#that one decade old video of two bots talking to each other

[pastelpaperplanes]

Big Ol Ask Post Pt. 3 I think

I haven’t drawn anything other than cursed or plain technical stuff w him 😔😔 have these for now but expect more soon!

anon a way back asked what he’d look like next to Overlord being already so big compared to Megs, that’s why you see Lordie if you’re wondering why he’s thrown in that line up!

by the way I have a voice claim for the big purple simp— Jenner from NIMH, he’s so awful but that suave baritone oh it fits too well >:] it’s the ‘humble servant’ line that got to me

Yep! Pharma is absolutely in this AU—as well as the CFau and Crack one too—and in all, he’s still an estranged medic long since booted from any legal work back on Cybertron.

He lost his credibility and more all those years ago when he found himself willing to do his fair share of cutting corners and hastily concealed malpractice to expedite his dream of getting his name down in the medical books—ultimately impressing his dear Mentor Ratchet, finally, in perfecting long-since banned risky experiments and surgeries—not to mention cruel and unusual temperament with the (supposedly) taboo practice of non-medicinal mnemosurgery.

His ambitions and aggression always got the bet of him, this hasn’t changed since he found himself working in freelance outposts. Light years away from Cybertron, he’s made a name for himself as a Good Doctor—but to his under-the-table black market part-dealing clients, he’s just about as bad as a Crooked Medic can get.

Bounty hunters and Arms Dealers like him for his business, a certain DJD member likes him for the occasional berth company and seemingly never ending supply of fresh T-Cogs—but no one actually likes him for his nasty temperamental personality, save for a young and naive Ratchet once upon a time.

Pharma is a roamer, as of recent he’s been a hard to reach mech—seems as if he’s found a little project to keep himself pretty occupied in the last few decades—something about a breakthrough for aiding the Decepticon Energon Crisis :] him and a small, horrifyingly cheerful surgeon are well on their way to completing their first trial batches, it’s safe to say that their little synthetic mixture will have it’s users sated and compliant.

they’ve got that amazing ‘new car smell’ those first few weeks, and instead of chittering like an Insecticons or vibrating their wings like a seeker—they beep and squeak, sometimes even honk a horn depending on the baseline altmode coding, to get their Creators’ attention before their vocalizer truly starts to kick online

It’s cute, but loud

Much like a seeker sparkling, they have to reach a certain ‘age’ (upgrade) to be able to transform completely, in between then they’re still able to rev those engines as a warning should they need it, as well as spin their wheels should they need a getaway HEELIES IF THEYRE LUCKY WOOHOOOOO—for seekers they can hover on their thrusters!

Crusade is actually pretty formal with Megatron. But yeah as a kid, Megs was always known as Carrier, but as Sadie got older and more aware of their surroundings—they definitely came to learn the true weight of that title and the fact that they were the progeny of the faction leader, a fact they should have really held onto with more pride. Not wanting to draw more attention to the already blatant favoritism (and nepotism) Crusade made a switch to addressing Megatron as Sir, My Lord, Lord Megatron, —ect. to better fit in with their fellow troops.

It bothers Megatron more than than he lets on. Crusade shouldn’t have to hide their high ranking as his child, the heir to the faction. Megs is their Carrier and can only order them around for so long, as their Leader however—pulling rank may just allow for their infuriatingly stubborn sparkling to listen to them should a day come where even a Carrier’s plea is dismissed.

Crusade does slip up every now and then and a ‘Carrier’ will slip—often hushed and annoyed though as Megs does like to tease every now and then, gotta remind them that they’re still his baby every once in a while :’)

Optimus however—whenever him and Crusade should truly reunite, will never be called Sire by Crusade, which they so heatedly established early on—Crusade never needed one and they don’t need one now, better to not let the title trigger those long-suppressed emotions. Sure enough though Optimus will get his moment.

actually no lmfao so you’re good! Eh, I haven’t mentioned much plot w them outside of them and Megs, plus bits of potential interactions with Optimus—so the rest of Team Prime is free game :D

For what I (hopefully will have) planned, their interactions with team Prime will be eh,,,interesting to each their own to say the least. Some more stressful than others BUT let’s not get into that until I’ve worked it out—for now I’ll just mention what they’re dynamics would be like when the drama of Oh Shit Boss Bot You’ve Been Hiding a Kid For HOW LONG has died down.

A usually touch-wary Crusade actually is the one to initiate a hug with Bulkhead, he’s the biggest and warmest and somehow is always happy to see them. Plus he tells cool recaps of Earth films and gifts them strange blobish paintings every now and then, all of which Crusade doesn’t exactly understand, but at least the colors are pretty.

Bee is annoying,,,which is what Crusade would say if confronted if they actually liked all the shenanigans Bee suggest they pull together, prank wars to the max, sparring for fun, video games?, DOUGHNUTS and RACES in the fortress halls??? Ahem. they are a super serious soldier, not a hooligan. But honestly, Bee is the one they seek out the most should they need an adventure, they missed out on a lot of this ‘fun’ growing up on the Nemesis—Bee seems to know how to balance a day of soldiering and dumbassery. sometimes.

Ratchet reminds them a bit too much of their Carrier than they’d care to admit. The medic is an old soul to his very core, perpetually tired but quick to snap into work mode, and sweet if you reallllllly squint. Sadie has been taught from day one to always respect medics, Ratchet obviously takes the cake on I’ve Seen Some Shit and for that alone Crusade both fears and admires Ratchet. Again, growing up on the Nemesis they didn’t have too many bots willing to talk much with them—but Ratchet (after he’s gone through his own lot of therapy, him AND Arcee. good lord) has a never ending pile of stories to share with them. Ratchet may throw in a few more colorful curses than necessary—which is SURPRISING bc Crusade thought they’d heard them all back home, but he’s entertaining and tells Crusade how it is, no sugarcoating. For that Crusade is grateful, there’s been too many half-truths thrown about to them in their recent years :’)

Ghost Prowl freaks them out—why does he deliberately have to be so sneaky?? Crusade has only met Prowl a fleeting handful of times (visits from the Allspark come with meaning, you know) and each time Crusade has been given nothing but odd riddles and poetic nonsense. Kidding. Prowl does like his wordplay’s but his given advice is always well meaning—the most firm and direct message Crusade has been passed though was probably most definitely “ Get those two cowards for mecha you call your Creator’s to stop fooling around with each other and SPEAK—at this rate it’s physically paining me that they haven’t begun Ritus and they’re not getting any younger”

Team Prime adores Sadie, they ask Megatron to see their sparkling photos every chance they catch him. And Crusade. hates it.

:) have

We’ve been here before, haven’t we?

[mollymauk-teafleak]

Benzaiten Steel and the Case of Mistaken Identity

Ben has a very awkward morning on the Carte Blanche...

Just a fun little scene from a happier, better universe where Ben is alive and happy and committing intergalactic crimes with his brother and their new family.

Please consider reblogging or leaving a comment over on Ao3!

---

Contrary to popular belief, there were a lot of differences between the Steel Twins.

Sure, there was the obvious stuff like the hairstyle and the general disposition, how you could tell which one you’d bumped into on any given day by whether they were smiling or scowling. There was the dress sense and the scars and the tattoos that didn’t match, except for the one. And, of course, the different number of eyes.

But Benten had always thought it was the smaller differences, the ones nobody noticed, that mattered. That made them Juno and Benzaiten, not just the Steel Twins. Not that he resented being seen as one of a matched set, of course not. It was wonderful to work with Juno on the Carte Blanche, to live in the same space as him again and see him every day, tired in the mornings and working furiously into the evenings, to sit with him and have meals as a family with the rest of their crew. To always have him in arms reach, to show him a funny video on his comms or hang off his shoulders as they stood together. To use their nearly but not identical faces in their work, making people believe there was only one of them and seeing their faces when it all fell into place.

Benten knew how it felt to lose his brother and he never wanted to go back to that.

Still, it was nice to have their own individual quirks even if they went unnoticed. Like this, like how Benten was always the early riser while Juno would stay in bed as long as decent society allowed him. He’d gotten used to it as a kid; the three buses he had to take to his dance class had meant getting up just before sunrise six days out of seven. Juno’s hobbies, which were what Ben charitably called his obsessions, his research or his work meant he stayed up late buried in files and data, seeing patterns in it that no one else would, with one eye or two. Often when they were teenagers, he’d be up and about to head out just as Juno was dragging his carcass to bed.

That had led to an intimate familiarity with another difference, how each twin took his coffee.

Benten had the kitchen of the Carte Blanche to himself, the SimSun lights just kicking into gear. Soon the ship would come to life, the noises of some mechanical fix going on from the cargo bay as Jet began his first task of the day, Buddy humming to herself as she sat in her cabin and made the impossible possible, the clatter of Vespa sharpening tools in the med bay either to hurt or to heal, the hammering of fingers on keys as Rita worked at her comms, over the too loud chatter of her stream. And Ransom...well, Ransom doing whatever he did on a morning with his usual eerie silence. All that would come but for now it was quiet, just the sound of his bare feet sticking to the tiles as he moved around and the song he was whistling.

Today was going to be a good day, Benten told himself triumphantly. They were back in charted space which meant he could video call Mick, hearing his boyfriend’s voice and seeing his beautiful, ridiculous grin for the first time in weeks. The thousands of miles between them would shrink to the width of a comms screen and everything would feel better.

And it would start with coffee. He did feel a little pang of guilt at only making two cups, one for him and one for Juno, but it was hard to break traditions that were decades old. He’d always left one waiting for his brother in their crappy little Oldtown kitchen, for when he’d reluctantly follow him into consciousness. He’d always wanted the first thing Juno knew when he woke up was that someone was looking out for him. And to drink some coffee because he probably looked like shit.

Juno liked to pretend he was the toughest, meanest lady around, making Benten wonder if anyone else knew he took his coffee with three sugars and enough cream to make it barely a few shades above white. He mixed in each spoonful of freeze dried coffee and powdered, stasis milk carefully, though it would never taste like the real stuff you got planetside. There was a lot about long haul space travel that sucked. The food was ninety percent of it.

Still, it was hot and sweet and prickling with caffeine, in the mug Rita had painted herself with ‘world’s best boss’ printed on the side, and Benten knew his brother would really appreciate it. It would make him smile in that rough, crooked way he did, the smile that didn’t come out very often but Ben wished it would. People deserved to see it.

He stopped whistling as he balanced the mugs in his hands, trying really hard not to slop any over the sides. Sure the cleaning bots would take care of any spills but Benten had always felt mean about giving them any work to do. The kitchen door slid shut behind him, the mechanism not quite what it had been when the ship was new and making more noise than it should. Juno’s room wasn’t far, none of them had spread out much from the others even with all the rooms to choose from. He should only be a few doors down.  

But as Ben moved past the bathroom door, he heard the sound of running water and his brother’s unmistakable rough voice, singing as he showered. Ben grinned to himself, pausing a moment to listen while Juno butchered a peppy, upbeat dance number that had come on the radio the other day. He had a good voice, though he’d never admit it, this just wasn’t his vibe. Still, he sang it cheerily and Ben could imagine him bouncing on the balls of his feet and swaying his hips in time to the beat as he soaped his hair.

Why was he up so early? What had him in such a good mood? Ben wondered briefly before realising he didn’t care all that much. What mattered was Juno smiling, singing, dancing, it didn’t matter why. Clearly, life on the Carte Blanche was doing him good, shaking him out of the dark place he’d been in ever since he’d lost the eye, regained it and lost it again. Just as Ben had hoped when he’d agreed to come with his brother and live as an interplanetary thief.

He had to take a few deep breaths so he didn’t cry then and there, just hearing his brother doing something as simply alive as singing in the shower.

Benten kept walking, thinking he would just leave Juno’s coffee in his room for him to come back to. And then maybe he’d ask him to play video games or watch a stream or ask if he could work on the stuff for their next job in his room. Anything just to be near him and see the light back on in his eye, to know for sure that he’d really got his brother back.

Benzaiten was still lost in his own thoughts as he approached the bunk Juno had claimed as his own, the one with the glitter covered sign that read ‘Mister Steel’s Room’ in Rita’s handwriting, the same as the ones she’d made for all of them on their first day aboard. He was so distracted, he couldn’t even be startled when the door opened before he was anywhere near it.

Or when Ransom stepped through, wearing nothing but a tiny pair of boxer shorts that covered very little and suggested very heavily what they did cover. That and a shirt of Juno’s that Ben recognised immediately, oversized so the neck draped to leave one shoulder bare. A shoulder covered in dark, mouth shaped shadows.

Ben stopped dead, eyes snapping wide. Every time he’d seen Ransom before now, he’d been perfectly made up and poised to the point of near absurdity, in his sleek, expensive outfits and coiffed hair and sharp smile. He’d been practically scared of the guy, not least because of how Juno reacted to him and wouldn’t say why, no matter how many times Benten tried to steer the conversation that way to find out more.

Now he wished he knew less.

Ben opened his mouth but couldn’t get any sound out, he was too stunned at the realisation that Ransom was actually human and not a perfectly styled doll of some kind. So Ransom just yawned, exactly like a cat would right down to the way he smacked his tongue after, and blinked, eyes useless with sleep and without his glasses.

“I thought you were showering, dear heart,” he mumbled, his slick accent muddied and rougher than it ever seemed.

And then, before Ben could make any kind of protest, Ransom closed the distance between them and kissed him languidly, hand slipping around his waist to grab a handful of...something that erased any doubt Ben had been clinging to as to what this man was doing in his brother’s bedroom.

Instantly, Ben froze solid, eyes wide with the kind of panic only rabbits facing down the headlights of oncoming cars and people in this exact situation could experience. A heartbeat later, Ransom did the exact same, unfortunately leaving him in that position for a handful of agonsing, painful seconds. When he finally jumped back, he looked very, very awake. In fact, he looked like he might never sleep again.

“So…�� Ben cleared his throat, grimacing, “You’re sleeping with my brother, huh?”

Ransom’s blush was fearsome, more than a master thief’s really should be, “I...my sincerest apologies, Benzaiten, I was only...um, your brother...I…of you have any concerns about his...um, his virtue-”

Ben could have screamed cutting across him quickly, “I really do not want to hear the slightest thing about my brother’s virtue. Just...give him this,” he thrust the coffee at Ransom, “And never speak of this again. To him but especially to me. Agreed?”

Ransom took a deep breath, taking the coffee and hiking the shirt up to his neck, like that would erase the hickeys from existence, “Agreed.”

Eventually Benzaiten would realise he was happy about this. He would recontextualise a hundred glances between him and Ransom, he would learn to read the emotion in Juno’s voice whenever he talked about him, what was masked in the intensity of it. He would realise that finally someone loved Juno exactly how he deserved to be loved.

But for now, he was going to lock his door, call his boyfriend and scream into a pillow and wish with all his heart that more people would learn to see the differences between him and Juno.

[lilyofthesword-writes]

Robotic Friendship - Chapter 1

Summary: The Autobots get a super virus on their computer system. Raf's oldest sister is brought in to help.

Pairing: Ratchet x OC (platonic), Soundwave x OC (platonic)

Word Count: 776

Warnings/Disclaimers: None for this chapter

Author’s Note: This was originally started about a decade ago, so it probably isn’t the best writing. Critiques welcome!

Masterlist

Jack, Miko, and Raf sat on the couch playing video games in the Autobot base. Ratchet was the only bot to be found. The others had left via ground bridge while Jack distracted Miko. They left Ratchet to babysit and activate the ground bridge as usual. He kept himself busy researching and inputting data on the synthetic Energon formula. It helped him to ignore the humans.

All seemed to be well minus Miko's perpetual pouting about not being able to follow Bulkhead. Ratchet was in the middle of modifying the formula when an error message popped up on one of the screens. Then, one after another were coming up, each making an obnoxious beep. In seconds, all the screens were covered. Ratchet worked frantically to fix it all but it just ended up with him slamming his fist in frustration at the wall.

"Ratchet, are you OK?"

It was Raf. He had left the couch to see what the noise was all about. Ratchet turned back to the computers. "It's these infernal machines! Human technology is just so... Primitive..."

"Would you like any help?"

"No!"

Ratchet looked around to see if the other two humans were paying attention. Jack and Miko were too busy playing some fighting game. He leaned over to Raf and quietly asked, "Do you think you can fix it?"

"It's possible. Let me take a look."

Raf pulled out the laptop from his backpack and hooked it up to the system. He took a seat on the floor and started typing. Ratchet watched him intensely hoping to return to his research soon. Raf's forehead scrunched up as he accelerated his typing. "This is not good."

"What? What's not good?"

"Well, it's a computer virus. Normally I can fix these but I've never seen anything like this. It is obvious that someone hacked into the system and planted it though. The best I can do is quarantine it temporarily."

"Why only temporarily?"

"I don't know how to stop it. It'll eventually eat through any firewall code I use."

Raf was eventually able to quarantine the virus but knew someone else had to be brought in. When Optimus and the others returned, Ratchet told them of the problem. It was decided that Agent Fowler needed to be informed. Fowler was surprised to hear the Autobots needed help. He called a specialist and escorted him to the base. He worked while Fowler spoke with everyone else.

"So our little computer whiz couldn't fix the issue, eh?" he chuckled. "You've always kept things working up until now."

Raf just looked away and sighed. He was good but still...

The specialist growled in frustration. Fowler returned to his side. "What's the problem, Stan?"

"I can't get rid of this thing. It just keeps growing..."

"There has to be something you can do."

"Just beef up what the kid's already done. That's it."

Optimus joined in, "So we need to salvage what we can and move it to back-up."

"But Optimus what about the rest of the data?" asked Ratchet. "The only part of the synthetic Energon research left is what we originally retrieved from Bulkhead."

"Then you will have to start over and work with the physical left over samples, Old Friend."

"We don't have that kind of time –"

"And we will lose more time if all the data is infected."

This silenced Ratchet but Raf took his place. "I know someone who might be able to fix this."

Bumblebee chimed in with his R2-D2 beeping.

"Yeah Bee. She's awesome." Raf looked back to Optimus and Fowler. "It would mean that another civilian is brought in."

The specialist laughed, "Someone who can do better than our department? Impossible. We would already have this person working for us."

"That may be, sir," Raf replied, "But she prefers to stay under the radar."

Optimus stepped forward, "Is this person someone we can trust?"

"Yes, of course."

Raf then thought to himself, "She's the only one who has never forgotten me before coming here."

"So who is this mystery girl?" Fowler asked.

"She's my oldest sister. She was the one who taught me about coding."

"Then we'll run a quick background check and make arrangements," Fowler decided.

"In the meantime, we will back up the uninfected data," Optimus said while looking over at Ratchet.

Fowler and the specialist moved to pack up their equipment when Raf approached them. "Agent Fowler? Can I ask you something?"

"Sure. What is it?"

"When everything goes through, would Bee and I be allowed to go talk to her and then bring her here?"

Fowler smiled and said, "I'll see what I can do."

[rainbowgazes-archive]

i uploaded my own album to youtube today, an album i produced in 2014. it was my first album, it’s not very good, but that’s not what i want to talk about

within seconds the video was monetized by a third party twice. this left me dumbstruck as i, unless someone implanted a memory in my brain without my knowledge, know for a fact i sat down and wrote all 9 goddamn songs on that album. however i knew the reason it happened and it’s because each song uses samples from an open domain library of samples that comes free with mixcraft, a DAW i’ve been using for 4 different versions now for 6 years.

so i loaded up the first song. surprise! it was a single sample that happens halfway into the song. this is frustrating because in their song it’s in the background and in mine it’s basically the lead through most of the song. even then, not only do they sound nothing alike beyond that, the sample i used is going at a different tempo and in the key of B as opposed to the claimant’s song which is much faster paced and in the key of C

the second song literally took me 20 minutes of scouring to find. the only place i could find it and actually listen to it without either being a part of a predatory youtube MCN or getting past a paywall was a video with 70 views using the song. sure enough, it starts with the same sample that one of my songs does. but once again, the songs sound nothing alike beyond that. in this case it’s almost the exact opposite of the previous case: their song is slower and more ambient and uses it as the hook, while mine uses it as just the intro and is a lot faster and heavier.

now i know: sampling is a huge gray area in copyright (as if copyright law isn’t just entirely gray area at this point) and i’m willing to accept that this will probably happen quite a bit with any future sample-heavy projects i may produce, but here’s the kicker: both songs came out in 2017. 3 fucking years after mine.

don’t get me wrong: im not mad because i’m not making money. i have this album up for free on my bandcamp because it’s old and not very good. im mad because its a reminder of how ridiculous it is that we have wasted so much time, energy, and resources on something as sophisticated as a bot that can pick up on audio that’s the same even when the key and tempo are different. im mad because, while this is technically lying about copyright ownership, a company will never get in trouble for filing a false positive and stealing from independent creators. meanwhile, if an independent creator does this, they go to fucking jail. im mad because copyright law has remained largely the same for decades despite the fact that the dissemination of media is so much more fragmented and these giant megacorporations are trying to keep a stranglehold on the market so they can keep pulling in ungoldy amounts of money they don’t need while paying the artists who got them to where they are fucking dirt.

making money myself is hardly a thought in my mind. there’s no money in music unless you get really fucking lucky. but the principle of it is what really drives me nuts. since i released my first album and two other things after i’ve made a grand total of $95 and that’s not a complaint. i am genuinely happy i made over a single dollar. but both companies that claimed my album are owned by parent companies that pulled in over a billion dollars last year alone in revenue. And yet they’re so greedy that they develop technology that steals pennies from independent artists and creators either through “legitimate” claims (i don’t care if it’s technically not legal, 20 seconds of song in a self produced 15 minute video is not worth the entirety of that video’s revenue) or false positives, and we’re just supposed to deal with that. that’s just how life is. 

[innuendostudios]

The newest installment of The Alt-Right Playbook: Mainstreaming. If you like this series, or my other work, and want to see more of the same, consider backing me on Patreon.

Transcript below the cut.

Say, for the sake of argument, there’s this acclaimed science fiction writer and essayist who’s writing his memoir in the late 80’s. I’m gonna drop the pretense right now and say his name is Samuel R. Delany, he’s been namedropped on this channel before and he probably will be again because he’s my favorite writer. Delany’s writing about his experience as a young gay man in the late 50’s/early 60’s - that is, nearly a decade before Stonewall - and he opts to share a couple of anecdotes, which I will relate to you now.

One is about a time when he decided to come out to his therapy group. While being gay in mid-century New York brought Delany a lot of joy, he found himself describing his life to the group as though being gay were something he was trying to fix. By reflex, he presented himself as lonely and ashamed, though, in reality, he was neither. And, while he did eventually describe himself more accurately, he can’t help but muse, in the book, on the limits of language at the time.

Back then, the word “gay” was explicitly associated with high camp and effeminacy, where Delany is more of a bear, a term that was not yet in common usage. The default term was “homosexual,” which was then a medical classification for what was deemed a mental disorder. “Queer” and the f-word were still slurs that had yet to be reappropriated. So, while all the words to describe himself were, technically, available, they all carried the connotations of the most popular narrative about gay men: that they were isolated, aberrant, and pitiable.

Another story is about Delany being present for a police raid at a truck stop where queer men would meet for casual hookups. By the nature of being hidden in the bushes or secreted between parked semi trailers, any man in attendance could see the men nearest to him, but none could get a view of the whole. But, during the raid, from his vantage point, Delany saw, for the first time, the size of the entire crowd, and was shocked to see nearly a hundred men empty out of the parking lot to evade the cops. In the morning, the police blotter mentioned only the handful of men who’d been arrested, and not the 80 or 90 who got away.

Both of these stories are about how the dominant narrative of the isolated gay man becomes self-reinforcing: A constant threat of police violence meant gay men stayed hidden from the cops and, consequently, from each other. And the terminology of the era being mostly dictated by straight people made it very hard to talk about queerness without reinforcing their narrative.

Delany argues that, among the most revolutionary things the 60’s did to culture, was the radicalization of language - redefining old terms and popularizing new ones - and giving marginalized groups a budding sense of their numbers. In short, two of the most powerful tools for making any marginalized group less marginalized are Language and Visibility.

Folks, we’re talking today about Mainstreaming, the process by which a group or idea from the fringes of society moves towards the center. How strangers become neighbors and how thoughts become common sense. There is a concept known as the Overton Window, which I am not going to describe because plenty of people have done so already - link in the down there part - but, in short: as a fringe group becomes more visible, and their language becomes commonplace, their presence in society starts to seem normal. They become demystified. Some people who thought they were strange and threatening will start to warm up to them, though this does not happen across the board. Many who hated them when they were fringe will see their becoming mainstream as a kind of existential occupation of territory, as in “If this is normal now, what does that make me?”

But much of what is considered standard in society today has gone through this process.

Now, straight folks like myself often think that greater queer visibility and the proliferation of queer language is for our benefit; if our queer friends feel safe coming out to us and we know which words we should and shouldn’t use, it makes it easier for straights and queer folks to be pals! And it is true that no one gets mainstreamed without advocates in the existing mainstream, but let’s not beat around the bush: Language and Visibility are tools of consolidating power. Visibility means having a sense of your numbers. Common language means forming alliances. You get a bunch of formerly isolated gay men connecting with each other and accurately describing their experiences, you’ve got yourself a movement, with or without straight friends.

This is why it’s to the benefit of straight society to tell queer men they are isolated, because isolated queer men are in no position to make demands.

(Just so it doesn’t get left out of yet another conversation, Delany is writing about gay men because the book is a memoir and that’s his experience, but neither he nor I are ignoring that the Gay Rights movement was kicked off by trans women.)

Okay!

While the example I’m using is a positive one that any progressive worth their salt should be in favor of, mainstreaming is a morally neutral phenomenon. Culture is plastic. Any fringe group or idea can become normalized, regardless of its inherent worth. And, for a certain subset of extremely online people with fringe beliefs, who understand the ways mainstreaming has evolved in the attention economy, it can be a weapon.

We need to ask how a group of predominantly disgruntled twenty- and thirtysomething white men congregating on anonymous imageboards becomes a political movement, whose members get profiled in the New York Times, whose writing patterns are recognized by most of the internet, and whose figureheads get staffed in the White House. Where did the Alt-Right come from?

Mainstreaming is not a wholly organic process, because usually the people who get mainstreamed are actively working to become so. But people usually have only so much control over how and how fast this happens: A group expands its language and visibility; if this leads to larger numbers and greater mainstream acceptance, the process repeats, this time with a bigger group and a bigger audience; so long as there is growth, each cycle is more impactful, as the bigger a group is the faster it gets even bigger and the more common language becomes the faster it proliferates.

By all rights, if your beliefs are wildly unpopular, this process shouldn’t work. Your language and visibility don’t expand because too many people don’t want to talk like you or about you. So what do you do then? Well, normally, you either give up or bide your time, but, if you have a lot of media literacy and no real moral compass, you get it done dirty.

If the media doesn’t want to cover you, make yourself newsworthy. Threaten to publicly out immigrants in front of a crowd. Start a hoax about white student unions. Lead a white power rally and leave the hoods at home. Do the kinds of things that journalists cannot, in good conscience, ignore. Once you’ve made yourself news, they’ll feel they can’t publish a condemnation without getting your side of the story, so, bam, you’ve got an interview. The more erratic and dangerous you seem, the more they’ll want to write a profile so people can figure you out; the article about how surprisingly normal you seem in person basically writes itself. If you want to spread a conspiracy theory, send it to a small, local news site that doesn’t have the resources to fact check you; once they publish something salacious, all the bigger news channels will have to talk about it, if only to debunk it. Put provocative stuff in front of politicians; anything they retweet has to be news. In a pinch, you can always piggyback off a famous activist by making takedown videos, or, if you’re really ambitious, harass someone at a conference.

Everyone’s desperate for clicks. If you can generate them, you’ll get your message out.

If nobody’s adopting your language, adopt it for them. Make sure you and all your friends each have half a dozen fake Twitter accounts spamming the same terminology at everyone who discusses race, gender, orientation, or ability. Put every Jewish name in parentheses until everyone on the internet knows what that means whether they want to or not. Hell, don’t even do it yourself: Russia’s not the only one who can make bots. Make thousands of bots. And make sure your real account, your fake accounts, and your bots all talk the same so no one can tell the difference anymore. Make hashtags and get them trending all by yourself, and, while you’re at it, spam all the hashtags for movements you hate with porn and gore so they can’t be used. And if your words and memes still aren’t popular? Just steal words and memes that are already popular. Just decide “this? this means white power now,” “this is antifeminist now.” Saturate the web with your new usage, always insisting that you’re doing it “ironically,” while eroding confidence in anyone who uses these words in the original sense. And never stop insisting that most everyone would talk the same as you if there weren’t so much damn censorship.

Delany’s experience was having few words to describe himself that could conjure images of a gay man in a loving community. What the Alt-Right does is shout “you just call everyone you don’t like Nazis” while their people are giving interviews wearing Nazi paraphernalia; they even imply that calling dudes marching to the tune of “Jews will not replace us” Nazis is somehow antisemitic. Meanwhile they ask to be called identitarians and race realists. They want to stigmatize words that conjure images of white fascism - which, again, they very explicitly support - and replace them with words that conjure images of clean-cut philosophy majors.

And where Delany saw a group of 80 or 90 gay men reported in the papers as a group of 4 or 5, the Alt-Right wants to get reported as being much larger than it actually is. They want to draw attention to themselves by any means necessary, up to and including violence, but to ensure that, any time the cameras train on a violent act, there is a man in a suit ready to distance himself from it; to paint the picture that, but for a few bad actors, this is a peaceful movement of young, presentable intellectuals.

This isn’t simply a battle between different ideologies, this is a battle over the definition of normal. The Alt-Right knows how plastic culture can be. Their anger comes from the normalization of things they hate, and their movement exists because they believe anything that becomes mainstream can be made fringe again. Which is why, if you wanna cater to them, you promise to reassert old norms.

Much as we’d like to believe people are driven by morality, most people are driven by the desire to be normal. And when the news is filled with images of swastikas, iron crosses, and tiki torches, the guy in the suit with the fashy haircut looks pretty normal by comparison. And that’s why he wears the suit.

Thankfully, the plasticity of culture cuts both ways. Just as surely as we can lose all the ground we’ve gained over the last half-century, everything the Alt-Right does to make itself palatable can be undone. (In fact, it’s maybe beginning to happen.) It’s going to be a long road that will probably require changes to how media platforms generate traffic and a lot of new politicians. But I want you to keep a phrase close to your heart: this is not normal.

That phrase has become something of a mantra since the election in 2016. It can be misused: white supremacy, sexism, and every other kind of bigotry are part of the fabric of American life and always have been, so, even if this is more extreme than the ushe, it’s not by nearly as much as most privileged people like to think. So I want you to treat it less like an observation and more as a statement of intent. Whatever shit the Alt-Right pulls, I want you to say: this is not normal; this is not normal; this is not normal.

We will not let this be normal.

[coincolumnist-dot-com]

Why Do Some Tokens Grow by More Than 1000%?

Introduction The world is a changed place when compared to how it was decades ago. The changes can be seen in infrastructure, technology, commerce, monetary systems, and much more. The rate at which development is catching up with the world is dynamic and of the latest inventions that are changing the way we live, blockchain technology appears to be in the lead. Many people have conceived blockchain technology in different ways based on the use cases they are familiar with. However, blockchain technology is simply a digital ledger where transactions or events are recorded, duplicated, and distributed so that it can be very difficult to alter the data recorded in it. While the design of blockchain technology has been embraced by both private and public organizations today, their most prominent use case is modeled in cryptocurrencies. Examples of these cryptocurrencies include Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), Nominex (NMX), and more. Cryptocurrencies are also called digital currencies, and under the growing parlance of the cryptocurrency ecosystem, can also be called tokens. Cryptocurrencies are a digital representation of cash. However, they are not issued by the government or central authorities but by private individuals and organizations. Typically, cryptocurrencies are a revolutionary invention first conceived by the man known only by the name, Satoshi Nakamoto. Satoshi created Bitcoin (BTC) in 2009 as a peer-2-peer payment system to bypass the monetary control of central banks or financial intermediaries. From that point to date, Bitcoin has given birth to many more digital currencies and tokens as many people are now tokenizing their businesses to take advantage of the innovation. Large and by, the diversity in the cryptocurrency ecosystem today is a testament to the long-standing need to embrace financial freedom. Cryptocurrencies and tokens afford this as anyone, anywhere in the world can gain unrestricted access to these assets without needing to answer to the government or authorities. Another major twist that has enjoined greater embrace is the rate of growth in the prices of these assets. Bitcoin for instance has grown from $65 back in 2013 to more than $55,000 today, representing over 84,776% growth according to crypto market data aggregator, CoinMarketCap. As a flagship cryptocurrency in the world, BTC’s growth is well acclaimed by there are tokens that outshine Bitcoin by percentage gain today. These tokens with impressive growths are numerous but for this article, an exploration into the following high yield tokens will be made. These tokens include; - Nominex (NMX) - PancakeSwap (CAKE) - Finance (SFG) - Bella Protocol (BEL) - PerlinX (PERL), and; What is Special About these Tokens? There are over 9,000 cryptocurrencies and tokens around today and each one has its addressable market, and utilities. A part of the considerations for judging the uniqueness of any digital asset out there may be subjective and varied based on different criteria, but NMX, CAKE, SFG, PERL, and BEL are tokens with good decentralized finance (DeFi) features and returns great incentives to their community and investors at large. Each of these tokens is profiled below, in no particular order; Nominex (NMX)  Nominex  is a relatively new cryptocurrency exchange that is already carving its way up the ladder, in competition with other major exchanges. In a bid to register its foothold in today’s fast-growing cryptocurrency ecosystem, Nominex launched with a clear picture of what people want in a big exchange and designed a framework to offer this and more. With the research done to enhance the opportunities of Nominex, the platform launched with the following defined pioneering features. These features are described below; - A combination of the features of both centralized and decentralized exchange offerings. The obvious incentives here include zero fees for centralized exchanges and a yield farming program that pays as much as 550% APY. - Extra high withdrawal limits of up to 3 BTC for new users who have not undergone the regular Know Your Customer compliance checks. This limit exceeds that for other bigger exchanges such as Binance with a 2 BTC limit. - Nominex users can fund their purchases using either Visa and Mastercard which guarantees ease of use. - Users get to benefit from a 50% off transaction fee when using NMX, the exchange’s native token to pay for fees. - 7 types of trading orders of which the world’s largest exchange - The Nominex trading platform offers over 60 different types of trading pairs and the count is still growing. - The Nominex platform has Smart contracts that were audited by io under the supervision of Alexey Makeev, one of the industry’s leading experts, also renowned for auditing the Aave protocol; (view report) - Withdrawal and staking of NMX come with no fees with a certain amount of the tokens. - The Nominex exchange offers 8 different types of referral bonuses and two types of referral farming bonuses. - Atop all these, the Nominex platform is one of the most user-friendly platforms in the space today. While each of these innovative products and offerings is worth applauding, the Nominex exchange is planning an integration with Binance, through the Binance Broker Program.

With these, all of Binance’s trading pairs will become available on Nominex as well as Binance’s liquidity. Nominex users will thus have access to the large ecosystem and offerings from Binance while also enjoying the extra incentives from Nominex as described above. Talk about value, the integration with Binance will also open access to semi-automatic trading bots, copy trading, and much more. Nominex Referral Program and an Almost Lifetime Staking Rewards  The Nominex exchange has a very robust referral program designed to reward ecosystem leaders. In fact, the uniqueness of the referral program remains one of the major success stories of the exchange since its inception. While most exchanges allow for a limited number of referrals, Nominex lets you refer as many people as you want, without any limitation in the number. The Nominex referral program is organized in the shape of a binary tree, featuring  2 people on level 1, 4 on level 2, 8 on level 3, and so on. A detailed pictorial representation or explanation of this can be found in this YouTube video. The Nominex referral model grows itself out without much effort on the part of the leader. As noted earlier, there are a whopping eight types of referral bonuses – plus two different yield farming bonuses based on referrals. Depending on the activities on a referrer’s downline, a leader may earn up to 50,000 USDT in a week. A major hallmark of the Nominex exchange protocol is the design of the staking rewards which can earn users as much as 550% APY with rewards spread over 70 years. The trading platform has set aside as much as 193 million NMX tokens for its liquidity farming program. However, the possibility of the token or the system experiencing hyperinflation will be eliminated due to the multi-decade spread of the reward. As of today, Nominex distributes about 8,741 NMX a day from the main reward pool, with approximately 1/5th of that number (1,741 NMX) being used as bonuses. Any user who deposits NMX for staking gets a cut of the rewards on a daily basis. This can be accumulated for a longer period and can increase the reward up to 900%. The NMX Tokens and its Performance  The Nominex (NMX) tokens are used in running a smooth operation on the Nominex exchange, drawing increased utility from its use for paying transaction fees, paying out incentives for referral and farming programs, and much more. NMX was launched back in February 2021 as a decentralized finance token built on the Binance Smart Chain as a BEP-20 token. The token has seen remarkable growth since its inception, a massive surge propelled by the utility surrounding it and boosted by the scalability and low trading transactions of the BSC. Among the advantages the Binance Smart Chain gives NMX over other DeFi chains include; - Hyper low transaction costs of $0.05 in fees against an average of $15 on the Ethereum network. - Superfast transaction confirmation which takes just 3 seconds, and; - The ease with which NMX can be integrated into any Binance Smart Chain supported DeFi project which is high in demand at this time. The NMX token has added all of its backing potentials to surge as much as 5000% growth from its original listing price at a current trading valuation of $5.47 per token. For a token that is barely a few months old, NMX is certainly another hidden potential in the DeFi world. The growth of NMX will further be boosted by additional initiatives being rolled out by the Nominex exchange including trading tournaments with attached price targets. These tournaments happen once in a few days in the Nominex Arena and it has a prize fund of around $400. Bigger tournaments with a bigger reward are also often featured from time to time. S.Finance (SFG)  S.Finance is a special type of decentralized exchange that is designed to cater to the trading of stablecoins. Stablecoins are a variety of digital tokens whose value does not change because they are not subjected to the extreme volatilities other cryptocurrencies are known for. S.Finance was created as a fork of another DeFi protocol “Curve Finance” to minimize or eliminate the barrier of entry for Chinese users in particular.

The S.Finance ecosystem is governed by its native token, the SFG tokens, and is used in governance activities including but not limited to voting. The SFG tokens are secured by the Ethereum standard, as it is designed as an ERC-20 token and it finds its major utility when used in yield farming or when staked. The SFG tokens have no private placement and are also not pre-mined. To earn SFG, users will need to provide liquidity to the supported pools. Only a total of 21 million, with 100% of these based on contribution distribution. SFG gives a very high yield with an Annual Percentage Yield (APY) which could be as high as 523.65% according to CoinMarketCap. This yield, however, also depends on either of the supporting pools the user picks. S.Finance has a platform that comes with a simple design, making it difficult not to give acclaim to the project developers. However, in today’s cryptocurrency ecosystem, diversity and the ability to be able to pick from a variety of choices is the hallmark of decentralized finance. The attempt to maintain transparency through the submission of its smart contract for auditing changes the entire narrative about the seemingly limited impact of S.Finance’s niche market. PerlinX (PERL) PerlinX prides itself as an asset liquidity engine. The project focuses on democratizing the trading of real-world assets through decentralized liquidity pools and synthetic asset generation. While the PerlinX operational model might sound too complex for a new user to the decentralized finance ecosystem, the project provides a simplified guide to help anyone get started.

PerlinX is governed through the PERL tokens with two major compelling utility or use cases. These include; - Supply Liquidity and Earn Incentives, and; - Collateralization and the creation of Synthetic Assets. In the former use case, PERL can be used to supply liquidity through staking as made possible through the Balancer Protocol that the PerlinX liquidity pools utilize. Rewards are earned for these liquidity provisions with APY that can be as high as 161.41%. PERL also serves as the major collateralization asset in the creation of synthetic tokens or assets of any kind. While this feature is not yet integrated according to the PerlinX website, it certainly will be a game-changer for the PerlinX DeFi penetration strategy. As an asset, the PERL tokens have good potentials, as evident in the solid fundamentals of the underlying projects. The PerlinX protocol is utilizing a third-party integration strategy to open its users to other standard DeFi protocols in the space. Examples of these include its support for both Balancer and UMA, with a promise to add additional protocols later on. Over the past year, PERL has surged over 1,027% and despite the meteoric growth, it remains a low cap token. This can be taken as a sign of hidden potential in the token which can be unlocked only with further ecosystem development and incentives rollout amongst other perks. Bella Protocol (BEL) Bella is a decentralized finance protocol that opens users to a whole new world of opportunities. Primarily, the protocol seeks to take advantage of the shortcomings of other DeFi projects bordering on high gas fees, slow speed, and poor user experience to roll out a platform that addresses these issues.

The Bella DeFi suite lets users deposit and enjoy high-yielding arbitrage opportunities which can either be on-chain or through the protocol’s custodial service. The Bella protocol and its associated products are automated, have zero gas fees, and capped with a high yield. Per CoinMarketCap, the yield could be as high as 505% per annum. The Bella Protocol argues that it represents the BlackRock of Crypto Wealth Management with a wide range of product suites. The products on offer include; - Bella 1-Click - Bella Lending, and; - Bella Flex Savings The Bella 1-Click is a smart portal for popular DeFi products and serves as a simple yield farming tool. The Bella lending product is a decentralized money market with liquidity mining that can easily be deployed. The lending product offers a referral bonus and supports liquidity pool tokens. Read the full article

[rainbowtransform]

The Means to An End

First Part here, or read it on AO3

It’s years down the line before Shuri finally cracks the code in Tony’s game. She’d locked away the phone and didn’t even glance at it until her children pulled it out of its hiding spot and show it to her.

“We can’t crack it,” they told her, staring. Her fingers shake, and she opens the familiar game. The Black Panther comes on screen and it meows like a kitten. Shuri’s eyes fill with tears and she sinks down, cradling the game.

Her children go to find their father.

KuKhanya, May, and Ubomi come running in with Peter. He stares at her, glances at the game and tells their children to go to their rooms. “Umama is just thinking  of someone we used to know. Go.”

“Listen to your father,” Shuri chokes out, and they turn, fleeing. Peter sits next to her, doesn’t glance over, and says, quietly “I still miss him.”

“I know.”

“It feels like he’s still here.”

“Yeah.”

“Did he make that?”

“I got it when I was sixteen. He’d given it to me. Told T’Challa that I would crack it when I’m older. When he died, I…” She swallowed.

“You stowed it away.”

“Yeah.”

“You know Karen?”

“The first suit Tony’d given you?”

“Yeah. You know why I asked you to make me a completely new one and not upgrade my old one?”

“Because you’re a boy.”

“Excuse you,” he shot back in a snooty white voice. “I’m a man.”

Shuri giggles.

“No. It’s because the suit’s the first thing Tony gave me. It… reminds me of him.”

The game feels cold under Shuri’s hands. “I’m suppose to crack it,” she whispers. Peter nods, and offers his own hand. “If you’re going to try, I’m not going to stop you,” he tells her. “But I’m not going to let it mess up your sleep schedule.”

Shuri’s lips curl into a smile. “You sound like my brother,” she says.

“Considering we haven’t heard from him in a few weeks, that’s an improvement.”

“He’s taken a vacation.”

“Yeah, from everything.”

“He deserves it.”

“Always.”

Shuri shrieks, throwing the game away from her. “This is impossible!” She screams. The children are in school, and Peter sighs. “NADĚJE, monitor Shuri’s blood pressure.”

“Monitoring Creator’s states.”

“Ha, ha,” Shuri scowls. “NADĚJE, cancel order.”

“Order canceled.”

“Still haven’t figured out how to get them human-like?”

“Nope.”

“You’ll figure it out.”

“Do you know?” Shuri asked, jabbing a finger at him from behind, eyes locked on the code streaming steadily from the computer screen.

“It’s Tony’s secret.”

“He took it to the grave,” Shuri smiles grimly. “I would have loved to know it.”

“NADĚJE, could you order some pizza?”

“From where, Creator’s Second?”

“I don’t know, surprise me?”

“I am not programmed for that.”

Peter sighs. Shuri bangs her fist against the computer’s desk. “Hey,” Peter says grabbing it gently. “We’re not hurting the computer; it hasn’t done anything.”

“This is one of the reasons I hate Tony. But the code is beautiful and complex, and it seems just like… something I’ve seen before.”

“Why don’t we try it, together?” Peter suggests.

“I’m smarter than you, Peter.”

“I know, Shuri. But maybe you need a fresh set of eyes. You’ve been working on this as a sixteen-year-old, and,” he checks his watch. “Now it’s been six days, four hours, thirteen minutes, twenty-six seconds. Twenty-seven seconds. Twenty-eight. Twenty-nine. Thirty. Thirty-o”

“I get it!” She says yanking her hands back.

“You’re also running on six hours of sleep, spread across those six days. An hour a day, Shuri. An hour.”

“It isn’t my fault,” she mumbles. “My mind runs through eighty-thousand scenarios per minute.”

“Yes, which is why I want to help.” Peter leans over, pressing his lips gently on Shuri’s. “Let me help you?”

She pushes him away. “Fine, you puppy-dog boy.”

It takes them three months to finally crack the code, and they both are wide-eyed, slack-jawed as they stare at the hologram.

“Hey, Shuri,” Tony Stark says. He’s in his lab, eyes bright and he smiles. “This is going to be pretty weird, huh? But, listen, do you have Peter there? You do remember Peter right?”

The two adults grip each other’s arms. “Ah, you guys are basically inseparable. I’m even sure that you guys are going to get married, too. Maybe have a couple kids. Four, I’d guess. This is for everyone I’d left behind, basically. I’m not going to lie to you guys. I don’t expect to win this fight. I’ve… got something Thanos really wants. Something he’s been craving. But he’ll have to kill me before I reveal anything to him.”

“I’m going to go with Rhodey, because he’s my best friend. Rhodey’s been with me through thick and thin, wouldn’t take my shit or my money. ‘Charity,’ he’d called it. But… he’d invited me to his room, put up with DUM-E for years. I really hope his kids know what a good father he’s going to be.”

(Rhodey’s been dead for three years.)

“Pepper… she’s the love of my life. She couldn’t take me being a hero, and honestly? I never expected her to. She’s different. Doesn’t take my shit, keeps my mind on track, has 12% of my company,” Tony’s smile is thin. “She’s the best thing anyone could ask for. Happy’s being intertwined with her because he’s the best boxing buddy-slash-driver I could ever ask for. He’s the best person to talk to.”

(Both Pepper and Happy left the country. Last Peter and Shuri heard of them, they remet up and had been tanning by the beach together drinking and swapping stories of other places they’d been since the kids took over the company and they’d left.)

“The Avengers,” here Tony’s face darkens just slightly. “They’re following Roger’s lead. I don’t know what they’re doing now. Hopefully some sense has been knocked into them. Scott’s got a daughter, and Clint’s got a whole fucking family. They’ll grow soon.”

(They’re still together. The only difference is that there’s no one to be their scapegoat anymore. It’s rather sad.)

“The New Avengers are the my pride and joy, honestly. They’re the best team anyone can ask for, and they act like a family. They’re teens, but their better together than apart. I’m proud of them, and I hope they know this.”

(They do, they really do. Shuri swallows, hard, and Peter’s arm tightens.)

“Peter’s my first ‘mission’ so to say. Clint’s not the only one to recruit Avengers. I know Peter, and he’s going to do things with or without someone’s permission. I just hope he knows the sacrifices, and how hard it is. Especially if you’re dating a civilian. Pretty sure Shuri’s okay with that, though,” Tony smiled bitterly. “Just know… I’m always going to be proud of you, kid. Anything you do. Except the things I did, and the things I wouldn’t do.”

“Shuri…” Tony huffed. “You’ve either turned forty-seven, which is when the code gets easier, or you’d finally asked for help.” He raises an eyebrow. “What took you so long? The game’s designed to know if you’re working with someone else, and it’s better to figure out… you know. A place. How’s Vision, by the way? The Bots? FRIDAY?”

(Vision disappeared, years ago. Peter heard a rumor, once, about a man with a stone in his forehead who was helping others. When asked, he’d reply “It’s what my grandfather would want,” and turn away. They haven’t heard from FRIDAY since she’d broken the news that Tony was dead, and the bots are still shut down. They’re clean, spick-span even though they aren’t ‘alive’ anymore.)

“Vision’s gone, if I’m really thinking ahead. He’s… upset, probably. Angry, scared. Hopefully he’s going to a therapist. If FRIDAY’s shut down, you just got to rewire her to accept you as her new boss; she’d understand. The bots are different, and you can’t trick them into coming back online. The only ones who can do that is JARVIS. I didn’t have enough time to implement it. She’s learning, and she’ll continue learning.”

“That’s probably it. Um. Oh! Kit-Cat said you liked this one video of me dancing. Welp, here’s a side-by-side of me as sixteen, twenty-five, thirty, and thirty-five doing it. Oh… tell T’Challa that it didn’t matter he’d kept the Exvengers. It was better that they were in Wakanada rather than them loose on the world.”  Tony sighs. “If I survive this, I’m thinking maybe, maybe, I’ll consider going on that date with you.”

And Shuri understands. After Tony died, T’Challa grew distant for a time before coming back. He didn’t marry, despite the councils’ insistence that he “must have a wife, or husband,” and T’Challa had laughed with Shuri.

“They can’t make me,” he tells her. “I can’t, Shuri. For right now, I can’t.” And his eyes were distant, in a place Shuri couldn’t follow.

“Who broke your heart, brother?” Shuri had asked. “Who held your heart tight in their grip, and hurt it?”

“Someone who is longer with us,” T’Challa told her. (And for all her genius, she didn’t ask for help for Tony’s game, and didn’t figure out it was him that T’Challa gave his heart to.)

Shuri and Peter replay the message twenty times over. So much that KuKhanya had come downstairs, and blinked at the sight of her parents watching a strange man. “I’ve seen him,” she said. “On TV. They said he was smart.”

“Not smarter than me,” Shuri jokes.

KuKhanya shrugs. “I don’t know, Umama, he seems smarter than Father.”

Peter mock-gasped and Shuri burst into a round of giggles.

The next time T’Challa visited, Shuri showed him the video. He swallowed, reached out and brushed through the hologram.

“Why didn’t you tell me, before?”

“He must’ve made some last-minute additions to it before he’d died. See? The code of… dancing is decades old, but the one where he’s talking? That’s the day before he died. See? See the difference in color of the code?”

“Yes.”

There’s silence, and then Shuri asks. “Why didn’t you tell me about you and him?”

T’Challa’s smile is bitter, small, and he replies with: “There was no point, sister. Remembering and loving the dead like family is different from a lovers’ death. It’s more painful.”

“Especially since you’re… the Black Panther?”

“Yes, Shuri. Especially since that.”

When they turn and exit the lab, they go to the children sitting around eating dinner. Peter has a Kiss the Cook, He’s Spider-Man apron on and is serving chicken parasame around the table. “Uncle T’Challa!” They all shriek, and he smiles.

“Eat,” Shuri tells them, giving them the mother-eye. KuKhanya sighs, and Shuri looks at her.

“You are the Heir to Wakanda,” she tells her daughter. “You have to do things you don’t like, KuKhanya.”

KuKhanya pokes at her food. “I don’t want it,” she mumbles. “Not if there’s all these rules and things to go with it. Especially making a heir?” She scowls. “Why can’t Ubomi or May do it?”

“If you don’t marry, that’s okay. But that means making a heir falls onto one of your siblings’ shoulder. They’re still young, aren’t they?”

“May’s three years younger, and Ubomi’s a year younger than May.”

“Don’t talk back to your mother,” Peter says from the kitchen.

“Daaaaaaaaaaaaaad,” she whines playfully.

After dinner, T’Challa asks if the children wish to hear a story. They are excited, elated, because ‘Uncle T’Challa’s stories are the best! Better than Dad’s!’

“There was once a boy, young and full of life. But life was cruel to the boy, and gave him a bad father and a neglectful mother. But, mercy was kind, and gave the boy a nice frien-”

“What’s his name?”

“His name?” T’Challa smiles. “It’s Tony.”

No one notices a spark fizzing from the game they’d left on. No one sees something traveling through wires and electrical places. There’s something in the lab, but no one sees it.

DUM-E, U, and ButterFingers come online, slowly, sensing something unfamiliar yet fatherly. FRIDAY overrides NADĚJE and with a whispery, fluttery, little-girl-meeting-her-father, whispers:

“Boss?”

[megacircuit9universe]

Bad Penny

WED APR 29 2020

Okay, so the Covid pandemic has been an issue in America now for two months. I held off early on from doing any commentary or speculation about it, because it’s an extremely serious situation, and I felt I needed to just shut up and see how the situation developed.

Two months later, however, it’s time for some kind of an analysis.

Firstly, social distancing has been working incredibly well, anywhere it’s being taken seriously, and especially where it was established (by Gubernatorial decree) early.  And by, incredibly well, I mean... the hospitals have not been overrun with cases, and the death toll has been minimal... but even in states that are doing great.. there are still a lot of cases, and a lot of deaths.

The general “curve” in America... the climb in cases over time, has been flattened to an appreciable degree, but nowhere are we tailing off yet, and seeing any significant decline.

Two months in, we are still in the grip of this virus, but it’s now at least under control.  It’s at a plateau.  

The initial terror of those early weeks, when the cases just kept climbing, and projections were that hospitals would be overwhelmed... has subsided.  And now we’ve all dealt with this long enough to have gotten used to wearing masks in public, wearing gloves and washing our hands frequently, wiping down our groceries with sani-wipes after we get them home, and late night talk show hosts doing their monologues from home to no audience, and if they even have a guest, doing it via remote video conference.

People are trying their best to stay home, but not all people can stay home. Essential workers must still get out there and work every day, putting themselves at risk, while those who can stay home are getting restless... and running out of money.

Which brings us to the flip side of this extremely bad penny, which fate has dealt us... the economy.

Of course, if you’ve followed this blog, you know that’s been one of the main subjects for a couple years now... that good old self driving economy that had been booming along for a straight decade, seemingly impervious to any upset... even after three reckless years of a Trump administration.

I’ve stipulated many times over the span of these essays that a recession, being a thing to bedevil Donald Trump, was off the table.  It wasn’t gonna happen.  I believe in aliens, and that time travelers have predicted Trump presiding over a market crash... and STILL did not believe that, in this specific worldline, a recession could happen... because clearly, effective measures had been taken to prevent those predictions from coming true... namely and army of AI bots to regulate bubbles from getting too large, and sudden downturns from lasting over a week.

Yet... entering May of 2020... here we are.

And where is that?

Crude oil prices went negative last week.  The airline industry is operating at around 5% of what it was doing a year ago.  All sports, movie theaters, and any other public entertainment is shut down.  All schools are closed.  Weddings and funerals alike are being cancelled.  This means no catering for such events, no Senior proms, no graduation parties.  That hurts restaurants, who are already suffering from no dining room customers.

Small business are shuttering left and right.  Gyms and massage parlors. All barbershops and hair salons.  Pretty much all retail, including malls. 

Unemployment is higher now than it was at the peak of the Great Depression, and Congressional attempts to help people out, while they are sheltering in place... have been abysmal.

A one time payment of $1200.00 to each adult... not enough for most people to get through two weeks... and most people have not gotten these tiny checks, because the system is overwhelmed.

Same for small business aid... which they’ve attempted twice now to roll out.  Both times the money vanished into the wind instantly before it could get to those who need it... getting sucked up by large businesses who gamed the system and got in the door early... because we trusted big banks to dole out this Federal money on the government’s behalf.

Even scrap metal prices have fallen into a black hole.  Scrap iron and steel, which last year, got you a dollar or two a pound?... three tenths of a cent per pound today.  THREE POUNDS FOR A PENNY!

Now, they’re warning about disruptions in the supply chain of meat... not because we have any shortage of meat coming from the farms, but because Covid is breaking out in the meat packing plants, where “essential” workers cannot get any distance from one another, and do not have any time off to shelter from the virus.

The stock market itself is burnt toast.  It’s black, crispy, and smoking.

That AI bot coalition I wrote about last fall... that formed after Trump began fucking with tariffs, and conspired to get the ball rolling on his impeachment... well who the hell knows what’s become of them now, but the lower level economy bots are probably all frozen in permanent error mode, unable to process the world we are in now, thanks to a caronavirus.

So... is this economic crash Trump’s fault directly?  No.

The virus was a product of evolution that came out of Wuhan China... it had nothing to do with tariffs or politics.  It popped up by chance, and once it did, it was destined to spread around the world.

But in the US, we... specifically Trump, had a good three months warning, as it ravaged China, and spread to Europe... in order to prepare.

Obama had a pandemic task force.  If he had still been president, we would’ve been warned in January, and a federal lock down (rather than state by state) would’ve began in February, at the first sign that this virus had made its way into common spread.

Manufacture of PPE, and tests would have been ramped up immediately, and contact tracing would’ve also begun.

The economy would still have taken a it with all the social distancing, but there would also have been a world more pressure on congress (especially the senate) to get people proper compensation for lost wages while in lockdown.

States would have had all the resources they needed to battle the virus on the front lines and... because we got started so early, with such a well planned, and focused response... the entire run of the pandemic in America would have been far less severe, and under control in far less time... likely seeing us get back to something like normal life by April.

Granted, no matter who was president in 2020, we still would not yet have a vaccine, so even in the best case scenario, caution would be the watchword all through spring and summer... but with high levels of testing available, not just to identify the infected, but also the ones who’d recovered... it might just be the inconvenience of masks in public, smaller gatherings in public, and more intense screening at airports.

It would’ve been a mild recession, economically.  Businesses not doing as well as they did the year before.  People losing jobs in non essential industries, but then finding new niches online. 

I’m sure that in this best case scenario, people would still be bitching about their rights during lockdown, and then bitching more about it all having been an overblown hoax in the mild aftermath... crying that we never do all this stuff for the Flu!

Which, by the way, we should take the Flu more seriously.  Flu death tolls should not be so easily ignored every year.

At any rate, my point with the above paragraphs is to point out that under Trump, going into May, we are in a deadlock with Sars-COV2... while the economy is in a death spiral. 

And the only reason we’re doing THAT good, is thanks to the extreme struggles and sacrifice of state governments, and the people themselves... both forced to deal with this on their own, with no cooperation or material support from the federal government at all.

“Aw, come on!  You can’t say, NO support...”

Yes I can.  When you can’t even get your token support money where it’s supposed to go, because your distribution system is too half-assed to keep any track of it... yes I can.

I speculated, way back when this started, that perhaps they, the time travelers and their AI counterparts on our dark web, knew that the one scenario in which Donald Trump always fails to seize total power, is in timelines where a pandemic strikes in his first Presidential term... before he’s had enough time to dismantle the democracy... and because it’s just the one kind of problem he has no ability to bullshit away.

I dropped that line of speculation because it seemed then, and still seems now, too drastic of a move for agents of this type, who’s motto is, “first, do no harm,” to unleash a pandemic... not just on America, but the whole planet... to stop one President from becoming a dictator in one country on one of an infinite number of world lines.

That said... of all the types of national or global crises which could fall into a President’s lap while in office... pandemic DOES seem now truly to be the ONE scenario... Donald Trump just cannot get the upper hand against in any way.

Early on I thought, Well, this will be his 9/11.  His Great Recession.  This is his moment to shine and win reelection easily, because all he has to do is let the CDC run the show and then take all the credit when they get it under control!

But no.

He has refused to take a leadership role at any stage in this crisis... leaving it up to the states to deal with it... but also refusing to help the states... and also getting quite bristly with the CDC along the way.

He did, does, and will continue to believe he can bullshit this pandemic away, by minimizing it... promising it will magically go away... attacking anybody who takes it too seriously, or who questions his idiotic ideas for quick fixes like Hydroxychoroquin at first...

...and then last week his jaw dropping suggestion on live TV that maybe we should inject people with disinfectants as a kind of cleaning of the body... and then hit the body with UV light strong enough to penetrate the skin?

I do believe that profoundly moronic statement in front of the world... which he belabored for over a minute with full confidence... was in fact his coup de grace. 

Forget about, “grab them by the pussy,” this was on a whole other level of stupid and dangerous, at a moment in history when such stupidity was least tolerable by the planet as a whole, and most indelible.

And he’s not done being that level of stupid, either.  

This crisis is faaar from over, thanks to his total failure to lead... a fact which is no secret to anybody by this point... and he’s got six looong months to go between now and the election.

Six long months in which Sars-COV2 is NOT going away.

Six long months in which the destroyed economy is NOT getting any better.

Six long months in which to keep floundering, and flapping his gums with ever more ludicrous gems like... inject the body with disinfectants.  

Joe Biden may be barely lucid for two hours a day if you inject him full of steroids first thing in the morning... but at this point, even the most butt hurt Bernie supporter (and I am one) will be voting for Biden in November.. even if we have to wear a hazmat suit to the polls because the second wave of Covid19 is fully underway.

Trump... already impeached last year... now utterly unable to get caronavirus out of the news cycle ever again, even for a day... unable to get people to forget about it... because it’s upended their lives for years to come...

...unable to lean on a booming economy... and also unable to shake loose from the blame for, what is shaping up to be Depression II (forcing the history books to rename the one in the 30s as Depression I, going forward) will not have a goddam leg to stand on for reelection... even if his opponent were to be a paper bag with googly eyes taped to it.

So, the question is... was this just a coincidence in an election year?  Was it Yaweh?  Or was it the time force, making a last ditch offensive to stop Trump from becoming a dictator?

Well... if it was the latter... then it could only be warranted, if they knew for damn certain, that the death toll... globally... not just in America... in worldlines where Trump does seize total power... is always in the high millions.

I’m not saying that’s true.

I’m saying that for a deliberate pandemic to be staged... killing a couple to three million, as this one will likely do... it would have to be a last resort, and only to save, say... ten to twenty million over the same period of time.

Could any President, even one as idiotic and narcissistic as Trump, kill ten to twenty million people around the globe in a second term?  It sounds ridiculous. But... we were living in pretty ridiculous times even before this pandemic, and are certainly now, in extremely ridiculous times.  So... maybe?  Why not?

Double digit millions of deaths globally is just a few nuclear launches.  We’ve all known that since the 1950s.

And you have to admit... if there were ever a world leader dumb enough to actually start a nuclear war with China, Russia, India, etc... it would be Trump. He’s that stupid, and he’s that stubborn.

Even if he had to live out his last ten or twenty years in an underground bunker, he’d probably do it to settle some score or other... if he had nobody around to stop him, and no working democracy to stay his hand.

But... and I know this entry is dragging on by this point... we can’t bring up nuclear war without talking about the aliens.

According to this model, that’s the only thing they really care about, when it comes to Earthly affairs.  They’ve been closely monitoring us since the end of WWII, because we figured out nuclear fission bombs.

Life?  Check in every million years.

Fire?  Check in every thousand years.

Electricity?  Check in every hundred.

Fission bombs?  Keep an outpost nearby and troll their air forces and orbital space stations.

Weirdly, two days ago, it made headlines that the Pentagon had suddenly certified some old fighter plane footage of unidentified flying objects, trolling the air force pilots, was in fact real and not some hoax.

This was footage like they declassified back in 2015 or so... but they felt now was the time to come out and say... yes, this is real. We stand by this footage of little tick-tack objects locked onto by fighter plane scanners... outmaneuvering and outrunning them, despite all we know about the laws of physics, and despite the fact that one pilot on the radio is like, “There’s a whole fleet of them!”

Why did the Pentagon remind us of that stuff now... and stand by it’s legitimacy?

The motive would seem unclear.

But... Kim Jong-Un... dictatorial leader of North Korea, also happens to have gone missing since last week. He missed a big celebration of his grandfather god, Kim Ill-sung, and has not turned up since. 

The most credible speculation, coming out of China and Japan is that he’s dead.

According to these sources, he is either dead, or brain dead in a vegetative state... but he’s probably dead.

So, from the perspective of nuclear war... and who on planet Earth is the most dangerous global player with nukes... the only one actually blowing up nukes on testing sites in the last thirty years... and the one most likely to trigger a full global nuclear exchange...

...Well, that would be the same human in charge of that one hunk of land on the Korean Peninsula, that, as viewed from orbit, by night, is extremely dark and devoid of electric lights, even while all the land around it is shining very brightly.

In other words, Kim Jong-Un, would stick out as a sore thumb to aliens, obsessed with preventing nuclear war. 

And... he’s dead now.

...In this election year that the other loose cannon to worry about... in America... is also suddenly in very deep political trouble, due to an unexpected global pandemic which is killing a couple million... but not ten or twenty million overnight, with centuries, to millenniums of radioactive repercussions to stunt the progress of human kind.

But if the time traveler side of this is right, then we HAVE had such nuclear exchanges in other worldlines, here in the early 21st century... so in those worldlines, the aliens failed to intervene.

You have to go back over a year, I think... in this blog... to find the last time I speculated about the AI from time travelers, and the AI from 20-teen tech intermingling on the dark web with AI from alien tech.

And back then, I wasn’t sure what role the alien AI bots were really playing.

And I haven’t had anything new to say about that since then.

But now, on the eve of May 2020... there’s a case to be made that they just might’ve been quietly paying attention... and decided, in an extremely rare act of intervention in Earthly affairs... to take out Kim Jong-Un.

It doesn’t mean the aliens are behind the pandemic... which would not be their MO... but maybe the pandemic forced their hand, given the intel they had about how destabilizing it was to the world order... and yes, intel from our local time bots about how things went in other worldlines here on the ground with the same group of players running the world states.

Things to think about.

I’m far from stating anything definitively tonight.  I’m just a guy with a model.  And I’ve got some pretty insane world events to try and plug into that model... from the pandemic, to Trumps shitty response to it after two months, to the disappearance of Kim Jong-Un, to the Pentagon trying to low key tell us aliens are real.

We’ll see how shit plays out through spring and summer.

Until then, I am once again... going to bed.

[timalexanderdollery]

America’s sex education system is broken. This chatbot wants to be the solution.

Planned Parenthood created Roo, a sex ed chatbot that answers teens’ questions while maintaining their anonymity. | Planned Parenthood

Can a chatbot teach teens about sex? This episode of the Reset podcast uncovers alternatives to traditional sex ed.

US sex education is decades behind other countries. Right now, it isn’t even mandatory in every state. Add to that the awkwardness people feel about sex and bodies in general, top it with the idea of having to have these discussions in public, and what you get is a system that’s devolved into a total mess.

It’s no wonder 84 percent of teens look for sexual health information online. The problem there is that a lot of the answers they come across — about everything from STIs to puberty to pregnancy to sexual orientation — are often just plain wrong.

Naturally, tech wants to find a solution.

That’s how Planned Parenthood created Roo, a sex ed chatbot that encourages teenagers to ask all of their potentially uncomfortable sex-related without ever revealing their identity.

To build Roo, Ambreen Molitor, senior director of the Digital Product Lab at Planned Parenthood, first interviewed Brooklyn high school students about their online habits and what they would want out of a bot that talked to them about everything from safe sex to coming out. Her team discovered that above all, “teens really wanted to be anonymous.”

“Sometimes they didn’t feel comfortable talking to the community around them or in the sex ed classrooms. But also online, because more often than not, Gen Z’s teens in general are very aware that when you’re searching on Google, you’re being cookie’d. They’re very cognizant of what they type into the browser or the search query — which is really unique.”

In this episode, Molitor tells host Arielle Duhaime-Ross that Roo is seeing great success so far. Parents have even reached out on LinkedIn to praise her bot.

Of course, the complexities of human sexuality, specifically as they need to be explained to a developing and curious teenage population, can never be fully resolved through an anonymous computer that’s been preprogrammed with answers.

That’s where Nora Gelperin, a parent and longtime sex educator who’s currently the director of sexuality education and training at an organization called Advocates For Youth, comes in. She developed a sex ed video series called Amaze.

With over 80 installments on topics ranging from gender identity and sexual orientation to sex trafficking, intersectionality, puberty, and even wet dreams, Gelperin revealed that technology can be “really a great companion for adults, whether they’re parents and caregivers or professionals having these conversations.”

But don’t expect a chatbot like Roo or even an extensive and informative video series like Amaze to solve the problems that a lack of comprehensive sex education leave behind.

“I think that there is a lot of information that needs to be supplemented to any of those technology-based resources because they can’t talk about values, they can’t talk about what do you do if you think you want to have an abortion but your religion tells you you’re going to go to hell. Or what do you do if you think you’re committing a sin by masturbating. Those are the things where the technology is kind of limited,” Gelperin says.

Listen to the entire conversation here, where you can find out what a high-school-age person actually wants to be told about sex. Below, we’ve also shared a lightly edited transcript of Molitor’s conversation with Duhaime-Ross.

You can subscribe to Reset on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or Spotify.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross

Kids and teens are hungry for this kind of information.

Ambreen Molitor

Almost 84 percent of teens actually look for sexual health information online. So our team built a sex ed chatbot named Roo. It’s only 9 months old. Very much in its infancy.

Roo allows folks, specifically teens, to anonymously ask all kinds of questions around sexual health information. The interface is very much like a text format. So Roo will prompt you, greet you, and allow you to have the open space to ask a question. It can be as short or as long as you want and Roo will respond to you in 180 characters or less.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross

I’ve had pretty terrible experiences with chatbots and they don’t have the greatest track record in general. Maybe you remember Microsoft’s chatbot attempt a few years ago. They had to shut it down because Twitter managed to train it to be racist and misogynistic in less than 24 hours.

So when I heard about Roo, I was honestly pretty skeptical. I know Planned Parenthood is good at teaching people of all ages about sexual health but I wasn’t convinced the organization would have the tech chops to make a bot that didn’t suck. So I decided to put it to the test.

My experience with Roo wasn’t terrible. And that’s surprising. So I asked Planned Parenthood how they went about designing it.

Ambreen Molitor

How Roo works is three-fold.

First there is software that is built. It’s artificial intelligence, and the actual software that we use is called Natural Language Processing (NLP). For folks who are not familiar with what that does, it’s the same software that allows you to talk while you’re texting, it completes your word or completes your sentence.

That’s the same software we’re powering with Roo. So Roo is trained to anticipate the question and also anticipate the sentiment of the question to be able to answer it.

The second and third layer are human inputs.

The second input is we have a content strategist that comes in and ensures that the answers that we provide have that nonjudgmental tone. It provides the personality that brings Roo to life.

The third most important one is a team of educators that reviews each answer and ensures that it’s medically accurate and up to date.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross

Ambreen’s team talked to teens at a high school in Brooklyn about their online habits and what they wanted out of the bot.

Ambreen Molitor

Teens really wanted to be anonymous. Sometimes they didn’t feel comfortable talking to the community around them or in the sex ed classrooms, but also online. More often than not, Gen Z’s teens in general are very aware that when you’re searching on Google, you’re being cookie’d. So they’re very cognizant of what they type in the browser or search query, which is really unique.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross

Planned Parenthood actually even has a texting service where you can talk to a sex ed professional directly. But now you’re developing a chat bot. So it sounds like you still feel a need to remove a human from the equation even further.

Ambreen Molitor

Yeah. That’s because at certain times we found that teens feel comfortable with talking to a bot because it eliminates some strong bias and they’re quick to open up to the actual questions they need to get to.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross

According to Planned Parenthood, teens like using Roo because it protects their anonymity. And the fact that it comes in the form of a cute little avatar doesn’t hurt.

Ambreen Molitor

It’s gender-neutral. You cannot determine if it has a certain gender identity or even sexual orientation. If you take a long time to type something, Roo starts to like fall asleep and has some Z’s going over his head. And they love that. They’re like, “This avatar is actually paying attention to me. They’re taking the time to understand and connect with me in unique ways.”

Another thing we get so much feedback on is, “Not only is it great that I feel safe, but I also feel like this avatar really is listening and understanding my habits.”

Arielle Duhaime-Ross

Does it have a human form or human shape?

Ambreen Molitor

It’s a blob. It’s just basically an avatar that’s a rounded rectangle with eyes and a mouth to provide gestures.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross

So it’s your friendly neighborhood sex ed blob.

Ambreen Molitor

Precisely. It winks, sleeps, snores, all of those things.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross

Planned Parenthood doesn’t keep track of who uses Roo but users can opt in to share information about their age and race.

Ambreen Molitor

Of those people who opt in to provide that information, 80 percent of them have identified as teenagers. So it’s about 60-40 percent male to female and 2 percent other gender identities.

Almost 70 percent of the folks that we talked to — again, who have opted in to provide us information — are what we consider people of color. So they’re of a diverse background and race and ethnicity.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross

Planned Parenthood also monitors the questions people ask Roo. And some of the subjects teens broach with Roo have been surprising.

Ambreen Molitor

Consent is a topic that we did not anticipate either from the learnings through visiting the high school or through the data that we were seeing from our website. Otherwise, we anticipated lots of questions around puberty and around those changes.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross

“Is this normal ...”

Ambreen Molitor

Correct. The spectrum of normalcy is what every teen wants to understand, it’s where they live. Normal is very important to a teen. And that’s something we knew going into it.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross

These are big, complex, heavy topics. How does Roo answer these questions in 180 characters?

Ambreen Molitor

We start off by describing consent. We say that there’s no one way to do it. And then we provide just an example or some guiding principles for that. Once we answer the question, we recognize that someone may want to go deeper. And we have link-outs to pages on our site and videos on how you can find or figure out different ways that people can ask for consent. So it goes one step deeper when 180 characters cannot fulfill the curiosity that someone has about that question.

Approximately 80 percent of the time, we’re answering the question correctly. A lot of it falls on two years worth of data and testing that we did. So we didn’t just launch it and go with it.

The other reality we need to call out is that machine learning is not 100 percent accurate. I think Roo’s very humble to say, “I’m not built to answer this question,” or, “I don’t understand it,” or, “I actually don’t think it’s appropriate for me to answer it.” And we’re really good about handing it off to a human.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross

So there are questions Roo can’t answer. Which means Planned Parenthood had to build in some guard rails. For instance, if someone appears to be in crisis, Roo will hand off the conversation to a mental health hotline.

Ambreen Molitor

The other time that Roo does handoffs is when there’s decision-making in mind. So the birth control question is a really good one where there are several different birth control methods and there’s not one directional way to suggest this birth control method that’s universally great. That’s where decision-making comes in. That’s an opportunity for Roo to understand that it’s best to hand it off to an educator.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross

The feedback from teens seems to be positive so far. But there’s another demographic that Roo has also been attracting.

Ambreen Molitor

It’s so funny. Parents love this. I’ve actually had, anecdotally, parents reach out to me on LinkedIn and say, “Thank you so much for this bot.”

Arielle Duhaime-Ross

On LinkedIn — great place to talk about sex ed.

So Roo seems to be a surprisingly not-terrible chatbot. But when I think about Roo, I honestly feel kind of sad. Because I see why teens might prefer to use Roo rather than turn to an adult for help. And that makes me wonder:

Why is sex ed so broken? And is Roo really the solution?

For the answers to these questions and many more, listen to the full episode and subscribe to Reset on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

from Vox - All https://ift.tt/2Qs1Mvy

[gracieyvonnehunter]

America’s sex education system is broken. This chatbot wants to be the solution.

Planned Parenthood created Roo, a sex ed chatbot that answers teens’ questions while maintaining their anonymity. | Planned Parenthood

Can a chatbot teach teens about sex? This episode of the Reset podcast uncovers alternatives to traditional sex ed.

US sex education is decades behind other countries. Right now, it isn’t even mandatory in every state. Add to that the awkwardness people feel about sex and bodies in general, top it with the idea of having to have these discussions in public, and what you get is a system that’s devolved into a total mess.

It’s no wonder 84 percent of teens look for sexual health information online. The problem there is that a lot of the answers they come across — about everything from STIs to puberty to pregnancy to sexual orientation — are often just plain wrong.

Naturally, tech wants to find a solution.

That’s how Planned Parenthood created Roo, a sex ed chatbot that encourages teenagers to ask all of their potentially uncomfortable sex-related without ever revealing their identity.

To build Roo, Ambreen Molitor, senior director of the Digital Product Lab at Planned Parenthood, first interviewed Brooklyn high school students about their online habits and what they would want out of a bot that talked to them about everything from safe sex to coming out. Her team discovered that above all, “teens really wanted to be anonymous.”

“Sometimes they didn’t feel comfortable talking to the community around them or in the sex ed classrooms. But also online, because more often than not, Gen Z’s teens in general are very aware that when you’re searching on Google, you’re being cookie’d. They’re very cognizant of what they type into the browser or the search query — which is really unique.”

In this episode, Molitor tells host Arielle Duhaime-Ross that Roo is seeing great success so far. Parents have even reached out on LinkedIn to praise her bot.

Of course, the complexities of human sexuality, specifically as they need to be explained to a developing and curious teenage population, can never be fully resolved through an anonymous computer that’s been preprogrammed with answers.

That’s where Nora Gelperin, a parent and longtime sex educator who’s currently the director of sexuality education and training at an organization called Advocates For Youth, comes in. She developed a sex ed video series called Amaze.

With over 80 installments on topics ranging from gender identity and sexual orientation to sex trafficking, intersectionality, puberty, and even wet dreams, Gelperin revealed that technology can be “really a great companion for adults, whether they’re parents and caregivers or professionals having these conversations.”

But don’t expect a chatbot like Roo or even an extensive and informative video series like Amaze to solve the problems that a lack of comprehensive sex education leave behind.

“I think that there is a lot of information that needs to be supplemented to any of those technology-based resources because they can’t talk about values, they can’t talk about what do you do if you think you want to have an abortion but your religion tells you you’re going to go to hell. Or what do you do if you think you’re committing a sin by masturbating. Those are the things where the technology is kind of limited,” Gelperin says.

Listen to the entire conversation here, where you can find out what a high-school-age person actually wants to be told about sex. Below, we’ve also shared a lightly edited transcript of Molitor’s conversation with Duhaime-Ross.

You can subscribe to Reset on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or Spotify.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross

Kids and teens are hungry for this kind of information.

Ambreen Molitor

Almost 84 percent of teens actually look for sexual health information online. So our team built a sex ed chatbot named Roo. It’s only 9 months old. Very much in its infancy.

Roo allows folks, specifically teens, to anonymously ask all kinds of questions around sexual health information. The interface is very much like a text format. So Roo will prompt you, greet you, and allow you to have the open space to ask a question. It can be as short or as long as you want and Roo will respond to you in 180 characters or less.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross

I’ve had pretty terrible experiences with chatbots and they don’t have the greatest track record in general. Maybe you remember Microsoft’s chatbot attempt a few years ago. They had to shut it down because Twitter managed to train it to be racist and misogynistic in less than 24 hours.

So when I heard about Roo, I was honestly pretty skeptical. I know Planned Parenthood is good at teaching people of all ages about sexual health but I wasn’t convinced the organization would have the tech chops to make a bot that didn’t suck. So I decided to put it to the test.

My experience with Roo wasn’t terrible. And that’s surprising. So I asked Planned Parenthood how they went about designing it.

Ambreen Molitor

How Roo works is three-fold.

First there is software that is built. It’s artificial intelligence, and the actual software that we use is called Natural Language Processing (NLP). For folks who are not familiar with what that does, it’s the same software that allows you to talk while you’re texting, it completes your word or completes your sentence.

That’s the same software we’re powering with Roo. So Roo is trained to anticipate the question and also anticipate the sentiment of the question to be able to answer it.

The second and third layer are human inputs.

The second input is we have a content strategist that comes in and ensures that the answers that we provide have that nonjudgmental tone. It provides the personality that brings Roo to life.

The third most important one is a team of educators that reviews each answer and ensures that it’s medically accurate and up to date.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross

Ambreen’s team talked to teens at a high school in Brooklyn about their online habits and what they wanted out of the bot.

Ambreen Molitor

Teens really wanted to be anonymous. Sometimes they didn’t feel comfortable talking to the community around them or in the sex ed classrooms, but also online. More often than not, Gen Z’s teens in general are very aware that when you’re searching on Google, you’re being cookie’d. So they’re very cognizant of what they type in the browser or search query, which is really unique.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross

Planned Parenthood actually even has a texting service where you can talk to a sex ed professional directly. But now you’re developing a chat bot. So it sounds like you still feel a need to remove a human from the equation even further.

Ambreen Molitor

Yeah. That’s because at certain times we found that teens feel comfortable with talking to a bot because it eliminates some strong bias and they’re quick to open up to the actual questions they need to get to.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross

According to Planned Parenthood, teens like using Roo because it protects their anonymity. And the fact that it comes in the form of a cute little avatar doesn’t hurt.

Ambreen Molitor

It’s gender-neutral. You cannot determine if it has a certain gender identity or even sexual orientation. If you take a long time to type something, Roo starts to like fall asleep and has some Z’s going over his head. And they love that. They’re like, “This avatar is actually paying attention to me. They’re taking the time to understand and connect with me in unique ways.”

Another thing we get so much feedback on is, “Not only is it great that I feel safe, but I also feel like this avatar really is listening and understanding my habits.”

Arielle Duhaime-Ross

Does it have a human form or human shape?

Ambreen Molitor

It’s a blob. It’s just basically an avatar that’s a rounded rectangle with eyes and a mouth to provide gestures.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross

So it’s your friendly neighborhood sex ed blob.

Ambreen Molitor

Precisely. It winks, sleeps, snores, all of those things.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross

Planned Parenthood doesn’t keep track of who uses Roo but users can opt in to share information about their age and race.

Ambreen Molitor

Of those people who opt in to provide that information, 80 percent of them have identified as teenagers. So it’s about 60-40 percent male to female and 2 percent other gender identities.

Almost 70 percent of the folks that we talked to — again, who have opted in to provide us information — are what we consider people of color. So they’re of a diverse background and race and ethnicity.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross

Planned Parenthood also monitors the questions people ask Roo. And some of the subjects teens broach with Roo have been surprising.

Ambreen Molitor

Consent is a topic that we did not anticipate either from the learnings through visiting the high school or through the data that we were seeing from our website. Otherwise, we anticipated lots of questions around puberty and around those changes.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross

“Is this normal ...”

Ambreen Molitor

Correct. The spectrum of normalcy is what every teen wants to understand, it’s where they live. Normal is very important to a teen. And that’s something we knew going into it.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross

These are big, complex, heavy topics. How does Roo answer these questions in 180 characters?

Ambreen Molitor

We start off by describing consent. We say that there’s no one way to do it. And then we provide just an example or some guiding principles for that. Once we answer the question, we recognize that someone may want to go deeper. And we have link-outs to pages on our site and videos on how you can find or figure out different ways that people can ask for consent. So it goes one step deeper when 180 characters cannot fulfill the curiosity that someone has about that question.

Approximately 80 percent of the time, we’re answering the question correctly. A lot of it falls on two years worth of data and testing that we did. So we didn’t just launch it and go with it.

The other reality we need to call out is that machine learning is not 100 percent accurate. I think Roo’s very humble to say, “I’m not built to answer this question,” or, “I don’t understand it,” or, “I actually don’t think it’s appropriate for me to answer it.” And we’re really good about handing it off to a human.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross

So there are questions Roo can’t answer. Which means Planned Parenthood had to build in some guard rails. For instance, if someone appears to be in crisis, Roo will hand off the conversation to a mental health hotline.

Ambreen Molitor

The other time that Roo does handoffs is when there’s decision-making in mind. So the birth control question is a really good one where there are several different birth control methods and there’s not one directional way to suggest this birth control method that’s universally great. That’s where decision-making comes in. That’s an opportunity for Roo to understand that it’s best to hand it off to an educator.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross

The feedback from teens seems to be positive so far. But there’s another demographic that Roo has also been attracting.

Ambreen Molitor

It’s so funny. Parents love this. I’ve actually had, anecdotally, parents reach out to me on LinkedIn and say, “Thank you so much for this bot.”

Arielle Duhaime-Ross

On LinkedIn — great place to talk about sex ed.

So Roo seems to be a surprisingly not-terrible chatbot. But when I think about Roo, I honestly feel kind of sad. Because I see why teens might prefer to use Roo rather than turn to an adult for help. And that makes me wonder:

Why is sex ed so broken? And is Roo really the solution?

For the answers to these questions and many more, listen to the full episode and subscribe to Reset on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

from Vox - All https://ift.tt/2Qs1Mvy

[shanedakotamuir]

America’s sex education system is broken. This chatbot wants to be the solution.

Planned Parenthood created Roo, a sex ed chatbot that answers teens’ questions while maintaining their anonymity. | Planned Parenthood

Can a chatbot teach teens about sex? This episode of the Reset podcast uncovers alternatives to traditional sex ed.

US sex education is decades behind other countries. Right now, it isn’t even mandatory in every state. Add to that the awkwardness people feel about sex and bodies in general, top it with the idea of having to have these discussions in public, and what you get is a system that’s devolved into a total mess.

It’s no wonder 84 percent of teens look for sexual health information online. The problem there is that a lot of the answers they come across — about everything from STIs to puberty to pregnancy to sexual orientation — are often just plain wrong.

Naturally, tech wants to find a solution.

That’s how Planned Parenthood created Roo, a sex ed chatbot that encourages teenagers to ask all of their potentially uncomfortable sex-related without ever revealing their identity.

To build Roo, Ambreen Molitor, senior director of the Digital Product Lab at Planned Parenthood, first interviewed Brooklyn high school students about their online habits and what they would want out of a bot that talked to them about everything from safe sex to coming out. Her team discovered that above all, “teens really wanted to be anonymous.”

“Sometimes they didn’t feel comfortable talking to the community around them or in the sex ed classrooms. But also online, because more often than not, Gen Z’s teens in general are very aware that when you’re searching on Google, you’re being cookie’d. They’re very cognizant of what they type into the browser or the search query — which is really unique.”

In this episode, Molitor tells host Arielle Duhaime-Ross that Roo is seeing great success so far. Parents have even reached out on LinkedIn to praise her bot.

Of course, the complexities of human sexuality, specifically as they need to be explained to a developing and curious teenage population, can never be fully resolved through an anonymous computer that’s been preprogrammed with answers.

That’s where Nora Gelperin, a parent and longtime sex educator who’s currently the director of sexuality education and training at an organization called Advocates For Youth, comes in. She developed a sex ed video series called Amaze.

With over 80 installments on topics ranging from gender identity and sexual orientation to sex trafficking, intersectionality, puberty, and even wet dreams, Gelperin revealed that technology can be “really a great companion for adults, whether they’re parents and caregivers or professionals having these conversations.”

But don’t expect a chatbot like Roo or even an extensive and informative video series like Amaze to solve the problems that a lack of comprehensive sex education leave behind.

“I think that there is a lot of information that needs to be supplemented to any of those technology-based resources because they can’t talk about values, they can’t talk about what do you do if you think you want to have an abortion but your religion tells you you’re going to go to hell. Or what do you do if you think you’re committing a sin by masturbating. Those are the things where the technology is kind of limited,” Gelperin says.

Listen to the entire conversation here, where you can find out what a high-school-age person actually wants to be told about sex. Below, we’ve also shared a lightly edited transcript of Molitor’s conversation with Duhaime-Ross.

You can subscribe to Reset on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or Spotify.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross

Kids and teens are hungry for this kind of information.

Ambreen Molitor

Almost 84 percent of teens actually look for sexual health information online. So our team built a sex ed chatbot named Roo. It’s only 9 months old. Very much in its infancy.

Roo allows folks, specifically teens, to anonymously ask all kinds of questions around sexual health information. The interface is very much like a text format. So Roo will prompt you, greet you, and allow you to have the open space to ask a question. It can be as short or as long as you want and Roo will respond to you in 180 characters or less.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross

I’ve had pretty terrible experiences with chatbots and they don’t have the greatest track record in general. Maybe you remember Microsoft’s chatbot attempt a few years ago. They had to shut it down because Twitter managed to train it to be racist and misogynistic in less than 24 hours.

So when I heard about Roo, I was honestly pretty skeptical. I know Planned Parenthood is good at teaching people of all ages about sexual health but I wasn’t convinced the organization would have the tech chops to make a bot that didn’t suck. So I decided to put it to the test.

My experience with Roo wasn’t terrible. And that’s surprising. So I asked Planned Parenthood how they went about designing it.

Ambreen Molitor

How Roo works is three-fold.

First there is software that is built. It’s artificial intelligence, and the actual software that we use is called Natural Language Processing (NLP). For folks who are not familiar with what that does, it’s the same software that allows you to talk while you’re texting, it completes your word or completes your sentence.

That’s the same software we’re powering with Roo. So Roo is trained to anticipate the question and also anticipate the sentiment of the question to be able to answer it.

The second and third layer are human inputs.

The second input is we have a content strategist that comes in and ensures that the answers that we provide have that nonjudgmental tone. It provides the personality that brings Roo to life.

The third most important one is a team of educators that reviews each answer and ensures that it’s medically accurate and up to date.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross

Ambreen’s team talked to teens at a high school in Brooklyn about their online habits and what they wanted out of the bot.

Ambreen Molitor

Teens really wanted to be anonymous. Sometimes they didn’t feel comfortable talking to the community around them or in the sex ed classrooms, but also online. More often than not, Gen Z’s teens in general are very aware that when you’re searching on Google, you’re being cookie’d. So they’re very cognizant of what they type in the browser or search query, which is really unique.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross

Planned Parenthood actually even has a texting service where you can talk to a sex ed professional directly. But now you’re developing a chat bot. So it sounds like you still feel a need to remove a human from the equation even further.

Ambreen Molitor

Yeah. That’s because at certain times we found that teens feel comfortable with talking to a bot because it eliminates some strong bias and they’re quick to open up to the actual questions they need to get to.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross

According to Planned Parenthood, teens like using Roo because it protects their anonymity. And the fact that it comes in the form of a cute little avatar doesn’t hurt.

Ambreen Molitor

It’s gender-neutral. You cannot determine if it has a certain gender identity or even sexual orientation. If you take a long time to type something, Roo starts to like fall asleep and has some Z’s going over his head. And they love that. They’re like, “This avatar is actually paying attention to me. They’re taking the time to understand and connect with me in unique ways.”

Another thing we get so much feedback on is, “Not only is it great that I feel safe, but I also feel like this avatar really is listening and understanding my habits.”

Arielle Duhaime-Ross

Does it have a human form or human shape?

Ambreen Molitor

It’s a blob. It’s just basically an avatar that’s a rounded rectangle with eyes and a mouth to provide gestures.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross

So it’s your friendly neighborhood sex ed blob.

Ambreen Molitor

Precisely. It winks, sleeps, snores, all of those things.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross

Planned Parenthood doesn’t keep track of who uses Roo but users can opt in to share information about their age and race.

Ambreen Molitor

Of those people who opt in to provide that information, 80 percent of them have identified as teenagers. So it’s about 60-40 percent male to female and 2 percent other gender identities.

Almost 70 percent of the folks that we talked to — again, who have opted in to provide us information — are what we consider people of color. So they’re of a diverse background and race and ethnicity.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross

Planned Parenthood also monitors the questions people ask Roo. And some of the subjects teens broach with Roo have been surprising.

Ambreen Molitor

Consent is a topic that we did not anticipate either from the learnings through visiting the high school or through the data that we were seeing from our website. Otherwise, we anticipated lots of questions around puberty and around those changes.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross

“Is this normal ...”

Ambreen Molitor

Correct. The spectrum of normalcy is what every teen wants to understand, it’s where they live. Normal is very important to a teen. And that’s something we knew going into it.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross

These are big, complex, heavy topics. How does Roo answer these questions in 180 characters?

Ambreen Molitor

We start off by describing consent. We say that there’s no one way to do it. And then we provide just an example or some guiding principles for that. Once we answer the question, we recognize that someone may want to go deeper. And we have link-outs to pages on our site and videos on how you can find or figure out different ways that people can ask for consent. So it goes one step deeper when 180 characters cannot fulfill the curiosity that someone has about that question.

Approximately 80 percent of the time, we’re answering the question correctly. A lot of it falls on two years worth of data and testing that we did. So we didn’t just launch it and go with it.

The other reality we need to call out is that machine learning is not 100 percent accurate. I think Roo’s very humble to say, “I’m not built to answer this question,” or, “I don’t understand it,” or, “I actually don’t think it’s appropriate for me to answer it.” And we’re really good about handing it off to a human.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross

So there are questions Roo can’t answer. Which means Planned Parenthood had to build in some guard rails. For instance, if someone appears to be in crisis, Roo will hand off the conversation to a mental health hotline.

Ambreen Molitor

The other time that Roo does handoffs is when there’s decision-making in mind. So the birth control question is a really good one where there are several different birth control methods and there’s not one directional way to suggest this birth control method that’s universally great. That’s where decision-making comes in. That’s an opportunity for Roo to understand that it’s best to hand it off to an educator.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross

The feedback from teens seems to be positive so far. But there’s another demographic that Roo has also been attracting.

Ambreen Molitor

It’s so funny. Parents love this. I’ve actually had, anecdotally, parents reach out to me on LinkedIn and say, “Thank you so much for this bot.”

Arielle Duhaime-Ross

On LinkedIn — great place to talk about sex ed.

So Roo seems to be a surprisingly not-terrible chatbot. But when I think about Roo, I honestly feel kind of sad. Because I see why teens might prefer to use Roo rather than turn to an adult for help. And that makes me wonder:

Why is sex ed so broken? And is Roo really the solution?

For the answers to these questions and many more, listen to the full episode and subscribe to Reset on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

from Vox - All https://ift.tt/2Qs1Mvy

[forexstrategies13-blog]

Using Trading Retracement Strategy

Hardcore technical evaluation VS trading fundamentals VS"hey I feel good about this trade even though I'm down big", has created for quite entertaining water-cooler talk around the workplace.  But in the end of the day, if you are a person who is risking your capital at the Forex Market, then you simply have One Question: What is a trading strategy that is employed effectively.

Short trades, only work the colours in another direction. Start looking for the first Red Starting Bar which prints following a string of Green bars, and then plot your trading Retracement zone -- the bar high and the bar low. Then look for Short trades whenever price rallies back into the zone.

PROFIT FROM OTHER MARKET PARTICIPANTS WITH A WINNING STRATEGY  You dontdon'td to possess a PhD in Mathematics to find out that Day Trading is a match of oofbabilities. Traders with a large selection of backgrounds, I will tell you that there is ONE THING that divides winning traders from losing traders. It has nothing to do with professional background, education, age, etc..

Nicely folks, EXPERIENCED traders understand  In this article I'm going to show You How You Can keep your Forex Trading strategy Simple, of course, and focused. I am also going to share with you reside trading examples from some of my favored money trading currencies and how it generates a 90% win rate.

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That there's a means to raise your odds of a winning trade to 75%, 80%, and in some cases 90%.

Trading (and the ability to make a steady flow of income out of it) resides securely someplace in the center.

Worked effectively for the previous 100 years, and it'll keep working profitably for another 100 years.

To find out more about how it is possible to catch 2000-3000 PIPS per week from the Forex market, click here to get in contact with us.  For BUY trading installments, only Search for It is simply the ability to recognize  Most novice traders are under the belief that the probability of winning are 50-50, like its a casino card game. Low of the Starting Bar now become a more complex / true variant of a pullback zone (also known as the Retracement zone) which we are searching for price to pullback in to. Click here to see our Youtube video about precisely the perfect exchange installation to search for.

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Hows thaHow'sssible? How can there be a Forex trading strategy that balances for a 90% win rate? For SELL trading hinges, also known as  The greatest traders in the world are  The only way to earn a sizable fortune  In reality, the truth about Forex The High of the Starting Bar and also the  Folks, gone are the days of candlestick  Is the simplicity of the DynoBars graphs. You can observe that these color coded bars contain absolutely no Trading Indicators, illustrating a concept known as Naked Trading -- the capability to exchange according to pure Price Action.

So how do the top traders on Earth  That trading is a delta-neutral game. If there are X amount of winners on a particular trading day...then you will find also X quantity of winners. There must be losers and winners in every marketplace, in every exchange, in every transaction. There are only two players from the game -- experienced  traders and in-experienced traders. Guess who gains at the expense of another?

They risk 1 dollar to make 1 dollar (also known as 1:1 danger to payoff ), or they risk 1 dollar to make 2 bucks, etc.. Too quickly to take gains, and also slow to reduce losses. Trying to purchase falling markets (predicting a"bottom")...and much worse...trying to short increasing Markets (calling a"top"). I know you know just what I'm referring to. And that's, of course, why many novice traders blow out their trading account fast and offer up.

How about seasoned traders? The Professional traders use an easy Forex trading strategy Forex Trading Strategies is a phrase that conjures up a group of vastly different reactions from different people. In the Market is to import a Forex trading strategy that explains when  the potential START of a new fad occurs, then put in on that tendency, manage your danger, and allow another clueless market participants do the heavy lifting for you.

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Having coached and mentored countless  Make a killing from the Forex market? By pushing and riding the Trend of the Market all the way into the finish.  By squeezing every drop of profit out of the Trend like a skillet. By employing powerful Trend Trading applications such as DynoBars and other tools to spot the START of a fresh Trend.

Traders load up their graph with 20 unique indicators. They stare at the computer screen for 12-15 hours per day and wonder why they're constantly on the incorrect side of their trade. These traders account for 100 percent of all market losses.

CONCLUSION Masters of simplicity. They don't jump around searching for 20 different currency pairs to exchange -- they settle on 2 or 3 pairs. Moreover, top traders NEVER use indexes -- they exchange on a Naked Chart. Click here to see our Youtube video about the outcomes of Indicator Trading vs Naked Trading.

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People, no one has ever made some money by leaping to the END of a trend. Hows thaHow'sssible? How can there be a Forex trading system that accounts for a 90% success rate? Simple, focused, and of course rewarding. I am also going to demonstrate to you live trading examples from some of my favorite currency trading currencies and how it creates a 90% success rate.

Worked effectively for the last 100 decades, and it'll keep working profitably for another 100 decades.

That there is a means to increase your odds of a winning trade to 75%, 80%, and in some cases 90%.

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Trading (along with the ability to earn a steady stream of income out of it) resides securely somewhere in the middle.

Such as DynoBars that identifies important trends. They sit back and work less than 2 hours a day -- and accounts for 100 percent of all market profts.

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The debates that traders have, such as  The first Green Bar that finishes printing after any series of continuous Red Bars. This is your sign that a possible monster commerce may be going to get started. For reference purposes, this Bar may be called the Starting Bar.

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From the young 21 year old hotshot trader  who fantasizes about making quick money to satisfy his luxurious? lifestyle...to the retired greybeard investor who takes little-to-no-risk...and all of walks in between.

From the Market is to import a Forex trading system that identifies whenever the possible START of a new tendency happens, then get in on this trend, manage your danger, and allow the other clueless marketplace participants perform the heavy lifting for you.

In Fact, the facts about Forex Low of this Starting Bar today become a more sophisticated / accurate variant of a pullback zone (also called the Retracement zone) that we're searching for price to pullback into. Click here to watch our Youtube video on exactly the perfect exchange set up to look for.

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|Create a killing in the Forex market? By trapping and riding the Trend of the Market all the way to the finish.  By squeezing every drop of profit from that Trend just like a well-used towel. By using powerful Trend Trading applications like DynoBars along with other tools to recognize the START of a fresh Trend.

Trading (along with the ability to earn a steady stream of income out of it) resides securely somewhere in the middle.

Worked effectively for the last 100 decades, and it'll keep working profitably for another 100 decades.

The only way to earn a sizable fortune  Simple, focused, and of course rewarding. I am also going to demonstrate to you live trading examples from some of my favorite currency trading currencies and how it creates a 90% success rate.

Low of this Starting Bar today become a more sophisticated / accurate variant of a pullback zone (also called the Retracement zone) that we're searching for price to pullback into. Click here to watch our Youtube video on exactly the perfect exchange set up to look for.

Now you dontdon'td to have a PhD in Mathematics to figure out this Day Trading is just a game of oofbabilities. That there is a means to increase your odds of a winning trade to 75%, 80%, and in some cases 90%.

Hows thaHow'sssible? How can there be a Forex trading system that accounts for a 90% success rate? For SELL trading setups, also called  From the young 21 year old hotshot trader  who fantasizes about making quick money to satisfy his luxurious? lifestyle...to the retired greybeard investor who takes little-to-no-risk...and all of walks in between.

Charts and tape studying. Today's trading has been dominated by institutional traders and black box algorithm trading bots. These are the BIG traders that move markets, and some other effective Forex trading strategy MUST follow these large traders. Studies have revealed that there are a staggering 2 Million retail currency trading accounts started each year -- nearly 200,000 accounts each month! Those are the people that we take money out of, and this is the reality of gambling. Day daily. Month after Month. Year after Year.

Brief transactions, simply work the colours in the other direction. Start looking for the very first Red Starting Bar that prints after a series of Green pubs, and  plot your Retracement zone -- the bar high and also the bar low. Then search for Short transactions if price rallies back to the zone.

PROFIT FROM OTHER MARKET PARTICIPANTS WITH A WINNING STRATEGY  Most beginner traders are under the impression that the odds of winning are 50-50, like its a casino card game. In Fact, the facts about Forex So how do the top traders around Earth  Hardcore technical evaluation VS trading principles VS"hey I feel good about this trade even though I'm down big", has created for very entertaining water-cooler talk around the office.  But in the end of the day, if you are a person who is risking your capital at the Forex Market, you only have One Question: What exactly is a trading plan which is employed effectively.

For BUY trading installments, simply Search for In this article I'm going to show you how to keep your Forex Trading strategy The first Green Bar that finishes printing after any series of continuous Red Bars. This is your sign that a possible monster commerce may be going to get started. For reference purposes, this Bar may be called the Starting Bar.

Is the simplicity of our DynoBars charts. It's possible to observe that these colour coded bars feature zero Trading Indicators, demonstrating a concept called Naked Trading -- the capability to exchange according to pure Price Action.

They hazard 1 buck to earn 1 dollar (also called 1:1 danger to payoff ), or they risk 1 buck to create 2 dollars, etc.. Too quickly to take gains, and also slow to decrease losses. Attempting to buy falling markets (predicting a"bottom")...and even worse...trying to brief increasing Markets (calling a"top"). I understand you understand just what I'm referring to. And that's, clearly, why most beginner traders blow out their trading accounts fast and offer up.

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People, no one has ever made some money by leaping to the END of a trend. That trading is a delta-neutral game. If there are X amount of winners on a specific trading evening...then there are also X amount of winners. There have to be losers and winners in each current marketplace, in each trade, in each trade. There are only 2 players in the game -- seasoned traders and in-experienced traders. Guess who gains at the expense of the other?

[jam2289]

Ideas from the Last Few Months - Part 1 of ?

Ideas for narratives are always coming to me. Stories are the underlying structure of our psychologies and our societies. Sometimes I write these ideas down. Here are a few. (Get ready, it will seem fast and chaotic.)

I like the idea of human clay. I like the Creed songs about human clay, I like the myth of the golem formed from clay as presented in Terry Pratchett's book series "Discworld", I like the story of Prometheus forming man from clay. I think it could be tied into the Adam, Eve, and Lilith story too. I like when they used the idea in the tv show "Warehouse 13". It just seems like more could be done with it.

I like the idea of the sands of time. What if there was an epic quest or battle for the sands of time, but then the sands of time did nothing? That happens with goals and attainments a lot, they are hard to achieve and then they're a let down once achieved. I had that experience with mountain climbing years ago. Now, I always have some value that I'm pursuing in the future so that the feeling of an existential vacuum never encroaches on my psyche, but it's still an important human experience.

What if you have a failed hero that is resurrected? He seeks to redeem himself, but he fails again. That could be a great tragedy. Then, the failed hero is redeemed and possibly resurrected by a successful hero that his failed struggle inspired. Then it's a powerful story about repeated failure, the value of fighting the good fight even if you lose, and a story of redemption and triumph. It sounds epic.

The ancient Egyptian god Isis as a heroine that saves her husband.

What if dragon flames didn't burn heroes, what if the dragon flames shrunk people? A hero is shrunken and eaten by the dragon. Inside of the dragon's belly he finds a group of other heroes playing a game of cards on a shield. He rallies these failed heroes and leads them to a victory in which they are redeemed and resurrected. That seems like an epic children's story.

What about the heroes encounter with the hero?

The Humpty Dumpty problem. That's a tiny story that can be so powerful. I think I could expand on that in interesting ways.

Many authors like to start a story by drawing the map first. "Treasure Island" by Robert Louis Stevenson famously started that way. What about taking the "Atlas of World History" and using the maps as jumping off points for stories? You can make them set in our world, or completely change things for a fantasy setting.

There are old maps of the earth from the ancient world that are quite different than our modern ones. Those could be great settings for stories. I like the one where there are four rivers that emanate from one point in the south.

Moon cycles are interesting. What about a moon cycle curse connected to a bracelet or something?

I wrote a four word story once. There is an article on my blog about it. I could hold a photo, drawing, or painting contest and include the images in a book along with an essay about how closure works in narratives.

I created what I termed a Killer Pacman a couple of decades ago as a doodle on schoolwork. That creature has now morphed into the Butterfly Monster over the last two years of teaching English online to kids in China. I also created a Butterfly Fairy and an enchanted Butterfly Forest. I was even thinking about doing the pictures myself for some children's books. It would be cool to get a real artist to do the same pictures and juxtapose them with mine in a book.

What if there was a Time Capsule Society that was seeking to send a person into the future, a human time capsule? If you travel the speed of light you don't age, meaning you can essentially travel forward in time. Interesting.

What if we combine the Philip K. Dick story of Autofac with the DARPA Eatr bots? Autofac is an automated factory that doesn't need any humans to run, it does the entire process from finding natural resources to producing things and repairing itself. Eatr bots are military walking drones that are designed to eat biological energy sources to fuel themselves. Essentially, they could shoot and then eat people to keep going. A system like that could actually conquer the world. Classic science fiction dystopia, but better, because we actually have the technology.

A kid in middle school notices that socks are disappearing. It's becoming harder and harder to find a pair that match. Is there a monster behind this Sockpocalypse?

A funny of satire where there is a world of peace and prosperity and our minor problems are their major problems. Utopia World Problems.

Restorative justice is promising. It's about the injuring and injured parties agreeing to restitution through any reasonable means. These are stories of the fall, transformation, and redemption.

Would it be fun to tell the mythical story of dragons creating man from clay and fire? I think it would. Prometheus the dragon? Maybe. What if all of the Greek gods were dragons? And all of the Titans too? What if angels were dragons? Angles as dragons with ancient Titan names and myths? Interesting. I am intrigued by all of that.

Sometimes our motivations are just surface motivations. Sometimes our underlying motivations are hidden even from ourselves. Then, when you achieve what you were aiming at you realize that it wasn't what you really wanted. That theme is explored a bit in the show "Wayne".

Using a third person point of view to introduce another character through some specific incident, and then switching to the close third person point of view for the protagonist from there on is interesting. Ursula K. Le Guin did this in one of the "Earthsea Cycle" books.

Can I integrate the novel and the graphic novel? I saw this partially done by a girl named Lily that is about 10 years old and it was thought provoking.

What if a comet hit earth and created hell? Pushed up Antarctica as the mountain of purgatory with the four rivers of the world flowing from it. This is Dante's version of the world.

I like the idea of blood as ink. Maybe there is magical ink blood that when harvested can be used to make magical books.

In the ancient Greek afterlife the heroes went to Elysium, most people went to the grey fields of Asphodel, some people went to the fields of Punishment, and the worst beings went to the black depths of Tartarus. What if the heroes in Elysium were bored, recruited the wandering masses in Asphodel, freed the prisoners from the fields of Punishment, and attacked Tartarus. Could be epic.

Beowulf is an old and odd story about a Viking fighting a monster. A weird modern take on it is "The 13th Warrior" movie with Antonio Banderas, based on a book by Michael Crichton, "Eaters of the Dead". What if the monsters were actual Eatrs, the robot made by DARPA that can consume bodies to fuel itself on the battlefield?

What would have to happen to you for you to become a bad person? What about the reverse process? These are interesting thought experiments. Psychologist Jordan Peterson talks about how useful these can be. It's also an intriguing idea to explore in literary form.

Many stories have been told about self-fulfilling prophecies, where a prediction makes people act in a way that brings about the prediction. It's still a great idea.

Here's a note I left for myself that I don't fully understand: "once and future king, arthur, Community, my IQ, billionaires rise and fall and rise again". I understand it a bit. It's about the fact that so many stories are about being in a good state, losing that good state, and then the struggle to restore the previous good state. Because I have bones pressing on my brainstem I have experienced that struggle with my IQ, that's why that's in there. The tv show "Community" also follows that structure in a sitcom format. King Arthur is that story. A number of billionaires have lost everything, and then made it back again.

Resentment is the murderer's muse. What if we personify it as something like a muse sitting on the shoulder? Creepy!

What if Obscurity was a demon that followed people around and made sure that they weren't noticed?

In a general sense, everyone is seeking the promised land in life. That can take many forms. Sin is missing the mark. I don't know where I'm going with that, but it might be something.

The philosopher and professor Susan Wolf wrote a book titled "Meaning in Life and Why It Matters". I think she comes to some bad and dangerous conclusions in that book. I would like to write a commentary taking apart each piece of it.

One of my most liked articles and speeches ever is about great first lines in fiction. I thought it was an interesting topic, but people were more interested than I thought they would be. It might be fun to write a book going through a bunch of first lines from books that I like, and don't like, and analyzing them.

Since I write and speak about grief, I could probably explore grief in a narrative structure. That might not be fun to write though, so I might not do that.

What if the mark of Cain was like the lives in a video game, and Cain then was able to have seven lives and die seven times? This is for all of his descendants. There could be some odd adventures and psychologies there.

That's less than half of my most recent ideas. I'll cover more next time.

________________________________________________

You can find more of what I'm doing at http://www.JeffreyAlexanderMartin.com

[cryptoquicknews-blog]

New Post has been published here https://is.gd/3KiZaX

RIP ICOs: 2019 Will Be the Year of Enterprise Blockchain Tokens

This post was originally published here

Ajit Tripathi is a partner at ConsenSys, where he specializes in global financial services business development and corporate venture strategy.

The following is an exclusive contribution to CoinDesk’s 2018 Year in Review. 

One year ago, I wrote an article for CoinDesk in which I humbly argued that the price of ether didn’t matter and what everyone in the blockchain community should focus on is building useful applications instead.

Hate to say I told you so, but… I did.

A few short months later, CryptoKitties were chased away by the bears, the initial coin offering (ICO) boom was gone, and the euphoria of $1,000 ether and $20,000 bitcoin had been replaced by the dire prognostications that crypto was “ded.”

Below I review what I regard as the major developments of 2018, and what lies ahead in 2019. And at the risk of being accused of double-spending, I’m going to quote freely from my earlier article, since many of the points I made have been vindicated or bear repeating.

When you’re #ODL and you know it…

Until June 2018, enticing crypto engineers to work on any enterprise product was hard, very hard. The lure of tokens ran rampant.

Most people in my dot-com generation learned the hard way that showing up at 8 a.m. and burning brain fuel until 10 p.m. is kinda the only way. But what 24-year-old who can write a grammatically correct sentence with “token” and “moon” in the same breath wants to do that?

When the dot-com microcaps were booming, I didn’t either. What exactly are these cash flows… duh! But, as I wrote a year ago:

“One day everyone in crypto will have to generate fiat revenues and profits in some form.”

When most of the tokens later crashed spectacularly, moon and lambo swiftly retreated from the social discourse and boring middle class concepts like enterprise technology, real human users and a fiat salary re-entered human conversation.

Deja vu, deja vu…

The year of regulation

I quote myself, yet again: “Dealing with other people’s money is always going to be regulated”.

In 2018, when folks in crypto weren’t talking about the tanking prices, we were talking about regulation or hoping it’d go away. Well, it didn’t.

In February, Chairman Christopher Giancarlo of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission advocated a “do no harm” approach to crypto regulation, referring to the erstwhile U.S. approach to the internet.

The clearest and most concise guidance from a regulator came in February from the Swiss, who, to their credit, have been forward-looking in their acknowledgment of the potential of blockchain technology so far. The Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority, or FINMA, clearly laid out the various types of tokens and what makes a token a payment token or a utility token or a security.

Both sides of the securities law debate were woken up by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) director of corporate finance, William Hinman, when he stated in June that to his understanding, “the ethereum network and its decentralized structure, current offers and sales of ether are not securities transactions.”

We the British, maintained our classical studious approach, studying and further studying the space and to our credit, doing no damage, either in support or opposition of the crypto space while calling for good behavior and manners… yes, manners all this time.

On the policy front, the European Commission led the way with a systematic approach to engaging with the blockchain community through the EU Blockchain Observatory.

The year of ‘ded’ ICOs

That said, the news flow in 2018 was dominated not by hardworking engineers building great technology but by traders and bankers mooning and REKTing things, as they do best.

Against the flow, as ICOs boomed I mused…

“I suspect that each year, half of the ICO-funded startups from the previous year will die – if they even make it that long.”

Well, they didn’t.

As EY reported:

“86% are now below their listing price; 30% have lost substantially all value. An investor purchasing a portfolio of The Class of 2017 ICOs on 1 January 2018 would most likely have lost 66% of their investment. Of the ICO start-ups we looked at from The Class of 2017, only 29% (25) have working products or prototypes, up by just 13% from the end of last year.”

Forgive them for they know not of which they speak

So many many folks mused that since ICOs were doing so badly and since most ICOs were launched on ethereum, ethereum must also be “ded.” Well, the price chasers were wrong then and they are wrong now.

As I said to CoinDesk editor in chief Pete Rizzo in a video interview at Consensus 2018, “cryptocurrencies are online community assets.”

Any token that has survived at least one boom or bust and has a thriving community (of people, not trolls and trading bots) has the potential to be used by many many more people over the next two decades as this technology matures and as these platforms scale.

We haven’t even scratched the tip of the iceberg with our ice skates yet. Further, ethereum is the leading platform today because of its ecosystem, which only seems to grow and accelerate…

The year of the ecosystem

Turns out, the price of ether is the least interesting feature of ethereum. I said back then…

“Ethereum has momentum, developer adoption, and a team that is willing to address the technical limitations even at risk to the price of ether. This is why I am making a big bet of time on ethereum rather than a bet of money in crypto. It has people who are serious about the Web 3.0 vision and solving real consumer and business problems.”

At DevCon4, Joseph Lubin, the illustrious co-founder of ethereum, made his famous “killer ecosystem” speech. The way I understood it was that we’re so early in this technology that it’s the quality and depth of the ecosystem surrounding a blockchain platform that’d define its long-term success or failure.

Waiting for a killer app is a fool’s errand because killer apps don’t quite tell you in advance that they are killer apps. The way to get to a whole range of killer apps is to unleash the creative power of developers, enterprises, investors and other agents of society.

That to date has been ethereum’s singular achievement.

The week before, Joe received a memorable reception at Sibos, the biggest conference in banking. Sibos featured enterprise platforms like komgo, Adhara and Trustology in addition to solutions from DAH, Hyperledger, Corda and Ripple and ran talks to packed business audiences.

At the end of Sibos, the most common refrain from the attendees was… “blockchain is here to stay”.

Indeed, the crypto ecosystem of hoodies had just started to merge with the enterprise ecosystem of suits

The year of #buidl

I am insufferable… I quote myself again:

“The question is what did we solve, enhance, or deliver that will make individuals, companies or governments produce more, be more efficient, or enjoy their lives and relationships more?”

In my book, the crowning glory of the year for the entire enterprise blockchain community, and not just the ethereum community, was the production release of VAKT, a platform for trading of physical commodities and komgo, a trade finance platform for commodities that interoperates seamlessly with VAKT. These two platforms were built from start to finish within 2018 on ethereum and marked the arrival of enterprise ethereum in real production use.

The coolest piece of kit produced by enterprise blockchain in 2019 was Kaleido. Built by ex-IBM engineers at ConsenSys, Kaleido enabled one-click industrial-grade deployment and support of enterprise ethereum-based applications. This is a much bigger deal than it sounds.

Development is arguably less than 20 percent of the effort over the lifetime of any enterprise application. Deployment and support are the other 80 percent. Kaleido took 80 percent of the effort out of that 80%.

The most valuable piece of engineering in blockchain was Open Law which enabled the creation of smart contracts whose execution corresponds demonstrably with the underlying legal contracts. In essence, Open Law put the “contract back in smart contracts” and opened up a vast range of real-world applications in financial and non-financial asset markets.

The most readable news in blockchain was Evan Van Ness’ “This Week in Ethereum,” a relentlessly BUIDL focussed newsletter that was a source of perspective through the amusing hysteria and paranoia of the #crypto investor community.

The year tokens came to enterprise

While no one was watching, tokens came to enterprise financial services as Euronext and other ecosystem partners went to pilot at Liquidshare, a consortium re-engineering the interaction between post-trade parties by leveraging blockchain technology and developing a new infrastructure for small and medium-size enterprises (SMEs) in Europe.

In June, the South African Central Bank. working on Project Khokha, proved that a new wholesale payment system built on ethereum can process a day’s worth of interbank payments in less than two hours, that too with full confidentiality and finality.

The Monetary Authority of Singapore and SGX, the city-state’s stock exchange, announced in September that they have successfully developed delivery versus payment (DvP) capabilities for the settlement of tokenized assets across different blockchain platforms.

The public blockchain space started to create enterprise-friendly (and -unfriendly) fiat tokens at pace. As CoinInsider reported, 45 stablecoin projects had raised $350 million in funding by November.

The jokes about a stablecoin going to the moon suddenly didn’t sound like jokes anymore.

2019… The year of enterprise tokens

When you follow the market news too closely, it’s difficult to not be blinded by the obvious. So what’s really going on?

It turns out that the first killer app of the internet was not email. It was the ridiculously simple web page. The first killer app of blockchain is the ridiculously simple token.

A token is a mere smart contract that encapsulates the rules governing the exchange of an asset. Once this contract can be generated from an underlying legal contract and shown to execute in line with the legal contract, regulated, legally sound applications of blockchain become possible. This is a big deal.

It turns out, all economic activity, micro or macro is built on top of legal contracts. Unfortunately, because of information asymmetries, cost of enforcement, the risk of disputes and uncertainty in legal systems, the cost of contracting in too many transactions can exceed the benefit of the transaction.

Smart contracts that execute in line with legal contracts provide evidence of state on-chain and ship with dispute resolution systems can dramatically reduce the costs of contracting and the cost of enforcement, unlocking economic activity across industries and economies.

All that in a little token…

Ok, so should I buy? SODL? HODL?

I quote myself again

“Does that mean you should buy ether today? I can’t and don’t offer investment advice.”

In 2019, tokens will invade the enterprise in full force. The de-siloing of systems that began with multiple energy and bank companies creating VAKT and komgo will accelerate exponentially across applications such as gaming, securities markets, trade finance, intellectual property, digital collectibles, patents and licenses, real estate and many many more, and by 2020, start to show what all the fuss around blockchain was really all about.

Even more importantly, the boundary between public and private networks will start to disappear as assets on one network need to be exchanged with assets on another. Ethereum is uniquely position to grow from this phenomenon.

To conclude, indulge me as I quote myself one last time:

“When we are dead, it’s not what we HODL or SODL that matters. It’s what we BUIDL.”

Rebirth image via Shutterstock.

#crypto #cryptocurrency #btc #xrp #litecoin #altcoin #money #currency #finance #news #alts #hodl #coindesk #cointelegraph #dollar #bitcoin View the website

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[biofunmy]

Jeremy Stoppelman’s Long Battle With Google Is Finally Paying Off

Amy Osborne for BuzzFeed News

Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman in an elevator at Yelp headquarters in San Francisco.

The line outside Shizen, San Francisco’s hottest Michelin-starred hipster vegan sushi restaurant, is extremely long, but the wait is surprisingly short. After the doors open and the first wave of diners are seated, the line mostly disappears, despite it being one of the more popular spots in the city. Just a few people linger on the sidewalk. Why aren’t more people waiting to get in?

The line, or lack of it, is a weirdly effective real-world product demo for Yelp, the 15-year-old review site and local business directory. Shizen has put its reservation system and waitlist on Yelp. Which means that when impatient diners want to wait for a table, they can do so at a bar around the corner, or even at home, and then arrive just in time to be seated. In other words, you don’t have to stand in line to be in line. And so, before you know it, Jeremy Stoppelman, Yelp’s vegan CEO, is tucking into a roll made from beets, kale, and, uh, seaweed pearls. (Trust us on this one: 5 stars.)

Yelp bought a waitlisting company in 2017, and it rolled out new predictive wait times and notification features this year. It’s one of a slew of changes the company made in 2019, including introducing some new ways for it to make money. This follows years of moving beyond mere reviews. You can look up a restaurant’s rating, sure, but you can also use it to get a quote from a chimney sweep or order delivery through one of its partners.

“One of the most powerful companies in the world didn’t want us to succeed.”

And while rolling out new features and revenue streams, or even pivoting into completely different business models, are relatively normal things for tech companies to do, for Stoppelman and Yelp, it feels a bit existential.

“In Yelp’s case, it’s been the thing that I probably have been most focused on for the last decade,” said Stoppelman, “finding a way to survive knowing that one of the most powerful companies in the world didn’t want us to succeed.”

That powerful company is Google and its corporate parent, Alphabet. For most of Yelp’s history, it has been engaged in a painful and public spat with the search and advertising giant, with Yelp executives endlessly beating the drum about what they describe — in interviews, tweets, regular newsletters, and even cutesy animated videos — as Google’s anticompetitive practices.

For years, this seemed like a quixotic fight at best. Stoppelman or some other Yelp executive would take a swipe at Google, which Google would then more or less ignore as it casually snacked on YouTube or Motorola or Nest or Waze or Fitbit. But this view of Google — and big tech writ large — as too big and too powerful has gained traction in recent years both in Europe and the United States, and it is now facing multiple antitrust actions, and has already racked up billions in fines. In recent weeks, attorneys general from 50 states and territories (minus California) announced an antitrust probe into Google’s advertising and search business. The winds have shifted and are coming from the left and the right. The Donald Trump administration has been openly antagonistic toward Big Tech, and the president has said on multiple occasions in response to questions about Google that it might be a monopoly. Meanwhile Sen. Elizabeth Warren has a literal plan to break it up.

In short, the world has lined up behind Stoppelman, who, despite the changes he’s making to the site’s platform or the newfound seriousness with which his antitrust arguments are being taken, is basically doing what he always has. In a series of two wide-ranging interviews with BuzzFeed News, one at Yelp’s office and another at the vegan sushi place, he talked about the changes his company has been through the past 15 years. But mostly he talked about trust. Gaining it, losing it, and, of course, busting it.

Stoppelman is 41. He’s thin and athletic-looking, with cordlike veins that snake down his biceps and that hyperfit, low-body fat upgrade that tech execs seem to have all downloaded at the same time. A Virginia native, he moved to the Bay Area after college, in 1999, and went to work as an engineer during the peak of the first dot-com boom for @Home Network, which was in the early stages of a merger with the internet portal Excite, which Stoppelman said was “clusterfucked.”

“I finished all the coding ideas that my boss had. I’d be like, ‘Hey, I’m out of stuff. What do you want me to work on next?’ And he’d be like, ‘Oh, meet me at my desk at 4:45.’ I’d go by his desk and he’d be gone,” said Stoppelman. “But it was also late ’99, early 2000, so it was hopping in the Bay Area. I was getting recruiting calls already. My phone was ringing every day.”

One of those calls came from a recruiter at X.com, a banking and payments processing company founded by Elon Musk, who had already founded and sold a previous company. Stoppelman went in for an interview.

“At the end of it I met Elon, and I was blown away. I was like, I want to be like this guy! He’s only 28 years old but was much like he is today. He’s like, we’re going to take down Visa! He’s wildly ambitious and knows what he wants to do. Who knows if it will happen, but I’d never met anyone like that.”

They did in fact make it happen, succeeding beyond what was probably in any way realistic in those early days (although Musk himself was pushed out of the CEO role along the way to make room for Peter Thiel). X.com was renamed PayPal; in 2002, as the dot-com boom was going south, eBay acquired the company for $1.5 billion. Those early PayPal employees were suddenly quite rich.

This was the origin of the “PayPal Mafia,” so named for the group of former PayPal employees who went on to found a slew of successful businesses and invest in many others. In many cases they started companies together, or invested in each other’s startups. The group includes Musk, Stoppelman, Thiel, Russell Simmons, Max Levchin, Reid Hoffman, Keith Rabois, David Sacks, Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, Joe Lonsdale, and Dave McClure, among others. Together they would start some of the best-known companies in Silicon Valley, among them LinkedIn, Tesla, SpaceX, Palantir Technologies, and YouTube, while their capital investments helped give rise to Facebook, Uber, Lyft, Pinterest, Stripe, Airbnb, Square, and a host of others.

Stoppelman attributes much of their success to timing. The dot-com market correction began in early 2000, its deflation accelerating after the Department of Justice won a ruling against Microsoft in April that year, and continuing all the way through 9/11 and beyond. Once high-flying companies like Pets.com and Kozmo.com became nothing more than correction roadkill as the market sloughed off trillions of dollars in value. But the PayPal guys, on the other hand, did great.

“While the internet was collapsing around us, our company was successful. We didn’t go through the trauma of the dot-com bust,” said Stoppelman. “Everyone had some capital and confidence at a time when most people that had been anywhere near the blast radius of the internet were completely dismissive. The mainstream thinking was ‘Yeah, that internet. Maybe it’s a utility, but it’s not this exciting commercial thing we thought it was.’ That created a very fertile soil. You have people with capital, interest, confidence, motivation, all at the right time in their career — late twenties to late thirties — pretty good odds.”

In 2004, after he spent a year at Harvard Business School, Stoppelman along with Simmons, also of PayPal, cofounded Yelp with investment from yet another PayPal alum, Levchin. In its early days, it was going to have more of a social networking–style structure, where people could ask friends for recommendations. But as Stoppelman and Simmons absorbed a lot of what was happening elsewhere on the internet, particularly with blogging, Yelp settled on local business reviews as a sort of “directed blogging.” The focus was mostly restaurants and small businesses, but you could review just about anything you could think of there: plumbers, doctors, gas stations, cannabis clinics, hotels, parks, monuments, dog parks, you name it.

Problems began almost immediately.

Trust is hard to come by, especially on the internet, where everything anyone doesn’t like is fake. Facebook has spent years awash in fake news and misinformation. Amazon ratings and reviews are notoriously compromised by bad actors. Photos are shopped. Videos are doctored. That account is a bot. The chans have wormed their way into our brains. And even when we see the same stuff, we can’t always agree what happened.

For Yelp, the trust problem was fake reviews. Restaurants were paying people, or offering them discounts, to write nice things on the site. Or people would, for one reason or another, trash a restaurant they had never been to. Maybe it was a competitor, or maybe the owner was an outspoken Democrat. Yelp’s solution was to take an aggressive stance. Most of its users probably didn’t notice, but it created a lot of headaches for its relationship with the businesses it relies on for ad dollars.

But trust was also something Stoppelman and Simmons had thought about, extensively, at PayPal, a company whose entire business depended on getting strangers to send each other money via the then-new internet. In fact, they had seen PayPal’s business boom and were now rich precisely because it had cracked down on fraud and established consumer trust. They had a low tolerance for scammers.

“Within the first two weeks we could see some business owners generating obvious reviews for themselves. The fake content popped up pretty quick. We could tell that spam was going to be a problem,” said Stoppelman. “And we also looked at the competitor that we were up against in those days, Citysearch. They had a consumer review feature, but it was just totally spammed out.”

From those early days, Yelp focused on taking down reviews that it thought were spammy or bogus. Those takedowns became something of an arms race, and the company has sometimes gone to extremes to try to keep things in check. Yelp will publish consumer alerts on businesses pages when it detects inauthentic activity, for example, and even runs sting operations.

“We have a team that tries to buy reviews from people, and then also try to identify businesses that are buying reviews,” said Stoppelman. “If we catch someone red-handed, we’d take screenshots of correspondence and all that and put up a banner saying on their business page, saying, ‘Hey, this business is trying to game the system, and here’s the evidence.’”

It also takes action when people start reviewing businesses simply because they are in the news for other reasons, often political — because everything is political now. For example, in 2018, when the Red Hen restaurant in Lexington, Virginia, refused to serve then–White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, online mobs from all across the country turned to Yelp to pummel the restaurant with negative reviews — even though they had never set foot in the door.

This is a relatively common occurrence, and it doesn’t always take a national story. Local issues can also send people to a business’s page for punitive reasons, which means Yelp has to police these kinds of review-brigading all over the country, even when the company isn’t aware of whatever the issue is that triggered the action. So it has an algorithm to detect what the company calls an “unusual activity” alert that it adds to the business’s page until the activity subsides and it can mop up.

It also surfaces reviews algorithmically via recommendation software. It segregates reviews that the software flags for being solicited or biased, or because it doesn’t know enough about a user. Which means Yelp hides almost 30% of the reviews posted to its site, according to the company. This review filter is, to put it mildly, enormously unpopular among businesses. It has also led to a rash of false conspiracy theories (covered previously by BuzzFeed News) that the company takes down good reviews in order to get businesses to buy ads. It also means Yelp leaves money on the table — it could easily juice engagement and user numbers if it took a less aggressive approach to policing content. But here’s the thing: It works. The company is approaching 200 million reviews, and it may even have passed that milestone by the time it announces its quarterly results this week.

Moreover, when you see an average review number on Yelp, it’s a pretty good indicator. A 4.5-star restaurant is probably going to be pretty great. A 2-star restaurant? Not gonna eat there. You might also see an alert about a restaurant’s cleanliness on Yelp. In more than 30 states, it makes that information available right on a restaurant’s page. It’s another transparency measure that’s good for consumers but has probably cost the company money with the communities of small businesses that populate its site.

“If you optimize for maximum attention, you’re leaning into human nature of rubbernecking at train crashes, and all the worst stuff that humanity can provide.”

“I’m sure we could have been making a lot more money if we allowed ourselves to be compromised and just said: Anything goes on Yelp. You want 5 stars? Tell your friends to go write a bunch of reviews for you and they’ll be on Yelp and then you can advertise. And wouldn’t it be wonderful?” said Stoppelman.

Instead, Yelp went another route. It is vigilant about reviews, and has passed on some easy ways to make money from users’ data. It doesn’t let businesses target users who happen to be walking by with an ad, for example. Despite persistent rumors, it’s hard to imagine Yelp fitting in as an acquisition target for Big Tech — in just two interviews with BuzzFeed News, the outspoken Stoppelman took shots at Facebook, Amazon, and Google.

Which is all the more curious as Stoppelman is a member of perhaps the most successful circle of investors ever, in the PayPal Mafia, and yet his business runs counter to so much of the prevailing wisdom in Silicon Valley, which argues for growth at any cost.

“When I look out at other companies,” Stoppelman said, “I see other priorities, namely growing revenue as much as possible. So why didn’t Facebook crack down on certain types of content, or why did they allow sensational stories or stories that are not true to blast across the network and get amplified so much? Had they had the foresight to say, ‘Hey, this is bad for the world’ or ‘This is bad for our long-term brand, we should shut it down,’ it probably wouldn’t have turned into an eventually traumatic political issue.

“But at the end of the day, collecting attention is the way that they make money, and they dial up the algorithm — the same as YouTube, same for Google. You know, it’s like Google and Facebook did the same thing: Use the algorithm to optimize for maximum attention. And if you optimize for maximum attention, you’re leaning into human nature of rubbernecking at train crashes, and all the worst stuff that humanity can provide. And that’s where you end up. And I’m sure it was like rocket fuel for their business, but now we’re paying the price.”

Amy Osborne for BuzzFeed News

Stoppelman talks with Ronald Clark, head of investor relations, and Brigitte Ehman, manager of business operations and strategy, as they walk through the front lobby at Yelp headquarters on Sept. 20 in San Francisco.

Yelp’s headquarters are in the old Pacific Bell Building, once the tallest building on the West Coast, and the first skyscraper in San Francisco’s SoMa district. When Yelp moved in, it was an early tech colonizer of this particular section of downtown San Francisco, today known as the East Cut. Now, the East Cut is swimming with internet giants, and the Pacific Bell Building is dwarfed by the Salesforce Tower, just a few blocks away.

Yelp’s windows look out on that building and the park next door that bears Salesforce’s name. You can see the offices for Slack, Trulia, and Facebook as well, all of which ring the new multibillion-dollar park and transit center. LinkedIn and Google have offices nearby. To the west, on a blighted section of Market Street, are Uber’s and Twitter’s headquarters. Pinterest is a few blocks south. So is Airbnb. Yelp is hemmed on nearly all sides by tech behemoths.

Yelp is small compared even to Twitter. It’s endured years of ups and downs, including a stock slide last year over the way it sells ads. (It eliminated fixed-term contracts.) The company has a market cap of only about $2.5 billion — nothing compared to Alphabet or Amazon, both of which have market caps of nearly $900 billion. Or, for that matter, Apple and Microsoft, which have both blown past trillion-dollar market cap territory.

Yet Yelp is a tidy, profitable business that pulled in $55 million in profit on $942 million in revenue last year. Seventy-three million people open it up on their phones every month. One hundred million look at it on the web. That’s not shabby. But in 2019, in the era of billion-plus user companies, a mere 100 million people puts you at a disadvantage.

“Google didn’t stick to the plan.”

“The question is, is there a path to independence?” Stoppelman said. “Distribution is always the centerpiece. If you create a great product or service, how do you get it in the hands of the people? The problem with Big Tech is they control the distribution channels. Distribution is the key. If Google is the starting place for all of the people that are tapping into the web, to the extent they get in front of consumers and block them from finding the best information, it’s really problematic, and that can stifle innovation.”

To that end, much of what Yelp has been doing recently is aimed at connecting directly with its audience. In addition to things like reservations and waitlists, it also introduced new customization features, which let you set up dining preferences, dietary restrictions, and other personalized options. These are nascent but represent a big push for the company as it tries to provide individualized recommendations — which means that when you search for a place to get lunch in the near future, your results will be different than your coworkers’ at the next desk over. Yelp has rolled out new tools for businesses as well. A new “Connect” tool lets businesses communicate directly with people who have shown an interest in it — maybe they’ve checked in there or written a review. It also added features designed to help new businesses without many reviews reach audiences, and as a way to build new revenue streams outside of search ads.

But it is the roiling national debate about the role Big Tech plays in our lives — from the way it enables disinformation to how it relies on unfair business practices — that has thrust Stoppelman into the center of a national conversation. Yet he didn’t just end up there. Much of the newfound traction that the antitrust argument is getting is due to a long game from Yelp, which has leaned on regulators across the world for years now. The company began when Google’s business was under far less scrutiny.

“We really started Yelp to do something noble,” Stoppelman said. “We wanted to help people connect with the best local businesses. There was this platform called Google, and we essentially did everything that they said. We generated really fantastic content, we cultivated community, we did all these things that were expensive, that were hard to do, and required a lot of innovation. Google didn’t stick to the plan.”

Google tried to buy Yelp in 2009, but the deal fell apart. And so the larger company built out its own local business reviews, and today it promotes those above content from Yelp, TripAdvisor, or other competitors. Search for “Thai restaurants in Hollywood,” for example, and Google will spit back the top-rated ones from its own listings. Yelp’s listings will generally be there, but farther down the page.

“The only way that we could get them to do the right thing in the early days was by shaming them in the press. So that’s where this all began — they would do something egregious like steal our content and put it in every Android phone and the Google Places app. We would talk to TechCrunch or something, and someone would write it up, and they’d be shamed into doing something. And then eventually they got tired of that and … as we would shame them, they’d get less responsive. And so we would naturally progress to the next level, which was ‘Okay, the only source of power now that might be able to check them is government.’”

Google, via a spokesperson, denied these claims.

In 2011, Yelp’s senior vice president of public affairs, Vince Sollitto, gave a presentation to the Conference of Western Attorneys General, in which he charged that Google was engaging in anticompetitive practices that hurt its smaller competitors. Meanwhile, Luther Lowe, Yelp’s vice president of public policy, aggressively continued to make the antitrust argument to the press. (If you write about Google, Lowe is probably already lurking in your inbox.)

“What happened is that the government lost its will to prosecute.”

“I’ve always had a view that the government could and should play a role. I was born in the late ’70s, a child of the ’80s. My dad was an SEC lawyer who worked on insider trading cases. My worldview has always been government regulation isn’t the end-all, be-all, but the government can and should play an assertive role in shaping a market economy,” said Stoppelman. “But what happened is that the government lost its will to prosecute.”

Yelp’s effort has ramped up as Google began delivering more answers on the search results page itself — including local information that had been Yelp’s bread and butter — rather than linking out to third parties. As of this past summer, more than half of all Google searches now end without a click, according to a SparkToro analysis of Google’s clickstream data. That is, most of the time when someone searches for something on Google, they just get the answer they are looking for in the results themselves and don’t have to click through to another website (and see another website’s ads).

But who cares if I get my restaurant reviews from Google instead of Yelp or see hotel rankings right in a Google search rather than on TripAdvisor? The convenience of getting exactly what you are looking for without having to click out or wait for another page to load, especially in the era of mobile, is great. No question.

Yelp needed to show that Google delivering its own answers and own products above others hurt actual consumers, and not just Google’s would-be competitors. So Yelp launched a campaign to try to show how the search giant’s practices did just that. In short, Yelp’s argument is that when Google displays its own results it deprives consumers of choice and, worse, that Google’s local reviews are, well, not good.

“Google’s reviews… It is kind of comical that they call theirs reviews!” Stoppelman said. “Most, probably like 60% or 70%, of their reviews are actually ratings with no text. But they have to compete against us, so they’re generous with what they call a review.”

It’s been a slog. But there is also now real movement — and not just in Europe, which is more prone to regulation than the US — on the issue of antitrust. And on the issue of user trust, there have also been a litany of tech scandals that have roiled Google, YouTube, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, and Uber. High-profile startups like Theranos and WeWork turned out to be little more than elaborate cons. Tech, and Big Tech in particular, has few political friends on the left or the right. What was once one of the more admired industries suddenly seems more like a politically convenient punching bag.

There was a time when all that seemed to matter in tech was scale. Everything was about getting to a billion, and then the next billion after that. Growth was good for its own sake. And anyone who deviated from these lines was unrealistic, or flat-out irrational. But today those ideas are very much in retreat. Facebook and YouTube and Amazon are so large now that they seem almost beyond policing. Companies are increasingly being asked to defend their scale and practices. It turns out, when you put a billion people together on the internet and let them say whatever they want, the marketplace of ideas bends toward propaganda and Nazis.

Stoppelman seems to be playing a long game, counting on some of the scale we’ve let these companies stack up to be leveled off by government actors. It is often said in and around Silicon Valley that we are in the early stages of the internet. And the question before us now is really about how much control we want to place in a handful of companies, be they in the US, or China, or wherever.

“The first seven years or eight years, there was a lot of eye-rolling in Silicon Valley about Yelp being a complainer, or I’m a whiner, or this is a stupid issue,” Stoppelman said. “I think the reality is now the world has caught up.” ●

Sahred From Source link Business

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RIP ICOs: 2019 Will Be the Year of Enterprise Blockchain Tokens

Ajit Tripathi is a partner at ConsenSys, where he specializes in global financial services business development and corporate venture strategy.

The following is an exclusive contribution to BTC News Today’s 2018 Year in Review. 

One year ago, I wrote an article for BTC News Today in which I humbly argued that the price of ether didn’t matter and what everyone in the blockchain community should focus on is building useful applications instead.

Hate to say I told you so, but… I did.

A few short months later, CryptoKitties were chased away by the bears, the initial coin offering (ICO) boom was gone, and the euphoria of $1,000 ether and $20,000 bitcoin had been replaced by the dire prognostications that crypto was “ded.”

Below I review what I regard as the major developments of 2018, and what lies ahead in 2019. And at the risk of being accused of double-spending, I’m going to quote freely from my earlier article, since many of the points I made have been vindicated or bear repeating.

When you’re #ODL and you know it…

Until June 2018, enticing crypto engineers to work on any enterprise product was hard, very hard. The lure of tokens ran rampant.

Most people in my dot-com generation learned the hard way that showing up at 8 a.m. and burning brain fuel until 10 p.m. is kinda the only way. But what 24-year-old who can write a grammatically correct sentence with “token” and “moon” in the same breath wants to do that?

When the dot-com microcaps were booming, I didn’t either. What exactly are these cash flows… duh! But, as I wrote a year ago:

“One day everyone in crypto will have to generate fiat revenues and profits in some form.”

When most of the tokens later crashed spectacularly, moon and lambo swiftly retreated from the social discourse and boring middle class concepts like enterprise technology, real human users and a fiat salary re-entered human conversation.

Deja vu, deja vu…

The year of regulation

I quote myself, yet again: “Dealing with other people’s money is always going to be regulated”.

In 2018, when folks in crypto weren’t talking about the tanking prices, we were talking about regulation or hoping it’d go away. Well, it didn’t.

In February, Chairman Christopher Giancarlo of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission advocated a “do no harm” approach to crypto regulation, referring to the erstwhile U.S. approach to the internet.

The clearest and most concise guidance from a regulator came in February from the Swiss, who, to their credit, have been forward-looking in their acknowledgment of the potential of blockchain technology so far. The Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority, or FINMA, clearly laid out the various types of tokens and what makes a token a payment token or a utility token or a security.

Both sides of the securities law debate were woken up by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) director of corporate finance, William Hinman, when he stated in June that to his understanding, “the ethereum network and its decentralized structure, current offers and sales of ether are not securities transactions.”

We the British, maintained our classical studious approach, studying and further studying the space and to our credit, doing no damage, either in support or opposition of the crypto space while calling for good behavior and manners… yes, manners all this time.

On the policy front, the European Commission led the way with a systematic approach to engaging with the blockchain community through the EU Blockchain Observatory.

The year of ‘ded’ ICOs

That said, the news flow in 2018 was dominated not by hardworking engineers building great technology but by traders and bankers mooning and REKTing things, as they do best.

Against the flow, as ICOs boomed I mused…

“I suspect that each year, half of the ICO-funded startups from the previous year will die – if they even make it that long.”

Well, they didn’t.

As EY reported:

“86% are now below their listing price; 30% have lost substantially all value. An investor purchasing a portfolio of The Class of 2017 ICOs on 1 January 2018 would most likely have lost 66% of their investment. Of the ICO start-ups we looked at from The Class of 2017, only 29% (25) have working products or prototypes, up by just 13% from the end of last year.”

Forgive them for they know not of which they speak

So many many folks mused that since ICOs were doing so badly and since most ICOs were launched on ethereum, ethereum must also be “ded.” Well, the price chasers were wrong then and they are wrong now.

As I said to BTC News Today editor in chief Pete Rizzo in a video interview at Consensus 2018, “cryptocurrencies are online community assets.”

Any token that has survived at least one boom or bust and has a thriving community (of people, not trolls and trading bots) has the potential to be used by many many more people over the next two decades as this technology matures and as these platforms scale.

We haven’t even scratched the tip of the iceberg with our ice skates yet. Further, ethereum is the leading platform today because of its ecosystem, which only seems to grow and accelerate…

The year of the ecosystem

Turns out, the price of ether is the least interesting feature of ethereum. I said back then…

“Ethereum has momentum, developer adoption, and a team that is willing to address the technical limitations even at risk to the price of ether. This is why I am making a big bet of time on ethereum rather than a bet of money in crypto. It has people who are serious about the Web 3.0 vision and solving real consumer and business problems.”

At DevCon4, Joseph Lubin, the illustrious co-founder of ethereum, made his famous “killer ecosystem” speech. The way I understood it was that we’re so early in this technology that it’s the quality and depth of the ecosystem surrounding a blockchain platform that’d define its long-term success or failure.

Waiting for a killer app is a fool’s errand because killer apps don’t quite tell you in advance that they are killer apps. The way to get to a whole range of killer apps is to unleash the creative power of developers, enterprises, investors and other agents of society.

That to date has been ethereum’s singular achievement.

The week before, Joe received a memorable reception at Sibos, the biggest conference in banking. Sibos featured enterprise platforms like komgo, Adhara and Trustology in addition to solutions from DAH, Hyperledger, Corda and Ripple and ran talks to packed business audiences.

At the end of Sibos, the most common refrain from the attendees was… “blockchain is here to stay”.

Indeed, the crypto ecosystem of hoodies had just started to merge with the enterprise ecosystem of suits

The year of #buidl

I am insufferable… I quote myself again:

“The question is what did we solve, enhance, or deliver that will make individuals, companies or governments produce more, be more efficient, or enjoy their lives and relationships more?”

In my book, the crowning glory of the year for the entire enterprise blockchain community, and not just the ethereum community, was the production release of VAKT, a platform for trading of physical commodities and komgo, a trade finance platform for commodities that interoperates seamlessly with VAKT. These two platforms were built from start to finish within 2018 on ethereum and marked the arrival of enterprise ethereum in real production use.

The coolest piece of kit produced by enterprise blockchain in 2019 was Kaleido. Built by ex-IBM engineers at ConsenSys, Kaleido enabled one-click industrial-grade deployment and support of enterprise ethereum-based applications. This is a much bigger deal than it sounds.

Development is arguably less than 20 percent of the effort over the lifetime of any enterprise application. Deployment and support are the other 80 percent. Kaleido took 80 percent of the effort out of that 80%.

The most valuable piece of engineering in blockchain was Open Law which enabled the creation of smart contracts whose execution corresponds demonstrably with the underlying legal contracts. In essence, Open Law put the “contract back in smart contracts” and opened up a vast range of real-world applications in financial and non-financial asset markets.

The most readable news in blockchain was Evan Van Ness’ “This Week in Ethereum,” a relentlessly BUIDL focussed newsletter that was a source of perspective through the amusing hysteria and paranoia of the #crypto investor community.

The year tokens came to enterprise

While no one was watching, tokens came to enterprise financial services as Euronext and other ecosystem partners went to pilot at Liquidshare, a consortium re-engineering the interaction between post-trade parties by leveraging blockchain technology and developing a new infrastructure for small and medium-size enterprises (SMEs) in Europe.

In June, the South African Central Bank. working on Project Khokha, proved that a new wholesale payment system built on ethereum can process a day’s worth of interbank payments in less than two hours, that too with full confidentiality and finality.

The Monetary Authority of Singapore and SGX, the city-state’s stock exchange, announced in September that they have successfully developed delivery versus payment (DvP) capabilities for the settlement of tokenized assets across different blockchain platforms.

The public blockchain space started to create enterprise-friendly (and -unfriendly) fiat tokens at pace. As CoinInsider reported, 45 stablecoin projects had raised $350 million in funding by November.

The jokes about a stablecoin going to the moon suddenly didn’t sound like jokes anymore.

2019… The year of enterprise tokens

When you follow the market news too closely, it’s difficult to not be blinded by the obvious. So what’s really going on?

It turns out that the first killer app of the internet was not email. It was the ridiculously simple web page. The first killer app of blockchain is the ridiculously simple token.

A token is a mere smart contract that encapsulates the rules governing the exchange of an asset. Once this contract can be generated from an underlying legal contract and shown to execute in line with the legal contract, regulated, legally sound applications of blockchain become possible. This is a big deal.

It turns out, all economic activity, micro or macro is built on top of legal contracts. Unfortunately, because of information asymmetries, cost of enforcement, the risk of disputes and uncertainty in legal systems, the cost of contracting in too many transactions can exceed the benefit of the transaction.

Smart contracts that execute in line with legal contracts provide evidence of state on-chain and ship with dispute resolution systems can dramatically reduce the costs of contracting and the cost of enforcement, unlocking economic activity across industries and economies.

All that in a little token…

Ok, so should I buy? SODL? HODL?

I quote myself again

“Does that mean you should buy ether today? I can’t and don’t offer investment advice.”

In 2019, tokens will invade the enterprise in full force. The de-siloing of systems that began with multiple energy and bank companies creating VAKT and komgo will accelerate exponentially across applications such as gaming, securities markets, trade finance, intellectual property, digital collectibles, patents and licenses, real estate and many many more, and by 2020, start to show what all the fuss around blockchain was really all about.

Even more importantly, the boundary between public and private networks will start to disappear as assets on one network need to be exchanged with assets on another. Ethereum is uniquely position to grow from this phenomenon.

To conclude, indulge me as I quote myself one last time:

“When we are dead, it’s not what we HODL or SODL that matters. It’s what we BUIDL.”

Rebirth image via Shutterstock.

source: http://bit.ly/2RcFZK7

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