they did not take into account that China started with Alibaba, a B2B platform, not a B2C platform. 

Flipkart set all the wrong expectations – discounts and free home delivery. Even today the company is not profitable. Maybe not even relevant.

India’s Alibaba was IndiaMart and they went ahead with an IPO a year ago. They may not have a turnover comparable to Flipkart, but they do have one thing that Flipkart does not – profits. Even during a pandemic.

B2B e-commerce platform IndiaMART has posted over 64% increase in its net profit at INR 74.6 Cr in the first quarter of the financial year 2021, versus INR 44 Cr in the previous quarters. In terms of year-on-year growth, the listed company has registered a two-fold increase from INR 32 Cr. 

Source: Inc42

Hong Kong

For the longest time, Hong Kong has been the financial centre of Asia. Several International banks have been based out of Hong Kong and the easy movement of capital also encourages a lot of wealthy Chinese to park their money in the state. Singapore has been steadily eating away at the dominant position that Hong Kong holds. 

I saw an opinion suggesting Mumbai could replace Hong Kong as the financial capital of Asia.

“We are home to some of the large industrial houses (domestic and global) and top financial institutions. Our central bank is one of the most trusted regulators,” said Manjeet Kripalani, co-founder and executive director of Mumbai-based think-tank Gateway House. “Also, the city has the oldest stock exchange in the world and a commodity market in place.” The city can also boast of a huge port, she added, and is perfectly placed in terms of time zone between the east and west.

Source: Quartz

Jokes! The city is underwater every monsoon. That notwithstanding, India would need to undertake unprecedented tax reforms and make it easy for capital to move across borders to be able to get Mumbai to even hold a chance at hoping for a position similar to Hong Kong. 

Media

Media has been undergoing a huge change over the years. With the advent of the internet, newspapers were the first to take a hit. It was always known the ad dollars would slowly move away from traditional media but TV has been resilient. 

I got rid of Cable about 4 years ago. Before that, I would pay Rs. 7500 each year to Tata Sky. I would not have discovered Hotstar for a few more years but for a mess-up by Tata Sky. During their systems upgrade, they knocked out TV for a full month. They refused a refund. I started watching live sports on Hotstar and that was the end of that. I had no reason to go back to Tata Sky.

I never understood the reason Americans stuck around with cable and kept cursing it. I was told it was live sports but there should be an online option, why is it not there? Either way – the pandemic put all sports to bed and with it, looks like cable is going to go.

AT&T reported it lost another 886,000 cable and satellite TV subscribers in the second quarter of 2020. The telecommunications giant—the second-largest TV provider in the US behind only Comcast—lost about the same number of TV subscribers in the previous quarter. Its total subscriber base has eroded 18% in the last year alone.

Source: Quartz

On that note – PVR, the largest Multiplex chain in India is planning to start delivering popcorn through Swiggy!

Glass

The story goes, Steve Jobs called the board line of Corning Glass and asked them to put him through to the CEO. The operator politely told him, if he did not have an appointment she could not. Steve was pissed and told a common friend that Corning was all East Coast bullshit! Wendell Weeks, the CEO of Corning heard about this and called the board line at Apple – asked to speak with Steve Jobs. Obviously, they refused. He wrote back to Steve saying what had happened. The rest, as they say, is history.

Corning Glass has done for Apple just much as Apple has done as Corning. Apple put this small glass company from New York on the map and Apple was able to deliver a product that blew everyone’s mind. They are bringing something new to the market.

It takes about two years for Corning to develop each new generation of Gorilla Glass, the resilient material that graces a critical mass of iPhone and Android devices. That process has for several update cycles focused on protecting screens against drops, fending off shatters and cracks by boosting what’s known as compressive strength. The newly announced Gorilla Glass Victus, though, gives equal weight to prevent scratches. That’s harder than it sounds and more useful than you’d think.

Source: Wired

So, no more scratches.

Worth a read

If you want to know what we are fighting about in the Galwan Valley with the Chinese – This is an insanely great analysis by the New York Times

The Center for Climate Change Communication has published a handbook on how to discern between conspiracy theory and an actual conspiracy.

Signing off…

Categories
Learning by Proxy

China V India – Telecom – Social Network | Learning by Proxy

Every Saturday, I publish this series called ‘Learning by Proxy’. It is a capsule of some of the stuff that I found interesting over the week along with some context to it. I hope you enjoy it.

I was planning to follow-up on some of the topics that I had written the last time. But the geo-politics of it is so interesting, it almost turned into an essay in and of itself. I lost the politics section to it.

Follow Up

See below!


Politics

Chris Voss is a former CIA negotiator and the author of the book ‘Never split the difference’. The premise of the book is – when you are negotiating for the life of a hostage you can’t agree to split the difference. You have to get it the way you want it. One of the lessons therein – When negotiating, always give your adversary a way out. If you corner them – expect the unexpected. 

Some context first

China had started down the path of world dominance a few years ago. They decided to use the American (actually British) play of economic dependence = political dominance. They announced this thing called One Belt One Road, which was to be second coming for the Silk Route. They engaged over 130 countries and poured in hundreds of Billions to create infrastructure such as Road, Ports, Airports, etc. Every continent apart from North America was involved. India refused to be a part of it.

Now let us see the corner China has been painted into.

Hong Kong was an itch which has been hard to scratch for the last 3 years. In addition to that Trump and his trade wars had made life difficult. 

The Coronavirus put a new spin on things. Many of these countries that China has lent to are poor Asian and African nations and with Coronavirus ripping up their economies, they have requested loan waivers and renegotiation. 

As the coronavirus spread around the globe, Pakistan’s foreign minister called his counterpart in Beijing last month with an urgent request: The country’s economy was nose-diving, and the government needed to restructure billions of dollars of Chinese loans. […]

With each request, China’s drive to become the developing world’s biggest banker is backfiring. Over the last two decades, it unleashed a global lending spree, showering countries with hundreds of billions of dollars, in an effort to expand its influence and become a political and economic superpower. Borrowers put up ports, mines and other crown jewels as collateral.

Source: New York Times

Pakistan was supposed to keep India in check. They are now broke. The Middle-East is in a financial crisis of its own with oil prices at historic lows. This implies very limited options available to finance terrorism. Therefore, Trump is not going to give money away to Pakistan as liberally as Obama did. 

Further, not agreeing to the cries of the poorer countries will make it seem like it was an engineered Virus. The optics of it all are terrible! 

Trump called it the ‘China Virus’ and has been pressuring WHO to investigate them – WHO acquiesced. India supported the probe into China. China grudgingly agreed.

A pretty deep corner you see. Now for the push back.

China put an end to Hong Kong by passing a law that forever ends Hong Kong’s democracy – at least the way we knew it. With Pakistan now being rendered incompetent, they had to take matters into their own hands. They started trouble in Ladakh and Sikkim. India pushed back. Both sides said they will protect their sovereignty. All good distraction. But then…

Chinese President Xi Jinping on Tuesday ordered the military to scale up the battle preparedness, visualising worst-case scenarios and asked them to resolutely defend the country’s sovereignty.

Source: Economic Times

That escalated fast!

Then Trump tweeted offering to arbitrate between India and China. China changed course and figured this was one more thing they would want the American to stay out of.

On Wednesday tensions between the two nations seemed to de-escalate as China took an apparently conciliatory tone by saying that the situation at the border with India is “overall stable and controllable.”

Source: India Today

While there is a change of tone, satellite pictures show artillery build up on the Chinese side of the border. The US in the meantime is preparing to pass a law rescinding Hong Kong’s trade status.


Economics

Truth

It was a couple of editions ago that I had mentioned that the truth about the actual economic state of India will emerge post-COVID when nobody is paying attention. It is happening. 

Bank lending to MSME collapsed after 2016 as per RBI data. This during a time when the government claimed to have 7.2% GDP growth rate. Many of the MSMEs are critical suppliers to large industries how could they not want loans? If they saw an opportunity, they would have taken loans to grow. 

While large industries saw their credit expand by Rs 1.73 lakh crore, or at an annual growth rate of 1.9 per cent between April 2016 and March 2020, micro and small industries saw their credit expand by only Rs 10,335 crore, or at a 4-yr CAGR of 0.69 per cent during that period.[…]

The decline in demand for credit by the industry, however, coincides with the decline in the demand in the economy and falling capacity utilisations. The RBI’s Order Books, Inventories and Capacity Utilisation Survey (OBICUS) for the October-December 2019 quarter shows that the capacity utilisation declined to at least 12-year low of 68.6 in the quarter ended December 2019.

Source: Indian Express

Repo Rate

The interest rate is an instrument that is used to stimulate the economy when the times are good, expectations form the future are clear and risk can be estimated. When none of this is clear – the Interest rate becomes merely a number. If you play with it unnecessarily, you diminish your power. Modi placed a historian at the head of the RBI to act as his puppet and the bankers are giving him a lesson. RBI dropper repo rate (the rate at which banks borrow) once again to 4%. An all-time low.

“When a heightened level of risk aversion exists among banks, lower cost of capital alone incrementally will not translate into higher lending in the current situation,” said Sreejith Balasubramanian, an economist at Mumbai-based mutual fund IDFC AMC. “Banks make lending decisions based on their risk appraisal and appetite which is currently low.”

Source: Quartz

Business

Sizzling Telecom

In a world that is locked inside their homes, connectivity is a very valuable resource. It is the only thing that preserves a certain degree of sanity and allows for commerce in whatever form to thrive. Connectivity is unlocking its value.

A couple of editions ago, I had mentioned how Reliance has used Jio to free itself of debt. Also last time I had shared the surprise upswing that Airtel had registered. Airtel is now borrowing a trick or two from the Reliance Playbook. They have raised over a Billion dollar through a stake sale and reduced their debt burden. 

Bharti Airtel’s promoter firm Bharti Telecom raised Rs 8,433 crore on Tuesday, selling 2.75% stake in the telecom major to institutional investors through an accelerated book-building process in the secondary market. With this, the Sunil Bharti Mittal led-Bharti Airtel’s promoters are ostensibly looking to go ‘debt-free’, a path similar to the one chosen by Reliance Industries’ Mukesh Ambani. Bharti Airtel share price traded flat on the BSE on Wednesday. After the sale, the promoter group will continue to own 56.23% in the company.

Source: Financial Express

Also, rumours are that Google is planning to buy into Idea-Vodafone.

Not to be upstaged – Jio Platforms as it continues to raise its Billions announced Microsoft as one of the suitors willing to throw in USD 2 Billion. And they also announced their wishes to list on an international stock exchange. 

Post bagging multi-billion dollar deals from marquee investors in the last one month, Billionaire Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Industries is said to be now considering an overseas listing of Jio Platforms, according to people aware of the development.

Source: Mint

Technology

Social media is an echo chamber and that echo chamber has resulted in far too many countries in the world having right-wing governments. India included. Life is good so long as you are on the right side of the line – White in the US – Hindu in India and so on. Facebook knew what it was doing and why it was wrong. An explosive and incriminating report exposes the upper echelons of the company brushing aside genuine concerns. 

“Our algorithms exploit the human brain’s attraction to divisiveness,” read a slide from a 2018 presentation. “If left unchecked,” it warned, Facebook would feed users “more and more divisive content in an effort to gain user attention & increase time on the platform.” […]

But in the end, Facebook’s interest was fleeting. Mr Zuckerberg and other senior executives largely shelved the basic research, according to previously unreported internal documents and people familiar with the effort, and weakened or blocked efforts to apply its conclusions to Facebook products.

Source: WSJ

The person who made this presentation was the head of the ‘Integrity Team’ at Facebook. The company has none of it.

Twitter has been a haven for trolls permitting harassment at an unprecedented level. It came as a huge surprise when Twitter which is in part responsible for Donald Trump being president decided to flag this tweet at false.

[click on the tweet and open it to see the flag]

The move, which escalates tensions between Washington and Silicon Valley in an election year, was made in response to two Trump tweets over the past 24 hours. The tweets falsely claimed that mail-in ballots are fraudulent. Twitter’s label says, “Get the facts about mail-in ballots,” and redirects users to news articles about Trump’s unsubstantiated claim.

Source: Washington Post

The president threw a fit on Twitter about Twitter. Then announced on Twitter that he would be releasing an Executive Order against Twitter. 

In the meantime, Kellyanne Conway his “Counselor” went on a rant against – guess who? – the head of the Integrity Team of Twitter; Yoel Roth. He has been subjected to a lot of trolling by Republicans and Trump supporters – where else – on Twitter.

Here is a list of all the false claims made by the President of USA to date – all 18,000 of them. – https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/trump-claims-database/

And Twitter is not backing down!


Misc

The Indian Government is using drones to chase away locusts.

These are designed to spray 10-litre of chemicals, along with creating a sound that would disperse the locusts into different areas. “It has successfully contained the movement of locusts in an open area and on the foothills where it was not possible for the usual tractors to make it reach. A detailed assessment of its impact is being studied by the field officers,” said Om Prakash, commissioner, state agriculture department.

Source: Times of India

The Democrats are using the Republican playbook – GOD. Only God can save them now. God is peddling conspiracy theories on Trump!

Go on check out the twitter handle. It’s got a lot more there. About Ivanka’s Shoplifting and much more…

Signing off…

Categories
General Thinking

Trust and Profits

There is a deep corrlation between trust and profit.

It is often hard to see this correlation at work when things are going good. By the time you are in a place to realise it, the ship has sailed or rather sunk!

Facebook has been blamed for manipulating elections and propogating fake news for financial gains. They let advertisers run whatever messaging they wanted without any checks or balances in place. Just as long as the cash tills kept rolling. I read a couple of news reports yesterday that emphasised this further.

The New York Times has started making money again!

The New York Times Company posted expectation-beating earnings, bringing shareholders surprisingly high profits. The news sent Times’ stock up more than 10%, valuing it at more than $24 a share, a level it hadn’t seen since the summer of 2007.

Also, the greatest of all surprises – Twitter turned a profit! For the very first time since it listed in November 2013.

The social network reported its fourth-quarter earnings today, Feb. 8, and as expected, the company posted a modest profit, pulling in $91 million on $732 million in revenue. That’s a jump of 2% on the revenue it posted in the same period last year. It attributed the small rise to increased advertising revenue, stemming from the myriadupdates it made to its product over the last year, as well as video ad sales. (Annual revenue for the company was slightly down in 2017, however—it generated $2.4 billion, versus $2.5 billion in 2016.)

The advertising money is moving. And by the looks of it, it is moving fast. As the image of a company tarnishes, people start to move away from the company.

Facebook has an image problem and the numbers are reflecting that. The question is how far away are they from outright loss of trust.