Yearly Archive: 2016

Twitter is “toast” as a company and the stock is not even worth $10, according to a research note published Tuesday, following the departure of another top executive at the social media service.

The microblogging platform’s chief technology officer, Adam Messinger, tweeted that he would leave the company and “take some time off”, while Josh McFarland, vice president of product at Twitter, also said he was exiting the company. Both executives announced their departure on Tuesday.

Meanwhile, last month, Adam Bain stepped down as chief operating officer last month to be replaced by chief financial officer Anthony Noto, who has yet to be replaced. Twitter has also lost leaders from business development, media and commerce, media partnerships, human resources, and engineering this year.

The departures prompted Trip Chowdhry, the managing director of equity research at Global Equities Research, and a noted “uber-bear” on tech stocks, to issue a note on Tuesday claiming Twitter is “toast” and “not even a $10 stock”.

Source: Twitter is ‘toast’ and the stock is not even worth $10: Analyst

In retrospect, it is obvious that the scam as zeitgeist emerged out of real necessity: College loans are crippling, the job market is iffy and many of us are working part-time or freelancing (which feels, too often, like another scam). Rents are inordinately high, wages have flatlined, home ownership seems near-impossible, and even average life expectancy has, in an unprecedented turn, gone down in this country. Who could blame anyone for sympathizing with a scammer, someone who’d do whatever it takes to get theirs in a post-recession economy that’s split the 1 percent?—?who scammed the economy and then got hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer bailout as a reward?—?even farther from the regular folk? Underneath the surface of Donald Trump and Joanne the Scammer’s appeal is the anguish that traditional modes of achieving success are now entirely bankrupt?—?scamming, it seems, is all we’ve got.

Source: Why 2016 Was the Year of the Scam

They’re not only thinking the unthinkable, they’re planning for it. Quietly, some of George W. Bush’s advisers are preparing for the ultimate “what if” scenario: What happens if Bush wins the popular vote for...

Mr. Forman played the elder voice of reason to my youthful exuberance. I was only 25, while he had lived through what he saw as a comparable moment in history. He cautioned that he...

Moreover, killing Roof does absolutely nothing to ameliorate the conditions that brought him into being in the first place. The hammer of criminal justice is the preferred tool of a society that has run out of ideas. In this sense, Roof is little more than a human sacrifice to The Gods of Doing Nothing. Leave aside actual substantive policy. In a country where unapologetic slaveholders and regressive white supremacists still, at this late date, adorn our state capitals and our highest institutions of learning, it is bizarre to kill a man who acted in their spirit. And killing Roof, like the business of the capital punishment itself, ensures that innocent people will be executed. The need to extract vengeance cannot always be exact. It is all but certain that a disproportionate number of those who pay for this lack of precision will not look like Dylann Roof.

From: Ta-Nehisi Coates on Dylann Roof and the Death Penalty – The Atlantic