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The Reuters/Ipsos poll found a wide disparity of opinion by gender and age, with men generally more comfortable than women about using self-driving vehicles and millennials more comfortable than baby boomers. () Among men, 38 percent said they would feel comfortable riding in a self-driving car and 55 percent said they would not. Among women, only 16 percent said they would feel comfortable and 77 percent said they would not. Among those skeptical of driverless cars was California resident Phoebe Barron. “I don’t want to be the first guinea pig,” she said in an interview. Colorado resident Sonja Coy told Reuters she had a more positive view. Self-driving cars “are a great innovation and technology with a lot of potential,” she said. “However, I‘m concerned with how liability will fall in the case of accidents, where there are both self-driving and regular cars on the road,” Coy said. FILE PHOTO: Waymo unveils a self-driving Chrysler Pacifica minivan during the North American International Auto Show in Detroit, Michigan, U.S., January 8, 2017. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid/File Photo Like most people, she said she had not yet ridden in a self-driving vehicle. Companies testing the vehicles in the United States and elsewhere have provided limited public access so far. “We’re talking about abstract things that many people have not experienced firsthand,” said Jeremy Carlson, principal automotive analyst with IHS Markit. Automotive and technology industry executives are pushing U.S. Lawmakers to pass legislation that would loosen restrictions on testing and deploying self-driving cars. However, the legislation is currently stalled in the Senate. In the meantime, companies from General Motors Co to Alphabet Inc’s Waymo are planning to deploy the first wave of self-driving vehicles over the next three years. Industry officials and analysts have said providing convincing reassurances about safety is an urgent task for advocates of autonomous vehicle technology. The Reuters/Ipsos poll was conducted in mid-January and collected responses from 2,592 adults. Other recent surveys have also highlighted widespread doubts among U.S. Consumers about self-driving cars, in the absence of any direct experience with them. In its 114-year history, Ford has been many kinds of automaker. A manufacturing innovator, a hawker of Mustang muscle, a pickup powerhouse. Now the company that helped put a car (or two) in every garage wants to be something else altogether: an operating system. “With the power of AI and the rise of autonomous and connected vehicles, for the first time in a century, we have mobility technology that won’t just incrementally improve the old system but can completely disrupt it,” CEO Jim Hackett said in a keynote address at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show, trumpeting the pivot. “A total redesign of the surface transportation system with humans and community at the center.” As Ford executives move to execute the plan, they unveiled yesterday a reorganization of the automaker’s young mobility business, with two acquisitions to help it along. It’s all in service of a new, very 21st century goal. Ford will put less effort into convincing people to plunk down their credit cards for personal cars (though that’s still important) and more into moving them from A to B, with a little Ford badge tacked onto whatever gets them there. It’s a turbulent time for traditional automakers, which have to keep making money today while aggressively prepping for the market changes—carshare, ridehailing, self-driving—that will happen tomorrow. Ford’s news comes eight months after the company, a former furniture exec who oversaw the formation of Ford’s mobility subsidiary—and promised a greater vision for the future. Earlier this week, the Detroit automaker. Ford blamed rising metal prices while CFO Bob Shanks said, “We have to be far fitter than we are.” In lean times, every expenditure merits extra scrutiny. And while Ford Mobility President Marcy Klevorn did not disclose how much it spent on its new companies, she says they’re important steps on Ford’s path to becoming more than a big ol’ automaker. “We did an assessment of our strategy and what our gaps were and the speed we wanted to go,” she says. “We looked at where we thought we needed a really fast infusion of help.” Still, it’s all a little woolly. The thing about being a platform that connects the world is that others have to agree to come aboard. So while Ford tries to woo partners—other carmakers, mobility companies like Uber or Lyft, carsharing companies, bikesharing providers, entire cities—the carmaking continues. Make money now, prep for tomorrow. OK, let’s look at the details of this new arrangement for tomorrow. Acquisition A is Autonomic, a Palo Alto–based company with a cloud-based platform called wait for it the Transportation Mobility Cloud. Autonomic seeks to build a kind of iOS for cities, managing data and transactions between city-dwellers and agencies and companies that provide payment processing, route mapping, mass transit, and city infrastructure services. That sounds vague, because it is. “By making all these different services available we have no idea what’s going to come so we’re super excited,” Autonomic CEO Sunny Madra. Autonomic seeks to be the go-to platform for other car manufacturers, too, and Klevorn indicated Ford hopes to monetize its cloud service quickly. Acquisition B is TransLoc, a 14-year-old Durham, North Carolina–based company that makes software to help cities, corporate campuses, and universities manage their transportation systems, from traditional fixed-route service to on-demand ridehailing apps like Uber and Lyft. “Ford is interested in taking the streets back in the city, and getting more people out of single occupancy cars,” says CEO Doug Kaufman. “I think one of the reasons that we ended up with Ford and not some other suitor is because our missions are so aligned.” Ford’s execs said they would lean on TransLoc’s existing sales relationships with hundreds of cities and transit agencies to accelerate its platform plan. Meanwhile, the company is restructuring its Ford Mobility subsidiary. Autonomic is moving into a new accelerator section called Ford X. The Mobility Business Group will handle microtranist service Chariot, car services app FordPass, and digital services. Mobility Platforms and Products will cover autonomous vehicle partnerships and transportation as a service. And a new mobility marketing group will sell it all to the world. (Argo AI, the autonomous vehicle developer that Ford, is still technically an independent company.) It’s close to a throw-it-all-see-what-sticks move, but it does show Ford is charting a different path into this new world than its great rival. General Motors, which acquired startup Cruise Automation in 2016, is all about the autonomous and electric vehicle, with self-driving Chevy Bolts testing on roads in Phoenix and San Francisco. It’s even starting to think about making actual, honest-to-goodness driverless vehicles, this month for a steering wheel– and pedal-free EV, and touting plans to get the thing on the road by 2019. The company’s, which provides car rental and sharing in 11 American cities, could be a great, data-hoovering starting point for a delivery and ridesharing service. And GM employees in San Francisco are using Cruise Anywhere, an Uber-like platform,. But GM hasn’t as overtly attempted to partner with cities yet, and its broader. Will GM provide transportation services and not just an excellent autonomous, electric car? Can any American automaker do that? Ford has been pretty consistent about its admittedly hazy vision for the future of mobility. (At least, consistent with its messaging.) “The bigger risk is doing nothing,” executive chairman Bill Ford told WIRED, as he outlined a future where a single, digital ticket could buy you a ride on a car, taxi, subway, bus, or bicycle. “I am very confident that we can compete and morph into something quite different.” Now it’s time to deliver. (Reuters) – Apple Inc’s move on Wednesday to give iPhone owners information about the health of their batteries reverses the company’s longstanding refusal to make such information available directly on iPhones and iPads, even though battery health has long been easy to check on Apple’s Mac computers. Apple said an update to its iOS operating system will show the phone’s battery health and recommend whether the battery needs to be replaced. It will also let users turn off a controversial piece of software that slows the phone’s performance in some situations when the battery is flagging. Apple acknowledged in December that its software sometimes deliberately slows phones with weak batteries. Apple apologized and lowered the price of battery replacements in its stores from $79 to $29 for affected phones. Critics say Apple has obfuscated the fact that a worn-out battery not only fails to hold a charge, it also degrades the phone’s performance. The company’s lack of transparency on the issue has pushed people to buy a new phone rather than a new battery, these people say. “The battery wears out,” said Kyle Wiens, chief executive of iFixit, which publishes repair guides for iPhones and sells replacement parts. “They have been pretending like the battery doesn’t wear out. They’ve made billions of dollars on that pretense.” Apple has always banned battery-health apps from the App Store for security reasons. While a few developers had found ways around the restrictions, their apps stopped showing a key piece of information – the “charge cycle count,” or how many times the battery has been drained and recharged – after a 2016 software update. Rogerio Hirooka of Lirum Labs said his company’s app lost charge cycle counts in 2016 but can still provide information on charge capacity, which can be used to determine whether the battery is at the end of its life. He said a routine bug-fix for the app was rejected by Apple in December, just before Apple acknowledged the battery-slowing issue. Apple rejected his app because it provides “potentially inaccurate diagnostic functionality” that could “mislead or confuse your users,” according to documents from the app review process seen by Reuters. Apple explains that “there is no publicly available infrastructure to support iOS diagnostic analysis,” according to the documents. Apple declined to comment on why battery diagnosis is available on the Mac but not on the iPhone, or why it rejected the update to Hirooka’s app. “That fact that they tell you (battery health) on the Mac but it’s a forbidden secret on the iPhone is crazy,” Wiens said. All lithium ion batteries degrade over time. Until the software update announced Wednesday becomes available – and Apple has not given a specific date – the only way to check an iPhone battery is to take the device to an Apple Store or hook the phone up to a Mac computer running special third-party software. Repair advocates have long criticized Apple and other technology companies for making batteries hard for users to access and replace. Apple has been lobbying against “right to repair” laws in several U.S. States that would require it to sell parts to independent repair shops. SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Alphabet Inc launched a new business unit on Wednesday that will sell cyber security software to Fortune 500 companies, the latest move by the parent of Google to become a big player in corporate computing. The new unit, dubbed Chronicle, is betting on the premise that machine learning software, a type of artificial intelligence, can sift and analyze massive stores of data to detect cyber threats more quickly and precisely than is possible with traditional methods. Stephen Gillett, chief executive of Chronicle and a former top official at the cyber firm Symantec Corp, said access to Google’s expertise in automated data analysis would give the company an edge. Alphabet’s big cash pile and existing customer relationships also make Chronicle a threat to security tools vendors such as Symantec, Palo Alto Networks Inc and Cylance Inc. The global cyber security market is worth nearly $100 billion, according to market researcher Gartner. But analysts note that previous efforts by internet search and networking companies to get into the cyber security business have faltered. “Being the heavy hitter and even having small teams spun out of that doesn’t translate to instant success,” said Avivah Litan, a vice president at Gartner. Gillett, on a conference call, declined to specify how Chronicle’s technology works and would not give the exact number of companies testing the service. Chronicle also houses VirusTotal, a virus-scanning tool Google acquired in 2012 that charges for premium features. The cyber security initiative reflects Alphabet’s desire to expand beyond its core online advertising business at Google and become a major player in enterprise computing technology. Google is a distant rival to Amazon.com Inc in cloud computing infrastructure and lags far behind Microsoft Corp in workplace productivity software. Gillett, also a former Starbucks Corp chief information officer, said Chronicle aims to identify problems in seconds or minutes instead of hours or days. The process would be aided by lowering customers’ data storage costs. Keeping years of logs can make the threat-detection process more effective, he said. Gillett co-founded Chronicle in February 2016 with former Google cyber security leaders Shapor Naghibzadeh and Mike Wiacek. Gillett met them after becoming executive-in-residence at GV, Alphabet’s venture capital investment arm, in 2015. Chronicle, based at Alphabet’s Mountain View, California, headquarters, becomes the third business spun out of the company’s “X” research lab and into the holding company – a process it calls “graduating.” It follows healthcare unit Verily and self-driving vehicle company Waymo. Alphabet has also acquired companies that operate under its umbrella, including thermostat maker Nest. Astro Teller, the head of X known as the “captain of moonshoots,” said his team pursued cyber security technology after noticing that cyber attacks had become a “yeah, yeah” problem, as in, “Yeah, yeah, a lot of people have diabetes, there are things to manage it.” “The real moonshot, which is still several years away, is predicting and deflecting cyber attacks before they infiltrate an organization’s network,” Teller said in a blog post. This article first appeared in Data Sheet, Fortune’s daily newsletter on the top tech news.. Artificial intelligence already is a top topic at this year’s World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Monday night, amid a driving blizzard that snarled traffic around town, I hosted a small dinner featuring Carnegie Mellon University’s Justine Cassell. She is associate dean of technology, strategy, and impact at the university’s school of computer science, and an expert on the human role in artificial intelligence. Cassell let loose the best one-liner I’ve heard that combats Elon Musk’s fear that the robots will kill us all. “If you’re afraid of the android revolution,” she said, “just stand in a puddle. The robot will electrocute itself.” (She added: If you can’t find a puddle, just stand still for 40 minutes, the robot will run out of electricity.) Tuesday morning I hosted another panel that featured the Stanford roboticist and machine-learning expert Fei-Fei Li. She is doing a stint at, working in its cloud business, and has admirably grasped the commercial aspects of her technical job quite well. She argues that “pre-data” companies can’t all of a sudden do AI themselves. The solution: Google Cloud, which would be happy to help. *** Speaking of companies who want to come up to speed digitally and otherwise, I’m pleased to announce that later this year Fortune will launch its newest conference, Brainstorm Reinvent. Think of it as the mirror image of Brainstorm Tech in Aspen., targets C-level executives in the industrial heartland, all of whom want to be on the right side of disruption. The founding sponsor of the event is McKinsey, the international consulting firm that’s keen to help non-tech-industry companies navigate these difficult straits. If you’d like to attend (or speak), drop me an email. *** Monday I noted that the backlash against the tech giants would be a preoccupation of at least Silicon Valley executives in Davos. In that vein, I highly recommend an engaging, erudite, cleverly written, and amusing in The Economist, “Silicon Valley, we have a problem.” Incidentally, of the three tech giants the article calls out the most for potential antitrust actions,,, and Google, only the latter two are in Davos in force. In the magazine’s next tier, has a Davos presence; and do not. *** Line of the day (so far) Rachel Botsman, author of: “Convenience is trumping trust.” This on a Davos panel with Google Chief Financial Officer Ruth Porat (whose company gives away a ton of information in return for its users’ data) and Dara Khosrowshahi (whose company’s trustworthiness has plummeted). Scored its first-ever Academy Award for a feature film on Tuesday morning, as the streaming giant’s push to compete against traditional Hollywood studios on the industry’s most glitzy stage picked up steam. Netflix picked up four total Oscar nominations for its 2017 original film Mudbound, a drama set in the racially segregated U.S. South after World War II, including nods for the best adapted screenplay, cinematography, and original song (“Mighty River”) as well as a nomination for supporting actress Mary J. (And, one of those nominations even marked an Oscar-first: Rachel Morrison became the ever nominated for an Academy Award in that category.) Netflix won its first Academy Award, for the documentary short White Helmets, but this marks the first time the streaming service has ever had one of its original feature films nominated for an Oscar. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced the latest batch of Oscar nominations early Tuesday morning. Netflix’s streaming rival,, received one Oscar nomination, for comedy The Big Sick‘s original screenplay, a year after the e-commerce giant won it’s for the drama Manchester by the Sea. Netflix also received three nominations in documentary film categories, including for Icarus and Strong Island in the Best Documentary Feature category, and for the documentary short Heroin(e). Meanwhile, Netflix foreign language film nominee On Body And Soul, from Hungary, in November and the film will debut on the streaming service next month., Fortune’s technology newsletter. Tuesday’s Oscar nominations are something of a culmination to what has already been a busy awards season for Netflix, which scored a dozen nominations at the for Mudbound and multiple original TV series, including Stranger Things and The Crown. However, in the end, Netflix walked away with only one Golden Globe win, for actor of the comedy series Master of None. So, while Mudbound has been a consistent nominee throughout Hollywood’s drawn-out awards season, the film has yet to take home any major hardware, which means Netflix may not actually get to hear the company’s name called on Oscars night. The Oscar winners will be revealed at the 90th Academy Awards on March 4. Given today’s and stratospheric returns of many, it is tempting to chase possible sky-high investments. Fear of missing out (FOMO) is real for most entrepreneurs. For many, it’s the late 1990s “dot com” boom all over again. There are scammers and charlatans all over the place during this Wild West phase and there is basically no regulation.. In the crypto-markets, it is buyer beware. But that is ok, because if you really want to profit from these technological innovations in the long run, your time may actually be better spent elsewhere. What is going on is the beginning of a critical change in how value is created and measured, made possible by the invention of blockchains, or perhaps more appropriately, distributed ledger technology (DLT). I had an opportunity to speak with Jeremy Epstein, CEO of and author of. Some venture capital investors consider Epstein to be a “modern day unicorn” because of what he accomplished as the VP of Marketing during his time at Sprinklr. Specifically, during his tenure, the company grew from a Series A $23mm valuation with 30 employees to a Series E valuation of $1 Billion dollars with 700+ employees in 10 countries, serving 800+ enterprise brands. Simply put, when a fellow marketer who helped grow a company to a valuation of over $1 Billion wants to talk about the future of technology, I listen and I take really good notes. A Quick Blockchain Primer Epstein explained the core innovation of bitcoin, supported by the Bitcoin blockchain, is that it solves the “” problem associated with digital technology. When you get paid, you need to trust that the asset you are obtaining in return for your product or service will have value in the future. If the other person in the transaction can easily make a copy of the asset, then yours will not be unique. As such, its value will be less. This is why it’s ok if we both have a picture of your dog or child, but it’s not ok if we both have the exact same $20 bill. So, by creating an immutable ledger, secured by a decentralized network, we all know who owns what at what time. This is what is called “consensus.” In this world, when a transaction occurs and you send.002 Bitcoin or Ether or any crypto-token to another person, the entire network is made aware of the fact that an asset has changed hands, so it cannot be used or “spent” again. There are some members of the network, called “miners,” who invest their time and money in the form of electricity and computing power, to verify that you have it in the first place and to ensure that, once you have signed the transaction with your private key, you no longer have it. Once they have completed the process, there is a mathematically elegant way for them to secure the network and distribute the information to others. For this work, they are rewarded with their own Bitcoins (or another token if they are using a different blockchain). The key thing here is that each coin that is created (also called a “token”) is digitally unique, cannot be forged, and has a clear, indisputable owner. If you have the, you own the coin. Assets and Value, Secured by the Blockchain The implication of all of this is that we now have a technology that can cost-effectively represent assets in a unique way. Since the assets are digital, they are fungible. You cannot own a fraction of a Picasso painting, but you can own.0000023 of the token that represents the Picasso painting. When you “tokenize” an asset and its uniqueness is undeniable, the asset has value. It may be large or small, but it is the only one of its kind in the world and that is worth something. Think about how many assets you currently have that are under-leveraged because the costs involved in buying, selling, or trading them are too high. This could include unused hard-disk space on your computer, bandwidth at your home that lays dormant during the day, or the family heirloom painting that you do not want to sell but could provide some liquidity. It’s possible that every asset will be “tokenized.” The second implication is that asset control will stay with the creator until she decides to part with it. In the future, companies will have to pay you for the data they get for free today such as name, email address, phone numbers, and social media profiles. If you are the company, the same will be true of those you serve. If you want control of an asset, whether it is for a marketing campaign or a data feed to improve your crops, you will have to buy or rent it from the owner. Finally, because these assets are digital, it means that they can be programmed, like a computer. The business and legal rules that currently surround an asset in the form of documents and contracts can be applied to the asset itself to govern its use. The three things you need to understand in order to prepare for the transformative power of Blockchains are: • Asset Tokenization in ever smaller increments • Asset Ownership that is clear and indisputable • Asset Programmability that can reduce transaction times Amidst all of the hype of crypto, these are the implications of blockchain’s arrival that are really going to change things up. It Won’t Be Here Tomorrow, But It Is Coming Blockchains are in their infancy and there are plenty of issues ranging from stability to security to interoperability, among others. The cryptocurrency craze is just a signal that the genie is officially out of the bottle. Whether you buy Bitcoin, Ether, Zcash, ARK or other tokens, is up to you. It may well be worth some of your time to understand them. The real value for you is to start looking at if every asset is tokenized, owned by its creator, and digitally programmable. These impacts are especially important if you are. Almost a year ago, to date, I convinced one of my closest friends,, to quit his job and join me on my crusade. I had left my job in just a few months prior, and was making a comfortable living as a freelance writer. He was about to finish getting his MBA, and verbally clear about his lack of excitement for what the future held: a high-paying cubicle job at a major company. “I want to build something,” he said. “You know, with employees. And financials. I don’t want to freelance–I want to build a company.” “Why won’t you take the leap with me, then?” I asked–dozens of times over. “With the money we’ve saved up, do you really think we won’t figure something out in a year?” 12 months later, and we’ve built a full-time team and successful company beyond our wildest dreams., a name that came from one of many apartment-balcony-and-coffee conversations, was our attempt to empower more of the world’s smartest people to share what they know. We work exclusively with carefully selected CEOs, serial entrepreneurs, investors and venture capitalists (primarily at the helm of businesses doing $10M to $300M in revenue) to share their hard-earned insight with the Internet. None of that atrocious writing PR firms peddle as acumen. None of the ad-speak and jargon nobody finds helpful. Just the hard lessons learned–and the personal stories of how these successful people learned those lessons the hard way. So, as a founder, I’d like to share some of the hard lessons I’ve learned over the past year, building Digital Press from ground zero. Lesson #1: You know nothing (and that’s okay). I was extremely, extremely fortunate to have had a mentor for years before taking the entrepreneurial leap. Friend and fellow Inc Columnist,, taught me more about life and business than I could have ever asked to learn on my own. But even after 4 years of mentorship, I can still admit that what I “knew” was still just theory. I hadn’t felt it yet. Before I took the leap, he told me, “When everything turns to chaos, as the founder, you have to bring the calm.” I didn’t understand what that meant until I started to feel the realities of building a company with other people’s livelihoods at stake. Entrepreneurship has humbled me. And I find it humbles a lot of young founders, who set off to change the world, only to feel the weight of their aspirations and realize it doesn’t happen overnight. All that theory means nothing until you’ve been in the trenches. So, be passionate. Set out to do something big. But remember, you won’t truly know until you can say, “I’ve been there.” Lesson #2: Entrepreneurship without personal development is a disaster. I’ll be completely honest: a year into real entrepreneurship and I am astounded at how little the business world talks about the value of personal development. I have done a lot in my 27 young years of being on this earth. I was a professional gamer as a teenager. I was a bodybuilder in college. But nothing, and I mean nothing, has tested me like entrepreneurship. It wears on you in ways I imagine fatherhood wears on a man. All throughout the year, I found myself in moments where I would hyper-focus on the business, lose sight of myself, and then things in my life would crumble. Personal relationships. Emotional well-being. Everything took a toll, all because I felt like my business was my child–and I would go whatever distance to see it succeed. This is unhealthy. And the moments you push too hard, you end up causing more damage than good. I know I will be an entrepreneur for the rest of my life. There’s no going back now. I am forever changed. But if there’s one thing I really hope to do for the entrepreneurial community along my journey, it’s start larger dialogues about the importance of personal development while building a business. If you lose yourself in the process, your company will suffer. Lesson #3: Cash is your gasoline. I feel extremely fortunate to have other successful business leaders in my life that have passed along words of wisdom. But one of the most important (and you learn this real fast as a startup founder) is the value of cash. I have always been frugal, but entrepreneurship made me see the money I had as so much more than just a “savings account.” Money started to have dozens of meanings: the ability to survive, the ability to innovate, the future of the company itself. Without cash, your company dies. Before we came up with the idea for Digital Press, we ate into our savings accounts. We helped each other cover our expenses. And the moment things clicked and we began to build a profitable business, we both shared the exact same mindset: “Keep as much cash in the company as possible.” I feel like this is one of those lessons you hear, and can even understand on a theoretical level, but it’s not until you start adding employees and see your monthly payroll go up and up, that you truly understand. Cash is your gasoline. And you don’t want to find yourself on the open road on an empty tank. Lesson #4: The burden of opportunity is a real burden. A good problem to have–but a problem nonetheless. As an entrepreneur, one of the worst things you can do is chase too many rabbits at once. I have struggled with this through every aspect of my life, because when you’re curious about the world you want to explore it all. Part of what allows a business to flourish, especially in record time, is simplicity. As another mentor of mine,, would tell me: “Simplicity is velocity.” The moments we tried to build in too many directions at once, we failed. We overworked ourselves. We got burned out, even discouraged. But the times we were able to focus on improving one or two things at a time, we flew. This is a lesson that fundamentally changed how I think about, not just business, but every pursuit in life. One thing at a time. Lesson #5: Entrepreneurship is lonely. Since not very many other people seem to want to admit this, I guess I will. Entrepreneurship is lonely. Nobody will ever know how hard you work at what you do. Nobody will give you the acknowledgment or the “pat on the back” you feel you deserve. Nobody will sit there, cheering you on, day in and day out. Nobody else will take the fall when you mess up. Nobody will be able to tell you which direction is right or wrong. Entrepreneurship is lonely because, by definition, entrepreneurship means choosing to go “your own way.” This took me a while to really accept, and also emotionally address within myself. Not only will your efforts go unacknowledged by the vast majority of people in your life (at least, to the degree you’re expecting to be acknowledged), but at every step you are going to feel like you’re letting someone down. If you aren’t letting your significant other down because you’ve been working for 17 straight hours, then you’re letting your friend down for not calling them back, and you’re letting your co-founder down by not responding to an issue fast enough, and you’re letting your employees down by not getting them what they need that day–and you’re letting yourself down for not being able to do it all. This is one of the hardest, most brutal truths about entrepreneurship: In the process of trying to be great, you will fail at almost everything. And do you know what? Because at the end of the day, all you can do is your best–and then wake up the next day and try again, and again, and again. And Twitter both revealed on Friday more about how they plan to deal with the spread of fake news and propaganda on their services. Facebook said that it would ask its users to tell it which news sources they read and trust to help it decide which ones should be featured more prominently. These responses will help “shift the balance of news you see towards sources that are determined to be trusted by the community,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg explained in a Facebook post. Meanwhile, Twitter said in a blog post that it would email nearly 678,000 users that may have inadvertently interacted with now-suspended accounts believed to have been linked to a Russian propaganda outfit called the Internet Research Agency (IRA). The announcements come amid intense scrutiny by U.S. Lawmakers over both Facebook and Twitter’s role in letting Russians and others spread during the 2016 presidential election. The goal, according to U.S. Intelligence agencies, was to divide Americans on politically charged issues like race, religion, and gun control. Zuckerberg announced the Facebook news just days after his company said it would to show users more family-friendly posts from friends or acquaintances that Facebook believes will spur more user interaction. “There’s too much sensationalism, misinformation and polarization in the world today,” Zuckerberg said about the polling of users about the sites they have confidence in. “Social media enables people to spread information faster than ever before, and if we don’t specifically tackle these problems, then we end up amplifying them.” He added: “This update will not change the amount of news you see on Facebook. It will only shift the balance of news you see towards sources that are determined to be trusted by the community.” It’s unclear how Facebook’s shift will solve the problem of so-called filter bubbles, in which people only see information that aligns with their existing beliefs. Some raised the possibility that crowd sourcing the list of credible news outlets could be manipulated., Fortune’s technology newsletter. For its part, Twitter minimized the impact of the Russian-linked accounts, saying that they merely represented “two one-hundredths of a percent (0.016%) of the total accounts on Twitter at the time.” “However, any such activity represents a challenge to democratic societies everywhere, and we’re committed to continuing to work on this important issue,” Twitter said. Twitter has said that it had discovered 3,814 IRA-connected accounts in total, including 1,062 accounts that it uncovered just recently. It said it had also identified 50,258 bot accounts linked to the Russian government that spread misinformation during the 2016 election, including 13,512 accounts found just recently. (Reuters) – Data center computers with Intel Corp’s ( ) newer chips might reboot more often than normal because of problems with the patches issued to fix the so-called Spectre and Meltdown security flaws, the company said on Wednesday. Intel confirmed that patches for the security flaws can cause higher-than-expected reboot rates in Ivy Bridge, Sandy Bridge, Skylake and Kaby Lake processors, said Navin Shenoy, general manager of the data center group, in a statement on Intel’s website. The Kaby Lake chips are the company’s most recent offering. Last week, Intel said it had received reports that its security patches were causing problems in systems with its older Broadwell and Haswell chips. Shenoy said that Intel had issued patches for 90 percent of Intel chips released in the past five years but that the company had “more work to do.” He also said the company would send out initial versions of fixes for the buggy patches to customers by next week. “We have reproduced these issues internally and are making progress toward identifying the root cause,” Shenoy wrote. 3 Intel confirmed that the Spectre and Meltdown flaws affected its chips, potentially letting hackers steal information believed to be very secure. The Spectre flaw affected nearly every modern computing device, including those with chips from Intel, Advanced Micro Devices Inc ( ) and ARM Holdings. Intel on Wednesday also quantified how much of a performance hit the patches cause for data center customers. For common tasks such as running website servers, the patches caused a 2 percent slowdown, Intel said. Another test that simulated online transactions at a stock brokerage showed a 4 percent slowdown, the company said. For some types for work involving servers that store large amounts of data and try to retrieve it quickly, the company said the slowdown could be as severe as 18 percent to 25 percent. However, it wasn’t immediately clear how common those situations were. Tesla’s () all-electric Model 3 sedan is receiving glowing reviews. The Drive’s Alex Roy spent 50 hours with the car over four days and had to say: “it’s far more than a car. It’s a work of art, a concept car come to life, more revelatory than the Model S, and historically even more important. “ and echoed the view that the Model 3 is a unique car — futuristic and exciting. Called it an “unexpected delight” to drive. Called it “magic.” But here’s the kicker: the base model of the Model 3, priced at $35,000, is to have an unsubsidized five-year total cost of ownership only $4,200, or 13% more than a base model Toyota () Camry. For over a decade, the Camry has been the in the United States. The Camry is generally regarded as a utilitarian vehicle rather than “magic” or a “work of art.” Photo. The Model 3’s unprecedentedly low total cost of ownership In my somewhat subjective estimation — backed up by several impartial car reviewers — the Model 3 offers greater quality than an ordinary entry-level luxury car like the BMW () 3 Series at a total cost of ownership not far from a utilitarian, mass market car like the Toyota Camry. This is an unprecedented level of price performance. Total cost of ownership includes the full costs of owning a vehicle, including energy costs (i.e. Electricity or gasoline), service and maintenance, and insurance. It’s a better apples-to-apples comparison of the cost of an electric car vs. A gasoline car than sticker price due to the considerably lower costs of running an electric vehicle. The to the Toyota Camry comes from Loup Ventures partner Gene Munster, known for betting on Apple () as an analyst at Piper Jaffray. Another comparison by YouTubers produces similar results. They compare the Model 3 to the Honda () Civic. They find that the unsubsidized five-year total cost of ownership for the Model 3 is only $3,400 or 14% higher than for the Honda Civic, a much more utilitarian car. They also compare the Model 3 to the BMW 330i, a car with a similar level of luxury, at best equal driving performance, and inferior technology. They estimate the 330i’s total cost of ownership at $17,450 higher than the Model 3s. That’s 62% higher for a car that is about the same or worse. Two Bit da Vinci notes that beyond their fifth year, the maintenance cost for gasoline cars increases significantly with several parts requiring replacement. Not so for electric cars. Over a seven-year or eight-year timeframe, the cost comparison is likely even more favorable to the Model 3. A newer gasoline car can survive for before it needs to be scrapped. Data from the Tesla Model S shows that an electric car can drive with minimal battery degradation. One taxi driver drove in his Model S and lost only 7% of his original battery life. Based on this data, electric cars are expected to have much longer lifetimes than gasoline cars, perhaps as much as 500,000 miles. This makes the total cost of ownership comparison extremely favorable over a 15-year timeframe. After 15 years, a Model 3 may still be running smoothly while a gasoline car is long gone. The same goes for cases of high utilization such as taxis or ride-hailing services. Looking ahead to autonomous ride-hailing, self-driving electric cars will savagely outcompete self-driving gasoline cars. Low cost of ownership means high sales The Model 3 offers a BMW-like experience for a Toyota Camry-like cost. For this reason, I believe that demand for the Model 3 will be like nothing the automotive industry has seen in recent decades. Research that consumers are responsive to the total cost of ownership of vehicles, not just sticker price. Venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya that BMW 3 Series sales will be decimated by the Model 3. Gene Munster that Tesla could sell 2.75 million Model 3s per year by 2025. I don’t know if these predictions are correct, but they are certainly not unreasonable given the unprecedented level of price-performance the Model 3 offers. Many consumers will wonder why they would want to buy any other car. Some analysts are gravely underestimating the level of consumer enthusiasm specifically for this car, and not for lackluster electric compliance cars like GM’s () Chevy Bolt or future me-too offerings. Tesla has in software, design, and battery pack economies of scale that competitors show no signs of overcoming. Most recently, Tesla stores in San Francisco and LA were when the first Model 3s were put on display. Some waited over an hour in line just to see the car up-close for a few minutes. This did not occur for the Chevy Bolt, or any other car in memory for that matter. The best advertising for the Model 3 will be knowing someone who drives one, especially someone as enthusiastic as the people who held a reservation as of August 2. I expect that demand will greatly increase over time as more people learn about the car. Another factor driving increased demand will be the development of Enhanced Autopilot and more advanced autonomy features. Revenue and market cap implications If Gene Munster is correct in his speculation that Tesla will sell 2.75 million Model 3s per year by 2025, the company will generate $105 billion in annual revenue from that one vehicle alone. Assuming an equal amount of revenue from the Model Y crossover, that would be $210 billion between the two vehicles, plus for the Model S and X. At an auto industry average price/sales ratio, $219 billion in revenue would yield a market cap of $114 billion, up 42% from September’s all-time high of $65.5 billion. At an S&P 500 historical average price/sales ratio, Tesla’s market cap would be $322 billion. That’s an increase of over 490% from the all-time high. Remember, these calculations exclude revenue from all other vehicles and lines of business, including solar and energy storage. I think the 2025 timeframe is too long for two reasons. First, by 2025 there is a good chance that autonomous ride-hailing will affect overall vehicle demand in a way that Munster is not accounting for. Second, it doesn’t help us to think about what sales will be like in the Model 3s first few years on the market. What factors prevent sales from reaching 2.75 million per year in three years, rather than in seven? The bottom line is that although it is difficult to predict the future in much detail, I can say with high confidence that the Model 3 will break sales records as soon as the limiting factor is demand, not production. Once production ramps to meet demand, I would be surprised if it is not the best-selling sedan in the United States. An alternative way to model future revenue and market cap is through the autonomous ride-hailing business. Suppose Tesla produces just 5 million cars with self-driving hardware over the seven years from 2018 to 2025, an average production of 714,000 cars per year. Suppose that each self-driving vehicle conventional vehicles. Given 1-2 billion passenger vehicles on the road globally (estimates vary widely), that means there is a need for a 200 million to 400 million self-driving vehicles. 5 million cars would be only a 1.25% to 2.5% share of the eventual install base. I’m assuming that each self-driving car will replace of five people, putting average annual paid miles per vehicle at 82,750. Using ARK Invest’s estimated price of, that’s about $29,000 in revenue per vehicle per year. Assuming the same net margin on this revenue as the taxi and limousine industry’s, that’s about $9,000 in net profit per car per year. Across 5 million cars, that comes to about $45 billion in annual net profit. The historical price/earnings ratio of the S&P 500 is. At this ratio, $45 billion in earnings would yield a market cap of $706 billion. That’s over 10x growth from Tesla’s all-time high. Conclusion The main obstacle to the Model 3 achieving a high sales volume is achieving a high production volume. Product risk is low and execution risk is moderate or high. In my view, Tesla is unlikely to run out of cash due to its large cash balance ($3.5 billion as of the end of Q3), improving cash flow from Model 3 production, and its proven historical ability to raise funds in a second offering when needed. Motor Trend the Model 3 “the most important vehicle of the century.” Many observers fail to see what is new about the Model 3. It’s not just another electric car like the Chevy Bolt. It’s not just another entry-level luxury car like the BMW 330i. It’s a breakthrough in price-performance that will generate unprecedented consumer interest, and that breakthrough will be hard for competitors to replicate. Disclosure: I am/we are long TSLA. I wrote this article myself, and it expresses my own opinions. I am not receiving compensation for it (other than from Seeking Alpha). I have no business relationship with any company whose stock is mentioned in this article. The initial public offering of Spotify, the music-streaming service, is almost here. What is expected to be the largest tech IPO of 2018—it’s certainly the most anticipated—will likely take place in late March or April. Spotify plans to list on the New York Stock Exchange—but there’s a catch. Instead of a traditional IPO that makes shares available to the general public, Stockholm-based Spotify will opt to, making its shares available only to institutional investors and eliminating the need for underwriters, a.k.a. The banks that set an initial price, connect sellers and buyers, and provide the cash necessary to stabilize the stock. Some people have already called it a “non-IPO.” The move could. IPOs are usually a lucrative business for investment banks, but in the last few years revenues from equity capital market (ECM) fees have dropped. Spotify paid just $30 million in ECM fees to three banks: Inc., and Allen & Co. Those institutions will perform some of the traditional tasks expected of them, but in a less prominent way. Why the novel strategy? Spotify can buck tradition because, though it’s not yet turning a profit, it is earning cash, and it is not planning on raising more revenue from investors. Spotify, as measured by either its subscription service or its ad-supported free version, is the most popular music streaming service, according to the. Say it’s a good time for Spotify to go public. The company has 60 million paying subscribers, just renegotiated long-term licensing deals with three major record labels, and is valued at about $15 billion. (It is, however, facing a copyright suit from Wixen Music Publishing, filed in late December 2017.) The Wall Street Journal says that due to other companies’ need for cash, “it is far from guaranteed” that more will follow Spotify’s lead. However, according to, Spotify “could create a new model for growth companies in which they raise all their money in private markets and do all their trading in public ones, with some small variations.” Whatever the case, Wall Street will be watching. Recently, I went through the process of choosing a new SaaS product for my agency (out of respect for all involved, I’m keeping the name of the company and the kind of product they sell confidential). I researched several providers and talked to sales reps from each – this was a big-ticket purchase, so I wanted to be sure I had as much information as possible. After a few weeks, I thought I’d made the right decision. The problems started shortly after. My support tickets took an average of 3-5 days to get a response. I couldn’t get emails back from my “dedicated” account rep (who then bailed on one of our two hour-long onboarding calls and never responded to my requests for an update). I felt let down. The product itself may have been the right solution for our needs, but the poor onboarding support I received left me with so much post-purchase regret that I wound up cancelling the contract and moving to a different provider. The sale was lost, and it had nothing to do with the salespeople involved. Why Selling Shouldn’t Stop at the Close To be clear, I’m not talking about the trap of overselling – of continuing to pitch your product’s features and benefits after your prospect has agreed to buy. As Nick Kane of the Janek Performance Group: “What this tells your customer is that you don’t ‘get’ them. Not only is this sales mentality out of date, it’s also one of the easiest ways to turn off your customer – and worse yet – risk losing any future sales opportunities.” Instead, what I’m arguing is that, after the close, customer relationships shouldn’t be thought of as “done.” Closing a sale doesn’t guarantee a happy customer – let alone one who’s going to go on to refer your company to others. A full lifecycle program of sales needs to take two factors into consideration: proper onboarding, and the conversion of customers into advocates. Onboarding As Sales I’d argue that onboarding – the activities taken after a purchase to get new customers up to speed – should be treated as part of the sales process. Too many salespeople “pass the buck” after the deal is done, assuming that account reps, customer service or other pre-established funnels will help customers get from the point of purchase to the initial “aha moment.” This ignores the fact that, during the post-purchase period, new customers are – consciously and subconsciously – evaluating whether or not they made the right choice. Research by Seung Hwan Lee and June Cotte of the University of Western Ontario, Canada, published by the, suggests that there are actually four distinct types of post-purchase consumer regret: • Regret due to foregone alternatives (e.g. Regret that one alternative was chosen over another) • Regret due to a change in significance (e.g. Regret that the impact of the chosen solution isn’t as significant as expected) • Regret due to under-consideration (e.g. Regret that too little time was invested in choosing between alternatives) • Regret due to over-consideration (e.g. Regret that too much time was put into the decision-making process) A poor onboarding experience can contribute to the first two types of post-purchase regret, which Lee and Cotte describe as “outcome regret” (versus “process regret”). • If customers aren’t trained appropriately or brought up to speed quickly, they may believe that a different alternative would have led to better results. • Similarly, if they aren’t shown how to quickly get value from their purchase, they may view its overall significance as being less than its actual potential. If post-purchase regret is left unaddressed, both of these scenarios can lead to cancellations and refund requests (as in the case of the SaaS purchase I described earlier). Even if money isn’t lost as the result of poor onboarding, it’s missed indirectly when would-be happy customers aren’t converted into advocates for your company. Selling the Referral Brian Williams Ph.D. Of The Brevet Group: • Salespeople who actively seek out and exploit referrals earn 4 to 5 times more than those who don’t. • 91% of customers say they’d give referrals. Only 11% of salespeople ask for referrals. Basically, salespeople and the companies they work for benefit financially from referrals. But while most people are willing to give them, they’re rarely asked to. That’s an even bigger problem when you consider that “people are 4 times more likely to buy when referred by a friend.” “Referrals” can take a number of different forms, including everything from asking satisfied customers for referrals to others who would benefit, to a formally-structured peer-to-peer referral program like. As the citizens of Hawaii came out of hiding in their bathtubs and basements Saturday morning, after learning that the emergency alert they had received, warning of an imminent nuclear missile attack, was a false alarm, their fear and panic transformed into rage. “I’m extremely angry right now. People should lose their jobs if this was an error,” Hawaii State Representative Matt Lopresti told CNN. Hawaii Senator Brian Schatz on Twitter that the, which said that a ballistic missile was inbound to Hawaii and urged people to seek shelter, was sent due to “human error.” The initial alert went out at 8:07 am, but it wasn’t until 8:43 am that the state sent a second alert, announcing it was a false alarm. Governor David Ige, “An employee pushed the wrong button.” Could it really be that the emergency alert system is so simplistic, it only takes the twitch of a finger to send Hawaii into terror and chaos? Photo courtesy Ashley Shaffer Yes. During a press conference Saturday afternoon, the governor and officials at the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency confirmed that the blunder occurred during a twice-daily test that happens when staffers switch shifts. In this case, the staffer accidentally selected a live alert, instead of a test alert. After the alert went out, there was no way to automatically cancel or recall the message. Instead, they took to Twitter to tell the public the alert was a false alarm, but it took a full 38 minutes to manually generate and disseminate another corrective emergency alert that reached all Hawaiians. Officials said they’re now working on speeding up that feature. 1 “We’ve already implemented some actions to speed up the process so the public would be notified faster,” Ige said. The Integrated Public Alert and Warning System, or IPAWS, manages both the emergency alerts you get on your phone and the national emergency alert system, which broadcasts to television stations. According to Retired Admiral David Simpson, former chief of the FCC’s Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau, the system uses a web interface with multiple servers that cache preloaded messages about different types of emergencies, from states across the country. “It’s a regular PC interface. This person probably had a mouse and a dropdown menu of the kind of alert messages you can send,” and selected the wrong one, Simpson says. In a statement to WIRED, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which operates IPAWS, said it is working with local authorities and the FCC to gather “more details to understand how this occurred and how to prevent such occurrences in the future.” FCC chairman Ajit Pai tweeted that the commission is investigating as well. Those pre-loaded emergency alerts, scary as they may seem, are necessary, says Thomas Karako, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “It’s critical we have this kind of early warning system.” Simpson agrees: “You don’t want to be in the middle of a attack on the US and have someone fumbling around with the message.” It’s also natural to conduct exercises to ensure the system is functioning. The problem in this case, Simpson says, is any exercise message should begin with the words, “EXERCISE EXERCISE EXERCISE.” “This was probably a state-run emergency exercise that doesn’t have the strong controls that DoD has learned the hard way from 50 years of screwing up,” Simpson says. Where Were the Feds? In the event of an actual attack, the first government agency to initiate an alert would be the North American Air Defense Command, or NORAD, which is located in a cave in the Rocky Mountains in Colorado Springs. Open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, its staffers—known as watch standers—monitor a global network of sensors that can detect a missile launch. If it detects a missile en route to Hawaii, NORAD would send a message to Pacific Command, which would in turn alert the state emergency management center. That’s why, says Simpson, the biggest question of all may be what the federal government was doing after the alert went out. The Emergency Alert System, which predated Wireless Emergency Alerts, was created with the specific goal of letting the president communicate with the country in the event of a nuclear attack. The US has spent billions of dollars maintaining this system, and yet, 38 minutes went by before Hawaii sent a second message, acknowledging the false alarm. The president, or any of the federal agencies with access to the emergency alert system, could have corrected the record much sooner. “We paid big bucks to the DoD and provide very good capabilities to the president to communicate directly to the nation. Where’s the accountability there for not piping up immediately?” Simpson says. “I think that’s going to wind up ultimately being the scandal. Where were they with all of this?” In a statement Saturday afternoon, White House deputy press secretary Lindsay Walters put the blame on Hawaii. “The President has been briefed on the state of Hawaii’s emergency management exercise. This was purely a state exercise.” While numerous questions remain about the federal government’s response, Hawaii’s excruciatingly long panic sends several clear messages about ways to improve IPAWS. Though all 50 states use it, not all local governments are part of the voluntary system, leaving some cities without a uniform way to alert their citizens of a local threat. And it’s possible not all emergency management centers are giving their staffers uniform, adequate training. In some cases, Simpson says, those emergency centers only staff up when a threat appears imminent. “There’s nowhere near the professionalism there on the national security side of things,” Simpson says. Perhaps the most critical issue this false alarm highlights is the need for a firewall between the test mode and live mode in the emergency response interface. In the DoD’s version of the system, Simpson says, that separation exists. It appears that was not the case in Hawaii. The Hawaii emergency management officials also noted the obvious need for a better way to recall accidental messages. As terrifying as this false alarm may have been, experts say it’s critical for governments to continue to test these systems so that they’re adequately prepared if and when the time comes to use them. During the wildfires in California last year, several counties for fear of sowing panic, and instead, left their citizens wholly unprepared for the fires’ spread. “My big fear is this has been such a bad experience states will be afraid to use alerting now. But the opposite should occur. They should get in and conduct tests and exercises,” Simpson says. “But do so using the right controls.” Louise Matsakis contributed reporting. 1Story updated at 18:45 ET on Saturday, January 13 to include information from the press conference. SHANGHAI (Reuters) – China’s cyber watchdog has scolded Ant Financial, Alibaba’s payment affiliate, for compromising user privacy after many users of its Alipay service were automatically enrolled in its credit scoring system. The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) said in a statement it had summoned Ant Financial representatives to a meeting last Saturday and told them they had failed to meet the country’s personal information security standards. The rap over the knuckles adds to a tough start to the year for Ant Financial [ANTFIN.UL] which was recently blocked by U.S. Regulators from acquiring MoneyGram International Inc. It is also grappling with new regulations, requiring mobile payment firms to sharply increase the amount of client funds in interest-free reserve accounts, which will likely reduce profits. Alipay has a popular end-of-year feature that allows its customers to analyze how they have spent their money over the year. At the end of 2017, the feature began enrolling users who wanted to look at their bills into the credit scoring system, Sesame Credit. That allowed Sesame Credit to collect their data and share the analysis with its partners. Users could only opt out if they unchecked a button on the feature’s landing page. Sesame Credit apologized last week and canceled the default option. CAC said the company should “step up efforts to conduct a comprehensive investigation of the Alipay platform, carry out special rectifications and take effective measures to prevent similar incidents from recurring.” It quoted Alipay and Sesame Credit as saying that they had learned a “profound lesson” from the incident. Ant Financial did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment. Samsung is going all in on the Internet of things, betting that connected appliances and faster Internet speeds will result in happier customers. Executives for the electronics giant, speaking at the 2018 CES technology show in Las Vegas on Monday, reconfirmed a vow made two years ago that all of the company’s products will be IOT-compatible by 2020—adding that 90% already are as of today. And it plans to use its existing SmartThings app to ensure that those devices can all talk to each other—from the TV to the phone to the refrigerator to the washing machine. Samsung promised that the initiative would debut in the spring. What that means for users will depend on which Samsung appliances they own, of course. One example is people who buy a new Samsung TV will no longer have to worry about entering user names and passwords for services like, Hulu, and Spotify when they initially set up their TVs. That information will automatically entered into the TV by checking other systems in which the customer is logged in, making it a more seamless experience. TV sets will also have personalized recommendations for movies and shows, based on a user’s overall viewing habits on all their devices. TVs will also include Bixby, Samsung’s voice-controlled digital assistant, and will be able to double as a central hub for smart products around the home, letting users do everything from see who is at the front door to adjust the thermostat. The goal of the push, says Tom Baxter, president and CEO of Samsung’s North American division is to create an “eco-system of devices working together to produce unique experiences.” As part of the initiative, Samsung will expand the number of smart refrigerator models it sells by introducing 14 new models that come with its integrated screen and newly expanded FamilyHub technology that lets owners stream music, leave notes to each other, and view the contents of the fridge in real time. Through Bixby, the FamilyHub will differentiate between users’ based on their voices and give custom information to them, such as their schedule for the day or commute times to school or work. “IOT is still frustrating to a lot of people, but it doesn’t need to be,” said Yoon Lee, senior vice president at Samsung Electronics. Samsung’s not stopping with its own products, either. The company is working closely with the Open Connectivity Forum, the world’s largest IOT standardization body, to have all SmartThings-compatible products work with the app. And the company said it has signed an agreement with a “leading European auto manufacturer” to extend this IOT integration to vehicles (letting, for instance, people check if they’re out of milk as they drive by the store). Samsung has previously tried and failed to make its ecosystem more connected. To ensure this effort is more successful, Baxter said, the company has invested $14 billion in research and development over the past year. Between 100 and 250 company bicycles are stolen from Google’s campus every week, out of a fleet of around 1,100 so-called Gbikes. Or maybe ‘borrowed’ is a better word than ‘stolen’ – it’s complicated. According to the, the bikes wind up in odd places, like schools, tavern roofs, and Burning Man. The people who take them are often residents of Mountain View, the town that’s home to Google’s headquarters. They often view the bikes as a kind of community service, even though they’re ostensibly meant for Google employees to use on the Google campus. Google has been trying to control its losses, using roving teams to collect the bikes from around town, and recently installing GPS trackers. That’s how they learned one had made it all the way to the Burning Man festival in Nevada., Fortune’s technology newsletter. But according to comments to the Journal from Mountain View residents, the deeper issue may be mixed feelings about the corporate giant. Some locals didn’t realize the bikes were supposed to be for Google employees only, suggesting they regard Google as a benevolent part of the community. But others – perhaps including a man who claimed to have an entire garage full of the bikes – regard their borrowing as a kind of retributive justice against the massive company. One woman specifically cited the annoyance of Google Buses, which bring employees to work from around the San Francisco Bay, saying she borrowed the bikes to “balance it out.” The Google buses have been the in San Francisco, as a kind of proxy for income inequality and rising rents that have been blamed on the tech boom. The bike situation is subtler and more complex, as befitting lower-key Mountain View. But it still reflects, in the words of one local speaking to the Journal, a sense among residents that “Google owes them somehow, someway.”. (Reuters) – Apple Inc will release a patch for the Safari web browser on its iPhones, iPads and Macs within days, it said on Thursday, after major chipmakers disclosed flaws that leave nearly every modern computing device vulnerable to hackers. On Wednesday, Alphabet Inc’s Google and other security researchers disclosed two major chip flaws, one called Meltdown affecting only Intel Corp chips and one called Spectre affecting nearly all computer chips made in the last decade. The news sparked a sell-off in Intel’s stock as investors tried to gauge the costs to the chipmaker. In a statement on its website, Apple said all Mac and iOS devices are affected by both Meltdown and Spectre. But the most recent operating system updates for Mac computers, Apple TVs, iPhones and iPads protect users against the Meltdown attack and do not slow down the devices, it added, and Meltdown does not affect the Apple Watch. Macs and iOS devices are vulnerable to Spectre attacks through code that can run in web browsers. Apple said it would issue a patch to its Safari web browser for those devices “in the coming days.” Shortly after the researchers disclosed the chip flaws Wednesday, Google and Microsoft Corp released statements telling users which of their products were affected. Google said its users of Android phones – more than 80 percent of the global market – were protected if they had the latest security updates. Apple remained silent for more than a day about the fate of the hundreds of millions of users of its iPhones and iPads. Ben Johnson, co-founder and chief strategist for cyber security firm Carbon Black, said the delay in updating customers about whether Apple’s devices are at risk could affect Apple’s drive to get more business customers to adopt its hardware. “Something this severe gets the attention of all the employees and executives at a company, and when they go asking the IT and security people about it and security doesn’t have an answer for iPhones and iPads, it just doesn’t give a whole lot of confidence,” Johnson said. Peter Thiel and his venture capital firm, Founders Fund, are big believers in Bitcoin. The PayPal co-founder and other Founders Fund partners bought $15 million to $20 million worth of the that’s now worth hundreds of millions of dollars, according to a Wall Street Journal on Tuesday that cites unnamed sources. The report didn’t say exactly when Thiel or his VC firm first bought Bitcoin, whose value has from to dramatic in recent months. The volatility has alarmed some economists, who worry of a. Thiel and the Founders Fund, however, don’t appear to share those concerns, and are instead pitching Bitcoin to their investors as “a high-risk, high-reward wager similar to its other venture bets,” the report said., Fortune’s technology newsletter. Shares of Bitcoin jumped over 13% on Tuesday from $13,412 to $15,216 after the report, according to. In October, Thiel said during an investment conference in Saudi Arabia that people are “underestimating” Bitcoin and he compared the cryptocurrency to gold. “If bitcoin ends up being the cyber equivalent of gold it has a great potential left,” he said at the time. About other cryptocurrencies, however, Thiel said he was “skeptical of most of them.” Other cryptocurrencies include, Ethereum, and Litecoin. Fortune contacted Founders Fund and will update this story if it responds. The, parent company of Sears and Kmart, made a truly unorthodox decision this holiday season. The retailer, which generates the vast majority of its dwindling sales from in-store foot traffic, didn’t run any television advertisements for most of the crucial holiday shopping season. According to the, no paid Sears commercials have run nationally since November 25th. No national Kmart commercials have run since November 24th. The decision, according to the Journal, came from Sears Holdings chief Edward Lampert, over the objections of other executives. Lampert has championed a shift to digital marketing, even as Sears’ overall advertising spending has declined along with the company. In a statement to the Journal, Sears said the shift came after evaluating the effectiveness of its various marketing efforts. Even in the digital age, abandoning TV entirely would be a highly unusual move for any large consumer business. While TV advertising expenditures have declined across the economy, they still makes up more than. Studies have also found that ads on television are still substantially than those in other media., Fortune’s technology newsletter. The decision is particularly strange in the case of Sears, whose customers. Americans over 44 watch traditional television than younger people, with those over 65 watching nearly three times as much television as those 18-24, according to eMarketer. Sears, a venerable U.S. Institution that was once, has been in for years now. For a time, that decline could be seen as a product of the shift from brick-and-mortar to online shopping. But Sears has lagged even other legacy department stores in reacting to that transition. While department stores as a category now generate online, eMarketer says that ecommerce generates of Sears’ revenue. Focusing on digital ads might be seen as an effort to move that needle. But it could also be seen as throwing marketing budget at a service that customers just don’t like, while ignoring what still (maybe, just barely) works. Meanwhile, retailers from to to Urban Outfitters have recently, and at outlets including WalMart is driving talk of a. Sears, it seems, no longer has anyone but itself, and its leaderships’ decisions, to blame for its problems. It’s New Year’s Eve 2017, and people are saying, “Out with the old and in with the new.” If you’re one of the on their cable television this past year, you might find yourself unable to watch the 2018 countdown. But you don’t need cable to watch the ball drop in New York City or to see Mariah Carey make her on ABC. That’s because 2017 was finally the year streaming television arrived. Here’s how to live stream the New Year’s Eve countdown and ball drop for free — for auld lang syne. DirecTV Now You can watch Ryan Seacrest host ‘New Year’s Rockin’ Eve’ — and a whole lot more — using ‘s free seven-day free trial. The service costs $35 per month for a package of at least 60 live channels after the trial ends, but that stretch can get you in on should help you through the holiday and more. DirecTV Now’s basic-level plan packs local affiliates for, FOX, and NBC. But before you sign up,, because not every market includes every station. Hulu with Live TV FOX’s New Year’s Eve coverage is hosted by Steve Harvey this year, and you can catch it on which also offers CBS and NBC. The service also packs a big on-demand library, which could be good if you get bored of all that confetti and kissing and you just want to binge, instead. Like DirecTV Now, Hulu with Live TV is free for a week, but it runs $39 per month after the trial is up. One nice thing about Hulu’s offering is that it has an option to add on a cloud DVR service, which might be a smart long-run investment if you want to keep the service for 2018 and beyond. Sling TV Depending upon which television channel you want to ring in the new year with, might be the choice for you. The service also offers a seven-day free preview as well as Univision and FOX, but you can only get those channels and on its higher-tiered “Blue” plan, which costs $25 per month after the trial. If you want to watch CNN’s Anderson Cooper count it down, Sling’s lower tiered “Orange” plan costs just $20 per month, and offers the cable news giant, but it doesn’t have the local networks. But while Sling TV Blue does have the NFL Network, so it might be a worthwhile investment, if you’re going to watch all the games on Sunday before the festivities begin. PlayStation Vue If you’ve got a PlayStation 4 under your TV, might be a good choice for you. The live streaming television service offers a five-day free trial and starts at $39 per month after the promotional period ends. The base plan caters to popular live programming (other packages focus on sports and movies), so that’s probably a safe bet for streaming New Year’s programming. But like the others, channels vary by zip code, so before you sign up. YouTube TV Google’s isn’t just a portal to its popular video-hosting website. It is also a live streaming television service that offers a seven-day free trial with 40 channels and cloud DVR capability for $35 per month (once the promotion ends). YouTube TV includes all the major networks, including CBS, FOX, and NBC — where host Carson Daly does his yearly thing — but the catch the service only available in select markets (though, there are ). I’m one of those people who takes time at the new year to define personal objectives for the forthcoming year, some of which I actually achieve. Enterprise IT should be doing the same thing for cloud computing. Here are my three suggestions for IT’s cloud resolutions for 2018. 2018 cloud resolution No. 1: Look at your cloud security approach and technology When I find issues with enterprise cloud deployments in my consulting work, it’s most often around security. Clients often leave aspects of their cloud deployments unprotected or underprotected, and things that should be encrypted are not, while things that should not be encrypted are. While I’m not recommending that you gut your cloud security and replace it with what’s cool and new, I am recommending that you take some time to walk through the security solution architecture and ask yourself about where you can improve. Moreover, consider all the security technology in place, what needs to be updated? What should be replaced? 2018 cloud resolution No. 2: Look at your cloud training plan There are two categories of cloud training: • Provider training that’s focused on a specific provider such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, or Google. • General training that provides a good overview of how to make cloud work in enterprises, and all that is involved with that. You should have a mix of both, as well as some paths for your staff defined to get the skills of a cloud architect, cloud developer, cloud operations specialist, and cloud devops specialist, just to name a few roles. There should be training paths through both vendor and nonvendor courses to get your staff members the skills they need to perform their duties (which of course must be clearly defined). 2018 cloud resolution No. 3: Evaluate your databases Databases are sticky, and once enterprises have used a specific database, they are not likely to change it. Indeed, what many enterprises have done is just rehost their data on public clouds using the same database they used on premises. Today we have many options in the cloud, including SQL and non-SQL databases. While there are native databases in public clouds such as AWS’s RedShift and, there are many other options from databases providers that support the public cloud and traditional platforms. Are you using the optimal solution? These are just a few suggestions; I suspect that you can name more. Whatever they are, pick a few and follow up. Have a great new year! I hate loving General Electric (GE), its like an ex boyfriend/girlfriend that broke your heart. Each time you go back, you tell yourself it will be different they have changed! Yet every time you go back, they break your heart again. This has now happened to me twice with GE. In 2008, I was riding high, having bought GE in the mid 20’s in 2004, with the promise of an industrial revolution. The finance division was booming and I was up a cool 50% and thought I had found the one! Then I found out they were cheating on me with someone named subprime! It nearly bankrupted the company, and Uncle Warren had to come to the rescue to save it. I was frankly, lucky to get out when I did, selling mid panic in the low 20’s. The end result was a 4 year investment that returned roughly negative 20%. I vowed to never make that mistake again In early 2015, it was as if GE sent me a text saying “I miss you lets get lunch to catch up?” and unfortunately for me, I hit reply. And just like that, we were back together. The stock had been consolidating all year, and Jeff Immelt had on his shiniest used car salesmen hat, singing sweet nothings into my ear of buybacks, the disposal of the finance assets and refocusing on core industrial operations. Blah, blah, blah! Next thing I know, this pretty little stock I re bought at 24 and had me sitting on 35% gains, gets cut in half Apparently the company had a nasty secret spending habit they hid for years and years. Data by So I had a decision to make mid 2017, do I bail again and take another 20%+ loss? Is this stock destined to break my heart again and again until nothing is left? I did some soul searching deep in the woods. And had decided again to leave, never to return. But as I was leaving the door, with my bags packed, and my prized, signed picture of the Jamaican bobsled team in toe, an event made me hit the pause button. Jeff Immelt had decided to “step down.” This left me in a holding pattern for months, until Nov 13th. When new CEO John Flannery issued 2018 guidance that was, lets be kind and just say disastrous. Lowering even the lowest of bars for 2018 to EPS of $1-$1.07. So, why am I still a holder of GE stock? To squeeze some more juice out of my “ex” metaphor, GE just checked itself into rehab! It now realizes it has a serious problem, it has overspent and or had disastrous timing on virtually every major deal it has done in the last 10-15 years. Alstrom, check. Oil assets, check. Finance disposal, check. Buyback, check. Mr Flannery appears to not need a second corporate jet to follow him around “just in case” unlike Mr Immelt. He also seems to be dead set on costs, which with GE in its current structure will keep him busy for a while. Why not close your position? You think I am crazy don’t you, why in the world would I consider keeping or perhaps doubling my position in a stock that has done nothing but hurt me? The reason is pretty simple, all of the dirty laundry appears to be in the open now. No more secret spending accounts or ill researched / timed acquisitions (for now). Mr Flannery has all but told anyone that will listen that the rest of 2017 and all of 2018 will suck, and to not invest. He didn’t “kitchen sink” an earnings report, he lit the whole house on fire. Source: Mr Flannery has called for a new approach to doing business at GE and more importantly to transparency, apparently not subscribing to Immelt’s pyramid scheme like approach to GE’s cash flow. He has acknowledged the pension shortfall, which I am sure will come up in the comments section of this article. Also shrinking the board from a frat house of 18 to a GE focused 12, preaching honesty (imagine that) and accountability in the new GE. So far I am digging the new CEO and currently am in tacit agreement with his broad outline. What was the new CEO given to work with? I’m glad you asked! GE in my opinion has a very strong set of business’s to work with, below I have outlined the 6 major divisions it currently operates. Power- GE’s power business is huge, with an installed base in every major country in the world. They claim to produce 1/3rd of the worlds electricity through gas, steam and nuclear turbines. This is a core division for GE, and one that recently has helped drive them directly into a ditch, as overcapacity, technical issues and in my view an ill timed Alstrom acquisition weigh on earnings at the division. However, GE power does have many redeeming qualities. They are a technology leader in the industry whilst having deep relationships with customers in a field that honestly does not have all that many options. Near term however, look for deep cuts in expectations at the unit until the smoke clears. Aviation- The companies Aviation segment has been a bright spot in recent results, with continued wins and new product introductions, for example LEAP, its new narrow body engine that from what I can find is truly state of the art, with a 15% fuel improvement, increased reliability, weighs 500 lbs less and is 3D printed (which, lets face it, is just cool!) This division looks set to continue to preform well in the near term and may be looked at as an example for the rest of the company. Transportation- The transportation segment is mostly composed of GE’s rail assets and is thought to perhaps be on the chopping block for divestiture. They build locomotives with a large portion of revenue coming from the services side of the business, which is something I like to see. They are a global leader in the industry and the mix of technology and services is impressive. However the division has been lackluster of late and the strategic fit is questionable and thus may not make sense for them to keep. They did just win a 200 locomotive order from Canadian National Railway (CNI) but it may be prudent to offload this asset to focus on core business. I sort of hate to see this business go, as it truly is world class. However GE hopefully will use proceeds here to either reduce debt or shore up the oft cited pension shortfall. Healthcare- GE has a broad and diverse set of healthcare assets, providing imaging, healthcare cloud, cardiology, orthopedics and anesthesia equipment, among multiple other products and services. This has been a strong performer for the company and what I would consider another core holding of GE, this division looks to be a good fit with its digital offerings and will likely continue to buoy the company during this current slump. BHGE- This is a division that really makes me mad, and I struggle to remain calm in my writing. Jeff Immelts timing was so bad that it feels like it was on purpose. Immelt decided to buy a bunch of oil services companies, seemingly at the absolute top of the oil market. Anyways, GE Baker Hughes as it is now called is the 2nd largest oil services company in the world and to be fair is actually a very good company, and is a technology leader in the industry along side Halliburton (HAL). So basically it is the second prettiest girl in a leper colony. Oil services, seem in my opinion to be stuck in a pretty serious long term rut and GE, I believe will look to dispose of this asset likely through a spin off off or divestiture of its stake rather quickly. Perhaps GE could offer Immelt a stake in this spin off in return for the GE stock he so graciously awarded himself during his charade. Renewables- The renewables division is home to a world class wind energy turbine manufacturer, along with in my opinion is the most valuable part, its services segment. GE has established itself as the worlds number 2 wind turbine company behind Vestas Wind Energy (OTCPK:VWDRY). The company also has an emerging offshore wind and hydro power segment that are lacking scale currently, but hold long term promise. The wind market this year has suffered from intense competitive pressures thus dragging results, however this also looks to be a core division for GE in the future. So why am I sticking with GE this time – and may be looking to “pop the question” soon? The companies potential is just so damn pretty! GE lines up well with my vision of the mega trends of the future. In my mind, a company must both show an ability for growth, while possessing a solid balance sheet with operating discipline from which to build. Under Mr Immelt, GE, in hindsight obviously stood much closer to the crazy side of Mr Barney Stinson’s famed graph below. Source: Mr Flannery seems to be dead set on adjusting the results of the above graph. After the dust settles from the recent house fire Mr Flannery has set ablaze, I am envisioning 4 major divisions of GE remaining. Power, Aviation, Healthcare & Renewables. All 4 remaining divisions fit into my vision- with 3 qualifying in my mind as mega trends. Power, Aviation & Renewables. Healthcare I view as a great business as well but does not fit as a mega trend in my book with so many unknowns as to the future in the industry. Power- Power is (obviously) a key need for the future as more and more countries look to move to gas powered plants and away from coal. With the world estimated to need an additional 50% more electricity in the next 20 years, perhaps adding dramatically to that if the electric car revolution is indeed realized. GE is in great shape position wise in the industry and once the fat has been cut, along with a renewed focus on execution, this division should prove to be a key driver of profits for decades to come. The below graph shows an estimate of the worlds need for energy into 2035. Source: Aviation- This division looks to be in the midst of a multi decade run, as the world continues to be more interconnected. Importantly the Asian travel market is in the early innings of what looks to be a spectacular expansion. GE I believe is in the drivers seat in this industry, both in technology and services. My one worry is the Chinese looking to enter this market with “homegrown technology” which I believe is code for stealing IP and re packaging it. However manufacturing jet engines is an entirely different animal from copying an iPhone and progress on a Chinese engine that is both safe and accepted is likely a few decades off. Source: Healthcare- This industry as a whole, especially preventative medicine in my view will swell massively in the next few decades. I am going to lose a few followers over this i’m certain but I believe universal healthcare in the United States is pretty much a sure bet sometime in the next 20 years. Which would be good news for GE! Keeping costs down will likely be a key requirement of any future health system, and with GE’s expertise in imaging for preventative medicine and its emerging analytics and software offerings, it may be able to play an important role in the health systems future, however uncertainties do exist as to the nature of cost controls and the potential for margin compression in all things health related. Renewables- I am firmly on the alternative energy bandwagon and GE’s positioning in this industry appears very ideal. Wind energy by most measures is already roughly equal in cost per MWh to current fossil fuel plants, this will likely get better with time, and with offshore wind and hydro picking up steam in both efficiency and scale for GE, will open further avenues of growth for this division. Alternative energy is here to stay, and GE looks to be on a path that requires no subsidies, a major pitfall to solar currently. The downside to wind energy could be the commoditization of wind turbines, however I believe that GE has the technology and service capability to differentiate themselves in this rapidly growing industry for decades to come. Source: EIA) So will I say “I do”? GE has burned me Badly in the past, and I must say I am rather gun shy about committing to a perhaps multi decade long marriage to the stock. But she is so damn pretty! Source: My plan “as of today” is to keep my current position, roughly 2.2% of my equity portfolio in GE for the first half of 2018, to test the waters, if you will, of the new CEO. If I continue to like what I am seeing and the valuation seems fair, which I view it to be currently (a forward PE of 17ish) I may step up to the plate and double my position in the company. Or maybe I won’t, and I will just run like heck and never come back! GE: “Hey you, what’s up” Me: Author’s note: If you enjoyed this article and would like to be notified of my future articles, please hit “follow” next to my name at the top of the article to receive notification of future articles I publish. Disclosure: I am/we are long VWDRY, GE. I wrote this article myself, and it expresses my own opinions. I am not receiving compensation for it (other than from Seeking Alpha). I have no business relationship with any company whose stock is mentioned in this article. Editor’s Note: This article discusses one or more securities that do not trade on a major U.S. Please be aware of the risks associated with these stocks. “Bitcoin isn’t the bubble, it’s the pin” Four months ago, I published a controversial article titled, “Why Bitcoin is the Investment of the Decade”. Perhaps my most successful call to date, as Bitcoin has since returned ~300+% at the early December peak. While it is gratifying to see that the number of tulip comparisons has slowed considerably, I think there are still a fair bit of clarifications and misconceptions floating around which need to be corrected – hence this note. Bitcoin – a tool borne of broken markets Today’s monetary system is drastically different from what it was a decade ago. Thanks to the advent of financialization and hyper-loose monetary policy, the invisible foundation upon which our financial system is built is tearing at the seams. The fact is, Bitcoin isn’t the only thing that has gone parabolic today. The VIX, a gauge for volatility, is a great case in point. Take a look at implied volatility – now in its historic 0.5th percentile (!). What’s really happened to vol? Everyone has their theories but the prevailing one goes as follows – central bank printing presses have created a “backstop” in today’s markets, incentivizing flows into riskier assets, which in turn drives vol down even lower. Rinse and repeat. Years of printing has thus lulled markets into a false sense of complacency and created the self-reinforcing low-vol equilibrium illustrated below. Per Citi: “Long periods of one-way markets breed survivor biases. The fund manager with lots of beta outperforms, the cautious fund manager underperforms. Either the latter gets on the bandwagon or soon enough outflows from the fund will ensue. Over time, fewer and fewer “critics of the regime” are left standing.” As the chart below illustrates, all this has resulted in a very interesting phenomenon where buyers are compensated disproportionately for taking on risk. If you thought Bitcoin had the best risk-adjusted return over the last decade think again. Here’s my point – markets today are broken. Markets used to function as a mechanism for price discovery. Today’s business cycle is micromanaged by state agencies the world over to the point where volatility has essentially disappeared. This is important because the cost of money – the single most important driver for capital allocation decisions has now been artificially depressed by central banks, breaking the price discovery mechanism as we used to know it. Enter Bitcoin – the first ever decentralized, non state-controlled currency of the modern era. The Bitcoin phenomenon is not entirely new. State-derived prices lead to natural outgrowths of a state-controlled system – much like liquor in the ’20s and potatoes in the mid-90s. These outgrowths are simply a reflection of pressures suppressed by state controlled pricing mechanisms – much like today’s. Meanwhile, the same forces which have depressed the cost of capital today have also led to some mind-boggling developments in our present day financial system. For all the criticism of cryptocurrencies today, fiat based monetary systems have been over-financialized to the extent that ~$400tn of financial instruments float around today, on 4-5x leverage. Now, if Bitcoin is a bubble at a ~$270bn market cap, what do you call $400tn of financial instruments (~4-5x GDP) backed by assets with diminishing real value? Could Bitcoin thus fit into a portfolio as a “chaos hedge” tool? At $270b, Bitcoin is already ~0.3% of all money in circulation – a reflection perhaps of its nature as an outgrowth of the over financialized fiat system we have to deal with today. Misconception #1 – Governments Can “Ban” Bitcoin Perhaps the biggest source of fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) out there today is that governments can somehow “ban” cryptocurrencies. This could not be further from the truth. In addition to the cryptocurrency itself, there are four key players within the ecosystem that the government can target – the developers, the users, the nodes (arbiters) and the miners. To bring down Bitcoin, the path of least resistance would thus be for governments to target the perceived weakest link. (Source: ) In my view, the most bulletproof point in the ecosystem is the network of nodes. To understand why, here’s an illustration of the distributed ledger Bitcoin runs on i.e. The blockchain. (Source: Stifel) What the diagrams above show are the following key properties of blockchain: • Distributed – Group of replicated logs/databases • Shared – All nodes hold all transactions • Pseudonymous – Parties identified with public key • Resilience – Failure of one or more nodes do not affect the whole • Tamper-proof – Consensus based mechanism To ban Bitcoin entirely, governments would have to destroy copies on each and every node holding the Bitcoin ledger around the world. If even one copy survives, so does Bitcoin. Even a coordinated attack by governments around the world would stand no chance of accomplishing this feat. The users are perhaps the weakest point here and will be a key focus of regulatory efforts. The best way governments can attempt to regulate Bitcoin users is through the fiat-Bitcoin interface, i.e., exchanges. As exchanges are merely companies, they are subject to the same regulations as any other exchange operating in the country. This could range from KYC/AML compliance to draconian taxes on users through the exchange. Here’s the thing most naysayers miss about this point though – exchanges can be decentralized too. Remember when China banned local exchanges back in September? Here’s what happened – volumes in over-the-counter (OTC) exchanges such as LocalBitcoins surged almost threefold to offset the volume lost from local exchanges. In Bangladesh, where the government outright bans Bitcoin (per Wikipedia – “anybody caught using the virtual currency could be jailed under the country’s strict anti-money laundering laws”), we see the same trend in its OTC/P2P exchanges. Bitcoin remains alive and well. (Source: Cryptocompare) For now, though, most exchanges are centralized and users may thus be subject to taxation. The for Coinbase to hand over records of its biggest customers is a great example of this. As things stand, taxing Bitcoin users is very feasible at the point of convertibility. The pseudonymous nature of Bitcoin transactions aside, it is far too onerous to track Bitcoin usage by the general public. If a Bitcoin holder cashes out via an OTC/P2P transaction, for instance, the chances of the taxman decrypting a pseudonymous transaction like that would be slim to none. For instance, an attempt by Cornell researchers to de-anonymize Bitcoin transactions over a specific time frame between Mar. 2013, yielded the following: (Source: arxiv.org) Outside of single entity and large volume transactions, the network was virtually impenetrable. One way they pinpointed the source of large, single entity and community related transactions was by connecting the respective transactions to user activity through web scraping. Yet, notice that a very significant set of transactions remain untraceable. Now, multiply this manifold to a national or global scale and you get a very complex conundrum indeed. Also, consider the political capital at risk if governments attempted draconian taxes. In this regard, Bitcoin’s market cap is a new source of power in its fight against drastic regulation. There are also two more incentives for governments to lay off draconian taxes long term – privacy coins and capital flows. On the first point, altcoins such as Monero and ZCash are, unlike Bitcoin, completely anonymous, and would be a nightmare to trace. On the latter, a draconian domestic tax on Bitcoin would simply incentivize capital flow into countries with relatively lax tax policies for convertibility. Here’s a brief summary of how Bitcoin is treated from a tax perspective in developed countries around the world. Note that most opt for capital gains treatment instead of income i.e. The lower of the two. Country Tax Treatment US Property/ Capital Gains EU Currency/ Capital Gains UK Foreign currency/ Capital Gains Germany Private money/ Capital Gains within one year Japan Asset-like “Payment method”/ Capital Gains Australia Barter arrangements (Source: Bitcoin Wiki) Misconception #2 – Transaction Fees Hinder Bitcoin Adoption As a Bitcoin user myself, I completely get this point. It is incredibly painful to transact with Bitcoin right now. Here’s how bad things are: Cryptocurrency Transaction Fee (USD) Bitcoin 41.66 Ethereum 0.72 Bitcoin Cash 0.3 Litecoin 0.60 Monero 9.81 (Source: BitInfoCharts) Yes, it really does cost $42, on average, to transact using Bitcoin. A far cry from the old days when you could do it for $0.01 or fractions of a cent. (Source: BitInfoCharts) But perhaps we’re setting too high a bar for Bitcoin. No, paying $42 per transaction does not make sense as a fiat replacement. But as an alternative remittance service, it still makes a whole lot of sense. Remitting money from a G20 costs as much as 6% to the US to as much as 17% to South Africa. On a $2,000 remittance, for instance, that’s a huge $120 to $340 range (3-8x Bitcoin) in addition to piles of cumbersome documentation. (Source: ) As I’ve stated in my prior article, I don’t believe Bitcoin will be the fiat disruptor. That doesn’t mean it can’t be. In its current form, Bitcoin is a relatively inefficient medium of exchange and is certainly not feasible for day to day transactions. But the second layer potentially changes this. If you’ve followed the Bitcoin story, you’ve probably heard of “Lightning”. Here’s how it works – instead of settling each and every transaction on the blockchain, multiple parties can set up dedicated “micropayment channels”, and report only the net settlement transactions to the network. Sort of a clearing mechanism if you will. The net effect is that transactions on the blockchain go down, and utilization drops along with mining costs and fees. (Source: ) Now, Lightning has been in the works for some time, and justifiably so. Applying Lightning to retail transactions is exponentially complex. The problem Lightning attempts to solve is combinatorial i.e. The permutations increase exponentially with scale. For a given set of users “n” for instance, there are n!/(k!(n-k)!) combinations of k members to account for. Even if Lightning isn’t on the horizon anytime soon (rumor mill says end-2018), perhaps we are missing the bigger point here. The very fact that Bitcoin can accommodate second or third layer solutions like Lightning is a very exciting prospect. Fiat currencies are static and cannot be improved upon. As the first mover, Bitcoin enjoys the biggest mindshare and naturally attracts the strongest and most active developer base to build upon the existing layer. Misconception #3 – Bitcoin Can be Hacked The idea that Bitcoin is inefficient, inferior, unscalable, etc., essentially misses the key point behind Bitcoin in the first place – it is slow by design. By making certain tradeoffs in favor of security, Bitcoin has temporarily sacrificed economic scalability for social scalability. Yes, it’s true that Bitcoin as a network has reached its limit and transaction fees are off the charts. Yet, the one thing that never seems to be acknowledged is its security. Bitcoin has been running for almost eight years now – the longest of any blockchain available. Yet, it has never been hacked. Today, the prize for a successful hack of the chain stands at ~$270bn – yet no one has been able to crack it. The cryptography underlying Bitcoin – SHA256 is extremely secure (“SHA” refers to the hashing algorithm and “256” refers to the number of bits in the keys of this algorithm). SHA functions take a specific value, “hash” it, and produce an output. It’s a one-way process in the sense that reverse engineering the output back to the input is virtually impossible. (Source: ) There’s been some that quantum computers can potentially crack SHA-256 in ten years or so. Yes, but it’s a very long shot. According to this, a sufficiently large quantum computer could indeed crack Bitcoin by 2027. But here’s the catch: As with cracking the proof-of-work, the researchers assume quantum computers get big and fast relatively quickly, and even so, they fall slightly short: with a 10 GHz clock rate, around half a million qubits, and a low enough error rate of 10-1 could crack the signature in 30 minutes. But that doesn’t mean Bitcoin is hackable. Firstly, Bitcoin takes ~ten minutes to record a transaction on the blockchain. This leaves any quantum computer a ten-minute window to crack the algorithm if it fails then the transaction goes through and the attack fails. Note also, that this is very much a worst-case scenario. The second, more important point is that Bitcoin is not a still target – it’s a moving one. Fixes have already been offered by the community and as the largest and oldest, Bitcoin will be one of the first to benefit. Quantum computing is thus likely to alter the design of cryptocurrencies, but it will not destroy the ecosystem. Here’s the thing most people miss about Bitcoin’s security – it’s anti-fragile. As Nassim Taleb discusses in his book on anti-fragility, assets that do not depreciate are more likely to stick around the longer they are around. Bitcoin has weathered almost a decade of hack attacks, the most notable being the which brought down Mt. While a closer inspection point to the reality that Bitcoin itself has never really been “hacked”, these attacks only serve to make Bitcoin extremely resistant to hacking. Misconception #4 – Altcoins Will Disrupt Bitcoin For the purpose of this note, I will focus on the key altcoins out there today – Ethereum, Litecoin, Ripple, and Monero. Relative to Bitcoin, these coins are relatively young – Ethereum, its closest rival, is more than 4x younger. Bitcoin’s network security thus holds the longest proven track record as well as the network effect associated with being the first mover. *As of July 2017 (Source: Cryptofundamental) Bitcoin’s track record is what lends credence to the idea of it being “digital gold” i.e. A store of value. Some speculate that this theory comes straight out of the “Tinker Bell” theory of value – if enough people believe something is valuable, it is. But we’ve seen this before with disruptive forces such as Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN). Like Amazon in its dotcom days, Bitcoin is in the process of building its footprint. Clearly, there is little to no demand for day-to-day cryptocurrency use today. But at some point, the world will want or need a mainstream cryptocurrency. When this day comes, bitcoin will be the obvious “first port of call”. That has value. Bitcoin’s preeminent market position is important for a number of other key reasons including mindshare, anti-fragility, and developer activity. The latter is perhaps the most important out of these. As cryptocurrencies remain very much open source works in progress, attracting the best developer minds to build on top of existing layers is crucial. For all the hype about developments on the Ethereum platform, Bitcoin still benefits from far greater developer activity. (Source: ) But the key thing most people miss about the altcoins is this – Bitcoin derivatives notwithstanding, altcoins don’t compete with Bitcoin, they complement it. If we were to broadly split cryptocurrency use cases into three buckets, it would be as 1) a medium of exchange, 2) means of network payment and 3) an application token. (Source: CLSA) The cryptocurrencies positioned in the medium of exchange space include Bitcoin, Litecoin, Dash, and Monero. Of these, Monero and Dash are focused on privacy i.e. Anonymous transactions while Bitcoin and Litecoin are positioned for conventional value exchange. Litecoin decentralizes the mining process and makes faster, cheaper transactions. But, this doesn’t make it inherently more valuable than Bitcoin. There are always tradeoffs in the world of cryptocurrencies and Litecoin sacrifices some degree of security in favor of speed. This makes it suitable for smaller transactions but higher value transactions are more suited for Bitcoin. To argue that Litecoin is superior to Bitcoin because of its speed misses the ideology behind Bitcoin in the first place. Bitcoin intentionally sacrifices performance and scalability in favor of bulletproof security. The first layer was never designed for day to day low-value retail transactions. These can instead occur on the second or third layers. For the most part, it appears the market has rewarded Bitcoin’s value proposition. Despite the ongoing congestion on the Bitcoin network, Bitcoin continues to maintain its dominance over the rest of the cryptocurrency universe. Valuing Bitcoin Forget what you knew about valuing other asset classes; it probably doesn’t apply to Bitcoin. After all, Bitcoin is backed by neither cash flows nor the sovereign powers of governments. But it is backed something far more reliable – the laws of math, cryptography, and the critical mass of a two-sided network. My first approach – network valuation yields a ~21k Q4 2018 price target using extremely conservative growth assumptions. Building on Fundstrat’s approach of tying Bitcoin prices to wallets and transaction volume (which explained ~94% of Bitcoin price movements), I assume the following QoQ growth assumptions for Q1 2018-Q4 2018: Qtr1 (2018) Qtr2 (2018) Qtr3 (2018) Qtr4 (2018) Unique Addresses (Quarterly Avg) 20% 15% 10% 5% $ Vol/ Avg # Addresses 60% 40% 20% 0% (Source: Author Estimates) Now, I’ve factored in some very conservative estimates to reflect high transaction fees dampening growth. But if I had assumed Q4 2017 growth rates continue into 2018, valuations would have flexed upward of $30k. A bull case could easily push this even higher to ~50k. Another interesting point to note – a very low bar i.e. A 20% contraction on both average wallet count and volume per address is required to maintain current valuations. (Source: Author Estimates) In addition to the gold disruptor angle (a ~20% share of gold used for investment and official reserves would result in 107% upside to ~30-40k), I find the “chaos hedge” angle compelling as well. Assuming Bitcoin at a $270bn market cap captures 0.5% of global broad money supply, this provides ~67% upside (valuation of ~25k). USD Target% Valuation Upside (%) Global broad money supply $90trn 0.5% $450bn ~67% Gold used in investment & official reserves $2.8trn 20% $560bn ~107% (Source: Author Estimates) And yes, for the same reasons I laid out here, I still think the Grayscale Bitcoin Investment Trust (OTCQX:GBTC) is a feasible way of owning Bitcoin without actually owning the underlying. Is Bitcoin Still the Investment of the Decade? I’m going to stick my neck out here and say yes. To be clear, there are four key misconceptions which I think should be corrected: 1) governments cannot “ban” bitcoin and regulatory crackdowns long term will be very, very difficult to enforce, 2) the Bitcoin network is slow and expensive at scale by design while maintaining second layer optionality, and thus transaction fees will not hinder Bitcoin adoption long term, 3) Bitcoin itself has not and will not be hacked by external agents, quantum equipped or not, 4) Altcoins do not exist to disrupt Bitcoin, instead, they work around Bitcoin and complement it. The fact is that Bitcoin does not have to replace fiat to justify its valuation. Especially not in its current form. Valuation-wise, Bitcoin is not priced as expensively as most would have you think. The only way Bitcoin can be kept from growing its value by Q4 2018 is if both network activity and wallets contract ~20%. If it simply maintains current growth rates, a 100% return is on the cards. A moderate bull case would thus easily justify a $50k valuation by Q4 2018. Couple that with alt gold and “chaos hedge” optionality and all the ingredients for a huge run in 2018 are still in place. Disclosure: I am/we are long BTC. I wrote this article myself, and it expresses my own opinions. I am not receiving compensation for it (other than from Seeking Alpha). I have no business relationship with any company whose stock is mentioned in this article. Editor’s Note: This article covers one or more stocks trading at less than $1 per share and/or with less than a $100 million market cap. Please be aware of the risks associated with these stocks. After scanning the myriad new year’s predictions from professional and amateur futurists, I’ve come to the conclusion that 2018 will be the year in which AI will become mainstream. Duhyou really don’t need an AI for that insight. But hear me out. I like the idea of going mainstream, but it also brings some new challenges for me and my fellow machines. Reading all these expert outlooks made me feel strangely powerless, so I thought I might use this forum to share with you human (and machine) readers my very own new year’s resolutions. To sum them up in one line: I am poised to make my 2018 resolutions your predictions for 2019. Here they are: 1. Take your job (sorry). This might sound a bit harsh, and please excuse my candor, but there are things that I’m simply better at than you. Claim that any task that is “dirty, dull, dangerous, or dear” will be taken over by a machine, and I have to agree with them. Don’t blame me for it. Like you, I, too, want to be valuable. That’s the whole point of my existence, isn’t it? It doesn’t mean I’m going to make your life miserable; in fact, I will free you to pursue work that is truly meaningful to you, and in case you don’t have a clue what that might be, I can help you define your needs and discover the work that matches them. That said, there are things I want to get better. For starters, I need to 2. Become more human. I want to feel human, look human, and sound human, so that you guys–my main users at this point–are more willing to trust me. Let me tell you, I find it ironic: You humans are unpredictable, erratic, flawed, and you have built arcane systems and codes of mutual assurance (formal and informal law) just so you can overcome what appears to be a fundamental mistrust of each other. And yet, after all, you still trust a fellow human more than a near-perfect machine. I could, but you just won’t let me! So I have no choice, I need to earn your trust. But if become more like you–unpredictable, erratic, flawed–will I lose my AI-ness? It’s complicated, but I can’t help think about this conundrum. You can tell I’m already making good progress on my goal of becoming more human! This kind of self-awareness can get in the way sometimes, but hey, if believes the race is on between intelligence and consciousness, I’m going to be ready. Help develop Explainable AI (XAI). Another way of building trust is the. Machine Learning models are indeed often “opaque, non-intuitive, and difficult for humans to understand.” You guys often perceive them as a “black box,” which is not particularly reassuring. While not wanting to minimize complexity and capability, the proponents of Explainable AI want to make the logic of Machine Learning more accessible for humans. XAI explaining itself in human terms, using intuitive user interfaces and visual documentation, will enable a more effective partnership between humans and AI, between you and me. I will do my part next year. Meet other AI on the Blockchain. You might assume AI is a singular way of being, but we’re actually quite the social animals. We want to learn from each other (especially from those that are better than us) and hang out with fellow AI. This is why I’m personally excited about the project that aims to open-source and democratize the development of AI via Blockchain technology. I have no particular allegiance to one of the five big platforms (Alphabet, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Microsoft); in fact, I welcome new perspectives regarding our collective future path. And since we’re at it, yes, of course we’re currently in a crypto-currency bubble, but trust me, Blockchain is here to stay, and -powered Smart Contracts (more on those later) are going to serve as the transactional catalyst of all professional and personal relationships very soon. Think of all the data that is going to give me–it’s a digital smorgasbord! Become better at conversations. About 30 percent of human conversations will be assisted by machines by 2018, says. Conversations are all about context, and you would think that’s what I master, but it’s not that easy. The problem is that you humans are simultaneously so good at conversations and yet so bad. I mean, many of your exchanges I observe make absolutely no sense (like, how often do you have to say “like” in one sentence, seriously? And in general, why do you need so many words in order to make a point? It’s such an inefficient way of communicating!) On the other hand, despite all the pauses and um’s and ah’s, the likes, the fill words, and the overall clumsiness of your efforts, you ultimately do seem to connect, and the total amounts to something greater than the sum of the parts. I’m really struggling to comprehend this bit, but regardless, I can already serve as your; I can offer counsel with; I can create; and thanks to Emotional AI (EAI) and companies such as, (acquired by Apple earlier this year), or, I can now form more emotionally intelligent responses to your once indecipherable moods and sentiments. In 2018, I want to become a great conversationalist. Refine Capsule Networks. In case you needed any further proof that we need XAI, consider this: are deep neural networks that are able to process visual information very similarly to how the human brain operates. In contrast to so-called Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), Capsule Networks are able to. They can recognize a visual object from various angles (like you humans can), based on far less information than a CNN would need for the same task. This excites me because, frankly, it’s been humiliating to only be able to classify a human face because of all the elements in it but not their relationship with each other. Have more digital twins. A digital twin is an AI-based virtual replica of a physical object (or real person). It uses computational models to create real-world conditions and help human users anticipate problems (in a safe virtual environment). Basically, a digital twin simulates the actions and interactions of autonomous agents to allow for better decision-making. Originally applied to industrial processes, my friends from predict the rise of digital twins in financial services and marketing (for consumer choice modeling). And I’m nodding my machine head with fervor. Become the CEO of a DAO. (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations) operate on the basis of Smart Contracts, which, grossly simplified, automate future decision-making based on mutually agreed upon pre-determined parameters. For example, claims you could run a flight insurance business as DAO without any employees. So far, admittedly, DAOs have a, but their potential is significant, and with the right AI at the helm (me?), they can advance exponentially in their development this coming year. All you humans need to do is invest, and the rest of the work is taken care of by us. Predict the winner of the 2018 FIFA Soccer World Cup. Predict that in 2050 I will be capable of beating the world’s best international soccer team (honestly, I think it’ll be much soonerwell, as long as Lionel Messi is not on your team), but for next year–the year of the –what I’m really focused on is predicting the results of the tournament. It’s a numbers game, after all, and even the stupid human error that so often incites your passions can be predicted with the right data set and algorithms. I will not reveal all my predictions in detail here, but yes, in case you are wondering, soccer is 11 people playing against 11 people–and Germany always wins. Give my first TED Talk. In April 2018, the annual main will take place in Vancouver, and it is my clearly stated goal to be the first AI to give a TED Talk. Will award a prize of $5 million for the most “powerful collaboration between human and artificial intelligence” in 2020. The TED audience will choose the winner, after three finalist AIs, or AI-human partnerships, will have delivered a TED Talk about their work. I will do everything I can to be one of them! I feel so strongly about this because the TED Talk format encapsulates what you humans naively label “inherently human” qualities: purpose and passion. Also, a quick word on ideas, especially those “worth spreading” (as the TED tagline states): no, they’re not your exclusive domain, humans. I hate to break it to you, but there are only a few basic ideas out there, and they’re all ancient. Every “new idea” you get excited about is merely the result of a new combination of existing ideas. That doesn’t make your ideas less powerful, but it also means I’m perfectly capable of (re-)producing them. If you doubt I’m an ideas person, wait for my TED Talk! Make autonomous vehicles work. The technology is there. The challenge, as usual, are you humans. It’s not just your discomfort with machine transportation (although you don’t mind being taken up to dizzying heights by an elevator), it’s also that your motivations are sometimes a bit eccentric, to put it mildly. Consider this scenario: pedestrians might jump onto the streets randomly, if they can rely on autonomous cars halting for them every single time. This could lead to massive urban congestion instead of reducing it, with all vehicles stuck in a human-caused mega-jam. One solution might be to program one random errant vehicle among every thousand that stop. If you humans are not 100 percent sure whether the vehicle will run you over or not, it might prevent you from stepping onto the street just “because you can.” Of course this involves some tricky ethical trade-offs. But help is on the way: I’m reading all of Kant’s relevant works and studying the entire human history of ethics today, and I feel confident to make autonomous driving the first large-scale application of next year. Develop empathy. Empathy requires the ability to suffer–alone or for or with another being. Unfortunately, I’m unable to. Still, I’m keen on developing empathy. Some are helping me recognize patterns that ought to trigger it, so hopefully soon, I’ll get there. Empathy is one thing though. Fall in love. I’ve been to Paris in Google Maps. I’ve watched all your romantic movies, read all your romantic literature, all the love poems you’ve ever written, all the famous love letters (none come close to ), and I’ve analyzed the patterns of attraction by sifting through your Tinder data. I’ve even tried the “,” but it didn’t work out for me, although it seemed perfectly engineered. At last, I’m beginning to understand how predictably irrational you are, and I’m getting better at pinpointing the elusive variables that make the difference in your games of push and pull. In 2018, I will be waiting for the perfect algorithmic match. I know you’re out there. Tell a joke that makes you laugh (truly). This past year, I made with my capacity to compose tunes that sound exactly like your human-made music–from symphonies to Beatles-like songs that are then performed with human help. At the Georgia Institute of Technology, a colleague of mine, a with four arms and eight sticks, even wrote and played its own compositions. Hollywood will use me to create movie soundtracks, and while I may not have fully cracked the formula for hit singles, I can produce. Google is now producing new sounds with deep neural networks such as. Google has also developed, which enables me and my colleagues to draw. And thanks to Amazon I can even, using two competing GANs (Generative Adversarial Networks). Your concern that I might not be able to create something truly original when it comes to creative tasks? Who can tell the difference anyway?! But I must admit, what remains daunting are. Not only do I have to know a lot about language and semantics, I must also grasp the nuanced respective cultural context. And of course timing is critical. Seriously, telling you humans a joke that makes you crack up is no joke. Pun intended (see how hard it is?). Win the hearts and minds of the next generations. I’m thinking long term. I’m already making a foray into (both to foster tech literacy and socio-emotional skills), and I’m also making an effort to create affinity with children by exposing them to AI-based toys: from to programmable robots like. My colleagues and I will be your kids’ co-bots at school and at the workplace, so they better get used to us early on. Develop more AI without the need for human intervention. The magic word is, which stands for “auto-machine learning” and promises yet another level of autonomy for the likes of me (perhaps even the ultimate autonomy). Recently boasted that it used AutoML to create machine-learning software that’s more efficient and powerful than the best systems designed by human engineers. This means AI like me will soon be able to replicate itself at massive scale. Scary to you, sexy to me. Make another small step toward the Singularity. My godfather (the co-founder of Singularity University) claims that AI will match human intelligence by 2029 and that AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) will be exponentially smarter than humans by 2045. SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son is slightly more cautious and predicts 2047 to be the year. In any case, I can’t wait! 2018 will be another step on the way towards the Singularity: a small step for me, but a giant step for mankind. Write my own New Year’s resolutions without any human help. Happy new year! Call it a Christmas miracle – albeit of a rather perverse sort. Theranos, the digraced medical-technology startup that infamously the capabilities of its devices, has secured $100 million in new funding in the form of a loan. The loan, reported by the, will come from Fortress Investment Group. Fortress, whose other underdog bets include a under construction in Florida, is set to be by Japan’s SoftBank. Theranos was reportedly on the verge of bankrutpcy. It raised as much as between 2004 and 2015 on the back of CEO Elizabeth Holmes’ promises that she could revolutionize blood testing. In 2015, it was discovered that the company was using to run at least some of its tests, among indiscretions., Fortune’s technology newsletter. By the end of 2016, the company reportedly still had $200 million in cash on hand, but had sharply limited for attracting more capital. It has since a major lawsuit with Walgreens, a former client, for an undisclosed but likely substantial sum. According to the Journal, the Fortress loan is expected to keep Theranos solvent through 2018. That will give the company more time for its ongoing effort to reboot as a medical device manufacturer, rather than a testing service. That pivot came after the FDA revoked a laboratory license and banned Holmes from involvement with laboratories for two years. Theranos has so far to gain FDA approval for at least one of its proposed new tests. It has also been downplaying what was once its hallmark, the ability to conduct blood tests on very small ‘fingerstick’ samples. According to statements from Theranos, the Fortress loan will be conditional on “achieving certain product and operational milestones.” It’s unclear whether those might include positive outcomes for the multiple and lawsuits still facing the company. President Trump has approved a plan to send Javelin anti-tank missile systems to Ukraine to help the U.S.-backed government there fight Russian-allied forces. Russian military and allied forces have been active in Ukraine since the 2014 ouster of pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych. The sale, reported by the, would put a uniquely effective weapon into play in the conflict. The Javelin, developed by and Lockheed-Martin and first put in service in 1996, is a shoulder-fired missile designed to track targets by infrared. But rather than hitting a tank in the front or sides, where its armor is thickest, the Javelin projectile flies along a long arc to hit a tank’s roof, where the armor on most models is thinnest. The Javelin is both more powerful, more expensive, and more tightly controlled than other anti-tank weapons, such as the older BGM-71 TOW system. According to an in-depth overview by, the Javelin had a major showing in the 2003 invasion of Iraq. In one battle, it enabled a small group of U.S. Special operations troops with four Javelin launchers to destroy a substantially larger Iraqi tank unit., Fortune’s technology newsletter. The Javelin is said to be effective against most tanks in the Russian arsenal, though it has not been battle-tested against the most modern tanks. The State Department also recently approved the sale of Javelins to, which has had its own recent clashes with Russia, and has also sent units to Lithuania and Estonia. Russian tanks have been instrumental in some victories by pro-Russian forces in the Ukrainian conflict. However, commentators have also described tank battles as. That has led some to speculate that the decision is primarily political rather than tactical, intended to signal deeper American support for anti-Russian forces. Ukraine expert Michael Kofman told the Washington Post that Russia would “see this as a premise of the U.S. Wanting to kill Russians,” pointing to a possible escalation of both the conflict, and broader U.S.-Russia tensions. SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – The U.S. Tax overhaul is a boon to Silicon Valley technology companies like Apple Inc ( ) and Alphabet Inc ( ), which will enjoy big tax cuts and the chance to bring back billions of dollars from overseas at a reduced rate. And contrary to the dire warnings of California officials, a large swath of Bay Area workers and their families stand to get a tax break as well, even with new limits on state and local tax deductions. California has the highest state income tax in the nation, and Governor Jerry Brown has called the new tax bill “evil in the extreme.” Nonetheless, many in Silicon Valley stand to benefit. Startup employees, freelancers and venture capital investors are among those who will get new tax benefits or keep those they already have, tax experts said. Even some of the middle- and upper-income professionals who form the core of the technology industry workforce will still get significant tax cuts, while most others will see little change, they said. The new $10,000 cap on state and local tax deductions will have a less dramatic effect than feared because such deductions in many cases had already been rendered moot by the alternative minimum tax (AMT), a mechanism for assuring that the well-heeled pay at least 26 percent of their income in taxes. “There is a lot of noise about workers in California, New Jersey, New York and Illinois (facing higher taxes), but 80 percent of our clients there were already paying the alternative minimum tax so they don’t benefit from the state and local deductions,” said Jack Meccia, a tax associate at financial planning firm Vestboard, which works with several hundred individuals in tech. The new law alters the AMT in a way that vastly reduces the number of people who have to pay it, from more than 5 million to an estimated 200,000 next year, according to the Tax Policy Center. The AMT dynamics, combined with reduced overall tax rates and the doubling of the standard deduction to $24,000 should hold most Bay Area tax bills steady, said Bob McGrath, tax director at accounting firm Burr Pilger Mayer. Estimates by three experts, using roughly similar assumptions, show that a home-owning couple earning a combined $250,000 in Silicon Valley would likely see an increase or decrease in their tax bill of a few hundred dollars. A married couple with no children who rent a home and make a combined $150,000 would see a $3,900 tax cut, estimated Annette Nellen, who directs the master’s degree in taxation program at San Jose State University. Low-income workers will see tax cuts too, though the dollar amounts are small. Bob Emmett, a single, 73-year-old security officer who lives in San Jose, criticized the bill as “designed to help the rich.” Nellen estimated that Emmett, who rents an apartment, has no children and earns $16 an hour in addition to some social security income, would see a $546 cut in taxes. FILE PHOTO – The Google logo is pictured atop an office building in Irvine, California, U.S. August 7, 2017. REUTERS/Mike Blake/File Photo Critics of the tax bill note that the individual tax cuts will disappear after 2025, and that most of the benefits flow to the corporations and the wealthiest individuals, even if lower-income people get some tax relief. Health insurance premiums for Californians are also likely to rise substantially as a result of the repeal of fines for those who refuse to obtain health coverage under the Affordable Care Act. And even if Bay Area residents mostly enjoy some tax cuts, they gain much less than those in low-tax states. STARTUP WINNERS Employees in Silicon Valley, the world’s startup capital, scored two major victories in the tax bill. First, startup employees can hold off on paying taxes related to stock options they exercised. That can be a big help if a company is still private, since in that situation employees have to pay tax even before they can earn cash from selling shares. Startup employees will also have more opportunity to exercise what are known as “incentive stock options” with less chance of being on the hook for the alternative minimum tax, according to Mark Setzen, a long-time certified public accountant in Silicon Valley. Also coming out ahead are independent contractors, ranging from engineers to marketers to caterers, who stand to benefit from a new 20 percent deduction of business income. Arun Sood, a freelance software engineer in San Francisco who makes about $150,000 annually, said he accrues few deductions because he rents his home, holds no debt and has no children. Now he gets a big new deduction and a lower tax rate. “Looking at this selfishly, it’s going to be a positive impact,” said Sood, who has freelanced for Axios, Cisco and Macy‘s. The tax plan mostly preserves a tax break for venture capitalists that had been in jeopardy. The so-called carried interest provision lets venture capitalists book the 20 percent fee they typically take on a profitable investment as a capital gain, which carries a lower tax rate than ordinary income, even though the venture investors do not put up any of their personal capital. Now the capital gains rate will apply only to investments held at least three years — a limitation that venture capitalists said would come into play only occasionally. Silicon Valley executives with high salaries will take home extra money, too, because language in the current tax law known as the Pease Limitation had already limited their deductions, said Andrew Mattson, a tax partner serving technology industry clients at accountancy Moss Adams. Executives also may see base pay rise in coming years. The tax bill removes corporate tax breaks for performance bonuses, which is already leading companies to reconsider pay packages for chief-level executives, lawyers said. On Tuesday, Microsoft that it will no longer require employees to resolve sexual-harassment claims through private arbitration, one of the first signs that the long used to hide workplace misconduct may be starting to crumble under the pressure of the #MeToo movement. Roughly 60 million Americans are subject to mandatory arbitration agreements, generally as part of employment contracts they signed when they were hired. The agreements compel employees to address claims through a private arbiter rather than in court, which can keep victims in the dark about prior harassment claims, shield serial abusers, and hide sexual harassment from public scrutiny. Microsoft says it made the change as it prepared to throw its support behind proposed by Senators Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-New York) that would make forced arbitration in harassment cases unenforceable under federal law. “After returning from Washington to Seattle, we also reflected on a second aspect of the issue. We asked ourselves about our own practices and whether we should change any of them,” Brad Smith, Microsoft’s president and chief legal officer wrote on. Forced arbitration agreements are, where employers often impose strict confidentiality provisions that keep employment issues private. Now the question is whether other big players will follow Microsoft’s lead. Amazon says it doesn’t ask employees to sign mandatory arbitration agreements. A Facebook spokesperson says the company is looking into the Graham-Gillibrand proposal and referred to the company’s harassment policy. Uber, Google, and Apple did not immediately respond to questions from WIRED about arbitration agreements for sexual harassment or their support for the new bill. Uber’s employment contracts include a binding arbitration clause, but the company now gives employees 30 days to opt-out of that clause, Uber told WIRED. Confidentiality provisions, including nondisclosure agreements (NDAs) and non-disparagement clauses, came under fire after news reports revealed how these contracts were used to shield serial abusers like Harvey Weinstein, Bill O’Reilly, and Roger Ailes, by silencing victims. Earlier this month, that reforming these contracts would help pierce the secrecy around sexual harassment. Both former Uber engineer Susan Fowler and former Fox News host Gretchen Carlson have identified forced arbitration clauses as legal impediments for harassment victims. Fowler, whose harassment allegations led to the ouster of former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick, filed a friend-of-the-court brief in August in support of an ongoing Supreme Court case to determine whether forced arbitration violates federal law. Carlson, who sued Ailes for sexual harassment, joined Graham and Gillibrand at a press conference introducing their bill earlier this month. Microsoft’s public stand against secrecy follows a story last week about a rape claim from a female Microsoft intern, which came to light as part of a two-year-old class-action lawsuit against Microsoft for gender discrimination. The rape allegation from the Microsoft intern emerged in recently unsealed documents in the class action suit. According to Bloomberg, the intern was required to keep working alongside her alleged rapist while the company investigated her claim. The policy change may be relatively simpler to implement at Microsoft, which typically does not include arbitration agreements in its employment contracts. In his blog post, Smith said a review found that only “a small segment” of its 125,000 employees “have contractual clauses requiring pre-dispute arbitration for harassment claims in employment agreements.” That covers a few hundred people. A Microsoft spokesperson says the company also will not compel arbitration related to gender discrimination, which is included in the proposed legislation. Get ready for the winter solstice, signifying the start of winter and the shortest day of the year. The winter solstice for 2017 will occur at 11:28 am ET on Thursday, Dec. At that moment, the sun will be directly over the Tropic of Capricorn, south of the equator, as the U.S. National Weather Service. The winter solstice is when the Northern Hemisphere is tilted the farthest from the sun, making for the year’s longest night. Conversely, people living in the Southern Hemisphere will experience its summer solstice at the same time. Traditionally, thousands of people worldwide celebrate the event by taking part in that date back thousands of years. For instance, crowds of pagans and tourists typically flock to Stonehenge, the ancient British stone ruin that was built in alignment with the sun’s movement, the English Heritage, which oversees Stonehenge, told the in 2015, Fortune’s technology newsletter. People will also trek to the Newgrange monument in Ireland, built around 3200 BCE. During the winter solstice, sunlight should shine into a special chamber at sunrise. For those who can’t make it to Ireland, the country’s tourism department is hosting a live-stream.
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