Archive | News

Uber is the poster child for all that is wrong with Silicon Valley culture. Broculture. Disdain for the law because the company believes itself so special. Most of all, it pretends it can become profitable by blowing through billions in venture capital funding without ever making a profit or even having a remote possibility for doing so. They get bonus points for spending money on hare-brained schemes, like flying cars, rather than focusing on their core business.

Tell me again why Travis Kalanick is such a great CEO, because that makes no sense to me. Uber is losing billions of dollars. His blundering arrogance has cost them huge amounts of business and the negative PR is, gasp, hurting the bizarre valuation of $70 billion for a private company that has never made money. Investors are getting twitchy that the whole thing could crater.

Really, why is a company that is losing billions valued at $70 billion? That is completely insane.

[Uber] has been losing money at a rate that some tech analysts say is faster than any technology company ever. It lost nearly $3 billions in 2016 (and another billion or two in China), and it has already lost $700 million in the first quarter of 2017.

Uber has become stuck in a pattern of using its venture capital funding to subsidize at least 50% of every ride in order to cut fares and try to gain a monopoly position that can drive the competition out of business. In short, Uber is charging too little for each passenger ride.

Those who say there is nothing to the Trump / Russia investigation, that Russia did not interfere in the election, now need to believe that Obama, multiple intelligence services, and multiple members of Congress of both parties are lying and that Donald Trump alone is telling the truth, even though by his actions Trump has rather clearly been obstructing justice. Which is mighty peculiar behavior for someone who claims innocence.

…an intelligence bombshell, a report drawn from sourcing deep inside the Russian government that detailed Russian President Vladi­mir Putin’s direct involvement in a cyber campaign to disrupt and discredit the U.S. presidential race.

But it went further. The intelligence captured Putin’s specific instructions on the operation’s audacious objectives — defeat or at least damage the Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, and help elect her opponent, Donald Trump.

Obama also approved a previously undisclosed covert measure that authorized planting cyber weapons in Russia’s infrastructure, the digital equivalent of bombs that could be detonated if the United States found itself in an escalating exchange with Moscow.