Category Archives: Mars Colonization

My north star(s) for philosophy, management, and politics are "Star Wars," "The Sopranos," and "Game of Thrones," respectively. The Iron Bank (GOT) is a metaphor for today's financial institutions, if present-day banks didn't need bailouts or to inventfake accountsto juice compensation. Regardless, it was well known throughout Braavos thatThe Iron Bank will have its due. If you failed to repay, they'd fund your enemies. So today's Iron Bankers are the venture capitalists funding (any) incumbents' enemies. If this makes VCs sound interesting/cool, don't trust your instincts.

Lately, I've spent a decent amount of time on the phone with my bank in an attempt to get a home equity line, as I want to load up on Dogecoin. (Note: kidding.) (Note: mostly.) If Opendoor and Zillow can use algorithms and Google Maps to get an offer on my house in 24 hours, why does it take my bank which underwrote the original mortgage so much longer?

Read more: I sold Credit Karma to Intuit for $8.1 billion in what was the biggest decision of my career. Here are the 4 most important lessons I learned.

How ripe a sector is for disruption is a function of several factors. One (relatively) easy proxy is the delta between price increases and inflation, and if the innovation in the sector justifies the delta. Think of the $200 cable bill, or a $5.6 million 60-second Super Bowl spot, as canaries in the ad-supported media coal mine.

Another, easier (and more fun) indicator of ripeness is the eighties test. Put yourself smack dab in the center of the store/product/service, close your eyes, spin around three times, open your eyes, and ask if you'd know within five seconds that you were notin 1985. Theaters, grocery stores, gas stations, dry cleaners, university classes, doctor's offices, and banks still feel as if you could run into Ally Sheedy or The Bangles.

It's hard to imagine an industry more ripe for disruption than the business of money.

Let's start with this: 25% of US householdsare either unbanked or underbanked.Half of the nation's unbanked households say they don't have enough money to meet the minimum balance requirements. 34% say bank fees are too high. And, if you're trying to get a mortgage, you'd better hope the house isn't cheap.

Inequity is a breeding ground for disruption, leaving underserved markets for insurgents to seize and launch an attack on incumbents from below. We have good reason to believe that's happening in banking.

A herd of unicorns is at the stable door, looking to trample Wells Fargo and Chase. Fintech is responsible for roughly one in five (17%) of the world's unicorns, more than any other sector. In addition, there are already several megalodons worth more than financial institutions that have spent generations building (mis)trust.

How did this happen? The fintechs are zeroing in on everything big banks aren't.

Example No. 1: Innovation. Over the past five years, PayPal has issued 26x more patents than Goldman Sachs.

Example No. 2: Cost-cutting. " Neobanks " offer the basic services of a bank, with one less expensive and cumbersome feature: the branch. Historically, the branch wasthe bank. But ground-level real estate staffed by people is expensive, and now that money is a digital construct, the "vault" is in our pockets. A traditional bank branch needs$50 million in deposits to generate an adequate return. Yet nearly half (48%) of branches in the US are below that threshold. Not surprisingly, banks are closing branches as fast as they opened them: In 2020 alone, 3,300 bank branches closed, a quarter of all retail closures.

There's a big opportunity for branchless banks to expand. Already, there are at least177 neobanks. Founders frame these offerings as more progressive, less corporate.Dave, a new banking app, offers a Founding Story on its website (illustrated with cartoon bears) about three friends "fed up" with their banking experience, often incurring $38 overdraft fees. As it turns out, "Dave" is/areserial entrepreneurswho sold their last company for $85 million. Dave provides free overdraft protection and has 10 million customers.

Example No. 3: Less inequity. NYU Professor of Finance Sabrina Howell's research found fintech lenders gave 18% of PPP loans to Black-owned businesses, while small to medium-sized banks provided just 2%. Among all loans to Black-owned firms, Professor Howell found 54% were from fintech startups .

Racial discrimination is the most likely explanation, as lenders faced zero credit risk. In addition (my thesis), just as people of color have embraced crypto (48% of Bitcoin buyers are nonwhite) there may be increased comfort among minority groups to deal with technology versus institutions that have a history of racist lending practices. At a base level, systemic racism creates friction on several dimensions. I'm an investor in Better Mortgage, which leverages AI to remove friction from the supply chain of financing a home (e.g., approval in as little as three minutes). This results in lower fees for the borrower and better pay for jobs that have suffered from high turnover. As every CEO tries to channel their inner Bezos, and obsess over the consumer, there's a huge opportunity to mimic Hastings and build a model that achieves something few firms have managed over the last 30 years; give their rank and file workers a raise.

Example No. 4: Serving the underserved. Unequal access to banking is a global botheration. Almost a third of the world's adults, 1.7 billion, are unbanked. In Argentina, Colombia, Nigeria, and other countries, more than 50% of adults are unbanked.

Why? Again, many don't have enough money to meet minimum balance requirements, and it's more profitable to service wealthy customers. However, a lower-cost, technology-driven model coupled with a market that provides cheap capital to growth firms results in a much-needed example of how capitalism is the worst economic system of its kind except for all the rest.

Take Argentine fintech Ual, whose CEO Pierpaolo Barbieri I spoke with on thePod last week. In just four years, more than three million people have opened an account with his company about 9% of the country and over 25% of 18 to 25-year-olds now have a tarjeta Ual (online wallet). Ual recently launched in Mexico, where, as of 2017, only 2.6% of the poorest 40% had a credit card. This is more than an economic issue it's a societal issue, as financial inclusion bolsters the middle class and forms a solid base for democracy.

Chase savings accounts are offering, no joke, 0.01% interest. Wells Fargo? The same, though if you keep your investment portfolio with Wells, they'll double that rate to 0.02%. Meanwhile, neobanks including Ally and Chime offer 0.5% 50x the competition.

There is also blood in the water for fintech unicorns that have created a debit, versus credit, generation: The buy-now-pay-later fintech Afterpay has more than 5 million US customers just two years after launching in the country. As of February, its competitor Affirm has 4.5 millioncustomers.

Unicorns are also coming for payments. The megasaurus in this space is PayPal, which has built the first global payments platform outside the credit card model and is second only to Visa in payment volume and revenue. Square's Cash app is capturing share, and Apple Cash is also a player, as it's Apple.

Square, Apple, and a host of other companies are taking the "partnership" approach, bolting new services onto the existing transaction infrastructure. Square's little white box is a low-upfront-cost way for a small merchant to accept credit cards. It's particularly interesting that Apple teamed up with Goldman Sachs instead of a traditional bank. Goldman is looking to get into the consumer space (seeMarcus), and Apple is looking to get into the payments space this alliance could be the unsullied fighting with air cover from dragons. It should make Wells and BofA anxious.

The Big Four credit card system operators (Visa, MasterCard, Discover, and American Express) are still the dominant payment players, and they have deep moats. Their brands are global, their networks robust. Visa can handle 76,000 transactions per second in 160 currencies, and as of this week it had settled$1 billion incryptocurrency transactions.

Still, even the king of payments sees dead people. In 2020, Visa tried to buy Plaid for $5.3 billion. Plaid currently helps connect existing payments providers (i.e. banks) to finance software such as Quicken and Mint. But it plans to expand from that beachhead into offering a full-fledged payments system. Visa CEO Al Kelly initiallydescribed the deal as an "insurance policy" to neutralize a "threat to our important US debit business." In an encouraging sign that American antitrust authorities are stirring, the Department of Justice filed suit to block the merger, and Visa walked.

Fintech is also coming for investing with online trading apps (Robinhood, Webull, Public, and several of the neobanks) and through the crypto side door (Coinbase, Gemini, Binance). Insurance is under threat from companies like Lemonade (home), Ladder (life), and Root (auto).

In sum, fintech is likely as underhyped as space is overhyped. Why? The ROI on your professional efforts and investing are inversely proportional to how sexy the industry/investment is, and fintech is boring. Except for the immense opportunity and value creation for multiple stakeholders. "Half the world is unbanked, but we need to colonize Mars," said no rational investor ever.

Re investing in fintech: What has, and will always be, a good rap? The guy/gal who owns the bank.

Life is so rich,

Scott

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SCOTT GALLOWAY: Fintechs Are Taking Over the Banking Industry - Business Insider

Blink while playing one of the best city-building games, and youll lose countless hours expanding your city, refining your infrastructure, and focusing your trade. Every game on our list represents hundreds of hours of simulation gameplay, regardless of if you want to build a modern metropolis, conquer strange Viking lands, or terraform the Red Planet.

Although city-building games usually carry a steep learning curve and tons of content, beginners can dive into any option on our list and have a good time. We have a mix of hardcore survival experiences likeFrostpunkand minimalist builders likeIslanders,so theres something for everyone.

Cities: Skylinesis the best city-building game you can play right now. It takes all of the best parts ofSimCity,ignores the bad parts, and expands on the mechanics to create a city-builder thats enjoyable for hundreds of hours. Starting with a small square off the highway, youll build your infrastructure to accommodate new residents, businesses, emergency services, schools, and more.

The base game gives you plenty of challenges to overcome, including managing emergencies, keeping your residents happy, and dealing with the flow of traffic throughout your city.Cities: Skylinesreally comes alive through its DLC, though.Green Cities,for example, gives you 350 assets to build a more eco-friendly city, whileAfter Darkgives you new tourist attractions and an international airport so you can draw more people in.

Plus, theres mod support, so you can add community assets and grab inspiration from custom-built maps.Cities: Skylinesisthecity-building game on PC, and its a must-own if youre a fan of the genre.

Anno 1800puts you at the beginning of the Industrial Age. Starting with a trade port and a small plot of land, youll attract farmers and workers to build your city from a farming village into a modern manufacturing powerhouse. From there, youll make your mark on the world with a network of trade routes, diplomatic agreements, and expeditions around the globe.

Like other Anno games, this one is focused on production and industry. Instead of engaging in war or appeasing your citizens,Anno 1800mainly tasks you with building and maintaining supply chains and then exploiting those supply chains to generate as much revenue as possible through trade. Youll need to fight from time to time, but only to defend your industry.

We choseAnno 1800not only because its the most recent but also because the setting captures the spirit of the gameplay. If youre looking for a different setting, Anno 1404throws you into the age of colonization, and Anno 2070looks forward to near-future industry.

Frostpunkis a city builder under the worst possible circumstances. You are the leader of a surviving colony after the fallout of a volcanic winter. Eruptions and catastrophic weather have wiped out most of the worlds population, and its your job to build a city around a steam-powered engine stuck in the center of a frozen wasteland.

Frostpunkputs on the pressure early and never lets up. Youll have to send citizens out to gather materials, knowing some of them wont make it back, enact laws to extract 24-hour labor, and choose who gets rations and medical treatment first (if at all).Frostpunkis as grim as video games come, but it still provides a riveting experience where building your city feels like just a means to an end.

Eager to settle the Red Planet? SurvivingMarsis for you. Its a traditional city builder where you need to build infrastructure, tend to the needs of your citizens, and grow your industry, but instead of dealing in electricity and housing, Surviving Mars deals in oxygen and space domes. Its one thing to attract people to your colony on Mars. Its another thing to keep them alive.

Surviving Marscomes from Paradox Interactive, the same publisher behindCities: Skylines.That means a lot of DLC. New content is still rolling out, butGreen Planetgives you new terraforming options so you can turn land into sources of water and vegetation, and Space Racethrows you in the center of an international struggle to colonize Mars first.

In a lot of ways, Surviving MarsisCities: Skylinesin space, but even that description sells it short. It combines survival, exploration, and city-building into a neatly defined package that never fails to entertain.

El Presidente is back inTropico 6, giving you another chance to rule, manipulate, and build your own banana republic. If you havent played a Tropico game, they are city builders where youre allowed to do all of the devious, corrupt things youre not supposed to do while building a city. As the absolute ruler of your island, your job is to make lofty speeches to keep your citizens happy while exploiting the land and resources for all theyre worth. The world will know the name of your island for better or worse.

Tropico 6is a joy to play, not only because its so silly but also because its a genuinely fun city builder. That said, it gets even better with DLC. Lobbyistoopens the doors to foreign leaders for some backdoor politics and helps you cover your corruption, andSpittermakes El Presidente a superstar on social media to attract celebrities and faction leaders to your island paradise.

Its hard overstating how much of a joy Tropico 6is to play. If the cold industry of Anno 1800and the hopeless survival of Frostpunkare just too much, giveTropico 6a spin.

Banishedis a city builder that puts your citizens at the heart of the experience. You lead a group of exiled travelers looking to establish their own colony, and unlike a lot of similar games, growing that colony is your sole focus. Banisheddoes away with currency and skill trees; instead, youre tasked with managing the resources your colony can harvest and ensuring that your colonists can start families to keep your colony running into the future.

Banishedis a methodical city builder that rewards thoughtful resource management and punishes rash expansion. Instead of conquering new land, youll focus more on assigning jobs to your citizens, replacing natural resources youve harvested, and growing your city only when theres a need to. If youre looking for a city builder with loads of DLC and mod support,Banishedisnt for you. Instead, its a game that focuses on doing one thing well, and it succeeds.

RimWorld is a colony simulator where almost anything can happen. You lead the establishment of a new colony on a rim world, a planet located on the edge of known space. Your colonists all come with a randomly rolled list of traits, which dictate how they act. You may have a genius who learns quickly but is suspectable to a mental break or someone with bloodlust who gets a mood boost from killing strangers and making clothes out of their skin. Seriously.

All of the traits are tongue and cheek, despite how serious they get (nudists, for example, get a mood bonus while theyre naked). The combination of traits across your colony gives you a wholly unique experience every time you load up the game. Your colonists will interact with each other based on their traits, and thats where much of the basis for gameplay is formed.

On top of that, an artificial intelligence (A.I.) storyteller heads up your experience, providing random events based on your difficulty and game settings. Events can be everything from two colonists breaking up with each other to a revenge assault of animals youve hunted too much.RimWorldis a generator of unique and memorable gameplay experiences, and its one of the best simulation games on the market.

Islandersis a bite-sized city builder about building a city on an island. It does away with skill and research trees, trade, and resources and focuses on the building itself. At the start of the game, you have the choice between different packs of buildings. Regardless of the one you choose, theyll fill your inventory with buildings that you can place on your island. It doesnt cost anything to place them, but youll get a score depending on where you place them.

As you build and raise your score, youll unlock new buildings and refill your inventory. From there, its just a matter of how far you can go. Once you fill up an island, youll have the option to move to the next island and expand your empire. And if you run out of buildings before you can refill your inventory, the game ends.

Islandersis a simple game that anyone can pick up and play, but it rewards players who pay careful attention to building placement and resource management. If youre looking for a city builder that isnt bogged down my menus and systems,Islandersis for you.

Northgardputs you in charge of a Viking clan looking to conquer the mysterious shores of Northgard. Either against A.I. opponents or real-life players, your goal is to expand your kingdom to win. Similar toCivilization VI,Northgardprovides a few different win conditions, including Wisdom, which is awarded for recruiting loremasters and receiving blessings, and Fame, which is awarded for conquering new territory and becoming a king.

The game pushes into the 4X territory of the best strategy games but still manages to keep things accessible. Although conflict with rival clans and beasts is to be expected, Northgardstill includes a jobs system for your Vikings, farming, and trading, so you can build your city the way you want.

The SimCity franchise has been dethroned byCities: Skylines,so there isnt much of a reason to pick up the latest entries in the franchise. 2003sSimCity 4,however, remains a staple of the genre. Its a nostalgia trip that allows you to build a network of cities connected by public transit, summon natural disasters at will, and tend to the varied needs of your citizens as you build a sprawling metropolis.

At the time of publication, however,SimCity 4 is 18 years old and hasnt received the attention it deserves. If youre interested in playing the game, we recommend installing a few mods and bug fixes to get the game running smoothly. Otherwise, youll deal with frequent crashes and/or game-breaking bugs.

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The best city-building games on PC - Digital Trends

This view, known as technological determinism, is historically flawed, politically dangerous, and ethically questionable. To achieve progress, societies like ours need a more dynamic understanding of why technology changes, how we change with it, and how we might govern our powerful, marvelous machines.

Technology is not an autonomous force independent of society, nor are the directions of technological change fixed by nature. Technology at its most basic is toolmaking. Insisting that technological advances are inevitable keeps us from acknowledging the disparities of wealth and power that drive innovation for good or ill.

Technology is always a collective venture. It is what it is because many people imagined it, labored for it, took risks with it, standardized and regulated it, vanquished competitors, and made markets to advance their visions. If we treat technology as self-directed, we overlook all these interlocking contributions, and we risk distributing the rewards of invention unfairly. Today, an executive officer of a successful biotech company can sell stock worth millions of dollars, while those who clean the lab or volunteer for clinical trials gain very little. Ignoring the unequal social arrangements that produced inventions tends to reproduce those same inequalities in the distribution of benefits.

Throughout human history, the desire for economic gain has underwritten the search for new tools and instrumentsin fields like mining, fishing, agriculture, and recently gene prospecting. These tools open up new markets and new ways to extract resources, but what the innovator sees as progress often brings unwanted change to communities colonized by imported technologies and their makers ambitions.

The story of the internet shows that modern societies are often better at imagining the upsides of technology than its downsides.

For example, in West Bengal, where I was born, weavers lost such skills as making the intricate narrative motifs of the Baluchari sari during 200 years of British rule. Indeed, Britains first industrial revolution, which introduced the power loom in cities like Lancaster but adopted punitive tariffs to keep out hand-loomed cloth from India, was also a story about dismantling Bengals once-flourishing textile industry. Lost arts had to be regained after the British left. The cost of a radical break with a nations own economic and cultural heritage is incalculable.

The desire for military advantage is another driver of technological change that can, in some instances, benefit civil societybut dual use technologies often retain ties to forces that prompted their development. Nuclear energy, a spinoff from the pursuit of the atomic bomb, was sold to the world by US President Dwight Eisenhower as atoms for peace. Yet nuclear power remains closely tied to the threat of nuclear weapons proliferation.

Similarly, the internet and world wide web, which revolutionized how much of the world lives today, owe much to the US Defense Departments vision of a network of computers. First celebrated as a space for emancipation, the digital world has slowly revealed its antidemocratic features: constant surveillance, cybersecurity threats, the lawlessness of the dark web, and the spread of misinformation. More public awareness of the internets origins might have led to a more accountable cyberworld than the one designed by hotshot technologists.

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The dangerous appeal of technology-driven futures - MIT Technology Review

Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk said on Tuesday that his Starlink venture was growing quickly as he forecast total investment costs in the satellite internet business at between $20 billion and $30 billion.

The Tesla Inc CEO and founder of SpaceX, a rocket ship venture that seeks to colonize Mars, said up-front investment costs before Starlink achieves substantial positive cash flow would be $5-$10 billion.

"It's a lot, basically," Musk said in a video interview from California with the Mobile World Congress, the telecoms industry's largest annual gathering that is being held in Barcelona.

Starlink, an array of low-orbit satellites offering high-speed connectivity for people living in remote areas, is already offering a trial service and says it aims for near-global coverage of the populated world this year.

It now has more than 1,500 satellites aloft and is operating in about a dozen countries, adding more every month, said Musk, forecasting that total customer numbers would reach half a million over the next 12 months, from 69,000 now.

Skeptics question whether satellite internet can ever develop a viable business model, because the main market it targets is people living in remote areas, who are too few in number to support the vast up-front investment costs.

He pushed back against that idea, saying that Starlink could help fill in the gaps in fifth-generation mobile and fibre-optic networks.

"There's a need for connectivity in places that don't have it right now," said Musk.

This story has been published from a wire agency feed without modifications to the text.

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Musk ready to invest as much as $30 billion in Starlink - Mint

A group of scientists thinks they detected signs of life on Venus and America is intent on finding out the truth through a combination of public and private missions to Earths neighbor.

NASA is making plans for an uncrewed trek to Venus before the end of the decade to answer questions about life on other planets.

New attention to Venus was spurred on by a U.K.-led research teams apparent discovery last year of phosphine gas in the planets atmosphere. Scientists used powerful telescopes to discover the gas.

On Earth, phosphine is associated with life. On Venus, scientists are trying to figure out ifit is a sign of life.

In June, NASA selected two new missions: DAVINCI+, focused on Venus atmosphere, and VERITAS, focused on Venus surface. Tom Wagner, a NASA scientist who leads the Discovery Program that selected the missions, said the DAVINCI+ mission will measure phosphine.

The potential phosphine discovery, or the possibility that phosphine was discovered in the atmosphere of Venus, that was like a lightning bolt through the community, right? said Mr. Wagner. Because there are questions like, Hey, some people think that life could survive in the atmosphere of Venus even if it doesnt survive on the surface. Its a really intriguing question.

Venus, the second planet from the sun and Earths neighbor, is the brightest natural object in Earths night sky other than the moon. But it has traditionally been Earths other neighbor, Mars, that captures the imagination and inspires tales of extraterrestrials.

The potential phosphine gas discovery on Venus provoked a vigorous debate on the possibility of life on the brightly lit and extremely hot planet. Some scientists argued that the U.K.-led scientists misinterpreted the data.

Sara Seager, an MIT planetary scientist who co-authored the U.K.-led research teams study, said she is eager to examine more information but it was not just phosphine that was unexpectedly detected on Venus. She said there is other evidence of things in Venus atmosphere that do not make sense, including small amounts of molecular oxygen and the tentative detection of ammonia NH3.

Its like someone leaving these clues, you know? Ms. Seager said. Like a forensic crime scene, weve got a puzzle something together and you cant just say, Oh, that means theres life. Cause it doesnt, but its not just phosphine.

Mr. Wagner said NASAs team is considering making a subtle change to the instruments to measure trace amounts of phosphine in Venus atmosphere that it might otherwise miss.

NASA has said the DAVINCI+ and VERITAS missions, each costing $500 million, are both intended to study the lost habitable world of Venus.

According to NASA, Venus may have been the first habitable world in our solar system complete with an ocean and an Earth-like climate. Mr. Wagner said he expects NASAs upcoming missions to rewrite the textbooks on Venus and serve as a rediscovery of the planet.

Its not just going there and measuring phosphine, its actually really going and understanding how the planet works as a system, if phosphine was there, how it was generated, and what other markers for life might be your precursors to life, and overall habitability questions thats what were really getting at, Mr. Wagner said.

The DAVINCI+ and VERITAS missions will take approximately six months to get from Earth to Venus, according to NASA officials. Mr. Wagner said VERITAS will orbit Venus for at least a couple of years mapping the planet while DAVINCI+ will descend through the atmosphere in approximately 40 minutes. Once DAVINCI+ hits Venus surface, it will have approximately 10 minutes to take readings before succumbing to the planets surface temperature that can top 900 degrees Fahrenheit.

NASAs focus on Venus is not fleeting. Both missions are expected to launch between 2028 and 2030, but NASA is already taking steps to make other trips to Venus possible. In June, NASA published a solicitation for partners to help develop Hot Operating Temperature Technology for Venus that Mr. Wagner said was about making electronics, batteries, and radios that can survive extreme heat.

The long-term outlook of NASA stands in stark contrast to the strategies of billionaires Jeff Bezos, who intends to visit outer space later this month, and Elon Musk, who has designs on colonizing Mars.

NASAs careful plodding is part of the approach that has sustained the agency throughout its history and enabled it to exceed expectations.

We use habitability when its like, OK, were not looking for a living thing moving around, right? Were trying to understand maybe how life could have formed, Mr. Wagner said. Heck, if we see life, thats great. But you know, if we dont, its still another piece of the puzzle.

If there is life on Venus, Ms. Seager said she thinks it would be associated with the planets cloud droplets and her team is working on a privately funded mission to examine the droplets. Her team is also working with Rocket Lab, a California-based company, that has made plans to hunt for life in Venus clouds in a mission scheduled for 2023.

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Is there life on Venus? American scientists ready space missions to explore the possibility - Washington Times

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg shared a video of himself wakeboarding to mark the Fourth of July, with John Denver's "Take Me Home, Country Roads" playing. In the video, the 37-year-old carried a giant U.S. flag as he navigated the waves of a lake. The video was widely mocked, with many suggesting that it is the perfect foundation for memes.

"Happy July 4th," Zuckerberg wrote in the caption on Instagram and Facebook. On Facebook, Zuckerberg attempted to show a sense of humor by responding to some of the jokes people posted. "It's a hydrofoil. There's a wing under the water that I'm riding that pushes the board into the air," Zuckerberg explained in one comment. "It's a lot of fun. There's an electric-powered version that you can get, but in this video, I'm riding a regular foil board and surfing a little wave."

Some of Zuckerberg's followers suggested he was celebrating more than just Independence Day. On June 28, a federal court dismissed the Federal Trade Commission's antitrust complaint against Facebook. A parallel case filed by 48 state attorneys general was also dismissed, reports CNBC. The lawsuit claimed Facebook's acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp in 2012 and 2014, respectively, were attempts to stop serious threats to its monopoly.

We are pleased that todays decisions recognize the defects in the government complaints against Facebook, Facebook said in a statement last week. "We compete fairly every day to earn peoples time and attention and will continue to deliver great products for the people and businesses that use our services."

The dismissal was not a complete victory for Facebook though. The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia said it did not agree with all of Facebook's arguments, but ruled in its favor because the FTC failed to prove Facebook has a social media monopoly in the U.S. The court also ruled that the FTC could continue to push Facebook to divest Instagram and WhatsApp, but can only succeed if it can also succeed in proving Facebook has a monopoly. Still, the fact that the state attorneys general lawsuit was completely dismissed means the FTC could have a tough road ahead.

Over on Twitter, the response to Zuckerberg's wakeboarding video was even more critical. One person even edited the video to sup[erimpose a Facebook logo onto the American flag. "Zuck crossing the Delaware," the Twitter user joked.

"This is the stuff meme dreams are made of," meme page Tank.Sinatra wrote on Instagram. "This is some meme materials," another Instagram user wrote.

"Zuck really doing his part to make tech founders seem normal," Box CEO Aaron Levie sarcastically wrote.

"In a world of out-of-touch tech billionaires, Zuck somehow manages to make himself look even more out of touch than the guy who wants indentured servitude on Mars," one Twitter user wrote. The comment referred to remarks Elon Musk has made about colonizing Mars.

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Mark Zuckerberg Marks 4th of July With Wakeboarding and John Denver, Sparking Mockery on Social Media - PopCulture.com

SpaceX founder and Tesla CEO Elon Musk visits the construction site of Tesla's gigafactory in Gruenheide, near Berlin, Germany, May 17, 2021.

Michele Tantussi | Reuters

Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said he will only publicly list satellite broadband service Starlink when its cash flow is more predictable.

Starlink, which is currently operated by space exploration firm SpaceX, allows people to connect to the internet via a satellite dish that is placed on or near their property. The internet is beamed down to the dish via Starlink satellites that have been put into orbit by SpaceX.

"Going public sooner than that would be very painful," Musk said in a tweet late Wednesday. "Will do my best to give long-term Tesla shareholders preference."

The billionaire's tweet came after a Twitter user asked him: "Any thoughts on Starlink IPO we would love to invest in the future. Any thoughts on first dibs for Tesla retail investors?"

SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell said last year that Starlink could be spun off from SpaceX for an initial public offering.

Starlink, which is based in Redmond, Washington, ultimately wants to provide the world with faster internet, starting by improving internet access in parts of the world that aren't currently served by broadband providers.

It plans to do this by putting thousands of small telecoms satellites into low-Earth orbit that can beam high-speed, low-latency internet to the ground.

Starlink is currently trialing its service with customers in 11 countries including the U.S. and the U.K.

Musk said in May that the company had received more than 500,000 preorders for its internet service and anticipates no technical problems meeting demand.

Starlink should be able to provide continuous global coverage by September, Shotwell said Tuesday.

"We've successfully deployed 1,800 or so satellites and once all those satellites reach their operational orbit, we will have continuous global coverage, so that should be like September timeframe," she told a Macquarie Group technology conference via webcast, according to Reuters.

"But then we have regulatory work to go into every country and get approved to provide telecoms services."

Starlink has said it plans to launch 12,000 satellites in total at a cost of approximately $10 billion.

Musk said in May that Starlink will be a crucial source of funding for some of his other plans, including sending paying customers to Mars and colonizing Mars.

In an interview in March last year, Musk said SpaceX could make up to $30 billion a year by providing broadband. He said that Starlink will be "helpful to telcos because Starlink will serve the hardest to serve customers" adding that 5G isn't great for the countryside because "you need range."

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Elon Musk says Starlink will go public when its cash flow is more predictable - CNBC

This idea was not new. Plato believed society functioned best when it was run by experts. Technocracys focus on engineers was rooted in the conviction that there was a technological fix to almost all of societys problems.

Today, the idea that governments are too slow, too inefficient, too lacking in expertise to solve hard problems is widely shared among the engineers and entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley.

This libertarian impulse has always been part of the ethos of Silicon Valley. One of its first and most forceful expressions came in 1995, when tech pioneer John Perry Barlow delivered his Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, the Declaration began. I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.

Silicon Valleys attitude towards government has become more accommodating since Barlow delivered his declaration, both out of choice and necessity. But there remains a conviction that, left to their own devices, tech companies are better able to solve problems in areas like transportation, education and health care, where decades of government regulation have put a break on innovation.

Theres a lack of focus on efficiency, lamented former Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt on a panel about government and technology in 2019. The reason there's no innovation in government is there's no bonuses for innovation. In fact, if you take a risk and it fails, your career is over.

This is the kind of overblown rhetoric weve come to expect from engineers and entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley, and their insistence that governments should step aside in favour of true problem-solvers is clearly self-serving. But the idea that we should be looking to experts rather than politicians for solutions to massively complex problems like a deadly pandemic or a climate emergency is gaining traction everywhere.

The idea of an apolitical world is appealing more and more to people, argues Eri Bertsou, a senior researcher at the University of Zurich and co-editor of a 2020 book called The Technocratic Challenge to Government.

People are tired, and they are put off by the commotion and the disagreement of representative politics, Bertsou said. So it's this appeal of an efficient machine-like system where problems can be identified through evidence, facts, reason, rather than ideological beliefs. I think that a lot of people find that appealing.

Bertsou has been studying the rise of technocratic governments around the world, especially in Europe. In February 2021, Mario Draghi, an economist and former president of the European Central Bank who had never held political office, was named Italian prime minister to help manage the countrys post-pandemic economic recovery.

Draghi is a technocrat, chosen for the specific experience he brings to the job. Italians are fond of technocrats, especially when times are tough, and Draghi is the fourth technocrat prime minister there since 1993. You can also find cabinet-level technocrats in Greece, France and Lebanon, among other countries. But none of them would be embraced by Technocracy, because they are still operating within the price system, still treating symptoms, not the disease.

While the number of technocrats in government is on the rise, so, too, is the number of populist politicians who wear their lack of expertise like a badge of honour.

During the 2020 U.S. presidential campaign, U.S. President Donald Trump mocked his opponent, Joe Biden, for saying he would listen to the scientists when it came to managing COVID-19. If I listened totally to the scientists, Trump proclaimed, wed have a country right now that would be in a massive depression.

But theres been a price for not listening to the experts. Countries run by populist leaders of various shades particularly the U.S., Brazil and the U.K. have recorded among the highest COVID-19 death rates.

For longtime Technocracy Incorporated supporters like Ed Blechschmidt, the idea that anyone would question the science around the pandemic, or anything else, is mystifying.

You cant argue with science and technology, he insisted. Science exists and scientific fact is fact. You cant have a political position about it. You have to recognize it and implement science.

But as weve discovered during the pandemic, science can sometimes speak with many voices, and by definition, representative democracy requires a constant balancing act among competing interests. Governments have to listen to the scientists but also to business people, parents and others.

Bertsou believes that by insisting on finding the one correct solution to every problem, Technocracy has presented a false dichotomy. There is not one type of scientific knowledge, and no one way of governing social problems.

Technocracy Incorporated began nearly a hundred years ago by seeking answers to two important questions: Why on a continent so rich in natural resources, energy and industrial capacity, were so many people suffering? And how could democracy, with all its obvious imperfections, continue to function effectively in a world where science and technology played an ever more dominant role?

Technocracys answers to both those questions were bold, radical, overly complicated and wildly impractical. Today, no one is talking about a North American Technate or a 16-hour work week or replacing money with energy certificates. But it would be wrong to dismiss Technocracy Incorporated as just another failed utopian scheme not while the answers to those two questions remains so elusive.

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In science we trust | CBC News - CBC.ca - CBC.ca

To date, five rovers made in America, at least partially, have been sent to the Red Planet. They are the Sojourner, Spirit,Opportunity, Curiosity, and Perseverance. Of them, only two are presently still active, the Curiosity and the recently arrived Perseverance, and theyre accompanied by a tiny helicopter called Ingenuity.

Each of the five land-based pieces of hardware sent up there by the Americans is extraordinary in one way or another. A good chunk of them far exceeded their initial life expectancy, some have made discoveries no one expected, while others (or should we say pretty much all of them) have sent back precious data and images that kept keep scientists busy and the public in the loop.

Even if you personally are not all that interested in space exploration in general or the exploits of the human-made rover on Mars in particular, chances are you at least once saw a photo of the planet sent back by the said rovers or a selfie portraying one of them surrounded by the surreal Martian landscape.

Theyre extraordinary stills, revealing a world our race might eventually end up colonizing, a future home for the generations to come. They also reveal how, at times, the lack of an idea so simple it should seem obvious to all allows others to take the lead.

The American photos of Mars show just the desolate landscape, or the motionless rovers from awkward angles, at times weirdly distorted on account of a large number of shots being stitched together for a more panoramic look.

To date, despite decades of experience, American engineers didnt think of sending to the planet a wireless camera one of the rovers could plant in the soil and snap the first, proper photo of a human-made wheeled machine on Mars.

Also, despite decades of experience, the Americans didnt consider for one bit they could use that camera to snap an actual video of the rovers moving on the reddish surface of the neighboring piece of rock, making this entire Mars exploration thing much more real for us here on Earth.

The Chinese did both in the span of a single month.

As you might already know, back in May, the Asian nation became the second to land a rover on Mars. Zhurong is how its called, and while its not supposed to live for long, it has already made history.

Shortly after it came down from its lander, it planted a wireless camera in the Martian soil and moved away some 30 feet (10 meters) to take a photo of itself and the lander, Chinese flag includedthat reminds me, when's the last time you've seen the American flag on Mars?

That happened in mid-June, but now, as the month is drawing to a close, the Chinese released something even better: actual footage of the Zhurong moving away from the camera (check tweet attached below), which, if I am not mistaking, is the first time humans can experience a rover from this perspective.

China is a very propaganda-conscious nation and one that has ambitions of colonizing the solar system. It has these ambitions since about the same time as the Americans, but it is only in the past two decades or so that they have really taken off.

Thats because China is pumping huge amounts of resources into space exploration. In the span of a few short years, the country sent its people to space, landed on Mars, and sent a crew to a space station it just began building in orbit this month.

The scary (or encouraging, depending on which side of the fence you're on) part is that this whole space thing seems to come natural to the Chinese, who make it look all easy and simple.

It might be a big gamble, but if I were a betting man, Id put my money on China becoming the first to send people to Mars, and who knows, even set up a colony there.

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At the Rate Things Are Going, American Rovers Might Find Chinese Cities on Mars - autoevolution

Biography author Walter Isaacson has been in touch with Tesla Inc(NASDAQ: TSLA) CEO Elon Musk to discuss the possibility of penning a biography of the billionaireentrepreneur, as per a Fox Business report.

What Happened: As per the report, Isaacson, whose biography on late Apple Inc (NASDAQ: AAPL) co-founder Steve Jobs sold over 3 million copies, has spoken with Musk over the telephone in recent weeks; the two plan additional conversations before a final decision is made.

Musk is known to have shown interest in having someone of Isaacson's stature write his biography but a final decision is still pending, the report said citing sources.

Isaacson conducted more than 40 interviews and spent two years writing his most popular biography on the iconicAppleco-founder.

The author of "The Code Breaker," "Leonardo da Vinci," "Benjamin Franklin," and "Einstein" in an interview with Yahoo Financein Marchcalled Musk in some ways Steve Jobs of our time because hes crazy enough to think he can change the world.

See Also: Did Billionaire Elon Musk Sell All His Mansions To Live In A $50,000 House?

Why It Matters: In February, Musksaid on Twitter that he is writing a book on Tesla and SpaceX. The renowned entrepreneur and innovator who wants to colonize Mars, has created a unique legacy of his own with a mix of invention and entrepreneurial spirit.

Price Action: Tesla shares closed 1.17% lower at $671.87 on Friday.

For news coverage in French, Italian, or Spanish, check outBenzinga France,Benzinga Italia, orBenzinga Espaa.

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