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Thursday, December 31, 2015
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#Happy #New #Year #Friends ..... Let's Celebrate .. Party ON :)
People Tried Really Hard To Figure Out What's Going On With Airbnb In 2015
Here’s what — if anything — we learned.
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2015 was a huge year for Airbnb. It earned a $25 billion valuation. It was used to book over 1 million stays per night. It launched its services in Cuba.
But 2015 was not a year without obstacles for the tech startup that, for many, has — until this year — represented the softer side of the so-called "sharing economy." Facing regulatory pressure in big cities like New York, L.A., and San Francisco, Airbnb spent much of the year — and its marketing budget — trying to convince the world that the platform is good for cities, good for middle-class families, and good for people in general.
But it's been hard — maybe harder than it should be — to prove that that's true. And meanwhile, Airbnb's opponents have argued that not only is the company not good for regular old middle-income city dwellers, but that its short-term rentals are actually causing a decline in affordable housing in certain cities and neighborhoods.
There's no doubt that some people do rely on Airbnb revenue to stay in homes that, what with rising costs of living, they couldn't otherwise afford. But it's also true that, in certain cases, unchecked short-term renting can have an adverse impact on rent.
Over the course of the last year, city governments, news outlets, and nonprofit organizations of all stripes have strived to figure out whether the net effect of Airbnb is positive or negative. But because Airbnb has been reluctant to share much information about where and how much the platform has been used, they've have had to cobble together a picture of the company's impact by scraping publicly available information from its website. They've been able to draw some conclusions from analyzing that data, many of which Airbnb has actively contested. The company, in turn, has released data reports of its own — reports that, unsurprisingly, tend to confirm that the platform is helping, not hurting, regular Americans.
With all the reports and counter-reports on Airbnb that have emerged this year, what have we actually learned? Given the efforts of housing advocates, attorneys general, data journalists and, to an extent, the company itself, are we actually any closer to understanding the impact of Airbnb?
The easiest way to spot rule-breaking on Airbnb is to count the number of hosts who list multiple properties on the site, since those people are likely not renting out a room in their home, but operating as a small business.
* In New Orleans, 46% of hosts listed multiple properties.
* In Vancouver, 35% of hosts listed multiple properties.
* In Boston, 15% of hosts listed multiple properties.
Murray Cox is the amateur data scientist behind Inside Airbnb. In 2015, he made it his mission to scrape and analyze as much data about short-term renting on the site as possible — from 50 cities globally. He found that, in most cities, hosts with more than one property listed accounted for a third of the overall listings in that city.
In fairness, Airbnb has taken steps to shut down users running such operations.
* Before April 2014, there were nearly 100 hosts with more than 10 properties listed on Airbnb in New York City. After April 2014, when the company cracked down on these "bad actors," there were less than 10 such hosts. But by early 2015, there were 22 hosts with more than 10 properties listed, according to a report by travel site Skift.
Despite Airbnb's attempts, the problem persists. As of early 2015, 29% of Airbnb listings in New York City belonged to hosts who had listed two or more properties, according to The Verge. And as of mid-November, at least 46 hosts were listing six or more entire-home properties in NYC, according to Airbnb's own data.
Those numbers might seem small, but multi-property hosts actually account for a lot of Airbnb's revenues.
* During a recent 12-month period, hosts with more than one entire-home listing in New York City accounted for more than 30% of all New York revenue. (And that includes share-home and shared-room listings.)
* And hosts with at least three entire-home listings accounted for more than 18% of all New York City revenue.
Airbnb seems fairly committed to getting the major offenders off the site, a development that happened in the last year. But the so-called "bad actors" that remain are still making a solid chunk of change off the site.
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Wednesday, December 30, 2015
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Microsoft Wants You To Take Pretty Selfies -- With Your iPhone
Microsoft Selfie promises to tweak your pics for age, gender, skin tone and lighting.
Remember when Microsoft released that age-guessing tool?
Microsoft
Well, the company is once again bringing its machine learning techniques and algorithms to bear on our photos, but this time it's using them to do something that's actually useful: making selfies look better.
"Microsoft Selfie" is an iOS app that promises to subtly optimize selfies, calibrating them for things like "age, gender, skin tone and lighting." It's not exactly a novel concept — Chinese smartphone manufacturer Xiaomi offers a similar feature. But it is another example of Microsoft extending its reach beyond Windows as it course corrects for our increasingly mobile world.
This isn't Microsoft's first selfie app. Indeed, Microsoft Selfie appears to be a stripped down version of the Windows Phone app Lumia Selfie rejiggered for iOS. That said, with Microsoft's share of the mobile market at a piddling 1.7%, the company has a far better shot of getting some traction for its new selfie app on the iPhone than it does on devices running its own mobile OS.
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Take A Look At The Future Of Facebook
Jason Stein
While on vacation in Aruba yesterday, Jason Stein, CEO of social media advertising agency Laundry Service, tweeted two screenshots from a new Facebook test that showed up on his wife’s phone. The test inserted a number of different content feeds next to Facebook’s traditional News Feed, with Travel, Style and Headline channels visible in the pictures.
Stein described these specialized content feeds as a “a newspaper made up of all the world's newspapers.” The vision is one previously articulated by Facebook’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, who once said he hoped his platform would be a “perfect personalized newspaper for every person in the world.” Text, photos and outside links are still the dominant form of content shared on Facebook. And the importance of links to outside media, for example, drove the company to build Instant Articles, a product that hosts outside publisher content within Facebook in order to get stories to render as fast as possible (BuzzFeed is a partner). Scrolling through specialized content feeds, each replete with Instant Articles could potentially be a great experience.
It’s All About The Movies
But the test gets especially interesting when you consider video. As far back as 2014, Facebook proclaimed that video would be its dominant content format within five years. This shift made sense given that costs of producing and publishing video are falling while the bandwidth availability is increasing.
But Facebook gave little indication of how it could present all this video content in a coherent, enjoyable way. It could, perhaps, turn the News Feed into a big video feed. But jumping from a CNN segment, to a clip of your friend’s baby, to a traditional goofy internet video sounds a bit jarring. Facebook’s recently-rolled-out dedicated video experience, while still new, is subject to this problem.
These specialized feeds, though, might provide an answer. At the very least, they’re an attempt by Facebook to figure out how to make the content people consume on its platform more coherent than the sometimes scattershot News Feed. It paves the way for a better video experience.
If people do want to consume video within these feeds, still an open question, then Facebook can puts its most powerful tool into play: its algorithm. For years now, Facebook has been trying to figure out the exact pieces of content to show us based on what we’ve interacted with in the past, what our networks are interested in, and a handful of other factors. The algorithm powers the News Feed which while far from perfect, is effective at displaying relevant content. Put Facebook’s algorithm to use within a Style or Sports vertical and one day it could display a stream of videos catered to each user’s specific interests.
Stein believes Facebook’s algorithm can help organize web videos in a way that might make sense out of the overabundance of them. “When when you sit down to watch video, especially longer form, you’re in the mood for a specific genre, be it sports, comedy, music, drama, news, documentary, and so on,” he told BuzzFeed News. “Algorithmically organizing videos within genres is critical to the future of video. This new Facebook UI is likely the backbone for its video and TV apps.”
Stein then provided screenshots revealing the existence of far more content feeds available outside the three displayed in his initial screenshots. Among them: Food, Entertainment, Health & Fitness, Animals & Pets, Sports, Games, Science & Tech. Not only that, each vertical is customizable. So someone interested in the Style channel, for instance, can decide whether they want to see women's fashion or men's or whether they're interested in beauty tips, jewelry, accessories, or some combination of the above. This is the foundation of even more personalized channels.
For Facebook, the business implications are clear. It already has the best audience data in the world, since we, its users, have effectively helped it build it the dream catalogue for advertisers by telling it everything about ourselves. But advertisers understand that while a well-targeted ads may be good, a well-targeted ad in context can be great. In other words, when a beer manufacturer knows you’re a beer drinker, they’re better served showing you an ad while you’re watching sports highlights as opposed to a video of your nephew’s first steps. The ad served next to the baby video still hits its target, but it won’t be as effective.
Many questions remain — most notably whether Facebook will see this new format through. But also it remains to be seen if content creators will produce the volume of quality video needed to help Facebook live up to its five year promise. But assuming Zuckerberg and Co’s assumptions play out, what we’re looking at today may very well be the next big step for a company determined to seize even more control over the distribution of information and entertainment as we move deeper into the social age.
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'Tis The Season For Online Dating
If you've been sitting on your parents’ couch this holiday season glumly contemplating failed relationships past and your inevitable partnerless future, do not despair. There is hope for you yet. Because when the clock strikes midnight Thursday, not only will you be making out with some random stranger, you’ll be entering the hottest month of the year for online daters.
That's right: January sees far more matches and dating-related messages than any other month, according to data from dating apps Coffee Meets Bagel and Hinge. So hit pause on Netflix, take a shower maybe, and get ready to meet the person of your dreams via a match notification pushed to your phone's homescreen.
"Without fail, January is our biggest month each year," Karen Fein, VP of marketing at the dating app Hinge, told BuzzFeed News. Same goes for dating app Coffee Meets Bagel, which saw a 44% growth in matches last January over the previous month, and a 56% bump in messages exchanged on its platform.
The uptick may be due to an unscientific phenomenon called cuffing season, during which people look to form relationships to get them through the colder months.
"We think there is an uptick in matching and messaging post-Christmas because people are seeking a flame to warm the winter/post-Holiday chill," Coffee Meets Bagel spokesperson Liina Potter explained. "You could say 'cuffing season' is in full effect. In the New Year, people also seek the seed to create new beginnings, which includes new relationships."
If you mess up in January, you should still be OK. The next two months or so are still prime time for online dating, according to Hinge's Fein. "Men on Hinge are 15% more likely to want a relationship in the winter than they are in other seasons," she said. "Women are 5% more likely."
If all else fails, pray for snow. According to Fein, snowstorms also tend to cause big increases in activity on Hinge.
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Facebook's Free Basics Shuts Down In Egypt, Continuing Troubled Run
Facebook's Free Basics program, which provides free internet access to a select group of apps and websites, has been shut down in Egypt, according to an Associated Press report.
In a statement provided to the AP, Facebook said it hoped to ""resolve this situation soon."
"We're disappointed that Free Basics will no longer be available in Egypt," the statement said. "More than 1 million people who were previously unconnected had been using the Internet because of these efforts."
It's still unclear why the service was halted in Egypt, but the shutdown marks another setback for the program, which has been the subject of a regulatory battle in India. Detractors there have derided the initiative for favoring some apps and sources of information over others, something they say goes against the principles of Net Neutrality. Free Basics is still live in over 30 countries.
Facebook — and social media in general — played a prominent role in Egypt's Tahrir Square uprising in 2011. The platform was a key organizing tool for demonstrators who eventually overthrew the government. There have since been several attempts to block it.
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A Redditor Made Some Hilarious Honest Ads For Free Basics
“Join your ignorant friends by showing support for what is misleadingly called a ‘Digital India’.”
The Times of India
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12 Times People In Tech Apologized In 2015
#Sorry.
Reddit had a rocky year, to say the least, and its problems boiled over during the July 4th weekend when moderators closed off prominent subreddits to the public. The blackout protested Reddit's dismissal of community moderator and employee Victoria Taylor, whom Reddit moderators had seen as an ally who championed the popular "Ask Me Anything" feature. The crisis prompted then-interim CEO Ellen Pao to post a 335-word apology for Reddit's "long history of mistakes" and pledge to give moderators new tools and more support. "I know these are just words, and it may be hard for you to believe us," Pao wrote. "I don't have all the answers, and it will take time for us to deliver concrete results." But Redditors weren't interested in waiting. Pao resigned a week later.
Ellen Pao
Justin Sullivan / Getty Images
The Shade Room is a celebrity gossip site that publishes straight to social media, earning it more than 2.5 million followers and the nickname "Instagram's TMZ." In May, Instagram shut it down, apparently mistakenly. The account was later back online.
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Tuesday, December 29, 2015
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Priest Reportedly Suspended For Riding A Hoverboard During Mass
“He will be out of the parish and will spend some time to reflect on this past event,” the diocese of a Philippine church said.
A priest in the Philippines is in trouble after a video showing him singing a Christmas song while riding a hoverboard during Mass has gone viral.
Several parishioners are seen cheering and clapping in the video as the priest rolls around the nave like a pro.
But the Diocese of San Pablo, Laguna, condemned the priest's actions on Tuesday, saying, "That was wrong," according to a report by Rappler, a Philippines-based news website.
According to a statement from the diocese, the priest, who has not been identified, sang a Christmas song while riding the hoverboard around the church as a way of greeting his parishioners during the Christmas Eve Mass.
"[The Mass] is the Church's highest form of worship," the diocese said. "Consequently, it is not a personal celebration where one can capriciously introduce something to get the attention of the people."
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Sidecar Is Shutting Down Its Ride-Hailing Service
Sidecar, a ride-sharing and delivery service that never quite caught on like Lyft or Uber, is calling it quits. The company said Tuesday that it will cease operations at 2pm Pacific time on December 31 -- just before the New Year's Eve rush.
Founded in 2012, Sidecar came early to the on-demand ride-sharing market, but struggled to compete with more well-funded rivals like Uber and Lyft. Despite some valiant attempts at differentiation with medical marijuana deliveries and a feature that allowed passengers to choose the gender of their driver, the company -- which had raised about $35 million from a handful of investors -- found it was unable to continue on as a ride-hailing and delivery business.
"Today is a turning point for Sidecar as we prepare to end our ride and delivery service so we can work on strategic alternatives and lay the groundwork for the next big thing," Co-founders Sunil Paul and Jahan Khanna wrote in a post to Medium. "... This is the end of the road for the Sidecar ride and delivery service, but it’s by no means the end of the journey for the company."
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Camper Van Beethoven Singer Sues Spotify For $150 Million
Camper Van Beethoven
Spotify has taken some flak over the years for paying too little in royalty fees to the musicians and songwriters whose music it distributes. Now the streaming music service has been slapped with a lawsuit claiming it sometimes doesn't pay any royalties at all.
On Monday, Camper Van Beethoven and Cracker frontman David Lowery filed a class-action lawsuit against Spotify alleging that the company knowingly streamed songs to its more than 75 million users without obtaining the proper licenses to do so. First reported by Billboard, the suit seeks some $150 million damages for a proposed class expected to exceed 100 members.
At the crux of the suit is Lowery's claim that Spotify has created a "$17 to $25 million reserve" to pay royalties to artists whose work it has streamed without licensing, but it hasn't bothered to find those artists to make payment.
"Our argument is, we're not that hard to track down," Victor Krummenacher, a member of Camper Van Beethoven eligible to participate in the suit, told BuzzFeed News. "If [BuzzFeed] can track me down — and I'm not a principal in the suit — Spotify should be able to track us down to license our songs."
But it hasn't, Krummenacher said. Instead, Spotify is holding on to the money, waiting for artists to hit it up for payment. "They black box the money," he said.
This isn't the first time Spotify has run into trouble over copyright and royalty issues; The company is currently involved in settlement negotiations with the National Music Publishers Association. In the past, Spotify has argued that the byzantine music licensing structure, which requires payments for both recording and publishing rights, is too complex to manage for a catalog of over 30 million songs.
“We are committed to paying songwriters and publishers every penny,” Spotify said in a statement. “Unfortunately, especially in the United States, the data necessary to confirm the appropriate rights holders is often missing, wrong or incomplete.”
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The Year We Almost Lived In The Future
Apple
This past September, near the end of one of its marathon keynote events, Apple dimmed the lights to wrap up its presentation with a one-minute ad spot for the iPhone 6S. It’s vintage Apple: breezy, cross-cultural, feel-good, and trying just hard enough, with a couple of quick celebrity cameos from the likes of Bill Hader and Selena Gomez. “This is the iPhone 6S,” it begins, “not much has changed...except...” The next 50 or so seconds feature a remarkably well-lit and masterfully written gadget specs and features summary, ultimately concluding with the iPhone’s new tagline: “The only thing that’s changed is everything.”
It was savvy branding for one of Apple's iPhone S product cycles, where the company is touting a phone that, while outfitted with some new guts and a few bells and whistles, is pretty much visually identical to last year’s model. “The only thing that’s changed is everything” suggests a paradigm shift or a pivotal moment of some kind. It’s a little glib; a bit overblown. And maybe, despite best efforts, it still manages to leave you longing for next year's model. But above all it's a decent way to try to think broadly about the year that was in technology.
2015 was, like most years in tech, mostly iterative. Only it wasn't sold that way at all. The past 12 months felt like a constant barrage of The Next Big Thing, punctuated by occasional scandals, crises, and chan-fueled internet tire fires.
Yet with few exceptions, what we were excited or terrified about wasn't what we had, it was what we were just about to get. It was a year when the blueprint for the next decade seemed to come into focus, with long-promised stuff arriving in forms we could actually touch and feel and use (self-driving Teslas! VR newspapers! Hoverboards!). And yet the things that did arrive seemed like stopgaps — placeholders for the real future. We were living in the year of the Rio, waiting on the arrival of the iPod. We have become conditioned to have ridiculously high expectations for the transformative power of Silicon Valley — borne of desktop computing, and the World Wide Web, and the iPod, and iPhones, and Uber, and, Wi-Fi, (Wi-Fi!), and, Christ, you ungrateful git, Christ, even Google search. Do you remember being amazed by Google search? It was amazing. Once.
And yet all of that has led to this point where tech companies are boxed into making (or at least framing) promises that they can’t yet deliver.
The Apple ad and its catchphrase “The only thing that’s changed is everything” were a direct response to preposterously high expectations. It’s a reminder that, Even if you missed it, don’t worry, we can confirm that we wowed you with all this exciting newness! It’s blunt confirmation that you tuned into this keynote for a glimpse at the future and Apple, as usual, delivered. It’s all kind of silly, but it belies a bigger truth: To promise anything small in 2015 is certain failure. And, if you can’t deliver anything at all, make sure whatever it will eventually be appears jaw-dropping — show us a whale breaching in the middle of a basketball court.
Technology is always marching steadily toward this promise of the future, but recent years have seen the pressure for companies to ratchet up expectations enormously — in part due to the equally enormous valuations and market capitalizations based on those expectations. Moonshots aren't ludicrous ambitions for tech's major players, they're table stakes. (Literally — in the past few weeks both Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin and Elon Musk's SpaceX have successfully launched and landed reusable rockets!) Innovation is increasingly measured by the changes one company can make in the physical world, often by attacking and upending centuries-old industries like transportation, agriculture, and housing. The bar for building something new has been raised so high that companies must reveal something transformative or be dismissed as a disappointment. Iteration is tolerated, but only for so long.
And so, 2015 feels like the year where the future almost arrived. (Google made prototype pants that act like touchscreens!) We got whiffs of truly transformative technology only to be told it wasn't quite ready for us yet. (Or in some cases, that it may have been something of a sham all along. See: Theranos.)
Google's smart fabric project.
Google / Via google.com
In March we were treated to a preview of the future of our wrists, courtesy of Apple. The promise was many-fold: freedom from the tyranny of our phones and their dizzying array of notifications, creating a seamless layer between our bodies and our devices, and elevating wearable technology from a luxury to a commodity. Android, Pebble, and others had already been there, of course. Words like Fitbit Killer were bandied about. Nobody knew anything, but certainty abounded. The Apple Watch would fail or succeed spectacularly. The only thing that would change was everything.
More than six months later and very little has changed. Apple has said it wouldn’t reveal sales numbers, leaving analysts to make semi-educated guesses. One firm suggests sales since launch have increased from 3.6 million to 3.9 million in the most recent quarter. That same firm estimates that competitor Fitbit shipped an estimated 4.7 million devices in the third quarter. Further analyst numbers suggest the cheaper Fitbit alternative has consistently outsold the pricey-to-extremely-pricey Apple Watch. And all this makes sense, given that the true potential of the Apple Watch is still unclear. The potential contours of a transformative wrist-bound computing future are visible, but the particulars have yet to take form.
This year we watched as one-time hardware Moonshots rolled closer into our view from the future’s horizon. Earlier this month I strapped Microsoft’s $3,000 Hololens to my face and found myself immersed in a fantastic world overlaid with robot bugs and three-dimensional models of the solar system. But that moment was fleeting — a brief tease of an augmented future yet to come. When Microsoft unveiled Hololens last January, the company dubbed it the “next step” of computing, and there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that could be the case — someday. But right now, that next step is just a tightly controlled demo shown off to reporters in a faux living room.
Similarly, 2015 was the year that virtual reality took its most significant strides to date. After decades of disappointment, VR proved, in no uncertain terms, that it is hopping off its treadmill to nowhere and coming for us. Soon. But, much like the Hololens, so much of the virtual reality we saw this year smacked of proof of concept and novelty. Go to a VR event/press conference and you’ll hear VR’s rallying cry: "If you think that’s cool, just wait until you see what we’re going to be able to do in a few years!" Of course that future is easy to envision. Late this year, the New York Times dropped over one million virtual reality boxes on its subscribers’ doorsteps, delivering a small and novel preview of what may soon feel commonplace. But if 2016 is the year that virtual reality arrives, it will do so unevenly. Fully realized experiences like Oculus will be immersive, but their high price will make them exclusive. Meanwhile, more accessible VR experiences like the NYT-distributed Google Cardboard models will still largely feel unsatisfactory — a tease of what’s to come.
The same goes for artificial intelligence, which draws perennial chatter from industry observers. Consider M, Facebook’s attempt at AI butlery. Powered by some slick algorithms and a trove of data, M appeared to demonstrate almost sentient behaviors; M helped book flights, prank friends — it even lowered cable bills.
But we only had part of the story. While M was indeed backed by some ambitious AI, the bulk of the requests submitted to it were handled by real human beings — contract workers doing things that artificial intelligence cannot.
Google, via Aleksandr Milewski
If you were one of a privileged few to ride in a self-driving car this year, you discovered that any vehicle strapped to the gills with LIDAR sensors and connected to Google’s cloud is arguably a better, more experienced driver than you’ll ever be. The rest of us were similarly wowed throughout the year with stats like: “Google’s cars have driven a total of 1.2 million miles on the road." In 2015 the once-ludicrous idea of autonomous vehicles suddenly seemed an inevitability. Any conversation about the promise of technology in 2015 probably, at some point, at least briefly mentioned self-driving cars as a yardstick by which to measure the industry. It’s perhaps the most tangible evidence of the future having arrived.
But aside from carefully rehearsed demos and admirable road test stats, autonomous vehicles have monumental hurdles to clear before they’re incorporated into our commutes. Difficult questions need to be asked — How is liability determined when an accident occurs? How will we keep them from getting hacked? Will they be fully autonomous or allow driver intervention? What happens to normal cars? — and dizzying logistics have to be dealt with. And if 2015 showed us the self-driving car’s potential, it also showed us how far we — the passengers — have to go to be trusted with the technology.
We’re aiming for a transportation revolution, but what we’ve got now are Tesla owners filming themselves while putting their vehicles on autopilot and climbing fully out of the driver’s seat.
Perhaps this all sounds depressing or short-sighted, but it really shouldn’t be. Bubbling underneath the frustration of a future just out of reach is a lot of hope and excitement for what’s next — maybe even light feelings of progress! It does however say everything about how breathless we’ve become in our insatiable request for the Next Big Thing. If you’ve trained your eye on the big, flashy, transformative breakthrough, then consumer tech in 2015 probably looked a lot like one of Apple’s S years: plenty to talk about and plenty new, but difficult from a bird’s-eye view to see how everything changed.
The last 12 months were less a year of undelivered promises or technological shortcomings than they were a year where our expectations and hype and optimism for something better down the line sometimes failed to align with reality. 2015 was a year in which we saw the future more clearly than ever, but still couldn't quite get to it. Sure, we finally have hoverboards* — but they still have training wheels.
*Author’s Note: Publicly remarking that hoverboards don’t actually hover will be punishable by law in 2016. Crazy, I know, but those are the rules.
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Meet The Benedictine Monk Of Silicon Valley
William Alden / Via BuzzFeed News
Like many techies, Brother Eckhart Camden wears a hooded garment to work. But his uniform is not a hoodie, strictly speaking. Instead, Brother Eckhart wears a black tunic and scapular — reflecting his status as probably the only Benedictine monk working at a Silicon Valley software company.
"That's for the remembrance of death — the reason why the Benedictines wear black," Brother Eckhart told BuzzFeed News in an interview in the Palo Alto garden where he prays daily. "One of the things that's to help you keep humble is to remember that you are mortal."
Brother Eckhart, 56, with an unruly beard and long gray hair, has worked in technology for more than 30 years, though he moved to California's Bay Area only in 2013, to join a software startup. Until recently, he was known as Chip Camden, and his hair was buzzed short. (A photo that appeared in the Wall Street Journal in 2013 shows his previous incarnation.) But a series of spiritual experiences in recent years, he says, helped him rediscover his Christian faith and put him on a path that culminated in a ceremony in November, when he took Benedictine vows.
Since ancient times, monks of the Order of Saint Benedict have adhered to a tradition of chastity, asceticism, and prayer. Brother Eckhart's group, the Community of St. John Cassian, is a small and relatively new Benedictine organization within the Episcopal Church, founded only last year in Berkeley. Unlike other Benedictine communities, it doesn’t have a monastery, though it is hoping to be able to afford one soon. For now, its members live alone, in conventional society, and are expected to support themselves financially.
In a role seemingly befitting a monk, Brother Eckhart oversees quality at his software startup, which is now a division of one of the region's biggest tech companies. (His employer asked not to be named in this article; in the charitable spirit embraced by Brother Eckhart, we assented.) He spends four hours a day in prayer, including Bible study and meditation, in several sessions starting when he arises at 5 a.m. This practice, he says, has helped him improve his focus and made him calmer at work — useful traits for ensuring that software development be held to a high standard.
"I do see that quality benefits from that centeredness," Brother Eckhart said. "It's often about discipline, and awareness, and paying attention to the moment, and not getting too far ahead of yourself."
At the same time, life in Silicon Valley these days can be full of potential pitfalls for anyone trying to free themselves from material things. Tech companies of all sizes offer catered meals and abundant snacks while showering their employees with perks. Brother Eckhart gave up drinking long before taking his monastic vows (he makes an exception for communion wine), although he once accidentally took a sip of white wine at a company party. "I asked for water and they gave me wine, thinking I was joking," he said.
But despite the abundant temptations on offer in the current Silicon Valley gold rush, he has been able to maintain his monastic discipline. He gave up his car when he moved to Palo Alto and lives in a one-bedroom apartment with few possessions. His youngest son has a severe mental disability, he said, and he directs a large part of his earnings toward his son's care.
"The free lunches are great," Brother Eckhart said. "But as far as the rest of the lifestyle, I try not to be too acquisitive."
Though he came to the Benedictine order later in life, Chip Camden studied the Bible as a student at Oral Roberts University in the late 1970s and planned to become a minister. He discovered computer programming almost by accident, working a part-time job in the university's data processing department.
Soon he taught himself programming languages like COBOL and DG Eclipse Assembler, while also studying Hebrew and Greek. His first wife, whom he married while in college, noticed those four languages seemingly melding in his brain.
"One night, my wife woke me up and described for me the things I was saying," Brother Eckhart recalled. "And I was actually talking in all four at the same time."
"Programming languages are actually human languages. They're not machine languages," he added. "They're just extremely well specified."
After that marriage and a second one fell apart, and after many years working as an independent software consultant, Brother Eckhart came back to Christianity. Studying the Bible in college had shown him inconsistencies in scripture and turned him into an atheist, he said. But while listening to Anton Bruckner's Symphony No. 4, on a CD recovered from his estranged second wife, he broke down in tears upon discovering an unexpectedly beautiful passage in the music.
Later, he believed he received a divine message after praying for strength in anticipation of a heart surgery. An eagle he had seen months earlier appeared on a branch before him, seeming to represent strength, and he noticed a biblical passage, Isaiah 40:31, inscribed on plaques on nearby benches. "But those who hope in the Lord will renew their strength," it reads. "They will soar on wings like eagles."
He found the Benedictine community through an Episcopal church in Palo Alto. Adhering to a chaste life, he said, was not hard.
"After my second wife and I split, my therapist recommended that I not start another relationship for 18 months," Brother Eckhart said. "I decided to give it a try. And I suddenly found such freedom in not having to relate to people that way."
Benedictine monks are not common in the United States today, even in spiritually diverse Northern California. Brother Brendan E. Williams, the founder and prior of the Community of St. John Cassian, said he knew of just one other Benedictine community in the Bay Area, the Camaldolese monks at Incarnation Monastery in the Berkeley Hills, who are Catholic.
Still, the Bay Area is a stronghold of contemplative tradition, particularly the Buddhist variety. The Buddhist monk Shunryu Suzuki, who established the San Francisco Zen Center in the early 1960s, inspired countless Westerners to meditate, and mindfulness gurus have since infiltrated corporate offices. In the HBO show Silicon Valley, the CEO of the fictional tech giant Hooli often turns to his spiritual guru for counsel.
"It's a little trendier to be Buddhist, I think, than it is to be Christian," Brother Eckhart said. "Perhaps in Western culture we're a little too close to the seedy underbelly of Christianity's history."
Noting the similarities between his tradition and Buddhism, Brother Eckhart said he enjoys talking to a work colleague who is Buddhist.
"We have wonderful discussions about contemplative technique, and the kinds of experiences that we have in trying to find that place to be, or place to non-be, if you will," he said. “I find that I have more in common with him than I have with many Christians, who aren't familiar with the contemplative tradition of Christianity."
In preparation for his vows ceremony in November, Brother Eckhart sent messages to colleagues informing them of his plans, including that he would be wearing a monk's habit to the office. "They've all been very supportive," he said.
His outfit — all black, down to his high-top Chuck Taylors — follows the precepts outlined by St. Benedict. He wears a traditional medal on a necklace, a black belt, and a hood, for warmth, which "gives me a Gandalf look."
And then there's that scraggly beard, which, in today's tech scene — with executives like Jack Dorsey of Twitter sporting mighty facial growth — doesn't seem very unusual at all.
"It is kind of trendy, unfortunately," Brother Eckhart said. "But I quit trimming it about a year and a half ago, and just kind of let it grow. I don't know why, exactly. I guess I like it."
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Monday, December 28, 2015
Zell am See in Austria at Night by Joern_Ahrens http://buff.ly/1YNeTkV
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#motivational #quote
A Bunch Of People Got Hurt On Christmas Riding Their New Hoverboards
‘Tis the season for broken bones.
Hoverboards were the hottest gift under the Christmas tree this year, and many people spent Friday learning how to use their new toys — with painful results.
It was, shall we say, a steep learning curve.
Instagram: @yongdawsonphotography
People had little falls...
...and people had big falls.
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2015 Was The Year Work Stopped Working
When the debate over how on-demand workers should be classified — whether as employees or independent contractors — first erupted, the folks at TaskRabbit thought it was none of their business. The problem, COO Stacy Brown-Philpot told BuzzFeed News, seemed to be Uber’s — that company was the one attracting attention, and the one being sued. “We really felt like, our marketplace is different, and this is a battle that they are fighting,” she said.
But the question of whether gig workers should be provided the same benefits and protections as employees didn’t stay Uber’s problem for long. Fast-forward a few months, and TaskRabbit executives, like so many other on-demand economy leaders, were taking trips to Washington and meetings with senators in the hopes of having their agenda incorporated into the rapidly advancing national conversation on labor regulation. “What we’re trying to do,” Brown-Philpot said this December, “is educate the federal government about how our Taskers are working.”
In 2015, a lot of people had the same realization. Uber, TaskRabbit, and many of their peers in the on-demand economy have been predicated on cheap contract labor since their inception — and have been insisting that the law needs to catch up to the technology they’ve invented, rather than vice versa, for nearly as long. As any legal expert will tell you, plenty of companies that existed years before the term “sharing economy” even existed have wrestled with the choice between expensive, trainable employees and cheap, independent contractors. “If you think about FedEx drivers and Microsoft workers, these questions have been with us for a long time,” Harvard Law School professor Benjamin Sachs told BuzzFeed News. “Uber has gotten everyone’s attention, and so has focused us on a question that courts and academics have been thinking about for a long time.”
But this was the year that the widespread popularity of apps like Uber and the massive amounts of cash in Silicon Valley made worker classification a major topic of national interest. The conversation has largely been driven by the class-action lawsuit brought against Uber in late 2014 by Boston-based labor attorney Shannon Liss-Riordan, who has made the on-demand economy something of a personal speciality. By January, federal Judge Edward M. Chen weighed in on the issue during a court hearing, saying that “the idea that Uber is simply a software platform” is not a “very persuasive argument.” Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich took up the cause in February, penning a number of articles about how tech companies like Uber will lead to a rise of misclassification.
But it wasn’t until March when momentum took hold. That’s when Judge Chen decided to try the case by a jury, saying that the drivers may indeed be employees. A week later, a very similar case was brought against Instacart, which, at the time, hired independent contractors both to shop in grocery stores and to deliver groceries to customers’ homes. Handy, Homejoy, Postmates, Try Caviar, and others were also sued by workers.
Once June rolled around, the issue started to reach a fever pitch. In California, a judge found a single Uber driver — separate from the larger class-action suit — to have been misclassified as a contractor, ruling that she was owed around $4,000 in expenses. In Silicon Valley, venture capitalists started promoting the idea of creating a new class of worker, a middle road between contractor and employee, an idea that had actually been floated back in January in the Wall Street Journal. As BuzzFeed News wrote in June, that new contractor classification would solve a major problem for the on-demand economy, potentially allowing companies to train workers and tell them what to do and where to be without having to pay for the benefits that employees get.
The idea took off.
What followed was a hectic summer. There were more lawsuits, this time against Washio, Postmates, and Shyp. Shyp reacted in a novel way — by changing the business model. Following the example Instacart had set just a few weeks prior, Shyp announced that it would begin transitioning its contractor-based workforce to full employees. Other companies would soon do the same, including Shift, which decided in October to make the workers who handle buying and selling used cars on the platform employees of the company. CEO George Arison said it’s a choice the company could not have made before the lawsuits. “If I had walked into that room in July of 2013, they would have said, 'You should under no circumstance go W-2 and definitely keep 1099.'"
Meanwhile, the issue of worker classification was making its way to the national stage. The Department of Labor weighed in, softly reminding the nation that the 1099 classification is only used in rare cases and that the vast majority of Americans should be classified as employees. But the cannonball-sized splash came when presidential candidate Jeb Bush made a point in July of coming out as pro-Uber; the former governor of Florida gave a talk on the benefits of the gig economy at Thumbtack’s headquarters, before getting picked up in an Uber and driving off. When Hillary Clinton suggested that there might be some problems with the innovations of the gig economy, she was roundly attacked for being anti-tech. Later that summer, Clinton held “secret meetings” in San Francisco, in which she talked with executives from on-demand companies about the needs of the industry.
By fall, the showboating was over, and things started to get serious. In October, President Obama hosted a summit on “worker voice” at the White House during which he expressed concern that a third worker classification might be, in practice, no more than “a watered-down version” of existing employee protections. After that, real policy proposals started to surface. In November, a coalition of tech companies and labor organizers announced their mutual support for portable benefits — a plan to build a system that will allow workers to collect prorated benefits from multiple companies simultaneously, potentially a serious step toward reimagining the social safety net. In December, a formal proposal was put forth by the Hamilton Project laying out what a third worker classification could actually look like. And finally, app-based drivers in Seattle won the right to organize and collectively bargain.
Via Flickr: er0l
So what’s next?
2016 is a presidential election year, a fact that has already begun to impact discussions of national policy. There’s a chance that campaign season will serve as a distraction, as topics like immigration and ISIS bowl over the issue of worker classification. But there’s also a chance, says TaskRabbit’s Brown-Philpot, that gig economy regulation will again become a part of the electoral debates in the same way it did this summer. “Hillary had a 12-person meeting on the sharing economy. Jeb orchestrated an Uber ride. Rubio has been spending time with Handy,” she said. “I don’t think they’re gathering that information for their health.”
After all, the worker classification question gets at one of the deciding issues for American voters: jobs. Because the issue at hand is partially about the benefits employees receive, it’s also connected to health care, which is guaranteed to play a part in the election.
If the gig economy does become an issue in the presidential contest, Democrats and Republicans will find a way to divide themselves on either side of it — a near eventuality that Sen. Mark Warner alluded to it an essay on Medium he co-wrote with Gov. Mitch Daniels, in which he declared his support for coming up with federal policy that defines, among other things, a new class of worker. “Thankfully,” it reads, “on these issues, battle lines have yet to harden and shared progress is still possible.”
In addition to potentially facing regulation in Washington next year, on-demand companies will also face challenges in the motherland. Venture capital is simply no longer as readily available to entrepreneurs as it was six months ago. It's a problem that will hit on-demand companies especially hard, given that many of them have relied on the artificial injection of venture cash rather than charging customers full price for services in order to scale their platforms. Charles Moldow of Foundation Capital has written about the economics of on-demand startups in the past; he says luxury services startups like Luxe and Zirx, both on-demand valet apps, aren’t long for this world. “People may love your service, but if you're unable to raise prices and charge rates that make you a legitimate business, you're not going to be able to raise money, and you're going to be in trouble,” he said.
In fact, six months ago, venture capitalists were already questioning whether the on-demand space wasn’t growing overcrowded. In the beginning, “it was land grab mode,” said Semil Shah, a venture capitalist who backs DoorDash and Instacart, among others. “We’re starting to see only a few will really kind of survive into something.” As less available funding contributes to the demise of some companies and the acquisition of others, those with ongoing legal problems and costly labor issues are more likely to be gone for good.
Sarah Horowitz of the Freelancers Union said that throughout labor history, new industries arise, and the nature of American capitalism is that government tries to serve and encourage them. But as industry becomes more powerful, workers will begin to question what they’re getting in return for their labor, and protections will have to be put in place. Phase one was the hiring of Washington, D.C., big guns like David Plouffe and Chris Lehane to run policy teams for these companies, drastically inflating their lobbying budgets. The second phase, in which laborers return fire, began this year with the Uber lawsuit, and will continue to unfold in 2016.
Class-action lawsuits, especially ones with a class as large as Uber’s (more than 100,000 drivers as of early December) are a major cost no company wants. Further, pending litigation can make a company significantly less attractive to a potential acquirer. There’s no doubt that the situation we now find ourselves in — in which there is a congressional Sharing Economy Caucus falling over itself to regulate a relatively small, nascent industry — has been driven by lawsuits. As Sen. Warner has repeatedly said, the multibillion-dollar valuations some of these companies tout also draws attention.
But beyond size and scale, these cases have captured national attention because there was always something a little too good to be true about the idea that merely owning a cell phone afforded everyone the ability to have clean underwear or ice cream or weed brought to them instantaneously. Revealing the underclass of drivers who power each app as potentially maltreated is satisfying because it seems to confirm with fact what was formerly just a feeling — that we’ve become too lazy, too indulgent, too carried away by convenience.
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21 Times We All Fell Head Over Heels For Oscar Isaac
You’ve got a good situation going on in your face and your everything, friend.
When he made us an offer that is very hard to pass up.
Chivas Regal / youtube.com / Via ramplings.tumblr.com
When he challenged the logic of gendering a droid.
Collider / youtube.com / Via draculords.tumblr.com
And suggested an innovative way of, uh, playing with your Poe Dameron action figure.
Yahoo / yahoo.com / Via mockingjaygay.tumblr.com
And commented on the fact that you can now suck yogurt out of his face.
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Poll: Who Do You Think Rey Actually Is?
Is the star of Star Wars: The Force Awakens from a famous family? WARNING: This post is full of spoilers.
Disney / Lucasfilm
Disney / Lucasfilm
She's brave, strong, resourceful, and independent.
Disney / Lucasfilm / Via bianki-san.tumblr.com
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This Is Everyone's New Favorite "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" Character
TR-8R is love. TR-8R is life.
Going into Star Wars: The Force Awakens, the Stormtrooper everyone was excited about was Captain Phasma.
Disney / Lucasfilm
But now that the movie is out, a different First Order trooper has captured the hearts and minds of the people.
Disney / Lucasfilm
Though this Stormtrooper is nameless in the movie, the Internet has named him TR-8R after his obsession with the traitorous Finn.
Sony / Disney / Lucasfilm / Via imgur.com
He's pretty much the most meme-able thing ever.
Via imgur.com
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16 Confessions Only "Harry Potter" Fans Will Understand
“I sometimes wish I could get a mild case of amnesia and reread the Harry Potter series again.” All confessions courtesy of Whisper.
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Mr. Mime Is Literally Just A Human
We’ve been fooled for years by this charlatan.
This is Mr. Mime.
Just look at him.
The Pokémon Company International
According to the National Pokédex, Mr. Mime is Pokémon #122.
The Pokémon Company International
But that's a goddamn lie, isn't it? Because Mr. Mime isn't a Pokémon at all.
The Pokémon Company International
Mr. Mime is just a fucking man.
The Pokémon Company International
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Lyft Billboard Hit With Anti-Gentrification Message In San Francisco
Alex Kantrowitz
The ride hailing app Lyft is running an outdoor ad campaign positioning itself as an alternative to public transportation — or at least a fallback option for when it stops working. But the campaign's message isn't resonating in San Francisco's SoMa neighborhood, where a vandal defaced one billboard from Lyft with a message likely meant for the city's tech community at large.
The vandal, in a markup that took some effort, changed the above sign's message from "STOPS THAT JUST WON'T STOP" (an apparent reference to city's beleaguered, frequently broken public transport system) to SHOPS THAT JUST WON'T STOP GENTRIFYING." And in the bottom right-hand corner, the Lyft logo was altered to read "Lyfe in S.F."
As tech money and workers continue to flood into San Francisco, many within the city are feeling the impact by way of rising real estate prices and a changing cityscape. For the past few years, that transformation has also led to some vocal anti-tech actions. Lyft happens to be the victim this time.
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23 Life-Changing Apps We Downloaded This Year
The app-iest place on Earth.
Amy Sefton for BuzzFeed
Tab (free, iOS and Android) makes complicated bill splitting *super* easy.
I've successfully convinced most of my friends to download Tab because it is just that good.
First, you take a picture of the bill. Then, Tab analyzes the text and adds each item, in digital form, to the app. Anyone with Tab can join the bill and each person can tap their item. If multiple people split a communal dish, like fries, Tab can take that into account too.
Tab
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Mark Zuckerberg On Free Basics: "Who Could Possibly Be Against This?"
Free Basics in action
In an op-ed published in today's Times of India, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg made a plea on behalf of Free Basics, his company's program that offers unlimited, free access to a limited set of apps and websites in India and a number of other countries.
The program is under popular attack in India, criticized for offering access to a skewed, Facebook-ified version of the internet instead of the entire thing, and faces an existential risk from regulators who are considering whether it's fair for a company to shape the type of internet its citizens have access to.
"If we accept that everyone deserves access to the internet, then we must surely support free basic internet services. That’s why more than 30 countries have recognized Free Basics as a program consistent with net neutrality and good for consumers," Zuckerberg wrote. "Who could possibly be against this?"
Zuckerberg's op-ed is the latest move in an aggressive effort by Facebook to shore up support for the program in India, where the tide of popular opinion seems headed in the other direction. The company took the unusual step of deploying its notifications tab last week to promote a petition addressed to India's Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) in support of Free Basics. It also took out a two page ad spread in the Times of India over the weekend arguing on behalf of the program.
Protests against Free Basics' model by net neutrality advocates, who argue that Facebook is a self-interested gatekeeper providing its own version of the internet, have grown so loud that the TRAI has asked Reliance Communications, which works with Facebook to provide the service, to put it on hold.
Linked at the bottom of Zuckerberg's Times Of India op-ed was a counterpoint written by Nikhil Pahwa, co-founder of Savetheinternet.in, which advocates for internet rights in India. In his piece, Pahwa outlined the main critique against Free Basics, arguing that it goes against the principles of Net Neutrality.
"Net Neutrality is about the ISPs (and telecom operators) not giving a competitive advantage to any particular website or application," Pahwa wrote "Today, Facebook, in partnership with Reliance Communications, reserves the right to reject applications from websites and apps for Free Basics, and forces them to conform to its technical guidelines."
Instead of pursuing the current Free Basics model, which offers unlimited access to a select group of apps and websites, Pahwa asks why Facebook is not providing limited access to the entire internet. This setup would not privilege one service, such as Facebook's, over another.
Oddly, for a company required to maximize value for its shareholders, Facebook continues to insist that its Free Basics program is not about making money. "This isn’t about Facebook’s commercial interests – there aren’t even any ads in the version of Facebook in Free Basics," Zuckerberg wrote in his op-ed.
But of course, Facebook stands to gain if Free Basics helps it secure a beachhead with the millions of people it brings online. If Facebook is one of the first apps people have access to and connect with, then it will likely enjoy a similar network effect that has made it seemingly irreplaceable in countries like the U.S., where it has been adopted en masse. And while the company is not running ads to Free Basics users right now, it could of course eventually do so in the future.
In the two page ad spread appearing in Sunday's Times Of India, Facebook, addressing the revenue question, declared: "We are doing this to connect India, and the benefits to do so are clear." That statement may be fair, but only if one acknowledges that the clear benefits exist not only for those coming online via Free Basics, but for the company providing that access as well.
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Which "Star Wars" Spaceship Should You Fly?
Time to find out whether you should be co-piloting the Millennium Falcon, or flying in an X-Wing like you’re Poe Dameron.
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19 Times Henry Cavill's Jawline Was Out Of Control
More like Jaw Of Steel, am I right?
When he just stood there looking like a real-life superhero.
Keith Tsuji / Getty Images
When he modeled for Men's Fitness and it was sensory overload.
Men's Fitness / mockingjaygay.tumblr.com
When he raised his eyebrow and held a mic close to his face.
Toshifumi Kitamura / AFP / Getty Images
When he gazed at Amy Adams in Man of Steel.
Warner Bros. / Via giphy.com
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