How to cure the crazy

The return of Donald Trump forces the question: Is there anything the GOP can do to recover from insanity?

BY JONATHAN BERNSTEIN

Donald Trump (Credit: Reuters/David Moir)

One thing when writing about the Republican Party and the crazy – you can always be certain that it’ll generate new examples. So just when the news that a member of the House accused dozens of Democrats in Congress of being Communists seemed to be going stale, along comes Donald Trump – who is scheduled to appear at a fundraiser with Mitt Romney next week – to spout birther nonsense.

For those of us who believe that there’s something seriously wrong with the Republican Party (and see Tom Mann and Norm Ornstein’s new book; see also my argument that the problem is not about how “conservative” they are, but about their radical style), the big question is whether anything can be done about it. American democracy needs two strong, solid political parties, but currently one of the parties is just a mess – incapable of making coherent policy when it’s in office, and dangerously obstructionist when it’s out of office.

So how can a party recover? I think there are three ways, but two are unfortunately quite unlikely, and the third is at best uncertain.

Some talk about the possibility that the electorate will punish Republicans for their radicalism. Unfortunately, I think that’s unlikely. Note that consecutive blowouts in 2006 and 2008 certainly didn’t make things better. Part of the problem here, too, is that elections generally don’t work that way. It’s true that the impression of ideological extremism can be costly, as Barry Goldwater and George McGovern learned the hard way, but we’re talking here about 2 or 3 percentage points in a presidential election. Direct action by the voters just isn’t enough to do it. After all, as voters, they can only choose between the nominees that they’ve been offered, and if anything voters are more partisan than ever; they’re not likely to defect just because a candidate embraces the crazy, even if they don’t like it, because they would still have a strong preference for that candidate otherwise.

A second possibility is that they’ll wind up with a successful president who sets a strong example of sane conservativism and who is strong enough within the party that he or she can push a lot of the crazies to the fringes and beyond. That could work. Presidents have limited influence in general, but one thing that a popular president can do is to define normality for his or her own party. They can reward some and punish — or at least avoid rewarding — others, creating real and meaningful incentives that can be very different from what came before. The obvious analogy is Dwight Eisenhower’s maneuverings against Joe McCarthy. The problem is that for this strategy to work it takes a skilled and popular president who decides to try it, but Republicans might have to wait a long time before they get another Ike.

So the first method probably can’t work, and the second one is unlikely to happen. That leaves one other possibility: that the Republican coalition itself might demand change. Specifically, that Republican-aligned interest groups – perhaps business, national security or others – might become upset enough with the crazy, or worried enough that the crazy will impede their ability to get things done, that they’ll push to end it. After all, part of the problem with the crazy is that it truly is random; you really never know what nonsense Limbaugh or the Breitbart sites are going to be up to next, and there’s every possibility that it could interfere with groups within the party pursuing their interests. Even worse: Politicians who believe they were elected because their most valuable allies convinced the electorate that the president was a radicalized foreigner are going to be responsive to those supporters, and not to organized party groups. Those groups have enough troubles as it is, since in the current free-for-all campaign finance environment they have to compete with random billionaires who might have all sorts of unorthodox policy preferences.

We’ve seen a little bit of this already. During the healthcare debate, many normally Republican-leaning groups chose to work with the Obama administration and cut their best deal, rather than sticking with the rejectionist GOP. Several companies quit the conservative state lobbying organization ALEC when it became controversial by lobbying for ideological and partisan goals. On the national security side, a break has emerged between the Department of Defense and movement conservatives; both conservatives who care about national security and (on some issues) businesses might choose to stick with the Pentagon. And it’s not quite the same thing, but there’s been asmall but steady stream of defectors from the movement.

Nevertheless, something like this would likely play out in nomination politics, with party-aligned groups insisting on candidates who are willing to fight for their interests while rejecting the crazy, and there certainly isn’t any sign of that yet. Will it in 2014 and 2016 if Romney falls short this fall and the crazy gets even worse? I have no idea – but that’s the only path out of this that I can imagine.

 How to cure the crazy – Republican Party – Salon.com.

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ey’s business experience might not be a good thing, Simon says. | AP Photo

By ROGER SIMON | 5/24/12 4:29 AM EDT

My experience with vulture capitalism is limited. A vulture could not make even a snack out of my capital.

I don’t own any individual stocks. I did only once. I bought stock in a newspaper that I worked for. When I left the paper, I dumped my stock, figuring that without me, the paper would be largely worthless.

Today, that newspaper is bankrupt. I would like to apologize to any stockholders or employees who got hurt because of the 15 shares I sold. But that is capitalism. It is nature, “red in tooth and claw,” as Tennyson put it.

Mitt Romney ran a venture capital firm that Democrats say sucked profits out of companies and heartlessly fired employees.

Romney says this is nonsense. He was a champion of free enterprise and created tens of thousands of jobs. Did people sometimes get laid off? Yes. But free enterprise entails risk. “I know why businesses hire people and why they become forced to lay them off,” he says.

Romney says his experience as a businessman is the chief reason he should be elected president. (He lists running the 2002 Winter Olympics as second and mentions his single term as governor of Massachusetts hardly at all.)

But do businessmen actually make good presidents?

I put my crack research staff (Google Search) on this, and I expected to find a difference of opinion. I did not. There appears to be nearly unanimous opinion that businessmen have not made good presidents.

Amity Shlaes, a senior fellow in economic history at the Council on Foreign Relations and a Bloomberg View columnist, compared the economic records of two presidents: Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover. Both were Republicans.

Coolidge may be best remembered for saying that “the chief business of the American people is business.” And, as Shlaes writes, under Coolidge real wages grew, growth averaged more than 4 percent a year, unemployment stayed below 5 percent, and Coolidge’s budget was lower when he left office than when he came in.

But Coolidge had never spent one day as a businessman. He studied philosophy and economics at Amherst and then became a country lawyer. His real talent was politics: He was a mayor, state senator, lieutenant governor, governor, vice president and finally president when Warren Harding died in office. Coolidge had never owned a house, had never taken out a mortgage.

Choosing not to run for a second term, Coolidge was succeeded by a mighty businessman, Herbert Hoover, who was a mining engineer and an investment banker and had helped organize the feeding of devastated Belgium after World War I.

Hoover appeared perfect for the modern, complicated presidency: He was a cool-headed businessman with a warmhearted philanthropic streak. He was a disaster.

The stock market crashed, and unemployment rose to 25 percent. Hoover raised tariffs and increased taxes. He was branded with a word that described the shantytowns that sprang up everywhere: Hoovervilles. (The name was coined by the publicity chief of the Democratic National Committee, by the way.)

·But is Hoover the exception? Have other businessmen-presidents done better? Not much.

Daniel Akst, a columnist for Newsday, consulted with Barbara Perry, a senior fellow at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, to determine the employment background of every president. His conclusion: “It’s important to know whether a president has worked in business. It’s important because having worked in business is associated with being a lousy president, at least in the modern era.”

Akst counts Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Truman among our best modern presidents, none of whom had real business backgrounds. (Truman was a failed haberdasher.) Akst also counts Bill Clinton, again who had no business background, as a successful president. 

Two successful businessmen — George H.W. Bush, an oil man, and Jimmy Carter, a peanut farmer — both presided over bad economies and served single terms.

You can count George W. Bush as a businessman. He was in the oil business and was part owner of a baseball team before entering politics. And he is our only president to possess an M.B.A. (from Harvard, no less, just like Mitt Romney). Yet in his second term, Bush presided over a massive economic collapse. 

You can make your own list, but it is awfully hard to come up with historic proof that businessmen make good presidents. You can make the case, however, that a lot of non-businessmen made lousy presidents, too. 

Paul Krugman, an economist and New York Times columnist, wrote a few months ago that “businessmen — even great businessmen — do not, in general, have any special insights into what it takes to achieve economic recovery.” 

Mitt Romney disagrees. “The president’s a nice guy, but he’s never had a job in the private sector,” Romney says. “He’s never created a job. I think it helps to have had a job to create a job.”

Romney is willing to forgo a vastly lucrative future in the private sector for a public-sector job that pays a mere $400,000 a year. 

It is the presidency, and Romney is willing to make a sacrifice to hold it. That’s the kind of guy he is.

Businessmen make lousy presidents – Roger Simon – POLITICO.com.

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By Erik Kirschbaum

BERLIN | Sat May 26, 2012 7:02pm BST

(Reuters) – German solar power plants produced a world record 22 gigawatts of electricity per hour – equal to 20 nuclear power stations at full capacity – through the midday hours on Friday and Saturday, the head of a renewable energy think tank said.

The German government decided to abandon nuclear power after the Fukushima nuclear disaster last year, closing eight plants immediately and shutting down the remaining nine by 2022.

They will be replaced by renewable energy sources such as wind, solar and bio-mass.

Norbert Allnoch, director of the Institute of the Renewable Energy Industry (IWR) in Muenster, said the 22 gigawatts of solar power per hour fed into the national grid on Saturday met nearly 50 percent of the nation’s midday electricity needs.

“Never before anywhere has a country produced as much photovoltaic electricity,” Allnoch told Reuters. “Germany came close to the 20 gigawatt (GW) mark a few times in recent weeks. But this was the first time we made it over.”

The record-breaking amount of solar power shows one of the world’s leading industrial nations was able to meet a third of its electricity needs on a work day, Friday, and nearly half on Saturday when factories and offices were closed.

Government-mandated support for renewables has helped Germany became a world leader in renewable energy and the country gets about 20 percent of its overall annual electricity from those sources.

Germany has nearly as much installed solar power generation capacity as the rest of the world combined and gets about four percent of its overall annual electricity needs from the sun alone. It aims to cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 40 percent from 1990 levels by 2020.

SUNSHINE

Some critics say renewable energy is not reliable enough nor is there enough capacity to power major industrial nations. But Chancellor Angela Merkel has said Germany is eager to demonstrate that is indeed possible.

The jump above the 20 GW level was due to increased capacity this year and bright sunshine nationwide.

The 22 GW per hour figure is up from about 14 GW per hour a year ago. Germany added 7.5 GW of installed power generation capacity in 2012 and 1.8 GW more in the first quarter for a total of 26 GW capacity.

“This shows Germany is capable of meeting a large share of its electricity needs with solar power,” Allnoch said. “It also shows Germany can do with fewer coal-burning power plants, gas-burning plants and nuclear plants.”

Allnoch said the data is based on information from the European Energy Exchange (EEX), a bourse based in Leipzig.

The incentives through the state-mandated “feed-in-tariff” (FIT) are not without controversy, however. The FIT is the lifeblood for the industry until photovoltaic prices fall further to levels similar for conventional power production.

Utilities and consumer groups have complained the FIT for solar power adds about 2 cents per kilowatt/hour on top of electricity prices in Germany that are already among the highest in the world with consumers paying about 23 cents per kw/h.

German consumers pay about 4 billion euros ($5 billion) per year on top of their electricity bills for solar power, according to a 2012 report by the Environment Ministry.

Critics also complain growing levels of solar power make the national grid more less stable due to fluctuations in output.

Merkel’s centre-right government has tried to accelerate cuts in the FIT, which has fallen by between 15 and 30 percent per year, to nearly 40 percent this year to levels below 20 cents per kw/h. But the upper house of parliament, the Bundesrat, has blocked it.

 Germany sets new solar power record, institute says | Reuters.

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For two months last fall, Eric Simons secretly took up residence inside the Internet giant’s Palo Alto, Calif., campus, eating free food, enjoying gym access, and building a startup in the process.

by Daniel Terdiman  May 24, 2012 4:00 AM PDT

19-year-old entrepreneur Eric Simons spent two months secretly living at AOL’s Palo Alto, Calif. campus, sleeping each night on a couch like this one.

(Credit: Eric Simons)

It was 6 a.m. when Eric Simons was jolted awake by the yelling.

After working until 4 a.m, the 19-year-old entrepreneur had finally passed out. A few hours of sleep would help with the day ahead.

But unlike most people working at AOL’s Palo Alto, Calif., campus who were surely still hours from showing up at the sprawling complex, Simons was already there. He’d been living there for two months, hiding out at night on couches, eating the company’s food, and exercising and showering in its gym. And now, with an angry security guard bellowing at him, it was all over.

Eric Simons

(Credit: Eric Simons)

The story of how Simons, just two years removed from a Chicago high school, came to be living in AOL’s Palo Alto campus could well become part of Silicon Valley lore, especially because it highlights the lengths some entrepreneurs will go to make their dreams a reality. And though stories abound these days of startup founders barely old enough to drink swimming in venture capital, far more have to get by on packaged noodles and the good will of friends with extra couches.

Chicago
You hear it all the time, but Simons, now 20, was a mediocre student with little interest in school. That changed one day when his high school chemistry teacher confronted him and demanded to know what she could do to get him interested.

“I was stumped,” Simons writes on the About Us page of his startup, ClassConnect. “She didn’t ask me to try harder, she didn’t ask me to stay after for help or study more — she asked me to figure out how she could grab my interest. No one had ever bothered to ask me that before. A few moments later I replied, ‘let’s get everyone working together on computers — I’ll even build the software for us to use.’” His life as an entrepreneur had begun.

He wanted to get straight into the thick of it, so after high school, and a short period crashing on couches with friends at the University of Illinois, Simons accepted a slot in the inaugural class ofImagine K12, a new Silicon Valley incubator focused entirely on education. His plan? Start a company that builds tools allowing teachers to create and discover lesson plans, and share them with students and teachers.

“Teachers around the U.S. and the world are asked to teach from a checklist,” Simons said. “They’re asked to teach the exact same thing…and they’re all going and creating their own lessons. What we’ve built is almost a GitHub for teacher lessons. They can fork someone else’s lesson plan and use that as a springboard.”

Is it ironic that a bad student ended up launching a company that aims to revolutionize education? Simons doesn’t think so. “It wasn’t that I didn’t like school,” he said. “I didn’t like [the way it was done]. I said, I’m going to take a crack at this. I’m young enough that I can take a crack at some crazy stuff. Ten years from now, maybe I can’t be sleeping on people’s couches.”

Living at AOL
For Simons, “crazy stuff” meant moving to Silicon Valley and trying to get his fledgling company off the ground. But his initial idea wasn’t quite working. Imagine K12 was a great place to get mentorship and learn how startups are built, but he and his ClassConnect partners had been given just $20,000 by the incubator, and after the four-month program ended, the money was gone. When his friends left to go back to college, Simons needed another solution.

AOL’s Palo Alto campus, as seen using Google Maps.

(Credit: Screenshot by CNET)

Imagine K12 is hosted at AOL’s Palo Alto campus, and everyone involved gets a building badge. As it turns out, Simons told CNET, the badges kept working, even after the program ended, giving him ongoing access, along with a face that had become familiar to others who worked there.

“I couldn’t afford to live anywhere,” Simons recalled. “I started living out of AOL’s headquarters.”

Contacted for comment, David Temkin, senior vice president of Mail and Mobile for AOL, told CNET, “It was always our intention to facilitate entrepreneurialism in the Palo Alto office — we just didn’t expect it to work so well.”

For someone with neither money nor an aversion to sleeping on others’ couches, the AOL building had plenty of allure. “They had a gym there with showers,” Simons said. “I’d take a shower after work. I was like, ‘I could totally work here…They have food upstairs, they have every drink on tap. This would be a sweet place to live.’”

Note that Simons said he would work there. After his four months in the incubator, he was used to toiling away at ClassConnect inside the building, and with other programs, from the Stanford-focused incubator StartX to AOL’s own First Floor Labs also taking up space there, there was no shortage of non-AOL employees shuffling in and out all the time. But Simons was intent on launching his startup, so why not find a desk and pound away for 12 to 16 hours a day?

“There were so many people going in and out each day,” he said. “They’d say, ‘Oh, he just works, here, he’s working late every night. Wow, what a hard worker.’”

$30 a month
Having spent several months legitimately working in the building, often quite late, Simons had noticed that although there were security guards with nightly rounds, there were at least three couches that seemed outside those patrols. Plus, they looked fairly comfortable. He claimed them.

This was his routine: He’d work until midnight or later, and then fall asleep around 2 a.m. on one of the couches. At 7 a.m. — and no later than 8 a.m. so he’d be safely out of his field bed before anyone else arrived — he’d wake up, go down to the gym for a workout and a shower, and then go back upstairs and scarf a breakfast of cereal and water or Coke. Then he’d work all day, finally waiting until everyone else in the building had gone home before returning to one of his three favored couches.

“I got a really good work ethic,” he said, “and I got in shape, since I had to work out every morning.”

But the real point was that he was spending next to nothing. The first month, he spent just $30, mainly on the occasional trip to McDonald’s or for “random food expenditures when I got sick of eating ramen and cereal. I could have not spent a dollar, but I was going crazy.”

Then, of course, there was Thanksgiving. That Thursday, to splurge, he grabbed dinner at a local Boston Market.

“It was a game I was playing,” he said. “What is the minimum amount of money I can spend each day to stay alive. You do some crazy things.”

Some of those crazy things included getting by with the barest of wardrobes. But because he had access to the building gym, he kept everything other than the clothes on his back and his computer there. “I only had maybe five to ten T-shirts, a pair of jeans, and a pair of shorts,” he said, “so it all fit in one locker. [Plus] they had their own laundromat there, so I’d wash my clothes there.”

Evasion
Simons could probably have crashed elsewhere, but he wanted to see how long he could make the AOL squatting work. Some friends knew what he was doing, and they thought it was funny. But no one helped him, other than a couple buddies who discussed strategies with him on how to evade security.

“Honestly (though), I didn’t think they were going to catch on,” Simons said. “I had no indicators that they even cared about that…After the first month, I was like, ‘This has worked so far, but this probably isn’t sustainable,’ so I made sure my friends were OK with” me eventually crashing on their couches.

And then came that fateful morning with the 6 a.m. yelling. “One of the guys who manages the building came in at like 5 or 6 in the morning,” Simons lamented, “and he scoured the entire place to find me. And he ripped me a new one. He was pissed that I was treating it like a dorm. Which was reasonable.”

Ever the entrepreneur
Though the security guard was angry, he knew that Simons was part of Imagine K12. So no one called the police. He lost his badge, but he still had access to the incubator, and continues to go to the AOL building for meetings to this day. But he treads carefully. “When I’m there, I beeline for the Imagine K12 office,” he said, “and when I’m done, I beeline straight for the door.”

After moving out of the AOL building, things began looking up financially. Based on the strength of what he’d built for ClassConnect, especially after pivoting and focusing solely on letting teachers share lesson plans, Simons said he was able to score $50,000 in seed funding fromUlu Ventures and Silicon Valley VC Paul Sherer.

“I was aware” of Simons living at AOL, Clint Korver of Ulu Ventures told CNET. “Tenacity and commitment are key attributes of a great entrepreneur. Eric has these in spades as demonstrated by his willingness to do whatever it takes to get his company off the ground.”

Now, Simons said, he’s looking to raise an additional $500,000.

But one thing the initial $50,000 got for him is a rental house in Palo Alto. It’s also made it possible for him to hire an engineer and a couple of interns for ClassConnect, all of whom will share the new pad.

But being the consummate entrepreneur, he decided to use the house to raise extra cash. One of the bedrooms has two bunk beds, so Simons turned the place into a hacker house by renting them out on Airbnb, and trying to make a couple grand a month to help with the rent.

So is Simons just a kid with a particularly honed entrepreneurial spirit?

“Yeah, save money whenever possible, and use all the resources you can,” he said. “And don’t die. That’s basically my motto.”

 Meet the tireless entrepreneur who squatted at AOL | Bootstrap – CNET News.

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ALSO

15 student experiments aboard SpaceX Dragon capsule

SpaceX capsule docks at International Space Station

SpaceX rocket launch hailed as ‘a new era in space exploration’

By W.J. Hennigan

May 26, 2012, 3:36 a.m.

Less than 24 hours after a historic docking, astronauts aboard the International Space Station clambered intoSpaceX‘s unmanned Dragon spacecraft and began unloading supplies that were packed inside.

Wearing oxygen masks as a precaution, the astronauts opened the hatch, slid the door open, and took delivery of the 1,014 pounds of food, water and clothing aboard Dragon.

“Like the smell of a brand new car,” said NASA astronaut Don Pettit, after going inside.

Live coverage of the hatch opening, which included some of the first video footage from inside the cone-shaped Dragon, started Saturday shortly before 3 a.m PDT on the Hawthorne company’s website and NASA TV.

Delivering cargo wasn’t SpaceX’s key mission — the space station is well-provisioned. The main purpose was to demonstrate that the Dragon space capsule could rendezvous with the $100-billion orbiting outpost and link up with the space station’s onboard computers.

Those goals were achieved when the Dragon docked with the space station at 9:02 a.m. PDT on Friday. It marked the first time a privately built and operated space capsule had done so.

Not only was it a milestone for SpaceX, it could also indicate a potential seismic shift for U.S. spaceflight, which for more than half a century has been the province of governments and large, entrenched aerospace firms.

SpaceX, offically named Space Exploration Technologies Corp., built its Dragon capsule and the Falcon 9 rocket that lifted it into orbit on its own. By contrast, the overall design of NASA’s previous spacecraft vehicles and their missions were tightly controlled by the government and contracted to aerospace giants.

SpaceX, with about 1,800 employees, has received nearly $400 million in seed money from NASA and has a $1.6-billion contract to haul cargo in 12 flights to the space station for the agency.

Now that the U.S. fleet of space shuttles has been retired, NASA’s plan is to outsource space station missions to privately funded companies. If NASA deems the current test mission successful, SpaceX will begin fulfilling the cargo-carrying contract later this year.

In the current mission, which began early Tuesday morning with a launch from Cape Canaveral, Fla., the Dragon is slated to stay at the space station until Thursday.

Once released from the space station, the craft should make its way back to Earth and deploy parachutes to slow its descent after entering the atmosphere.

It’s set to splash down Thursday in the Pacific Ocean hundreds of miles west of Southern California.

 NASA astronauts open SpaceX capsule hatch and begin unloading cargo – latimes.com.

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By Salvador Rodriguez

May 25, 2012, 12:36 p.m.

The Facebook spending spree may be continuing as a new report says the social networking giant might be looking to buy Norwegian company Opera Software.

Now fully under the microscope of Wall Street as well as Main Street investors, Facebook is trying to solve its mobile monetizing problems and has been gobbling up various companies in recent months to increase its presence in the world of smartphones.

If the latest report is accurate, the Menlo Park-based company’s next target could be Opera.

The website Pocket-lint reported early Friday that it’d been told by “one of its trusted sources” that Facebook is interested in Opera for its popular Web browser.

The Opera browser is available on desktop computers, various phones and tablets and even theNintendo Wii, and the company claims to have more than 200 million users, according to the report.

As of last week, Google’s Chrome is the top browser, followed by Microsoft, Mozilla and Apple’s respective browsers, and Thursday, Yahoo jumped into the latest round of the “browser wars” with its new product, named Axis.

“The move — which would no doubt send shivers of panic through Google — although unlikely to affect Chrome’s continued growth in the short term, would see the two tech giants battle it out on your desktop and mobile for web surfing as well as social networking,” Pocket-lint said.

Adding credibility to the rumor is a report by The Next Web that includes a source close to Opera saying the company has been looking for potential buyers.

The anonymous source said Opera is talking to possible buyers and has instituted a hiring freeze, which The Next Web said “is a surefire sign that something big is about to happen — or at least that Opera wants something big to happen.”

The source could not confirm to The Next Web whether Facebook was one of the potential buyers, but did say such a deal would make sense.

A spokeswoman for Facebook said the company did not wish to comment on the rumored purchase; a spokesman for Opera said the company does not respond to market rumors.

It’ll be interesting to see whether this deal is real and, if so, when it could drop.

It’s the Friday before Memorial Day, which is celebrated in the home countries of both companies, so a lot of people won’t be working or working too hard for the next couple of days. But as anyone in the media world knows, times like that can be the perfect time to drop big news.

 Is Facebook going to buy Opera, make its own browser? – latimes.com.

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Facebook IPO Post Mortem – Killer – but not for the reasons you think !

May 23rd 2012 5:05PM

1. Say goodbye to the individual investor on Wall Street. Whatever positive impression they had of the IPO market and the stock market in general was just torched to the ground. When everyone you know associated with the stock market is telling you and the media is confirming that this could be a huge IPO that will make money for those lucky enough to get shares and the opposite happens, goodnight. All confidence in the stock is destroyed. Put your money in the bank or if you want to gamble, at least slot machines in Vegas pay out 98pct.

2. The Valuation Bubble in Silicon Valley is bursting – but not for the reasons you think. Historically IPOs function as a means of getting stock to outsiders. People who were not sold/assigned/granted shares could only buy shares once they reached the public markets. The new secondary markets in private shares changed that. They allowed outsiders to purchase shares in a market with very little liquidity.

The demand for shares outstripped the supply and you know what happens when demand outstrips supply ? The price goes up. So shares of FB on secondary market went up and up and up. (Just as LinkedIn had done before them, but it greater volumes) When it was time to go public the IPO had to be priced higher than the prevailing share price on the secondary market.

To make matters worse, those folks who bought shares in the secondary private market, driving up the share price now had the shares they wanted to buy , so they were no longer going to be the buyers the IPO counted on to eat up shares in the open market.

Can you imagine how pissed you would be if you bought a boatload of Facebook thinking you got in at a better than IPO price only to watch the price on the open market post IPO drop below the price you paid in the private market ? Ouch.

The law of unintended consequences is that the dynamics for how private companies are valued and are able to raise Pre IPO rounds could quickly change if the prices and volumes on SecondMarket and its competitors declined significantly.

3. I always laugh at all the pundits /analysts who try to tell you what any non dividend paying stock is worth. Its a function of supply and demand. Its never fundamentals. Read what I wrote a long time ago about the stock market. In the case of facebook they put an ENORMOUS number of shares into the market. Too much supply. Valuation has no relevance what so ever. Conventional wisdom says the buyers of stocks will try to determine the value of a stock before they buy or sell and make the appropriate rational decision. Not even in a Richie Rich cartoon does that happen.

4. Mobile is going to crush Facebook. The logic for Facebook’s price decline is that they have a problem in mobile. They can’t offer all the games they can in a browser. They can’t offer the same ads or branding opportunities. All true.

From the Wall Street Journal :
“As more people gravitate to smartphones and tablets, they’re increasingly forgoing the desktop to the access the Web. Between 2008 and 2011, the percentage of U.S. adults who accessed the Internet from PCs daily grew to 62% from 54%. In the same period, the percentage of daily mobile Internet users rocketed to 26% from 4%, according to Forrester Research.

“People see this modality of consumption shifting from the PC to mobile,” said Matt Murphy, a venture capitalist at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. “On top of that, mobile feels like it’s much more the kind of wide open that anybody can win kind of arena.”

All true as well.

However the same is absolutely true for every ad driven internet site. They face limitations in what they can offer on mobile vs what they can offer through a PC brower. Look at the Google search results on mobile. No where near the number of results. Thats fewer click and CPM opportunities and ZERO display ad opportunities. Of course Google has Android, but that still isn’t generating much , if any revenue for them and it isnt currently designed to.

And then lets not forget Youtube. Everyone is supposed to be dumping TV and heading to video right ? Well how can that be if most online consumption is headed to mobile ? With so few mobile users having unlimited data plans, and that number most likely declining, then what is Youtube going to do when users start complaining and going nuts over the fact that they are having to pay for the data they use to watch Youtube mobile ads ? How many youtube ads have you seen on a mobile device lately ?

Which leads to a much broader question. Just what percentage of PC Online usage will mobile displace ? Is it feasible that people will “cut the broadband cord” and live exclusively off of their mobile internet access ? Why not use your mobile as an in home hotspot rather than paying for 2 internet connections ? If you avoid streaming video and downloads its easy to stay within your caps. Do you know anyone that has cut their broadband access to go exclusively mobile internet ?

Bottom line, if you think mobile will displace online usage from PCs then you should immediately short Google and other ad plays and buy TV stations and networks. If you can’t buy an ad effectively on mobile and no one is using a PC to connect to the internet any more, then the only way to reach an audience is going to be via good old tv. And all that over the top video noise, forgettabout it.

I wonder what Netflix thinks about mobile vs pc online consumption ?

5. And in the interest of disclosure I bought 150k shares of FB. 50k shares at 33, 50k shares at 31.97 and 50k shares around 32.50. Its a trade, not an investment. Kind of like buying a Mickey Mantle, a Hank Aaron and a Barry Bonds Rookie Card knowing there is a card show in town next week

 Facebook IPO Post Mortem – Killer – but not for the reasons you think ! « blog maverick.

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Can you buy technology with a clean conscience?

Posted on 25 May 2012 at 16:13

Pitifully paid workers, weak environmental policies, supply chains that allow manufacturers to abdicate responsibility. Simon Brew asks: is it even possible to buy ethically sound technology?

PC World sells, at the time of this magazine going to press, 85 different laptops. Its website stocks 26 variants of the Apple iPod, and an extensive range of tablet computers – each keenly priced, and capable of performing tasks that sizeable desktop PCs of a decade ago would have struggled with.

Chances are, too, that each was made in a factory in China. The reason for this is simple: workers are cheaper in most Eastern economies, and the saving made on labour greatly outweighs the expense of moving tankers full of products to the other side of the world.

In the past, when people have voiced ethical concerns surrounding technology, it’s typically been centred on environmental issues. Such issues, as we’ll see, are still relevant, but it’s increasingly the human consequences of manufacturing technology that are coming under the microscope.

How is the end user supposed to know just how their shiny new product came to be? Do they even care that there’s a sporting chance the manufacturer itself couldn’t tell you where every last component came from? And if they did, how is it possible to have confidence that the product they’ve just bought conforms to any kind of ethical standard? Or do we all just want to buy the cheapest product available?

Is it even possible to buy any technology with a clean conscience, without bankrupting ourselves in the process?

Focus on Foxconn

On 2 January 2012, more than 150 workers at the Foxconn Technology Park in Wuhan, China, took to the roof of the factory and threatened to commit suicide. It took two days to talk them down from the top of the three-storey plant.

The protest started in response to Foxconn’s decision to move hundreds of workers to a different production line. Reporters (including those from PC Pro) dutifully published this news; ironically, they did this using equipment that was more than likely a product of said Foxconn facilities in the first place.

Suicides and stand-offs over poor working conditions at Foxconn’s Chinese factories have been rife for many years, to the point where the company has installed nets to break the fall of potential jumpers. The facilities, which manufacture hardware for many major companies, are responsible for the production of more than a third of the world’s consumer electronics products, employing hundreds of thousands of workers.

Suicides and stand-offs over poor working conditions at Foxconn’s Chinese factories have been rife for many years

Yet those workers are cheap. You don’t have to look far for stories of six-day weeks and 12-hour days among employees, with pay rates reported to start at a mere 30p an hour.

This, it should be noted, partly reflects the lower cost of living in China than in the UK. But even so, it’s the kind of substantive saving in manual labour that companies including Apple, Microsoft, Nokia and Acer have been keen to take advantage of, building up sizeable profits for themselves in the process. Apple alone racked up $20 billion of gross profit in the last 13 weeks of 2011.

Increasingly, these firms have come under fire for continuing to support factories that pay such meagre wages and provide such poor working conditions.

Yet, the question of employee treatment isn’t as clear-cut as campaigners may lead you to believe. The suicide rate in Foxconn’s factories, for instance, is below the national average figure for China as a whole.

Read more…

Can you buy technology with a clean conscience? | Analysis | Features | PC Pro.

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By Tal Beery 

05.22.12, 5:47pm 

Trade School New York. Credit: Tal Beery.

In 2010, three people had the crazy idea to start a school where the teachers teach whatever they want and the students pay for classes with whatever teachers need—cutlery, art, advice—but never with money. A barter-based learning space, they called their project Trade School, and ran it for the first time out of a tiny store front on New York City’s Lower East Side. It was a huge hit. In just two years, Trade Schools have been popping up around the world and are now active in 15 cities and 10 countries, with almost no prodding from its founders. Caroline Woolard, a co-founder of Trade School, sat with me recently to discuss their growth and the challenges and opportunities they face when adapting their idea to an international audience.

TB: So, what makes people want to start all these Trade Schools?

CW: We actually ask people to make videos answering exactly that question. People do it for all kinds of reasons. In Oakland they are explicit about this being a project for educational justice because it is too expensive to get access to information. And in other places they want to do it to meet people who are really interested in sharing ideas—I call it “rigorous generous” people—who work really hard but also want to be in a community that is generous and vulnerable.

TB: Do you identify as a “rigorous generous” person?

CW: Yes, I do!

TB: How does someone start a Trade School?

CW: First, you go on the website and there is a PDF that you have to read about how we organize. We have principles, which you have to accept or alter them in a way that we accept, and then you have a lot of conversations with me! In the future, you will have conversations with organizers from other Trade Schools as well. Trade School London organizers, for example, are starting to help new Trade Schools open. I hope that one organizer from each Trade School joins the “Trade School Everywhere” organizing crew and helps new Trade Schools open.

You could also just go start a Trade School without talking to me. You wouldn’t get our software, which helps you organize, and you won’t be part of the network of Trade Schools. In Cologne and in Charlottesville, Virginia, they started a Trade School after emailing us once and just going for it. They did it way faster than we expected.  We have talked with them since and feel that they are doing things that are aligned with our principles, so we link to them from our website. But if you want to start a Trade School and you want advice and you want our software you just talk to me and I have a lot of organizational documents that I share.

Caroline Woolard. Credit: Carolina Zerpa of Trade School Barcelona, © OurGoods.org.

TB: What’s so great about this software?

CW: If you are in a place where a lot of the people will use the internet it is a lot faster to use the software. It coordinates all the emails—reminder emails, sign up emails—and all the administrative stuff I used to do by hand. Or Zubalsky built the software and Rich Watts and Louise Ma did the design. We are going to have a huge upgraded version that will be open source that we are raising money for now.

TB: How do you ensure that Trade Schools abroad are run in the best way possible?

CW: I don’t monitor the other Trade Schools closely. The kind of people who volunteer to spend 10-40 hours a week organizing a space that runs on mutual respect are pretty incredible. I talk to most of the organizers on Skype on a weekly basis so I have a sense of who they are. I have had really good debates with organizers about their vision and what frameworks interest them because I want to make sure we are in the same mindset or at least understand why we aren’t and that the difference isn’t too great. Also having them make videos about why they wanted to start a Trade School gives me a good sense of who they are.

TB: In expanding internationally, are there cultural differences that are hard to overcome?

CW: In Italy, they told us they think it is weird to serve coffee or tea ahead of time before the class. I don’t know why, but they said that was weird. In Cologne, there was a time when they only wanted to just have classes that are totally free. Now I think it’s just some classes. In Guadalajara, they said that if you take a class as a student you have to commit to teaching a class, so that all students will become teachers. Also in Guadalajara, in the beginning, the organizer said that no one uses the internet, so he uses flyers and a lot of analog, face-to-face organizing techniques to get people to know about Trade School. But now he does also post the classes on the internet.

Trade School flyers in foreground, with a SolidarityNYC poster in the background. Credit: © OurGoods.org.

TB: Is there a reason Trade School is expanding so much right now?

CW: Maybe because the monetary system is failing people in a global way. Maybe because higher education is getting privatized all around us, and not only in this country. And lots of social services from health to education to arts are getting cut all over the world and people feel that some things just don’t work in a market economy. Some things are just about creativity and passion and people have a human right to them, so they want to make them happen whether or not their government is helping.

We also make it clear that we want you to organize a Trade School in your area. says at the top, “Do you want to start a Trade School?” By making this very obvious, by putting our desire to share it with other people out there, anyone who could read English and was interested knows straight away that it is open to them. So I think making our desire to share it available helps a lot, because something like 10,000 people look at our website every month even when we aren’t in session.

TB: Is there anything inherently political about Trade School?

CW: I feel that all projects are inherently political because for me, politics is about recognizing each person’s power or agency. Just in the very idea of mutual respect, or students becoming teachers, we are trying to make each person’s power more visible. Also, Trade School is a big volunteer project and can’t be done alone. We want all organizers to organize as a collective or cooperative, and that in itself is about horizontal power and allowing voices to be heard and opinions to be discussed to make consensus possible.

TB: Are there any limits to Trade School’s growth?

CW: If each Trade School that opens doesn’t follow the principles of cooperation, especially the last one about cooperation between cooperatives, and other Trade Schools don’t help new Trade Schools open, we’ll have a problem because I can get really burned out.  Even if we don’t have money, if I do a good job of training the trainers, I think there is no limit to growth. Everyone can help another school start.

The other limit to growth will be if we don’t get help with the software, because if people want a website that functions really well, it will need to be continually maintained. We need to find more organizers on the tech end of things who want to work with Python and Django to make the Trade School software great. So that‘s another community—the online open software community—that we need to grow.

TB: And that might cost money.

CW: Maybe, it might not, we’ll see!

Shareable: Barter-Based School Goes Global [INTERVIEW].

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from the how-about-that… dept

We just wrote about Google’s very cool, new copyright transparency tool, which lets you dig into the details of all the search takedowns that Google gets. As people start to play around with the site, some interesting things are coming to light. Lots of people noticed that the number one copyright holder requesting takedowns from Google search was… Microsoft. While some have suggested this is an attempt by a competitor to worsen Google’s search rankings, that’s difficult to believe for a variety of reasons. If Microsoft were issuing bogus takedowns, that would certainly come to light pretty quickly.

However, what is interesting is that you can use the new system to play around and notice that Microsoft doesn’t always seem to take down from its search engine, Bing, the same links that it orders Google to takedown. As we noted in our original post, there’s been plenty of talk suggesting that Google isn’t fast enough in taking down things upon DMCA request, but the company claims that they average less than 11 hours — and considering that they’re processing over 1 million takedowns per month (and are checking them by hand), that’s pretty impressive. How long does it take Microsoft to take content down?

Well, you would think that if Microsoft is sending a takedown notice to Google to remove a site from its search engine, that it’s almost certainly letting Bing know to remove it too, right? Why wouldn’t it. But if you do some digging, you can find sites that Microsoft has ordered taken down from Google, but which are still available via Bing. Here’s just one example. If you look through Google’s transparency report, there’s a specific search takedown request that was filed on May 11, so not too long ago. You can see the full ChillingEffects notice here as well. The takedown was sent, on behalf of Microsoft, by a company called Marketly, who appears to send a large number of takedowns, according to the Google data. In this case, Marketly had sent a takedown to Google demanding the removal of a bunch of URLs from its index concerning a variety of XBox 360 games, including DiRT 2. The 20th URL listed goes to a page on TorrentRoom.

Now, if you take that URL and put it into Google and Bing, you get two very different responses. First, there’s Google:

Okay. As per the takedown, clearly Google has removed that URL from its index. Now how about Microsoft:

Whoops! There it is. Now, it seems pretty reasonable to assume that if Marketly is sending a takedown to Google to get such a link taken out of its search engine, on behalf of Microsoft, that it quite likely is issuing the same kind of takedown to Microsoft’s Bing (hell, you’d perhaps think that Microsoft could just pull the link without a takedown). And yet… the site, which Microsoft supposedly wants to disappear, is gone from Google, but found easily on Bing.

This would suggest that, either Marketly and Microsoft decide to leave up certain infringing content on Microsoft’s own search engine while taking it down from Google… or that Microsoft certainly isn’t that fast at doing removals. And yet, why don’t we hear the people who always bitch about Google complaining about Microsoft?

Of course, the data is also revealing some other interesting “issues” with Microsoft’s takedowns. Kurt Opsahl, for example, noticed that Microsoft sent Google a takedown, you can view here, which claims that previous takedown notices, also from Microsoft, are in fact, infringing. This one was also sent by “Marketly” and suggests that they don’t do much research to make sure the sites are legitimately infringing before issuing takedowns.

Odd That Microsoft Demands Google Take Down Links That Remain In Bing | Techdirt.

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