From the op-ed page of the New York Times:
Twitter, Women and Power
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Twitter is on schedule to go public as a company next month, a sparkling symbol of innovation, technology — and stale, old thinking reflected in a board of seven white men.
I'd explain how this sentence encapsulates on multiple dimensions what's been going wrong with public thought, but I'm already over my 140 character limit, so forget it.
anybody know how they plan to monetize?
ReplyDeletecharge for tweeting? sell you more than 140 characters?
not that they actually need to make much money to have a stock valuation of 50 billion ridicubucks or whatever totally fake market capitalization they end up with. facebook still only makes like 1 billion dollars a year and is somehow valued at 120 billion ridicubucks.
it's not possible to monetize what facebook is, and their income will NEVER grow very much. never. 2 billion a year might be their ceiling. yet, there they are, worth more than twice as much as intel, who merely pulls in a cool 11 billion a year. on bigger margins, too.
They're monetizing already, through 2 kinds of non-annoying, organic ads (promoted tweets and promoted accounts), plus selling aggregated data to firms looking to mine it for profitable trends. They also have a few deals with TV networks I think - the instant, communal nature of twitter encourages live TV watching.
DeleteTwitter's problem isn't so much generating revenue but profit. They're on pace to bring in about $500 million this year and still lose money.
whoops, maybe i'm just getting plain stupider. not sure what number i was looking at but intel's market cap is not 50 billion (must have been looking at intel revenue last year).
ReplyDeleteinstead, it's 110 billion. so, facebook is MERELY worth 10 billion more than vastly financially superior, decades long established, actual prouct producing, money making machine intel. and not twice as much, as i originally posted. whew. i feel much better now. sanity has returned to the world.
not.
How is this any different from what America's Pravda has been spewing for decades?
ReplyDeleteCanned beans and Twitter are the technological innovations that are going to Power America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation.
ReplyDeleteSamsung is one of the most insanely successful tech companies in the world. Last year it did $269 billion in revenue and $26 billion in profit. Here's its <a href="http://www.samsung.com/uk/aboutsamsung/management/boardofdirectors.html>board of directors</a>: 8 men, 1 woman, all Korean. There are far fewer Koreans in the world than there are whites, or even "white men."
ReplyDeleteSo why this obsession with the fact that Twitter's board is all white? It would never, never, ever be a point of concern if a board were all Korean, or Asian, or Jewish, or pretty much anything else. But white men, oh no!
By the way, this whole kerfuffle was started by a racist, ethnocentric, pro-immivasion Indian, Vivek Wadhwa, who is probably more pissed about the absence of Indians than of women. After all, how will we continue to justify the Indian immivasion if Indians comprise so small a share of the leaders of all the blockbuster Silicon Valley IPOs?
The world is getting stupider in a very specific way. Specifically, the world is approaching the absolute zero of intelligence when it comes to "identity politics" issues - race/sex/etc. And, of course, "identity politics" issues are growing to consume everything.
ReplyDeleteAs George Carlin noted: "There are some people - they're not stupid, they're not full of s**t... THEY'RE F***ING NUTS!!!"
ReplyDeleteMy addendum is that a surprising number of those people work for the New York Times.
People of different races or genders aren't inherently different, except when they are.
ReplyDeleteWomen are the same as men! That's why there should be as many women in politics, in high tech, and CEO offices as there are men!
Women are different from men! That's why companies like Twitter and Apple need women on their boards: they'll never be able to understand women without a woman on their board.
We are at war with Eastasia. We've always been at war with Eastasia.
So the stale white guys who built Twitter from an idea to a social network with 200 million+ users should give six-figure sinecures to 3 women because: justice. Or profits.
ReplyDeleteWhatever, but Kristof has peddled that "Lehman Sisters" silliness before, apparently forgetting that Lehman did have a woman in the C-Suite, as did other stricken Wall Street firms.
For diversicrats like Kristoff seven white men (in what is still a white majority country) could only be the result of conspiratorial planning; no way could it be a result of best-man for-the-job. The irony is that it's hiring otherwise useless black hand-shakers that usually requires conspiratorial planning.
ReplyDeleteAlso, don't even mention (real-world) synergy issues. That's pure white conspiracy and it drives them wild with rage. They prefer their own loopy (anti)logic that increasing racial diversity ipso facto increases synergy - it's "strength". That's why the Kristoffs of the world live as far away as they possibly can from other whites.
Love this from Kristof: "The Senate built a restroom off the floor for female members only in 1993, and now, a couple decades later, women are providing adult supervision in the 'old boys’ club."
ReplyDeleteYes, women have gotten more numerous since the '92 elections - which is why the state of our country is so much better, and why politicians are more honest than ever!
Tell me we haven't hit Idiocracy 500 years early.
ReplyDeletewren: "Tell me we haven't hit Idiocracy 500 years early."
ReplyDelete-
Yo thinkin' is stale, pale male; that mean it fail.
Penny Al Arrabbiata, i like the cut of your jib.
ReplyDeletei have also noted liberals seem to not care at all that every japanese and korean company is 100% japanese or korean. and often, even nearly 100% male. supposedly this would prevent them from making a kick ass product. but nobody ever informed the japanese or korean men about their debilitating condition. somehow, through near-superhuman effort i assume, they are able to overcome their asianness and maleness and take over market segments through better engineering.
from time to time i also make the argument that the more women, the worse an institution gets. few things set up by men will run well once a certain percentage of women is reached. a couple women is ok. anymore than that and start worrying.
in fact it's probably more likely that the SS United States began to list to port after women were allowed to vote, and not after allowing in "a bunch of dirty southern europeans!". any society risks a long term shift to the left when going from no women voting, to all women voting.
What is stupider - the statement before the dash or the one after ?
ReplyDelete"What is stupider - the statement before the dash or the one after ?"
ReplyDeleteIf I had more than 140 characters, I might be able to do that question justice.
From the article by Nick Kristof, whiteman extraordinaire -
ReplyDeleteI also realize that I live in a glass house, because my world of punditry is a cacophony of mostly white male voices. Gender imbalance isn’t just Twitter’s problem, but a global challenge across many sectors.
Don't worry chief, the vultures are going after the fattest lambs first, it will take a little while for them to get to you.
The NYT op ed page has ALWAYS been stupid.
ReplyDeleteKristof also lives in Scarsdale, the stalest, whitest (and jewishest) of NY's rich suburbs.
ReplyDeleteBut they have good diets.
ReplyDeleteKristof's whole schtick is sticking for those poor oppressed third-world women and their evil patriarchal oppression. I strongly doubt he believes a word of what he says.
ReplyDeleteYeah! The modern world: brought to you by dull losers such as Jobs, Wozniak, Ford, Brin, Grove, Noyce, Zuckerberg, etc. If we only had more women involved, we could have had cars with bigger makeup mirrors instead of the lame ones we got.
ReplyDeleteHint to Kristof: Just because you write for the NYT doesn't mean it isn't trolling.
@jody:
ReplyDelete"from time to time i also make the argument that the more women, the worse an institution gets"
Winner, winner, chicken dinner! This is why unions are too busy worrying about diversity and inclusion and not paying attention to the impact of illegal immigration on their members. The most powerful unions these days are government ones dominated by women. No more Samuel Gompers.
Any bets that the Obamacare website fail was designed by the same geniuses participating in Zuckerberg's "hack a Mexican," er Mexican hack-athon?
ReplyDeleteMcKinsey & Company found that the international companies with more women on their corporate boards far outperformed the average company in return on equity and other measures.
ReplyDeleteI.e. very profitable companies can afford to make token hires.
In my experience board seats are typically window dressing anyway. I have rarely worked at or consulted with a company where the board of directors played a signficant role. The exceptions were usually because the board was simply a proxy for the private equity firm that owned the Company.
Kristof can take comfort in the many companies, all sparkly with technology and innovation, that've been started by blacks and women, and taken public, here in America and abroad.
ReplyDeleteAlso, as soon as we get all the Mexican busboys and gardeners and peddlers and field-hands out from the Shadows, we'll no doubt be seeing a mighty surge of sparkly companies that'll put the undeserving bad white men in their place.
At least he didn't say 'old', so at least there's some thought.
ReplyDeleteLook on the bright side.
Clearly, we need more Norwegians on the boards of startups.
ReplyDeleteKristof also lives in Scarsdale, the stalest, whitest (and jewishest) of NY's rich suburbs.
ReplyDeleteThis champion of diversity lives in a community that is 79.5% white and 12.9% Asian; subtotal: 92.4%.
Hispanics: 3.9%
Blacks: 1.4%
(Median household income: $220,119; median value of home or condo: $948,447).
Minorities who can swing the cost of living in Scarsdale are likely of the better sort.
Source of data: http://www.city-data.com/city/Scarsdale-New-York.html
I've been reading this blog for about 6 months, and now almost every day I see numerous examples of Steve's theory of how the current crop of journalists and editors usually frame stories. It is important for them to create a narrative that is sympathetic to a Good group and derisive of a Bad group.
ReplyDeleteOther examples that come to mind are this story that was on TIME magazine's website 2 weeks ago, headlined "Women are the Only Adults Left in Washington."
http://swampland.time.com/2013/10/16/women-are-the-only-adults-left-in-washington
A few weeks ago the NYT had a story on top of its most-emailed list headlined "Why Men need Women."
Maybe those two stories were accurate, maybe not, but the point is just that a blatantly anti-man narrative is completely permissible. This is because Men, as a group at least, are not Good to the editors of Time and NYT.
A related situation was the mainstream press coverage of a shipwreck that killed hundreds of refugees (Good) off Lampedusa in the Mediterranean. It singled out European governments (Bad) for failing to take measures to prevent the catastrophe.
Of course there was no discussion of the authorities in the refugees' home countries, places like Eritrea and Somalia. Any such discussion would complicate the simple narrative putting blame on the Bad group.
The NY Beta Times is written for women. And they really do hata hate hate beta males, which is 90% plus of White guys.
ReplyDeleteI use twitter for realtime news, finding/keeping good links & getting to know interesting people. Sometimes it's good for blowing off some steam directly to the retarded politician/journo who said something stupid.
ReplyDeleteIt's good for advertising your small business too.
For blogging it's no good. But so what? It's a supplement, not a substitute.
It's cool.
"Scholarly research, which I just pulled out of my rectum, suggests that the best problem-solving doesn’t come from a group of the best individual problem-solvers, but from a diverse team whose members complement each other."
ReplyDeleteThere, fixed it for him. Wonder when he'll get around to the gross over-representation of Jews in television and Hollywood, and how much better those industries would be with more inclusion. Third of never I'm guessing.
By the way, this whole kerfuffle was started by a racist, ethnocentric, pro-immivasion Indian, Vivek Wadhwa, who is probably more pissed about the absence of Indians than of women. After all, how will we continue to justify the Indian immivasion if Indians comprise so small a share of the leaders of all the blockbuster Silicon Valley IPOs?
ReplyDeleteOne of the main backers of Twitter who stands to gain billions from the IPO is an Indian.
It's still surprising to me how brazen they are with the anti-white racism.
ReplyDeleteIs anyone here keeping track...?
I have dealt with a lot of Americans in geology/academia/general life and a disproportionately large number knew their business and were reliable.
ReplyDeleteSo I don't understand why all the people who comment on the NYT are such morons. Can anyone explain the discrepancy?
"US programming in decline"
ReplyDelete"Women and minorities hardest hit"
Kristof contrives reasons to socialize with Third World prostitutes and he once admitted "My hard drive overflows with photos of children bleeding from shrapnel."
ReplyDeleteSteve Sailer said...
ReplyDeleteBut they have good diets.
And good exercise really Fixxed poor Jim.
I bet half of those guys have Asian girlfriends, especially the ones who are short and bald.
ReplyDelete“The NYT op ed page has ALWAYS been stupid”
ReplyDeleteThat was the second pattern I spotted after moving there. The first one was: When crossing street at night, forget about cars. That´s the black guy on the bike who will hit you
ReplyDeleteI think twitter makes money by charging for full access to the tweet stream. You can get partial access for free, but it is a "sample" that nobody seems to be able to describe. Further, twitter changes the sampling algorithm at will based on what people are doing with it. If twitter doesn't like your research, they just change it.
There's some money in it for people to sell law enforcement agencies software that searches for people bragging about crimes. So far nobody has a universal solution. They are all custom solutions for a single area, like a single town would be one solution. If you go to the next town it has to be customized again.
Perhaps the New York Times should rid their Op-Ed pages of White male writers, and I'll give you two choices about who the first one to be purged should be, and the second two don't count. When women and non-whites start getting involved in the start-up of successful tech companies, their first board of directors will visibly reflect the wonderful multicultural tapestry Mr. Kristof desires. What I really suspect he is doing is attempting to guilt successful tech companies into tokenism or merely trying to win a sanctimony contest against his fellow NYT editorial writers.
ReplyDeleteXerox has been bragging about its commitment to diversity for over a decade. Their last two CEOs have been women (Anne Mulcahy & Ursula Burns, who is also black), their CFO is a woman, and their ten-member board includes 2 blacks, 1 Hispanic, and 4 women.
ReplyDeleteResults? Their stock today is lower than it was ten years ago, and today fell 10.44%.
James Taranto of wsj and Best of the Web Today are off for a couple of days but that's a candidate for his "Fox Butterfield Is that You?" section
ReplyDeleteWhiskey, women always perform terribly when quizzed on current events. Because they're not as into world news, politics etc. The target audience of the NYT is people who are interested in that stuff, women can read the celebrity tabloid rags.
ReplyDeleteDoes the NYT editorial staff actually write these articles from sratch every time? Or do they have a collection of PC mad lib templates, each of which gets recycled once every few months? Next we'll hear about how Apple doesn't have enough transsexual engineers, or whatever, and how that is crippling their innovation.
ReplyDelete"Xerox has been bragging about its commitment to diversity for over a decade."
ReplyDeletexerox was responsible for the EBT system crashing and deactivating itself on october 12.
Kristof must be full of stale, old thinking as he is a white male.
ReplyDeleteWhy not remove himself from the Times so someone 'fresh' can replace him?
CNBC = Charles Murray on delay
ReplyDelete