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mostlysignssomeportents · 10 months ago

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Kickstarting “The Bezzle” audiobook, sequel to Red Team Blues

I'm heading to Berlin! On January 29, I'll be delivering Transmediale's Marshall McLuhan Lecture, and on January 30, I'll be at Otherland Books (tickets are limited! They'll have exclusive early access to the English edition of The Bezzle and the German edition of Red Team Blues!).

I'm kickstarting the audiobook for The Bezzle, the sequel to last year's Red Team Blues, featuring Marty Hench, a hard-charging, two-fisted forensic accountant who spent 40 years in Silicon Valley, busting every finance scam hatched by tech bros' feverish imaginations:

http://thebezzle.org

Marty Hench is a great character to write. His career in high-tech scambusting starts in the early 1980s with the first PCs and stretches all the way to the cryptocurrency era, the most target-rich environment for scamhunting tech has ever seen. Hench is the Zelig of tech scams, and I'm having so much fun using him to probe the seamy underbelly of the tech economy.

Enter The Bezzle, which will be published by Tor Books and Head of Zeus on Feb 20: this adventure finds Marty in the company of Scott Warms, one of the many bright technologists whose great startup was bought and destroyed by Yahoo! (yes, they really used that asinine exclamation mark). Scott is shackled to the Punctuation Factory by golden handcuffs, and he's determined to get fired without cause, so he can collect his shares and move onto the next thing.

That's how Scott and Marty find themselves on Catalina island, the redoubt of the Wrigley family, where bison roam the hills, yachts bob in the habor and fast food is banned. Scott invites Marty on a series of luxury vacations on Catalina, which end abruptly when they discover – and implode – a hamburger-related Ponzi scheme run by a real-estate millionaire who is destroying the personal finances of the Island's working-class townies out of sheer sadism.

Scott's victory is bittersweet: sure, he blew up the Ponzi scheme, but he's also made powerful enemies – the kinds of enemies who can pull strings with the notoriously corrupt LA County Sheriff's Deputies who are the only law on Catalina, and after taking a pair of felony plea deals, Scott gets the message and never visits Catalina Island again.

That could have been the end of it, but California's three-strikes law – since rescinded – means that when Scott picks up one more felony conviction for some drugs discovered during a traffic stop, he's facing life in prison.

That's where The Bezzle really gets into gear.

At its core, The Bezzle is a novel about the "shitty technology adoption curve": the idea that our worst technological schemes are sanded smooth on the bodies of prisoners, mental patients, kids and refugees before they work their way up the privilege gradient and are inflicted on all of us:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

America's prisons are vicious, brutal places, and technology has only made them worse. When Scott's prison swaps out in-person visits, the prison library, and phone calls for a "free" tablet that offers all these services as janky apps that cost ten times more than they would on the outside, the cruelty finds a business model.

Working inside and outside the prison Marty Hench and Scott Warms figure out the full nature of the scam that the captive audience of prisoners are involuntary beta-testers for, and they discover a sprawling web of real-estate fraud, tech scams, and offshore finance that is extracting fortunes from the hides of America's prisoners and their families. The criminals who run that kind of enterprise aren't shy about fighting for what they've got, and they're more than happy to cut some of LA County's notorious deputy gangs in for a cut in exchange for providing some kinetic support for the project.

The Bezzle is exactly the kind of book I was hoping I'd get to write when I kicked off the Hench series – one that decodes the scam economy, from music royalties to prison videoconferencing, real estate investment trusts to Big Four accounting firm bogus audits. It's both a fast-moving, two-fisted crime novel and a masterclass on how the rich and powerful get away with both literal and figurative murder.

It's getting a big push from both my publishers and I'll be touring western Canada and the US with it. The early reviews are spectacular. But despite all of this, I had to make my own audiobook for it, which I'm pre-selling on Kickstarter:

http://thebezzle.org

Why? Because Audible – Amazon's monopoly gatekeeper to the audiobook world, with more than 90% of the market – refuses to carry my work.

Audible uses Digital Rights Management to lock every audiobook they sell to their platform. Legally, only an Audible-authorized app can decrypt and play the audiobooks they sell you. Distributing a tool that removes Audible DRM is a felony under Section 1201 of the 1998 DMCA.

That means that if you break up with Audible – delete your Audible apps – you will lose your entire audiobook library. And the fact that you're Audible's hostage makes the writers you love into their hostages, too. Writers understand that if they leave the Audible platform, their audience will have to choose between following them, or losing all their audiobooks.

That's how Audible gets away with abusing its performers and writers, up to and including the $100m Audiblegate wage-theft scandal:

https://www.audiblegate.com/

Audible can steal $100m from its writers…and the writers still continue to sell on the platform, because leaving will cost them their audience.

This is canonical enshittification: lock in users, then screw suppliers. Lots of companies abuse DRM to do this, but none can hold a candle to Amazon, who understand that the DMCA is a copyright law that protects corporations at the expense of creators.

Under DMCA 1201 commercial distribution of a "circumvention device" carries a five-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine. That means that if I write a book, pay to have it recorded, and then sell it to you through Audible, I am criminally prohibited from giving you the tool to take it from Audible to another platform. Even though I hold the copyright to that work, I would face a harsher sentence than you would if you simply pirated the audiobook from some darknet site. Not only that: if you shoplifted the audiobook in CD form, you'd get a lighter sentence than I, the copyright holder, would receive for giving you a tool to unlock it from Amazon's platform! Hell, if you hijacked the truck that delivered the CD, you'd get off lighter than I would. This is a scam straight out of a Marty Hench novel.

This is batshit. I won't allow it. My books are licensed on the condition that they must not be sold with DRM. Which means that Audible won't sell my books, which means that my publishers are thoroughly disinterested in paying thousands of dollars to produce audiobooks of my titles. A book that isn't sold in the one store than accounts for 90% of all sales is unlikely to do well.

That's where you come in. Since 2020, I've used Kickstarter to pre-sell five of my audiobooks (I wrote nine books during lockdown!). All told, I've raised over $750,000 (gross! but still!) on these crowdfunders. More than 20,000 backers have pitched in! The last two of these books – The Internet Con and The Lost Cause – were national bestsellers.

This isn't just a way for me to pay off a lot of bills and put away something for retirement – it's proof that readers care about supporting writers and don't want to be locked in by a giant monopolist that depends on its drivers pissing in bottles to make quota.

It's a powerful message about the desire for something better than Amazon. It's part of the current that is driving the FTC to haul Amazon into court for being a monopolist, and also part of the inspiration for other authors to try treating Amazon as damage and routing around it, with spectacular results:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/dragonsteel/surprise-four-secret-novels-by-brandon-sanderson

And I'm doing it again. Last December, I went into Skyboat Media's studios where Gabrielle De Cuir directed @wilwheaton, who reprised his role as Marty Hench for the audiobook of The Bezzle. It came out amazing:

https://archive.org/details/bezzle-sample

Now I'm pre-selling this audiobook, as well as the ebook and hardcover for The Bezzle. I'm also offering bundles with the ebook and audiobook for Red Team Blues (naturally these are all DRM-free). You can get your books signed and personalized and shipped anywhere in the world, courtesy of Book Soup, and I've partnered with Libro.fm to deliver DRM-free audiobooks with an app for people who don't want to mess around with sideloading.

I've also got some spendy options for high rollers. There's three chances to name a character in the next Hench novel (Picks and Shovels, Feb 2025). There's also five chances to commission a Hench short story about your favorite tech scam, and get credited when the story is published.

The Kickstarter runs for the next three weeks, which should give me time to get the hardcopy books signed and shipped to arrive around the on-sale date. What's more, I've finally worked out all the post-Brexit kinks with shipping my UK publisher's books to EU backers. I'm working with Otherland Books to fulfill those EU orders, and it looks like I'm going to be able to sign a giant stack of those when I'm in Berlin later this month to give the annual Marshall McLuhan lecture at the Canadian embassy:

https://transmediale.de/en/2024/event/mcluhan-2024

Red Team Blues and its sequels are some of the most fun – and informative – work I've done in my quarter-century career. I love how they blend technical explanations of the scam economy with high-intensity technothrillers. That's the the same mix as my bestselling YA series Little Brother series – but these are firmly adult novels.

The Bezzle came out great. I hope you'll give it a try – and that you'll come out to see me in late February when I hit the road with the book! Here's that Kickstarter link again:

http://thebezzle.org

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/10/the-bezzle/#marty-hench

#pluralistic #kickstarter #audible #the bezzle #bezzles #prison tech #disciplinary technology #crowdfunding #wilw #wil wheaton #audiobooks #publishing #science fiction #marty hench #martin hench #red team blues #shitty technology adoption curve #reits

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octuscle · 6 months ago

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My family is very rich, but my father's recently gotten into some legal trouble and our accounts are frozen until that's sorted out, which surely won't be too long. Until then I've had to move in with our landscaper and his son. Carlos is so infuriating! He's an uneducated and tatted up thug with horribly ghetto fashion sense who spends all his time lifting weights or getting into trouble on the streets. He's very hard to live with, but maybe I'll end up being a good influence and rub off on him while I'm stuck here?

It's not easy at the beginning. Carlos is such a lazy good-for-nothing. You tell him about the start-ups you've just founded or the ones you wanted to invest in. He doesn't seem to listen to you at all. He's playing with his cell phone, pumping his biceps with dumbbells. He usually doesn't say a word. To improve your influence on him, you accompany him to the gym. It's amazing. Even though he is usually sluggish, he is focused and disciplined here. Of course, the gym is nothing like the health club where you used to train. But there's nothing wrong with staying in shape. So you sign up. If you tidy up in the evening, mop the floor and clean the toilets, you can even train for free and get a few extra dollars. That's great, especially as it gives you more time to exert your good influence on Carlos.

Somehow Carlos is getting more and more careless. The more time you spend at the gym, the less he shows up. You and your bros at the gym think it's all very stuffy. He also wears less cool clothes. He asks if he can wear some of the shirts you've managed to save. No problem for you, you usually wear his old gym clothes anyway. It's not worth changing your clothes either. Either you're at the gym or you're hanging out with your gym buddies. One of them took you to the tattoo artist the other day. You look hot with that tattoo on your chest. But tattoos are really expensive! One of your bros organizes a job for you as a meat cutter at the slaughterhouse. That's great, then you can work there early in the morning, then have a nap, go to the gym, tidy up and clean and go straight back to the slaughterhouse. It's pretty exhausting. But you have your bros around you the whole time. Only Carlos, the philistine, you hardly ever see. Sometimes, when you do train together again, he asks you a few questions about the startup shit. Dude, you'd better deal with that when you're back in your penthouse. Shit, it's going to be a sick party with your bros and the other guys from the slaughterhouse. But you're happy to help Carlos. The little prick doesn't seem to get anything else together. His parents hardly ever get to see him either.

Carlos moves out of his parents' house. Apparently, the second round of financing has raised 200 million dollars. For some fucking fitness plan app. Shit, you used to have a similar idea. How could Carlos the little prick steal it from you? And how did he even know how to create a pitch deck and raise a financing round? And now it's only just come out that this is his second startup. He implemented the first idea and had a modest exit. But at least he was successful enough to buy your old penthouse at a foreclosure auction. His parents say that you shouldn't be sad. You would be like a son to them. And of course you can stay with them in Carlos' room.

Carlos is cool. On the cover of every business and digitization magazine. The rising star in the startup sky. Somewhere you read shit like "Ingenious combination of big data, big business and big muscles". Supposedly he also bought your family's house on Long Island. Fuck that. He gave you that cool necklace for your birthday. And a voucher for the tattoo artist. You got a tattoo of raw meat. To mark you as a stallion from the slaughterhouses. This is your home. And your destiny.

#male tf #muscle tf #reality change #inked man #chav tf

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janglingargot · 2 months ago

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Oh, hey, are we dropping Vandelay family headcanons in the tag today? Because oh boy, have I got some headcanons after doing the math on the various timeline stamps that we're given throughout the game.

So here's the thing, right? I honestly don't think Roxanne's kids have the same father, for starters. No judgment, for the record, just observing! Hear me out:

That fifteen-year age gap seems to indicate that Kale was born in Roxanne's early twenties, right around the time she was getting Vandelay Solutions off the ground as a startup. He has her last name, and we never hear anything about a father, which indicates to me that the bio dad was not in the picture. We know that the company's rise was meteoric, going from one woman selling products out of the back of a truck, to the biggest company of its kind, in just three years. (We also know that Vandelay Technologies was well-established enough to be doing major disaster cleanup by the time Korsica was a child, and she's about six years younger than Kale.)

What that says to me, personally, is that Roxanne was not super involved in Kale's upbringing. She was young and passionate and extremely busy with her flourishing tech startup, and I assume that by the time Kale was a small child, she had plenty of money to make sure he was being taken care of, by other people. I'm not judging her too harshly for this: I'm sure she justified it to herself as the best way to support her child, and vanishing into your brilliant work at the expense of family time is the kind of behavior that countless male tech geniuses get a free social pass for.

Fast forward to fifteen years later, and Vandelay Technologies is a stable empire. Roxanne would have been in her late thirties or early forties by that point. She's older now, more interested in parenting, and it's sinking in for her that she's mostly missed her first baby's childhood and he's grown into someone she has very little in common with. She's got all the resources she could ever need at her fingertips now, if she wanted to try single parenting again and do it properly this time.

Enter Peppermint, who I honestly think was a planned-for and dearly-beloved IVF baby. (All the physical features she shares with Kale, mostly coloring, are also shared by Roxanne, and they're built quite differently; it's not at all hard to imagine them having different genetic fathers.) This time around, Roxanne kept her home life and work life so meticulously separate that Macaron didn't even know she had a daughter. I think whether Roxanne thought of it that way or not, Peppermint was kind of a do-over child, a chance for Roxanne to be a "real" mother and a hands-on mentor.

The way Peppermint talks about her upbringing, it seems like she felt an enormous amount of pressure to follow in Roxanne's footsteps, which she eventually rebelled against by running away. She was the late-in-life child, the mother's daughter, the technically gifted protegé. With her talents and interests, she would have been the obvious choice to inherit the company and carry on the Vandelay legacy.

But did Roxanne really want Peppermint to be her little mini-me? I'm not so sure, especially considering the things she says during their reunion. Given Pep's age and the implication that she ran away when she was no older than eighteen (she's 23 and Kale has been in charge at Vandelay for at least five years), not to mention the things she says about Kale's manipulative behavior, I strongly believe that Kale had a hand in exacerbating the misunderstandings between mother and daughter. Kale obviously deeply resented his baby sister for being "Mommy's favorite", and was probably dripping poison into her ear throughout her teens, if not well before that.

Deliberately souring their relationship must have seemed like his best shot at inheriting the company, and we know Kale was eager to ride his mother's coattails and do as little real work as possible. For that matter, he must have hated the idea of being supplanted by this upstart baby who got all the attention he never did, born when he was nearly an adult himself. I have no doubt that Kale did whatever he could to convince Peppermint to get out of Roxanne's life, not to mention his own.

#hi fi rush #Roxanne Vandelay #peppermint hi fi rush #kale vandelay #fan theories #headcanons #i just think they're neat #i have loads more thoughts about these three but I'm gonna cut myself off for now since this is already turning into a dissertation

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dreaminginthedeepsouth · 2 months ago

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William Faulkner, "Never be afraid" :: [(From a speech delivered May 28, 1951 at Fulton Chapel, University of Mississippi)]

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

September 25, 2024

Heather Cox Richardson

Sep 26, 2024

In 2004 a senior advisor to President George W. Bush famously told journalist Ron Suskind that people like Suskind lived in “the reality-based community.” They believed people could find solutions to problems through careful study of discernible reality. But, the aide continued, Suskind’s worldview was obsolete. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” the aide said. “We are an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality— judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

We appear to be in a moment when the reality-based community is challenging the ability of the MAGA Republicans to create their own reality.

Central to the worldview of MAGA Republicans is that Democrats are socialists who have destroyed the American economy. Trump calls Harris a “radical-left. Marxist, communist, fascist” and insists the economy is failing.

In Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, today, Harris laid out her three-pillar plan for an “opportunity economy.” She explained that she would lower costs by cutting taxes for the middle class, cutting the red tape that stops housing construction, take on corporate landlords who are hiking rental prices, work with builders and developers to construct 3 million new homes and rentals, and help first-time homebuyers with $25,000 down payment assistance. She also promised to enact a federal ban on corporate price gouging on groceries and to cap prescription drug prices by negotiating with pharmaceutical companies.

Harris said she plans to invest in innovation by raising the deduction for startup businesses from its current $5,000 to $50,000 and providing low- or no-interest loans to small businesses that want to expand. Her goal is to open the way for 25 million new small businesses in her first four years, noting that small businesses create nearly 50% of private sector jobs in the U.S.

Harris plans to create manufacturing jobs of the future by investing in biomanufacturing and aerospace, remaining “dominant in AI, quantum computing, blockchain, and other emerging technologies, and expand[ing] our lead in clean energy innovation and manufacturing.” She vowed to see that the next generation of breakthroughs—“from advanced batteries to geothermal to advanced nuclear—are not just invented, but built here in America by American workers.” Investing in these industries means strengthening factory towns, retooling existing factories, hiring locally, and working with unions. She vowed to make jobs available for skilled workers without college degrees and to cut red tape to reform permitting for innovation.

“I am a capitalist,” she said. “I believe in free and fair markets. I believe in consistent and transparent rules of the road to create a stable business environment. And I know the power of American innovation.” She said she would be pragmatic in her approach to the economy, seeking practical solutions to problems and taking good ideas from wherever they come.

“Kamala Harris, Reagan Democrat!” conservative pundit Bill Kristol posted on social media after her speech.

For his part, Trump has promised an across-the-board tariff of 10% to 20% that billionaire Mark Cuban on the Fox News Channel called “insane” and Quin Hillyer of the Washington Examiner warned “would almost certainly cause immense price hikes domestically, goad other countries into retaliating, and perhaps set off an international trade war” that could “wreck the economy.” Cuban then told Jake Tapper of CNN that Trump’s promise to impose 10% price controls on credit card interest rates and price caps is “Socialism 101.”

Yesterday, more than 400 economists and high-ranking U.S. policymakers endorsed Harris, and today, the members of former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley’s presidential leadership teams in Michigan, Iowa, and Vermont announced they would be supporting Harris, in part because of Trump’s economic policies.

While Trump insisted yet again today that “the economy is doing really, really badly,” the stock market closed at a record high today for the fourth day in a row.

In other economic news, for nine years, Trump has said he will find a cheaper and better way to provide healthcare to Americans than the Affordable Care Act, although on September 10 he admitted he has only the “concepts of a plan.” Today the Treasury Department released statistics showing that 4.2 million small business owners have coverage through the ACA. Losing that protection would impact 618,590 small business owners in Florida, 450,010 in California, 423,790 in Texas, and 168,070 in Georgia.

Trump has made a claim that crime has risen dramatically under President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris central to his campaign rhetoric. The opposite is true. Two days ago, on September 23, the Federal Bureau of Investigation released its official report on crime statistics from 2023 compared with 2022. Those statistics showed that murder and non-negligent manslaughter fell by 11.6%. Rape fell by 9.4%. Aggravated assault fell by 2.8%. Robbery fell by 0.3%. Hate crimes fell by 0.6%.

Central to the worldview of MAGA Republicans is that immigration weakens a nation and that immigrants increase crime and disease. First Republican vice presidential nominee Ohio senator J.D. Vance and then Trump himself repeatedly advanced the lie that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, are eating their neighbors’ pets and bringing disease.

Clergy members from multiple faiths have asked politicians to stop their lies about Haitian immigrants, and today the leader of Haitian Bridge Alliance, a nonprofit organization that represents the Haitian community, filed a charges against Trump and Vance for disrupting public services, making false alarms, telecommunications harassment, and aggravated menacing and complicity.

Immediately, Representative Clay Higgins (R-LA), who in the past supported Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke and filmed a selfie inside a gas chamber at Auschwitz, posted on social media: “Lol. These Haitians are wild. Eating pets, vudu, nastiest country in the western hemisphere, cults, slapstick gangsters…but damned if they don’t feel all sophisticated now, filing charges against our President and VP. All these thugs better get their mind right and their *ss out of our country before January 20th.”

After an outcry, Higgins took the post down. According to House speaker and fellow Louisiana Republican Mike Johnson, who called Higgins a “very principled man,” Higgins took it down after he “prayed about it.” Johnson seemed unconcerned about his colleague’s racism, saying, “we believe in redemption around here.”

But in a statement, House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) called Higgins’s statement “vile, racist and beneath the dignity of the United States House of Representatives. He must be held accountable for dishonorable conduct that is unbecoming of a Member of Congress. Clay Higgins is an election-denying, conspiracy-peddling racial arsonist who is a disgrace to the People’s House. This is who they have become. Republicans are the party of Donald Trump, Mark Robinson, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Clay Higgins and Project 2025. The extreme MAGA Republicans in the House are unfit to govern.”

On Monday, Dan Gooding of Newsweek reported that although Trump said on September 18 he would go to Springfield, he will not. Republican Ohio governor Mike DeWine had warned that the local community would not welcome a visit from the former president.

Republican politicians and candidates, including Trump, embraced North Carolina gubernatorial candidate and current lieutenant governor Mark Robinson, who trumpeted the extremists’ MAGA narrative. The September 19 revelation by CNN reporters Andrew Kaczynski and Em Steck that Robinson had boasted on a pornography website that he considers himself a “black NAZI!”, would like to reinstate slavery, and would like to own some people himself, and shared the sexual kinks in which he engaged with his wife’s sister prompted most of his campaign staff to resign.

Andrew Egger of The Bulwark reported today that on a different online forum, Robinson called for a political assassination as well as making racist attacks on entertainer Oprah Winfrey and former president Barack Obama. Robinson has called all the information released about him “false smears” and has said “[n]ow is not the time for intra-party squabbling and nonsense,” but declined help tracking down those he claims falsified his online comments. Today, multiple media outlets reported that top staff in Robinson’s government office are stepping down.

Reality hit hard this week in Texas, too, where U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Christopher Lopez yesterday approved the auctioning off of conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’s media business, the aptly-named InfoWars. Jones insisted that the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting was a “hoax” designed to whip up support for gun restrictions, and that the grieving parents were played by “crisis actors.” Juries found Jones guilty of defaming the families of the murdered children and causing them emotional distress.

The auction of his property will enable the families to begin to collect on the more than $1 billion the jurors determined Jones owed them for his reprehensible and harmful behavior.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

#Letters From An American #Heather Cox Richardson #election 2024 #William Faulkner #quotes #MAGA poison #racism #Mark Robinson #Clay Higgins #the economy #the middle class

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triviallytrue · 2 years ago

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my (extremely simplistic) narrative of the past 8 years or so in tech is the entire industry spent the massive amounts of free money they got in the good macroeconomic climate searching for the next [iphone/google ad service/facebook ad service/AWS] and essentially came up empty.

amazon had alexa, facebook had meta, google had... whatever the fuck it is that google has, idk i can't keep track of all the shit they start and then kill, uber and lyft had self driving cars, innumerable startups had a billion other products, and none of these ideas really panned out. some of it was good enough to stay in business, but a lot of it was just setting money on fire.

but now everyone's running out of money to set on fire. the fundamentals are still there, all of [iphone/google ad service/facebook ad service/AWS] are still around and still insanely profitable, it's not like the industry is going to die or something. but i think people are sobering up a bit to the idea that the low-hanging fruit has been picked, which is kind of a funny position for an industry that likes to think of itself as the forefront of global innovation to be in.

the remaining unanswered question is mostly whether or not this LLM stuff pans out, and if so, to what degree

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louff4tw · 1 year ago

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A church bought 3mil worth of debt for 15k and basically wiped it clean for the people who owed. I now have a Headcannon that especially since Bruce became a billionaire. He would spend 1Mil at least in a year to buy around 200mil worth of debt and abolish it.

And a extra 1Mil on debt at Christmas.

And that he spends his free time spending on go fund mes and kick starters. Dude probably has a whole shelf full of Kickstarter stuff. And tries to only buy from small businesses.

Even the super fancy clothing stores he avoids. His suit shop is a local one. Been in business since his grandad. And only one shop ever.

Bet when he goes to the met Gala he finds a startup fashion designer. Buys his own ticket and promotes them. Especially if they are from Gotham. But I like to imagine world wide.

I bet he built a supermarket to keep foods and other stuff costs down so that super centres like Walmart. Didn’t force small businesses out and then raise prices. Same with fast food. Bet he helped build bat burger at least a little.

Bet he has donation stores where the prices are actually low and not ridiculous like $5 for a half empty bottle of lotion that originally was $2. And the only reason it costs money at all is to pay employees and building costs. He makes almost no money from these.

Bet he also has apt buildings near hospitals free for family’s with sick relatives not even just kids.

And that all retirement homes and special needs homes are really affordable.

This is my Batman. The one who helps at night as Batman and as Brucie during the day! Bet he pulls a John Cena and does a lot of make a wish. Except he pays and tells make a wish to put that money towards other kids.

Bet each of his kids help come up with charity ideas like helping with foster care. After school programs. Library’s. Shelters for animals. For humans. Halfway homes to help the homeless find stability.

Here’s a really personal one. He does hundreds of family Christmas baskets a year. We grew up in poverty and we never forgot that kindness

#I just want a b man who helps #batman #batfam #bruce wayne #brucie wayne

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chromaticramblings · 1 year ago

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book review - ecotopia by ernest callenbach

Ecotopia, written by ernest callenbach in the 1970s, describes a world in which the land regions previously known as northern california, washington, and oregon secede from the rest of the united states and create their own nation, the nation of Ecotopia. the principles of sustainability and circular economy are central to this new nation.

here are my thoughts on some things covered in the book, i hope that this reaches someone else who's read it and we can share thoughts!

(this will include spoilers. however, the nature of the book is not a narrative, and is rather a presentation of ideas. therefore reading this post will not ruin the book for you if you choose to read it)

one of the greatest thought experiments Ecotopia undertakes is that of ideal urban planning. in that respect, the book is pretty cool! they hypothetical nation of Ecotopia describes San Francisco as a central city hub, from which spokes of public transport emerge and run to smaller city towns. these towns take the place of suburbs, which were razed during the country’s Independence / reconstruction era. (wooooo!!) public transport abounds and runs at a high speed of 30 mph, which is all you really need since the urban centers are so densely built and multi use. Between city towns are managed forests (actual forests! not monocultures) as well as natural land which has been allowed to restore itself.

people live in flexible communes that typically work together to produce something, whether that be a farming commune, fishing commune, artist communes, or business / science communes that invent things. everyone has a universal base income that is just minimal enough to reasonably get by, allowing people to pursue art or a risky startup without fear of dying. which i think is really cool! necessity breeds innovation yes but you need security too. work culture in Ecotopia is also vastly different, as the boundary between work and leisure and personal time is eroded, which may seem like a bad thing but the consequence of the UBI system means that most Ecotopians actually Like their work and choose to do it of their own free will. crazy huh.

houses are typically made of wood, which to me raised a suspicion flag, cause this is the Bay Area we’re talking about, which is Humid as Shit, and the Ecotopians have phased out paint due to it containing heavy metals. which good for them i guess but those houses are gonna rot lmfao. i took the liberty of imagining they are proofed with sealant made from the biodegradable, non petroleum based plastic the Ecotopians had developed and manufactured. while wood is the building material of choice, houses are also built from large tubes of insulated bioplastic, which are joined at the whim of the family or commune creating the house. (there are no architects, everyone builds their own houses themselves to suit their needs.) these houses are cheap and accessible, and zoning laws seem to be nonexistent, making homelessness a nonissue.

in terms of materials, everything in Ecotopia is renewable and has a full zero waste lifecycle. wood is the material of choice. the only metal Ecotopians use comes from scavenged cars and machinery of the pre seccession era. Ecotopians still manufacture plastic, but most kinds of it are fully biodegradable in a few days. when a lasting material is needed, a different type of plastic is used; this kind will not degrade until it is in full contact with soil. given how important disposable plastic is for applications such as research, i'm glad this was considered and accounted for in this book instead of throwing it off as a "we don't need plastic anymore kumbaya" kinda vibe.

culture wise, there is a lack of emotional restraint which the book’s narrator, a visitor from NYC, frequently comments on. hugs and physical affection between all relationships and genders are normalized. there also seems to be an insistence on small talk as a way to humanize those working “lesser skilled” jobs. honestly i found this a bit annoying, as i don’t think small talk is necessarily indicative of human connection, and that a truly emotionally attuned people would be okay with giving space when necessary. but i thought it was nice to acknowledge that all people are people, even while working “subservient” jobs.

ok so those were the things i liked.

criticism #1.

WILLIAM WESTON STOP BEING A FUCKING MISOGYNIST CHALLENGE

alternatively:

ERNEST CALLENBACH WRITE ONE (1) WOMAN WHO ISN’T A SEX OBJECT CHALLENGE

NO, THE WOMAN WHO YOU DESCRIBED AS UNATTRACTIVE WHO ALSO HAPPENS TO BE IN A POSITION OF POWER DOES NOT COUNT

god jesus christ

over the course of his adventures, journalist William Weston encounters many fellows (men) and new friends whom he talks around the fire with (men). he also encounters Marissa, a beautiful wild woman, exotic and mysterious who runs through the forest, cares deeply for trees, stares into his soul with her plain face and round dark eyes, and has sex with him twenty four hours three hundred sixty five days a year.

he also encounters Linda, an attractively sarcastic yet caring nurse, who nurses his injuries, jacks him off, and consumes him with thoughts of when he “will be healed enough to fuck her properly”. (direct quote)

in addition to the misogyny, there appears to be a fair amount of gender essentialism in Ecotopian society, something I found disappointing. Ecotopian clothes are sharply gendered. (from my understanding of Ecotopian values, i’d expect everyone to be wearing skirts due to the ease of manufacture and resulting ease of movement.) women are described to have an “air of fertility” (yes, actually). the governing party is made up of women, due to womens’ “natural competency regarding cooperation and diplomacy rather than competition”. the only sport in the country, the ritual war games, is barred to women. (it’s actually remarked later in the book that in Ecotopian psychology offices, it is often women who come in with issues of untamed aggression, and attributes it to their exclusion from the games. i wonder what a solution could be 🤔) thankfully work is not gendered, but it appears the social spheres of men and women rarely intersect, as Weston socializes and discusses ideas with a fair amount of men, and no women. perhaps for the better, as he’d be too distracted trying to fuck them to have a discussion of any substance.

queer pairings are also mentioned offhand, but they serve the purpose of emphasizing the Ecotopian's open attitudes towards sex and intimacy. queerness is treated as a sexual quirk rather than as an orientation.

in addition to the disappointing sexism / heterosexism, there's a good amount of racism. different races live segregated. although this is a conscious choice by the inhabitants, it still strikes as somewhat odd that there wouldn't be a way for humans to maintain their culture while living in an integrated society. many of the barriers to race equality in our current system are abolished in Ecotopia; the cheapness of the bioplastic houses makes it accessible for anyone to own a house anywhere, and the ease with which people can start their own enterprises reduces employment barriers significantly. therefore i'd expect integration between races to be a significant achievement of the Ecotopians. the writing itself is also racist. callenbach makes distinctions while describing the cultures of the nonwhite populations that make it clear that white is the default of Ecotopia, and all other cultures are side notes. also, callenbach makes no mention of an Ecotopian prison system (an aspect of society that no doubt merits analysis) until he mentions the Black community. sir what is up with that 🤨

there's also a lot to be said of callenbach's treatment of Indigenous ideas. the Ecotopians take a lot of inspiration from classic Indigenous principles, such as living in balance with the earth's natural resources and respecting nonhuman life, and Indigenous clothing styles. however, this feels rather appropriative rather than appreciative, and there are no actual Indigenous characters in the book. i would expect that such an empathetic society which takes direct principles from Indigenous culture would appreciate and honor the Indigenous people within that society rather than just shamelessly taking their culture, especially given the context that Ecotopians are ex citizens of the united states, the country which caused the Indigenous communities in that area so much harm.

overall, i think this book's strengths lie in its rethinking of what society could be like without work as its central focus. i love the UBI system, the reduced work week, and the attitude of work as something to enjoy rather than something to get over with. i also love that the nation's economic fall wasn't skipped over. i think its important to realize that many policies which would improve human health and quality of life would also lower our GDP, and that maybe that's perfectly fine. maybe human lives matter more than how rich a nation is. despite all these strengths, however, the sexism and racism cannot be overlooked; they made me almost put the book down several times. this book is clearly a product of its time, written by a white man. in keeping with good critical thinking practices, its important to recognize what ideas are good to keep and what needs to be thrown out.

tldr: great ideas about an alternative structure for society, unfortunately sexist and racist as well. 6/10

#gonna spam tags in hopes that it finds someone who's read it •_•#ecotopia #ecopunk #solarpunk #urban planning #utopia #sustainability #ecology #sci fi novels #sci fi #environmentalism #currently reading #books #bookblr #politics #public transportation #ernest callenbach #UBI #book review

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jcmarchi · 1 month ago

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Translating MIT research into real-world results

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/translating-mit-research-into-real-world-results/

Translating MIT research into real-world results

Inventive solutions to some of the world’s most critical problems are being discovered in labs, classrooms, and centers across MIT every day. Many of these solutions move from the lab to the commercial world with the help of over 85 Institute resources that comprise MIT’s robust innovation and entrepreneurship (I&E) ecosystem. The Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab (J-WAFS) draws on MIT’s wealth of I&E knowledge and experience to help researchers commercialize their breakthrough technologies through the J-WAFS Solutions grant program. By collaborating with I&E programs on campus, J-WAFS prepares MIT researchers for the commercial world, where their novel innovations aim to improve productivity, accessibility, and sustainability of water and food systems, creating economic, environmental, and societal benefits along the way.

The J-WAFS Solutions program launched in 2015 with support from Community Jameel, an international organization that advances science and learning for communities to thrive. Since 2015, J-WAFS Solutions has supported 19 projects with one-year grants of up to $150,000, with some projects receiving renewal grants for a second year of support. Solutions projects all address challenges related to water or food. Modeled after the esteemed grant program of MIT’s Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation, and initially administered by Deshpande Center staff, the J-WAFS Solutions program follows a similar approach by supporting projects that have already completed the basic research and proof-of-concept phases. With technologies that are one to three years away from commercialization, grantees work on identifying their potential markets and learn to focus on how their technology can meet the needs of future customers.

“Ingenuity thrives at MIT, driving inventions that can be translated into real-world applications for widespread adoption, implantation, and use,” says J-WAFS Director Professor John H. Lienhard V. “But successful commercialization of MIT technology requires engineers to focus on many challenges beyond making the technology work. MIT’s I&E network offers a variety of programs that help researchers develop technology readiness, investigate markets, conduct customer discovery, and initiate product design and development,” Lienhard adds. “With this strong I&E framework, many J-WAFS Solutions teams have established startup companies by the completion of the grant. J-WAFS-supported technologies have had powerful, positive effects on human welfare. Together, the J-WAFS Solutions program and MIT’s I&E ecosystem demonstrate how academic research can evolve into business innovations that make a better world,” Lienhard says.

Creating I&E collaborations

In addition to support for furthering research, J-WAFS Solutions grants allow faculty, students, postdocs, and research staff to learn the fundamentals of how to transform their work into commercial products and companies. As part of the grant requirements, researchers must interact with mentors through MIT Venture Mentoring Service (VMS). VMS connects MIT entrepreneurs with teams of carefully selected professionals who provide free and confidential mentorship, guidance, and other services to help advance ideas into for-profit, for-benefit, or nonprofit ventures. Since 2000, VMS has mentored over 4,600 MIT entrepreneurs across all industries, through a dynamic and accomplished group of nearly 200 mentors who volunteer their time so that others may succeed. The mentors provide impartial and unbiased advice to members of the MIT community, including MIT alumni in the Boston area. J-WAFS Solutions teams have been guided by 21 mentors from numerous companies and nonprofits. Mentors often attend project events and progress meetings throughout the grant period.

“Working with VMS has provided me and my organization with a valuable sounding board for a range of topics, big and small,” says Eric Verploegen PhD ’08, former research engineer in MIT’s D-Lab and founder of J-WAFS spinout CoolVeg. Along with professors Leon Glicksman and Daniel Frey, Verploegen received a J-WAFS Solutions grant in 2021 to commercialize cold-storage chambers that use evaporative cooling to help farmers preserve fruits and vegetables in rural off-grid communities. Verploegen started CoolVeg in 2022 to increase access and adoption of open-source, evaporative cooling technologies through collaborations with businesses, research institutions, nongovernmental organizations, and government agencies. “Working as a solo founder at my nonprofit venture, it is always great to have avenues to get feedback on communications approaches, overall strategy, and operational issues that my mentors have experience with,” Verploegen says. Three years after the initial Solutions grant, one of the VMS mentors assigned to the evaporative cooling team still acts as a mentor to Verploegen today.

Another Solutions grant requirement is for teams to participate in the Spark program — a free, three-week course that provides an entry point for researchers to explore the potential value of their innovation. Spark is part of the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Innovation Corps (I-Corps), which is an “immersive, entrepreneurial training program that facilitates the transformation of invention to impact.” In 2018, MIT received an award from the NSF, establishing the New England Regional Innovation Corps Node (NE I-Corps) to deliver I-Corps training to participants across New England. Trainings are open to researchers, engineers, scientists, and others who want to engage in a customer discovery process for their technology. Offered regularly throughout the year, the Spark course helps participants identify markets and explore customer needs in order to understand how their technologies can be positioned competitively in their target markets. They learn to assess barriers to adoption, as well as potential regulatory issues or other challenges to commercialization. NE-I-Corps reports that since its start, over 1,200 researchers from MIT have completed the program and have gone on to launch 175 ventures, raising over $3.3 billion in funding from grants and investors, and creating over 1,800 jobs.

Constantinos Katsimpouras, a research scientist in the Department of Chemical Engineering, went through the NE I-Corps Spark program to better understand the customer base for a technology he developed with professors Gregory Stephanopoulos and Anthony Sinskey. The group received a J-WAFS Solutions grant in 2021 for their microbial platform that converts food waste from the dairy industry into valuable products. “As a scientist with no prior experience in entrepreneurship, the program introduced me to important concepts and tools for conducting customer interviews and adopting a new mindset,” notes Katsimpouras. “Most importantly, it encouraged me to get out of the building and engage in interviews with potential customers and stakeholders, providing me with invaluable insights and a deeper understanding of my industry,” he adds. These interviews also helped connect the team with companies willing to provide resources to test and improve their technology — a critical step to the scale-up of any lab invention.

In the case of Professor Cem Tasan’s research group in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, the I-Corps program led them to the J-WAFS Solutions grant, instead of the other way around. Tasan is currently working with postdoc Onur Guvenc on a J-WAFS Solutions project to manufacture formable sheet metal by consolidating steel scrap without melting, thereby reducing water use compared to traditional steel processing. Before applying for the Solutions grant, Guvenc took part in NE I-Corps. Like Katsimpouras, Guvenc benefited from the interaction with industry. “This program required me to step out of the lab and engage with potential customers, allowing me to learn about their immediate challenges and test my initial assumptions about the market,” Guvenc recalls. “My interviews with industry professionals also made me aware of the connection between water consumption and steelmaking processes, which ultimately led to the J-WAFS 2023 Solutions Grant,” says Guvenc.

After completing the Spark program, participants may be eligible to apply for the Fusion program, which provides microgrants of up to $1,500 to conduct further customer discovery. The Fusion program is self-paced, requiring teams to conduct 12 additional customer interviews and craft a final presentation summarizing their key learnings. Professor Patrick Doyle’s J-WAFS Solutions team completed the Spark and Fusion programs at MIT. Most recently, their team was accepted to join the NSF I-Corps National program with a $50,000 award. The intensive program requires teams to complete an additional 100 customer discovery interviews over seven weeks. Located in the Department of Chemical Engineering, the Doyle lab is working on a sustainable microparticle hydrogel system to rapidly remove micropollutants from water. The team’s focus has expanded to higher value purifications in amino acid and biopharmaceutical manufacturing applications. Devashish Gokhale PhD ’24 worked with Doyle on much of the underlying science.

“Our platform technology could potentially be used for selective separations in very diverse market segments, ranging from individual consumers to large industries and government bodies with varied use-cases,” Gokhale explains. He goes on to say, “The I-Corps Spark program added significant value by providing me with an effective framework to approach this problem … I was assigned a mentor who provided critical feedback, teaching me how to formulate effective questions and identify promising opportunities.” Gokhale says that by the end of Spark, the team was able to identify the best target markets for their products. He also says that the program provided valuable seminars on topics like intellectual property, which was helpful in subsequent discussions the team had with MIT’s Technology Licensing Office.

Another member of Doyle’s team, Arjav Shah, a recent PhD from MIT’s Department of Chemical Engineering and a current MBA candidate at the MIT Sloan School of Management, is spearheading the team’s commercialization plans. Shah attended Fusion last fall and hopes to lead efforts to incorporate a startup company called hydroGel. “I admire the hypothesis-driven approach of the I-Corps program,” says Shah. “It has enabled us to identify our customers’ biggest pain points, which will hopefully lead us to finding a product-market fit.” He adds “based on our learnings from the program, we have been able to pivot to impact-driven, higher-value applications in the food processing and biopharmaceutical industries.” Postdoc Luca Mazzaferro will lead the technical team at hydroGel alongside Shah.

In a different project, Qinmin Zheng, a postdoc in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, is working with Professor Andrew Whittle and Lecturer Fábio Duarte. Zheng plans to take the Fusion course this fall to advance their J-WAFS Solutions project that aims to commercialize a novel sensor to quantify the relative abundance of major algal species and provide early detection of harmful algal blooms. After completing Spark, Zheng says he’s “excited to participate in the Fusion program, and potentially the National I-Corps program, to further explore market opportunities and minimize risks in our future product development.”

Economic and societal benefits

Commercializing technologies developed at MIT is one of the ways J-WAFS helps ensure that MIT research advances will have real-world impacts in water and food systems. Since its inception, the J-WAFS Solutions program has awarded 28 grants (including renewals), which have supported 19 projects that address a wide range of global water and food challenges. The program has distributed over $4 million to 24 professors, 11 research staff, 15 postdocs, and 30 students across MIT. Nearly half of all J-WAFS Solutions projects have resulted in spinout companies or commercialized products, including eight companies to date plus two open-source technologies.

Nona Technologies is an example of a J-WAFS spinout that is helping the world by developing new approaches to produce freshwater for drinking. Desalination — the process of removing salts from seawater — typically requires a large-scale technology called reverse osmosis. But Nona created a desalination device that can work in remote off-grid locations. By separating salt and bacteria from water using electric current through a process called ion concentration polarization (ICP), their technology also reduces overall energy consumption. The novel method was developed by Jongyoon Han, professor of electrical engineering and biological engineering, and research scientist Junghyo Yoon. Along with Bruce Crawford, a Sloan MBA alum, Han and Yoon created Nona Technologies to bring their lightweight, energy-efficient desalination technology to the market.

“My feeling early on was that once you have technology, commercialization will take care of itself,” admits Crawford. The team completed both the Spark and Fusion programs and quickly realized that much more work would be required. “Even in our first 24 interviews, we learned that the two first markets we envisioned would not be viable in the near term, and we also got our first hints at the beachhead we ultimately selected,” says Crawford. Nona Technologies has since won MIT’s $100K Entrepreneurship Competition, received media attention from outlets like Newsweek and Fortune, and hired a team that continues to further the technology for deployment in resource-limited areas where clean drinking water may be scarce.

Food-borne diseases sicken millions of people worldwide each year, but J-WAFS researchers are addressing this issue by integrating molecular engineering, nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence to revolutionize food pathogen testing. Professors Tim Swager and Alexander Klibanov, of the Department of Chemistry, were awarded one of the first J-WAFS Solutions grants for their sensor that targets food safety pathogens. The sensor uses specialized droplets that behave like a dynamic lens, changing in the presence of target bacteria in order to detect dangerous bacterial contamination in food. In 2018, Swager launched Xibus Systems Inc. to bring the sensor to market and advance food safety for greater public health, sustainability, and economic security.

“Our involvement with the J-WAFS Solutions Program has been vital,” says Swager. “It has provided us with a bridge between the academic world and the business world and allowed us to perform more detailed work to create a usable application,” he adds. In 2022, Xibus developed a product called XiSafe, which enables the detection of contaminants like salmonella and listeria faster and with higher sensitivity than other food testing products. The innovation could save food processors billions of dollars worldwide and prevent thousands of food-borne fatalities annually.

J-WAFS Solutions companies have raised nearly $66 million in venture capital and other funding. Just this past June, J-WAFS spinout SiTration announced that it raised an $11.8 million seed round. Jeffrey Grossman, a professor in MIT’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering, was another early J-WAFS Solutions grantee for his work on low-cost energy-efficient filters for desalination. The project enabled the development of nanoporous membranes and resulted in two spinout companies, Via Separations and SiTration. SiTration was co-founded by Brendan Smith PhD ’18, who was a part of the original J-WAFS team. Smith is CEO of the company and has overseen the advancement of the membrane technology, which has gone on to reduce cost and resource consumption in industrial wastewater treatment, advanced manufacturing, and resource extraction of materials such as lithium, cobalt, and nickel from recycled electric vehicle batteries. The company also recently announced that it is working with the mining company Rio Tinto to handle harmful wastewater generated at mines.

But it’s not just J-WAFS spinout companies that are producing real-world results. Products like the ECC Vial — a portable, low-cost method for E. coli detection in water — have been brought to the market and helped thousands of people. The test kit was developed by MIT D-Lab Lecturer Susan Murcott and Professor Jeffrey Ravel of the MIT History Section. The duo received a J-WAFS Solutions grant in 2018 to promote safely managed drinking water and improved public health in Nepal, where it is difficult to identify which wells are contaminated by E. coli. By the end of their grant period, the team had manufactured approximately 3,200 units, of which 2,350 were distributed — enough to help 12,000 people in Nepal. The researchers also trained local Nepalese on best manufacturing practices.

“It’s very important, in my life experience, to follow your dream and to serve others,” says Murcott. Economic success is important to the health of any venture, whether it’s a company or a product, but equally important is the social impact — a philosophy that J-WAFS research strives to uphold. “Do something because it’s worth doing and because it changes people’s lives and saves lives,” Murcott adds.

As J-WAFS prepares to celebrate its 10th anniversary this year, we look forward to continued collaboration with MIT’s many I&E programs to advance knowledge and develop solutions that will have tangible effects on the world’s water and food systems.

Learn more about the J-WAFS Solutions program and about innovation and entrepreneurship at MIT.

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copperbadge · 2 years ago

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Hi Sam!

My mom wants to start a nonprofit as a second career, focusing on providing free menstrual products to schools, colleges, universities, homeless & domestic violence shelters, and prisons in our local area (feel free to dm me for specific location info!).

I was wondering if you had any insight on grants and funding ect. at the start of a new nonprofit since you've been working at one for so long? Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Somewhat unfortunately in this case, I've always worked for very established nonprofits -- even at the much, much smaller nonprofit I work for now we have a multimillion-dollar yearly revenue, and we've been around for something like 20 years. FWIW my current nonprofit did start in a garage, so startup nonprofits can be successful! And I do have some advice but I'm not sure how helpful it will be.

If she hasn't worked for/with nonprofits before, she should find something adjacent to her interests -- probably a food pantry or shelter, since they deal in similar "procurement" work, getting needed products into the hands of people who need them -- and volunteer (or even apply for paid work there). It'll give her an idea of how they work, how much work is involved, and even to an extent the landscape of nonprofits in her region. Possibly (usually very likely) there's already a nonprofit doing the work she'd like to do, in which case if she doesn't work with/for them, she should at least know a great deal about what they do and how. Starting up a nonprofit is pretty similar, laborwise, to starting up a for-profit company; it can be both complicated and labor-intensive, so if she isn't knowledgeable about nonprofit work, that's where I'd recommend starting.

If she is familiar with nonprofit work, and just needs insight on funding, I do have a bit more to offer there. First, she should be sure she's aware of any similar nonprofits and have a pitch ready about how hers differs. As with a for-profit businesses, she should have a plan for how funding will be deployed -- how many units can be bought for what price, how they'll be distributed, how she can track the work she does so she can provide statistics to potential donors. If she's capable of beginning the work before landing any big donors (ie -- if she has an existing grant or some independent wealth to put towards it) she should use that "startup" time to figure out how this will work and at what level before she brings donors onboard. Regardless of anything else, I recommend starting small, so that she can scale up rather than trying to manage a large org all at once.

Data is the name of the game these days -- she should track everything possible and keep extremely good records, because that's the kind of thing large donors and grantors want to see. The amount of information you usually have to provide to a granting foundation is significant. We have very poor records from our earliest days as a nonprofit and that's also difficult at times, because we can say we EXISTED in 2010 but we don't have a great idea of who we were interacting with, and a lot of institutional knowledge lives in the heads of longtime employees. She's going to want to have some form of good book-keeping, and start building a database as soon as possible not just of donors and mailing-list recipients but of foundations, grantors, and beneficiaries.

Charity Navigator will be a good friend because you can find registered nonprofits by region; I would also recommend a Guidestar.org account (they're free) because Guidestar will help find local family foundations, who are more likely to support poverty alleviation/aid nonprofits -- these are basically legal entities that hold the money a family wants to use for philanthropy, and the family directs where the money goes. You can see where they've given if you look in their 990 records (available on Guidestar) so if you can find say, a wealthy local family who gives regularly to food pantries, they're a good candidate for solicitation.

A friend of mine works for Resilia.com, which is aimed specifically at providing digital solutions to nonprofits; they have some really nice free offerings, especially for people looking for help incorporating or finding funders. Can recommend as a good place to start if she's not sure where to start. :D

Readers, feel free to chime in with advice! Remember to reblog or comment, as I don't post asks sent in response to other asks.

#nonprofit #charity #fundraising

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mostlysignssomeportents · 9 months ago

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Big Tech disrupted disruption

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/08/permanent-overlords/#republicans-want-to-defund-the-police

Before "disruption" turned into a punchline, it was a genuinely exciting idea. Using technology, we could connect people to one another and allow them to collaborate, share, and cooperate to make great things happen.

It's easy (and valid) to dismiss the "disruption" of Uber, which "disrupted" taxis and transit by losing $31b worth of Saudi royal money in a bid to collapse the world's rival transportation system, while quietly promising its investors that it would someday have pricing power as a monopoly, and would attain profit through price-gouging and wage-theft.

Uber's disruption story was wreathed in bullshit: lies about the "independence" of its drivers, about the imminence of self-driving taxis, about the impact that replacing buses and subways with millions of circling, empty cars would have on traffic congestion. There were and are plenty of problems with traditional taxis and transit, but Uber magnified these problems, under cover of "disrupting" them away.

But there are other feats of high-tech disruption that were and are genuinely transformative – Wikipedia, GNU/Linux, RSS, and more. These disruptive technologies altered the balance of power between powerful institutions and the businesses, communities and individuals they dominated, in ways that have proven both beneficial and durable.

When we speak of commercial disruption today, we usually mean a tech company disrupting a non-tech company. Tinder disrupts singles bars. Netflix disrupts Blockbuster. Airbnb disrupts Marriott.

But the history of "disruption" features far more examples of tech companies disrupting other tech companies: DEC disrupts IBM. Netscape disrupts Microsoft. Google disrupts Yahoo. Nokia disrupts Kodak, sure – but then Apple disrupts Nokia. It's only natural that the businesses most vulnerable to digital disruption are other digital businesses.

And yet…disruption is nowhere to be seen when it comes to the tech sector itself. Five giant companies have been running the show for more than a decade. A couple of these companies (Apple, Microsoft) are Gen-Xers, having been born in the 70s, then there's a couple of Millennials (Amazon, Google), and that one Gen-Z kid (Facebook). Big Tech shows no sign of being disrupted, despite the continuous enshittification of their core products and services. How can this be? Has Big Tech disrupted disruption itself?

That's the contention of "Coopting Disruption," a new paper from two law profs: Mark Lemley (Stanford) and Matthew Wansley (Yeshiva U):

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4713845

The paper opens with a review of the literature on disruption. Big companies have some major advantages: they've got people and infrastructure they can leverage to bring new products to market more cheaply than startups. They've got existing relationships with suppliers, distributors and customers. People trust them.

Diversified, monopolistic companies are also able to capture "involuntary spillovers": when Google spends money on AI for image recognition, it can improve Google Photos, YouTube, Android, Search, Maps and many other products. A startup with just one product can't capitalize on these spillovers in the same way, so it doesn't have the same incentives to spend big on R&D.

Finally, big companies have access to cheap money. They get better credit terms from lenders, they can float bonds, they can tap the public markets, or just spend their own profits on R&D. They can also afford to take a long view, because they're not tied to VCs whose funds turn over every 5-10 years. Big companies get cheap money, play a long game, pay less to innovate and get more out of innovation.

But those advantages are swamped by the disadvantages of incumbency, all the various curses of bigness. Take Arrow's "replacement effect": new companies that compete with incumbents drive down the incumbents' prices and tempt their customers away. But an incumbent that buys a disruptive new company can just shut it down, and whittle down its ideas to "sustaining innovation" (small improvements to existing products), killing "disruptive innovation" (major changes that make the existing products obsolete).

Arrow's Replacement Effect also comes into play before a new product even exists. An incumbent that allows a rival to do R&D that would eventually disrupt its product is at risk; but if the incumbent buys this pre-product, R&D-heavy startup, it can turn the research to sustaining innovation and defund any disruptive innovation.

Arrow asks us to look at the innovation question from the point of view of the company as a whole. Clayton Christensen's "Innovator's Dilemma" looks at the motivations of individual decision-makers in large, successful companies. These individuals don't want to disrupt their own business, because that will render some part of their own company obsolete (perhaps their own division!). They also don't want to radically change their customers' businesses, because those customers would also face negative effects from disruption.

A startup, by contrast, has no existing successful divisions and no giant customers to safeguard. They have nothing to lose and everything to gain from disruption. Where a large company has no way for individual employees to initiate major changes in corporate strategy, a startup has fewer hops between employees and management. What's more, a startup that rewards an employee's good idea with a stock-grant ties that employee's future finances to the outcome of that idea – while a giant corporation's stock bonuses are only incidentally tied to the ideas of any individual worker.

Big companies are where good ideas go to die. If a big company passes on its employees' cool, disruptive ideas, that's the end of the story for that idea. But even if 100 VCs pass on a startup's cool idea and only one VC funds it, the startup still gets to pursue that idea. In startup land, a good idea gets lots of chances – in a big company, it only gets one.

Given how innately disruptable tech companies are, given how hard it is for big companies to innovate, and given how little innovation we've gotten from Big Tech, how is it that the tech giants haven't been disrupted?

The authors propose a four-step program for the would-be Tech Baron hoping to defend their turf from disruption.

First, gather information about startups that might develop disruptive technologies and steer them away from competing with you, by investing in them or partnering with them.

Second, cut off any would-be competitor's supply of resources they need to develop a disruptive product that challenges your own.

Third, convince the government to pass regulations that big, established companies can comply with but that are business-killing challenges for small competitors.

Finally, buy up any company that resists your steering, succeeds despite your resource war, and escapes the compliance moats of regulation that favors incumbents.

Then: kill those companies.

The authors proceed to show that all four tactics are in play today. Big Tech companies operate their own VC funds, which means they get a look at every promising company in the field, even if they don't want to invest in them. Big Tech companies are also awash in money and their "rival" VCs know it, and so financial VCs and Big Tech collude to fund potential disruptors and then sell them to Big Tech companies as "aqui-hires" that see the disruption neutralized.

On resources, the authors focus on data, and how companies like Facebook have explicit policies of only permitting companies they don't see as potential disruptors to access Facebook data. They reproduce internal Facebook strategy memos that divide potential platform users into "existing competitors, possible future competitors, [or] developers that we have alignment with on business models." These categories allow Facebook to decide which companies are capable of developing disruptive products and which ones aren't. For example, Amazon – which doesn't compete with Facebook – is allowed to access FB data to target shoppers. But Messageme, a startup, was cut off from Facebook as soon as management perceived them as a future rival. Ironically – but unsurprisingly – Facebook spins these policies as pro-privacy, not anti-competitive.

These data policies cast a long shadow. They don't just block existing companies from accessing the data they need to pursue disruptive offerings – they also "send a message" to would-be founders and investors, letting them know that if they try to disrupt a tech giant, they will have their market oxygen cut off before they can draw breath. The only way to build a product that challenges Facebook is as Facebook's partner, under Facebook's direction, with Facebook's veto.

Next, regulation. Starting in 2019, Facebook started publishing full-page newspaper ads calling for regulation. Someone ghost-wrote a Washington Post op-ed under Zuckerberg's byline, arguing the case for more tech regulation. Google, Apple, OpenAI other tech giants have all (selectively) lobbied in favor of many regulations. These rules covered a lot of ground, but they all share a characteristic: complying with them requires huge amounts of money – money that giant tech companies can spare, but potential disruptors lack.

Finally, there's predatory acquisitions. Mark Zuckerberg, working without the benefit of a ghost writer (or in-house counsel to review his statements for actionable intent) has repeatedly confessed to buying companies like Instagram to ensure that they never grow to be competitors. As he told one colleague, "I remember your internal post about how Instagram was our threat and not Google+. You were basically right. The thing about startups though is you can often acquire them.”

All the tech giants are acquisition factories. Every successful Google product, almost without exception, is a product they bought from someone else. By contrast, Google's own internal products typically crash and burn, from G+ to Reader to Google Videos. Apple, meanwhile, buys 90 companies per year – Tim Apple brings home a new company for his shareholders more often than you bring home a bag of groceries for your family. All the Big Tech companies' AI offerings are acquisitions, and Apple has bought more AI companies than any of them.

Big Tech claims to be innovating, but it's really just operationalizing. Any company that threatens to disrupt a tech giant is bought, its products stripped of any really innovative features, and the residue is added to existing products as a "sustaining innovation" – a dot-release feature that has all the innovative disruption of rounding the corners on a new mobile phone.

The authors present three case-studies of tech companies using this four-point strategy to forestall disruption in AI, VR and self-driving cars. I'm not excited about any of these three categories, but it's clear that the tech giants are worried about them, and the authors make a devastating case for these disruptions being disrupted by Big Tech.

What do to about it? If we like (some) disruption, and if Big Tech is enshittifying at speed without facing dethroning-by-disruption, how do we get the dynamism and innovation that gave us the best of tech?

The authors make four suggestions.

First, revive the authorities under existing antitrust law to ban executives from Big Tech companies from serving on the boards of startups. More broadly, kill interlocking boards altogether. Remember, these powers already exist in the lawbooks, so accomplishing this goal means a change in enforcement priorities, not a new act of Congress or rulemaking. What's more, interlocking boards between competing companies are illegal per se, meaning there's no expensive, difficult fact-finding needed to demonstrate that two companies are breaking the law by sharing directors.

Next: create a nondiscrimination policy that requires the largest tech companies that share data with some unaffiliated companies to offer data on the same terms to other companies, except when they are direct competitors. They argue that this rule will keep tech giants from choking off disruptive technologies that make them obsolete (rather than competing with them).

On the subject of regulation and compliance moats, they have less concrete advice. They counsel lawmakers to greet tech giants' demands to be regulated with suspicion, to proceed with caution when they do regulate, and to shape regulation so that it doesn't limit market entry, by keeping in mind the disproportionate burdens regulations put on established giants and small new companies. This is all good advice, but it's more a set of principles than any kind of specific practice, test or procedure.

Finally, they call for increased scrutiny of mergers, including mergers between very large companies and small startups. They argue that existing law (Sec 2 of the Sherman Act and Sec 7 of the Clayton Act) both empower enforcers to block these acquisitions. They admit that the case-law on this is poor, but that just means that enforcers need to start making new case-law.

I like all of these suggestions! We're certainly enjoying a more activist set of regulators, who are more interested in Big Tech, than we've seen in generations.

But they are grossly under-resourced even without giving them additional duties. As Matt Stoller points out, "the DOJ's Antitrust Division has fewer people enforcing anti-monopoly laws in a $24 trillion economy than the Smithsonian Museum has security guards."

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/congressional-republicans-to-defund

What's more, Republicans are trying to slash their budgets even further. The American conservative movement has finally located a police force they're eager to defund: the corporate police who defend us all from predatory monopolies.

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

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octuscle · 1 year ago

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You open for asks?... I'm tired of moving from one startup business idea to the next. I'm tired of all the hipster coffee shit. I just want to make something with my hands. Drinking straight up filter coffee. Somewhere in nature if possible. Can you help me out?

At mid-20s, aren't you a little young for a midlife crisis? But I can understand you very well. Starting the day by spending an hour in the bathroom styling yourself to look as unstyled as possible, then ordering a Flat White with almond milk and a sugar- and gluten-free croissant. And then spending four hours philosophizing with other equally important and unsuccessful people about why you actually deserve to knock Google, Facebook and the like off their thrones.

Nevertheless, you order another Flat White and a croissant. But the coffee machine is broken. You can have a black coffee. Or a water. You take the coffee. The wifi doesn't work either. So you take a daily newspaper. But the only one available is The Tennessean. What are you supposed to do with the newspaper here in Seattle? Anyway, if that's the only option…

You start with the sports section. It's the only thing you're really interested in. But both the Titans and the Predators are a sad sight these days. You look around the cafe. All city slickers. You can't see those tattoos anymore. What are these sissy kids thinking? If you get a tattoo, you become a real guy? Probably not… Never was your thing. Costs a lot of money. The only decoration your muscles need are the hairs on them… And while we are on the subject of hair. Who actually tells people that what they call hairstyles is somehow pretty. Old Curt has been cutting your hair every two to three months since you were four years old. a good neat haircut.

You're getting tired of all this. Cap on your head and off to your pickup. Nashville's just too big for you, you've got to get out of here. Quickly pick up the bags of fertilizer and then back to the farm. Your old folks are probably waiting for you. And before it gets dark, you should take a look at the broken water pump.

It's good to be out in the fresh air again. And to pump the good air into your lungs and muscles. And shit, tomorrow morning you'll finally look forward to a breakfast with fried eggs and bacon again, not that crap like the hippsters eat.

#male tf #muscle tf #reality change #wife beater

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sharktankindiaproducts · 2 months ago

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Everything You Need to Know About Shark Tank India and Its Judges

If you’re a fan of entrepreneurship, innovation, and exciting business deals, you’ve probably heard of Shark Tank India. The show has taken India by storm, giving budding entrepreneurs a platform to present their business ideas in front of successful investors, also known as "sharks." It’s the perfect mix of business education, entertainment, and inspiration. In this blog, we’ll take a deep dive into what Shark Tank India is all about, the role of the shark tank india judges list, and how this show has inspired millions across the country.

What is Shark Tank India?

Shark Tank India is the Indian version of the popular American reality TV show Shark Tank, where entrepreneurs pitch their business ideas to a panel of investors in the hopes of securing investments. The show gives these entrepreneurs a chance to present their startups and ideas to well-established businesspeople, who can either invest their own money in the businesses or pass on the opportunity.

The show isn't just about securing investments; it’s also about learning. Viewers get to see how deals are negotiated, how investors think, and what makes a business worth investing in. Shark Tank India has quickly become a favorite among viewers who are interested in entrepreneurship, providing a rare behind-the-scenes look at how successful businesses are built.

Who Are the Shark Tank India Judges?

The Shark Tank India judges are a group of highly successful entrepreneurs and business leaders from different industries. These sharks bring their experience, knowledge, and capital to the table, looking for innovative ideas and promising business ventures. Let's take a look at some of the notable Shark Tank India judges who have appeared on the show:

Aman Gupta – Co-founder and CMO of boAt, a leading electronics brand, Aman Gupta has played a key role in making boAt one of the most popular brands for headphones and other electronic accessories in India. His business acumen and marketing skills are highly respected, and he has been a fan favorite on the show for his friendly and down-to-earth approach.

Anupam Mittal – Founder and CEO of People Group, Anupam Mittal is best known for his pioneering work with Shaadi.com, one of India’s largest matrimonial websites. His deep understanding of technology and marketing gives him a sharp eye for identifying promising startups in the tech space.

Ashneer Grover – Former Managing Director of BharatPe, Ashneer Grover is a well-known figure in the fintech space. He has a keen interest in tech-driven businesses and has been known to make quick, bold investment decisions on the show. His straightforward and no-nonsense attitude makes him one of the most intense judges on Shark Tank India.

Namita Thapar – Executive Director of Emcure Pharmaceuticals, Namita Thapar brings her vast experience in healthcare and pharmaceuticals to the panel. She is passionate about mentoring young entrepreneurs, especially those with ideas in the healthcare industry. Namita is also known for her calm demeanor and nurturing personality on the show.

Vineeta Singh – Co-founder and CEO of SUGAR Cosmetics, Vineeta Singh is a leading figure in India’s beauty industry. Under her leadership, SUGAR Cosmetics has grown into one of the fastest-growing beauty brands in the country. She is always on the lookout for startups that combine innovation with strong branding.

Peyush Bansal – Co-founder and CEO of Lenskart, Peyush Bansal has revolutionized the eyewear industry in India. His focus on tech-driven businesses and customer service makes him an insightful judge. Peyush is known for giving practical advice to entrepreneurs, helping them grow their businesses with a customer-first approach.

Ghazal Alagh – Co-founder of Mamaearth, Ghazal Alagh is an entrepreneur who has made a name for herself in the personal care space. Mamaearth is known for its natural, toxin-free products, and Ghazal’s passion for clean beauty shines through in her work as a judge. She often provides valuable insights to entrepreneurs in the beauty and wellness space.

How Shark Tank India Works

On Shark Tank India, entrepreneurs come onto the show with a specific business pitch. They present their business ideas, products, or services to the sharks, who then decide whether or not they want to invest. The entrepreneurs usually ask for a certain amount of money in exchange for equity in their company.

Once the pitch is presented, the sharks have the opportunity to ask questions, dig deeper into the business model, and assess the potential for growth. Based on the entrepreneur's answers, the sharks either make offers or decline to invest. Sometimes, multiple sharks show interest, leading to negotiations where the entrepreneur can choose the best offer.

The sharks bring more than just money to the table. They also offer mentorship, business connections, and strategic advice. Getting a deal on Shark Tank India can be a game-changer for startups, giving them the resources they need to grow their business quickly.

How Shark Tank India Inspires Entrepreneurs

One of the most significant impacts of Shark Tank India is the inspiration it provides to aspiring entrepreneurs. Watching the show, viewers get to see real people turning their ideas into successful businesses. The show encourages people to dream big and teaches them the importance of perseverance, creativity, and hard work.

The show has also helped break down the stigma around failure in business. Many entrepreneurs who don’t get a deal still receive valuable advice from the sharks, which helps them improve their business models and try again. It’s a great reminder that failure is just a stepping stone to success.

Shark Tank India Products

Many businesses that have appeared on Shark Tank India have gone on to achieve great success. From innovative tech products to eco-friendly solutions, these businesses have captured the imagination of both the sharks and the viewers. Shark Tank India Products has become a platform for promoting these entrepreneurial success stories.

For those interested in discovering products featured on the show, Shark Tank India Products offers a wide selection of innovative and unique items. Whether you’re looking for new gadgets, health products, or sustainable solutions, the businesses that have appeared on Shark Tank India are some of the most creative and forward-thinking in the market.

Conclusion

Shark Tank India has not only entertained millions of viewers but also played a crucial role in promoting entrepreneurship in India. With its panel of expert judges, the show provides invaluable lessons for anyone interested in business, innovation, and success. Whether you're a startup founder or simply someone with a love for great ideas, Shark Tank India is a must-watch.

#Shark Tank India Judges

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