Tech 9 Quotes

Consider that the telephone took 75 years to reach 50 million users, whereas television was in 50 million households within 13 years, the internet in 4,  . . . and Angry Birds in 35 days. In the tech era, the pace is accelerating further: it took Microsoft Office 22 years to reach a billion users, but Gmail only 12, and Facebook 9. Trying

I will never slide, never fall, never fail.

Here’s a simple definition of ideology: “A set of beliefs about the proper order of society and how it can be achieved.”8 And here’s the most basic of all ideological questions: Preserve the present order, or change it? At the French Assembly of 1789, the delegates who favored preservation sat on the right side of the chamber, while those who favored change sat on the left. The terms right and left have stood for conservatism and liberalism ever since. Political theorists since Marx had long assumed that people chose ideologies to further their self-interest. The rich and powerful want to preserve and conserve; the peasants and workers want to change things (or at least they would if their consciousness could be raised and they could see their self-interest properly, said the Marxists). But even though social class may once have been a good predictor of ideology, that link has been largely broken in modern times, when the rich go both ways (industrialists mostly right, tech billionaires mostly left) and so do the poor (rural poor mostly right, urban poor mostly left). And when political scientists looked into it, they found that self-interest does a remarkably poor job of predicting political attitudes.9 So for most of the late twentieth century, political scientists embraced blank-slate theories in which people soaked up the ideology of their parents or the TV programs they watched.10 Some political scientists even said that most people were so confused about political issues that they had no real ideology at all.11 But then came the studies of twins. In the 1980s, when scientists began analyzing large databases that allowed them to compare identical twins (who share all of their genes, plus, usually, their prenatal and childhood environments) to same-sex fraternal twins (who share half of their genes, plus their prenatal and childhood environments), they found that the identical twins were more similar on just about everything.12 And what’s more, identical twins reared in separate households (because of adoption) usually turn out to be very similar, whereas unrelated children reared together (because of adoption) rarely turn out similar to each other, or to their adoptive parents; they tend to be more similar to their genetic parents. Genes contribute, somehow, to just about every aspect of our personalities.13 We’re not just talking about IQ, mental illness, and basic personality traits such as shyness. We’re talking about the degree to which you like jazz, spicy foods, and abstract art; your likelihood of getting a divorce or dying in a car crash; your degree of religiosity, and your political orientation as an adult. Whether you end up on the right or the left of the political spectrum turns out to be just as heritable as most other traits: genetics explains between a third and a half of the variability among people on their political attitudes.14 Being raised in a liberal or conservative household accounts for much less. How can that be? How can there be a genetic basis for attitudes about nuclear power, progressive taxation, and foreign aid when these issues only emerged in the last century or two? And how can there be a genetic basis for ideology when people sometimes change their political parties as adults? To answer these questions it helps to return to the definition of innate that I gave in chapter 7. Innate does not mean unmalleable; it means organized in advance of experience. The genes guide the construction of the brain in the uterus, but that’s only the first draft, so to speak. The draft gets revised by childhood experiences. To understand the origins of ideology you have to take a developmental perspective, starting with the genes and ending with an adult voting for a particular candidate or joining a political protest. There are three major steps in the process. Step

Dr. Fauci’s business closures pulverized America’s middle class and engineered the largest upward transfer of wealth in human history. In 2020, workers lost $3.7 trillion while billionaires gained $3.9 trillion.46 Some 493 individuals became new billionaires,47 and an additional 8 million Americans dropped below the poverty line.48 The biggest winners were the robber barons—the very companies that were cheerleading Dr. Fauci’s lockdown and censoring his critics: Big Technology, Big Data, Big Telecom, Big Finance, Big Media behemoths (Michael Bloomberg, Rupert Murdoch, Viacom, and Disney), and Silicon Valley Internet titans like Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Eric Schmidt, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, Larry Ellison, and Jack Dorsey. The very Internet companies that snookered us all with the promise of democratizing communications made it impermissible for Americans to criticize their government or question the safety of pharmaceutical products; these companies propped up all official pronouncements while scrubbing all dissent. The same Tech/Data and Telecom robber barons, gorging themselves on the corpses of our obliterated middle class, rapidly transformed America’s once-proud democracy into a censorship and surveillance police state from which they profit at every turn.

Except then a local high school journalism class decided to investigate the story. Not having attended Columbia Journalism School, the young scribes were unaware of the prohibition on committing journalism that reflects poorly on Third World immigrants. Thanks to the teenagers’ reporting, it was discovered that Reddy had become a multimillionaire by using H-1B visas to bring in slave labor from his native India. Dozens of Indian slaves were working in his buildings and at his restaurant. Apparently, some of those “brainy” high-tech workers America so desperately needs include busboys and janitors. And concubines. The pubescent girls Reddy brought in on H-1B visas were not his nieces: They were his concubines, purchased from their parents in India when they were twelve years old. The sixty-four-year-old Reddy flew the girls to America so he could have sex with them—often several of them at once. (We can only hope this is not why Mark Zuckerberg is so keen on H-1B visas.) The third roommate—the crying girl—had escaped the carbon monoxide poisoning only because she had been at Reddy’s house having sex with him, which, judging by the looks of him, might be worse than death. As soon as a translator other than Reddy was found, she admitted that “the primary purpose for her to enter the U.S. was to continue to have sex with Reddy.” The day her roommates arrived from India, she was forced to watch as the old, balding immigrant had sex with both underage girls at once.3 She also said her dead roommate had been pregnant with Reddy’s child. That could not be confirmed by the court because Reddy had already cremated the girl, in the Hindu tradition—even though her parents were Christian. In all, Reddy had brought seven underage girls to the United States for sex—smuggled in by his brother and sister-in-law, who lied to immigration authorities by posing as the girls’ parents.4 Reddy’s “high-tech” workers were just doing the slavery Americans won’t do. No really—we’ve tried getting American slaves! We’ve advertised for slaves at all the local high schools and didn’t get a single taker. We even posted flyers at the grade schools, asking for prepubescent girls to have sex with Reddy. Nothing. Not even on Craigslist. Reddy’s slaves and concubines were considered “untouchables” in India, treated as “subhuman”—“so low that they are not even considered part of Hinduism’s caste system,” as the Los Angeles Times explained. To put it in layman’s terms, in India they’re considered lower than a Kardashian. According to the Indian American magazine India Currents: “Modern slavery is on display every day in India: children forced to beg, young girls recruited into brothels, and men in debt bondage toiling away in agricultural fields.” More than half of the estimated 20.9 million slaves worldwide live in Asia.5 Thanks to American immigration policies, slavery is making a comeback in the United States! A San Francisco couple “active in the Indian community” bought a slave from a New Delhi recruiter to clean house for them, took away her passport when she arrived, and refused to let her call her family or leave their home.6 In New York, Indian immigrants Varsha and Mahender Sabhnani were convicted in 2006 of bringing in two Indonesian illegal aliens as slaves to be domestics in their Long Island, New York, home.7 In addition to helping reintroduce slavery to America, Reddy sends millions of dollars out of the country in order to build monuments to himself in India. “The more money Reddy made in the States,” the Los Angeles Times chirped, “the more good he seemed to do in his hometown.” That’s great for India, but what is America getting out of this model immigrant? Slavery: Check. Sickening caste system: Check. Purchasing twelve-year-old girls for sex: Check. Draining millions of dollars from the American economy: Check. Smuggling half-dead sex slaves out of his slums in rolled-up carpets right under the nose of the Berkeley police: Priceless.

> In the 21st century, intellectual capital is what will matter in the job market and will help a country grow its economy. Investments in biosciences, computers and electronics, engineering, and other growing high-tech industries have been the major differentiator in recent decades. More careers than ever now require technical skills so in order to be competitive in those fields, a nation must invest in STEM studies. Economic growth has slowed and unemployment rates have spiked, making employers much pickier about qualifications to hire. There is now an overabundance of liberal arts majors. A study from Georgetown University lists the five college majors with the highest unemployment rates (crossed against popularity): clinical psychology, 19.5 percent; miscellaneous fine arts, 16.2 percent; U.S. history, 15.1 percent; library science, 15 percent; and (tied for No. 5) military technologies and educational psychology, 10.9 percent each. Unemployment rates for STEM subjects hovered around 0 to 3 percent: astrophysics/astronomy, around 0 percent; geological and geophysics engineering, 0 percent; physical science, 2.5 percent; geosciences, 3.2 percent; and math/computer science, 3.5 percent. 

As media strategist Tom Goodwin wrote in a TechCrunch article in March 2015: “Uber, the world’s largest taxi company, owns no vehicles. Facebook, the world’s most popular media owner, creates no content. Alibaba, the most valuable retailer, has no inventory. And Airbnb, the world’s largest accommodation provider, owns no real estate.”9

In my city we spent $1.6 billion on a new ticketing system for the trains. We replaced paper tickets with smartcards and now they can tell where people get on and off. So, question: how is that worth $1.6 billion? People say it’s the government being incompetent, and ok. But this is happening all over. All the transit networks are getting smartcards, the grocery stores are taking your name, the airports are getting face recognition cameras. Those cameras, they don’t work when people try to avoid them. Like, they can be fooled by glasses. We KNOW they’re ineffective as anti-terrorism devices, but we still keep installing them. All of this stuff—the smartcards, the ID systems, the “anti-congestion” car-tracking tech—all of it is terrible at what it’s officially supposed to do. It’s only good for tracking the rest of us, the 99.9% who just use the smartcard or whatever and let ourselves be tracked because it’s easier. I’m not a privacy nut, and I don’t care that much if these organizations want to know where I go and what I buy. But what bothers me is how HARD they’re all working for that data, how much money they’re spending, and how they never admit that’s what they want. It means that information must be really valuable for some reason, and I just wonder to who and why.

The myth of meritocracy achieves its apotheosis in America’s tech industry. According to a 2016 survey, the number one concern of tech start-up founders was ‘hiring good people’, while having a diverse workforce ranked seventh on the list of ten business priorities.9 One in four founders said they weren’t interested in diversity or work-life balance at all. Which, taken together, points to a belief that if you want to find ‘the best people’, addressing structural bias is unnecessary. A belief in meritocracy is all you need.

When thinking about how to incorporate lecture videos, many online faculty imagine posting videos of their classroom lectures in the course. This is certainly one way to do it, and some institutions are investing in elaborate lecture-capture systems to facilitate this process. But lecture capture requires expensive tech and a team of skilled professionals. The small teaching way is to record short narrated slideshow videos or webcam-style videos speaking directly to the camera on your computer monitor. The key word here is short. “Traditional in-person lectures usually last an hour, but students have much shorter attention spans when watching educational videos online,” writes Philip Guo in a blog post about a study he and his colleagues conducted (Guo, 2013). The researchers compiled data from 6.9 million video-watching sessions to track engagement patterns of online students. Their findings led to a strong recommendation that online class videos should be no longer than six minutes.

In the internal paper, the employee explained that Trump had outspent Clinton between June and November, paying Facebook $44 million compared to her $28 million. And, with Facebook’s guidance, his campaign had operated like a tech company, rapidly testing ads using Facebook’s software until they found the perfect messaging for various audiences. Trump’s campaign had a total of 5.9 million different versions of his ads, compared to Clinton’s 66,000, in a way that “better leveraged Facebook’s ability to optimize for outcomes,” the employee said. Most of Trump’s ads asked people to perform an action, like donating or signing up for a list, making it easier for a computer to measure success or failure. Those ads also helped him collect email addresses. Emails were crucial, because Facebook had a tool called Lookalike Audience. When Trump or any advertiser presented a set of emails, Facebook’s software could find more people who thought similarly to the members of the set, based on their behavior and interests. Clinton’s ads, on the other hand, weren’t about getting email addresses. They tended to promote her brand and philosophy.5 Her return on investment would be harder for Facebook’s system to measure and improve through software. Her campaign also barely used the Lookalike tool.

Despite stereotypes that telecommuting breeds slacking, early data suggests productivity is up, at least at some companies.8 As of June 2020, 82% of corporate leaders plan to allow remote working at least some of the time, and 47% say they intend to allow full-time remote work going forward.9 We are still early in the WFH experiment. High stress levels, distractions from family, and improvised tech aren’t a great match. We all have Zoom fatigue, but new tech is emerging that can improve team interactions. We crave contact, but not surveillance.

Curiosity is crucial to success. What worked yesterday is out-of-date today and forgotten tomorrow—replaced by a new tool or technique we haven’t yet heard of. Consider that the telephone took 75 years to reach 50 million users, whereas television was in 50 million households within 13 years, the internet in 4, . . . and Angry Birds in 35 days. In the tech era, the pace is accelerating further: it took Microsoft Office 22 years to reach a billion users, but Gmail only 12, and Facebook 9. Trying to resist this tide of change will drown you. Successful people in the digital age are those who go to work every day, not dreading the next change, but asking, “What if we did it this way?” Adherence to process, or how we’ve always done it, is the Achilles’ heel of big firms and sepsis for careers. Be the gal who comes up with practical and bat-shit crazy ideas worth discussing and trying. Play offense: for every four things you’re asked to do, offer one deliverable or idea that was not asked for.

Librarians have proven over and over that the profession is capable of extraordinary collaboration. More than forty years ago, a group of major libraries in Ohio recognized the importance of shared computing resources and established a partnership called the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC), which is now referred to primarily by its acronym. OCLC calls itself “the world’s largest library collaborative.” The library data and services provided by OCLC to 70,000 libraries around the world enables libraries to avoid a great deal of redundant work.9 The OCLC partnership has reduced the need for every library to create its own catalog record for every book or item it collects, creating enormous efficiencies. OCLC’s WorldCat system, for instance, allows anyone with web access to search across the catalogs of a large number of libraries to locate books wherever they are in the country. WorldCat is simple, but it has proved that implementing even the simplest of systems can be remarkably useful to library patrons.

If you ever get a gooey eye, don’t mess around, see a doctor, even if your schedule is packed. 2. Please don’t ever not use condoms. Please keep in mind that it is your own older and wiser self telling you this. It’s not propaganda. 3. Try running—you will like it. Has Pilates been invented yet? Do that. I wish you would pay attention to your laterals. Stay fit. Keep in mind that it will reduce cellulite acquisition. 4. When Grandma gives you a Krugerrand for your twenty-first birthday, have Dad put it in his safe deposit box because you will lose it, I promise you. 5. The stock market goes way up in 1999. But get out of tech by July 2000. 6. As discussed, keep wearing your retainer. 7. Sunscreen (60+) and remove makeup every night. 8. Brush up on multiple regressions before the departmental comprehensive senior year. But don’t freak out—you pass. 9. Try to maintain good sleep habits. I’m not sure this is possible. But try. 10. Start working on your Mandarin tones. 11. I’m giving you a list of big IPOs—see if you can invest early in any of them. They’re not going to let you in easily so show some hustle. Also, these are some great companies for a first job. 12. Remember you won’t always have the time you have now, so this is the time to learn Arabic. 13. Remember that greatness is difficult but worth it. 14. There will be plenty of time for boys/men/romance/dating once you’re a VP. There’s no point before then. 15. Remember, with men, the key quality you need is that they’ll put your career first, since it’s hard to both be extremely ambitious. 16. But men who don’t want to be #1 aren’t going to be exciting enough for you. 17. I haven’t figured out how to reconcile those two either, but maybe you can. 18. Having a killer work ethic is worth more than riches.

Welcome to 16X9. We’ve earned a reputation as one of the world’s top presentation design firm — recognized by leaders in tech, healthcare, and financial services, to name a few. At 16X9, we deliver what our clients expect: perfection. In fact, quality is one of our greatest virtues — it’s why some of our clients have referred to us as “PowerPoint wizards” and we’re fun to work with, too.

Tube Mastery And Monetization course help you kick start your YouTube channel from scratch and earn a handsome income out of it What is YouTube Monetization Course? Youtube Mastery and Monetization For Begginers teaches how to start, grow, and monetize a hyper-profitable YouTube channel from complete scratch. It doesn't matter if you don't have any tech skills or any previous business experience , as long as you have a heart to learn YouTube monetizes videos via pre-roll, display, and other advertising formats. Advertisers pay based on clicks and impressions. YouTube gives the content creator 55% of this revenue and takes 45% for itself. Content creators must adhere to advertising guidelines. Matt Par, a successful 20-year-old You Tuber, has been creating engaging content since 2014 and has received multiple silver play buttons along with a gold play button. Matt runs 9 successful YouTube channels, all with diverse content. To start earning money directly from YouTube, creators must have at least 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 watch hours in the past year. Once they reach that threshold, they can apply for YouTube's Partner Program, which allows creators to start monetizing their channels through ads, subscriptions, and channel memberships.For more detail message me

Paisbox Teched To Space/Time 9th Gate Sequence M.A.G.N.I.F.Y.(Modular Abstract Grid Network Integer For Key) <<11,2,3,5>> Phirand[5], Itemizer(2) Abstracter(2), Circlet(8) Ring(10) Diadem(12)(6)Dimension[4,9,13,5,1,6,9,2,1] (4)Portalizer[3,2,5,7,1,12,9,13,5,5], X[11]

Famous for its PalmPilot handheld personal organizer, the company 3Com, with stock market ticker COMS, announced that it was spinning off its PalmPilot division as a separate company. Some 6 percent of PalmPilot, ticker PALM, was offered to the public in an initial public offering at a price of $38 per share on Thursday, March 2, 2000. By the end of the day the 23 million shares that had been issued changed hands more than one and a half times, for a one-day trading volume of 37.9 million shares. The price peaked at $165 before closing at $95. The portion of PalmPilot sold in the IPO was deliberately set well below demand and led to a buying frenzy and price spurt typical at the time for tech stock IPOs. So far, this just repeated what we had often seen during the previous eighteen months of the tech stock boom. Now for the market inefficiency. At Thursday’s closing the market priced PalmPilot at $53.4 billion, yet it valued 3Com, which still owned 94 percent of PalmPilot, at “only” $28 billion.

According to a report in the New York Times, “the richest 0.1 percent of American households own 19.6 percent of the nation’s total wealth, up from 15.9 percent in 2005 and 7.4 percent in 1980. The richest 0.1 percent now have the same combined net worth as the bottom 85 percent.

For organizational behavior expert Charles Handy, the S-curve is the essential form of how businesses, social organizations and political systems develop over time, “it is the line of all things human.”7 Tech analyst Paul Saffo advises to “look for the S-curve,” noting that the uptake of new technologies—from personal robots to driverless cars—is destined to follow its shape.8 Scholars have used the sigmoid curve to describe the rise and fall of ancient civilizations like the Roman Empire, but also to predict modern-day shifts, such as the decline of the United States as a global superpower.9 In the field of systems thinking, the authors of the Club of Rome’s 1972 report The Limits to Growth put the S-curve at the heart of their analysis.10 More recently, economist Kate Raworth has shown that mainstream economics assumes that GDP growth follows an “exponential curve left hanging in mid-air,” when the reality is that it is far more likely to level off into the shape of the S-curve.

tech titan Elon,

What to Do Tonight Have a family meeting in which you talk about setting up technology-free times or zones. At the very least there should be no cell phones during meals or in the bedroom, but you may also want to carve out more cell-phone-free zones for the family. A friend’s wife says, “No cell phones on the couch. If you are on the couch, talk to me.” Model healthy use of technology. For example, never text while driving. If you need to send a text while you’re in the car, be sure to pull over. If you are on your phone when your child walks into the room, stop and greet him or her. If you need to check your phone for a text, e-mail, or alert, ask permission. “Is it okay if I check this? It might be Dad/I told so-and-so I would look for her message.” Try to have at least thirty minutes of unplugged “private time” every day with your kids during the week and at least an hour a day on weekends when you don’t take calls or check your phone. Consider identifying a certain period during the weekend (e.g., Sundays 9:00 A.M. to noon) as tech free—“It’s pancake, read the Times, and play a game time.” Negotiate with your kids if necessary about the best time for digital downtime. If your child has difficulty letting go of her phone, let her set a timer and tell her she can check her texts every ten or fifteen minutes. Ten to fifteen minutes seems obsessive—and it is, in our view—but kids who have a harder time with tech-free time will resent it less if you’re not rigid. Be respectful and know that even short periods of tech-free time may be hard for her.

Enterprise deals or “how to lose your freedom in 5 minutes” Being able to use our product for sales prospecting, I decided to go after some big names at the enterprise level. After one week I had booked meetings with companies like Uber, Facebook, etc. This is where the fun begins…or not… I spent 3 months doing between 4 to 9 meetings for each enterprise company I had booked meetings with. Every meeting leads to the next one as you go up the chain of command. And then comes the pilot phase. Awesome you might think! Well, not really… Working with enterprise-level clients requires a lot of custom work and paperwork. And when I say “a lot” I mean a sh*t ton of work. You need an entire department to handle the legal aspect, and hire another 10 people to entirely change your tech department to meet their requirements. During 4 months I went from being super excited to work with the most famous companies in the world to “this deal will transform our company entirely and we’ll have to start doing custom everything”. Losing my freedom and flexibility quickly became a no-go. The issue here is, with all these meetings I thought that they would adapt to our standards. That they understood from the start that we were a startup and that we couldn’t comply with all their needs. But it doesn’t work like this. It’s actually the other way around even though the people you meet working at these companies tell you otherwise. The bottleneck often comes from the legal department. It doesn’t matter if everyone is excited to use your product, if you don’t comply with their legal requirements or try to negotiate it will never work out. To give you an example, we had enterprise companies asking us to specifically have all our employee’s computers locked down in the office after they end their day. Knowing that we’re a remote company, it’s impossible to comply with that... If you want to target enterprise accounts, do it. But make sure to know that you need a lot of time and effort to make things work. It won’t be quick. I was attracted to the BIG names thinking that it would be an amazing way to grow faster, but instead, I should have been 100% focused on our target market (startups, SMBs).

How crypto mining is impacting enviorment? Crypto mining is the backbone of Proof-of-Work cryptocurrencies since miners handle all the transactions and the inclusion of new crypto coins in the network. If a network does not have a diverse mining network, it is prone to both malicious attacks and network halts. Since Bitcoin is highly correlated with the whole market, Bitcoin mining is the backbone of all cryptocurrencies. Many companies and mining rigs worldwide handle Bitcoin mining, and even individuals like you and I can perform mining with proper equipment. Bitcoin mining is a lucrative responsibility with high returns, but the mining community is recently facing a severe backlash because mining is hazardous to the environment. Bitcoin mining - a brief introduction Bitcoin mining is actually a bunch of codes trying to solve complex mathematical problems with the help of a machine's computation power. The complexity of these problems has been algorithmically set in a way that it would take around ten minutes to solve each problem, and hence every transaction takes around ten minutes to complete. The problem's complexity is increased if the time taken is less than 10 minutes and vice versa. Since its inception, when Bitcoin mining was as easy as mining on a 16-bit laptop, the field is getting cut-throat day by day, with millions of miners using high-tech ASIC mining machines costing around INR 1.5 lakhs a piece. Since there are a lot of miners, the program, which is set to release every transaction at around 10 minutes, has to exponentially increase its complexity which means high power-consuming machines with exceedingly high carbon emissions. How bad is it, really? An estimate by Digicomist, a crypto analyst website, said that Bitcoin mining consumes around 130 Terrawatt-hours of energy based on the estimates measured on July 9, 2022. These figures point out that a Bitcoin transaction takes 1455 Kilowatts of electricity, the amount of energy an average American household consumes in 49.5 days. Data by Cambridge Bitcoin Electric Consumption Index (CBECI) estimates that Bitcoin takes 0.36% of global electricity consumption. This data means that if Bitcoin were a country, it would be the 36th biggest country in terms of electricity consumption, ahead of Finland and Belgium. The above comparison is in accordance with the latest country energy data by the US. The second largest cryptocurrency, Ethereum, consumes 62.77 Terrawatt-hours of electricity per year which is comparable to Switzerland's yearly electric consumption. If the above data might not sound alarming, due to the inconsistencies of mining rigs, a massive chunk of electricity consumed is concentrated in countries with low electricity costs like Kazakhstan. The local flora and fauna of the region are duly hurting due to crypto mining, which will consume more electricity with the advancement of mining hardware. Bitcoin mining in the US alone is creating an estimated 40 Billion pounds of carbon emissions. There are several incidents of Bitcoin mining damaging the environment; one of the examples is Greenidge generation, a former coal power plant that then switched to natural gas. When Greenidge started mining Bitcoin, it used to draw water from a nearby lake in Dresden, New York, which increased the lake's temperature by around 50°F, endangering the fauna of the lake and its nearby region. After China's recent crackdown on cryptocurrency and mining, many rigs moved to Kazakhstan, a cost-effective alternative but the implications on Kazakhstan were higher. Many reports have come out of the country regarding constant blackouts due to the high power consumption of crypto miners. Kazakhstan, a country that mainly relies on fossil for its energy, does not have enough electricity to cater to the needs of both miners and its civilians.

the head of innovation of an international French insurance company. I was supporting a HealthTech start-up providing remote chats with GPs in South Asian emerging countries. As data is the new oil, the start-up was also capturing analytics in the process on key trends for main pathologies. Patients in those countries miss affordable access to medical consultations. Equally, insurance companies miss useful data of the healthcare market and the patient requirements. People in this part of the world cannot pay for yearly insurances with large coverage but they could afford some level of insurance addressing specific diseases, pregnancy or partial coverage for their children. Hence insurance companies are keen to better understand this population and tap into a huge market. As the win/win was obvious the founder of the start-up had engaged with several insurance companies in view of developing an open innovation program. I was following up the engagement bringing the professional experience of working with a major healthcare innovative company in the US. The conversation started very well with an innovation manager genuinely supportive of integrating start-up creativity in the enterprise. Knowing the corporate world, I was not surprised to uncover two obstacles:

Josh Miller, 22 years old. He is co-founder of Branch, a “platform for chatting online as if you were sitting around the table after dinner.” Miller works at Betaworks, a hybrid company encapsulating a co-working space, an incubator and a venture capital fund, headquartered on 13th Street in the heart of the Meatpacking District. This kid in T-shirt and Bermuda shorts, and a potential star of the 2.0 version of Sex and the City, is super-excited by his new life as a digital neo-entrepreneur. He dropped out of Princeton in the summer of 2011 a year before getting his degree—heresy for the almost 30,000 students who annually apply to the prestigious Ivy League school in the hope of being among the 9% of applicants accepted. What made him decide to take such a big step? An internship in the summer of 2011 at Meetup, the community site for those who organize meetings in the flesh for like-minded people. His leader, Scott Heiferman, took him to one of the monthly meetings of New York Tech Meetup and it was there that Miller saw the light. “It was the coolest thing that ever happened to me,” he remembers. “All those people with such incredible energy. It was nothing like the sheltered atmosphere of Princeton.” The next step was to take part in a seminar on startups where the idea for Branch came to him. He found two partners –students at NYU who could design a website. Heartened by having won a contest for Internet projects, Miller dropped out of Princeton. “My parents told me I was crazy but I think they understood because they had also made unconventional choices when they were kids,” says Miller. “My father, who is now a lawyer, played drums when he was at college, and he and my mother, who left home at 16, traveled around Europe for a year. I want to be a part of the new creative class that is pushing the boundaries farther. I want to contribute to making online discussion important again. Today there is nothing but the soliloquy of bloggers or rude anonymous comments.” The idea, something like a public group email exchange where one can contribute by invitation only, interested Twitter cofounder Biz Stone and other California investors who invited Miller and his team to move to San Francisco, financing them with a two million dollar investment. After only four months in California, Branch returned to New York, where it now employs a dozen or so people. “San Francisco was beautiful and I learned a lot from Biz and my other mentors, but there’s much more adrenaline here,” explains Miller, who is from California, born and raised in Santa Monica. “Life is more varied here and creating a technological startup is something new, unlike in San Francisco or Silicon Valley where everyone’s doing it: it grabs you like a drug. Besides New York is the media capital and we’re an online publishing organization so it’s only right to be here.”[52]

They express concern that technology creates social isolation, as people rely on tech-based communication rather than richer face-to-face encounters.9 We find a different story. Technologies such as the internet and mobile phones help people manage a larger, more diverse set of relationships. Consider

While people are avoiding handshakes, hugging seems to be increasing in popularity. Some say the increase came after the tragedy of 9/11 as the need for comfort and bonding increased. Others say the switch to casual dress in corporate America in the first decade of the twenty-first century brought a desire for a more casual greeting ritual. I feel it is a response in some parts of the country to the positive influence of Latin cultures that hug, and a response to the negative influence of a high-tech culture, in which we have so little touch and few physical connections with others.

The close relationship between Arizona and Israel long proceeded Donald Trump’s presidency. One journalist called the area the “Palestine-Mexico border” due to both nations sharing the same surveillance companies and co-operation.64 Tucson Mayor Jonathan Rothschild, who left office in 2019 after spending years welcoming Israel’s high-tech companies to build a home in Arizona, once said, “If you go to Israel and you come to Southern Arizona and close your eyes and spin yourself a few times you might not be able to tell the difference.”65 The reasons behind the collaboration are tied to two geographic spaces defined by some as vast and unoccupied and therefore deserving of colonization and control. It’s the settler-colonial mentality. Israel is helped by the fact that it’s a bipartisan American political belief that backing the Jewish state is akin to necessary religious doctrine. Arizona, like Palestine, is thus a testing ground. “Arizona is meant to be a showcase for technology before it expands across the country,” Tucson-based journalist and author Todd Miller told me. “Before 9/11, there was Border Patrol presence on Native American territory, but now it’s hugely expanded with surveillance technology. Native Americans are being racially profiled at border patrol checkpoints.” For the border profiteers, Palestinians and Native Americans are both equally deserving of monitoring. It was therefore not surprising that autonomous surveillance robots started appearing on both the Israel/Gaza border and US–Mexico border in 2021 and 2022.