“Fundamentally Parasitic” – Reddit CEO Lashes Out At “Spyware” TikTok
Reddit CEO Steve Huffman criticized the Chinese TikTok video app, describing it as a “parasitic” application at an event Wednesday, reported TechCrunch.
Huffman was speaking in front of a large group of tech entrepreneurs gathered at the “Social 2030” conference hosted by Lightspeed Venture Partners and former Facebook VP of Product Sam Lessin’s VC firm Slow Ventures.
“Maybe I’m going to regret this, but I can’t even get to that level of thinking with them,” Huffman said. “Because I look at that app as so fundamentally parasitic, that it’s always listening, the fingerprinting technology they use is truly terrifying, and I could not bring myself to install an app like that on my phone.”
“I actively tell people, ‘Don’t install that spyware on your phone,'” he said.
A similar claim was made in a lawsuit filed in California federal court in December, accusing TikTok and ByteDance of stealing user data to sell targeted ads.
“TikTok’s lighthearted fun comes at a high cost,” according to the lawsuit.
As of November, the app had been downloaded more than 1.5 billion times across the world. The US government has been actively warning personnel from using the Chinese app.
The Navy and Transportation Security Administration (TSA) have been the latest agencies to ban the app, citing potential security risks.
Chuck Schumer and Tom Cotton recently penned a letter to the head of national security, asking for an investigation into the app as a counterintelligence risk.
The lawsuit also said the company had been secretly gathering biometric data on its users, including harvesting phone and social network contacts, location, IP addresses, email addresses, and other sensitive data.
Huffman’s critique of TikTok was part of a more extensive discussion at the conference on social media’s influence on society.
Yes, one sometimes does see talk of “ad hominin attacks,” as in these court opinions—though I think Neanderthals aren’t quite what the authors had in mind. My advice: Avoid both “ad homnin” and “per curium.”
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The Milwaukee man who killed five co-workers at a beer company’s corporate office is a black Elizabeth Warren supporter, providing a clue as to why the mass shooting disappeared from the discussion so quickly.
51-year-old Anthony Ferrill showed up at the MillerCoors facility from where he had been fired earlier in the day wearing his uniform and carrying a silenced gun.
He proceeded to gun down five colleagues before turning the weapon on himself.
It subsequently emerged that Ferrill was an African-American Elizabeth Warren supporter (presuming that Ferrill shared the same political beliefs as his wife, who took a selfie with Warren at a rally last year).
The shooter was 51 year old Anthony Ferrill. His wife took selfies with you at a rally last year. This one is 100% on you, Liz. pic.twitter.com/Ko3BVQt8lZ
“Ferrill’s wife posted photos of her family and expressing liberal political views,” confirms Heavy.com. “In July 2019, Ferrill’s wife attended a speech by U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren at South Division High School Gym in Milwaukee. Following the speech, Ferrill’s wife took a photo with the Massachusetts senator.”
Despite being the worst mass shooting in Wisconsin’s history, the incident has largely disappeared from headlines and discussion, with online outrage noticeably dampened in comparison with other mass shootings.
“I hope it’s clear to everyone that if political capital can’t be made off a tragedy it will get memoryholed faster than the Jussie Smollett hoax,” commented one Twitter user.
I hope it’s clear to everyone that if political capital can’t be made off a tragedy it will get memoryholed faster than the Jussie Smollett hoax. https://t.co/3PJYCayOCF
If the culprit had been white, one suspects the media and Democrat politicians would be talking about white supremacy and gun control all week, but they seem oddly reserved on this occasion.
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Controversial NSA Phone Surveillance Program Led To Exactly Zero Arrests
National Security Agency (NSA) programme that analysed logs of phone calls and text messages made by Americans cost $100m and yielded one investigation and zero arrests from 2015 to 2019.” data-reactid=”16″ type=”text”>In yet more absurdity and confirmation that Edward Snowden was never an “enemy of the state” — as top intelligence officials and some congressional leaders have charged for years — it’s been revealed that the latest National Security Agency (NSA) program to analyze logs of phone calls and text messages made by Americans was an utter failure and waste, yielding exactly zero arrests from 2015 to 2019, despite having swept up some trillion US phone records.
National Security Agency (NSA) programme that analysed logs of phone calls and text messages made by Americans cost $100m and yielded one investigation and zero arrests from 2015 to 2019.” data-reactid=”16″ type=”text”>It cost taxpayers $100 million and was reported to produce a mass amount of redundant information, revealing information that the FBI didn’t already know only twice, resulting in only one investigation which led to no charges. This according to a government watchdog group which briefed Congress last week on the matter, the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB).
NSA headquarters, file photo.
National Security Agency (NSA) programme that analysed logs of phone calls and text messages made by Americans cost $100m and yielded one investigation and zero arrests from 2015 to 2019.” data-reactid=”16″ type=”text”>It was one among many broader controversial NSA programs to sweep up and analyze communications, which critics say routinely violate the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, which prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures.
National Security Agency (NSA) programme that analysed logs of phone calls and text messages made by Americans cost $100m and yielded one investigation and zero arrests from 2015 to 2019.” data-reactid=”16″ type=”text”>The NSA can still gather phone logs on Americans through other means of course, relying on other invasive programs, likely some of which still remain unknown and highly classified.
National Security Agency (NSA) programme that analysed logs of phone calls and text messages made by Americans cost $100m and yielded one investigation and zero arrests from 2015 to 2019.” data-reactid=”16″ type=”text”>According to The Independentcited in Yahoo News:
Freedom Act of 2015 expires on March 15.” data-reactid=”18″ type=”text”>The low success rate and high cost support the NSA’s decision to shut off the program in 2019. Politicians must now decide whether to allow the expiration of the legislation that makes the program possible. The USA Freedom Act of 2015 expires on March 15.
The Trump administration is reportedly seeking to extend the life of the program, in order to provide the government’s top signals intelligence spy agency with a future option to initiate the program if deemed necessary.
Important new report on the NSA program that gathered on the order of a trillion US phone records. https://t.co/5frRQoeTOO
The report in The Independent further said “The 2015 Act shifted responsibility for data collection from the government to telecommunications companies.”
The end result of this practice, alarmingly, was that “In some cases they would send the agency more data than they were legally allowed to collect.”
In Los Angeles, it’s not unusual to see a Beemer streak by with a Bernie 2020 sticker on the back bumper. There’s no such thing as a poor socialist and Bernie’s backers tend to have lots of cash.
While Bernie Sanders accuses Bloomberg of trying to buy his way to the nomination, the socialist bought his surge with $50 million in spending. He raised $25 million just in January. There’s more buying to do.
And while he boasts of backing from small donors, the wealth of his donors is anything but small.
Google, Amazon, and Microsoft. Their employees are three of the top 4 Bernie donors. Apple is in fifth place. These dot coms are not exactly organizations known to employ members of the proletariat. Google software engineers have sent thousands of dollars, individually, to Bernie.
Google’s senior engineers, like the ones who have backed Bernie, make $250,000 a year.
Geographically, Bernie’s top dollar zip code is 94110 in San Francisco. The average household income in this part of the Mission District, specifically the Inner Mission, the Bernal Heights area, is $166,302. The median home value is around $1.5 million and the median rent is almost $5,000 a month.
There are no poor socialists in what was dubbed as “the hottest neighborhood in San Francisco.”
This was the area that Salon founder David Talbot blasted as the “hottest zip code in the country” overrun by “Silicon Valley movers and shakers” in “new-model Teslas, BMWs and Uber limousines”. It’s only fitting that it should also be the spigot through which so much of Bernie’s tech bros dollars flow.
The second top dollar Bernie zip code in San Francisco, 94117 or Haight-Ashbury, seems like a better fit for Bernie. But the Summer of Love has long since given way to the Winter of Trust Fund Hipsters in the Haight where the average income is $201,503 and average home values top $1.6 million.
The media has made much of Bernie’s flow of donations from Brooklyn. But the money isn’t coming from the working-class Brooklynites of Bernie’s old neighborhood, but the gentrifying areas of the borough. 11215 or Park Slope is the second biggest top dollar zip code of Bernie donors.
The neighborhood, formerly urban, known as the home of Mayor Bill de Blasio, and the Park Slope Food Co-Op and its anti-Semitic push to boycott Israel, is filled with renovated brownstones filled with wealthy hipsters. It’s a place where a three-bedroom apartment can go for $2.9 million.
To New Yorkers, Park Slope has become a curse word embodying everything wrong with the new elite.
In third place on Bernie’s donor list is 10025 or the Upper West Side of Manhattan. With an average rental price of $4,695, it’s not exactly an inexpensive place to live. The UWS is the 8th richest neighborhood with a $190,281 mean household income. And this is where Bernie’s cash comes from.
11238 or Prospect Heights, in fourth place, is a newly gentrified neighborhood in Brooklyn where the median sales price passed $1 million, and you can expect to spend $800,000 for a one-bedroom co-op. The formerly urban neighborhood has been colonized by wealthy hipsters from Park Slope, and much of what goes for Park Slope also goes for Prospect Heights. They’re the gentrifiers funding Bernie Sanders.
In fifth place is 98103, the Seattle neighborhood of Wallingford. With an average household income of $124,504, the University of Washington neighborhood with its $800,000 homes isn’t working class. Among the cheapest housing options is a $400,000 one-bedroom condo that’s a mere 757 square feet. The area is so expensive because it’s home to tech employees, including Microsoft engineers.
Microsoft employees are among Bernie’s top dollar donors.
And in seventh place is 90026. The Echo Park neighborhood in Los Angeles is a hipster haven which boasts the most expensive pizza in the city where the median price for housing is $813,000, and rents can hit $6,700 a month. Like Park Slope and Haight-Ashbury, Echo Park is full of wealthy hipsters.
That’s Bernie’s core demographic.
In eight place is the Logan Square neighborhood of Chicago at zip code 60647. Logan Square is among the most expensive neighborhoods in the Windy City. A condo will set you back over half a million dollars. The rush got so bad that a garage transformed into a home was going for $2.85 million. With its hipster bars and a farmers market, it’s the perfect area for Bernie’s upscale and trendy base.
Ninth and tenth on the list of Bernie’s money neighborhoods are two expensive Manhattan areas.
10003, Union Square and Greenwich Village in downtown Manhattan, is home to NYU, once a hive of angry radicals, now stuffed full of luxury co-ops with wealthy radicals, where condos cost millions of dollars. Greenwich Village has been listed as the ninth most expensive neighborhood in New York City. So, it’s only fitting that it’s the ninth on the list of areas funding the Sanders 2020 presidential campaign.
In tenth place is 10011 or Chelsea and the West Village of Manhattan. It’s also the single most expensive zip code in New York City. Not only is it the most expensive area in New York, but it’s the 23rd most expensive area in the country with a median sale price approaching $2 million. And with average monthly rents of over $4,000, it’s the 19th most expensive rental area in the entire United States.
It’s also home to New York’s Silicon Alley, the city’s tech industry ghetto of dot com and fintech startups.
What do Bernie’s top donor zip codes have in common?Beyond wealth, Bernie’s cash flow is coming from a handful of very blue cities, almost all of them in California and New York City. Only two of the top ten zip codes are located outside San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York City. That alone conveys the insular and unrepresentative nature of Bernie’s funding base compared to the rest of the country.
Bernie’s campaign is powered by the very concentrations of power and wealth that he condemns.
The unrepresentative nature of Bernie’s backers isn’t just a matter of geography, but of culture. Some of Bernie’s top dollar zip codes overlap with the tech industry. His candidacy represents another example of how the tech industry has not only distorted our economy, but also warped our politics.
Much of Bernie’s money comes from hipster hubs where wealthy young white people in major urban areas have made old neighborhoods, including Bernie’s Brooklyn, unaffordable to the working class and middle-class people who once used to live there. Bernie’s donors, especially in places like Prospect Heights and Echo Park have also played a significant role in displacing minorities and the poor.
Follow Bernie’s money and it’s easy to see his campaign for the hypocritical farce that it is.
Tech industry bros and trust fund hipsters are buying the nomination for Bernie, while displacing minority candidates, the way they bought up brownstones in Brooklyn and displaced black people.
He’s the candidate of class warfare, not on behalf of the poor, but of young wealthy people seeking more power and influence at the expense of the more established wealth of an older generation. It’s tech industry bros warring for influence with fossil fuel titans, not for the poor, but for themselves.
Bernie’s base is much less than 1%. Call it the 0.001%. A wealthy and influential young lefty elite with disproportionate influence over the internet is setting the nation’s agenda using digital media, tech dominance, and the Weekend at Bernie’s campaign of a senile socialist who barely knows where he is and won’t release his medical records after a heart attack because they will show he’s barely there.
“Not me. Us.”
That’s Bernie’s slogan. It’s true, just not how people are meant to perceive it. Bernie is little more than a puppet of the campaign pros who made him a household name in 2016 and are trying to make him more than that now. The “Us” are not Americans or even Democrats. It’s the elites of these zip codes.
0.001% of the country is using a confused elderly socialist as a proxy for imposing their will on America.
The 2020 election will be a test of wills between Americans and the 0.001% living in Park Slope, Echo Park, the Mission District, and Haight-Ashbury. After eight years of hipster rule under Obama, is the country ready to bow its heads and let a handful of wealthy young radicals run their lives again?
CDC Suggests Men Shave Their Beards To Protect Against Covid-19
The rapid spread of Covid-19 across the world has prompted federal health officials this week to warn Americans that an outbreak could be imminent.
When it comes to preparing for a health crisis, good hygiene practices are needed to limit the transmission of the virus, such as mask-wearing and regularly sanitizing hands.
Nancy Messonnier, the director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, said earlier this week that the virus is rapidly evolving and expanding, it’s only a matter of time before confirmed cases in the US start increasing.
Additionally, HHS Secretary Alex Azar told the Senate this week that the Trump administration is seeking upwards of $2.5 billion to stock up on masks, ventilators, and other virus-fighting tools.
About 30 million N95 masks are stockpiled, but another 300 million more are needed for healthcare workers, Azar said.
A 2017 workplace safety infographic compiled by the CDC has been circulating social media in recent days, outlining the wearer of the mask must shave beards and mustaches for a tight fit.
Any facial hair within the respirator should be fine, but “full beard,” “chin curtain,” “mutton chops,” and “extended goatee,” to name a few, are not permitted for a properly functioning mask, and must be shaved off if the wearer wants to survive a virus crisis. “Soul patch,” “pencil,” and “zorro” are mustaches that work.
For those who want to keep their mustaches but continue to wear protective gear to shield against the virus, you might have to spend a few bucks. We outlined last week that Ao Air’s Atmos Faceware is the next generation of masks to block germs up to 50 times better than traditional masks currently on the market.
The company commissioned its own study (note: the research isn’t published nor peer-reviewed) describes how Atmos Faceware is a much better solution against particulate matter than standard air filter mask certified by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health.
Ao Air claims Atmos Faceware is unlike traditional face masks because it doesn’t require an airtight seal to be effective, which means the wearer doesn’t have to shave.
The high-tech mask costs between $350 to $400 and could be a hot commodity among the hipster crowd, who want to keep their “van dyke” or “dali” mustaches during a possible pandemic.
We Just Experienced The Fastest 10% Correction In S&P500 History
If only there were signs that the market was poised for a crash. Oh wait, there were,like the market being the most overbought and complacent ever, with every investor all-in as recently as last month:
… and ushered in the “Profane, Greedy Traders of Reddit” who “Are Shaking Up the Stock Market” even as US consumers just reported the highest median current value of their market investments.
In short, everyone felt invincible, and all thanks to the Fed’s QE4 which injected $600BN in the market and made even a modest drop appear impossible.
Only… it was not meant to last, and in a market that took the express elevator up and the Wile-E Coyote anvil down, less than a week after markets hit an all time high, stocks crashed, suffering three 3%+ drops in the past week as algos suddenly realized that not even the Fed can print viral antibodies, resulting in the biggest one-day Dow Jones point drop on record (down 1,191 on “Viral Thursday”), but more importantly, the fastest 10% correction from an all-time Dow Jones high since just a few months before the start of the Great Depression.
What about S&P? Well, since that particular index wasn’t around at the time of the Great Depression, one has to look elsewhere, which is what Deutsche Bank’s Torsten Slok has done, and as he shows in the next slide, the outcome is just as stark: with just 6 trading days passing between last week’s the all-time S&P500 high and today’s 10% correction, this was the fastest correction from a peak on record.
This means that in under six trading sessions, the US stock market lost half of its massive (mostly post-QE4) gains from all of last year.
Even more amazing, is that in under a week the S&P has lost a third of all its peak gains (which hit 62% last week) since the Trump election!
The only question now is what will Trump do – besides more jawboning that the US is extremely well prepared for “whatever this thing is” – to prevent even more furious losses in the market, culminating with the fastest bear market in history.
It’s not just the markets that are in freefall, so are crushed revised estimates of global economic growth.
Overnight Bank of America has taken the axe to its GDP growth forecasts, and in a note titled “Nowhere to Hide”, the bank’s chief economist Ethan Harris, writes that “we have taken another slice out of our 2020 global GDP forecast. The downward revisions are broad based, and we now expect just 2.8% global growth this year (Table 1). This would be the first sub-3% print since the financial crisis.“
Explaining why it’s “Gloom but not doom”, Harris writes that last month he cut his 2020 China growth forecast from 5.8% to 5.6%, “but left other major economies unchanged on the expectation of a brief and contained disruption. Our previous base case now looks increasingly like a best-case scenario.” However, with the V-shaped recovery no longer looking realistic, BofA’s new forecasts “account for a more “U-shaped” growth recovery, and a greater permanent loss in output.”
Explaining further, BofA writes that the weakness in the global economy is being driven by three factors.
The first is the lack of momentum going into the year. When we published our year-ahead report last November, we were calling for just 3.2% global growth, which was already well below trend, in our view. Since then 4Q GDP came in even weaker than expected, suggesting that trade and tech war uncertainty remained a headwind for global growth.
The second factor, of course, is China’s aggressive response to the COVID-19 outbreak. Economic disruptions have lasted for more than a month and many migrant workers are yet to return to work, leaving factories unable to operate at full capacity. As a result we have cut our China forecast again. We expect roughly zero sequential growth in 1Q, and a more delayed recovery, pushing 2020 growth down to 5.2%.
Last, we are now looking for large spillover effects. Extended disruptions in China should hurt global supply chains. Weak tourist flows will be another headwind for Asia. And limited outbreaks, similar to the one in Italy, are possible in many countries, leading to more quarantines and weighing on confidence. Therefore we have cut our forecasts across the board. We project just 2.2% growth outside China, also the lowest rate since 2009.
Not surprisingly, Harris cautions that “while the distribution of risks around our forecasts is now more balanced, we think the risks are still skewed to the downside.” The reason for that, is that his forecasts “do not incorporate a global pandemic that would basically shut down economic activity in many major cities. Accordingly, we are also not calling for a global recession (i.e., sub-2% global growth).” In other words, BofA’s global recession forecast will depend on whether China can reboot its economy, something it has been scrambling to do by fabricating low infection numbers and manipulating its Coronavirus statistics.
The risk, of course, is that in its panicked scramble to restart the economy, Beijing launches a second wave of infections, destroys what little confidence the people have in the communist party, and terminally cripples its – and the global – economy.
A New York Post journalist who once wrote about casual racism being widespread was caught on camera mocking an Indian reporter behind his back during a White House press conference.
The clip shows Ebony Bowden pulling strange faces and asking another journalist sat next to her “who is this guy?” as the Indian expresses his best wishes that the Trump administration will “keep America safe” from coronavirus.
Bowden then appears to look at another journalist to her right and bursts out in laughter before shaking her head.
Who is that reporter in the green mocking an Indian reporter? I bet she thinks Trump is racist. pic.twitter.com/YtGv32XOUe
The Indian reporter in question, Raghubir Goyal, has been a White House reporter since the days of President Carter, so it’s unlikely that Bowden hasn’t seen or heard him before.
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It Begins: Hawaii Stores Empty Out On Coronavirus “Panic Buying”
Hawaii is urging residents to prepare for a potential breakout of Covid-19 amid new warnings earlier this week from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that the deadly virus quickly spreading across the world could cause a “significant disruption” to American life.
Although there are no confirmed virus cases in Hawaii (the state Health Department says 80 people are self-monitoring for the coronavirus in Hawaii after recent travel to China), the CDC’s warning sparked a buying frenzy among residents this week as they emptied store shelves of food and supplies.
Twitter handle @zoeywoeyzoey said, “Hawaii Sam’s club is sold out of toilet paper hand sanitizer alcohol.”
KHON Honolulu said flatbed carts “were overflowing with boxes of canned goods, bottled water, toilet paper, and paper towels” at Costco’s Iwilei location.
“The essentials toilet paper, paper towels, bottles of water, soap, a lot of Clorox stuff, cleaning supplies… I figure with all the coronavirus scare and everything, it’s better to be safe than sorry,” said Honolulu resident Keane Zakimi.
Hawaii Foodbank told KHON that residents are panic buying non-perishable foods and medical masks. They said the same fear that is seen in Asia has now spread to Hawaii.
“If there’s no inventory at the store, then there’s very little for stores to donate to the Foodbank and also at home if you’re stocking up and hoarding for your family, the last thing you’re thinking about is making a donation. It impacts us in a very great way,” said Hawaii Foodbank President Ron Mizutani.
Honolulu Star-Advertiser said retailers across the state are experiencing shortages of 3M N95 masks. We noted last month that masks were selling out across the US. Prices of the masks have doubled or tripled since mid-January.
It’s only a matter of time before a virus case is confirmed in the state, and this could lead to an epic bust of its top industry: tourism, resulting in a recession for the island economy.
