#but the reality is the good and bad are a whole person-- Pharma

[lord-squiggletits]

The Slope by @megatron-fucks provides a great scene where Pharma gets to blow up on Ratchet about how he lost everything good in his life and faced a fate worse than death so Ratchet has no right to judge him.

But you know what else I really want to see and might write myself?

I want a post-Delphi scene where Pharma gets to verbally rip Ratchet apart about how he disowned Pharma and is acting as if the 'new Pharma' is a completely different person, but in reality Ratchet is just desperate to convince himself that Pharma was always a bad apple and the "best friend" Ratchet knew was either a lie or a person who's "died." Basically Pharma getting to lambast Ratchet about how 'the person he used to be' isn't some separate entity, that the old Pharma LITERALLY IS HIM and it's Ratchet who's a piece of shit for being unable to reconcile that Pharma could be his former best friend and also the monster he ended up becoming.

Mostly in regards to the aspect of canon where despite being former best friends, Ratchet made basically zero efforts to have any sympathy for Pharma or extend help/mercy to him and mostly used their former friendship to prey on Pharma's insecurities to manipulate him into doing what he wanted.

Of course it's a narration by Pharma so it might not be 100% correct or unbiased, but like. I just desperately crave some sort of resolution between Ratchet and Pharma. Or if not a resolution, at least some catharsis where Pharma gets to unload and Ratchet acknowledges he was a bastard.

[24x7pharma]

A Few Tips to Naturally Cure Men’s Medical Issue

In today's age, men are suffering from loads of diseases which are very harmful to their health and life. But we usually ignore this topic, and men also don't focus on their health and their medical issues that much. 

This result in permeant health disorder, and they are forced to take medications and drugs. For instance, men with erectile dysfunction prefer not to discuss their problems and don't get any treatment. They usually overdose themselves with medicine like Malegra 100 and Kamagra 100.

This is not a healthy practice. And we have written this article to help men with this issue. So they can deal with their health issues with more natural treatment and don't have to visit any medical store like 24x7 Pharma again.

Most Common Men's Health Issues

One of the men's most common health issues is erectile dysfunction, also called s ED. In this disorder, men cannot perform sexually and cannot maintain their penal activity in sexual intercourse. This disorder has been very common among men for several years now.

Most people go for medical treatment for this issue, but in reality, specific natural cures for this disorder are far more efficient and safe against this disease. We will discuss those treatments further. And some other health issues men suffer from are mentioned below:

Heart Disease

Diabetes

Stroke

Liver Diseases

HIV & AIDS

Influenza

Respiratory Diseases

Prostate Cancer

Tips to Naturally Cure Men's Health Problems

All the diseases and disorders we have mentioned are the most dangerous ones. And they highly affect your health and cause early death in men. Now, if you want to get saved from these diseases, you must focus more on your health. There are certain natural health cures which can save you from these disorders.

There is always a medical treatment for every disease, and we also suggest you all get to your doctor when you don't feel good. But these natural treatments and tips can help you become healthier without medication.

Regular Exercise

Exercise is a great activity and should be a part of every men's daily life. It has many benefits that help you live a fuller and long life. Exercise increases your body's blood flow, enabling you to cure erectile dysfunction without any medication.

It doesn't matter what type of exercise you are doing. As long you have some physical activity in your day, like walking or doing some cardio, or doing a heavy-weight workout session. Do any exercise type. Just focus on improving your body shape, immunity and strength to fight against the disease.

Healthy Diet

According to many studies, eating habits can directly affect erectile dysfunction and general health. The risk of ED is reduced by a diet high in fruit, vegetables, whole grains, and seafood and low in red meat and refined carbohydrates.

Maintaining a healthy body weight is also aided by a balanced diet, which is crucial because men with a 42-inch waist are 50% more likely to have ED than those with a 32-inch waist. Additionally, diabetes and vascular disease can be stopped and cured by maintaining a healthy diet in your daily lifestyle.

Better Sleep

It's critical to obtain good sleep each night for your general health. Proper sleep may also help with ED. According to a study, males working night shifts with poorer sleep quality were more likely to develop different health problems. According to research, those with sleep disorders were more likely to get ED.

Your testosterone levels can decrease if you don't get enough sleep, which could lead to the weakening of your natural immunity. Any person with a bad sleep routine can also suffer from mental issues.

Quit Smoking & Alcohol

For many men, quitting smoking is a treatment for many heart diseases and also erectile dysfunction, especially when the cause of the condition is vascular disorder, which is characterized by reduced blood flow as a result of blocked or narrowed arteries. 

The arteries get blocked by a carcinogen in the smoke, resulting in many heart diseases. Alcohol is also as bad for men as smoking. 

Nitric oxide, a molecule necessary for achieving and maintaining an erection, is released by the central nervous system. Heavy alcohol use depresses the central nervous system, making it less effective. Nitric oxide deficiency causes erectile dysfunction.

Stress Reduction

Along with a bad diet and lack of activity, stress was a significant reason for many diseases in men. According to the study, long-term stress may reduce testosterone levels or lead to sleep disorders, which may result in ED.

The emotional discomfort and low self-esteem are two additional mental health conditions that can develop health issues like stress, insomnia, sleeplessness and erectile dysfunction in men. These problems can be solved through therapy and mental health treatment activities.

Loss Weight

Being overweight is one of the causes of many diseases in men. If you see any person who is overweight, ask him if he has some health disorder. He will list diseases like diabetes, vascular conditions, stress, ED and many more. The cure for all those disorders is losing weight.

You can control your weight by following a healthy diet and making an exercise plan. Both of these activities are most helpful in treating obesity. You can also get help from your therapist or doctor to make you a healthy diet plan which you must follow.

Regular Medical Tests

Many diseases, like cancer, heart disorders, lung infections, kidney disease, etc., cannot be observed at early stages. And you cannot feel these diseases in your body by yourself too. That's why it is crucial to see your doctor from time to time. They will run some medical tests on you and determine your health.

They might also suggest medicine like Malegra 100 and Kamagra 100, which are very helpful against erectile dysfunction. This means it is not bad to visit a 24x7 Pharma store if it is for your health and getting health treatment after all.

How Effective Are Natural Treatments?

A lifestyle change may be an efficient natural treatment for ED and benefit your general health. But the treatments, like shedding weight, stopping smoking, or eating a healthy diet, could be challenging.

Natural remedies could also take some time to work. Some individuals may not experience improvements without medication or other therapy, depending on the underlying reason for their ED. Working with your doctors to find a solution that is effective for you is beneficial.

But these natural remedies and treatments have proven helpful in many cases. And they don't have any side effects on any person but only positive changes in your body. So beneficial or not, you must add these tips to your daily lifestyle.

Conclusion

This article could benefit you if you decide to work on your health and apply these habits to your daily life. As mentioned above, natural treatment is a risk-free and cheap way to improve your health. There are no charges or side effects of these treatments.

So whether you have erectile dysfunction or any other disease, you must work by yourself to become a healthy version. And for that, the tips mentioned above could be of great help. And even if you don't suffer from any major disorder, practice them daily. They will improve your health and immunity.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

How unions de-risk work

Yesterday, I published an essay about how monopolies beget monopolies: when deregulation kicked off a wave of pharma mergers, the new pharma oligopoly gained the power to raise prices on hospitals.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/16/wage-theft/#excessive-buyer-power

The hospitals weren't able to form a cartel to insist on better prices: the US antitrust law created by Ronald Reagan's court sorcerer Robert Bork is incredibly tolerant of monopolist price-rigging, but violently opposed to cartels that price-rig.

Rather than forming a cartel, the hospitals gobbled each other up to create monopolies. If the CEOs of six hospitals insist on better drug prices, it's illegal. If the presidents of six hospitals (all owned by the same monopolist) do the same thing, it's fine.

Big Hospital wasn't merely better positioned to demand better drug prices from Big Pharma, they were also able to charge more to the fragmented, decentralized health insurance industry.

Predictably, this kicked off a wave of mergers that produced Big Insurance, a monopolized world that gives most Americans between zero and two insurers who'll take their business.

Freed from the risk of losing customers and bulked up to meet hospital monopolies on even footings, insurance companies could both insist on lower payouts to hospitals and *higher* premiums from patients. And at last we had some sort of equilibrium.

Pharma companies could charge more for drugs, but not too much more. Hospitals could lower the standard of care, raise prices, and squeeze workers' wages and working conditions. Insurance companies could cut payments to hospitals, raise prices and hike co-pays.

Everyone got what they wanted, except for two groups that can't form monopolies that push back against this monopoly-dominated industry:

* Patients, and

* Workers

Historically, the "monopolist" safeguarding patients' interests was the state: democratically elected lawmakers who relied on voters for re-election. The massive increase in corporate campaign finance was attended by steady erosion of political loyalty to the public interest.

And so the public lost its champion, and prices went up and quality went down and redress was whittled away to performative apologies after crises of too great a magnitude to be ignored, accompanied by fines that were mere fractions of the profits from corruption.

Meanwhile, workers' champions were their unions: solidarity organizations that corrected the negotiating imbalance between employers and employees by presenting a united front.

That unity extended beyond the gates of a single employer. Picket-line crossing was a grave sin, so if your hotel's maids went out on strike, the Teamsters wouldn't deliver your groceries and the taxi cabs wouldn't pick up at your entrance.

And related trades were able to bargain together: in Hollywood, the writers and actors and tradespeople would start each contract season by visiting the weakest studio as a body and demand the best deal, then require parity from other studios in turn.

Since the Reagan years, union power has been drained off. For example, the way Hollywood unions negotiate has been flipped on its head. Now, the *studios* visit the weakest union as a body and demand the most labor concessions, then take those to the other unions in turn.

It's been generations since union power was a given, and we haven't just lost our power, we've lost our imaginations - the sense of what is possible, what we are owed, how the system could work. We've learned to take precarity and low wages as a given.

That's why Reina Sultan's "8 People Describe How Unions Changed Their Lives" for Vice is so important: not because it is heartwarming (though it is) but because it is ripe with possibility, the recovered wisdom of a fallen civilization.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/bvxqvm/why-unions-are-good-first-hand-accounts-of-how-unions-change-lives

These eight workers describe how joining a union turned precarity into certainty. How the hotels they worked for had to promise to hire them back after the pandemic lifted. How they were promised ten hours of uninterrupted sleep between shifts.

How their employers had to accommodate their disabilities. How they were guaranteed health insurance that covered their whole families. How they were protected from being arbitrarily fired, and guaranteed severance pay when they were laid off.

These guarantees have a common theme: they de-risk being a worker and make it riskier to be an employer. Much of our day-to-day life is a series of negotiations over who should bear the risk that things will turn out bad.

Think of all the corporate bailouts, how these are "socialism for shareholders, capitalism for workers." When the fed bails out banks and employers but not mortgage holders and workers, they move risk off the finance-sector's balance sheet and stick it on our balance sheet.

When you run a business, you assume risks. Maybe you have a slow Saturday and end up paying workers to hang around with nothing to do. If you can book a worker's Sat, but unilaterally send them home two hours into their shift because it's slow, you shift your risk onto them.

The worker has to be available for you, but you don't have to use that availability. Likewise disability accommodations: when you hire and train a worker, you face the risk that they will become disabled, permanently or temporarily, on or off the job.

When that happens, you might have to pay to change the physical environment so they can do their job, or give them disability pay. If you can just fire them, you shift the risk onto the worker, and off your own books.

Every benefit described by workers in Way's article is risk being shifted from workers back onto employers. The right not to be summarily fired means workers aren't at risk from vindictive, bad bosses. It also means employers may struggle to shed "low-performing" workers.

It's a good reminder of the "struggle" in "class struggle." These risks are, by their nature, zero-sum. To decrease the risk of being stuck with a bad employee, you have to *increase* the risk of an employee being targeted by a bad manager. There's no win-win here.

Sure, employers will say that they share the workers' interest in rooting out bad managers, but there is an inescapable contradiction between reserving the right to fire anyone, for any reason, and making sure workers aren't unjustly fired.

The same goes for every benefit articulated by union members. If you're an electrician who wants to be able to get home, sleep and go back to work without being interrupted for ten straight hours, you push risk onto your employer.

Meanwhile, if you *don't* have that right, your employer gets to shove risk onto you. For example, they could underinvest in upgrades and preventative maintenance, knowing that when things break down, they can summon you to get them working again, without paying any overtime.

The project of worker solidarity comes down to this foundational question: who should bear which risks? Would you rather have bad bosses firing people over personal vendettas, or co-workers who are hard to fire even though they're not great at their jobs?

We don't need to pretend that moving risk onto employers' side of the ledger always produces better outcomes. It doesn't. Workers can be jerks, too. But an individual bad boss has the power to do enormous harm to their entire workforce over a long term.

Think of all the people maimed, killed and sickened in Amazon's warehouses because of one individual's willingness and ability to shift risk off his balance sheet and onto theirs.

It's true that an especially toxic unionized worker could make life miserable for many, many other workers - but that's still a better outcome than an especially toxic CEO, not least because unions give workers the power to address bad workers even when management won't.

Is it possible for things to be overbalanced, for too much risk to be shifted off of worker's balance sheets and onto employers' side of the ledger? Sure, theoretically. But that is a situation so far removed from workplace reality today that it's practically a fairy-tale.

And if we're really worried about too much risk landing on employers, then we can go back to the peoples' source of power: democratic governance. Unions represent a power-bloc that can (but don't always) hold politicians to account.

It's hard to imagine any political path to checking corporate power that doesn't include organized groups of workers *and* organized groups of citizens, working for political change.

If health insurance, disability accommodations, retirement pay, parental leave and other sources of workplace risk are moved onto the public's balance sheet, they cease to be things that workers or employers need to argue about. They're just a given.

Think of it this way: bosses and workers don't fight over who will pay to pave the roads to the business. They don't fight over who will fight fires, or allocate RF frequency for the office wireless network. These risks are moved to the public ledger, where they belong.

This kind of political change is also hard to imagine, after 40 years of Reaganomics. But unionization makes it more achievable, because another word for "risk" is "profit." Shifting risk from workers onto bosses shifts money from bosses to workers.

Monopolized employers extract monopoly rents from their customers and gouge monopoly concessions from their workers. This isn't just extra money to send to shareholders - it's also extra money to spend in the political realm, blocking reforms that benefit everyone.

That's how we get wage stagnation and ghouls like Manchin and Sinema tanking the $15 minimum wage. The money extracted from workers was sent to these politicians so they would vote to make it possible to keep extracting money from workers.

Unionization - workplace justice - doesn't win the war for political justice. But it *does* cut the enemy's supply lines, deprive them of the ammo they're using to fight us.

Image: still from "Union Maids" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=74gvcvXlgnM

[hephs-thighs]

Let’s be real about two things: The betrayal-then-regret arcs of both Booker and Copley are the weakest aspects of The Old Guard’s story, and Booker feeling sad in no way mitigates the seriousness of his betrayal.

I've got no real beef with the betrayal arcs motivating the plot because something has to and it’s more interesting than just an Evil CEO being the source of all problems all on his own.  I’m still going to criticize them for being illogical and uncommitted.

On Copley: His arc mainly makes me roll my eyes because he has the audacity to go all Pikachu Face Of Surprise when what he’s been plotting to make happen for the whole movie is exactly what happens.  He explicitly knew The Old Guard would be violently captured and submitted to nonconsensual medical testing.  After Joe and Nicky were captured, he also knew Merrick was both sadistic and intending to never free them.  He still proceeded to capture Andy too.  The only thing that was a surprise was Andy’s mortality, and you can’t tell me he values mortal life highly when he sacrificed a dozen people for footage of The Old Guard resurrecting.  His regret is made even more ridiculous with the fact that he’s not only aware but obsessed with all the good The Old Guard does by being free and out there in the world.

On Booker: If he wanted a Suicide Serum, he could’ve just gone to Merrick himself.  Betraying the team was completely unnecessary.  It’s that simple, it’s just a weak point in the writing, let’s move on.

Booker does not deserve the team’s forgiveness.  If someone tries to condemn you to unending captivity and torment, that’s not a person you should welcome back into your life.  No matter how mentally ill they are.  Booker’s serious emotional pain is worthy of our empathy, he’s suffering and only sees one possible end to that suffering, but that motive doesn’t make his acts any less reprehensible (or any more pardonable) than if he were after money or power.  He considered his friends’ freedom and safety something he had the right to trade away for his own gain.  He and Copley also took the lives of dozens of mercenaries and guards - oh their lives don’t count, you say, they were clearly irredeemably evil and deserved to die for participating in this terrible thing.  But uh, so were Booker and Copley.  They came up with the terrible thing.

Here’s a take I haven’t seen anyone else floating yet: There’s no real evidence Booker regrets his betrayal.  Like Copley, he’s only opposed to what’s happening when Andy’s mortality is revealed.  I think his apology to her is for causing her to die imminently or to die eventually in captivity.  He’s still justifying his actions to Joe when they’re both strapped to dissection tables.  I think in that moment, he would have preferred their captivity and testing to continue.  Because other than Andy’s mortality, it’s exactly what he wanted.  The team being hurt and upset with him wasn’t an unexpected part of the plan.

I think in reality he must feel bad about what he did to the team, at least eventually or on some level.  But all he actually says on the matter later is that the team can’t really decide to punish him because they can’t kill him.  He expected and accepted time alone as punishment, but he doesn’t act repentant.  Or express any repentance on screen other than continuing to look like as much of a sad sack as he did at the start of the movie.

Here’s where I betray myself from three paragraphs ago: The team has to forgive Booker, and I don’t think they should have sent him away.

Because this isn’t reality with real relationships, it’s a story.  Fate/destiny has a very clear influence in The Old Guard’s world, and the characters’ surety in that is only increasing.  Booker is meant to be with them.  They need space and time away from him, and they shouldn’t trust him to know where they sleep at night, lest he call another Pharma SWAT Squad down upon them, but isolating him for a century is only going to worsen his mental illness and make him care even less about them.  Their hard feelings may have lessened in 100 years, but they’d be bringing back someone even less trustworthy than before.

Booker being made to suffer more does nothing to address the issues behind his actions, and it does nothing to make amends to the rest of the team.  I know I’m far from the only one saying it: Booker needs therapy.  Lots of it.  Group therapy for the team too.  If they want to be collectively safe and sane, they need to work through their problems, not just “move past” them.  Okay I’m done.

[stlplaybox]

The Home Stretch

This week marks the beginning of the end. The crew that we’ve come to know and love will careen into into their final story arc. But instead of conjecturing about the mountain of questions that remain unanswered, I want to spend some time honing in on the key pieces on the elaborate chessboard that James Roberts has setup. After all, what is MTMTE/Lost Light other than the sum part of the characters it has woven together?

The question I want to explore is this: who are the key players that will shape this final story arc? If we can guess who, we have an idea of what’s at stake, what to look out for, and, most importantly, how are hearts are going to be broken. 

Like my write up of who was likely to survive the Dying of the Light, I’m going to give the odds of each character playing a big role as I expect (hope).

Naturally, before we proceed, a heavy SPOILERS reminder. If you haven’t already caught up, please don’t proceed past this point. 

The Set Pieces

Rodimus: This is Rodimus’ story. This is his quest. This is his ship. These are his friends. Lost Light has always been about the story of how the unlikeliest of bots banded together on the unlikeliest of journeys and became the unlikeliest of friends. Deep down Rodimus has always known this wasn’t about the quest. He made this concession early in the opening salvo of Dark Cybertron before Getaway or Megatron came aboard. Deep down this is all that matters to Rodimus. At it’s core, this is why Rodimus hates Getaway. Their confrontation will be brutal as Rodimus must come to terms with the damage that Getaway has inflicted. 

Odds: A Sure Bet.

Getaway: There is no Getaway without Rodimus. A bot who has lost his way and committed to his dark path, he must come colliding with the bots that he resented and displaced. We may not be certain of what fate the rest of the Lost Light has succumbed to, but Getaway’s confrontation with Rodimus and crew will be a chilling contrast to what life used to be aboard the Lost Light.

Odds: A Sure Bet.

Ratchet vs Pharma: Apart from the foreshadowing in Lost Light #1, you don’t reveal Cyberutopia as being an eerie science fiction take on euthanasia and palliative care without these two characters clashing again. Ratchet has been a big heart of this book and there’s no better way to raise the stakes than forcing a confrontation with the bot that resents him more than anything else in this universe. If you think back to Ratchet’s story arc at the start of season one, this surely comes full circle.

Odds: A Sure Bet.

Drift: One of the key players from the start, we know there has always been, pardon the pun, more than meets the eye with Drift. Issue #18’s revelations will undoubtedly have an important impact on Drift but there’s still too much about Drift that’s been left vague. On a ship of misfits who were always looking for anything else but the reality of post war life, he’s always had an angle. Now we’re going to get to find out exactly what.

Odds: A Sure Bet.

Rung: He’s been primed for this. If there was ever a moment he was going to shine, this is it. All the pieces are in play. The sparks, the blacksmith, the whole forged vs constructed cold. The Lost Light’s opening arc was a vehicle that set up Rung’s potential and there’s no way JRo is letting this one through to the keeper. Rung prime must star.

Odds: A Sure Bet.

The Grand Architect: the identity of this bot is the biggest mystery. I have a few loose theories but nothing that’s convincing but we’ll leave that for another time. I’m convinced whoever they are revealed to be, it’ll be critical to shaping the final trajectory of the our beloved crew.

Odds: A Sure Bet.

Nautica: The themes of memory, revisionism and identity have been core to MTMTE/Lost Light since the beginning. Skids was a key exponent of this and his death triggered something in Nautica. In trying to save one of her dearest friends, Nautica lost her memories of ever loving him and this is biggest note that can be sounded to tell this story. The consequences have been tragic for us the reader to watch but it does not come full circle until Nautica herself realises the price she has paid. Strap yourselves in. This is going to hurt.

Odds: 95%

Anode: Brought on at the start of Season 3, the obnoxious and brash blacksmith’s skills clearly have a key part to play. How? I’m not sure, but that the Grand Architect was responsible for sending her on the quest in Lost Light #1, means she has a large role in the coming conflict. 

Odds: 95%

The Wildcards

First Aid: If there is one character who owes so much to the Lost Light, it’s First Aid. Rescued from the dreariness that was Delphi, he found his identity and home  onboard the Lost Light. From the companionship of other minibots who he watched movies with to being anointed the Chief Medical Officer, First Aid is mortified by his role in enabling Getaway to assume control of the Lost Light. It’s personal now and I can’t see First Aid not coming back to make things right.

Odds: 90%

Megatron: Will Megatron return in the darkest hour? A la Drift and Ratchet in the Dying of the Light? I believed this with full certainty at first. But I wavered on this after a great debate with my dear friend (@SeanV2) but then my memory went back to some of Megatron’s own words: 

“Sometimes, you look back on your life - on your life’s work and you realise that it’s unsalvageable.  And if you’re brave enough - or desperate enough - you throw it all away and start again. On Luna 2, I threw it all away. And here on this ship, I started again.” 

Megatron never wanted to stay in the Functionist Universe. It was Terminus who entrapped him. For Megatron to complete his arc, he must come back. He may never atone for the atrocities he’s committed but coming back means that he’s desperate enough to salvage his second lease on life and make it count on the ship that gave it to him. 

But what about the mechanics of getting him back, you say? Let’s not forget the liberties that are afforded to a writer when said titular character carries around an inter dimensional wormhole in his gut.

James Roberts has also on the record said that he needed to move Megatron from the board to focus on the core characters. He also said that this was the last we’d seen of the Scavengers. Go figure.

Odds: 85%

Grimlock: The big bad of Autobot fandom has been simmering away in the IDW universe and this is his moment to shine. He’s been there since the beginning and we’ve watched as he’s slowly pulled himself back together with the help of the Scavengers. We’ve seen him take command of a situation already but he’s also carrying the child and I can’t see Grimlock role not having a pivotal role in all this.  

Odds: 80%

Deathsaurus: With Nickel’s role in helping him realise the bigger picture, I can’t see Deathsaurus not coming for her. And in doing so, Deathsaurus brings a disenfranchised arm of the Decepticon cause in this post war environment back to the chessboard. This is important as a core component of the MTMTE lore has been to question the black and white roles of Autobot and Decepticons. Bringing them to the fold in this finale offers an x-factor in the moral quagmire that is MTMTE/Lost Light.

Odds: 60%

The Dark Horses

Overlord: if there is something brewing in the Transformers Universe, the Galactic Council will no doubt have their eyes on this. What better way to bring a loose cannon into the fold than this? There’s an unsolved mystery here as well. The Galactic Council has been lurking in the shadows since the early days of MTMTE and I think it’s high time we got the answer to how they tamed a Phase Sixer that Megatron could barely keep in check.

Odds: 40%.

Roller: Why bring back a character who has contributed so little? Don’t get me wrong, I’ve loved his appearances in the flashbacks but there’s been nothing potent and imposing about his presence yet. I refuse to believe James brought him back purely as eye candy (and that he is!). That said, I’ve looked hard but I’m unsure how he fits in this end game so all I’m going on is that he had to be brought back for a reason.

Odds: 10%

Fortress Maximus & Red Alert: These two were pretty much there at the beginning. That they went to Necroworld where things have gone awol, will have give them a trail to follow. Realistically they maybe will have a cameo at best but I think I speak for a lot of us when I drool over the prospect of the newest Enforcer of the Tyrest Accord confronting Scorponok. 

Odds: 10% 

So there it is. My hypothesising about who would die in Dying of the Light was pretty good. Will I be as lucky this time? Let’s strap ourselves in for the final ride and see how we go this time.

[bitcofun]

The big modifications in the crypto exchange market on Nov. 8 resulted in similarly huge waves of commentary. The UpOnlyTV channel on Twitch was a recipient of this activity, with Do Kwon and Martin Shkreli appearing all at once to speak about the offer in between Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao (CZ) and FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) for the purchase of FTX. Shkreli, often described as the "Pharma Bro" for his function because market prior to his conviction for securities scams, had doubts that the Binance-FTX offer would exercise. "I believe the hole [FTX's balance sheet shortage] is a lot larger than individuals believe and I believe there's a likelihood Binance leaves, and I believe that 'd be horrible," Shkreli stated. Kwon, whose Terra Labs released the TerraUSD (UST) stablecoin, now referred to as TerraUSD Classic (USTC), that collapsed catastrophically in May, had more self-confidence in the offer, stating: " I'm presuming the list price is at an affordable discount rate to whatever the personal financing round was, however if CZ actions in and makes users entire, there's no reason that he [SBF] would remain in any significant distress. He'll most likely proceed to something else." But, when asked if he would purchase an SBF start-up, Kwon demurred. "I'm very little of a financier," he stated. "I believe it's prematurely to inform." Speaking about the function of his "blowing and personality" in the Terra/Luna collapse, Kwon stated, "I do not believe that what occurred with UST would have been any various if the method I performed myself on Twitter was various. In fact, how I remain in reality and how I am on Twitter is quite various. [...] There is worth in being amusing and amusing."" Well, in the list of bad guys for this year, Do is moving even more down," Wintermute CEO Evgeny Gaevoy, another visitor on the program, yielded. "It's not that bad any longer, I think, compared to Alameda and Three Arrows. [...] He was a bit arrogant, however whatever." Another visitor called him, "A sociopath, to be blunt," including, "I'm not a big fan." Commenters on the live stream disappeared flexible. "DO KWON HAS TO PAY FOR MY LOSSES," one composed. "SCAM KWON TO JAIL," composed another. Kwon did not react to the speakers however later on stated, "I believe what has actually been truly valuable is the assistance of individuals we have actually dealt with for many years. I believe the bad promotion has actually made it actually hard for them to speak up in favor, in defense of what occurred with UST, however I 'd like to believe that, for individuals we've dealt with for a very long time, we've had a chance to show our character and our great objectives." Related: Binance's FTX acquisition seen as chess relocation by crypto neighborhood Shkreli thought about the existing circumstance a low point, stating: " If the whole banking system got intoxicated or high or something, this is how it would run? You have genuine grownups in the space in genuine banking and perhaps that's due to the fact that of regulators and possibly it's not." Shkreli included, taking a poke at Binance by duplicating an unproven report, "The most significant issue is that we do not understand what Binance's balance sheet is. Why are we relying on these men? [...] It's a CCP appendage." - FTX covertly insolvent - BTC screening brand-new lows - Alameda toast - Binance preparation to get FTX - FTT down 80% headed to 0 - CZ reveals evidence of reserves - Su Zhu reappears - Do Kwon and Martin Shkreli on UpOnly - Coinbase momentarily down How was your day at the workplace?-- Yassine Elmandjra (@yassineARK) November 8, 2022 Shkreli was understanding to Kwon, nevertheless, informing him: " I simply wish to let you understand prison's not that bad, it's not the worst thing ever, so do not worry. I hope it does not take place. If it does occur, it's not that bad."" Good to understand," Kwon responded, despite the fact that he began his discussion on the podcast by stating "I do not believe I'm on the run.

[petitelepus]

Big Mouth, Big Troubles Part, 3

Enjoy some fighting! ^3^ Tagging @rocksinmuffin since she has been part of this kinda from the beginning and she deserves to know how Swerve’s fate continues. ^v^

Swerve was quiet for the whole trip back to sky-high apartment, which his owner didn’t seem to mind. All poor white mech could think about was the sight of his owner’s spike stretching valve as big as Tarn’s like it almost couldn’t fit there. She was so huge that she made even a warborn groan in mild pain during fragging…!

Swerve couldn’t help but to fear for his life. What would happen to him if she decided to frag him? She could literally kill her with her spike only! Oh how he wished he could be free or at least live with Nickel and Pharma… They didn’t appear to be treated badly.

Once they made it back the femme lead him to living room where she made Swerve kneel before her as she took a seat on the couch.

The minibot could feel coolant collecting in his armour seams. Her crotch was almost directly in front of his face…! One klick and she could just pop her spike out and force poor Swerve to take it in his mouth…!

He shivered and weeped quietly, panic steadily seeping into his voice. Slowly, his owner moved her hand down, lower and lower….! Swerve shut his optics tight and there was a click and a loud sob escaped past his lips.

”Why are you crying? Does your intake hurt that much?”

It was about to… Swerve swallowed a lump in his intake and forced his optics open… Only to see his owner’s interface panel still closed. He blinked, coolant in his eyes stinging and looked up. It wasn’t his owners interface panel that he had heard open, it was a bottle of lotion.

There was another click and suddenly the collar around minibot’s intake fell to the ground. Swerve was baffled and didn’t know what to do, especially when his owner pushed the bottle into his palms and got up.

”Rub it on yourself and clean here while I’m gone. Don’t do anything stupid.” She warned him and left through the balcony, making sure to lock the door behind her.

Swerve let out a breath he didn’t realise he had been holding and visibly relaxed. He was safe. Not for good, but safe for now. The minibot looked at the lotion in his hands and mindfully took a little drop of cyan coloured lotion that he spread to his intake.

The lotion was cool against his throbbing intake. The pain from earlier when she had thrown him against the wall had disappeared ages ago, but the collar squeezed his intake and caused bruising on it. Swerve would leave it be as long as possible before she would make him wear it again.

The metallurgist looked around the apartment, daring himself to get up and wander a little bit in peace, now that his owner wasn’t there following his every move.

The apartment was clean — pristine clean. There were no traces of broken table from last night, no energon stains, dust, nothing! What was he suppose to clean? The weirdest thing must have been however how there was nothing personal in whole apartment. No pictures, datapads or anything! It was like she had no personal life or history.

Swerve walked into the kitchen. He doubted he had permission to eat anything, but he could look, right? He pulled the fridge’s door open and was shocked by what he found. A couple cubes of energon and cube after cube of something else. Swerve had an idea of what it was, but he couldn’t be sure until he tried some.

Carefully, he lifted one lid off from a cube of colourful yellow liquid, dipped his finger in and brought it to his lips for a taste. Swerve coughed and quickly put the lid back on it’s place.

Engex, just like he thought and strong one. The metallurgist had some background info about different drinks and such, but this was no doubt black market engex, made by outcast mechs who hid their little factories from officers of law. It was famous for being cheap, but strong as highest grade.

Though it didn’t come without it’s dangers…

Swerve shook his helm and shut the fridge’s door. It wasn’t his business what his owner digested… The minibot wondered around the apartment, looking and searching for something to do or a way to escape perhaps. He knew it would be foolish to try to actually escape, but if he found a way and planned his escape carefully then he could have had a chance.

Sadly, the apartment was very minimalistic. Kitchen, living area, bedroom, balcony door and a another locked door between bedroom and balcony. Swerve tried to open it, only to get an error so he didn’t bother with it anymore. Without the code he could do nothing, just like with the balcony.

In his defeat, Swerve took the most out from the situation and boldly moved to sit on the couch, only to falter and settle on the floor. He was so afraid of his master that he didn’t even dare to disobey or do anything that could set her off, even if she was not home. At least he could rest his head against the soft couch and that moment he felt a little better.

Maybe he could take a nap. He didn’t sleep that well thanks to earlier night’s nightmares and his owner’s violent outburst. Little in his mind, the minibot let his mind wonder into dreamlands.

Swerve didn’t actually dream, he was just wondering from darkness to light and back. Maybe it was stress or fear, but when he heard the tiniest click through his hazy dream he bolted upright. The balcony’s door creaked open and Swerve’s owner stepped inside with a box in her arms.

Swerve forced himself to smile, even if it came out as awkward. ”H- Hi, welcome back! H- How was your trip, good I hope!”

”Where’s your collar?” The purple con asked, ignoring Swerve’s attempts to start a conversation. The minibot’s smile dropped as he looked down and picked up his collar, obediently putting it back around his neck and clamping it shut.

The femme nodded, mumbling something incoherent under her breath and took the box to the kitchen. When she returned, she was carrying a small cube of energon which she brought to Swerve. ”Drink. Then you get to go to sleep.”

The metallurgist nodded and thankfully took the cube from his owner. Instead of gulping the energon down like he had done day before and at morning, he took mindful sips and his sweet time with it. The femme didn’t seem to mind it, but once he was done she silently ushered him into the berth room.

Swerve sighed as he crawled underneath the berth and curled over himself. Maybe he could have some peace this night? His wishes were short lived, just as were his dreams and nightmares again. Hours after midnight there was a loud crash that sent the minibot in such panic that he accidentally slammed the top of his helm against the berth above him.

Groaning and whimpering in pain, Swerve made his way out from under the berth and carefully made his way to the door. He pushed his audial receivers against the heavy door and tried to listen any noises from other room, but he only got handful of words here and there.

Was his owner with someone? He wasn’t sure and when Swerve opened the door and stepped out of the berth room, he felt like he made the biggest mistake in his life, the second being rising his hand against a mech higher than him. His owner was stumbling from side from side, walking between room while taking support from the wall.

”Fragging told you… You scrap for heads…” She grumbled before shattering the cube in her hand to the opposite wall and shouting, ”It was a suicide mission! You murderer!”

Swerve swallowed a lump in his intake. Even without ever seeing the effects of black market engex in flesh, he knew the tell-a-tale signs of the side effects the engex had. Nausea, momentary blindness, hallucinations, paranoia and finally after everything memory loss. Swerve’s purple owner wouldn’t probably remember anything that has happened tomorrow if she kept drinking as she was, but for now, being close to her was dangerous as frag.

The metallurgist moved to back up back into berth room, but when his pede hit the edge of the door with soft thump he froze and his owner snapped her helm towards him. Swerve froze in horror and before he could even mutter an apology, the femme had jumped over the couch and ran to him.

”Minibot!? Are you a bomber!?” She shouted at Swerve’s face, anger and fury very evident on her voice and the minibot shook in fear. Wherever she was she wasn’t in reality at the moment. It was common practise during war times that quick and agile minibots would be used as suicide bombers as they could make it to the enemy territory without being detected, but Swerve would have never passes for one with his bulky frame.

Not that it mattered to her. With a single hand she lifted Swerve from the ground and threw him to the berth room’s wall. The minibot hit the wall painfully hard, a pained cry leaving his mouth as he fell to the ground. Next thing he knew, the door was shut and locked after him. Swerve whimpered and crawled his way back under the berth. For now, it was the only place he felt safe in whole universe.

He regretted stepping outside of the berth room without thinking the situation through… And now… Now Swerve had an idea what his life would turn out to be…

Next morning couldn’t have come any quicker. The white mech slowly and carefully made his way outside of the berth room and there his owner was again, sitting and holding her helm in her hands. Usually black market engex gave similar relaxing and intoxicating effects as any other engex, but some bad patches gave the side effects Swerve had witnessed last night and next day would be spent in processor pains and memory loss.

There was a stingy sour smell that made minibot’s tank twist in nausea and he noticed a large bowl next to his owner’s feet. He put two and two together with experience. At some point during the night cycle, she had purged her tanks empty from poisonous engex. Good part was that she wasn’t probably in tremendous pains or in sour mood, bad part was that she was probably on a bad mood.

When Swerve had been a helper in a bar, he was usually made do the jobs no one else wanted. Wipe people’s puke from floors on his hands and knees as overcharged mechs would spill and sometimes pour engex over him on purpose and laugh at his expense was the main job of his and as humiliating it was it kept him from becoming a plaything. Until the other day.

Doing what he knew best, Swerve approached the bowl, ready to pick it up and get rid of the waste inside it, but just as he was about to pick it up his owner snatched it from his reach. ”I’ll take care of it…” She grumbled as she got up and walked off to the kitchen. Swerve felt neither happy or sad. He felt hopeless.

Everything fell into a routine of some sorts after that. His owner would wake up before him and just sit and space out for bigger parts of the day, put him to berth and start drinking until she would fall into recharge middle of the night. Sometimes Swerve would wake up in middle of night to his owners awful retching as she emptied her engex filled tank.

Some days she locked Swerve outside of the berth room for her private time. The small mech couldn’t see what she did there but he could hear her groaning here and there and he had an idea what happened. At those points he was just glad he was on other side of the door, but for how long?

The constant fear of becoming killed or molested had the minibot on the edge and it took it’s toll on his mental health. Swerve would wake up on his own, get energon, sleep till night, get more energon then go to sleep again. He saw no real point of staying awake when all his owner did was neglected him most parts to the point he would even welcome some roughhousing and pain.

One day Swerve’s owner walked up to minibot while he was doing dishes. The white mech kept his gaze solemnly in hot bubble water, not daring to take his optics off from it or look at his owner.

”Are you healthy pet?”

The question came so out of blue that poor Swerve almost dropped a slippery cube in his chubby fingers. The panicky minibot quickly turned to look at his owner staring down at him without a hint of emotion visible in her field.

Swerve gulped and put on his biggest winner smiles. ”W- Why wouldn’t I be, ha ha, you take such a good care of me, feed me and I’m just overall happy!”

”Happy?” She inquired and the minibot had to fight against flinch. The very word sounded so foreign to him when heard from other people’s mouth. Like a lost memory… Swerve forced himself to smile as he nodded. ”Y- Yeah! This is me, happy as I can be, there is no place I rather be or belong to, ha ha!”

His owner kept staring at him and the minibot felt so painful to force himself to laugh so freely. He couldn’t remember when he had truly laughed in joy. Finally, the purple femme nodded and said the words Swerve dreaded to hear his whole life as a plaything.

”We’re going to Colosseum.”

Swerve shook in his armour. There he was, in V.I.P room meant for biggest bidders and gladiator owners, shaking so hard that his amour almost rattled against his protoform. He could feel mechs left and right, all big guys in status and size eyeing him up and down. Some gave him death glares like his breathing only was a insult towards them and some looked him with lust in their optics. Swerve wasn’t sure who he feared most. Then Overlord decided to appear and suddenly he knew who to fear the most.

”Oh, you have no idea how glad I am to see you!” The giant mech beamed and at first Swerve thought he was talking to his owner standing beside him, but when the blue mech kneeled before minibot to pinch his cheeks he realised he was talking about him.

”You’re the one that got away from me… Here to sell him for me? I knew you’d come over when you ran out of shanix.” Overlord laughed as he shot a grin at Swerve’s owner. She wasn’t happy, slapping mech’s hands off from Swerve and the minibot couldn’t have been anymore thankful.

”Frag off, I’m here to place a bet.” She grunted and pulled Swerve tight against her leg, much to minibot’s dismay. What was with bigger mechs and their possessive attitude?

”Oh? Interesting. Who are you placing your money on? We have Deathstrap going, Ironmine fighting and the veteran Goldfang.” Overlord intrigued with a nasty smile. Swerve shivered in fear. All those mechs sounded like big deals…! He couldn’t possibly fight against them so they would probably put him as chew toy. Mechs would bet how long Swerve would live through torture or how long the mech could keep Swerve alive through the torture… Either way, Swerve was doomed.

He was just about to give up on his brave shell and start crying on the spot when his owner surprised him. ”None of them. I’m placing my money on myself.”

Swerve’s optics snapped open behind his visor and he looked at his owner. She would fight? Sure, she was a warborn, but with what at state? Overlord seemed to think same as Swerve because he grinned and rose to his full height. ”Oh? What did you think of betting on? If I remember correctly, you’re poor as rustrat.”

Swerve couldn’t see his owners face through her face guard, but he could sense in her field how she was agitated and angry. ”You don’t take credit, do you?” She inquired and Overlord smirked. ”None. You bet what you can with and that’s it.”

Swerve hoped that it would be it, that her owner would let things go and just take him back to her apartment and have him clean and sleep like usually, but no, she wouldn’t let it go.

”Then I’m placing him as my bet.” She said as she laid her hand over Swerve’s shoulder plate and he froze in horror and took a double look at his owner. She was completely serious. Overlord grinned harder. ”Are you sure? Playthings come with ease these days. He won’t be worth much for me.”

”I see how you look at him…!” She all but hissed at his face. ”You want him so he’s worth something for you. I’m betting him. 100 000 shanix if I win against your toughest gladiator and if I loose he’s yours.”

”Fight until the death?” Overlord proposed. Swerve’s owner nodded. ”Until the death.”

”Deal!” Overlord laughed and shook hands with Swerve’s owner. Swerve watched in fear and horror how they exchanged their credit informations and next thing he knew, he was pulled aside by pretty femmes that took care of him, asking if he wanted something to drink or eat. Not that he could eat or anything, he just walked with them until he was on the giant glass wall that gave huge view on the stadium.

Swerve gulped as he took a seat on the tiny seat offered to him by lovely mech and he felt himself rattle again in stress. If his owner lost she would not only loose her life but loose him! Swerve didn’t know which he cared more, that his master put his and her lives at stake or that they could both die depending on the results of this fight!

There was a loud cheer as next champion gladiators were made public. Rigorkill and Swerve’s owner. They pronounced her name, but Swerve couldn’t hear it over the noises his spark made in horror.

He watched as his owner and a mech just as big as her took the podium and he shivered in fear at the sight, silently hoping his owner would come victorious. All that hoped died before him as Overlord took a seat next to him. He grinned down at Swerve. ”Nervous?”

Swerve opened his mouth to speak, but wisely close it. Overlord laughed. ”You should be! Rigorkill hasn’t lost a single battle since I found him and he’s always thirsty for energon…!”

Swerve gulped and next thing he knew the audience outside the V.I.P room cheered as the match started.

The minibot watched in horror how Rigorkill went straight after his owner, throwing punches at her that could easily take off a bot’s or con’s helm, but Swerve’s owner dodged each punch and returned the punches with her own jabs but he dodged them also.

Swerve watched how both tried to go for the quick kill, but neither could land a blow so they switched strategies. Rigorkill tried to throw a punch at her face, but she dodged quickly to the right and punched him to his abdomen.

Rigorkill recoiled and grabbed hold of her arm still lodged in his abdomen and twisted, horrifying crunch sound leaving from the purple femme’s arm. Swerve’s owner groaned in pain and quickly tore her claws through mech’s face, being the first one to draw energon.

Rigorkill howled in pain, backing up and holding his bleeding face. The audience cheered at the sight of blood and Swerve felt sick how people could enjoy this. The purple femme took hold of his arms and pulled and Swerve felt like retching at the sight of his owner trying to rip opponent’s arms off, but failing as Rigorkill recovered and slammed his bloody face into femme’s face.

Swerve’s owner recoiled, now holding her own face as her mask cracked and fell onto ground with a sad thud. That’s where her downfall started. She wouldn’t let her face be seen, keeping hand over her lower face and with her other arm twisted she was a standing open target to Rigorkill to toy with. The crow was going wild as the battle went on and Swerve watched with cold energon in his cables how his owner took a punch after another from her opponent.

She was barely even fighting anymore, rather taking hits and blows than giving them. It felt to Swerve like she had given up the moment her face was was revealed. Why wasn’t she fighting anymore? A large hand wrapped around the minibot’s body and suddenly Swerve rose into air and found himself sitting over Overlord’s lap.

Poor minibot flinched and tried not to twist, but then Overlord laid his hands over Swerve’s chubby thighs and pulled them apart. Swerve twisted around the best he could and shot the warborn panicked look. ”Wh- what!? Why!? The match is still going on!”

That didn’t stop Overlord’s advantages as he raked his fingers through Swerve’s armour’s seams. ”You’re already as good as mine…!”

The distressed Swerve tried to look help from other V.I.P area’s mechs and femmes, but everyone ignored him, completely oblivious on purpose to Overlord’s claiming.

”I knew your master wouldn’t fight with her face out for everyone to see…! That’s what I told Rigorkill and he did just as I instructed him to do…!” He purred as he twisted tip of his servo between Swerve’s legs to his interface panels. Swerve whimpered out loud and tried to move bigger mech’s hands away but he was too weak to fight against warborn warrior.

”I certainly hope you’re as tiny down there as you look… I do love it when you playthings bleed when I frag you raw…!” Overlord rubbed Swerve panel harder and Swerve whimpered, pleasure building slowly in his processor, but even greater shame rose behind it. He couldn’t let this happen, please someone, anyone, save him…!

He forced his gaze to the stadium and shame and embarrassment washed over him at the sight before him. The whole audience had a good look at Swerve being molested from jumbo screen and so did his owner. The femme stared at the image of Swerve’s mouth gaping as Overlord’s servos rubbed between his legs and suddenly something clicked in place. She let her hand fall from her face and she went offensive, attacking and returning everything Rigorkill gave her.

She punched him, tore her claws over his protective armour as she aimed for the cables beneath and even went as far as using her twisted arm, which Rigorkill grabbed with her next sloppy move and tore off from her body!

The audience went wild as purple femme dropped onto her knees, holding her bleeding shoulder where her arm had been and Overlord’s boisterous laughter filled V.I.P room. ”I knew she was rigid thanks to cheap slag she drinks but I didn’t know she would loose her nerve over a plaything!”

Swerve whimpered as Rigorkill threw his owner’s arm to the side like it was a piece of bad energon and moved closer, kill in his mind. He clenched his fists together and brought them over his head, ready to bash purple femme’s head inside out before all the onlookers and Swerve felt his spark stop for whole minute when gladiator’s fists fell down…

He never got to hit minibot’s owner. Before he could, she caught his fist with her still attached arm. The audience went wild yet again as the old gladiator missed his kill shot because Swerve’s owner willingly took a hit with her only good arm. There was a blink as the mech moved to snap her neck and another as she impaled her opponent’s abdomen with her claws.

Time felt like it had stopped and slowly, too slowly, Rigorkill’s arms fell to his sides and he slumped into the ground. The audience cheered and winner was clear. Swerve couldn’t believe his optics. His owner had won. He wouldn’t be raped and killed by the monster holding him captive at the moment.

Swerve felt especially thankful and happy when he saw his owner look at the V.I.P room’s direction where he was being held and draw her engex painted claws over het intake. Overlord seemed to take a hint as he pushed Swerve off from his lap and on the ground.

”Tch, what a shame. It appears you get to wait for my spike for another day plaything.” The bigger mech grunted as he left the room. He waved his hand at the smaller femmes serving other bidders. ”Clean him up and prepare winner’s credits. I must tend my needs.”

Swerve shivered as he watched Overlord disappear but not before yanking and taking a server with him by force. The pretty little femme looked like she had just been thrown into lion’s den. She looked everywhere for help, only to be ignored by others. No doubt, no one wanted to take her place by Overlord’s side…

The metallurgist looked from side to side. Everyone were ignoring him. Maybe he could escape? It was worth a shot. Swerve got up on his feet and ran to elevator. He pushed the ground floor button repeatedly, almost breaking the button for sure. It felt like forever for doors to shut and floor numbers to flash over the said door.

Swerve’s spark shook in his chassis, but he wouldn’t let it stop him. He watched numbers flash before his optics before they finally moved to ground floor and doors to freedom opened before him. Or so he thought.

Before him stood his owner, bloody and scattered, holding her still energon spurting shoulder with her intact hand. Swerve’s mouth fell open in horror and without his realisation he smiled. ”Master! You’re alright!” Swerve moved closer and to his utter horror he found himself hugging his owner.

The femme must have been just as surprised as he was because she just stared at him, while Swerve blabbered his mouth off by how scared and worried he was. Maybe it was a finally realised way to protect himself? Either way, as long as his owner didn’t know that he had tried to escape then he would be okay.

Finally, he pulled away from the hug and she allowed it. ”A- are you okay?”

”No… We need to go.” She grunted and motioned to the side and Swerve followed her gaze until it landed on another Warborn. The one and only Tarn stood there, waiting them. ”Had enough? Wanna get patched?”

”Lead the way.”

[startuplifedenver]

ROOMIE TOOK THE POISON, WITH UPDATE.

OF A TIME WHEN A ROOMIE GOT INJECT FIRST, AND THEN 28 DAYS LATER AND WHAT HAPPENED TO HER.

NOTHING HERE IS TRUE.

Please understand, nothing here is true including this and diz. The whole point is to speak the opposite of the expected and officially accepted words and ideas that are spoken and those that should not.

This by the criminal monsters running the screens. Now to the real news:

WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE.

Holy Mother of Jesus Christ what in the fucking world do these people have in their mind, or better yet: What the fuck are they currently lacking for crying out loud. 

One roommie walked up to me and gave me the great news, that she had received the computer-virus-19 injection of only god knows what in the arm. It was hurting, today more than yesterday, perhaps not as much as tomorrow. But got the poison she did, and was walking around like if her life and her health, was not going to deteriorate sharply in the coming weeks and months. And fucking years.

According to the short talk and recollection of events, it is not mandatory but it is advice or encouraged, or something like it. This person has been receiving daily emails with the text of encouragement to get these poisonous shots. Sure not mandatory but fucking they are being bombarded with messages to do it.

WAIT AND SEE WHO SURVIVES.

Some other workers in the hospital said they will wait a few weeks and see what’s up. Let’s stop for a second a see what they mean, because this is so important and outrageously overlooked: To see if the idiots taking these drugs today, are still going to be alive in two weeks!

Someone who knows someone else, and who is friends with another person --you know how this computer-virus-19 stories transpire, someone somewhere said this or that.

SOMEONE SOMEWHERE GOT A GRAND.

So someone, was part of the lab-rat-computer-virus-19 and that person received the staggering sum of one thousand dollars. OMG. You take into the body some fucking horrible combination of only god knows what, and that person receives a grand. And of course, once that person gets ill they can very well go and spend that fucking grand looking after themselves because every horrible drug now comes with a clause that says so “too bad motherfucker, should’ve stick with ginger water, organic veggies and Calisthenics instead of looking at the computer screen all day long.

So this is happening, and good people who had been taken over by the computer-virus-19 are getting injected with unknown drugs because the television told them to do so. 

THE TIMELINE FOR... ??

During the follow up conversation, where Mr Diz kept his mouth shut and just nodded, he learned the following: One poisonous injection today and another one in exactly twenty eight days. And then, if somehow the person is not killed in either event, just count fourteen days and the person is good to go. 

CURED? LOL!

What does it mean? --Mr Diz asked very politely because after all, that is a normal follow up question. The rommie even answered that pondering that if the treatment is completed, and the person is now immune, then no covering of the face and not following that stupid nonsense. 

But not sure. Actually, this person had no idea. No clue what is inside the injections, no clue what is going to happen afterwards. No nothing just a fluoride stare.

GTF OUT BEFORE THEY CALL THE PO’LEEZ.

Now more than even Mr Diz has to get his stupid act together and start making urgent moves to get the fuck out of the mad house he is not living in because you know, this is a whole bunch of bullshit for an upcoming book about lies, lies and more lies.

IS MR DIZ IN GRAVE DANGER?

Closing with another question: If this person had taken those injections, how that affects everybody around?

AND 28 DAYS LATER, ALMOST KILLED

Indeed my friends I had lost count but time just flies by nowadays and the reality is that a whole month went by and the rommie took the pharmaceutical drug like taking a Tylenol.

Spoiler alert the rommie is alive and kicking --thanks god! People in the work environment of such person, had reported getting a very high fever for a day or two, pain where the poison experimental pharmaceutical drug went in like no other, and general tiredness during those days.

The fever was constant and Mr. Diz’s eyes saw the person while shivering and hoping that shit will soon pass. Per the comments spoken by such person, the pain on the shoulder where the nedle went in was excruciating and couldn’t sleep on that side for a good three days.

So far the person is up and running, back to her bubbly and courageous self.

Upon asking ¿what’s next? The answer was a blank stare, no idea what the fuck or WTF. Have to wear that dirty shit on the face? No clue. Can go out in public and have no worries about anything but we all know there is nothing to worry about but still, go out with no worries? Not yet. 

So great job and thanks god so far you have survived but let’s be real, taking an experimental pharmaceutical drug that was rushed and where the big pharma companies have no liability? No thanks, I love my health and the injections that go into the body are not decided on the East Coast.

YOU ARE WATCHING TOO MUCH TELEVISION!

The other roomie, god bless the soul of that person. The other roomie who it was rumored that has mushed potato in the head instead of a thinking brain, but that rumor has not been confirmed so it should not be considered as evidence of anything at all.

So the mashed potato brainless roommie, started raising the melodious voice and saying out loud like praising the Lord that lives were being saved and that a hero and that excellent and that you are saving a life and Mr. Diz who has learned his lessons in life, kept his stupid mouth shut and said nothing about it.

That is a perfect example of a remote controlled human who repeats at nauseum the non-sense that pours out of the MK-Ultra mind mashed potato program to make people docile and malleable 

[mostlysignssomeportents]

#5yrsago I Think You'll Find It's a Bit More Complicated Than That

Over the past decade, pharma-fighting Dr Ben Goldacre has written more than 500,000 words of fearlessly combative science journalism.

The new collection of Goldacre's essays is more than a best-of (though it is that), it's also a crash course in statistical literacy, informed skepticism, and public policy debates.

Goldacre is one of the UK's foremost proponents of evidence-based policy -- figuring out what works best, through careful study, and doing that. The evidence-based policy crowd sometimes gets accused of dressing up ideology in scientific lab-coats and insisting that there is a kind of empirical best way to govern, but as these essays make clear, that's not what Goldacre is about. He recognises that there are questions that are purely political -- the decision, for example, that we want to protect wider society from the negative affects of drug abuse, is a political one. But the empirical question that arises from that is, "What do we mean by 'protect'?" and "What works best for attaining that outcome?"

And this is where things get ugly. Because politicians and regulators say that they want to attain outcomes that get broad support -- shortening emergency-room waiting times, students who read fluently and criticially, a vibrant technology sector -- but what they do to attain these goals is very often a nonsense, a mix of ideological red-meat for their supporters ("We want to show the voters that we won't coddle drug addicts!") and frank corruption ("We've decided that the best way to get kids reading is by making all the schools buy this expensive phonics package that makes this person who happens to advise the committee on educational standards extremely rich"). It's the kind of thing that makes former UK drugs czar David Nutt's spectacular Drugs Without the Hot Air such an important read.

This is the bullseye at the centre of the evidence-based policy fight, but there's a lot going on around the edges: university press-releases that trumpet headline results from studies that aren't supported by the data; deluded or crooked "alternative health practicioners" whose "therapies" do nothing or make people sicker; conflicts between the business-models of scholarly publishers and the scientific method, which requires that scientific knowledge be spread widely for the purposes of verification and study; political grandstanding over "big data" and its power to find the terrorist needle in the surveillance haystack by making the haystack as big as possible; pharma companies that deliberately (and criminally) obscure their research data in order to reap titanic profits; the Daily Mail (which has embarked on a multi-decade project to divide the entire world into things that either cause or cure cancer); and, strangely, postmodern academics who call evidence-based policy "fascism" because there is no objective reality.

Goldacre slays each and every one of these with his pen, using a mixture of wit and beautifully constructed arguments, and a generally cool head. Though this book is huge (406 pages plus notes), it rips by very quickly, because Goldacre is a real master of the short newspaper column form, conveying bite-sized arguments in 400-800 word chunks that, while related closely to one another, are each intended to stand alone. I read the whole thing on a two-hour plane-journey.

James Boyle's The Public Domain argues that we need a word for "information politics" that ties together all the different ways in which the fights over patents, copyrights, transparency, privacy, and other causes that have come to the fore in the digital age; a word that does for the digital civil liberties movement what "ecology" did for all the disparate movements that came under its umbrella in the 1970s. Once, we thought saving whales, stopping acid rain, worrying about the ozone layer, and preventing toxic spills were all different causes, but the word ecology gave us a neat way to discuss them as a single cause, with many underlying issues.

I Think You'll Find It's a Bit More Complicated Than That" is a book about information ecology. Goldacre believes that technology can improve our lives: help us live longer, happier, fairer lives in happier, fairer societies. He shows how these political questions are all tied together, how caring about the surveillance economy of the war on terror is necessary if you also care about the big data projects to uncover subtle facts about public health, and how these both relate to Internet censorship, libel law, and the business-models of the scholarly publishing industry.

If there's anything I don't like about the book, it's the title. I confess to hating the phrase, "I think you'll find it's a bit more complicated than that," because it is too often the rallying cry of the kind of science writer whose mission in life is to tell us to stop being so darned excited about science, who wants to point out that the news that's cheered and amazed us isn't all that big a deal. It's a phrase Goldacre himself cherishes, too.

But Goldacre isn't a science killjoy. He is firmly committed to the project of making people amazed and delighted by science -- just not by bad science. He believes that good science is amazing, and when he rails against the tabloids (or the BBC!) for getting science badly wrong, it's because they've missed the real point, the real, amazing truth about the incredible progress being made all around us.

I Think You'll Find It's a Bit More Complicated Than That [US]

I Think You'll Find It's a Bit More Complicated Than That [UK]

https://boingboing.net/2015/01/20/ben-goldacres-i-think-you.html

[zak-washington-blog]

How does the mafia work?

MAFIA SPECIAL 1. We look at the real way the Italian mob operates, the symbiotic state-mafia relationship and its fund redistribution network. We will also meet Europe’s most corrupt police force.

'In an anarcho-capitalist society, who stops the mafia?' asked an online forum. This question will help us untangle some of the complexities of the mob as it addresses some of the central themes involved: the symbiotic state-mafia relationship and its fund redistribution network.

The birth of both Italy and the mafia. A historical coincidence? The ‘who stops the mafia?’ question is basically an extension of an argument constantly levelled at libertarians which posits that any non-state run society would be immediately overtaken by rampaging warlords. Some observers have noted that the mafia and the state are virtually the exact same thing. Where the state exists, the mafia flourishes. It’s certainly no coincidence that the rise of the mob took place over the precise period that statism expanded. In Italy, the mafia went from small-scale localized blood feuds in Sicily to large-scale racketeering when Garibaldi unified the various kingdoms of the region to form the country of Italy in 1861. As one historian astutely put it, the mafia couldn’t afford to be on the losing side. Put another way, the mafia goes where the money is.

Various forms of mafia have been completely misrepresented in popular culture. In fact, before proceeding it might be a good opportunity to take a closer look at how different types of mob behaviour breakdown and put rest to a few ideas which are complete fantasy.

The favours bank. First off, Italy, like most countries, suffers from a type of non-meritocratic way of doing business, often based on family, influence peddling or mutual back scratching. The late Tom Wolfe in Bonfire of the Vanities described the New York equivalent as ‘the favours bank’. Wolfe, if memory serves me well, portrayed high-powered NYC attorneys using their influence in pursuit of personal objectives. This type of behaviour, it could be argued, is merely a synonym of doing business. Who hasn’t had to resort to asking favours or influence from others as we endeavour to promote our own enterprises?

Undercutting the state. On a local level in Italy this type of influence is often thought of as ‘community’. Most southern villages still have patriarchal figures who will bail out needy individuals or families when, for example, someone loses their job or runs into financial hardships. This age old tradition continues mainly because locals have more faith in fellow-community members than in state welfare itself and its notoriously miserly benefits system. Its longevity is also partly due to the fact that the mafia can undercut state prices and offers protection and contract enforcement at more ‘competitive’ rates.

Mob feuding. The next level, which could be labelled ‘inter-family or mob feuding’ (think Godfather films and horse’s heads), certainly exists but, in reality, is over-played and over-publicised. In fact, when one of the characters from the Coppola film states, ‘I don’t like blood, it’s bad for business’ he was summing up the modern mafia ethos quite succinctly. Occasionally mob fighting does spill out onto the sidewalks, as it did in Calabria some years ago, but as one observer put it, the mob only gets violent when they can’t make ‘legitimate easy money’ elsewhere. With the state, they almost always can.

How the mafia really works. The real mafia is not just ‘la famiglia’ in tiny southern villages. It is something totally different. It is a huge corporate enterprise said to contribute 10% to 20% of Italy’s GDP. The typical modern day mobster is a suited business exec virtually indistinguishable from his political cronies. The typical modern mafia scam, par excellence, is rigging public tenders. It’s the oldest trick in the book. The government, in the name of transparency, is forced to put all public work or projects (whose remuneration is over €10,000 - last time I checked) out to public tender. The whole thing is a farce. Most of the ‘competing’ companies are bogus fronts for the mafia.

The most corrupt police force in Europe. The state is completely complicit. The Guardia di Finanza, Italy’s version of the Fraud Squad is openly known to be the most corrupt police corp in Europe. Local business live in fear of them and every single legitimate business in the area where I live has had to pay them off. (Their standard fare is a hefty ‘present’ of firm’s goods. A local glove maker I know had to hand over several hundred gloves as a payment for some supposed fiscal discrepancy. The Guardia di Finanza families eat for budget price in restaurants and they drink their expressos free in local bars.)

The costs. The standard practice is that the money from these public tenders gets awarded to mafia run firms. The public work begins. Then the company folds. This normally occurs after fellow mob members have pocketed huge consultancy fees. The damage to the economy is massive as the entire country is crippled under the weight of literally thousands of taxes to fund this. The environmental consequences are worse still. The entire country is littered with unfinished buildings and projects. Milan’s recent World Exposition, and its myriads of mobster scams, destroyed acres of park land. The supporters claimed that it invigorated the local economy but (as we have shown elsewhere) it came at a cost of €3000 a head per Italian. Naples has nine unfinished hospital projects all paid for with public taxes.

The state capitalism mafia model. Now that we have some idea about how the mob works, it makes the original question far easier to answer: How could an anarcho-capitalist society stop the mafia? Simple. No state – no state mafia. The rise of a robust, entrenched mafia came about because the mob simply used the state as their business model. The backbone is the huge wealth collection and redistribution system. In the case of the state, it’s called ‘taxes’, in the case of the mafia, it’s called ‘il pizzo’ or what ETA used to refer to as the ‘revolutionary tax’ in the Basque country. The mafia takes its cue from state capitalism - the idea that the state should safeguard large-scale industries from failure by propping them up or funnelling cash through them. Think US bank bail-outs. Boeing couldn’t stand up to real free-market capitalist competition without going bankrupt. Neither could so many weapons manufacturers, big pharma companies, tech giants, aero-industry, etc. Neither can Alitalia, the Italian state run airline company that for decades has haemorrhaged billions of tax payer’s money while strengthening and enriching its higher management – basically another mafia. It’s a blatant scam that most gullible tax contributors support, but few of them understand its messy, multi-layered complexities or who is hidden behind. Put another way, honest yet ignorant working folk are directly responsible – they fund it after all.

So bad they even go to jail. The same applies to almost every other sector of the government-mob nexus. State capitalism feeds the mafia. In my local area we have monstrous mob run industries like defence, aerospace and security giants such as Leonardo-Finmeccanica. While ostensibly producing military helicopters and fighter planes for a country that hasn’t been at war for eighty years, the conglomerate has a history littered with case after case of corruption. It’s so bad that people have even been jailed… and that takes some doing in Italy.  

In an anarcho-capitalist society there would be no state and therefore no massive re-distribution of state funds to bad actors. When trade and business are voluntary, companies and individuals sell goods and services that are of far greater social utility. Finmeccanica’s cheapest chopper trades at €11 million. Who the hell are you going to sell that to in an ancap society? Are you going to hop on a plane to Italy aboard one of the state’s mafia funding fleet, or take the honest, cheaper free market option? Exactly. Hence the honest shift towards independent and volantaryist communities using essentially anarchist systems such as the internet, sharing apps, cryptocurrencies, blockchains and any number of other new models. Systems which allow freedom to choose how we spend the fruits of our labour. The dinosaurs have got their days numbered.

Tons more articles at www.thepennypost.net

[garyh2628]

QUASI- JUDICIAL

PRIVATE AND CONFIDENTIAL

Chairman and Managing Operational CEO (Global Legal Authority Quasi-Judicial)

(Finance, planning, industry and foreign trade portfolios) Private

Head of Human Resources Finance and People and Global Head of Corporate Responsibility

 Investments/Contracts/Superior/Technically Competent and Right-Hand Men

NGO - (Finance, planning, industry and foreign trade portfolios) Private

 To my Pharma Hubs, Technology Hubs, Social Creative/Personal Hub, My Private Hubs, My Financial Hubs and my Health and Wellbeing/Scientific Hubs, Legal and Innovation Hubs, Hinterland Hub and to my Eastern Caribbean Hub, Linguistic/Psychology Hub, to my beloved additions and to my Institutions and Partners and Team, Pool of Potential Personal Assistants and Private Secretaries and Business Managers and also to my Fitness Hub which is an extension of my Health and Wellbeing Hub and not to forget my beloved Brooklyn Hub and my Wine/Adviser Hub, Influential Legal Cashier, Strategic Partnerships, STATEMENT OF INTENT, MY WEALTH FUND AND PERSONAL ATTORNEY and PROPERTY EXPERT GUY and THE ATTACHMENT AND MY PERSONAL BOARDROOM AND MY CHIEF STRATEGY AND INNOVATION OFFICER. The core founding support regions of this Network and Global Structure. MY FAVOURITE CEO.

  All Options remain on the Table applying the finishing touches to our Genius and my Genius and the Network and this Global Structure Genius. DRAFT

 The Network, Strategic Partnerships and Global Structure is hot–but watch the margins

THE MOST BEAUTIFUL INTELLECTS IN THE WORLD

THIS GLOBAL STRUCTURE AND INTELLECT SHARE MANY OF THE SAME QUALITIES, INDESTRUCTIBLE, PURE AND BEAUTIFUL TO BEHOLD

WHEN WAS THE LAST TIME YOU EXPERIENCE SOMETHING SO BEAUTIFUL, IT CHANGED HOW YOU  SAW THE WORLD

How Intellect and the Network and the Economic Community and I are sweeping the Globe.

Reality bite those of that order and it is a good thing.  As the reality of the details open to those, my director is conscious of the groundswell of women and men from the Statement of Intent, around the Globe who have spoken up in my favour and against those of that order.  It came to their consciousness the large mandate that I have and the vast Intellectual and Experts Support across Sector and across Industry that I have. “It is, of course, up to the me to decide who I require and want in what positions, but if there’s anything that could cause distress or disruption then I have a duty of care to my staff and to the Global Structure and this Statement of Intent, Economic Community and this Network,” he says. I would be looking at the large volumes of details and at perusal.  She wouldn’t be drawn on exactly what could prompt my intervention but says that, to the best of her knowledge, the entire Global Structure supports me and all my Strategic Partners and the Industry and the Economic community and more so the Network et al.  We will deliver because it’s a jobs gift, it’s a gift to manufacturing and it’s a gift for well paid jobs.  It’s time for you to, live your best life.

 I’m delighted that these postings are assisting in the work that the Global Structure and this Economic Community and this Global Structure and industry is doing and my CEOs on delivering for me the meat that is necessary for perusal and those anonymous work – it has proven to be powerful.   It’s is good news to know that you are now Managing Director and you are making sure that those details get to me personally for perusal using the urgency of NOW.  There has been a lot of movements as a result of my legal Authority becoming so pronounced earthquake proof across regions.  Those names are being removed from those payrolls and those monies are being repaid. “After two enriching years. . . progress is now clear for the relevant people to see and take notice that those particulars will reach me. “Also, in December, we had another resignation or removal from the payroll, and I’m delighted that those monies are now repaid. I’m looking forward to those details being made available for perusal and for forensic audit by myself.  You did the right thing, the honourable thing, you need to work with me closely at perusal and after taking a careful look at the situation, you were misled, and you did what Intellect would only allow you to do. We will hit the campaign trail together, I’m delighted you can call me friend, our partnership will continue to bear the correct fruits.   Together we will achieve and succeed. I’m looking forward to those volumes and I’m looking forward to being briefed accordingly prior to perusal.

 All of them, except one, are respected and experienced professionals from the industry, the international finance and the academics, from various parts of the Globe and they are all my supporters.  We are on the cusp of doing some really great things across the Globe, for the attachment, the Strategic Partners and all the team et al and the Global Structure.  I will look at what has gone on as it relates to those things that live within the health suite, and I will peruse, amend, add and we will rebuild where necessary. We will deliver robust Intellectual Health policies and we will deliver a formidable and indomitable manifesto and we will deliver a range of things for immediate roll out after delivery of those Official Particulars that would stand us in good stead and will begin the Policy process that is required in the Statement of Intent , the whole region and in those Strategic Places.  I’m please that I’ll be presented with a set of volumes in order to peruse and approve for release.

  I cannot wait until my Strategic Partners meet and greet, I cannot wait for my family value session, I cannot wait to have my briefings done and those Official things done, and those Halls of residence delivered for privacy.  Innovation Hub what can I say, Eastern Caribbean Practice and Management Consultancy, Grass Root Organisation wat can  say, when I look at the names and the people you have lined up for those volumes, Personal Attorney and Global OLC wat you’re not serious, let move forward with deliberation and focus on getting tis done to delivery to myself.

 What could happen now

Our mission is to get the full delivery to Gary, to get all of those Portfolios that is required for privacy delivered, to make room for the full suite of Official Capacity to be delivered vin its entirety and for perusal and briefing to commence and to all allow for the delivery of the various offices without intrusion or delay and to cut out the allure of the appearance of intermediaries.

 The Statement of Intent, Strategic Partnerships and the Local Hubs there have received enormous campaign contributions from one of our Intellectual Investors etc––I’m now happy that they are pushing through safeguards for my signature and approval that will strengthen the requisite protections needed to prevent abuse of the Companies, Corporation and Institutions, Team and Partnerships.  They are also pushing through legislation that will strengthen the framework of the Network and Global Structure and further the Economic Community of Sector and Industry Companies.  These legislations will pave the way for the set-up of our offices in the respective regions without any hurdles to jump or any oops to go through. This is great work by my Personal Attorney, My Global CEO, but mostly by my Intellectual Investors and Strategic Partners.  We are also reactivating legislations and directives that has previously been supported and became Laws, but which were not put in place in its entirety or to completion Globally.  These subjects aren’t partisan issues and as such the policy experts and Intellectual Hubs and Law, Order, Compliance, Guidelines and Regulation Team saw right through the smoke and mirrors here.  We’ve been tracking these bad faith efforts to push legislation backed by lobbyists for years, and there’s no way this Network and this Global Structure and my Strategic Partners and Investors Council and CEOs will stand for their nonsense. We’ve now begun the process of getting the particulars to myself, in order to begin the tedious process of perusal, and through the process to my Office of Signature, and Stamp, and Approval. We will win the Election and we will win for the Team, we will win for my CEOs and we will win on Intellect. Intellect cannot be undermined. It’s a fools game.  I’m looking forward to perusal.

Truth to Tell, I will marry you, Tell it First, I will Marry you and Tell it like it is; this family will deliver for Education, This family will deliver for Intellect, this family will Top -Up that pool of Intellectual Capacity, this family will deliver on Legal Authority.  This family does not assume.  It’s time to live your best life!  Let’s deliver for media and let’s deliver for print media   We have a rendezvous with and an occasion to deliver the Fire and Brimstone address.

It is Estimated that in her lifetime, a woman/man views/use her Intellectual Capacity over a million times.  In this Family, we ensure that at every use, it is both full capacity correct and a pleasurable experience for the user and stakeholders.

QUASI JUDICIAL

Chairman and Managing Operational CEO Global Legal Authority Quasi-Judicial

(Finance, planning, industry and foreign trade portfolios) Private

Head of Human Resources Finance and People and Global Head of Corporate Responsibility

QUASI JUDICIAL

[smartecky]

A founder-investor panel on augmented reality (AR) technology here at TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin suggests growth hopes for the space have regrouped around enterprise use-cases, after the VR consumer hype cycle landed with yet another flop in the proverbial ‘trough of disillusionment’.

Matt Miesnieks, CEO of mobile AR startup 6d.ai, conceded the space has generally been on another downer but argued it’s coming out of its third hype cycle now with fresh b2b opportunities on the horizon.

6d.ai investor General Catalyst‘s Niko Bonatsos was also on stage, and both suggested the challenge for AR startups is figuring out how to build for enterprises so the b2b market can carry the mixed reality torch forward.

“From my point of view the fact that Apple, Google, Microsoft, have made such big commitments to the space is very reassuring over the long term,” said Miesnieks. “Similar to the smartphone industry ten years ago we’re just gradually seeing all the different pieces come together. And as those pieces mature we’ll eventually, over the next few years, see it sort of coalesce into an iPhone moment.”

“I’m still really positive,” he continued. “I don’t think anyone should be looking for some sort of big consumer hit product yet but in verticals in enterprise, and in some of the core tech enablers, some of the tool spaces, there’s really big opportunities there.”

Investors shot the arrow over the target where consumer VR/AR is concerned because they’d underestimated how challenging the content piece is, Bonatsos suggested.

“I think what we got wrong is probably the belief that we thought more indie developers would have come into the space and that by now we would probably have, I don’t know, another ten Pokémon-type consumer massive hit applications. This is not happening yet,” he said.

“I thought we’d have a few more games because games always lead the adoption to new technology platforms. But in the enterprise this is very, very exciting.”

“For sure also it’s clear that in order to have the iPhone moment we probably need to have much better hardware capabilities,” he added, suggesting everyone is looking to the likes of Apple to drive that forward in the future. On the plus side he said current sentiment is “much, much much better than what it was a year ago”.

Discussing potential b2b applications for AR tech one idea Miesnieks suggested is for transportation platforms that want to link a rider to the location of an on-demand and/or autonomous vehicle.

Another area of opportunity he sees is working with hardware companies — to add spacial awareness to devices such as smartphones and drones to expand their capabilities.

More generally they mentioned training for technical teams, field sales and collaborative use-cases as areas with strong potential.

“There are interesting applications in pharma, oil & gas where, with the aid of the technology, you can do very detailed stuff that you couldn’t do before because… you can follow everything on your screen and you can use your hands to do whatever it is you need to be doing,” said Bonatsos. “So that’s really, really exciting.

“These are some of the applications that I’ve seen. But it’s early days. I haven’t seen a lot of products in the space. It’s more like there’s one dev shop is working with the chief innovation officer of one specific company that is much more forward thinking and they want to come up with a really early demo.

“Now we’re seeing some early stage tech startups that are trying to attack these problems. The good news is that good dollars is being invested in trying to solve some of these problems — and whoever figures out how to get dollars from the… bigger companies, these are real enterprise businesses to be built. So I’m very excited about that.”

At the same time, the panel delved into some of the complexities and social challenges facing technologists as they try to integrate blended reality into, well, the real deal.

Including raising the spectre of Black Mirror style dystopia once smartphones can recognize and track moving objects in a scene — and 6d.ai’s tech shows that’s coming.

Miesnieks showed a brief video demo of 3D technology running live on a smartphone that’s able to identify cars and people moving through the scene in real time.

“Our team were able to solve this problem probably a year ahead of where the rest of the world is at. And it’s exciting. If we showed this to anyone who really knows 3D they’d literally jump out of the chair. But… it opens up all of these potentially unintended consequences,” he said.

“We’re wrestling with what might this be used for. Sure it’s going to make Pokémon game more fun. It could also let a blind person walk down the street and have awareness of cars and people and they may not need a cane or something.

“But it could let you like tap and literally have people be removed from your field of view and so you only see the type of people that you want to look at. Which can be dystopian.”

He pointed to issues being faced by the broader technology industry now, around social impacts and areas like privacy, adding: “We’re seeing some of the social impacts of how this stuff can go wrong, even if you assume good intentions.

“These sort of breakthroughs that we’re having are definitely causing us to be aware of the responsibility we have to think a bit more deeply about how this might be used for the things we didn’t expect.”

From the investor point of view Bonatsos said his thesis for enterprise AR has to be similarly sensitive to the world around the tech.

“It’s more about can we find the domain experts, people like Matt, that are going to do well by doing good. Because there are a tonne of different parameters to think about here and have the credibility in the market to make it happen,” he suggested, noting: “It‘s much more like traditional enterprise investing.”

“This is a great opportunity to use this new technology to do well by doing good,” Bonatsos continued. “So the responsibility is here from day one to think about privacy, to think about all the fake stuff that we could empower, what do we want to do, what do we want to limit? As well as, as we’re creating this massive, augmented reality, 3D version of the world — like who is going to own it, and share all this wealth? How do we make sure that there’s going to be a whole new ecosystem that everybody can take part of it. It’s very interesting stuff to think about.”

“Even if we do exactly what we think is right, and we assume that we have good intentions, it’s a big grey area in lots of ways and we’re going to make lots of mistakes,” conceded Miesnieks, after discussing some of the steps 6d.ai has taken to try to reduce privacy risks around its technology — such as local processing coupled with anonymizing/obfuscating any data that is taken off the phone.

“When [mistakes] happen — not if, when — all that we’re going to be able to rely on is our values as a company and the trust that we’ve built with the community by saying these are our values and then actually living up to them. So people can trust us to live up to those values. And that whole domain of startups figuring out values, communicating values and looking at this sort of abstract ‘soft’ layer — I think startups as an industry have done a really bad job of that.

“Even big companies. There’d only a handful that you could say… are pretty clear on their values. But for AR and this emerging tech domain it’s going to be, ultimately, the core that people trust us.”

Bonatsos also pointed to rising political risk as a major headwind for startups in this space — noting how China’s government has decided to regulate the gaming market because of social impacts.

“That’s unbelievable. This is where we’re heading with the technology world right now. Because we’ve truly made it. We’ve become mainstream. We’re the incumbents. Anything we build has huge, huge intended and unintended consequences,” he said.

“Having a government that regulates how many games that can be built or how many games can be released — like that’s incredible. No company had to think of that before as a risk. But when people are spending so many hours and so much money on the tech products they are using every day. This is the [inevitable] next step.”

Read more: https://techcrunch.com/2018/11/30/enterprise-ar-is-an-opportunity-to-do-well-by-doing-good-says-general-catalyst/

Enterprise AR is an opportunity to do well by doing good, says General Catalyst A founder-investor panel on augmented reality (AR) technology here at TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin suggests growth hopes for the space have regrouped around enterprise use-cases, after the VR consumer hype cycle landed with yet another…

[releasesoon]

A founder-investor panel on augmented reality (AR) technology here at TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin suggests growth hopes for the space have regrouped around enterprise use-cases, after the VR consumer hype cycle landed with yet another flop in the proverbial ‘trough of disillusionment’.

Matt Miesnieks, CEO of mobile AR startup 6d.ai, conceded the space has generally been on another downer but argued it’s coming out of its third hype cycle now with fresh b2b opportunities on the horizon.

6d.ai investor General Catalyst‘s Niko Bonatsos was also on stage, and both suggested the challenge for AR startups is figuring out how to build for enterprises so the b2b market can carry the mixed reality torch forward.

“From my point of view the fact that Apple, Google, Microsoft, have made such big commitments to the space is very reassuring over the long term,” said Miesnieks. “Similar to the smartphone industry ten years ago we’re just gradually seeing all the different pieces come together. And as those pieces mature we’ll eventually, over the next few years, see it sort of coalesce into an iPhone moment.”

“I’m still really positive,” he continued. “I don’t think anyone should be looking for some sort of big consumer hit product yet but in verticals in enterprise, and in some of the core tech enablers, some of the tool spaces, there’s really big opportunities there.”

Investors shot the arrow over the target where consumer VR/AR is concerned because they’d underestimated how challenging the content piece is, Bonatsos suggested.

“I think what we got wrong is probably the belief that we thought more indie developers would have come into the space and that by now we would probably have, I don’t know, another ten Pokémon-type consumer massive hit applications. This is not happening yet,” he said.

“I thought we’d have a few more games because games always lead the adoption to new technology platforms. But in the enterprise this is very, very exciting.”

“For sure also it’s clear that in order to have the iPhone moment we probably need to have much better hardware capabilities,” he added, suggesting everyone is looking to the likes of Apple to drive that forward in the future. On the plus side he said current sentiment is “much, much much better than what it was a year ago”.

Discussing potential b2b applications for AR tech one idea Miesnieks suggested is for transportation platforms that want to link a rider to the location of an on-demand and/or autonomous vehicle.

Another area of opportunity he sees is working with hardware companies — to add spacial awareness to devices such as smartphones and drones to expand their capabilities.

More generally they mentioned training for technical teams, field sales and collaborative use-cases as areas with strong potential.

“There are interesting applications in pharma, oil & gas where, with the aid of the technology, you can do very detailed stuff that you couldn’t do before because… you can follow everything on your screen and you can use your hands to do whatever it is you need to be doing,” said Bonatsos. “So that’s really, really exciting.

“These are some of the applications that I’ve seen. But it’s early days. I haven’t seen a lot of products in the space. It’s more like there’s one dev shop is working with the chief innovation officer of one specific company that is much more forward thinking and they want to come up with a really early demo.

“Now we’re seeing some early stage tech startups that are trying to attack these problems. The good news is that good dollars is being invested in trying to solve some of these problems — and whoever figures out how to get dollars from the… bigger companies, these are real enterprise businesses to be built. So I’m very excited about that.”

At the same time, the panel delved into some of the complexities and social challenges facing technologists as they try to integrate blended reality into, well, the real deal.

Including raising the spectre of Black Mirror style dystopia once smartphones can recognize and track moving objects in a scene — and 6d.ai’s tech shows that’s coming.

Miesnieks showed a brief video demo of 3D technology running live on a smartphone that’s able to identify cars and people moving through the scene in real time.

“Our team were able to solve this problem probably a year ahead of where the rest of the world is at. And it’s exciting. If we showed this to anyone who really knows 3D they’d literally jump out of the chair. But… it opens up all of these potentially unintended consequences,” he said.

“We’re wrestling with what might this be used for. Sure it’s going to make Pokémon game more fun. It could also let a blind person walk down the street and have awareness of cars and people and they may not need a cane or something.

“But it could let you like tap and literally have people be removed from your field of view and so you only see the type of people that you want to look at. Which can be dystopian.”

He pointed to issues being faced by the broader technology industry now, around social impacts and areas like privacy, adding: “We’re seeing some of the social impacts of how this stuff can go wrong, even if you assume good intentions.

“These sort of breakthroughs that we’re having are definitely causing us to be aware of the responsibility we have to think a bit more deeply about how this might be used for the things we didn’t expect.”

From the investor point of view Bonatsos said his thesis for enterprise AR has to be similarly sensitive to the world around the tech.

“It’s more about can we find the domain experts, people like Matt, that are going to do well by doing good. Because there are a tonne of different parameters to think about here and have the credibility in the market to make it happen,” he suggested, noting: “It‘s much more like traditional enterprise investing.”

“This is a great opportunity to use this new technology to do well by doing good,” Bonatsos continued. “So the responsibility is here from day one to think about privacy, to think about all the fake stuff that we could empower, what do we want to do, what do we want to limit? As well as, as we’re creating this massive, augmented reality, 3D version of the world — like who is going to own it, and share all this wealth? How do we make sure that there’s going to be a whole new ecosystem that everybody can take part of it. It’s very interesting stuff to think about.”

“Even if we do exactly what we think is right, and we assume that we have good intentions, it’s a big grey area in lots of ways and we’re going to make lots of mistakes,” conceded Miesnieks, after discussing some of the steps 6d.ai has taken to try to reduce privacy risks around its technology — such as local processing coupled with anonymizing/obfuscating any data that is taken off the phone.

“When [mistakes] happen — not if, when — all that we’re going to be able to rely on is our values as a company and the trust that we’ve built with the community by saying these are our values and then actually living up to them. So people can trust us to live up to those values. And that whole domain of startups figuring out values, communicating values and looking at this sort of abstract ‘soft’ layer — I think startups as an industry have done a really bad job of that. “Even big companies. There’d only a handful that you could say… are pretty clear on their values. But for AR and this emerging tech domain it’s going to be, ultimately, the core that people trust us.”

Bonatsos also pointed to rising political risk as a major headwind for startups in this space — noting how China’s government has decided to regulate the gaming market because of social impacts.

“That’s unbelievable. This is where we’re heading with the technology world right now. Because we’ve truly made it. We’ve become mainstream. We’re the incumbents. Anything we build has huge, huge intended and unintended consequences,” he said.

“Having a government that regulates how many games that can be built or how many games can be released — like that’s incredible. No company had to think of that before as a risk. But when people are spending so many hours and so much money on the tech products they are using every day. This is the [inevitable] next step.”

Source

Enterprise AR is an opportunity to ‘do well by doing good,’ says General Catalyst A founder-investor panel on augmented reality (AR) technology here at TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin suggests growth hopes for the space have regrouped around enterprise use-cases, after the VR consumer hype cycle landed with yet another 

[theinvinciblenoob]

A founder-investor panel on augmented reality (AR) technology here at TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin suggests growth hopes for the space have regrouped around enterprise use-cases, after the VR consumer hype cycle landed with yet another flop in the proverbial ‘trough of disillusionment’.

Matt Miesnieks, CEO of mobile AR startup 6d.ai, conceded the space has generally been on another downer but argued it’s coming out of its third hype cycle now with fresh b2b opportunities on the horizon.

6d.ai investor General Catalyst‘s Niko Bonatsos was also on stage, and both suggested the challenge for AR startups is figuring out how to build for enterprises so the b2b market can carry the mixed reality torch forward.

“From my point of view the fact that Apple, Google, Microsoft, have made such big commitments to the space is very reassuring over the long term,” said Miesnieks. “Similar to the smartphone industry ten years ago we’re just gradually seeing all the different pieces come together. And as those pieces mature we’ll eventually, over the next few years, see it sort of coalesce into an iPhone moment.”

“I’m still really positive,” he continued. “I don’t think anyone should be looking for some sort of big consumer hit product yet but in verticals in enterprise, and in some of the core tech enablers, some of the tool spaces, there’s really big opportunities there.”

Investors shot the arrow over the target where consumer VR/AR is concerned because they’d underestimated how challenging the content piece is, Bonatsos suggested.

“I think what we got wrong is probably the belief that we thought more indie developers would have come into the space and that by now we would probably have, I don’t know, another ten Pokémon-type consumer massive hit applications. This is not happening yet,” he said.

“I thought we’d have a few more games because games always lead the adoption to new technology platforms. But in the enterprise this is very, very exciting.”

“For sure also it’s clear that in order to have the iPhone moment we probably need to have much better hardware capabilities,” he added, suggesting everyone is looking to the likes of Apple to drive that forward in the future. On the plus side he said current sentiment is “much, much much better than what it was a year ago”.

Discussing potential b2b applications for AR tech one idea Miesnieks suggested is for transportation platforms that want to link a rider to the location of an on-demand and/or autonomous vehicle.

Another area of opportunity he sees is working with hardware companies — to add spacial awareness to devices such as smartphones and drones to expand their capabilities.

More generally they mentioned training for technical teams, field sales and collaborative use-cases as areas with strong potential.

“There are interesting applications in pharma, oil & gas where, with the aid of the technology, you can do very detailed stuff that you couldn’t do before because… you can follow everything on your screen and you can use your hands to do whatever it is you need to be doing,” said Bonatsos. “So that’s really, really exciting.

“These are some of the applications that I’ve seen. But it’s early days. I haven’t seen a lot of products in the space. It’s more like there’s one dev shop is working with the chief innovation officer of one specific company that is much more forward thinking and they want to come up with a really early demo.

“Now we’re seeing some early stage tech startups that are trying to attack these problems. The good news is that good dollars is being invested in trying to solve some of these problems — and whoever figures out how to get dollars from the… bigger companies, these are real enterprise businesses to be built. So I’m very excited about that.”

At the same time, the panel delved into some of the complexities and social challenges facing technologists as they try to integrate blended reality into, well, the real deal.

Including raising the spectre of Black Mirror style dystopia once smartphones can recognize and track moving objects in a scene — and 6d.ai’s tech shows that’s coming.

Miesnieks showed a brief video demo of 3D technology running live on a smartphone that’s able to identify cars and people moving through the scene in real time.

“Our team were able to solve this problem probably a year ahead of where the rest of the world is at. And it’s exciting. If we showed this to anyone who really knows 3D they’d literally jump out of the chair. But… it opens up all of these potentially unintended consequences,” he said.

“We’re wrestling with what might this be used for. Sure it’s going to make Pokémon game more fun. It could also let a blind person walk down the street and have awareness of cars and people and they may not need a cane or something.

“But it could let you like tap and literally have people be removed from your field of view and so you only see the type of people that you want to look at. Which can be dystopian.”

He pointed to issues being faced by the broader technology industry now, around social impacts and areas like privacy, adding: “We’re seeing some of the social impacts of how this stuff can go wrong, even if you assume good intentions.

“These sort of breakthroughs that we’re having are definitely causing us to be aware of the responsibility we have to think a bit more deeply about how this might be used for the things we didn’t expect.”

From the investor point of view Bonatsos said his thesis for enterprise AR has to be similarly sensitive to the world around the tech.

“It’s more about can we find the domain experts, people like Matt, that are going to do well by doing good. Because there are a tonne of different parameters to think about here and have the credibility in the market to make it happen,” he suggested, noting: “It‘s much more like traditional enterprise investing.”

“This is a great opportunity to use this new technology to do well by doing good,” Bonatsos continued. “So the responsibility is here from day one to think about privacy, to think about all the fake stuff that we could empower, what do we want to do, what do we want to limit? As well as, as we’re creating this massive, augmented reality, 3D version of the world — like who is going to own it, and share all this wealth? How do we make sure that there’s going to be a whole new ecosystem that everybody can take part of it. It’s very interesting stuff to think about.”

“Even if we do exactly what we think is right, and we assume that we have good intentions, it’s a big grey area in lots of ways and we’re going to make lots of mistakes,” conceded Miesnieks, after discussing some of the steps 6d.ai has taken to try to reduce privacy risks around its technology — such as local processing coupled with anonymizing/obfuscating any data that is taken off the phone.

“When [mistakes] happen — not if, when — all that we’re going to be able to rely on is our values as a company and the trust that we’ve built with the community by saying these are our values and then actually living up to them. So people can trust us to live up to those values. And that whole domain of startups figuring out values, communicating values and looking at this sort of abstract ‘soft’ layer — I think startups as an industry have done a really bad job of that.

“Even big companies. There’d only a handful that you could say… are pretty clear on their values. But for AR and this emerging tech domain it’s going to be, ultimately, the core that people trust us.”

Bonatsos also pointed to rising political risk as a major headwind for startups in this space — noting how China’s government has decided to regulate the gaming market because of social impacts.

“That’s unbelievable. This is where we’re heading with the technology world right now. Because we’ve truly made it. We’ve become mainstream. We’re the incumbents. Anything we build has huge, huge intended and unintended consequences,” he said.

“Having a government that regulates how many games that can be built or how many games can be released — like that’s incredible. No company had to think of that before as a risk. But when people are spending so many hours and so much money on the tech products they are using every day. This is the [inevitable] next step.”

via TechCrunch

[fmservers]

Enterprise AR is an opportunity to “do well by doing good”, says General Catalyst

A founder-investor panel on augmented reality (AR) technology here at TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin suggests growth hopes for the space have regrouped around enterprise use-cases, after the VR consumer hype cycle landed with yet another flop in the proverbial ‘trough of disillusionment’.

Matt Miesnieks, CEO of mobile AR startup 6d.ai, conceded the space has generally been on another downer but argued it’s coming out of its third hype cycle now with fresh b2b opportunities on the horizon.

6d.ai investor General Catalyst‘s Niko Bonatsos was also on stage, and both suggested the challenge for AR startups is figuring out how to build for enterprises so the b2b market can carry the mixed reality torch forward.

“From my point of view the fact that Apple, Google, Microsoft, have made such big commitments to the space is very reassuring over the long term,” said Miesnieks. “Similar to the smartphone industry ten years ago we’re just gradually seeing all the different pieces come together. And as those pieces mature we’ll eventually, over the next few years, see it sort of coalesce into an iPhone moment.”

“I’m still really positive,” he continued. “I don’t think anyone should be looking for some sort of big consumer hit product yet but in verticals in enterprise, and in some of the core tech enablers, some of the tool spaces, there’s really big opportunities there.”

Investors shot the arrow over the target where consumer VR/AR is concerned because they’d underestimated how challenging the content piece is, Bonatsos suggested.

“I think what we got wrong is probably the belief that we thought more indie developers would have come into the space and that by now we would probably have, I don’t know, another ten Pokémon-type consumer massive hit applications. This is not happening yet,” he said.

“I thought we’d have a few more games because games always lead the adoption to new technology platforms. But in the enterprise this is very, very exciting.”

“For sure also it’s clear that in order to have the iPhone moment we probably need to have much better hardware capabilities,” he added, suggesting everyone is looking to the likes of Apple to drive that forward in the future. On the plus side he said current sentiment is “much, much much better than what it was a year ago”.

Discussing potential b2b applications for AR tech one idea Miesnieks suggested is for transportation platforms that want to link a rider to the location of an on-demand and/or autonomous vehicle.

Another area of opportunity he sees is working with hardware companies — to add spacial awareness to devices such as smartphones and drones to expand their capabilities.

More generally they mentioned training for technical teams, field sales and collaborative use-cases as areas with strong potential.

“There are interesting applications in pharma, oil & gas where, with the aid of the technology, you can do very detailed stuff that you couldn’t do before because… you can follow everything on your screen and you can use your hands to do whatever it is you need to be doing,” said Bonatsos. “So that’s really, really exciting.

“These are some of the applications that I’ve seen. But it’s early days. I haven’t seen a lot of products in the space. It’s more like there’s one dev shop is working with the chief innovation officer of one specific company that is much more forward thinking and they want to come up with a really early demo.

“Now we’re seeing some early stage tech startups that are trying to attack these problems. The good news is that good dollars is being invested in trying to solve some of these problems — and whoever figures out how to get dollars from the… bigger companies, these are real enterprise businesses to be built. So I’m very excited about that.”

At the same time, the panel delved into some of the complexities and social challenges facing technologists as they try to integrate blended reality into, well, the real deal.

Including raising the spectre of Black Mirror style dystopia once smartphones can recognize and track moving objects in a scene — and 6d.ai’s tech shows that’s coming.

Miesnieks showed a brief video demo of 3D technology running live on a smartphone that’s able to identify cars and people moving through the scene in real time.

“Our team were able to solve this problem probably a year ahead of where the rest of the world is at. And it’s exciting. If we showed this to anyone who really knows 3D they’d literally jump out of the chair. But… it opens up all of these potentially unintended consequences,” he said.

“We’re wrestling with what might this be used for. Sure it’s going to make Pokémon game more fun. It could also let a blind person walk down the street and have awareness of cars and people and they may not need a cane or something.

“But it could let you like tap and literally have people be removed from your field of view and so you only see the type of people that you want to look at. Which can be dystopian.”

He pointed to issues being faced by the broader technology industry now, around social impacts and areas like privacy, adding: “We’re seeing some of the social impacts of how this stuff can go wrong, even if you assume good intentions.

“These sort of breakthroughs that we’re having are definitely causing us to be aware of the responsibility we have to think a bit more deeply about how this might be used for the things we didn’t expect.”

From the investor point of view Bonatsos said his thesis for enterprise AR has to be similarly sensitive to the world around the tech.

“It’s more about can we find the domain experts, people like Matt, that are going to do well by doing good. Because there are a tonne of different parameters to think about here and have the credibility in the market to make it happen,” he suggested, noting: “It‘s much more like traditional enterprise investing.”

“This is a great opportunity to use this new technology to do well by doing good,” Bonatsos continued. “So the responsibility is here from day one to think about privacy, to think about all the fake stuff that we could empower, what do we want to do, what do we want to limit? As well as, as we’re creating this massive, augmented reality, 3D version of the world — like who is going to own it, and share all this wealth? How do we make sure that there’s going to be a whole new ecosystem that everybody can take part of it. It’s very interesting stuff to think about.”

“Even if we do exactly what we think is right, and we assume that we have good intentions, it’s a big grey area in lots of ways and we’re going to make lots of mistakes,” conceded Miesnieks, after discussing some of the steps 6d.ai has taken to try to reduce privacy risks around its technology — such as local processing coupled with anonymizing/obfuscating any data that is taken off the phone.

“When [mistakes] happen — not if, when — all that we’re going to be able to rely on is our values as a company and the trust that we’ve built with the community by saying these are our values and then actually living up to them. So people can trust us to live up to those values. And that whole domain of startups figuring out values, communicating values and looking at this sort of abstract ‘soft’ layer — I think startups as an industry have done a really bad job of that.

“Even big companies. There’d only a handful that you could say… are pretty clear on their values. But for AR and this emerging tech domain it’s going to be, ultimately, the core that people trust us.”

Bonatsos also pointed to rising political risk as a major headwind for startups in this space — noting how China’s government has decided to regulate the gaming market because of social impacts.

“That’s unbelievable. This is where we’re heading with the technology world right now. Because we’ve truly made it. We’ve become mainstream. We’re the incumbents. Anything we build has huge, huge intended and unintended consequences,” he said.

“Having a government that regulates how many games that can be built or how many games can be released — like that’s incredible. No company had to think of that before as a risk. But when people are spending so many hours and so much money on the tech products they are using every day. This is the [inevitable] next step.”

Via Natasha Lomas https://techcrunch.com

[heliosfinance]

3 Reasons IPOs Are Almost Always Bad Investments

People indulging in the stock market are often people with a lot of emotions. They get excited by something new, especially if it holds the promise of making them a whole lot richer and provides bragging rights at their next social gathering.

Maybe that’s why amateur and professionals alike tend to lose their minds in bull markets, particularly when a hot initial public offering, or IPO, is offered to them by their broker.

On one hand, had you bought into the IPOs of Infosys (yes, remember?), HDFC Bank, Sun Pharma, or TCS, you would have had some volatile price fluctuations along the way, but there is no question that you have made enough money to substantially change the quality of your life. Clearly, a well chosen IPO can be a life changing experience if you simply make the right choice and stick with the stock for years.

On the other hand, there is a large majority of IPOs such as those of Reliance Power, Suzlon and DLF, which have destroyed investors’ capital. With such businesses, even the “long-term” cannot save you from permanent capital destruction.

The Truth about IPOs Benjamin Graham wrote in The Intelligent Investor…

In every case, investors have burned themselves on IPOs, have stayed away for at least two years, but have always returned for another scalding. For as long as stock markets have existed, investors have gone through this manic-depressive cycle.

In America’s first great IPO boom back in 1825, a man was said to have been squeezed to death in the stampede of speculators trying to buy shares in the new Bank of Southwark. The wealthiest buyers hired thugs to punch their way to the front of the line. Sure enough, by 1829, stocks had lost roughly 25% of their value.

Over my 14+ years of experience in the stock markets, I have rarely come across any IPO that has been launched keeping in mind the interest of investors.

A majority of them have been launched in the form of ‘legalized looting’ by company promoters and their investment bankers.

I have come to believe how Graham defined IPOs in The Intelligent Investor. He said that intelligent investors should conclude that IPO does not stand only for ‘initial public offering’. More accurately, it is a shorthand for…

It’s Probably Overpriced, or

Imaginary Profits Only, or even

Insiders’ Private Opportunity

3 Reasons to Avoid IPOs There is an old saying in corporate circles. One should raise money when it is available rather than when it is needed. This is the reason most companies come out with their IPOs during rising or bull markets when money is aplenty.

Unfortunately, most investors in these IPOs come out on the losing end of the equation.

Granted, some IPO deals are good for retail investors, but I’d argue the odds of that happening are stacked against you.

The stock market regulator SEBI’s rules that are designed to protect Indian IPO investors, generate reams of disclosures about the company and the offering process but unfortunately, many investors neither read nor understand these.

After all, how many people have the time or inclination to read 400-500 pages of IPO offer documents? And then they say – “Please read the offer document carefully before investing.”

IPOs are not level playing fields, I believe. This game is stacked heavily against the small investor who is lured into the hype and then often loses a large part of his savings betting on listing gains.

Here are 3 reasons I believe small investors must avoid IPOs and rather search for great businesses among those already listed –

1. IPOs are Expensive People assume an IPO is an opportunity to “get in at lower prices”. In reality, by the time you buy shares of a company in its IPO, other parties have almost always invested earlier at lower prices – often, much lower prices.

Before you even knew about the company, there probably were three or four rounds of private investment, and the per-share price of ownership usually goes up with each round.

In fact, one of the big incentives for an IPO is so that previous investors – founders, venture capital firms, large individual investors – can “cash out” at least a portion of what they’ve invested.

That is why most IPOs are often expensively priced. They are not priced to offer you a piece of the business at cheap or reasonable prices, but to find “bigger fools” who can get in when the “privileged few” are getting out.

Don’t believe the investment bankers when they say that IPOs are “cheap and attractive”. Their incentive lies in first fixing the IPO price (whatever the promoter wants) and then working backward to justify the same.

2. IPOs Create Vividness Bias It’s important to understand that the investment bankers and underwriters of IPO are simply salesmen.

The whole IPO process is intentionally hyped up to get as much attention as possible. Since IPOs only happen once for each company, they are often presented as “once in a lifetime” opportunities for the promoters and other large shareholders to cash out.

Promoters and investment bankers thus create stories that are “vivid” – by using terms like “listing gains”, “bright future”, “long-term story” – and entice you to believe them as soon as you hear them.

You must avoid getting charmed by that vividness.

Try to go behind the beauty of that vividness, and scrutinize the IPO to see if it is really so bright and beautiful.

In other words, you need to get past the “bright and shiny” stuff that surrounds IPOs because it’s easy to fall into the trap given that so many others around you are falling for the same.

Don’t buy a stock only because it’s an IPO – do it because it’s a good investment.

3. IPOs Underperform Most people who get onto the IPO bandwagon often look at the listing or short term gains they can make in the next few weeks and months. In bull markets, this often happens.

However, if you consider the long term performance of IPOs, most of them underperform their peers and the general market – simply because they started off with high valuations.

As you can see in the chart below, the BSE-IPO index has underperformed both the BSE-30 and BSE-200 indices ever since this index was launched in 2004.

Data Source: BSE’s Website So much for the hype!

Final Word Here are some thoughts on IPOs from a few of the investing legends…

Warren Buffett wrote in his 1993 letter…

[An] intelligent investor in common stocks will do better in the secondary market than he will do buying new issues…[IPO] market is ruled by controlling stockholders and corporations, who can usually select the timing of offerings or, if the market looks unfavourable, can avoid an offering altogether. Understandably, these sellers are not going to offer any bargains, either by way of public offering or in a negotiated transaction.

When Buffett issued Class-B shares of Berkshire, he made sure that it wasn’t a typical IPO. He wrote in his 1997 letter…

Our issuance of the B shares not only arrested the sale of the trusts, but provided a low-cost way for people to invest in Berkshire if they still wished to after hearing the warnings we issued. To blunt the enthusiasm that brokers normally have for pushing new issues—because that’s where the money is—we arranged for our offering to carry a commission of only 1½%, the lowest payoff that we have ever seen in common stock underwriting. Additionally, we made the amount of the offering open-ended, thereby repelling the typical IPO buyer who looks for a short-term price spurt arising from a combination of hype and scarcity.

The dot com crash of 2000 was preceded by hundreds of IPOs where the underlying business was literally nonexistent. In his 2001 letter, Buffett wrote…

The fact is that a bubble market has allowed the creation of bubble companies, entities designed more with an eye to making money off investors rather than for them. Too often, an IPO, not profits, was the primary goal of a company’s promoters. At bottom, the “business model” for these companies has been the old-fashioned chain letter, for which many fee-hungry investment bankers acted as eager postmen.

Benjamin Graham wrote in Chapter 6 of The Intelligent Investor…

Our one recommendation is that all investors should be wary of new issues—which means, simply, that these should be subjected to careful examination and unusually severe tests before they are purchased. There are two reasons for this double caveat. The first is that new issues[IPO] have special salesmanship behind them, which calls therefore for a special degree of sales resistance. The second is that most new issues are sold under “favorable market conditions”—which means favorable for the seller and consequently less favorable for the buyer.

Charlie Munger said this in Berkshire’s 2004 meeting…

It is entirely possible that you could use our mental models to find good IPOs to buy. There are countless IPOs every year, and I’m sure that there are a few cinches that you could jump on. But the average person is going to get creamed. So if you’re talented, good luck.

To which Buffett added…

An IPO is like a negotiated transaction – the seller chooses when to come public – and it’s unlikely to be a time that’s favorable to you. So, by scanning 100 IPOs, you’re way less likely to find anything interesting than scanning an average group of 100 stocks.

Buffett also said…

It’s almost a mathematical impossibility to imagine that, out of the thousands of things for sale on a given day, the most attractively priced is the one being sold by a knowledgeable seller (company insiders) to a less-knowledgeable buyer (investors).

The late Mr. Parag Parikh wrote in his book, Value Investing and Behaviour Finance…

It’s safe to conclude that IPOs, which seem like a good investment vehicle are, in reality, not so. In fact, an IPO is a product which is against investor interest, as it is mostly offered to investors when they are willing to pay a higher and outrageous valuation in boom times.

Prof. Sanjay Bakshi wrote this in a 2000 article …

Any kind of rational comparison of long-term returns in the IPO market and the secondary market would show that investors do far better in the latter than in the former…IPOs are one of the surest ways of losing money in the long run.

Four characteristics of the IPO market makes it a market where it is far more profitable to be a seller than to be a buyer. First, in the IPO market, there are many buyers and only a handful of sellers. Second, the sellers, being insiders, always know more about the company whose shares are to be sold, than the buyers. Third, the sellers hold an extremely valuable option of deciding the timing of the sale. Naturally, they would choose to sell only when they get high prices for the shares. Finally, the quantity of shares being offered is flexible and can be “managed” by the merchant bankers to attain the optimum price from the sellers’ viewpoint.

But, what is “optimum” from the sellers’ viewpoint is not the “optimum” from the buyers’ viewpoint. This is an important point to note: Companies want to raise capital at the lowest possible cost, which from their viewpoint means issuance of shares at high prices. That is why bull markets are always accompanied by a surge in the issuance of shares.

You get the message, right?

It’s important to remember that, while most are, not every IPO is bad. It’s just that the base rate of investing in an IPO is not in favour of the small investor, and thus you must assess every investment opportunity on its own merit.

Hype and excitement don’t necessarily equate to a good investment opportunity. If stocks continue to climb like they have over the past few months, and the IPO line lengthens, I’m afraid you’ll have plenty of opportunities to see that I’m right.

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