Podcasts about square cash

Handymen typically accept various forms of payment for their services to accommodate the preferences and convenience of their clients. Here are some common forms of accepting payment: 1.           Cash: Cash payments are straightforward and immediate. Many handymen prefer cash payments as they are easy to handle and don't involve transaction fees. 2.           Checks: Some clients prefer to pay by personal or business checks. Handymen may accept checks but usually wait for them to clear before considering the job complete. 3.           Credit/Debit Cards: Accepting credit or debit card payments allows handymen to offer convenient payment options to their clients. This can be done through mobile card readers or online payment processing services. 4.           Online Payment Platforms: Handymen can utilize online payment platforms such as PayPal, Venmo, Square Cash, or other similar services to receive payments electronically. 5.           Bank Transfers: Clients may opt to make direct bank transfers to the handyman's account. This method can be convenient for both parties, especially for larger transactions. 6.           Payment Apps: Mobile payment apps like Zelle, Google Pay, or Apple Pay provide another convenient option for transferring funds securely. 7.           Invoice and Payment Terms: Some handymen may work with clients on invoicing and payment terms, allowing for installment payments or setting up payment plans for larger projects. 8.           Bartering: In some cases, handymen might accept goods or services in exchange for their work. This could involve trading services with other professionals or accepting goods as payment. It's essential for handymen to communicate clearly with their clients about their preferred payment methods and any associated fees or terms. Additionally, using written contracts or agreements can help ensure clarity regarding payment expectations for both parties. Watch us on YouTube (click here) Subscribe to our free newsletter, https://handymanprosradioshow.com/newsletter-signup/ Join our Facebook group @handyman pros Send us an email, questions@handymanprosradioshow.com. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/handymanpros/message

Welcome to the almost 3k latent space explorers that joined us last month! We're holding our first SF listener meetup with Practical AI next Monday; join us if you want to meet past guests and put faces to voices! All events are in /community.Who among you regularly click the ubiquitous

This week we follow up on iPhone 14 series screen sizes. We debate the EU's future standardization of USB-C for all mobile devices and Apple Card's new high yield Savings accounts. We dig into to the newly introduced Apple TV 4K (3rd Gen), the new iPad (10th Gen) with Magic Keyboard Folio, and the new iPad Pro (6th Gen) series with M2 and Mini-LED (sort of). Picks: macOS defaults, Apple Aqua: Exploring the Legacy Of MacOS X User Interface, iOS Architecture Generator. Give us some feedback or ask questions with #askmtjc on Twitter (https://twitter.com/search?q=%23askmtjc&src=typed_query). Join our slack channel (https://itguytechno.slack.com). audio fixed.

Read the article and watch the full interview: https://dx.tips/plaid-hockey-tips---SaaS API founders should not miss this week's Cartoon Avatars interview with William Hockey, former Plaid cofounder/CTO and now founder of Column.He does not do interviews often and rarely do you get this level of insight into a $13 billion, fintech category-defining behemoth. What follows is a TL;DR for those who, well, TL;DW.The $12 Billion UI Decision - Owning the UIMany SaaS API providers take pride in being "behind the scenes", or being "whitelabel" to appeal to as many enterprise customers as possible. Jeff Lawson often proudly talks about how many people use Twilio without realizing it.TLDR: Hockey bet the company on going against that received wisdom - forcing 100% of his customers to migrate to a Plaid hosted UI with Plaid's logo and branding - over a period of 2 years, with a lot of pushback.He estimates this decision alone was worth 90% of the company value today (!)From the 22-26 minute mark:I think the most successful decision we made was actually owning the interface - the physical design and owning the client side...When we first started, we were this transparent infrastructure provider and so the consumer had no idea who we were......and so what happened is you didn't know, as a consumer, that Plaid existed in that flow. We realized that this was kind of problematic because, as a consumer, you were not getting the same experience hooking up your bank account to Venmo as you were when you hooked up your account to Square Cash, or Chime or, Coinbase..and that had a lot of security issues but also had conversion issues because every application thought that their design was best or whatnot...so what we decided to do is we made them display a Plaid designed UI to the consumer...We made the application insert our branding, our logo and our experience into the application. That was extraordinarily controversial, as you can imagine, because these applications want to control the experience.One way to view this move is concluding "Plaid customers were so bad at their jobs of optimizing UI that just providing the APIs wasn't enough."The motivations were two fold: self protection (Plaid oriented) and conversion optimization (customer oriented):We needed to establish some level of relationship with the consumer and provide uniformity across these applications because we were the only one focused this hard on conversion.It actually started converting a lot better... the consumer actually started to feel comfortable, like hey I know this screen, I've seen this before, and it also allowed us to do a lot of micro optimizations around messaging certain banks and just allowed us to kind of have a platform that we could actually deliver content and software directly to the consumer...Where my eyes really popped is how far they took this - forcing ALL their users to adopt this flow - near impossible for most API companies to do especially if customers threaten to leave over this decision.Now 100% of traffic flows this way and it's actually one of the only reasons that we have good relationships with the banks because those sensitive data never actually hits the application anymore and we can also if a bank wants to make you accept some terms of service or something like that, we can deploy that instantly... and so it allows us instant flexibility.but it was a very very challenging rollout - it took almost 18 to 24 months, there was a lot of pushback to it - but i think if we didn't do that, A) consumers wouldn't have as good of an experience, B) we also would have got commoditized and it would have been really easy for these applications to switch it out. It would just been a worse experience for everybodyBut in the end, it was worth it:I think that (decision) probably generated like 90% of our market cap today.You can try the full UX of the $12 Billion UI right here: plaid.com/demo without connecting a bank account.You can see Stripe, a Plaid competitor that stayed relatively behind the scenes, increasingly start to own the experience with Billing in 2018, Checkout in 2020, and lots more I am unaware of. In fact, Stripe Checkout's marketing sounds eerily similar to what Hockey just said for Plaid:You get the benefit of all this and everything that's to come: even faster load times, additional payment methods we add, compliance with future payments regulations, and every optimization we make to maximize conversion—all without major code changes on your end.Alvar Lagerlof also reports that Swedish fintech Klarna also inserts a branded UI:This is a product direction you can expect more SaaS APIs taking going forward as they seek both to build their own customer relationships and to serve their B2B customers better (by doing their jobs better than they can).Sidenote: Founder Intuition Over DataWhat is perhaps most interesting is that this decision was made without data - Hockey felt like he would not have had support from consumers, banks, or employees - which is why these kind of high conviction bets require founder-led companies.Also noteworthy - it took "three or four years" before it became obvious that forcing their UI was the right decision.At 27 minutes:I see this with founders a lot - when they go try to do product interviews or customer interviews, they're assuming that the people they're interviewing have similar knowledge, interest, or insight to them, and that's just not the case.We just felt like there was a bit of an arbitrage where we knew where the industry was going to play out we knew what the banks were going to react and so we just made the gut call.This isn't something he encourages at all scales - and the transition from being a product visionary at 10 employees to a delegating leader at 1000 employees is a difficult but necessary transition.Column: The Bank with Developer ExperienceFor his next act (as a billionaire, post Plaid), William bought a bank and is now aiming to provide "financial infrastructure to other companies" - if anyone wants to do bank-like activities (loaning, holding, or moving money), Column offers you an API to do that. They aren't the first, but they are aiming to do it better/faster than the incumbents.True to form, he seems to want to own the whole experience here too.At the 39-44 minute mark:How it worked before is, you had this very complicated supply chain where you had these community banks that were obsessively renting out their charters, but they didn't really know what people were doing with it.(Then) banking as a service providers... would sit in between the customer and the bank and they would provide the APIs, they'd provide the developer experience, and they would pass all the risk and complexity up to the bank...and the bank would then outsource all of their technology out to a core and these cores are something called FIS, Fiserv and Jack Henry and they provide all of what you actually think a bank does...We looked at this space and it seems over complicated for something that should be relatively simple... so we are a bank but we also have built all of our own core, we built all of our own developer experience, so if you want to do something, all you have to do is come to us and we'll provide the end-to-end solution.We took this really elongated supply chain and condensed it into one institution...What i learned from Plaid is it's really hard to build a really great developer experience unless you control your entire end-to-end flow because if I don't actually own the bank or I don't own the core, I can't actually deliver you a good service, because I have partners upstream that could it mess up.What happens in the industry right now, is you have these really great companies that are super smart, they build really great technology, but they've obsessively offloaded a lot of the technology and responsibility upstream to people they don't control and so they actually can't deliver a good experience.I want to control the entire thing, all the way up to the Fed and back...So in many ways, it's just a high conviction bet that I think this space is going to evolve a completely vertical solution that is controlled end to end, it will be the winner and I think it's going to take me 10-40 years to get there, but if we do I think we have an opportunity to be the largest and most important financial institution out there.The rest of the conversation goes into cryptoskeptic discussion which isn't super useful for devtool founders.Founder/Investor ReflectionsThis interview/anecdote was notable because it concerns the ideal structure of developer tooling (I wrote a basic intro on Horizontal vs Vertical strategy here).The default approach of all SaaS APIs for the past 1-2 decades has been to aggressively horizontalize - pick one piece of functionality that is repeatedly built by all other companies, specialize in it, turn the fixed-cost upfront investment into a scale-from-zero-to-infinity variable cost API.Hockey took a different route - going from partial vertical integration - forcing Plaid as an API-in-the-middle provider - to full vertical integration with Column. Other founders, notably Rippling, are choosing to centralize rather than specialize, and build multiple offerings from day 1.Developers know the adage - there are only two ways to make money - bundling and unbundling.Economists call this the study of industrial organization.As exhaustion sets in from the modern data, devops, martech, and other landscapes becoming too fragmented, there are surely opportunities to offer the vertically integrated, premium "Apple" to the free, commoditized, so-so "Android" in each kind of developer tooling domain.Either way you land, Plaid and William Hockey's story is a fascinating and relatively rare example of successful vertical organization that more people should know.

Cash App (formerly Square Cash) is a mobile payment service developed by Block, Inc., that allows users to transfer money to one another (for a 1.5% fee for immediate transfer) using a mobile-phone app. The service is available only in United Kingdom and the United States. In September 2021, the service reported 70 million annual transacting users and $1.8 billion in gross profit. History Cash App was launched by Block, Inc. (formerly Square, Inc. at its launch) in October 15, 2013 under the name "Square Cash". In March 2015, Square introduced Square Cash for businesses. This allowed individuals, organizations, and business owners to create a unique username to send and receive money, known as a $cashtag. Since then, the $cashtag has become the most popular method for users to transfer money. In January 2018, Cash App added support for bitcoin trading. In October 2019, Cash App added support for stock trading to users in the United States. In November 2020, Square announced it was acquiring Credit Karma Tax, a free do-it-yourself tax-filing service, for $50 million and would make it a part of its Cash App unit. On November 3, 2021, Square opened Cash App to teenagers between 13 and 17. The app previously required its users to be at least 18 years old. Younger teens will need a parent or guardian to authorize their account and will not have access to cryptocurrency or stock trading until they turn 18.

Chris Osborn is the Founder and CEO of Dialect, a smart messaging protocol that powers seamless, on-chain messaging experiences, starting with wallet-to-wallet chat and dapp notifications. Joe McCann guest hosts. 00:49 - Origin Story02:06 - What is Dialect?05:59 - What are the blockers in Web 3.0?07:46 - Why Solana?11:11 - Looked into other ecosystems?13:52 - What is the process to use Dialect?22:31 - Using Solana Pay with Dialect27:22 - In-game messaging28:36 - Dialect's operations and current projects31:03 - Exciting projects in web 3.034:53 - NFTs and Messaging DISCLAIMERThe information on this podcast is provided for educational, informational, and entertainment purposes only, without any express or implied warranty of any kind, including warranties of accuracy, completeness, or fitness for any particular purpose.The information contained in or provided from or through this podcast is not intended to be and does not constitute financial advice, investment advice, trading advice, or any other advice.The information on this podcast is general in nature and is not specific to you, the user or anyone else. You should not make any decision, financial, investment, trading or otherwise, based on any of the information presented on this podcast without undertaking independent due diligence and consultation with a professional broker or financial advisor. Joe (00:10):Hey everybody. Welcome back to the Solana Podcast. It is Joe McCann here again as your guest host, and today we have a very special guest, founder and CEO of Dialect, Chris Osborn.Chris (00:23):Hey Joe, it's great to be here.Joe (00:25):It's great to have you. So I'm really excited about today's episode because what you are doing at Dialect, I think, unlocks a lot of really interesting use cases in the Solana ecosystem, but first I think it might be useful for the listeners to kind of get a sense of who you are, your background and frankly, how you even got started with Dialect.Chris (00:49):So my background is actually in physics. I did my PhD in Atomic Physics at Columbia University. So this WAs like laser cooling and trapping of atoms, precision time measurements and quantum computing stuff. I learned pretty quickly that what I really loved to do is write software and build technology, so I knew after graduating that I wanted to move to the West Coast and work on some cool technology problems. I actually had an opportunity to split the difference and I worked at Rigetti Computing. I don't know if you're familiar, they're a quantum computing startup and got to work on almost every part of their stack, including a lot of software and technology.I helped lead one of the three teams that launched quantum cloud services, which was like AWS for quantum computing, and that helped me realize that I really love kind of like bridging the gap between hard tech and consumer problems and how do users interact with hard tech, and got the itch to build a startup. So actually I started this company outside of crypto and participated in YC. We were building a consumer investing product and pivoted the company actually last fall or early last fall full force induced Solana and started building Dialect.Joe (02:01):Yeah, that's great. I mean, can you maybe just in a few words, like what is Dialect?Chris (02:07):Yeah, so with Dialect what we're doing is we're building what we're calling a smart messaging protocol for DApp notifications and wallet-to-wallet chat. Those are the first two use cases that we're working on. And the best way to think about it is kind of like a decentralized inbox, a way to enable the messaging primitive between wallets. I personally like to think about kind of like hair on fire burning use cases, the things that people need today, and one of the major use cases here is giving DApps a way to connect directly with their users. And that's through the main mechanism that users identify themselves on the blockchain, which is with wallets.Joe (02:46):So cool. So, I mean, I remember meeting you many, many months ago last year and was really blown away because one of the kind of gaps that I was seeing in a lot of Web 3.0 Applications, irrespective of the underlying chain, was the ability to have like native notifications that are genuinely on chain and not using a service like Twilio or a Web 2.0 or cloud computing context. So the users kind of better understand what Dialect is and can enable, you can kind of walk through maybe some canonical use cases of Dialect?Chris (03:22):Yeah, absolutely. So the use case that got me into it right away like that first just really compelling use case is if you're using a collateralized lending protocol. You lend in token A and you borrow out token B and as prices move, if you become under collateral, the protocol or many protocols will end up liquidating your collateral on an underlying market. And in a world without messages and notifications, basically up until today, a lot of early DeFi users relied on just like a poll mechanism. Like I got to constantly come back to this product and refresh the browser and see how are my positions doing? And there've actually been some like kind of remarkable situations where when there were dramatic price movements, people could see that there was a wallet address on chain that was at risk of a very large liquidation and folks were like, "How do we get in touch with this user? How do we actually contact them and let them know that there's a problem?"And so there's no question that there's like a huge need here. Liquidations were the start, we're now working with projects across DeFi in various capacities, DAOs is another really big use case we can talk about in a little bit and NFTs. So alerts about really important situations, obviously those are kind of like that first use case, but the holy grail with messaging is user retention and engagement. So even if you get beyond emergency situations across whether it's like NFTs and more social, or whether it's DAOs and collaboration, there's just like infinite use cases for technology like this.Joe (04:58):That's really cool. I mean, I agree. It feels like almost every Web 3.0 project or protocol is going to need notifications in some capacity. I mean, I know myself I've been in those positions where I need to add more collateral to a position and I have to keep going back to it, or more recently using some of the structured product vaults that are out there where you can... if you want to say redeem some of your investment, maybe the interest that you've earned, you have to just kind of set a calendar invite.Chris (05:27):That's exactly right. That's right.Joe (05:28):Yeah. So to me that's some friction for end users, but it seems like a solvable problem and it sounds like that's what Dialect is doing. But I'm curious because today in like a Web 2.0 Kind of cloudy world, push notifications, email notifications, in-browser notifications, they just seem so commonplace to implement. So why is it that you think that this hasn't really been a thing yet in Web 3.0 ? What's been kind of the blocker and maybe then we can talk about why you chose Solana?Chris (06:01):Yeah, this is actually a really... This is a super cool problem. The blocker is the following, and obviously nothing's ever truly a strict blocker, it's really just a question of sort of like what are your priorities and what are you working on? So in Web 2.0if you're like a typical startup, you're already running some backend service that's got a database and it's got some synchronous and asynchronous processes. And if you're building in Web 2.0, there's tons of Web 2.0 tooling to support you. And so right into one of those backend services, you can sign up for Twilio, get your authentication keys, store them as environment variables and then anytime there's a specific process where you want to send a user a text message, you just fire it off. Same exact kind of Web 2.0 SaaS system exists for Apple push notifications, Android, SendGrid email, all that. Where things get interesting in Web 3.0 is typically, and especially with like the more really Web 3.0 native projects, whether that's in DeFi, NFTs, wherever, your backend is the blockchain.And there's some basic things that are different with most blockchains like Solana or Ethereum, and that's that most information is public. So you can't store sort of like secret credentials on chain and then in addition, you can't make HTTP requests to some other SaaS. So like the SaaS model breaks down when you start building in blockchain, so if you want to support these use cases for your users, you basically have to like expand your engineering footprint, spin up some Web 2.0 services that perform two processes. One is monitor the blockchain for the events that you care about and then number two is decide that you're going to send messages accordingly, whether that's like Twilio, email or push notifications. So that's part one and then part two, to answer your question about why Solana, and this comes back to my personal journey in crypto.So a friend told me about Bitcoin way back in like 2011. Around that time, I was first exposed to the proof of work concept. It's like easily top five most incredible things that I've learned in my life. I didn't start working in crypto until now, but that had a huge impact on me and I've been following along with everything that's been happening in crypto since then. So heard about Ethereum in 2016 when it... I think it launched in 2016. And what Bitcoin did with proof of work decentralization and then Ethereum did for generalizing compute on-chain and in a decentralized fashion, I discovered Solana in late 2020, I think early October, 2020. For me what Bitcoin and Ethereum did, Solana's proof of history and how it scales technology for ultra fast transaction settlement times, ultra low transaction fee costs, that to me was as impactful. So I see that in the direct lineage of technology.So, that was like late 2020, and DeFi Summer was in full force. I was starting to use more and more technology like more and more Web 3.0 native apps. Over the course of that year I mentioned I was working on a separate project, I saw the Solana ecosystem just absolutely explode. It was like a literal Cambrian explosion. So by the time it was like late summer of 2021, I was taking a hard look at what I was currently working on and then I was looking at Solana and saying every extra week that I'm not working on solana is just a huge missed opportunity. And pulled the trigger and moved full force into Solana. Solana's transaction costs and speed opened up an enormous new design space that is really not feasible if you want to build a truly on-chain messaging system on some other blockchains.So if you're looking at fractions of a tenth of a penny in terms of the transaction costs and then subsecond, you know 400 millisecond block times, that enables a very large new design space. So what I saw at the time was this opportunity to build a whole new SaaS layers. So with Dialect we're building developer tooling, we want to provide this end user experience for developers to build into their own DApps. And when you have any orders of magnitude improvement in performance, it just opens up a very large new space to build in, so to me it was a no brainer. There was no question in my mind. So I've been a blockchain enthusiast for over 10 years, but Solana was that threshold. That was sort of that Rubicon where I just knew this is this, it's now time to build.Joe (10:22):Yeah. I mean, I feel like in other ecosystems, something like this... I don't want to say it's not possible, it just seems like it's impractical. And I think Solana's design where it has this incredibly cheap transaction fee and speed is perfectly suited for something like Dialect and on-chain messaging, if you will. But have you dug into say other chains like maybe something in the Cosmos Ecosystem or even just Ethereum? And did you evaluate whether or not this could be done or was it just kind of like at the baseline look, Ethereum is like pretty expensive for transaction and relatively slow block times, this is just going to work for say push notifications or wallet-to-wallet messaging?Chris (11:12):Yeah, so that's a great question. I would say the following: there are some wallet-to-wallet chat and communication tools on Ethereum and with many of them, what you do is you authenticate with your wallet, but the messages may be stored off-chain somewhere else. And that's not obviously a total deal breaker. In general, I think the authentication problem... I know it's not specific to messaging, but it obviously takes really like a front seat in messaging of who's sending these messages, and the general problem of authenticating with your wallet is just a fun design space. So we're personally really excited to see messaging come online on some other blockchains. If you really want to run a fully on-chain experience where the message source of truth is on-chain, Solana really has several orders of magnitude on a lot of these competing chains.Not that that's necessarily the future that exists long term, it may actually make sense for there to be more of a data centric L1 that stores these messages. And so the choice for us coming full circle on this question is Solana presented an opportunity for us to build relatively small architectural footprint. That means let's just keep as much on Solana as possible. We're decentralized first, we're not storing any messages in say fire base or any other Web2 services, and really provide that great experience, and it's really just a question now of where go.Messaging between wallet is such an important and compelling use case, and I think we're seeing a lot more projects come online now that this problem's inevitably going to be solved in a cross chain manner. We are excited about that future, but we're a hundred percent focused on Solana for now. We also say, I didn't necessarily explicitly say this earlier, but Solana's proof of history concept and the way that it works, some of the first podcasts I listened to about that in summer and fall of 2020, just really blew my mind. So another big piece of it is go where there's just exciting technology, where the developers are extremely talented and everybody's really enthusiastic. For us, there's just a no brainer, we a blast on Solana.Joe (13:15):I hear that very, very often these days, there's been quite a bit of interest from developers; in a lot of cases, developers who have never written an Ethereum app or any sort of other Web 3.0 app or just diving into Solana and loving it. So speaking of developers, as a developer, how do I use Dialect? Can you kind of walk us through the scenario? Is there an SDK? Is there a token I need to have? What is the kind of process if I'm a protocol or a project today that wants or needs on-chain messaging or notifications for my protocol or project? How do I get started?Chris (13:54):Let me answer in two parts. Number one is what you do today. Our messaging protocol is live and audited on the Solana main net, and we have open sourced our protocol and Web 3.0 client we build with Anchor. I really love anchor, it's one of our favorite toolkits we've worked with. So you can import that Web 3.0 client directly into your web app or some other process, some other service that you're running and you can get started sending messages right away. As I mentioned, even for DApp notifications, the primitive is wallet-to-wallet messaging. So in the same way that you might receive an email from a business, some kind of notification they're sending from an email address that they manages the business, the same thing goes here; you manage a key pair that you do your messaging with. So you can import our protocol and just start sending and receiving messages.The main way that most projects interact with our tooling is two-part though, two layers on top of that core protocol. Number one is if you're a DApp and you need to send a notification to a user or a message saying that they're at risk of liquidation, let's come back to this liquidation example. You need to be monitoring the blockchain to detect that there's this event where you then programmatically send the messages. The same thing goes historically with Twilio or SendGrid, you incorporate this code into your services. So like we talked about earlier, you need to be running these off-chain services that help determine that events are happening and to write messages. And we offer open source tooling around this, it's called our monitor framework and our monitoring service, which is our opinionated way about how to host that. And you can then basically spin this up yourself, or you can host with us and you use that to write the very minimal code that's specific to your protocol.So let's say you have some way to query for the users or the wallets obligations, which is a term that lending protocols use, and you can get your collateral health or your risk of liquidation directly from that data. Our monitoring service allows you to fetch that data, basically write the code that's specific to your protocol and then that gets piped into kind of like a reactive framework that we use to determine whether or not to send messages. So this is monitoring tooling that's specifically custom built for figuring out to send a message and it can work very flexibly with other kinds of tooling. Maybe it's like you've got a Kafka messaging queue, or some other kinds of... Some projects actually have fairly sophisticated Web 2.0 infrastructure, but they're still interested in working with us because we handle the hard problem to just making sure at most one and just at least one message get fired off to a user.The second half is how do you surface these messages to users? So today what we're solving, what we're live with are what we're calling in-app notifications. So think about your favorite Web 2.0 product; you sign in, and maybe somewhere in the nav bar you see a little notification bell and it's a button and you can click to see that there are messages or something you need to know about from that product. Today, we offer basically like a single React component. We're prioritizing React, most projects, web apps are built in React, where you can drop that single component into the nav bar of your DApp and right out of the box if a user clicks that notification, they have the opportunity to fully onboard to the notification experience all within that single component. So it's like a model that pops up that allows you to say yes, I'd like to enable notifications for this app.And then once you've done that, you can kind of see what are you going to get notifications around. So it might be warnings about pending liquidations, it might be liquidations themselves, it might be actually more receipt style messages. So it might be an order filled if you're using a DEX where orders fill asynchronously, it can be things around DAO collaborations. So one of the major use cases that DAOs we've been speaking to have been interested in is engagement and retention on voting. So you might receive notifications from a DAO telling you that you have six hours left to vote on a proposal, or that there's a new proposal, or that maybe you're near a quorum on the voting threshold needed to pass or reject a proposal. So there's all these different use cases and really you get that right out of the box directly in your nav bar with this single React component. So that's in-app notifications.What's coming soon and coming back to this question of just the broader messaging thesis, we're launching support soon for email, Telegram, possibly text message, other kinds of Web 2.0 means because the reality is even if the thesis and the vision is fully on-chain messaging, we live in a world where many users rely on and really appreciate getting messages via Web 2.0. So email's a no-brainer, and a lot of projects have asked us to support that so that's coming online very soon. And then Telegram is a little more of like a Web 3.0 native messaging solution that's still off-chain, and a lot of projects have asked us for support on that. So you can think of the Dialect standard as both the on-chain messaging standard, as well as a suite of really out of the box tooling to allow DApps to reach their users however they want.Joe (19:13):What's really interesting about how you're thinking about building out your company and the protocol and kind of the suite of products is that it reminds me of kind of like early days of Twilio. So I wrote a blog post many years ago, probably 10 years ago now about how over-the-top messaging was really kind of this new platform play. We've seen through the myriad messaging apps and then kind of the power of iMessage on Apple and the blue bubble versus the green bubble. I think there's now a regulation coming out of the EU that all these messaging apps have to inter-op with each other. But that took many, many years and I think Twilio really captured a lot of the developer mind share around creating these kind of suites of messaging products and it started with SMS. And so you mentioned something like Telegram, which I think everybody in crypto lives and dies in Telegram. I can barely keep up with myself.Chris (20:17):That's right.Joe (20:17):I've written some Telegram bots and they're pretty easy if you have a fundamental understanding of how webhooks work. Is that something that Dialects will enable? Is that like maybe some arbitrary webhook could fire? Or is it something that needs to be actually he baked into the on-chain program itself?Chris (20:34):Yeah, so it's not actually for support. We want to keep the part on-chain as light and simple as possible and so you can think of these web two channels such as Telegram as really just parallel rails. So you have the detection of an event that a user wants to hear about and that's monitoring data on-chain, and then you have various channels which may purely be in one user's case, "Oh, I just want to get an email, or I just want to get a Telegram message from a bot that's managed by the project." The developer experience around Twilio and Telegram and whatnot are excellent, but what Dialect provides here, if a DApp is interested in reaching their users by these means is you just get it all out of the box right away. You write a little snippet of code that fetches the data that determines if a message needs to be sent, and then you say how you want each message to look and that's really all you have to think about.The user will choose how they want to be gotten in touch with directly through the front end tooling that we provide. I think it was actually you, Joe, who mentioned this to us, that one of the key metrics is time to success. Crypto is moving at just an absolute lightning pace and while every project that we've talked to really wants this tooling, it's never quite the first priority that they have. So what we're trying to do is really make that as simple as possible for these projects to integrate us.Joe (21:53):So let's talk about some of the categories that exist, not just broadly in Web 3.0, but I would argue is probably more suited towards Solana, particularly the payment space. So Solana Pay has launched, there's lot of people building a lot of really interesting stuff with Solana Pay from point of sale solutions to web apps and mobile apps, et cetera. Can you kind of walk me through an example of how say someone that wants to build something with Solana Pay would utilize Dialect. Chris (22:26):Yeah, this is actually a really fun topic. Ever since Solana Pay got launched, the team and I have just been super excited about the messaging use cases there. This is also a good template for talking about our smart messaging thesis, so I'm going to segue from Solana Pay into a broader discussion here, but I would start by saying the following: Solana Pay is a standard for being able to perform transactions, being able to perform transfers between wallets on-chain and there is a very compelling messaging use case here. If you think about some of the standards in Web 2.0 , whether it's Apple Pay for transferring, or Venmo or Square Cash, that kind of dynamic experience of being able to message between users and actually take action on the message. One of our key insights with Dialect is this smart messaging standard we're building toward, and you can think of that kind of like an interactive link preview.In every DApp that you use where you connect your wallet, you have signing privileges everywhere. And so where we're building and this... A few minutes ago I said, "Here's where Dialect is today and the question is where we're going." In this smart messaging future, we're allowing users to send basically interactive link previews and you can think of a transfer request as one of the simplest use cases there. So for example, if you want to send a transfer request by a Dialect message to one of your friends directly at their wallet address, you can send that and then they can take action right in the message, whether that's scanning a QR code that's rendered for them, or it's clicking a send payment message. Coming back to some of the use cases we talked a little while ago about such as liquidation, warnings or DAO proposals and voting prompts, the holy grail in user retention and engagement is being able to reach them and have them be able to take action right where you're messaging with them.In Web 2.0 beyond these app specific use cases, whether it's a Venmo transfer request or similar, most of the time if you get an email, there's a link in the email and you have to click that and go out to another app. And maybe you're not logged in on your phone so you say, "Okay, in five hours when I'm back at my computer I'll take care of this." Or similar with a text message. What's really unique about messaging in Web 3.0 is that we can build a standard where you can take action right in the message. So whether it's Solana Pay, whether it's a vote yes or a vote no on a proposal, or it's a quick deposit to top up your collateral to avoid liquidation, any of those things with Dialect and our smart messaging standard, what we're building toward is that kind of Web 3.0 native future. So the last thing I would say about this is, yes, it's true that messaging and notifications are this really critical missing piece of Web 3.0 and it's just a really known hair on fire problem. When we got started on Dialect, the question we asked ourselves is not just how we fill in that missing piece, but also how we take Web 3.0to a place that Web 2.0 can't as easily go. And this is because our thesis is Web 3.0 is going to reach mass adoption because of exciting and really compelling delightful new use cases that products are going to start to come online, whether they take advantage of universal authentication like we're talking about now, whether they take advantage of composability of sort of the global shared state of all the data existing on a single blockchain, those are the use cases that are going to make it really compelling for the first billion users to onboard to Web 3.0. This is our thesis with smart messaging and Solana Pay is a really key and interesting part of that picture.Joe (26:18):I'll be honest, that is fascinating because one of the cool things about what you're mentioning is that push notifications or in-app notifications become actionable. You can actually do something right there-Chris (26:33):That's right.Joe (26:34):... versus it being this sort of delayed or async process. And so the use cases really open up pretty dramatically because of the fact that these messages are now interactive and you can do things with them.Chris (26:50):That's right.Joe (26:50):And have you guys thought through maybe where this could potentially work in like the context of a video game or even like the metaverse? There's a lot of Web 3.0 games/metaverse type environments being created and I'm curious if sort of in-game messaging makes sense or if it's something that is slightly different?Chris (27:18):Yeah, in-game messaging I think is a fantastic use case, and we've spent a little less time talking to gaming projects. I think just because that's a little early on, as we have say, talking to DeFi, NFT, DAO projects. But one of the things I'm most excited about is sort of the universality of NFTs as assets and all of the infrastructure that's being built around the things that you achieve and the assets that you acquire in-game end up having a life and a value beyond that game. It's really compelling to us that there be interactive sort of like smart message experiences around that content, at the very least. So I think gaming is an incredibly exciting in use case.Joe (28:05):Awesome. Yeah, I could see a lot of really cool integrations being utilized there and they just kind of don't exist today. I mean, frankly, there aren't a lot of Web 3.0 games period, but I know a lot of them are coming online later this year. What about like the traction of the company and folks that you're working with today? I know since you pivoted Dialect into this smart messaging protocol business things have really started to heat up. Can you talk about maybe how many people you're kind of signing up or any projects that are currently utilizing your product today?Chris (28:38):Yeah, that's right. We're talking to a few dozen projects right now across a lot of the verticals that I mentioned earlier. We're going live with a handful of our first projects that we've publicly announced so far. So that includes Squads and meaning on the DAO tooling side, Jet Protocol on the lending side, Bridgesplit on the NFT and NFT fractionalization space. Oh, on protocol Friktion is another project, you mentioned structured products earlier and it's been a real joy working with them. One of the things that we believe is it's best to like dog food your own tooling to make it better. So we've just straight up been rolling our sleeves up to help build out with them, and that helps us get better and better at our developer tooling.Then there's just this other wave, as I mentioned, a few dozen other projects that we can't talk about quite yet, but are extremely excited to support. And to support all these projects, we've also been growing the team pretty quickly as well. So there's a lot going on right now and as we talked about earlier, it's an incredibly compelling use case. This technology has to exist, at the very least receiving an email or a text message or a Telegram message. But where things really catch and where we really have a great time with our conversations is around this smart messaging future that we're building out, and that's when I think folks get really excited about the opportunity.Joe (30:07):Yeah. I mean, I completely agree. It's really hard to imagine a scenario where an app isn't going to need some form of messaging or notifications. And given the direction and the future of the company and where you guys want to take the product and protocol, it seems inevitable that folks are going to be adopting this. So maybe talk a little bit about how you're envisioning the future. You know, you have a very specific view into what you're doing with Dialect, but by engaging with all these different projects and protocols, you can get like an interesting view into what things are happening, what things are coming out soon, and maybe where you see things heading. The space is evolving and changing so rapidly and quickly that it's hard to predict anything, but what are some things that you kind of see in the future not necessarily just for Dialect, but also you Web 3.0 in general and how maybe Dialect plays a role in that?Chris (31:05):Yeah. I think if there were a single theme and I'm not alone in saying this, it's just really what got me into crypto in the first place and it's incredible to see it beginning to happen. I would say the thesis here is composability, so any blockchain that really makes global shared state a possibility. I think it might have been Chris Dixon who said composability is like compounding interest, it just causes this exponential runaway in technology. And the things I'm most excited about and we are most excited about at Dialect is that composability. So whether it's being able to exchange information and perform financial actions between DeFi protocols or it's the financialization that's going into some gaming tools that are coming online, like you said, that rely on some DeFi infrastructure like... To me, this is why it's going to be the sort of killer consumer experiences that come of composability and global shared state that are really going to make for the next big wave in Web 3.0.Chris (32:09):And the way we're interested in that in our own small way with Dialect, and I didn't mention this earlier, is one of our visions here with smart messaging is creating a kind of decentralized inbox. So as we mentioned, our tooling today supports these on chain messages delivered directly to any given DApp where the user enables and then can consume those messages in the DApp itself. But those messages can be consumed by anyone and so there's this other half of the problem that we're working on that's coming online soon, where for example, a mobile wallet could have an entire inbox and messaging section. And now you're talking about no matter which DApps you've enabled, you're receiving a true iOS or Android push notification directly to that mobile messaging experience that you have there, and that's just yet another example of composability. And so, like I said, I'm not alone in being incredibly excited about this but it really is, I think, the kind of compounding developer experience that's just going to create a whole new set of really exciting consumer... Like a new kind of internet consumer experience.Joe (33:18):That's awesome and I agree. I think one of the areas that is no short of discussion in Web 3.0 is NFTs. I've talked about this on some Twitter spaces and other podcasts where right now we're just kind of in the infancy of what NFTs can unlock. You know, there's obviously the art aspect of it, there's in video game assets, et cetera, et cetera. But one of the things that I am interested to hear your take on, and maybe how this correlates to Dialect is NFT is in a person's wallet, it's on chain, but the person interacting with the wallet is a customer, a user, and I think a lot of companies want to be able to engage with their customers and users more directly. So is there a scenario where I have an NFT in my wallet and depending on the NFT mentor or something, maybe it's a brand, maybe it's a company, maybe it's an artist, maybe it's a musician, has a way to either via the NFT directly or utilizing Dialect, be able to kind of communicate with me directly?Joe (34:31):An example I always give is imagine Starbucks wants to airdrop, I don't know, some seasonal loyalty program thing, right? Christmas, Easter, or whatever, spring break, you name it, and it's for people that have this NFT in their wallet and they want to airdrop them something or be able to communicate with them. Is this something that Dialect would unlock or do you think this is something that's more kind of NFT specific?Chris (34:55):To be honest, I thought you'd never ask about this. This is this third part of smart messaging that we are just beyond excited about. It touches on a few different things, but maybe I'll just say briefly that another key aspect of Web 2.0 messaging that I think to many of us feels very broken is this question of sort of like cold inbound and marketing and spam. With Web 3.0's inherent financialization, there is this very natural situation where you can basically tokenize messaging and create markets around how different entities communicate with each other. And on the two extremes there, or maybe let's talk about three, two to three points on the spectrum here. If you Joe and I just want to message with each other, there's sort of mutual opt-in in the exchange of a token and we can just message with each other.Similarly, if there's a business that I really love and I want to opt-in let's say, like you mentioned, I think you said Starbucks, I'll opt into that and there may be some implicit under the hood kind of exchange of a token that allows for that messaging. There's also scenarios where businesses want to get in touch with individuals that they think are high value, and that's a cold inbound scenario. In that scenario, a business might need to actually buy one of these tokens of yours on an exchange in order to engage with you.By financializing that component of cold inbound, I think one, it creates a much more harmonious kind of like cold messaging experience in Web 3.0 that in many ways is a bit much in Web 2.0, but in the mutual opt-in scenario or the messaging is effectively like vanishingly small cost or effectively free. And powering all of this, kind of coming back to your point about NFTs, is the NFT primitive. So this is a technology in an architecture we're exploring right now and it's very likely that NFTs will serve that use case. It's a kind of technology in a use case that we're just like beyond excited about.Joe (36:59):Fascinating conversation today with you, Chris. I really appreciate it. The future's bright for Dialect, the use cases that you've outlined are kind of no brainers, but what I'm really excited about is what we unlock in a Web 3.0 native context for smart messaging. I want to thank you today for joining the Solana Podcast. How can people actually get in contact with you? Are you on Telegram or Twitter? If they want to contact Dialect and get in touch, what's the best way of doing that?Chris (37:26):Yeah, the best way to get in touch with us is on Twitter and our Twitter handle is @saydialect, that's S-A-Y D-I-A-L-E-C-T. We love engaging with the community. Developer feedback, we live and die off of that, and so if you have complaints about our technology, have feature requests, any of that, send it our way. We're also on Discord. We have a Discord community, you can join that from our bio in Twitter. And then the last thing I would say is we're hiring, and so if this technology is interesting to you, we would love, love, love to work with you.Joe (38:02):Well, you heard it here first folks. Chris Osborn, computer scientist in the quantum physics space turned smart messaging protocol engineer and architect. Chris, thanks so much for joining the Solana Podcast. Looking forward to chatting with you again soon. See ya.Chris (38:18):Thank you very much, Joe. It was my pleasure.

This is Jesse Pujji and today we're breaking down Block – formerly known as Square. This software and financial services business was founded by Jack Dorsey and Jim McKelvey in 2009. It has since expanded from its first product – a payments card reader – into a $75 billion market cap with six businesses that build on the firm's mission of economic access and empowerment. Those are: Square, Cash App, Afterpay, Tidal, Spiral, and TBD.   To break down Block, I'm joined by payments expert and investor at TDM Growth Partners, Hamish Corlett. We cover the common threads that have enabled Block to organically build two major ecosystems in Square and Cash App, how the recent Afterpay acquisition can strengthen the connective tissue between those businesses, and the competitive frontiers Block faces. Please enjoy this business breakdown of Block.   For the full show notes, transcript, and links to the best content to learn more, check out the episode page here.   -----   This episode is brought to you by Visible Alpha. The team at Visible Alpha built a platform to analyze consensus data and financial metrics on over 6,000 publicly traded companies. Rather than having to dig through models one by one, Visible Alpha extracts data from every line item across sell-side models so you can better understand expectations on metrics beyond just revenue and earnings. Try Visible Alpha for free by visiting visiblealpha.com/breakdowns   -----   This episode is brought to you by Scribe. Scribe is the trusted transcription provider for the business and investing community. Scribe is designed to accurately transcribe messy, real-world audio and is unique in that it's optimized for the complexities of enterprise audio, such as company and product names, currencies, accents and numbers. Visit kensho.com/breakdowns to learn more and unlock your free trial.   -----   Business Breakdowns is a property of Colossus, LLC. For more episodes of Business Breakdowns, visit joincolossus.com/episodes.   Stay up to date on all our podcasts by signing up to Colossus Weekly, our quick dive every Sunday highlighting the top business and investing concepts from our podcasts and the best of what we read that week. Sign up here.   Follow us on Twitter: @JoinColossus | @patrick_oshag | @jspujji | @zbfuss   Show Notes [00:02:52] - [First question] - What is Block and what it does as a business [00:04:58] - How is Block organized, their scale, and how many merchants they serve [00:08:03] - Their founding story and the insight that lead to creating Block [00:10:49] - Major milestones in the last decade after releasing their card reader [00:13:47] - The story behind their Cash App and what it is [00:18:59] - What Afterpay is and how it creates connections for merchants [00:21:23] - Overview of the payment ecosystem and where Block fits into it [00:25:03] - The P&L of Square, its blended gross margin, and customer acquisition strategy [00:30:42] - How Cash App makes money and its P&L [00:35:54] - The balance sheet of Block and how they've stood out in a competitive space [00:38:31] - The ways their product organization allows them to move at a rapid pace [00:40:30] - How they avoid fraud that's seemingly everywhere in financial service businesses [00:42:01] - His thoughts on the competitive environment and how they're succeeding [00:47:56] - Highlights of M&A and how they reconcile them with their overall strategy [00:54:44] - Their view on Bitcoin and crypto and how it plays into Block's business [00:59:09] - Things that could happen in a macro environment to aid their future growth [01:01:30] - What could go wrong in the future and the macro environment's impact [01:03:49] - Lessons for builders and investors when studying Block's story [01:06:20] - Places to go to learn more about Block

Today's episode is with Max Rhodes, the co-founder and CEO of Faire, an online wholesale marketplace that connects independent retailers and brands. Prior to starting Faire in 2017, Max spent several years at Square, where he was a founding member of Square Capital, the first product manager on Square Cash, and a Director of Consumer Product for Caviar. In today's conversation, we dive deep into how startups can get international expansion right. After launching in the U.K. and Netherlands in March 2021, Faire company expanded into countries like France, Germany, Italy and the Nordic region. They're now in 15 markets, with over 700 employees in 10 offices around the world.  After sharing the company's origin story and initial strategy, Max offers a helpful analogy that helped him decide when to go international, and details some lessons he learned from other companies like DoorDash and Airbnb. Next, Max takes us through the nuts and bolts of how the Faire team approached their first international launch, from staffing and operations, to how they thought about local competitors. Max also walks us through the operating cadence and strategic planning process that powered Faire's international growth. We also talk about the human side of scaling internationally, and the growing pains that come along with it.  To help mitigate the effects, Max shares how he's implemented the concepts from the First Round Review article on “Giving away your Legos.” Read the article here: https://review.firstround.com/give-away-your-legos-and-other-commandments-for-scaling-startups  You can follow Max on Twitter at @MaxRhodesOK. You can email us questions directly at review@firstround.com or follow us on Twitter @firstround and @brettberson.

★TECH CRUNCH https://jp.techcrunch.com/2022/01/19/2022-01-18-blocks-cash-app-adopts-lightning-network-for-free-bitcoin-payments/ ★Lightning networkとは(bitflyer) https://bitflyer.com/ja-jp/s/glossary/lightning-network ★海外スタートアップ攻略（ブログ） https://daijirostartup.com/ ★だいじろうのTwitter（ご意見お待ちしてます！） https://twitter.com/daijirostartup #海外　#スタートアップ　#web3 #liteningnetwork --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/daijirostartup/message

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TALIA! If you haven't already, send her money on Square Cash! Today's topics of discussion include a brewing celebrity couple-off between A-listers, the many ways you can gamble, Talia's favorite famous Capricorns, and why Alainna just can't quit Kanye West. This is the episode for all our pop culture lovers. Outro music: Girls by the Beastie Boys IG: @cleleisurelodge Contact us via email at cleleisurelodge@gmail.

SponsorsRewind: https://cloudaccountingpodcast.promo/rewindAFO Wealth Management Forward: https://cloudaccountingpodcast.promo/afoClient Hub: https://cloudaccountingpodcast.promo/clienthubShow NotesComing soon! Get in TouchThanks for listening and for the great reviews! We appreciate you! Follow and tweet @BlakeTOliver and @DavidLeary. Find us on Facebook and, if you like what you hear, please do us a favor and write a review on iTunes, or Podchaser. Interested in sponsoring the Cloud Accounting Podcast? For details, read the prospectus, and NOW, you can see our smiling faces on Instagram! You can now call us and leave a voicemail, maybe we'll play it on the show. DIAL (202) 695-1040Need Accounting Conference Info? Check out our new website - accountingconferences.comLimited edition shirts, stickers, and other necessitiesTeePublic Store: http://cloudacctpod.link/merchSubscribe Apple Podcasts: http://cloudacctpod.link/ApplePodcasts Podchaser: http://cloudacctpod.link/podchaser Spotify: http://cloudacctpod.link/Spotify Google Play: http://cloudacctpod.link/GooglePlay Stitcher: http://cloudacctpod.link/Stitcher Overcast: http://cloudacctpod.link/Overcast ClassifiedsFuture Firm: https://futurefirmaccelerate.com/Ambitious Bookkeeper: http://bkworkshops.online/Accounting Podcast Network: https://accountingpodcastnetwork.com/Go here to create your classified ad: https://cloudacctpod.link/RunClassifiedAd  Want to get the word out about your newsletter, webinar, party, Facebook group, podcast, e-book, job posting, or that fancy Excel macro you just created? Why not let the listeners of The Cloud Accounting Podcast know by running a classified ad? Hit the show notes for the link to get more info.Full Transcript Available Upon Request - info@cloudaccountingpodcast.com

Listen to our archived episodes: RadioPublic|LibSyn|YouTube Support the show: Patreon|PayPal: 1x or monthly|Square Cash   Listen as David Waldman and Greg Dworkin deftly weave the weekend logjam of news into rafts of stories right before your ears: We begin under the cloud of another mass shooting —  Many clouds of many mass shootings: 9 incidents with 4 or more victims, 4 mass shootings in 6 hours, 50 injured, a dozen dead. Maybe we should do something about it. Trump banned bump stocks, which didn't mean a thing, and they're coming back anyhow. We also aren't doing enough about COVID. Some of us are safe, too many are not, and variants keep coming. A Texas hospital fires its employees for not taking vaccines, and a federal judge is okay with that. Joe Biden's overseas at the G-7 not being a moron, disappointing no one but Vlad and the conservative media. Joe is so hard to pick on, but not Kamala Harris, as any pack of jackals will happily tell you. Kamala's not the first VP to wade into trouble in Latin America, she just needs to better communicate with the press. Bibi Netanyahu is Israel's new former guy. The new boss is definitely not the same as the old boss, in fact there's plenty of new bosses, many of them ready to work with our new bosses, just not necessarily with each other. Women in Israeli politics aren't erased, just heavily blurred. Some Southern Baptists aren't southern, or Baptist enough for others, but most of them do idolize Donald Trump. Followers of the former guy sing the praises of guns and daddies, but aren't too big on Black folk. Black folk, on the other hand have been accepting of Ralph Northam, once Northam showed that he could learn from his mistakes. QAnon is beginning to lose its flock. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema are about to prove that Joe Lieberman was right all along. Or not. If Donald Trump doesn't pay for his crimes, we all will. At the DOJ, officials start throwing themselves under the bus, but no one will ever believe Barr and Sessions didn't know. Apple told Don McGahn that his and his wife's records were subpoenaed by the Trump DOJ in 2018. No one believes that Trump and Barr had nothing to do with the teargassing on Lafayette Square. People who read past the headlines understand that they did. The Oregon House expelled Mike Nearman only after a video of Nearman planning, and another video of Mike executing his plan to aid armed trespassers into the Oregon capitol were released. Republicans will tell you all of this talk about Democracy collapsing is exaggerated, especially compared to what they are planning.

Listen to our archived episodes: RadioPublic|LibSyn|YouTube Support the show: Patreon|PayPal: 1x or monthly|Square Cash   It's Friday, the day we look forward to David Waldman pulling out his old KITM ukulele for a couple of hours of “wiki wakki wooing” us into our weekend… But, as too often happens nowadays, some heinous act of political corruption comes along, necessitating that we toss our dependable ballads and shanties and just dig back into the news: Well, they finally got to the bottom of that wiretapping story. It turns out to be Republican projection, kind of like it always does. The Department of Justice, under Jeff Sessions, then Bill Barr, and of course Donald Trump, had directly investigated Democratic members of Congress... and their kids. The DOJ subpoenaed Apple, the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN and others, for phone and email records, including the phone data from at least one minor child, then placed everyone under a gag order to cover up its actions. At the time this was happening, William Barr testified that he “didn't know” if Trump told him to do this. Today, Barr “doesn't recall”. There hasn't been a worse AG than William Barr, but the question is, is Merrick Garland any better? Merrick is not casting any blame at the moment, which doesn't make all of this “no one's fault”, instead it increasingly is making it all Merrick Garland's fault.   Over and over again, Donald Trump commits crimes for which he should be convicted. Democracy can not stand if Trump is not held accountable. Well, Trump and the last few Republican administrations, and probably the next few.

Listen to our archived episodes: RadioPublic|LibSyn|YouTube Support the show: Patreon|PayPal: 1x or monthly|Square Cash   Hot topics this morning included Armando's displeasure at “old school” pro-Republican coverage of VP Harris' Central American trip. But others were focused on the new Senate Rules committee report on the various security failures of January 6th. The Biden DOJ continues in its traditional role as zealous guardian of executive power, this time continuing the Trump-era defense of… (alleged pervert) Trump. The only political tradition Trump ever honored: flip-flopping on the filibuster. Speaking of tradition and the filibuster, people are for some reason interested in discerning the true legacy of Robert Byrd—Manchin's predecessor in the Senate—on the filibuster and the sanctity of the rules. But it's actually not all that easy to work out. Joan McCarter knows that well. And she knows that it probably doesn't matter, anyway. At least, not to Joe Manchin. We're still waiting to find out what might matter to Joe Manchin. So far, we know that finding votes to prove his theories about bipartisanship doesn't. But that's still technically better than the absolutely nothing we know about Kyrsten Sinema. On the other hand, we are learning things about how deep the problems are at the IRS, and how billionaires are able to slip by almost tax-free.

Listen to our archived episodes: RadioPublic|LibSyn|YouTube Support the show: Patreon|PayPal: 1x or monthly|Square Cash   David Waldman and Greg Dworkin present today's KITM with flies up front and forward facing, as you've come to expect. Mo Brooks has finally been served with a lawsuit filed by Eric Swalwell. Well, Mo was still hiding, but his wife, who happens to be of suitable age and discretion, took it for him. Brooks might've not been aware of that convention, as he was also unaware that he shouldn't post his Gmail password and pin numbers. Mo is no ordinary stooge, but is actually paid a lot to know better. Marjorie Traitor Greene demands that Joe Biden investigate Anthony Fauci by June 31, which is exactly when Joe should do it. The former guy kicked off a new season of The Ex-Presidential Apprentice this weekend, along with simultaneous presidential, congressional and House Speaker campaigns, demonstrating there's no one in American politics who could ever fill Trump's pants like he can.  It's a load probably few in history could carry, in fact. Many Republicans are lining up with their pails to lend a hand, however. When will democracy die? Two years from now? Four? Will the Democrat's effort be not enough… or even less? Donald Trump loves Joe Manchin as much as he used to love Mitch McConnell. Mitch McConnell in turn learned to love the Insurrection. Many hoped and planned for an insurrection before January 6th. The Militias were just waiting for Trump's word, but should know Donald never commits to anything.  Trump expects that you'll simply assume that he's determined to strike in the US, and act accordingly.  We aren't the only ones in the world with a Trump. Benjamin Netanyahu hasn't started wearing his pants backwards, but he's starting to feel a “deep state”, and has witnessed several greatest frauds in history as well. January 6th style violence isn't far away, and Israel has right wing militants already in the streets, just waiting for the word... Then there's Jair Bolsonaro.

Listen to our archived episodes: RadioPublic|LibSyn|YouTube Support the show: Patreon|PayPal: 1x or monthly|Square Cash   Happy National Donut Day! Oh, I mean… Very Somber and Reflective National Donut Memorial Day. Sorry. Gee whiz, why aren’t people rushing back to work at low-paying jobs? Joe Manchin still saying the same thing over and over, but not making any more sense. There’s more detail out now from the Senate parliamentarian on the new reconciliation theory. But as usual, I’m less than thrilled with the way it’s explained in the media. As with everything, if you want something done right, you’ve got to do it yourself. Economists say California’s stricter COVID lockdown has set them up for a stronger economic recovery. Emptywheel says something’s happening with Rudy, and Rudy’s such a bad lawyer, he’s taking everybody around him down, too. Why? How? Well, start here, I guess. Don’t “mess with” Texas, arrest Texas! After all, they wanted to hang Mike Pence, which he’s OK with. Just like he’s OK with the end of the “Christian Era.” Georgia’s GQP wants in on the fraudit train. DeSantis figures out that people like getting checks. Will he do better with them than Dems did?

Listen to our archived episodes: RadioPublic|LibSyn|YouTube Support the show: Patreon|PayPal: 1x or monthly|Square Cash   It was all smooth sailing for today’s Raft o’ Stories™ from Greg Dworkin. Good news on unmasking the vaccinated! It doesn’t appear to have had significant spillover effects resulting in any spike in infections. Bad news (maybe) on additional reconciliation bills. The Senate parliamentarian has more thoughts. News from the Q-ological world: a new taxonomy of Q loons has been put forward. As with the coronavirus, this illness appears to spread in church. Elsewhere in crazy, Israel is attempting to sort out its governance, and, uh… here is a thing that people once thought, I guess, about girls and the news. Although maybe it’s not entirely off-base, considering what some people do with the news. Like, pretend that a real thing is that there’s a park in Seattle that’s “too woke.” A park. Not a person. A park. About that Texas voter suppression bill, was it all just one big misunderstanding, gosh darn it? If so, why is the governor—who is terrible—so determined to see it through? And speaking of terrible people trying to see things through for no particular reason, there’s more to know about that wacky  Kushner/MBS plan to “reshape the Middle East.” Specifically, what’s behind the Saud-ish interest in custodianship of Haram al-Sharif, and why they’d want Jordan out of the picture. Finally, a quick tour of some Trump crime spree hot spots: the DC hotel is up for sale, again; Trump, caught with his pants down both literally and figuratively, has someone else thrown under the bus (again); Trump’s stupid blog, where he’s recently been inciting more sedition, is suddenly shut down because reasons.

Listen to our archived episodes: RadioPublic|LibSyn|YouTube Support the show: Patreon|PayPal: 1x or monthly|Square Cash     It was a big day for follow-ups on stories we’ve discussed earlier. First, a new attempt at a GQP freak-out, thanks to Marjorie Traitor Greene. Then, a reminder that these outrages aren’t real. They’re just like GQP Facebook targeted ad messaging tests. Spit them out as fast as you can make them up, then see what sticks. And about that Ryan Air flight forced down over Belarus? It still sucks, but... there’s a “but.” And about that Texas voter suppression bill? It still sucks, but… there’s a “but.” And about that Maricopa County fraudit? It still sucks, but… soon it will suck worse. And about that pandemic? Some of the things that happened didn’t necessarily suck. And about Sean Hannity? He still sucks. And finally, about that lie that cops didn’t use tear gas to clear the way for Trump’s Lafayette Square/St. John’s photo op? It’s still a lie. But now the Biden DOJ is defending the cop riot, anyway. Then, Joan McCarter called. And she didn’t lie once! We got the inside scoop on Idaho’s hottest story: the dueling executive orders of Gov. Brad Little and rogue Lt. Gov. Janice McGeachin. Thanks to Joan, we know that this isn’t the first time Idaho’s had to deal with this f*cknuttery! Last Friday’s filibuster of the Jan. 6th commission could’ve gone very differently. And maybe all filibusters from now on should. But in the meantime, what next for the investigation?

Listen to our archived episodes: RadioPublic|LibSyn|YouTube Support the show: Patreon|PayPal: 1x or monthly|Square Cash   David Waldman and Greg Dworkin will… won’t… WILL be back on Memorial Day! Maybe. But they are definitely here today! We are under a cloud of another mass shooting, or is it “beneath the shadow”? You’d think I’d have the idiom down, for how often it happens. By the way, it was the 18th mass shooting in California this year. It’s the 12th mass shooting in the US — this weekend. It’s time for harsh words! Joe Manchin wants a January 6 commission, and for that matter, filibuster reform as much as you do, but if he gave them to you, you might leave him. One of the January 6th Capitol tourists said he entered the Capitol that day to find his son a bathroom (Nancy Pelosi’s desk) and maybe pick up a souvenir (Nancy Pelosi’s decapitated head).  Kremlin Cruz is full of exactly what you’d expect. Donald Trump is fading away, as is QAnon, but if not for nutcases, Republicans would simply cease to exist. And, that is why MT Greene is the absolute, uncontested leader of the Republican party. It turns out that Greene is not the leader of the Democratic party, so they’d be happy to just get rid of her. On the other hand, militias never fade away, they just die… unfortunately they plan to take a lot of us with them. So, what’s the chance the COVID-19 virus leaked from a lab? “50%”? Or, maybe “1%”? Who knows? What do numbers have to do with pandemics anyhow? It’s what the media thinks that really matters. Joe Biden didn’t trust Mike Pompeo, because who would? So, Joe will keep track this time. Find an evil corporation, become a shareholder — success! There was a plot to “Game of Thrones” the Middle East, and of course Jared Kushner schemed to be the Littlefinger for Ol’ Little Fingers.

Listen to our archived episodes: RadioPublic|LibSyn|YouTube Support the show: Patreon|PayPal: 1x or monthly|Square Cash   It’s Wednesday on KITM! There’s no show without David Waldman, and we all need Greg Dworkin to get through our day, but who’s finally back to grind his gears and offer expert legal and constitutional analysis, but Armando!  One year after the death of George Floyd, and his legacy continues to unfold, perhaps even with Whites, although they can be a pretty dense crowd. Kristen Clarke was confirmed as the first Black woman to head the Justice Department’s civil rights division. The vote was a close one, however, as many Republicans weren’t certain that someone like her might overly favor, you know… “her kind”. Donald Trump knew those Chinese were up to something. Of course, most of the time Donald was polishing their apples and loving their cake, but sometimes he was just “asking questions”. Trump just asked questions every single day of his administration (and before and after), so odds are good that he’d eventually run into an answer he found useful. Tom Cotton started the Wuhan Lab “question” and jumped it right up to a “bioweapon” question. Mike Pompeo was always big on questions, and so was a natural to lead a raid on Wuhan. With all the bad-faith inquiries, it was tough to spot the valid leads to follow. Some fully vaccinated people are still wearing masks. Most of them do it for their health and yours. Most mask wearers would answer nicely and politely if you asked them why. With the pandemic panic fading, fewer Californians are gathering tar and feathers for Governor Gavin Newsom, especially those voters considering the alternative. The Maricopa fraudit is a joke, but we keep laughing at these idiots and they keep multiplying and becoming more dangerous. Except for Mike Lindell. We can probably keep laughing at him. What is it that keeps Trumpers out of jail? Once again, it is up to Donald to lead the way. The NYC grand jury convened by Cyrus Vance might finally get the ball rolling. Bill Barr can’t cover for Donald Trump anymore… but wait, has Merrick Garland taken up where Barr left off? In the Capitol, McCarthyism still runs rampant. Liz Cheney might like democracy, but she’s nobody’s friend. Paul Gosar used to have friends, before he started hating democracy. Right now there is little chance for any sort of reconciliation.

Listen to our archived episodes: RadioPublic|LibSyn|YouTube Support the show: Patreon|PayPal: 1x or monthly|Square Cash   David Waldman and Greg Dworkin present our KITM Victoria Day Special. Not the Eastern Orthodox one either!   Belarus sent a MiG-29 fighter jet to hijack a civilian airliner containing a journalist that isn’t a big fan of the Belarus president. The Belarus president isn’t a big fan of journalists.   Think the former guy could drive? Of course not, why would he learn a thing? Joe Biden drove a Ford F-150 Lightning to 60 miles per hour in 4.4 seconds, and liked it. American EVs will be made with Trump’s ass in mind, however, and thus will be the size of houses. The good news — you can live in them like houses too.   A year after George Floyd died, and crime is rising!  Well, it might correlate better with the lifting of the Covid mask mandate.   The mask mandate could have been dropped a little slower, you know, so that the people who complain government moves too slow could get themselves situated. Vaccine rollouts, on the other hand, need to be quick and smooth, so as not to spook the vaccine hesitant into a stampede. It’s definitely hard to get everyone on the same page, especially when they aren’t into reading pages —  at least not yours.   You’d think the Fraudiots and their fraudit in Maricopa would have embarrassed the Republican party into non-existence, but these are Trump Republicans —  pretty much identical to Republicans past, except for how they apparently crave shame. They all crave power, it’s just that a dwindling number believe disgrace might get in the way of that. After all, the audit franchise is expanding into Georgia, and MAGA-Qs are preparing to be future election officials.    Republican Mike Gallagher called January 6th "banana republic crap" but isn’t about to vote for a January 6 commission. An Ohio GQP chair worked tirelessly for Trump, raised millions, but was slow to destroy a co-worker that disparaged Donald, so she’s a goner.   Jared Kushner stayed at the Ritz-Carlton Abu Dhabi on the taxpayer’s dime, when Mohammed bin Salman had a perfectly good pocket for his stay.   Jason Miller slipped an abortion pill into the smoothie of a stripper he got pregnant (allegedly) A US District Judge says Miller owes Gizmodo $42,000 for wasting their time with a defamation suit.

Listen to our archived episodes: RadioPublic|LibSyn|YouTube Support the show: Patreon|PayPal: 1x or monthly|Square Cash   Some may be hesitant on adhering to his 100% raw cicada diet, but few would doubt David Waldman’s expertise on politics and procedure: The election fraud myth began with a lone grifter, then rolled like a big dung ball across America and around the world, picking up more schemers, scammers, and conspiracy theories, until it crushed Maricopa county. A Michigan judge is attempting to block its path over his county, when earlier he helped give it a little roll himself. The House voted in favor of a bill to establish a commission to investigate the January 6 attack on the Capitol, as expected, since most people would want to know how such an atrocity occurred, and avert it in the future. You wouldn’t expect Republicans to, however, and yet 35 did. Donald Trump demanded that the GQP get much weaker and much stupider, and do all he told them, and of course Republicans got right on it. (Bending over backwards and brownnosing would appear difficult, but seems second nature to most of them, although there’s just something special about the Pence family.) The bill now heads to the Senate and its doom. Well, maybe not. Greg Dworkin reminds us that there’s always hope… and doubt and despair, and that we need to have a plan for each of them. Norm Ornstein outlines several options for Democrats, including going it alone… and forcing Republicans to do likewise. Senator Ron Johnson plans his own, personal investigation in order to really accurately recreate what happened on January 6th. Perhaps he’ll be tazing and beating hundreds of watermelons with a Trump flag. We are just beginning to recover from the physical effects of COVID-19, but the trauma will be around for a while. 

LibSyn|YouTube Support the show: Patreon|PayPal: 1x or monthly|Square Cash   David Waldman just might be in cahoots with “Big Rope” to sell more gallows, as evidenced by several convincing sales pitches he voiced today. A guy in Colorado figured that all the other guys were disappearing their wives and fraudulently voting for Trump, so why shouldn’t he?  You might have seen insurrectionists storming the Capitol on January 6, Georgian Republican Andrew Clyde saw a normal tourist visit. You might have seen Andrew Clyde barricading Senate chamber doors against storming insurrectionists on January 6.  Andrew Clyde saw himself guiding tourist traffic. Gasoline shortages through the south were triggered by ransomware. Colonial Pipeline did pay that ransom, by the way. Oh, and the flow was not impeded, the ransomware attacked the meters used for billing. The whole Supreme Court might not need to line up for the gibbet, if 4 new jurists could be added to show them the error of their ways. Jared Kushner convinced his feeble-minded father-in-law to kill Americans to boost stocks. Jared apparently brought less peace to the Middle East as might have been hoped. Jared did make a ton of money. Then there’s Donald Trump. While Donald pretended to not lose the election, behind the scenes Trump ordered America into full retreat. Maricopa county knows auditing, and the Maricopa County Elections Recorder knows unhinged insane lies, and knows the difference. Greg Dworkin tells us why Smilin’ Joe Biden is so upbeat. While Joe continues to fix things, the GQP plummets into the blackhole of its constituents. These are the kind of people that vote “present” in a secret vote. The folks wondering why it is taking so long to escape mask mandates wonder why mask mandate relief is happening so fast. It’s not that the CDC came up with decision quickly, It’s that they waited so long to tell you what they decided. Millions under the crushing financial burden of awful deregulated insurance plans have discovered a miracle alternative called “Obamacare”! 

LibSyn|YouTube Support the show: Patreon|PayPal: 1x or monthly|Square Cash   Nope, there isn’t an Eastern Orthodox Eid al-Fitr, there is Eid al-Fitr, and it is today. Who would want to put off breaking that fast? Yum! David Waldman and Greg Dworkin bring on the Thursday KITM: MT (vessel) Greene stalked Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez down Capitol hallways verbally assaulting her, just like she did Cori Bush, and David Hogg earlier. Shouldn’t someone call 911? Meanwhile, Republicans ousted Liz Cheney over some disagreement she had with them about the tour group visiting the Capitol on January 6. The GQP might have a lot of tough questions to answer, but the toughest part will be getting honest answers out of them. The Big Lie is the only thing they have going for them. Lying is the one thing their voters like about them, and the only way they will keep their jobs.  A West Virginia delegate, previously Democratic, selected job security over principles. Texan Jason Villalba thought about it and picked principles instead. Joe Manchin really doesn’t understand the question. Elise Stefanik can turn into many things, but maybe not Chip Roy. Will the elimination of party primaries reduce the trend of Republican extremism? Covid vaccine reluctance keeps hitting new lows. Most people want vaccinated, and those who don’t are as difficult to access as when people want them to vote. If you are the type who resists vaccination because you calculate your odds of infection or death are about the same as winning the lottery, Ohio Governor Mike DeWine has got a deal for you. Donald Trump, screwball in exile, might thank his host Ron DeSantis for his asylum, but Donald isn’t that kind of guy. Trump told Wayne LaPierre that Texas would be a good place for the NRA to hide out. Trump was wrong. Does the DOJ still not understand that its loyalty should be to “justice”? 120 retired generals and admirals wrote an open letter to remind us that a military coup is not something that only happens in far-off lands.

LibSyn|YouTube Support the show: Patreon|PayPal: 1x or monthly|Square Cash   If you’re like me, you’ve been perfecting your lip-syncing to David Waldman’s two commercials that have played continuously for years and years of our KITM podcasts. Well, time is running out, as KITM is finally changing things up with the introduction of GUEST SPOKESPEOPLE — like you! To show you how its done, long-time listener/supporter Gil Aquino wrote and performed his very own minute commercial, David spiffed it up and it was just that easy. Try it! Greg Dworkin could produce his own plug for the show, but he’s been busy rehearsing that ventriloquism act with Abby, and hauling in huge rafts of important news and punditry to share with us. Cancel culture claimed Republican Liz Cheney in a blink of an eye. Liz Cheney was no angel by the way. She is in fact, pretty awful. But, Liz’s latest stand might be more than that of a Never (again) Trumper. It wasn’t just about telling the “Big Truth”, but about any truth ever mattering again. Republicans are now for or against democracy. There is no room for a middle in the party anymore, even if there might be with their voters. The GQP will try to lie to the public, they might try to lie to themselves, but they can never trust each other again. Joe Biden’s popularity is rising, because lies don’t work on Joe. Republicans won’t need lies if they can change laws. Of course, they can’t change laws without a lot of lying. Roy Blunt wouldn’t give water to anyone he wasn’t trying to manipulate. Gubernatorial candidate Caitlyn Jenner assures voters that she’d rather golf than consider their issues, but probably just said that for the votes. Evangelicals in Virginia apparently don’t care about the truth, or lies… or facts really. The NRA’s lies aren’t working at all anymore. The founder of Students for Trump lied so much that he lost track of who he was. He now has 13 months in prison to find himself. An expert panel looking into the handling of the Covid pandemic have decided that “mistakes were made”… kind of like in Chernobyl. Plenty of Americans still want the vaccine, but as in voting, the problem is access.

2 hour special! Eve and Kieryn talk about Purity Culture & Sex Addiction, Masturbation, and the nitty gritty of how Bottom Surgery works. This episode is extremely NSFW! CN: talking about sex/abuse/religion (and also joy). If you don't like descriptions of medical processes skip from 3:19 - 8:16. Contribute to Kieryn's surgery fund (leave a note or a peach/cat emoji): Paypal/Venmo/Ko-Fi: MxDarkwater, Square Cash: $kieryn (Kieryn's twitter is @/BluePupBoi)

On this episode of the What Do You Think About Podcast. The fellas discuss Cuomo sexual harassment allegations, Arizona man fix his own kidnapping just to call out of work. Dating app scammers make 304 million in 2020. Jay Z sells majority of tidal stakes to Square/Cash app for 297million plus much much more.......

Reviewing what we learned in 2020—and ranking what we read! So many books! Also: MARIMBAAAAAAAAAAA!!! Show Notes The books we covered this season: Phaedrus, Plato: 8.02, 8.03 The Postmodern Condition, Lyotard: 8.04, 8.05 The Age of Spiritual Machines, Ray Kurzweil: 8.06, 8.07 Jurassic Park, Michael Crichton: 8.08, 8.09 The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, Elizabeth Eisenstein: 8.10, 8.11 Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness, Simone Browne: 8.12, 8.13 The Real World of Technology, Ursula Franklin: 8.14, 8.15 Evolution as a Religion, Mary Midgley: 8.16, 8.17 Contact, Carl Sagan: 8.18, 8.19 Twitter and Tear Gas, Zeynep Tüfekçi: 8.20, 8.21 Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, Robin Sloan: 8.22 Stephen’s list Twitter and Tear Gas Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore The Printing Press as an Agent of Change The Postmodern Condition Contact Jurassic Park Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness The Real World of Technology Phaedrus The Age of Spiritual Machines Evolution as a Religion Chris’s list Twitter and Tear Gas Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore The Printing Press as an Agent of Change Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness Jurassic Park Phaedrus Contact The Real World of Technology The Postmodern Condition The Age of Spiritual Machines Evolution as a Religion Credits Music “Foxglove”, by Ryan Dugré. Used by permission, please don’t use without permission. “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0, meaning you can do whatever you want with this music… as long as you share it for others to likewise do what they want. Sponsors Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors: Daniel Ellcey Douglas Campos Jake Grant Marnix Klooster Spencer Smith If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash. Respond We love to hear your thoughts. Shoot us an email, or hit us up on Twitter or Facebook!

Neal Stephenson at double speed and with a smile on his face. Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, Robin Sloan Show Notes Robin Sloan Sourdough Ruby George Saunders Cory Doctorow Credits Music “Getaway Car”, by Ezekiel Songs originally written by Make Sure. Used by permission, please don’t use without permission. “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0, meaning you can do whatever you want with this music… as long as you share it for others to likewise do what they want. Sponsors Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors: Daniel Ellcey Douglas Campos Jake Grant Marnix Klooster Spencer Smith If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash. Respond We love to hear your thoughts. Shoot us an email, or hit us up on Twitter or Facebook!

The things we learned from Zeynep Tüfeçki’s examination of social media and sociopolitical change. (We liked this book a lot.) Twitter and Tear Gas, Zeynep Tüfeçki Show Notes Zeynep Tüfeçki her recently-launched newsletter Insight 52-Cent Party Cultural Revolution Tianenmen Square Twitter and the 2020 US election Twitter’s own take Hunter Biden Electoral college Ben Thompson Matt Levine’s newsletter Money Stuff His latest issue before going on parental leave back in August profiled in the New York Times Matching blazers For the ’gram Upcoming Book December (8.22 and 8.23): Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, Robin Sloan. Credits Music “Drop Off”, by Vertaal, feat. Severin Bruhin & Loren Hignell Used by permission, please don’t use without permission. “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0, meaning you can do whatever you want with this music… as long as you share it for others to likewise do what they want. Sponsors Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors: Daniel Ellcey Douglas Campos Jake Grant Marnix Klooster Spencer Smith If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash. Respond We love to hear your thoughts. Shoot us an email, or hit us up on Twitter or Facebook!

Walking through Zeynep Tüfeçki’s masterful explanation of the relationship between social media and protest movements. Twitter and Tear Gas, Zeynep Tüfeçki Show Notes Things we mentioned on the show, in the order we mentioned them: Zeynep Tüfeçki her recently-launched newsletter Insight modern Turkey Zapatistas Occupy Wall Street 1999 World Trade Organization protests Arab Spring Tea Party China’s treatment of the Uyghurs Capacities/capabilities The Capability Approach, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Amartya Sen American Civil Rights Movement March on Washington Montgomery Bus Boycott John Lewis The Internet Archive Upcoming Book December (8.22 and 8.23): Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, Robin Sloan. Credits Music “Ode to Youth”, by Liam Mour Used by permission, please don’t use without permission. “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0, meaning you can do whatever you want with this music… as long as you share it for others to likewise do what they want. Sponsors Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors: Daniel Ellcey Douglas Campos Jake Grant Marnix Klooster Spencer Smith If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash. Respond We love to hear your thoughts. Shoot us an email, or hit us up on Twitter or Facebook!

Best Mobile Payment Apps Apple Pay, Circle Pay, Facebook Payments, Google Pay, PayPal, Square Cash, Venma, and Zelle. and Google is a Monopoly & what does that mean

Thinking about Carl Sagan's views on belief, and how they relate to religion and science Contact, Carl Sagan Show Notes After reading Carl Sagan’s 1985 novel Contact and watching the 1995 movie of the same name, we discuss a major epistemological question: what are the acceptable grounds for belief? Are religious belief and scientific proof compatible? Sagan’s surprisingly nuanced views give us interesting ways forward. Things we mentioned on the show, in the order we mentioned them: Carl Sagan Cosmos: TV show and book Non-overlapping Magisteria More commentary on Sagan’s complex and complicated relationship with religion One of many episodes of the Bible Project talking about God working through history Richard Dawkins “Verily I say unto you, they have received their reward in full” (Carradini version, a mashup of the KJV and NIV translations of Matthew 6:2) Sagan’s views on religion and nuclear war Jenkins and LaHaye dispensationalist eschatology, otherwise known as the Left Behind series Postmillenialism Soviet genetics, also known as Lysenkoism (bonus: Lysenkoism is based partially on Lamarckism, which should be familiar to you if you just listened to our episodes on Mary Midgley’s work) Upcoming Book November (8.20 and 8.21): Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest, Zeynep Tufecki. You can also download it from Tufecki’s website as a PDF. December (8.22 and 8.23): Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, Robin Sloan. Credits Music “Character” by Kylie Odetta. Used by permission, please don’t use without permission. “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0, meaning you can do whatever you want with this music… as long as you share it for others to likewise do what they want. Sponsors Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors: Daniel Ellcey Douglas Campos Jake Grant Marnix Klooster Spencer Smith If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash. Respond We love to hear your thoughts. Shoot us an email, or hit us up on Twitter or Facebook!

Another book from the ’80s, but hey: at least this one is fiction! Contact, Carl Sagan Show Notes We read Carl Sagan’s 1985 novel Contact and watched the 1995 movie of the same name. In this episode, our overview of the book: its plot and its basic interests. Things we mentioned on the show, in the order we mentioned them: Carl Sagan Cosmos: TV show and book Neil Degrasse Tyson Fermi Paradox Wow! signal Very Large Array Arecibo Observatory Neil Patrick Harris (wait for it, it’ll all make sense in the end) Upcoming Book November (8.20 and 8.21): Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest, Zeynep Tufecki. You can also download it from Tufecki’s website as a PDF. December (8.22 and 8.23): Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, Robin Sloan. Credits Music “It’s a Movie, It’s a Dream” by Josh Caress. Used by permission, please don’t use without permission. “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0, meaning you can do whatever you want with this music… as long as you share it for others to likewise do what they want. Sponsors Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors: Daniel Ellcey Douglas Campos Jake Grant Marnix Klooster Spencer Smith If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash. Respond We love to hear your thoughts. Shoot us an email, or hit us up on Twitter or Facebook!

We argue with Mary Midgley on how she did what she did, more than what she did. Evolution as a Religion, Mary Midgley Show Notes Descartes’ belief that people can’t be rational without God; see paragraph six Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene David Hume Immanuel Kant John Rawls, the specific claim Stephen most has a problem with is the veil of ignorance concept explained in this page (although this is not mentioned in the episode) Jacques Monod Wickedness: A Philosophical Essay Robinson Crusoe Here’s another great cover of the book from the ’80s! Have to climb to Omega, man! Upcoming Book October (8.18 and 8.19): Contact, Carl Sagan (and the movie) November (8.20 and 8.21): Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest, Zeynep Tufecki. You can also download it from Tufecki’s website as a PDF. Credits Music “Sailor’s Cry” by A.M.R via Silk Music. Used by permission, please don’t use without permission. “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0, meaning you can do whatever you want with this music… as long as you share it for others to likewise do what they want. Sponsors Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors: Daniel Ellcey Douglas Campos Jake Grant Marnix Klooster Spencer Smith If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash. Respond We love to hear your thoughts. Shoot us an email, or hit us up on Twitter or Facebook!

What had Mary Midgley so incredibly angry in the 1980’s, and what did she do about it? Evolution as a Religion, Mary Midgley Show Notes Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene “Superman” and Friedrich Nietzsche David Hume Immanuel Kant The other book Chris is reading on politics &c. currently: Politics and the Order of Love, Eric Gregory Here’s another great cover of the book from the ’80s! Have to climb to Omega, man! Upcoming Book October (8.18 and 8.19): Contact, Carl Sagan November (8.20 and 8.21): Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest, Zeynep Tufecki. You can also download it from Tufecki’s website as a PDF. Credits Music “Acquainted with the Night” by Ezra Feinberg. Used by permission, please don’t use without permission. “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0, meaning you can do whatever you want with this music… as long as you share it for others to likewise do what they want. Sponsors Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors: Daniel Ellcey Douglas Campos Jake Grant Marnix Klooster Spencer Smith If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash. Respond We love to hear your thoughts. Shoot us an email, or hit us up on Twitter or Facebook!

We point out several concerns that we have with the arguments Dr. Franklin makes in her lectures-turned-book: the ineffectiveness of her holistic and prescriptive technologies frame, her deeply cynical view on policy, and other thorny places that her arguments lead (like the Soviet Union). The Real World of Technology, Ursula Franklin Show Notes Cold War peace movement Peace movements in Canada Second-wave feminism (to which Dr. Franklin’s feminism approximately belongs to) History of environmental movements, post-WWII Bijker, Hughes & Pinch’s seminal work on Social Construction of Technology: Stephen left out Hughes. Sorry, Thomas P. Hughes. Actor-Network Theory John Law and Annemarie Mol’s Handpump article: Stephen incorrectly only mentioned Mol instead of Law and Mol. Sorry, John Law. Robert Moses’s bridges Bay of Pigs invasion, also sometimes known as the Bay of Pigs incident: Stephen’s point in bringing this up was to allude to the point made neatly in the Wikipedia article: “[The failed invasion] also pushed Cuba closer to the Soviet Union, and those strengthened Soviet-Cuban relations would lead to the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.” Almost no nuclear power plants have been built since 1990 Nuclear power plants historically have decreased carbon emissions significantly: see paragraph four Here’s the great cover of the book from the ’80s–note that at no time are floppy disks mentioned in the book. Dr. Franklin does not advocate throwing floppy discs at people’s faces, presumably Upcoming Book September (8.16 and 8.17): Evolution as a Religion: Strange Hopes and Stranger Fears, Mary Midgley Credits Music “Vista” by Escaper. Used by permission, please don’t use without permission. We usually announce that on the show, but a technical error resulted in a second straight month without verbal crediting. Argh! Argh! “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0, meaning you can do whatever you want with this music… as long as you share it for others to likewise do what they want. Sponsors Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors: Daniel Ellcey Douglas Campos Jake Grant Marnix Klooster Spencer Smith If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash. Respond We love to hear your thoughts. Shoot us an email, or hit us up on Twitter or Facebook!

The Real World of Technology, Ursula Franklin Show Notes Cold War peace movement Peace movements in Canada Second-wave feminism (to which Dr. Franklin’s feminism approximately belongs to) Third-wave feminism (to which Dr. Franklin’s feminism approximately does not belong to): Oklahoma historically dumping stuff in rivers Arkansas historically dumping stuff in Oklahoma’s rivers Oklahoma contemporarily dumping stuff in rivers Here’s the great cover of the book from the ’80s–note that at no time are floppy disks mentioned in the book. Purple cover of a book with a floppy disk superimposed over a person’s face Upcoming Books September (8.16 and 8.17): Evolution as a Religion: Strange Hopes and Stranger Fears, Mary Midgley October (8.18 and 8.19): Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, Neil Postman Credits Music “Mission Plan” by Matthew Shaw. Used by permission, please don’t use without permission. We usually announce that on the show, but a temporary glitch corrupted that section of the podcast. Whoops. Also, learn more about Matthew Shaw, this song, and Stephen’s long and storied enthusiasm for Shaw’s work here. “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0, meaning you can do whatever you want with this music… as long as you share it for others to likewise do what they want. Sponsors Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors: Daniel Ellcey Douglas Campos Jake Grant Marnix Klooster Spencer Smith If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash. Respond We love to hear your thoughts. Shoot us an email, or hit us up on Twitter or Facebook!

Discussing Simone Browne’s epistemology, ideas, and arguments: what persuaded us, and what didn’t? Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness—Explained, Simone Browne Show Notes Critical theory Critical race theory Black feminism Intersectionality White as default in AI, potentially due to biased/non-diverse training data Finding God in the Lord of the Rings Looking for God in Harry Potter Surveillance Studies David Hume The two main subjects we mentioned on the show as relevant were critical theory (and specifically critical race theory) and surveillance studies. Notably, while Browne describes herself as a black feminist and makes reference to the adjacent idea of intersectionality, she never explicitly refers to critical (race) theory. We applied the term to her work based on the historical and interpretive methods she used. Reminder: as noted in 8.12, Stephen was definitely recording from a closet and some of his level drops are a result of (potentially) getting hit in the face with a sweater: screenshot of our Zoom call with Stephen in a closet Upcoming Books August (8.14 and 8.15): The Real World of Technology, Dr. Ursula Franklin September (8.16 and 8.17): Evolution as a Religion: Strange Hopes and Stranger Fears, Mary Midgley (Last episode we said we had a plan for the year and then it changed, so we’ll just keep going two books at a time!) Credits Music “Sali Lento” by Chouk Bwa & The Ångstromers. Used by permission. “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0, meaning you can do whatever you want with this music… as long as you share it for others to likewise do what they want. Sponsors Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors: Daniel Ellcey Douglas Campos Jake Grant Marnix Klooster Spencer Smith If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash. Respond We love to hear your thoughts. Shoot us an email, or hit us up on Twitter or Facebook!

Digging into Simone Browne’s application of critical race theory to surveillance studies. Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness—Explained, Simone Browne Show Notes The two main subjects we mentioned on the show as relevant were critical theory (and specifically critical race theory) and surveillance studies. Notably, while Browne describes herself as a black feminist and makes reference to the adjacent idea of intersectionality, she never explicitly refers to critical (race) theory. We applied the term to her work based on the historical and interpretive methods she used. Stephen reviewed our intro music, Joshua Crumbly’s “New Rock Thingy,” here. Finally (as noted on air), Stephen was definitely recording from a closet: screenshot of our Zoom call with Stephen in a closet Upcoming Books August (8.14 and 8.15): The Real World of Technology, Ursula Franklin September (8.16 and 8.17): (probably) Technopoly, Neil Postman (We actually have a tentative plan through the end of the year… but we’ll publicize it once we’re more solid!) Credits Music “New Rock Thingy” by Joshua Crumbly. Used by permission. “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0, meaning you can do whatever you want with this music… as long as you share it for others to likewise do what they want. Sponsors Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors: Daniel Ellcey Douglas Campos Jake Grant Marnix Klooster Spencer Smith If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash. Respond We love to hear your thoughts. Shoot us an email, or hit us up on Twitter or Facebook!

In this episode of the Business Cloud Native, host Emily Omier talks with Jon Tirsen, who is engineering lead for storage at Cash App. This conversation focuses on Cash App's cloud native journey, and how they are working to build an application that is more scalable, flexible, and easier to manage.The conversation covers: How the need for hybrid cloud services and uniform program models led Cash App to Kubernetes.  Some of the major scaling issues that Cash App was facing. For example, the company needed to increase user capacity, and add new product lines.  The process of trying to scale Cash App's MySQL database, and the decision to split up their dataset into smaller parts that could run on different databases. Cash App's monolithic application, which contains hundreds of thousands of lines of code — and why it's becoming increasingly difficult to manage and grow.  How Jon's team is trying to balance product/ business and technical needs, and deliver value while rearchitecting their system to scale their operations. Why Cash App is working to build small, product-oriented teams, and a system where products can be executed and deployed at their own pace through the cloud. Jon also discusses some of the challenges that are preventing this from happening. How Cash App was able to help during the pandemic, by facilitating easy stimulus transfers through their service — and why it wouldn't have been possible without a cloud native architecture.  Links: Cash App: https://cash.app/ Square: https://squareup.com/us/en Jon on Twitter: https://twitter.com/tirsen?lang=en Connect with Jon on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tirsen/?originalSubdomain=au The Business of Cloud Native: http://thebusinessofcloudnative.com  TranscriptAnnouncer: Welcome to The Business of Cloud Native podcast where we explore how end users talk and think about the transition to Kubernetes and cloud-native architectures.Emily: Welcome to The Business of Cloud Native. My name is Emily Omier, I'm here chatting with Jon Tirsen.Jon: Happy to be here. My name is, as you said, Jon Tirsen, and I work as the engineering lead of storage here at Cash App. I've been at Cash for maybe four or five years now. So, I've been with it from the very early days. And before Cash, I was doing a startup, that failed, for five years. So, it's a travel guide in the mobile phone startup. And before that, I was at Google working on another failed product called the Google Wave, which you might remember, and before that, it was a company called ThoughtWorks, which some of you probably know about as well.Emily: And in case people don't know, the Cash App is part of Square, right?Jon: Yes. Cash App is where we're separating all the different products quite a lot these days. So, it used to be called just Square Cash, but now it has its own branding and its own identity, and its own leadership, and everything. So, we're trying to call it an ecosystem of startups. So, each product line can run its business the way it wants to, to a large degree.Emily: And so, what do you actually spend your day doing?Jon: Most of my days, I'm still code, and doing various operational tasks, and setting up systems, and testing, and that sort of thing. I also, maybe about half my day, I spend on more management tasks, which is reviewing documents, writing documents, and talking to people trying to figure out our strategy and so on. So, maybe about half my time, I do real technical things, and then the other half I do more management stuff.Emily: Where would you say the cloud-native journey started for you?Jon: Well, so a lot of Square used to run on-premises. So, we had our own data centers and things. But especially for Cash App, since we've grown so quickly, it started getting slightly out of control. We were basically outgrowing—we could not physically put more machines into our data centers. So, we've started moving a lot of our services over to Amazon in this case, and we want to have a shared way of building services that would work both in the Cloud and also in our data centers. So, something like Kubernetes and all the tools around that would give us a more uniform programming model that we could use to deploy apps in both of these environments. We started that, two, three years ago. We started looking at moving our workload out of our data centers.Emily: What were the issues that you were encountering? Give me a little bit more details about the scaling issues that we were talking about.Jon: There two dimensions that we needed to scale out the Cash App, sort of, system slash [unintelligible] architecture. So, one thing was that we just grew so quickly that we needed to be able to increase capacity. So, that was across the board. So, from databases to application servers, and bandwidth, everywhere. We need to just be able to increase our capacity of handling more users, but also we were trying to grow our product as well. So, at the same time, we also want to build and be able to add new features at an increased pace. So, we want to be able to add new product lines in the Cash App. So, for example, we built the Cash Card, which is a way you can keep your money in the Cash App bank accounts, and then you can spend that money using a separate card, and then we add a new functionality around that card, and so on. So, we also needed to be able to scale out the team to be able to have more people working on the team to build new products for our users, for our customers. Those are the two dimensions: we needed to scale out the system, but we also needed to have more people be able to work productively. So, that's why we started trying to chop up—we have this big monolith as most companies probably do, which that's I don't know how many hundreds of thousands of lines of code in there. But we also wanted to move things out of that, to be able to have more people contribute productively.Emily: And where are you in that process?Jon: Well, [laughs], we're probably adding still adding code at an exponential rate to the monolith. We're also adding code at an exponential rate outside of the monolith, but it just feels so much easier to just build some code in the monolith than it is outside of it, unfortunately, which something we're trying to fix, but it's very hard. And it is getting a little bit out of hand, this monolith now. So, we have, sort of, a moratorium on adding new code to the monolith now, and I'm not sure how much of an effect that has made. But the monolith is still growing, as well as our non-monolith services as well, of course. Emily: When you were faced with this scaling issue, what were the conversations happening between the technical side and the business owners? And how is this decision made about the best way to solve this problem is x, is the Cloud, is cloud-native architecture?Jon: I think the business side—the product owners, product managers—they trust us to make the right decision. So, it was largely a decision made on the technical side. They do still want us to build functionality, and to add new features, and fix bugs, and so on. So, they want us to do that, but they don't really have strong influence on the technical choices we've made. I think that's something we have to balance out. So, how can we keep on giving the product side and the business side what they need? So, to keep on delivering value to them while we try to rearchitect our system so that we can scale out our operations on our side. So, it's a very tricky balance to find there. And I think so far, maybe we've erred on the side of keep on delivering functionality, and maybe we need to do more on the rearchitecting things. But yeah, that's always a constant rebalancing act we're always dealing with. Emily: Do you think that you have gotten the increased scalability? How far along are you on reaching the goals that you originally had?Jon: I think we have a pretty scalable system now, in terms of the amount of customers we can service. So, we can add capacity. If we can keep on adding hardware to it, we can grow very far. We've actually noticed that the last few weeks, we've had an almost unprecedented growth, especially with the Coronavirus crisis. Every single day, it's almost a record. I mean, there's still issues, of course, and we're constantly trying to stay on top of that growth, but we have a reasonably good architecture there. What I think is probably our larger problem is the other side, so the human side. As I said, we are still adding code to this monolith, which is getting completely out of hand to work with. And we're not growing our smaller services fast enough. It's probably time to spend more effort on rearchitecting that side of things as well.Emily: What are some of the organizational, or people challenges that you've run into?Jon: Yeah. So, we want to build smaller teams oriented around products. We see ourselves more of a platform on products these days: we're not just a single product. And we want to build smaller teams. That is, maybe we have one team that is around our card, and one team around our [unintelligible] trading and so on. And we want to have the smaller teams, and we want them to be able to execute independently. So, we want to be able to put together a cross-functional team of some engineers, and some UX people, and some product people, and some business people, and then they should be able to execute independently and have their own services running in our cloud infrastructure, and not have to coordinate too much with all of the other teams that are also trying to execute independently. So, each product can do its own thing, and own their own services, and deploy at their own pace, and so on. That's what we're trying to achieve, but as long as they still have to do a lot of work inside of our big monolith, then they can't really execute independently. So, one team might build something that actually causes issues with another team's products, and so on, and that becomes very complicated to deal with. So, we tried to move away from that, and move towards a model where a team has a couple of services that they own, and they can do most of their work inside of those services.Emily: What do you think is preventing you from being farther along than you are? Farther along towards this idea of teams being totally self-sufficient?Jon: Yeah, I think it's the million-dollar question, really. Why are we still seeing exponential growth in code size in our monolith, and not in our services? And I think it's a combination of many, many things. One thing I think, we don't have all of the infrastructure available to us in our cloud, in our smaller services. So, say you want to build a little feature, you want to add a little button that does something, and if you want to do that inside our monolith, that might take you two, three days. Whereas if you want to pull up a completely new service—I think we've solved it at an infrastructural layer, it's very quick and easy to just pull up a new service, and have it run, and be able to take traffic, and so on—but it's more of the domain-specific infrastructures of being able to access all the different data sets that you need to be able to access, and be able to shift information back to the mobile device. And all these things, it's very easy to do inside a monolith, but it's much harder to do outside of the monolith. So, we have to replicate a big set of what we call product platforms. So, instead of infrastructural platform is more product specific platform features like customer information, and be able to send information back to the client, and so on. And all those things have to be rebuilt for cloud services. We haven't really gotten all the way there yet.Emily: If I understood correctly from the case study with the CNCF, you sort of started the cloud-native journey with your databases.Jon: Yes, that was the thing that was on fire. Cash App was initially built as a hack week project, and it was never really designed to scale. So, it was just running on a single MySQL database for a really long time. And we actually literally put a piece of hardware on fire with that database. We managed to roll it, roll it off, of course, didn't take down our service, but it was actually smoking in our [laughs] data centers. It melted the service around it in its chassis. So, that was a big problem, and we needed to solve that very quickly. So, that's where we started.Emily: Could you actually go into that just a little bit more? I read the case study, but probably most listeners haven't. Why was the database such a big problem? And how did you solve it?Jon: Yeah, as I said, so we only had a single MySQL database. And as most people know, it's very hard to keep on scaling that, so we bought more and more expensive hardware. And since we were a mobile app, we don't get all the benefits from caching and replica reads, so most of the time, the user is actually accessing data that is already on the device, so they don't actually make any calls out to our back end to read the data. Usually, you scale out a database by adding replicas, and caching, and that sort of stuff, but that wasn't our bottleneck. Our bottleneck was that we simply could not write to the database, we couldn't update the database fast enough, or with enough capacity. So, we needed to shard it, and split up the data set into smaller parts that we could run on separate databases. And we used the thing called Vitess for that, which is a Cloud Native Foundation member, a product and [unintelligible] CNCF. And with Vitess, we were able to split up the database into smaller parts. It was quite a large project, and especially back then, Vitess was—it was quite early days. So, the Vitess was used to scale out YouTube and then it was open-sourced. And then, we started using it. I think, not long after that, it was also used by Slack. So now, currently Slack uses it for most of its data. And we started using it very early, so it was still kind of early days, and we had to build a lot of new functionality in there, and we had to port [00:15:20 unintelligible] make sure all of our queries worked with the Vitess. But then we were able to do shard splitting. So, without having to restart or have downtime in our app, we could split up the database into smaller parts, and then the Vitess would handle the routing of queries, and so on.Emily: If at all, how did that serve as the gateway to then starting to think about changing more of the application, or moving more into services as opposed to a monolith?Jon: Yeah, I think that was kind of orthogonal in some ways. So, while we scaled out the database layer, we also realized that we needed to scale out the human side of it. So, we have multiple teams being able to work independently. And that is something we haven't I think we haven't really gotten to completely, yet. So, while we've scaled out the database layer, we're not quite there from the human side of things.Emily: Why is it important to scale any of this out? I understand the database, but why is it important to get the scaling for the teams?Jon: Yeah, I mean, it's a very competitive space, what we're trying to do. We have a very formidable competitors, both from other apps and also from the big banks, and for us to be able to keep on delivering new features for our customers at a high pace, and be able to change those features to react to changing customer demands or, like during this crisis we are in now, and being able to respond to what our competitors are doing. I mean, that just makes us a more effective business. And we don't always know when we start a new product line where it's exactly going to lead us, we sort of look at what our customers are using it and where that takes us, and being able to respond to that quickly, that's something that is very hard if you have a big monolith that has a million lines of code and takes you several hours to compile, then it's going to be very hard for you to deliver functionality and make changes to functionality in a good time.Emily: Can you think of any examples where you're able to respond really quickly to something like this current crisis in a way that wouldn't have been possible with the old models?Jon: I don't actually know the details here. I live currently in Australia, so I don't know. But the US government is handing out these checks, right? So, you get some kind of a subsidy. And apparently, they were going to mail those out to a lot of people, but we actually stepped up and said, look, you can just Cash App them out to people. So, people sign up for a Cash App account, and then they can receive their subsidies directly into the Cash App accounts, or into their bank accounts via our payment rails. And we were able to execute on that very quickly, and I think we are now an official way to get that subsidy from the US government. So, that's something that we probably wouldn't have been able to do unless we've invested more to be able to respond to that so quickly, within just weeks, I think.Emily: And as Cash App has moved to increasingly service-oriented architectures and increasingly cloud-native, what has been surprisingly easy?Jon: Surprisingly easy. I don't think I've been surprised by anything being easy, to my recollection. I think most things have been surprisingly hard. [laughs]. I think we are still somewhat in the early days of this infrastructure, and there are so many issues; there's so many bugs; there's so many unknowns. And when you start digging into things, it just surprises you how hard. So, I work in the infrastructure team, and we try to provide a curated experience for our product teams, the product engineering teams, so we deal with that pain directly where we have to figure out how all these products work together, and how to build functionality on top of them. I think we deal with that pain for our product engineers. But of course, they are also running into things all the time. So, no, it is surprisingly hard sometimes, but it's all right.Emily: What do you think has been surprisingly challenging, unexpectedly challenging?Jon: Maybe I shouldn't be, but I am somewhat surprised how immature things still are. Just as an example, how hard it is, if you run a pod, in a EKS—Amazon Kubernetes cluster, and you just want to authenticate to be able to use other Amazon products like Dynamo, or S3, or something, this is still something that is incredibly hard to do. So, you would think that just having two products from the same vendor inside of the same ecosystem, you would think that that would be a no-brainer: that they would just work together, but no. I think we'll figure it out eventually, but currently, it's still a lot of work to get things to play well together.Emily: If you had a top-three wish list of things for the community to address, what do you think they would be?Jon: Yeah, I guess the out-of-the-box experience with all of these tools, so that they just work together really well, without having to manually set up a lot of different things, that'd be nice. I think I also, maybe this all exists, we haven't integrated all these tools, but something that struck me the other day, I was debugging some production issue—it wasn't a major issue, but it was an issue that had been an ongoing thing for two weeks—and I just wanted to see what change happened those two weeks ago. What was the delta? What made that change happen? And being able to get that information out of Kubernetes and Amazon—and maybe there's some audit logging tools and all this stuff, but it's not entirely clear how to use them, or how to turn them on, and so on. So, that's a really nice, user friendly, and easy to use kind of auditing, and audit trail tools would be really nice. So, that's one wish, I guess, in general: having a curated experience. So, if you start from scratch, and you want to get all of the best practice tools, and you want to get all the functionality out of a cloud infrastructure, there's still a lot of choices to make, and there's a lot of different tools that you need to set up to make them work together, Prometheus, and Grafana, and Kubernetes, and so on. And having a curated out-of-the-box experience that just makes everything work, and you don't have to think about everything, that would be quite nice. So, Kubernetes operators are great, and these CRDs, this metadata you can store and work with inside of Kubernetes is great, but unfortunately they don't play well with the rest of the cloud infrastructure at Amazon, at AWS. Amazon was working on this Amazon operator, which you would be able to configure other AWS resources from inside of the Kubernetes cluster. So, you could have a CRD for an S3 bucket, so you wouldn't need a Terraform. So right now, you can have Helm Charts and similar to manage the Kubernetes side of things, but then you also need Terraform stuff to manage the AWS side of things, but just something thing that unifies this, so you can have a single place for all your infrastructural metadata. That would be nice. And Amazon is working on this, and they open-sourced something like an AWS operator, but I think they actually withdrew it and they are doing something closed-source. I don't know where that project is going. But that would be really nice.Emily: Go back again to this idea of the business of cloud-native. To what extent do you have to talk about this with business stakeholders? What are those conversations look like?Jon: A Cash App, we usually do not pull in product and business people in these conversations, I think, except when it comes to cost [laughs] and budgeting. But they think more in terms of features and being able to deliver and have teams be able to execute independently, and so on. And our hope is that we can construct an infrastructure that provides these capabilities to our business side. So, it's almost like a black box. They don't know what's inside. We are responsible for figuring out how to give it to them, but they don't always know exactly what's inside of the box.Emily: Excellent. The last question is if there's an engineering tool you can't live without?Jon: I would say all of the JetBrains IDEs for development. I've been using those for maybe 20 years, and they keep on delivering new tools, and I just love them all.Emily: Well, thank you so much for joining.Jon: Thanks for inviting me to speak on the podcast.Announcer: Thank you for listening to The Business of Cloud Native podcast. Keep up with the latest on the podcast at thebusinessofcloudnative.com and subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or wherever fine podcasts are distributed. We'll see you next time.This has been HumblePod production. Stay humble.

In this episode of the NFX Podcast, Keith Rabois and James Currier examine the rule deviation behind some of technology's greatest startup feats — PayPal, Square, Yelp, and even Apple, Tesla, and SpaceX. They discuss: - The 5 People You Spend the Most Time With: It's easy to be a contrarian. It's hard to be right. What are the environmental and psychological factors needed to really think for yourself? - The Extreme 1% of the Bell Curve: A framework for rule deviation that leads to invention, not replication. - Being a Founder is Like Chewing Glass: The 3 biggest factors Keith cites that made the early PayPal team so strong, going on to create YouTube, Tesla, SpaceX, LinkedIn, Yammer, & more. - Counterintuitive KPIs that Transformed Yelp, PayPal, & Square: The non-obvious (even ridiculous-at-first) KPIs that changed their trajectory. - & much more Read the essay - www.nfx.com/essays

Person-to-person or peer-to-peer (P2P) social payment apps such as Venmo, PayPal, Square Cash, Zelle and more have become increasingly popular over the last few years, particularly for younger generations. Rather than pulling cash out of your pocket, these P2P apps are tied to your bank account, credit or debit card, allowing users to virtually pay back friends for coffee, dinner or cocktails, or for amenities like haircuts and pet grooming services…even rent payments—all for free! But in a post-pandemic world, these apps have taken on a life of their own as people are seeking ways to tip service workers, donate to causes, and patronize businesses that moved to digital services during lockdowns. Further, these apps facilitated quicker access to coronavirus stimulus payments, driving more users to the platforms. On this Business Casual segment, co-hosts Taylor Bagley, Tyler Kern and Daniel Litwin take on the rise of P2P apps, discussing their impact on both traditional banking and the unbanked customer, the ability to buy and sell bitcoin as well as trade equities, and other benefits such as how using the Square Cash debit card provides users with a rotating rewards program for delivery dining through DoorDash, grocery store purchases and more. Tune into the Business Casual podcast each Wednesday and Friday to stay abreast of the recent trends and hottest topics impacting B2B and our world. And, be sure to check out MarketScale's industry pages for the latest thought leadership, news and event coverage.

The printing press and the internet are often compared. How similar in impact are they really? The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, Elizabeth Eisenstein Show Notes Eisenstein’s outline: dissemination standardization reorganization data collection preservation amplification reinforcement cultural effects the Republic of Letters Links to things mentioned on the show: On context collapse: 2.02: Basketballs ≠ Pumpkins Our strongest take on “big data:” 6.06: A Kind of Blindness—Smart cities, “big data”, and the meaninglessness of mere information. The Republic of Letters Clarkives Upcoming books July (8.12 and 8.13): Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness, Simone Brown August (8.14 and 8.15): The Real World of Technology, Ursula Franklin September (8.16 and 8.17): (probably) Technopoly, Neil Postman Music drawn, by Trevor Ransom. Used by permission. “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho Sponsors Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors: Daniel Ellcey Douglas Campos Jake Grant Marnix Klooster Spencer Smith If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash. Respond We love to hear your thoughts. Hit us up via Twitter, Facebook, or email!

Digging into Elizabeth Eisenstein’s magisterial and seminal work on how print changed culture. The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, Elizabeth Eisenstein Show Notes We almost entirely ended up talking about the contents of this book specifically! And we weren’t joking about how dense it is: A picture Chris snapped of p. 113 of The Printing Press as an Agent of Change We did mention a couple other episodes of the show: 8.08: Jurassic Park—Explained on friction 7.09: Frictioneers Upcoming books July (8.12 and 8.13): Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness, Simone Brown August (8.14 and 8.15): The Real World of Technology, Ursula Franklin September (8.16 and 8.17): (probably) Technopoly, Neil Postman Music “Alpha Orionis” by Juffbass “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho Sponsors Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors: Daniel Ellcey Douglas Campos Jake Grant Marnix Klooster Spencer Smith If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash. Respond We love to hear your thoughts. Hit us up via Twitter, Facebook, or email!

Come join Layer1 as we discuss the latest in the Steem and Hive standoff, Uniswap launches v2, WAX Garbage Pail Kids NFTs sellout in 24 hours, Harmony upgrades to blend Sharding w/ PoS, and Craig Wright the Fraud. Telegram - t.me/SutlerVentures Twitter - https://twitter.com/layer1pod https://twitter.com/SutlerVentures Sutler Ventures - https://sutlerventures.com/ ______________________________________________________________ Breaking Craig Wright Called ‘Fraud' in Message Signed With Bitcoin Addresses He Claims to Own https://www.coindesk.com/craig-wright-called-fraud-message-signed-bitcoin-addresses-satoshi Quick News Tether hits #3 by MC and falls below $1 for longest stretch since March https://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-demand-pushes-tether-below-1-for-longest-stretch-since-march FTX token (FTT) launches with Coinbase Custody after expanding to US via a spot exchange https://cointelegraph.com/news/coinbase-to-custody-ftxs-exchange-token Russia Seeks to Criminalize Crypto Usage with Fines, Imprisonments https://www.financemagnates.com/cryptocurrency/news/russia-seeks-to-criminalize-crypto-usage-with-fines-imprisonments/ Tezos reaches over 80% of total tokens staked, with 18% of the total being held by exchanges (re: self-bonding!) https://bitcoinexchangeguide.com/tezos-staking-reaches-a-new-ath-at-over-80-top-5-exchanges-holding-18-of-xtz-supply/ Largest investment bank in Latin America has chosen Tezos to issue a real-estate focused STO https://cryptopotato.com/largest-investment-bank-in-latin-america-used-tezos-to-launch-a-security-token/ You can now "auto-buy" BTC on the Square Cash app https://cointelegraph.com/news/square-dollar-cost-averaging-lets-users-repeat-buy-bitcoin-in-cash-app Update to Keep Network's tBTC issues https://blog.keep.network/details-of-the-tbtc-deposit-pause-on-may-18-2020-38d7dd555663 Genesis expands its business by offering custody via an acquisition https://fortune.com/2020/05/21/genesis-cryptocurrency-vo1t-bitcoin/ New Bitcoin scam in China steals nearly $1bln in BTC https://gainbitcoin.com/wotoken-crypto-mlm-scam/ Uniswap launches Version 2.0 adding price oracles, flash swaps and a liquidity migration tool from V1 to V2 https://decrypt.co/29438/defi-protocol-uniswap-launches-v2-on-ethereum-mainnet Discussion Tron/Steemit to seize STEEM tokens from key dissidents in ongoing Hive/Steem debacle -- how does this end well for anyone? https://cryptobriefing.com/tron-will-seize-5-million-steem-from-dissident-tokenholders/ Goldman Sachs has an invite only "Bitcoin Call" set for May 27th -- are institutions bullish, neutral or bearish for crypto? https://bitcoinist.com/goldman-sachs-is-inviting-clients-to-a-bitcoin-call-heres-why-thats-so-important/ https://www.financemagnates.com/cryptocurrency/news/greyscale-is-buying-bitcoin-at-record-rates-29-9m-per-week-growing/ China orders second-largest mining region to close, 9% of Bitcoin hashrate at risk - miner DUMP https://cryptoslate.com/china-orders-second-largest-mining-region-to-close-9-of-bitcoin-hashrate-at-risk/ https://twitter.com/iamjosephyoung/status/1264875725414379521 Bitcoin Layer1 Technologies launches "Bitcoin batteries" for the Texas energy market https://cointelegraph.com/news/layer1-stabilizes-texas-grids-with-bitcoin-batteries 50 Bitcoin that was mined in Feb 2009 was moved https://messari.io/article/50-bitcoins-mined-in-february-2009-just-moved Ethereum MetaCartel becomes DAO incubator https://medium.com/metacartel/metacartel-is-evolving-%EF%B8%8F-350a64b39f3c EOS EOS DeFi protocol adds 4 EOS BPs to governance system https://www.eoswriter.io/170202_independent-eos-companies-collaborate-to-strengthen-equilibriums-defi-protocol.eos WAX GPKs Sell Out https://www.eoswriter.io/170166_wax-marketplaces-topps-all-other-blockchains.eos Cardano Charles Hoskinson said to be working on RFID like microchip; Cardano posts big gains with new testnet upcoming https://cointelegraph.com/news/cardano-is-working-on-a-microchip-that-would-give-crypto-a-cash-like-experience https://cryptobriefing.com/with-shelley-upgrade-horizon-cardano-posts-big-gains/

Andy and Linda take a break from regularly scheduled programming to reflect on the COVID-19 pandemic and ensuing social isolation. In this episode, they discuss the masonry local to New York and Baltimore and side-projects. Recorded on May 20th, 2020. If you have a question for Andy and Linda send it to mail@earthtolinda.com. Please include your pronouns so we can address you properly if we answer it on air! If you'd like to sponsor an episode of Earth to Linda, send $4 to 'andymangold' through Venmo or Square Cash and we'll do an episode in your honor. It's that easy.

Don’t go into science for the money: you will get killed by dinosaurs. Jurassic Park, Michael Crichton (and the movie!) Show Notes We put dinosaurs mostly in the background and talk about what Crichton really wanted to discuss: the science/industrial complex, the limits of science to interpret or re-create nature, the limits of discovery, and disciplinary power. Things mentioned on the show People trying to recreate mammoths in Siberia to fix … climate change? The world’s fastest supercomputer being used for climate simulations, among other things The wild tale of Anthony Levandoski’s self-driving cars corporate espionage Self-driving cars as a zero-sum game We also mentioned the famous “you didn’t stop to consider whether you should…” quote in 6.11: Very Thoughtful Ethics Dogs. Upcoming books Note that we’ve ended up changing plans since we recorded our Kurzweil episodes! We originally planned to read Simone Browne’s Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness, but decided to talk about our “background” reading so far! June: The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, Elizabeth Eisenstein July: Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness, Simone Brown Music “Pull Apart (feat. Samantha Eason)” by Summerooms “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho Sponsors Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors: Daniel Ellcey Douglas Campos Jake Grant Marnix Klooster Spencer Smith If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash. Respond We love to hear your thoughts. Hit us up via Twitter, Facebook, or email!

Though we spent the first two episodes of this semester discussing tools to manage email, there is a better way! In this week’s episode, Robby and Craig discuss tools that can take you beyond email to better collaborate and communicate with your teams at school. Apple Pay Square Cash Venmo Slack Songshare Workflow Slack Pricing Todoist Todoist Education Pricing Semester 1 Episode 4: Drafts Trello Kanban Subscribe Apple Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS Follow The Class Nerd - Blog RSS, Micro.blog, Twitter Craig - Micro.blog, Twitter Robby - Twitter, Blog