Congratulations to my long-time partner at Glenbrook, Carol Coye Benson! Carol has just published a new book on Global Payments.
Carol is a real industry expert with years of experience on this topic. If you’re looking to better understand the complexities of how payments work on a global scale you’ll want to read this new book.
Global Payments is available in both paperback and Kindle formats.
Carol and I collaborated many years ago to write the book Payments Systems in the U.S., now in its third edition with co-author Russ Jones.
“Hopefully, by the middle of the year, I hope most Americans will have been immunized,” Slaoui, head of the Trump administration’s vaccine initiative, said … “If enough people are immunized, we should have this pandemic under control in the second half of 2021.”
Here is my outlook for 2021: We will all be even more sick to death of lockdown, more bored silly working from home, and damned tired of re-living the same Groundhog day over and over again.
The study, which relied on objective data from tens of thousands of people about how they spent their days, found that those who were the most sedentary faced a high risk of dying young, but if people got up and moved, they slashed that threat substantially, even if they did not move much.
He worried that if he didn’t keep up he’d be left behind, because some people were running so quickly and with such focus that, if you didn’t do the same, you risked betraying your future.
The takeaway from this project should not be: no one will spend six months of their life just to hack my phone, I’m fine. Instead, it should be: one person, working alone in their bedroom, was able to build a capability which would allow them to seriously compromise iPhone users they’d come into close contact with. Scary stuff!
“This is a match made in heaven. Together, Salesforce and Slack will shape the future of enterprise software and transform the way everyone works in the all-digital, work-from-anywhere world. I’m thrilled to welcome Slack to the Salesforce Ohana once the transaction closes.”
If only I could, I decided, I would always winter here, like the redstarts and the goldfinches in the garden, like the arrowhead of white storks which flew over once under a blue moon, their wingbeats carrying through the silent night.
Trump and his team are doing lasting damage to American democracy as the president struggles to come to grips with the reality of his loss. And yet, these lawyers and officials will likely face no real consequences for their actions—and if they do, those repercussions will not be enough to address the scale of the problem.
A more promising approach would be to find issues on which individual senators would benefit politically from breaking with their leadership and supporting President Biden’s plan.
Some airline executives note that technology has always stimulated more business travel, not less. The easier it is to make connections in the business world, the more reason there is to go meet with people. Others say that this time it’s different.
Caffeine naps work for several reasons, some of which are obvious, some of which are not. You get the calm restfulness that a nap provides (without sleeping long enough to feel groggy), and you also benefit from the energy jolt from the cup of coffee.
“You don’t want to get ahead of yourself and claim any victories, but this has the makings of a very, very important positive impact on ending this outbreak,” said Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.”
Our failure to protect ourselves has caught up to us. The nation now must endure a critical period of transition, one that threatens to last far too long, as we set aside justifiable optimism about next spring and confront the dark winter ahead.
So I learned to be much bolder. And if you make a wrong decision, you make another decision. Those were really the two things: What’s the vision? And be bold. Take those tough decisions. Gumption. I’m trying to bring the same values and thinking.
But nobody I’ve ever covered treats an audience with the blithe disdain of Mr. Ruddy. He has them watching a great story — a thriller, a whodunit — about a stolen election. He thinks they’re stupid enough to fall for it, dumb enough to keep watching even after the fantasy inevitably dissolves…
We are living through a monetary revolution so multifaceted that few of us comprehend its full extent. The technological transformation of the internet is driving this revolution. The pandemic of 2020 has accelerated it
Compare that to the $10 billion or so it would cost to buy merchant silicon and something becomes clear – Apple is not saving that much money by building its own silicon.
Liebig’s work – improved upon in the following decades, particularly by scientists who learned how to manufacture ammonia synthetically – gave rise to the ammonia-based fertilizer industry that still dominates global agriculture. It’s hard to exaggerate how big a deal it’s been.
Working behind the scenes is one of the world’s richest men, neither a scientist nor a doctor, who sees himself and his $50 billion foundation as uniquely prepared to take a central part.
Every strand of mRNA is made up of four molecular building blocks called nucleosides. But in its altered, synthetic form, one of those building blocks, like a misaligned wheel on a car, was throwing everything off by signaling the immune system. So Karikó and Weissman simply subbed it out for a slightly tweaked version, creating a hybrid mRNA that could sneak its way into cells without alerting the body’s defenses
With his denial of the outcome, despite a string of courtroom defeats, Trump endangered America’s democracy, threatened to undermine national security and public health, and duped millions of his supporters into believing, perhaps permanently, that Biden was elected illegitimately
For many of my generation, our long-cherished hope for a better, greater India is all but gone. We wanted to trade some of our democratic chaos for a little bit more growth. We ended up with less of both.
You have to have a name. But with the borderless nature of our economies, various trademark challenges, and other hurdles, you are lucky to land on one that is worth having.
“We can’t lose sight of the fact that, fundamentally, everything has changed. Will there be more stimulus money? Will people be shy about spending? We just don’t know.”
With sparse crowds and none of the stampedes of holidays past, some retail watchers started to refer to Black Friday as Blasé Friday instead — and that was even before the virus hit.
Here at Gleason Beach, once referred to as Malibu North, the beach gets drowned during high tide. Bits of concrete and rebar are all that remain of 11 clifftop homes that have already surrendered to the sea.
Three factors — the logic of partisan polarization, which inaccurate polling obscured; the strength of the juiced pre-Covid-19 economy; and the success of Mr. Trump’s denialist, open-everything-up nonresponse to the pandemic — mostly explain why Democrats didn’t fare better.
At a low point in his party’s existence, with much of the GOP’s leadership class pre-writing their own political epitaphs by empowering Trump to lay waste to the country’s foundational democratic norms, an obscure lawyer from west Michigan stood on principle.
The number of travelers flying Wednesday was half of what it was on the day before Thanksgiving in 2019, before the coronavirus was a threat in the United States.
South Dakota has a positivity rate of more than 43 per cent of those tested, according to Johns Hopkins University. That is among the highest in the nation and compared with about 3 per cent in New York.
If you have data that spans a very wide range of values (different orders of magnitude) then you pretty much have to create a semi-log plot so that you can see all of it.
Sunrise – Marin County, California – Thanksgiving 2020 – by Scott Loftesness
This blog began November 25, 2001 – nineteen years ago yesterday.
Thanksgiving, celebrated on the fourth Thursday in November since 1941 due to federal legislation, has been an annual tradition in the United States by presidential proclamation since 1863 …
This year we emailed a dozen people whom we respect and who know a lot, asking what they’d seen, experienced or realized this annus horribilis that left them moved or grateful.
We are going to need everything we can get from science and the human spirit because we are facing enormous challenges that will not end with the pandemic.
Gratitude is absolutely a key component in a practical spiritual toolkit. For one thing, it’s the antidote to self-pity. The two are incompatible feelings; you can’t be grateful and self-pitying at the same time—the two won’t arise together and seldom co-exist.
A few years ago, I started the practice of writing down one thing I was grateful for every day. It is one of the first things I do every morning, and I find it helps me get the day started right.
36 days remain until the end of the year. I started this blog on November 25, 2001 – nineteen years ago today! What a trip it’s been!
Marin Morning – Fall 2020 – by Scott Loftesness
The Losses We Share – New York Times (Meghan Markle) – So this Thanksgiving, as we plan for a holiday unlike any before — many of us separated from our loved ones, alone, sick, scared, divided and perhaps struggling to find something, anything, to be grateful for — let us commit to asking others, “Are you OK?”
A novel approach to truth-telling – Financial Times – Twenty years ago, I assumed that the world’s two largest democracies, India and the US, would stay on course, never imagining that both countries — among many others — would see the rise of populists and the loss of so many freedoms.
Introducing the Eisenhower Matrix – Eisenhower – The Eisenhower Matrix, also referred to as Urgent-Important Matrix, helps you decide on and prioritize tasks by urgency and importance, sorting out less urgent and important tasks which you should either delegate or not do at all.
I Remember When Rock Was Young – New York Times (JenniferFinney Boylan) – The combination is weird, joyful and gorgeous.
Bitcoin finally finds a rationale in doomsday scenarios – Financial Times – To be clear, I don’t believe in the risk of global authoritarianism painted by the cryptocurrency’s most fervid backers. But as a doomsday contingency system, I am glad someone created bitcoin just in case.
On (not) leaving San Francisco – On my Om – Right now, it seems that not just leaving San Francisco, but kicking it on the way out, has become a bit of a meme. And with all the bizarre propositions on our election ballots, our rabid political ecosystem, our declining quality of life, and the prospects of rising taxes, I can understand the temptation.
How Venture Capitalists Are Deforming Capitalism – New Yorker – Dunlevie admitted to a partner that he wasn’t certain how WeWork would ever become profitable, but he was taken with Neumann. Dunlevie said to the partner, “Let’s give him some money, and he’ll figure it out.” – see also Fred Wilson’s comments: Thoughts On Charles Duhigg’s New Yorker Piece – There is more truth to that article than anyone in the venture capital industry wants to admit. The idea that capital alone can create a strong company is a flawed idea that the VC industry pursued with a lot of passion for most of the last decade.
iPhone 12 Diary: Apple ProRAW photos are the clincher for me – 9to5Mac – ProRAW is Apple’s attempt to give us the best of both worlds. To include computational photography features, but also to give us a file with as much data as possible for use in editing.
Trump Lost The Election. Why Do His Supporters Refuse To Believe It? – Refinery29 – Trump, of course, knows he has lost the election. But by creating doubt around the results, he is not only trying to undermine both the eventual Biden administration, but also to position himself as a winner to his base in an effort to subsequently make money on speeches, rallies, and books.
How Trump placed a ticking time bomb at the center of our system – Washington Post (Greg Sargent) – While this time the state legislatures appear unwilling to carry out Trump’s scheme, and a few GOP senators have signaled that they would not agree to count rogue electors in any case, that’s hardly a guarantee against future breakdowns.
It’s Time to Unfollow Donald Trump – GQ – Soon, the contents of his timeline will be no more important than that of any of this country’s many replacement-level MAGA social media personalities with bald eagle avatars, and I hope you do not follow many of them, either.
Qantas Will Require Passengers To Be Vaccinated – OneMileataTime.com – In an interview with Australian TV show “A Current Affair,” Qantas CEO Alan Joyce made some interesting comments. Specifically, Joyce said that Qantas will require that passengers show proof of having received a coronavirus vaccine to travel internationally with the airline.
Need a Hypothesis? This A.I. Has One – New York Times – The machines may already have cracked hidden codes behind many human behaviors, but it will require live brains to help tease those out.
What to Know About California’s Vaccine Rollout – New York Times – “Don’t anticipate or expect that you can go down to a local pharmacy anytime in this calendar year and likely get a vaccination.”
Productive Uncertainty – Jerry Neumann – It’s tempting, as a venture investor, to back companies developing amazing new technologies. But this often doesn’t work out as well as investing in companies that are using existing technologies in a new way.
Expert advice on the near future of cheap travel – SFGate – The most surprising and deepest discounts have been those summer flight deals to Europe. Cheap summer flights to Europe in July and August are almost unheard of.
Bitcoin Trades Again Near Record, Driven by New Group of Buyers – Wall St. Journal – The rally has attracted a wide cast of characters, from the Wall Street billionaires Paul Tudor Jones and Stanley Druckenmiller to momentum investors who aim to ride winning assets higher and losing markets lower.
