Quote of the Day
“I think we have to recognize that for most of our history, our institutions were explicitly racist.”
- US Attorney General William Barr in an interview on CNBC.
Well, well.
Policing reform can work in the US: Camden N.J is an encouraging case-study
From Alex Tabarrok:
One of the few bright spots over the past week was Camden, NJ where instead of beating protesters the police joined them. Protests in Camden were peaceful and orderly and there was little to no looting. As I wrote last year, Camden disbanded its police force in 2013, nullifying the old union contract, and rebuilt.
Canden was sometimes reckoned to be the third most dangerous city in the US. Ever since the reforms, all of its key law-enforcement metrics have improved. The key to it seems to be breaking the police union’s control over the municipality. Which is interesting. Often unions are key to protecting workers. But sometimes they become toxic — as anyone who (like me) who remembers the print unions in London’s Fleet Street can remember.
Facebook is an autocracy, so it has a natural affinity with autocrats
My Observer column yesterday made the point that Mark Zuckerberg holds the key to whether Trump gets re-elected or not and predicted that he won’t do anything to prevent re-election.
This conjecture seemed a bit extreme to some readers. But here is a very respectable columnist, Rana Foroohar, writing in today’s FT…
That brings us to what Facebook’s stance is really about — power. Like most large, ubiquitous and systemically important companies that operate globally, Facebook aligns itself with the powers that be. If it wants to stay this big and unregulated, Facebook cannot afford to upset the rulers of countries where it operates, no matter how abhorrent their actions. We saw that in Myanmar, where military personnel used Facebook to help incite the Rohingya massacres. Now we see it in the US, where Facebook refuses to run afoul of a president who just called in troops to tear gas citizens.
It is a kind of oligarchic symbiosis that we haven’t really seen in the US since 1877. That was when then-president Rutherford B. Hayes, who had been helped into office by the railway barons, ordered 1,200 federal troops to Baltimore to put down what he called a labour “insurrection”. It was the first time that federal troops had been turned against American workers, and it transformed what might have remained a local conflict into the Great Railway Strike of 1877.
And, for the avoidance of doubt, Zuckerberg is an authentic autocrat
Here’s the relevant section of the company’s SEC filing:
Our CEO has control over key decision making as a result of his control of a majority of the voting power of our outstanding capital stock.
Mark Zuckerberg, our founder, Chairman, and CEO, is able to exercise voting rights with respect to a majority of the voting power of our outstanding capital stock and therefore has the ability to control the outcome of matters submitted to our stockholders for approval, including the election of directors and any merger, consolidation, or sale of all or substantially all of our assets. This concentrated control could delay, defer, or prevent a change of control, merger,consolidation, or sale of all or substantially all of our assets that our other stockholders support, or conversely this concentrated control could result in the consummation of such a transaction that our other stockholders do not support. This concentrated control could also discourage a potential investor from acquiring our Class A common stock, which has limited voting power relative to the Class B common stock, and might harm the trading price of our Class A common stock.In addition, Mr. Zuckerberg has the ability to control the management and major strategic investments of our company as a result of his position as our CEO andhis ability to control the election or replacement of our directors. In the event of his death, the shares of our capital stock that Mr. Zuckerberg owns will be transferred to the persons or entities that he has designated. As a board member and officer, Mr. Zuckerberg owes a fiduciary duty to our stockholders and must actin good faith in a manner he reasonably believes to be in the best interests of our stockholders. As a stockholder, even a controlling stockholder, Mr. Zuckerberg isentitled to vote his shares, and shares over which he has voting control as governed by a voting agreement, in his own interests, which may not always be in the interests of our stockholders generally.
In other words, absolute control.
Solving online events
Very perceptive essay by Benedict Evans on why it’s so difficult to replace large face-to-face conferences with online events.
Online events remind me a lot of ecommerce in about 1996. The software is raw and rough around the edges, and often doesn’t work very well, though that can get fixed. But more importantly, no-one quite knows what they should be building.
A conference, or an ‘event’, is a bundle. There is content from a stage, with people talking or presenting or doing panels and maybe taking questions. Then, everyone talks to each other in the hallways and over coffee and lunch and drinks. Separately, there may be a trade fair of dozens or thousands of booths and stands, where you go to see all of the products in the industry at once, and talk to the engineers and salespeople. And then, there are all of the meetings that you schedule because everyone is there. At a really big ‘conference’ many people don’t even go to the actual event itself. At CES or MWC, a lot of the people who go never actually make it to the conference or the show floor – they spend their days in hotel suites in Las Vegas or Barcelona meeting clients and partners. Everyone goes because everyone goes.
The only part of that bundle that obviously works online today is the content. It’s really straightforward to turn a conference presentation or a panel into a video stream, but none of the rest is straightforward at all.
First, we haven’t worked out good online tools for many of the reasons people go to these events…
Insightful essay, worth reading in full.
Quarantine diary — Day 79
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