Tech News
Tech News and Analysis from around the web
Julia Love / Reuters:
A look at Uber's struggles in Latin America, which has been its worst performing region in the first three quarters of 2019, as Didi makes big inroads in Mexico — MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Latin America, long a safe haven for Uber, was the biggest weak spot in the money-losing company's …
Rosalie Chan / Insider:
Workato, provider of an app integration and automation platform with customers including Slack and Broadcom, raises $70M Series C led by Redpoint Ventures — - On Monday, the automation startup Workato announced it raised $70 million in series C funding led by Redpoint Ventures.
Steve O'Hear / TechCrunch:
UK's Balderton Capital has raised a new $400M fund to back EU tech startups at the Series A stage; the VC had closed a similar Series A fund in 2017 at $375M — Balderton Capital, one of the so-called “big four” early-stage VC firms in London (the others being Accel, Atomico and Index) …
Dan Seifert / The Verge:
Review of the redesigned Dell XPS 13 2-in-1: spacious keyboard and trackpad with a 16:10 13.4" display and fast performance, but it is not practical as a tablet — The latest XPS 13 2-in-1 rights the wrongs of its predecessor and is even better than the standard XPS 13
Alex Kantrowitz / BuzzFeed News:
Source: Twitter suggests it will allow political ads that spread awareness about issues like climate change, not ads mentioning a specific policy or candidate — Representatives from Twitter met with advertisers last week to discuss the specifics of what might be — and won't be — included in its ban on political advertising.
Gregory Scruggs / Reuters:
Amazon's record $1.5M effort to fill Seattle's city council with pro-business candidates fails, reviving chances of tax hikes on the city's tech firms — SEATTLE (Reuters) - Seattle voters, in a rebuke to heavy corporate campaign spending by Amazon.com, have kept progressives firmly in control …
Reuters:
Microsoft says it will honor California's digital privacy law throughout the US; source: CCPA offers special treatment to “service providers” like Microsoft — WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp said in a blog post on Monday that it would honor California's privacy law …
Catalin Cimpanu / ZDNet:
SmarterASP.NET, a web host with over 440,000 customers, says it was hit by ransomware over the weekend; many customers remain locked out of their data — SmarterASP.NET, a company with more than 440,000 customers, said it's been hit by ransomware over the weekend.
Mark Gurman / Bloomberg:
Sources: Apple to debut a new 3D sensor module in an iPad Pro coming in H1'20 and higher-end 2020 iPhones, to be followed by a AR/VR headset and AR glasses — - Company designs new 3-D system as hub for range of AR devices — Next iPad, iPhone to have 3-D system, followed by two headsets
Josh Constine / TechCrunch:
Facebook is rolling out a new option called Shortcuts Bar Settings that lets users remove certain tabs in the app's navigation bar and silence notification dots — Are those red notification dots on your Facebook home screen driving you crazy? Sick of Facebook Marketplace wasting your screen space?
Rob Copeland / Wall Street Journal:
Google partnered with Ascension, the 2nd-largest US health-care system, to analyze personal health info of millions, sources say as part of Project Nightingale — Search giant is amassing health records from Ascension facilities in 21 states; patients not yet informed
Megan Hernbroth / Business Insider:
Autonomous trucking startup iSee announces $15M Series A from Founders Fund — - iSee, an autonomous driving startup for trucks, announced $15 million in Series A funding from Founders Fund on Monday. — Unlike other autonomous driving and logistics startups, iSee uses proprietary deep learning …
Wall Street Journal:
Sources: WeWork's parent company is in talks to hire T-Mobile US CEO John Legere, following the exit of co-founder Adam Neumann — SoftBank searching for new leader of office-sharing startup following exit of co-founder Adam Neumann — WeWork is in discussions with T-Mobile US Inc. Chief …
Manish Singh / TechCrunch:
Alibaba says it sold goods worth $38.4B on Singles' Day, topping last year's record of $30.7B — After 24 hours of frenzied buying and selling, and weeks of advertising and promotions before it, the Alibaba Group said today its sales hit another record high on Singles' Day, the biggest shopping day on the planet.
Paul Sandle / Reuters:
Twitter says it is launching a new tool for the December UK election that lets users report deliberately misleading information about the voting process — LONDON (Reuters) - Twitter (TWTR.N) said it would make it easier to report misleading information about the voting process …
TL;DR: There are a lot of winnable votes in the 40 percent who are likely to vote for Trump.
Some elections reconfigure the balance between the two parties. Like Nixon, his southern strategy flipped the south from Dem to Repub. He saw an opportunity, took it, it worked, was transformational, and that reconfiguration is still in place 50 years later.
Well never imho has the country needed to reconfigure the balance between the parties more than it does now. The Repubs are being driven to fascism. That's usually a fringe thing in the US, but now is on its way to becoming mainstream. That is if you believe Trump's "base" is fascist. I for one don't think they are.
I think they hate liberal elites who think they know everything, but they think (in the flyover states) that they understand nothing about America. That's a complicated idea, and would take a lot of tweets to explain, but there's something real there. The America they grew up believing in, that many of us did, never was what they said it was, but it's still their core idea of America, and we've drifted very far from it. In their minds America is white, Christian, there's a mom and a dad and kids, and Thanksgiving, guns and self-sufficiency. This America doesn't have any problems. It kicks ass. It rules the world. And the white people dominate (a nice way of saying what it does to PoC's).
The basic grievance they have is this. Look at all the great things they're doing for "others" and I'm not getting any help at all. Take care of me first, and let the other guys pull themselves up like I did.
They feel the way they feel. And you probably have a lot of hypocrisy and lies in your own view of the world, btw. I know the family I grew up in did. Some day I'll write a piece about all the lies they clung to. It'll be a long piece.
Back to Trump's 40 percent. I'm not taling about all of them. Some for sure are real goose-stepping Jew-hating Nazis. But a lot of them just want to hear from a president "I got your back," and then enumerate their fears, so they know you hear them. Even if their fears are off the wall. You can say you hear them without selling your soul, or selling out the former Democratic Party base. And that's how the center-left party can emerge. It'll be called the Democratic Party, but it'll have a lot of until-recently Republicans in it. Nothing wrong with that. The Republicans used to have liberals.
Because the real important split in the US is between people who believe in the Constitution and those who don't. That's so basic. And now in 2019, it's peak season for converting rule-of-law Republicans to lifetime Democratic Party voters. And where the parents go, the kids are likely to follow.
So what's more important? A failed push for Medicare For All by President Warren or Sanders, or a new permanent political reality in the US that solves problems for 50 years led by President Bloomberg, Inslee or Klobuchar? I actually like Bloomberg because he mastered the sensibilities of business management, and has had three terms as NYC mayor to convert that sensibility to politics and governance. He's shovel ready, in other words. More than any of the others including Biden.
As I said at the beginning, this is a time when we could reconfigure the two-party system. There are a lot of winnable votes in the 40 percent who will vote for Trump if we nominate a Warren or Sanders. And if those votes plus minorities, city people and suburbanites could compromise, we could have a big enough majority to fix a lot of things. Things that most Trump voters want. Like to be sure of their health care. More jobs. Spending more money on domestic stuff as opposed to unwinnable forever wars. What they want, in a word, is security. These are all natural Democratic issues, and somehow via lies and Democratic lunacy the Repubs have been able to at least partially usurp them. That's because the Dems don't claim them. They get lost in the weeds talking about health benefits for non-citizens and taking away people's health insurance which for crying out loud is not even what the Dems are contemplating.
Reading Fiona Hill's testimony last night, she's saying something similar about the political system in the US. We're smart, we know how to do big things. There are a lot of good people in the United States ready to kick ass. If you can just get the poltiical stuff under control, America will resume the greatness that it never lost.