position:entrepreneur

  • Experimentable — Self-tracking from both entrepreneur and individual perspectives https://experimentable.com

    10 learnings: 1. Business First, Product Second (or rather, « a product is not a business. »); 2. Do Simple Arithmetic; 3. Building >> Reading; 4. Get In Front of Your Customers; 5. Know your Skills, Pay for Everything Else; 6. Team Composition – Crazy and Detail-Oriented; 7. Have Savings; 8. Avoid Repeating Mistakes; 9. Have Fun; 10. Do Cool Stuff.

  • [Interview] Tackling Complex Architecture: Do’s and Don’ts
    https://hackernoon.com/interview-tackling-complex-architecture-dos-and-don-ts-d6f8f34d694d?sour

    Image credit: PexelsWhat approach should be used when working on complex architecture? How do you build software that is easy to support and scale, and what are the mistakes to avoid?I had the opportunity to sit down with Sergiy Kukunin, a #full-stack developer at Spotlight Labs with 10+ years of experience, and talk to him about these issues in greater detail.The first question is, what should good software look like?Let’s first decide what the software is, and what it looks like from a non-programmer perspective. We are used to thinking about software as a tool for solving business tasks and problems.Imagine yourself as an entrepreneur who needs to solve such a task. You have two options: choose software that is available right now and will correctly solve your problem, but is entirely (...)

    #software-development #software-architecture #complex-architecture #enterprise-software

  • #CBP terminates controversial $297 million #Accenture contract amid continued staffing struggles

    #Customs_and_Border_Protection on Thursday ended its controversial $297 million hiring contract with Accenture, according to two senior DHS officials and an Accenture representative.
    As of December, when CBP terminated part of its contract, the company had only completed processing 58 applicants and only 22 had made it onto the payroll about a year after the company was hired.
    At the time, the 3,500 applicants that remained in the Accenture hiring pipeline were transferred to CBP’s own hiring center to complete the process.

    CBP cut ties with Accenture on processing applicants a few months ago, it retained some services, including marketing, advertising and applicant support.
    This week, the entire contract was terminated for “convenience,” government speak for agreeing to part ways without placing blame on Accenture.
    While government hiring is “slow and onerous, it’s also part of being in the government” and that’s “something we have to accept and deal with as we go forward,” said one of the officials.
    For its efforts, CBP paid Accenture around $19 million in start-up costs, and around $2 million for 58 people who got job offers, according to the officials.
    Over the last couple of months, CBP explored how to modify the contract, but ultimately decided to completely stop work and return any remaining funds to taxpayers.
    But it’s unclear how much money, if any, that will be.

    In addition, to the funds already paid to Accenture, CBP has around $39 million left to “settle and close the books” with the company, an amount which has yet to be determined.
    In November 2017, CBP awarded Accenture the contract to help meet the hiring demands of an executive order on border security that President Donald Trump signed during his first week in office. The administration directed CBP to hire an additional 7,500 agents and officers on top of its current hiring goals.
    “We were in a situation where we needed to try something new” and “break the cycle of going backwards,” said a DHS official about why the agency started the contract.

    Meanwhile, hiring remains difficult for the agency amid a surge of migrants at the southern border that is stretching CBP resources thin.
    It “continues to be a very challenging environment,” said one official about hiring efforts this year.

    In fact, one of the reasons that CBP didn’t need Accenture to process applicants, is because the agency didn’t receive as many applications as it initially planned for.
    The agency has been focused on beating attrition and has been able to recently “beat it by a modest amount,” said the official. “Ultimately we would like to beat it by a heck of a lot, but we’re not there yet.”

    https://edition.cnn.com/2019/04/05/politics/cbp-terminate-hiring-contract-accenture/index.html
    #frontières #contrôles_frontaliers #USA #Ests-Unis #complexe_militaro-industriel #business

    • Border Profiteers

      On a recent sunny spring afternoon in Texas, a couple hundred Border Patrol agents, Homeland Security officials, and salespeople from a wide array of defense and security contractors gathered at the Bandera Gun Club about an hour northwest of San Antonio to eat barbecue and shoot each other’s guns. The techies wore flip-flops; the veterans wore combat boots. Everyone had a good time. They were letting loose, having spent the last forty-eight hours cooped up in suits and ties back at San Antonio’s Henry B. Gonzalez convention center, mingling and schmoozing, hawking their wares, and listening to immigration officials rail about how those serving in enforcement agencies are not, under any circumstances, Nazis.

      These profiteers and bureaucrats of the immigration-industrial complex were fresh from the 2019 #Border_Security_Expo —essentially a trade show for state violence, where law enforcement officers and weapons manufacturers gather, per the Expo’s marketing materials, to “identify and address new and emerging border challenges and opportunities through technology, partnership, and innovation.” The previous two days of panels, speeches, and presentations had been informative, a major in the Argentine Special Forces told me at the gun range, but boring. He was glad to be outside, where handguns popped and automatic rifles spat around us. I emptied a pistol into a target while a man in a Three Percenter militia baseball hat told me that I was a “natural-born killer.” A drone buzzed overhead until, in a demonstration of a company’s new anti-drone technology, a device that looked like a rocket launcher and fired a sort of exploding net took it down. “This is music to me,” the Argentine major said.

      Perhaps it’s not surprising the Border Security Expo attendees were so eager to blow off steam. This year’s event found many of them in a defensive posture, given the waves of bad press they’d endured since President Trump’s inauguration, and especially since the disastrous implementation of his family separation policy, officially announced by former Attorney General Jeff Sessions in April of 2018, before being rescinded by Trump two-and-a-half months later. Throughout the Expo, in public events and in background roundtable conversations with reporters, officials from the various component parts of the Department of Homeland Security rolled out a series of carefully rehearsed talking points: Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) need more money, personnel, and technology; taking migrants to hospitals distracts CBP officers from their real mission; and the 1997 Flores court settlement, which prohibits immigration enforcement agencies from detaining migrant families with children for more than twenty days, is undermining the very sovereignty of the United States. “We want a secure border, we want an immigration system that has integrity,” Ronald Vitiello, then–acting head of ICE, said in a keynote address to the hundreds of people gathered in San Antonio. “We have a generous immigration system in this country, but it has to have integrity in order for us to continue to be so generous.”

      More of a technocrat than his thuggish predecessor Thomas Homan, Vitiello also spoke at length about using the “dark web” to take down smugglers and the importance of having the most up-to-date data-management technology. But he spoke most adamantly about needing “a fix” for the Flores settlement. “If you prosecute crimes and you give people consequences, you get less of it,” he said. “With Flores, there’s no consequence, and everybody knows that,” a senior ICE official echoed to reporters during a background conversation immediately following Vitiello’s keynote remarks. “That’s why you’re seeing so many family units. We cannot apply a consequence to a family unit, because we have to release them.”

      Meanwhile, around 550 miles to the west, in El Paso, hundreds of migrants, including children and families, were being held by CBP under a bridge, reportedly forced to sleep on the ground, with inadequate medical attention. “They treated us like we are animals,” one Honduran man told Texas Monthly. “I felt what they were trying to do was to hurt us psychologically, so we would understand that this is a lesson we were being taught, that we shouldn’t have crossed.” Less than a week after the holding pen beneath the bridge closed, Vitiello’s nomination to run ICE would be pulled amid a spate of firings across DHS; President Trump wanted to go “in a tougher direction.”

      Family Values

      On the second day of the Border Security Expo, in a speech over catered lunch, Scott Luck, deputy chief of Customs and Border Protection and a career Border Patrol agent, lamented that the influx of children and families at the border meant that resources were being diverted from traditional enforcement practices. “Every day, about 150 agents spend their shifts at hospitals and medical facilities with illegal aliens receiving treatment,” he said. “The annual salary cost for agents on hospital watch is more than $11.5 million. Budget analysts estimate that 13 percent of our operational budget—the budget that we use to buy equipment, to buy vehicles for our men and women—is now used for transportation, medical expenses, diapers, food, and other necessities to care for illegal aliens in Border Patrol custody.”

      As far as Luck was concerned, every dollar spent on food and diapers is one not spent on drones and weapons, and every hour an agent spends guarding a migrant in a hospital is an hour they don’t spend on the border. “It’s not what they signed up for. The mission they signed up for is to protect the United States border, to protect the communities in which they live and serve,” he told reporters after his speech. “The influx, the volume, the clutter that this creates is frustrating.” Vitiello applied an Orwellian inversion: “We’re not helping them as fast as we want to,” he said of migrant families apprehended at the border.

      Even when discussing the intimate needs of detained migrant families, the language border officials used to describe their remit throughout the Expo was explicitly militaristic: achieving “operational control,” Luck said, requires “impedance and denial” and “situational awareness.” He referred to technology as a “vital force multiplier.” He at least stopped short of endorsing the president’s framing that what is happening on the border constitutes an invasion, instead describing it as a “deluge.”

      According to the Migration Policy Institute, a non-partisan think tank, the U.S. immigrant population has continued to grow—although at a slower rate than it did before the 2007 recession, and undocumented people appear to make up a smaller proportion of the overall population. Regardless, in fiscal year 2018, both ICE and CBP stepped up their enforcement activities, arresting, apprehending, and deporting people at significantly higher rates than the previous year. More than three times as many family members were apprehended at the border last year than in 2017, the Pew Research Center reports, and in the first six months of FY 2019 alone there were 189,584 apprehensions of “family units”: more than half of all apprehensions at the border during that time, and more than the full-year total of apprehended families for any other year on record. While the overall numbers have not yet begun to approach those of the 1980s and 1990s, when apprehensions regularly exceeded one million per year, the demographics of who is arriving at the United States southern border are changing: fewer single men from Mexico and more children and families from Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador—in other words, an ever-wider range of desperate victims of drug gangs and American policies that have long supported corrupt regimes.

      This change has presented people like Luck with problems they insist are merely logistical: aging Border Patrol stations, he told us at the Expo, “are not luxurious in any way, and they were never intended to handle families and children.” The solution, according to Vitiello, is “continued capital investment” in those facilities, as well as the cars and trucks necessary to patrol the border region and transport those apprehended from CBP custody to ICE detention centers, the IT necessary to sift through vast amounts of data accumulated through untold surveillance methods, and all of “the systems by which we do our work.”

      Neither Vitiello nor Luck would consider whether those systems—wherein thousands of children, ostensibly under the federal government’s care, have been sexually abused and five, from December through May of this year, have died—ought to be questioned. Both laughed off calls from migrant justice organizers, activists, and politicians to abolish ICE. “The concept of the Department of Homeland Security—and ICE as an agency within it—was designed for us to learn the lessons from 9/11,” Vitiello said. “Those needs still exist in this society. We’re gonna do our part.” DHS officials have even considered holding migrant children at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, according to the New York Times, where a new $23 million “contingency mass migration complex” is being built. The complex, which is to be completed by the end of the year, will have a capacity of thirteen thousand.

      Violence is the Point

      The existence of ICE may be a consequence of 9/11, but the first sections of fencing along the U.S.-Mexico border—originally to contain livestock—went up in 1909 through 1911. In 1945, in response to a shift in border crossings from Texas to California, the U.S. Border Patrol and the Immigration and Naturalization Service recycled fencing wire and posts from internment camps in Crystal City, Texas, where more than a hundred thousand Japanese Americans had been imprisoned during World War II. “Although the INS could not erect a continuous line of fence along the border, they hoped that strategic placement of the fence would ‘compel persons seeking to enter the United States illegally to attempt to go around the ends of the fence,’” historian Kelly Lytle Hernández, quoting from government documents, writes in Migra! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol. “What lay at the end of the fences and canals were desert lands and mountains extremely dangerous to cross without guidance or sufficient water. The fences, therefore, discouraged illegal immigration by exposing undocumented border crossers to the dangers of daytime dehydration and nighttime hypothermia.”

      Apprehension and deportation tactics continued to escalate in the years following World War II—including Operation Wetback, the infamous (and heavily propagandized) mass-deportation campaign of 1954—but the modern, militarized border era was greatly boosted by Bill Clinton. It was during Clinton’s first administration that Border Patrol released its “Strategic Plan: 1994 and Beyond,” which introduced the idea of “prevention through deterrence,” a theory of border policing that built on the logic of the original wall and hinges upon increasing the “cost” of migration “to the point that many will consider it futile to continue to attempt illegal entry.” With the Strategic Plan, the agency was requesting more money, officers, and equipment in order to “enhance national security and safeguard our immigration heritage.”

      The plan also noted that “a strong interior enforcement posture works well for border control,” and in 1996, amid a flurry of legislation targeting people of color and the poor, Congress passed the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, which empowered the federal government to deport more people more quickly and made it nearly impossible for undocumented immigrants to obtain legal status. “Before 1996, internal enforcement activities had not played a very significant role in immigration enforcement,” the sociologists Douglas Massey and Karen A. Pren wrote in 2012. “Afterward these activities rose to levels not seen since the deportation campaigns of the Great Depression.” With the passage of the Patriot Act in 2001 and the creation of the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement in 2002, immigration was further securitized and criminalized, paving the way for an explosion in border policing technology that has further aligned the state with the defense and security industry. And at least one of Border Patrol’s “key assumptions,” explicitly stated in the 1994 strategy document, has borne out: “Violence will increase as effects of strategy are felt.”

      What this phrasing obscures, however, is that violence is the border strategy. In practice, what “prevention through deterrence” has meant is forcing migrants to cross the U.S.-Mexico border in the desert, putting already vulnerable people at even greater risk. Closing urban points of entry, for example, or making asylum-seekers wait indefinitely in Mexico while their claims are processed, pushes migrants into remote areas where there is a higher likelihood they will suffer injury and death, as in the case of seven-year-old Jakil Caal Maquin, who died of dehydration and shock after being taken into CBP custody in December. (A spokesperson for CBP, in an email response, deflected questions about whether the agency considers children dying in its custody a deterrent.) Maquin is one of many thousands who have died attempting to cross into the United States: the most conservative estimate comes from CBP itself, which has recovered the remains of 7,505 people from its southwest border sectors between 1998 and 2018. This figure accounts for neither those who die on the Mexican side of the border, nor those whose bodies remain lost to the desert.

      Draconian immigration policing causes migrants to resort to smugglers and traffickers, creating the conditions for their exploitation by cartels and other violent actors and increasing the likelihood that they will be kidnapped, coerced, or extorted. As a result, some migrants have sought the safety of collective action in the form of the “caravan” or “exodus,” which has then led the U.S. media and immigration enforcement agencies to justify further militarization of the border. Indeed, in his keynote address at the Expo, Luck described “the emerging prevalence of large groups of one hundred people or more” as “troubling and especially dangerous.” Later, a sales representative for the gun manufacturer Glock very confidently explained to me that this was because agents of al-Shabaab, the al-Qaeda affiliate in Somalia, were embedded with the caravans.

      Branding the Border

      Unsurprisingly, caravans came up frequently at the Border Security Expo. (An ICE spokesperson would later decline to explain what specific threat they pose to national security, instead citing general statistics about the terrorist watchlist, “special interest aliens,” and “suspicious travel patterns.”) During his own keynote speech, Vitiello described how ICE, and specifically its subcomponent Homeland Security Investigations, had deployed surveillance and intelligence-gathering techniques to monitor the progress of caravans toward the border. “When these caravans have come, we’ve had trained, vetted individuals on the ground in those countries reporting in real time what they were seeing: who the organizers were, how they were being funded,” he said, before going on an astonishing tangent:

      That’s the kind of capability that also does amazing things to protecting brands, property rights, economic security. Think about it. If you start a company, introduce a product that’s innovative, there are people in the world who can take that, deconstruct it, and create their own version of it and sell it as yours. All the sweat that went into whatever that product was, to build your brand, they’ll take it away and slap it on some substandard product. It’s not good for consumers, it’s not good for public safety, and it’s certainly an economic drain on the country. That’s part of the mission.

      That the then–acting director of ICE, the germ-cell of fascism in the bourgeois American state, would admit that an important part of his agency’s mission is the protection of private property is a testament to the Trump administration’s commitment to saying the quiet part out loud.

      In fact, brands and private industry had pride of place at the Border Security Expo. A memorial ceremony for men and women of Border Patrol who have been killed in the line of duty was sponsored by Sava Solutions, an IT firm that has been awarded at least $482 million in federal contracts since 2008. Sava, whose president spent twenty-four years with the DEA and whose director of business development spent twenty with the FBI, was just one of the scores of firms in attendance at the Expo, each hoping to persuade the bureaucrats in charge of acquiring new gear for border security agencies that their drones, their facial recognition technology, their “smart” fences were the best of the bunch. Corporate sponsors included familiar names like Verizon and Motorola, and other less well-known ones, like Elbit Systems of America, a subsidiary of Israel’s largest private defense contractor, as well as a handful of IT firms with aggressive slogans like “Ever Vigilant” (CACI), “Securing the Future” (ManTech), and “Securing Your Tomorrow” (Unisys).

      The presence of these firms—and indeed the very existence of the Expo—underscores an important truth that anyone attempting to understand immigration politics must reckon with: border security is big business. The “homeland security and emergency management market,” driven by “increasing terrorist threats and biohazard attacks and occurrence of unpredictable natural disasters,” is projected to grow to more than $742 billion by 2023 from $557 billion in 2018, one financial analysis has found. In the coming decades, as more people are displaced by climate catastrophe and economic crises—estimates vary between 150 million and 1 billion by 2050—the industry dedicated to policing the vulnerable stands to profit enormously. By 2013, the United States was already spending more on federal immigration enforcement than all other federal law enforcement agencies combined, including the FBI and DEA; ICE’s budget has doubled since its inception in 2003, while CBP’s has nearly tripled. Between 1993 and 2018, the number of Border Patrol agents grew from 4,139 to 19,555. And year after year, Democrats and Republicans alike have been happy to fuel an ever more high-tech deportation machine. “Congress has given us a lot of money in technology,” Luck told reporters after his keynote speech. “They’ve given us over what we’ve asked for in technology!”

      “As all of this rhetoric around security has increased, so has the impetus to give them more weapons and more tools and more gadgets,” Jacinta Gonzalez, a senior campaign organizer with Mijente, a national network of migrant justice activists, told me. “That’s also where the profiteering comes in.” She continued: “Industries understand what’s good for business and adapt themselves to what they see is happening. If they see an administration coming into power that is pro-militarization, anti-immigrant, pro-police, anti-communities of color, then that’s going to shape where they put their money.”

      By way of example, Gonzalez pointed to Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel, who spent $1.25 million supporting Trump’s 2016 election campaign and followed that up last year by donating $1 million to the Club for Growth—a far-right libertarian organization founded by Heritage Foundation fellow and one-time Federal Reserve Board prospect Stephen Moore—as well as about $350,000 to the Republican National Committee and other GOP groups. ICE has awarded Palantir, the $20 billion surveillance firm founded by Thiel, several contracts worth tens of millions of dollars to manage its data streams—a partnership the agency considers “mission critical,” according to documents reviewed by The Intercept. Palantir, in turn, runs on Amazon Web Services, the cloud computing service provided by the world’s most valuable public company, which is itself a key contractor in managing the Department of Homeland Security’s $6.8 billion IT portfolio.

      Meanwhile, former DHS secretary John Kelly, who was Trump’s chief of staff when the administration enacted its “zero-tolerance” border policy, has joined the board of Caliburn International—parent organization of the only for-profit company operating shelters for migrant children. “Border enforcement and immigration policy,” Caliburn reported in an SEC filing last year, “is driving significant growth.” As Harsha Walia writes in Undoing Border Imperialism, “the state and capitalism are again in mutual alliance.”

      Triumph of the Techno-Nativists

      At one point during the Expo, between speeches, I stopped by a booth for Network Integrity Systems, a security firm that had set up a demonstration of its Sentinel™ Perimeter Intrusion Detection System. A sales representative stuck out his hand and introduced himself, eager to explain how his employer’s fiber optic motion sensors could be used at the border, or—he paused to correct himself—“any kind of perimeter.” He invited me to step inside the space that his coworkers had built, starting to say “cage” but then correcting himself, again, to say “small enclosure.” (It was literally a cage.) If I could get out, climbing over the fencing, without triggering the alarm, I would win a $500 Amazon gift card. I did not succeed.

      Overwhelmingly, the vendors in attendance at the Expo were there to promote this kind of technology: not concrete and steel, but motion sensors, high-powered cameras, and drones. Customs and Border Patrol’s chief operating officer John Sanders—whose biography on the CBP website describes him as a “seasoned entrepreneur and innovator” who has “served on the Board of Directors for several leading providers of contraband detection, geospatial intelligence, and data analytics solutions”—concluded his address by bestowing on CBP the highest compliment he could muster: declaring the agency comparable “to any start-up.” Rhetoric like Sanders’s, ubiquitous at the Expo, renders the border both bureaucratic and boring: a problem to be solved with some algorithmic mixture of brutality and Big Data. The future of border security, as shaped by the material interests that benefit from border securitization, is not a wall of the sort imagined by President Trump, but a “smart” wall.

      High-ranking Democrats—leaders in the second party of capital—and Republicans from the border region have championed this compromise. During the 2018-2019 government shutdown, House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson told reporters that Democrats would appropriate $5.7 billion for “border security,” so long as that did not include a wall of Trump’s description. “Walls are primitive. What we need to do is have border security,” House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn said in January. He later expanded to CNN: “I’ve said that we ought to have a smart wall. I defined that as a wall using drones to make it too high to get over, using x-ray equipment to make it too wide to get around, and using scanners to go deep enough not to be able to tunnel under it. To me, that would be a smart thing to do.”

      Even the social democratic vision of Senator Bernie Sanders stops short at the border. “If you open the borders, my God, there’s a lot of poverty in this world, and you’re going to have people from all over the world,” he told Iowa voters in early April, “and I don’t think that’s something that we can do at this point.” Over a week later, during a Fox News town hall with Pennsylvania voters, he recommitted: “We need border security. Of course we do. Who argues with that? That goes without saying.”

      To the extent that Trump’s rhetoric, his administration’s immigration policies, and the enforcement agencies’ practices have made the “border crisis” more visible than ever before, they’ve done so on terms that most Democrats and liberals fundamentally agree with: immigration must be controlled and policed; the border must be enforced. One need look no further than the high priest of sensible centrism, Thomas Friedman, whose major complaint about Trump’s immigration politics is that he is “wasting” the crisis—an allusion to Rahm Emanuel’s now-clichéd remark that “you never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” (Frequently stripped of context, it is worth remembering that Emanuel made this comment in the throes of the 2008 financial meltdown, at the Wall Street Journal’s CEO Council, shortly following President Obama’s election.) “Regarding the border, the right place for Democrats to be is for a high wall with a big gate,” Friedman wrote in November of 2018. A few months later, a tour led by Border Patrol agents of the San Ysidro port of entry in San Diego left Friedman “more certain than ever that we have a real immigration crisis and that the solution is a high wall with a big gate—but a smart gate.”

      As reasonable as this might sound to anxious New York Times readers looking for what passes as humanitarian thinking in James Bennet’s opinion pages, the horror of Friedman’s logic eventually reveals itself when he considers who might pass through the big, smart gate in the high, high wall: “those who deserve asylum” and “a steady flow of legal, high-energy, and high-I.Q. immigrants.” Friedman’s tortured hypothetical shows us who he considers to be acceptable subjects of deportation and deprivation: the poor, the lazy, and the stupid. This is corporate-sponsored, state-sanctioned eugenics: the nativism of technocrats.

      The vision of a hermetically sealed border being sold, in different ways, by Trump and his allies, by Democrats, and by the Border Security Expo is in reality a selectively permeable one that strictly regulates the movement of migrant labor while allowing for the unimpeded flow of capital. Immigrants in the United States, regardless of their legal status, are caught between two factions of the capitalist class, each of which seek their immiseration: the citrus farmers, construction firms, and meat packing plants that benefit from an underclass of unorganized and impoverished workers, and the defense and security firms that keep them in a state of constant criminality and deportability.

      You could even argue that nobody in a position of power really wants a literal wall. Even before taking office, Trump himself knew he could only go so far. “We’re going to do a wall,” he said on the campaign trail in 2015. However: “We’re going to have a big, fat beautiful door on the wall.” In January 2019, speaking to the American Farm Bureau Association, Trump acknowledged the necessity of a mechanism allowing seasonal farmworkers from Mexico to cross the border, actually promising to loosen regulations on employers who rely on temporary migrant labor. “It’s going to be easier for them to get in than what they have to go through now,” he said, “I know a lot about the farming world.”

      At bottom, there is little material difference between this and what Friedman imagines to be the smarter, more humane approach. While establishment liberals would no doubt prefer that immigration enforcement be undertaken quietly, quickly, and efficiently, they have no categorical objection to the idea that noncitizens should enjoy fewer rights than citizens or be subject to different standards of due process (standards that are already applied in deeply inequitable fashion).

      As the smorgasbord of technologies and services so garishly on display at the Border Security Expo attests, maintaining the contradiction between citizens and noncitizens (or between the imperial core and the colonized periphery) requires an ever-expanding security apparatus, which itself becomes a source of ever-expanding profit. The border, shaped by centuries of bourgeois interests and the genocidal machinations of the settler-colonial nation-state, constantly generates fresh crises on which the immigration-industrial complex feeds. In other words, there is not a crisis at the border; the border is the crisis.

      CBP has recently allowed Anduril, a start-up founded by one of Peter Thiel’s mentees, Palmer Luckey, to begin testing its artificial intelligence-powered surveillance towers and drones in Texas and California. Sam Ecker, an Anduril engineer, expounded on the benefits of such technology at the Expo. “A tower doesn’t get tired. It doesn’t care about being in the middle of the desert or a river around the clock,” he told me. “We just let the computers do what they do best.”

      https://thebaffler.com/outbursts/border-profiteers-oconnor

  • Why #decentralization Still Matters and How The World Got Carried Away
    https://hackernoon.com/why-decentralization-still-matters-and-how-the-world-got-carried-away-28

    By Mathias Klenk, the founder of PassbaseThe Internet is a playground — one that has enabled some of the biggest innovations across recent decades. With the ability to access a number of products and services instantly from any connected device, it’s no wonder it has become a mainstay of most households and businesses around the globe.Why decentralization still matters.An enhanced digital experience is largely powered by tapping into data — data that can help companies decode user preferences, shopping patterns, payment choices, and other related transactions that have simplified our lives. A major part of this was enabled by centralized services. Although centralization proved to be useful for many, there are a number of evangelists who still believe decentralization matters.Tech entrepreneur (...)

    #security #blockchain #cybersecurity #digital-identity

  • France in the #blockchain Ecosystem with Karim Sabba from #paris Blockchain Week
    https://hackernoon.com/france-in-the-blockchain-ecosystem-with-karim-sabba-from-paris-blockchai

    Episode 35 of the Hacker Noon Podcast: An interview with Karim Sabba, French entrepreneur and founder of Paris Blockchain Week. Paris Blockchain Week is April 16–17, 2019 in Paris, France, Use code: HACKERNOON30 for a 30% discount.Listen to the interview on iTunes, or Google Podcast, or watch on YouTube.https://medium.com/media/fc1d92a51507e9eca88d7af519edd8e9/hrefIn this episode Trent Lapinski interviews Karim Sabba, French entrepreneur and founder of Paris Blockchain Week.“I jumped into this new ecosystem where I saw returns that I had never seen in my life. And that was what caught me in. That was the bait, and it was a good bait. But afterwards I started to dive into all those projects and I remember, I don’t want to name it because my apprehension of this was a bit weird, but (...)

    #crypto #blockchain-week-paris #hackernoon-podcast

  • Learning Data Science In 6 Weeks — How You Can Do It?
    https://hackernoon.com/learning-data-science-in-6-weeks-how-you-can-do-it-d46520c12d43?source=r

    Learning Data Science In 6 Weeks — How You Can Do It?With data science emerging as one of the hottest professions in the recent years, there’s an extremely high demand for data practitioners.However, many aspirants are bogged down by the myth that you need a Ph.D. or a Master’s in the field to become a data scientist.Those with very little statistics or programming skills too are often afraid of taking up courses in data science fearing they won’t find any use of what they learn.But in reality, if you have a passion for learning, can grapple with new challenges and persevere, you can learn data science in just 6 weeks data camp.And we don’t mean learning some basic things that won’t help you in getting a job.In 6 weeks, the right course can get you job-ready by teaching you the requisite skills (...)

    #ai #entrepreneur #data-science #machine-learning #magnimind-academy

  • Five #bootstrapping Hacks Every Founder Should Know
    https://hackernoon.com/considering-bootstrapping-your-startup-follow-these-tips-to-reach-your-g

    From investigating coworking spaces to avoiding credit cards, here’s some advice on bootstrapping a #startup in 2019.Have you ever heard about the old saying, “Pull yourself up by your bootstraps?” It means improving one’s situation or getting success through one’s own efforts, without outside help. Why am talking about bootstrapping here?It applies to your startup, too.Bootstrapping your startup means that keeping your #business updated and on the growing stage with little or no venture capital or you can say without any external investment. In short, this word symbolizes the business owners typically relies on their own savings and revenues in order to operate and grow their business entity in the race.Image credits: Photo by Danielle MacInnes on UnsplashIt’s not easy to do, but the rewards (...)

    #startup-lessons #entrepreneur

  • The Top 10 Things Entrepreneurs Need To Know About Qualifying for a #mortgage
    https://hackernoon.com/the-top-ten-things-entrepreneurs-need-to-know-about-qualifying-for-a-mor

    So in keeping with my mission to help people buy homes, I put together this little list on what you need to know if you’re an entrepreneur who wants to buy a home.The ability to qualify for a mortgage is based on 3 things: your income, your assets and your credit.2. You make your money when you buy the house, not when you sell.3. You need to be in business for at least 2 consecutive years, and your income is averaged over the last 2 years to qualify. So you need to have 2 years of positive income. The average of the two years net profit is what the bank thinks you make.4. Your credit should be at least a 620 if you want to get a mortgage in today’s lending environment. Though you can possibly get a mortgage with a lower score, 620 is the ideal minimum standard.5. You can get the seller to (...)

    #entrepreneurship #real-estate

  • Consider a Loan Instead of #vc Money
    https://hackernoon.com/consider-a-loan-instead-of-vc-money-48ad3b7b8d3c?source=rss----3a8144eab

    “If you’re starting a business and you take out a loan, you’re a moron,” said firebrand entrepreneur Mark Cuban in an interview with Bloomberg.However, if you’re a budding entrepreneur, hearing or reading such things from sharks can be disheartening, especially if you’re looking to start with little to no capital. To be fair to Cuban, he did go at length saying that businesses can be launched through sheer effort. Nevertheless, it takes money to make money, even just to make it through the day.There are, however, key instances where additional significant #funding may be needed, for example, when business suddenly picks up and you have to ramp up production to keep up with demand. You’d definitely want to take advantage of such opportunities.In these situations, is getting a small business (...)

    #fintech #startup #loans

  • How the Disposable Straw Explains Modern Capitalism - The Atlantic
    https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/06/disposable-america/563204

    Alexis C. Madrigal - Jun 21, 2018

    A straw is a simple thing. It’s a tube, a conveyance mechanism for liquid. The defining characteristic of the straw is the emptiness inside it. This is the stuff of tragedy, and America.

    Over the last several months, plastic straws have come under fire from environmental activists who rightly point out that disposable plastics have created a swirling, centuries-long ecological disaster that is brutally difficult to clean up. Bags were first against the wall, but municipalities from Oakland, California, (yup) to Surfside, Florida, (huh!) have started to restrict the use of plastic straws. Of course, now there is a movement afoot among conservatives to keep those plastics flowing for freedom. Meanwhile, disability advocates have pointed out that plastic straws, in particular, are important for people with physical limitations. “To me, it’s just lame liberal activism that in the end is nothing,” one activist told The Toronto Star. “We’re really kind of vilifying people who need straws.” Other environmentalists aren’t sure that banning straws is gonna do much, and point out that banning straws is not an entirely rigorous approach to global systems change, considering that a widely cited estimate for the magnitude of the problem was, umm, created by a smart 9-year-old.

    All this to say: The straw is officially part of the culture wars, and you might be thinking, “Gah, these contentious times we live in!” But the straw has always been dragged along by the currents of history, soaking up the era, shaping not its direction, but its texture.

    The invention of American industrialism, the creation of urban life, changing gender relations, public-health reform, suburbia and its hamburger-loving teens, better living through plastics, and the financialization of the economy: The straw was there for all these things—rolled out of extrusion machines, dispensed, pushed through lids, bent, dropped into the abyss.

    You can learn a lot about this country, and the dilemmas of contemporary capitalism, by taking a straw-eyed view.

    People have probably been drinking things through cylindrical tubes for as long as Homo sapiens has been around, and maybe before. Scientists observed orangutans demonstrating a preference for a straw-like tool over similar, less functional things. Ancient versions existed, too.

    But in 19th-century America, straws were straw, rye stalks, cut and dried. An alternative did not present itself widely until 1888. That year, Marvin Stone, a Washington, D.C., gentleman, was awarded a patent for an “artificial straw”—“a cheap, durable, and unobjectionable” substitute for natural straws, Stone wrote, “commonly used for the administration of medicines, beverages, etc.”

    Workmen created these early artificial straws by winding paper around a thin cylindrical form, then covering them in paraffin. Often, they were “colored in imitation of the natural straw.” Within a decade, these straws appeared often in newspaper items and advertisements across the country.
    A typical Stone straw ad from a newspaper in 1899 (Google Books)

    Advertising for the Stone straw describes its virtues and emphasizes the faults of the natural straw. Stone’s straws were free from TASTE and ODOR (natural straws were not). Stone’s straws were SWEET, CLEAN, and PERFECT (natural straws could be cracked or musty). You only had to use one Stone straw per drink (not always the case with natural straws).

    They worked. They were cheap. They were very popular and spawned many imitators because once an artificial straw had been conceived, it just wasn’t that hard to make them, tinkering with the process just enough to route around Stone’s patent. This could be read as a story of individual genius. America likes this kind of story.

    But in 1850, long before Stone, Abijah Fessenden patented a drinking tube with a filter attached to a vessel shaped like a spyglass. Disabled people were using drinking tubes in the mid-19th century, as attested to by a patent from 1870. These were artificial, high-value straws; rye was natural and disposable. But it wasn’t until the late 1880s that someone thought to create the disposable, artificial straw.

    Why?

    Americans were primarily a rural people in the early 19th century. Cities had few restaurants until the 1830s and 1840s. Most that did exist were for very rich people. It took the emergence of a new urban life to spark the creation of the kind of eating and drinking establishment that would enshrine the straw in American culture: the soda fountain.

    Carbon dioxide had been isolated decades before, and soda water created with predictably palate-pleasing results, but the equipment to make it was expensive and unwieldy. It wasn’t until the the gas was readily available and cheap that the soda fountain became prevalent. In the 1870s, their technical refinement met a growing market of people who wanted a cold, sweet treat in the city.

    At the same time, the Civil War had intensified American industrialization. More and more people lived in cities and worked outside the home. Cities had saloons, but they were gendered spaces. As urban women fought for greater independence, they, too, wanted places to go. Soda fountains provided a key alternative. Given the female leadership of the late-19th-century temperance movement, soda fountains were drafted onto the side. Sodas were safe and clean. They were soft drinks.

    By 1911, an industry book proclaimed the soda fountain the very height of democratic propriety. “Today everybody, men, women and children, natives and foreigners, patronize the fountain” said The Practical Soda Fountain Guide.

    Temperance and public health grew up together in the disease-ridden cities of America, where despite the modern conveniences and excitements, mortality rates were higher than in the countryside. Straws became a key part of maintaining good hygiene and public health. They became, specifically, part of the answer to the scourge of unclean drinking glasses. Cities begin requiring the use of straws in the late 1890s. A Wisconsin paper noted in 1896 that already in many cities “ordinances have been issued making the use of wrapped drinking straws essential in public eating places.”

    But the laws that regulated health went further. A Kansas doctor campaigned against the widespread use of the “common cup,” which was ... a cup, that many people drank from. Bans began in Kansas and spread.
    The Cup Campaigner

    In many cases, this cup was eventually replaced by the water fountain (or paper cups). Some factories kept the common cup, but purchased straw dispensers that allowed all to partake individually. “The spectacle of groups of able-bodied men standing around drinking water through straws and out of a common, ordinary drinking cup, prompted no end of facetious comment,” read an item in the Shelbina Democrat of October 11, 1911.

    Cup and straw both had to be clean to assure no germs would assail the children (or the able-bodied men). So even the method by which straws were dispensed became an important hygienic indicator. “In some stores, customers are permitted to choose their own straws, and this system would work very well if customers would not finger the straws,” The Practical Soda Fountain Guide lamented.

    That led to the development of the straw dispenser, which has a deep lineage. Already, in 1911, the thing existed where you individually pop a straw into reach. That’s it, right below, with the rationale written in: “Protects straws from flies, dust, and microbes.”
    The Practical Soda Fountain Guide

    To people living through the early 20th century, the straw was a creation of the new public-health regime. “Due to the ‘Yankee mania for sanitation,’ the [American] output of artificial straws has increased from 165 million in 1901 to 4 billion a year at present,” the Battle Creek Enquirer wrote in May 1924. “A manufacturer pointed out yesterday that, laid end to end, these straws would build an ant’s subway 16 times around the world at the equator.”

    Four billion straws! There were only 114 million Americans at the time, so that’s 35 straws per capita (though some were exported).

    Of course, straw making was improving through all these decades—mechanizing, scaling up—but the straw itself basically stayed the same. According to Sidney Graham—who founded the National Soda Straw Company in 1931, and who competed against Stone and other early straw manufacturers—in a 1988 history of the straw:

    Straws were uniform up until the 1930s ... They were tan in color, thin, and exactly 8.5 inches long. Then someone in the soda-bottling business started marketing eight-ounce bottles, and straws grew to 10.5 inches. Various soda fountains began mixing malted milks, and the old straws were too thin. So we started making them thicker. Still, they were all tan in color, like the original straws.

    In the interwar years, however, major changes came to straws. In 1937, for example, Joseph Friedman invented the bendy straw at his brother’s soda shop in San Francisco, leading to the design that’s prevalent today.

    But what happened to the straw industry is far more interesting than its (limited) technical advances. Three of the biggest names in the industry—Friedman’s Flexi-Straw Company; the Lily-Tulip Cup Corporation, which made popular white straws; and Maryland Cup Corporation—have bumped around the last 80 years like corporate Forrest Gumps.

    As it turns out, all three companies’ histories intersect with each other, as well as with structural changes to the American economy. But first, we have to talk about McDonald’s.

    Let’s start with Ray Kroc, who built the McDonald’s empire. For about 16 years, beginning in 1922, he sold cups for the Lily-Tulip Cup Corporation, rising to lead sales across the Midwest. “I don’t know what appealed to me so much about paper cups. Perhaps it was mostly because they were so innovative and upbeat,” Kroc recalled in his memoir, Grinding It Out. “But I sensed from the outset that paper cups were part of the way America was headed.”

    At first, selling cups was a tough job. Straws were cheap—you could get 100 for nine cents in the 1930s—but cups were many times more expensive. And besides, people could just wash glasses. Why would they need a paper cup? But America was tilting toward speed and disposability. And throwaway products were the future (“innovative and upbeat”). Soda fountains and their fast-food descendants were continuing to grow, spurring more sales of cups and straws. In the end, Kroc called the years between 1927 and 1937 “a decade of destiny for the paper-cup industry.”

    Selling all those cups brought Kroc into contact with soda fountains, and eventually he went into business selling milkshake mixers. This led him to Southern California, where he saw the first McDonald’s in operation. He bought his way into the small company and deposed the original owners. With Kroc growing the brand, McDonald’s added 90 franchises between 1955 and 1959. By 1961, Kroc was fully in control of the company, and by 1968, there were 1,000 McDonald’s restaurants.
    The first McDonald’s that Ray Kroc opened in Des Plaines, Illinois, is now a museum dedicated to the burger chain. (Reuters/Frank Polich)

    The restaurant chain became a key customer for Maryland Cup, which began as an ice-cream-cone bakery in Boston. Its first nonfood product launched under a brand that became nationally famous, Sweetheart. That product? The straw. The name derived from the original packaging, which showed “two children sharing a milkshake, each drinking from a straw and their heads forming the two curved arcs of a heart.”

    After the war, the company went into cups, and later other kinds of packaging for the growing fast-food industry. It developed new products for McDonald’s, like those old foam clamshell packages that hamburgers used to come in. It also snatched up the Flexi-Straw Company—along with all its patents and rights—in 1969. Things were going great. The founder’s son-in-law was president of the company in Baltimore; one nephew of the founder ran the McDonald’s relationship; the other ran the plastics division.

    Because the future, at that point, had become plastics! In 1950, the world produced 1.5 million tons of plastic. By the late 1960s, that production had grown more than tenfold. Every product was being tried as a plastic thing, and so naturally, the straw became a plastic thing, too. It didn’t happen overnight. It took years for paper straws to lose their cultural salience.

    While functionally, paper and plastic straws might have seemed the same, to the keen observer who is the narrator of Nicholson Baker’s dazzling 1988 novel, The Mezzanine, the plastic and paper straw were not interchangeable. Paper did not float. Plastic did: “How could the straw engineers have made so elementary a mistake, designing a straw that weighed less than the sugar-water in which it was intended to stand? Madness!”

    Baker’s narrator wonders why the big fast-food chains like McDonald’s didn’t pressure the straw engineers into fixing this weighting mistake. “[The chains] must have had whole departments dedicated to exacting concessions from Sweetheart and Marcal,” Baker writes.

    But there was a problem: lids, which had come into vogue. Plastic straws could push through the little + slits in the cap. Paper ones could not. The restaurant chains committed fully to plastic straws.

    Baker goes on to imagine the ramifications, painting a miniature portrait of the process of path-dependent technological choice, which has helped shape everything from the width of railroad tracks to the layout of your keyboard. The power players went plastic, so everyone had to go plastic. “Suddenly the paper-goods distributor was offering the small restaurants floating plastic straws and only floating plastic straws, and was saying that this was the way all the big chains were going,” Baker writes. Sometimes it all works. Other times, a small pleasure is lost, or a tiny headache is created: “In this way the quality of life, through nobody’s fault, went down an eighth of a notch.”

    I can’t prove that this was the precise series of events that took hold among straw engineers, cup distributors, and McDonald’s. Most corporate decision-making of this kind simply doesn’t stick in the nets of history. Yet these differences influence the texture of life every single day, and ever more so, as the owners of corporations become ever further removed from the products they sell. Let’s just say that the logic Baker describes, the way he imagines the development and consequences of these forgettable technologies, squares with the histories that we do know. The very straw engineers that Baker describes might well have been working in the plastics division of the Maryland Cup Corporation, owners of the Sweetheart brand.

    Baker was writing in the 1980s, when straws of all kinds had begun to proliferate, and the American economic system entered a period of intense consolidation and financialization. A key component of this new form of capitalism was the “leveraged buyout,” in which private-equity firms descended on old companies, sliced them up, took out huge amounts of debt, and sold off the various components, “unlocking value” for their investors. You might remember this was how Mitt Romney made his fortune. Matt Taibbi described the model in acerbic but not inaccurate terms: “A man makes a $250 million fortune loading up companies with debt and then extracting million-dollar fees from those same companies, in exchange for the generous service of telling them who needs to be fired in order to finance the debt payments he saddled them with in the first place.”

    Global competition and offshoring enabled by containerized trade was responsible for some of the trouble American manufacturing encountered in the 1970s and 1980s. But the wholesale restructuring of the economy by private-equity firms to narrow the beneficiaries of business operations contributed mightily to the resentments still resounding through the country today. The straw, like everything else, was swept along for the ride.

    In the early 1980s, Maryland Cup’s family-linked executives were on the glide path to retirement. Eighty family members held about half the company’s stock. In 1983, the company had $656 million in revenue, $32 million in profits, and 10,000 employees. It was the biggest disposable-food-product manufacturer in the nation, an empire built on cups, straws, and plastic silverware. The family was ready to cash out.

    The big paper and food companies circled Maryland Cup, but it was eventually sold for $534 million to Fort Howard, a paper company that had gone public in the early ’70s, and began to aggressively expand beyond its Wisconsin base.

    The sale was a boon for Maryland Cup’s shareholders, but the company did not fare well under the new management. Following the transaction, the Baltimore Sun relates, Maryland Cup executives flew to dinner with Fort Howard’s hard-charging CEO, Paul Schierl. He brought out a flip chart, on which he’d written the company’s “old” values—“service, quality, responding to customers.” He turned the page to show the company’s “new” values—“profits, profits, profits.” It’s like a scene out of Tommy Boy, or a socialist’s fever dream.

    Fort Howard forced deep cuts on the company. Some longtime managers quit. The trappings of the family company went out the window. No more executives dressing up as Santa Claus or local charitable contributions. And while Fort Howard was cutting people, it invested in expanding the company’s factories. This was just business. Schierl literally appeared at a sales meeting in a devil’s mask.

    Maryland Cup’s struggles intensified after the wave of departures that followed the acquisition. It needed customer volume to keep its new, bigger plants running, so Fort Howard snatched up the Lily-Tulip Cup Corporation in 1986 for another $332 million. Surely there would be synergies. More layoffs came.

    Two years later, the private-equity guys struck. Morgan Stanley, which had helped broker Fort Howard’s deals, swept in and snatched the company for $3.9 billion in one of those famed leveraged buyouts. The whole enterprise was swept off the public markets and into their hands.

    One of their moves was to spin out the cup business as Sweetheart Holdings—along with a boatload of debt jettisoned out of Fort Howard. Just eight years inside Fort Howard and a turn through the private-equity wringer had turned a profitable company into one that still made money on operations in 1991, but was $95 million in the red because it was so loaded up with debt.

    The company made layoffs across the country. Retirement health-care benefits were cut, leaving older employees so livid they filed a class-action lawsuit. A huge Wilmington factory closed after McDonald’s got rid of its plastic clamshell packaging for hamburgers, citing environmental concerns over plastic.

    In 1993, the company was sold again to a different investment group, American Industrial Partners. Eventually, it was sold yet again to the Solo Cup Company, makers of one-third of the materials necessary for beer pong. And finally, in 2012, Solo was itself sold to Dart Container, a family-owned packaging company that sells a vast array of straws under the Solo brand.

    Fort Howard continued on, going back public in 1995, then merging with another paper company, James River, in 1997, to become Fort James. Just three years later, an even bigger paper company, Georgia Pacific, snatched up the combined entity. In 2005, Koch Industries bought the shares of all the companies, taking the company back private. They still make straws.

    While bulk capitalism pushes hundreds of millions of plain plastic straws through the American food system, there are also thousands of variations on the straw now, from the “krazy” whirling neon kind to a new natural straw made from rye stalks advertised on Kickstarter (the entrepreneur calls them “Straw Straws”). There are old-school paper straws and newfangled compostable plastic straws. Stone Straw, founded by the inventor of the artificial straw, even survives in some form as the straw-distributing subsidiary of a Canadian manufacturing concern. Basically, there’s never been a better time to be a straw consumer.

    Meanwhile, the country has shed manufacturing jobs for decades, straws contribute their share to a dire global environmental disaster, the economy continues to concentrate wealth among the very richest, and the sodas that pass through the nation’s straws are contributing to an obesity epidemic that threatens to erase many of the public health gains that were won in the 20th century. Local governments may legislate the use of the plastic straw, but they can’t do a thing about the vast system that’s attached to the straw, which created first disposable products, then companies, and finally people.

    The straw is the opposite of special. History has flowed around and through it, like thousands of other bits of material culture. What’s happened to the straw might not even be worth comment, and certainly not essay. But if it’s not clear by now, straws, in this story, are us, inevitable vessels of the times in which we live.

    #USA #histoire #capitalisme #alimentation #plastique

  • What I learned during a 30-year career as an entrepreneur
    https://hackernoon.com/what-i-learned-during-a-30-year-career-as-an-entrepreneur-4a1404179676?s

    What I learned during a 30-year career as an entrepreneurMy journey as an entrepreneur has been an odyssey I’m stepping away from after 30 years. Entrepreneurs tend to hover between calculated risks and foolhardiness with a greater degree of comfort than most people. During three decades of running a business, I’ve learned as much from failure as success. Failure is often the better teacher. As I look back on founding a company, here are my “birthing” lessons; they’ll apply to new and emerging companies alike.Look before you leap, but leapIn my company’s early years figuring out how to make payroll was often the cause of many a sleepless night. Later as that worry subsided, I personally guaranteed millions of dollars in order to afford the costs of bringing on a big, new client or to acquire (...)

  • As An Entrepreneur, Unknowns Are Your Enemy.
    https://hackernoon.com/as-an-entrepreneur-unknowns-are-your-enemy-86ee7e08cf4b?source=rss----3a

    Here’s Everything You Need To Know Before Launching A StartupEntrepreneurs once had the luxury of setting strategies and slowly tinkering to perfect them — but not anymore.Today, we’re in a much less forgiving #startup ecosystem. If your competitor hits the market with a product, they can get it in front of hundreds of thousands of people via the internet and social media in a day. Whatever your idea, you can be sure there are a few other folks working on it, even more thinking about it, and thousands who will jump in as soon as they hear about it.In other words, a slow start separates the startup winners and losers.That’s why successful entrepreneurs need to have a detailed idea of what they’re getting into before jumping in. This means getting out there early to investigate the market, the (...)

    #company #business #startup-lessons #entrepreneurship

  • Top Mobile App Development Companies in #india and US
    https://hackernoon.com/top-mobile-app-development-companies-in-india-and-us-4d54be058c97?source

    Are you a small business, entrepreneur, ISV who want to make a BIG in the Mobile-First World? Definitely! No one wants to lose billions of potential customers who spend maximum time on their smartphones.But, But, But: finding the right mobile app development company is a herculean task! There are millions of application development firms all across the globe, and you should choose the best company catering to your business needs.First of all, let me tell you about myself. I am a software & technology consultant with 12+ years of experience in providing tips to budding enterprises on how they can save their time & money in their next software development project.In this blog, I will make your task easy to find the top mobile app development company in India, US & UK so that (...)

    #apps #mobile-apps #mobile-app-development #apps-for-business

  • A true story of an #ico project — my experience of launching an ICO and insights worth telling.
    https://hackernoon.com/a-true-story-of-an-ico-project-my-experience-of-launching-an-ico-and-ins

    A true story of an ICO project — my experience of launching an ICO and insights worth telling.“Whoever told you doing ICOs was easy simply haven’t done one”a true ico storyThis is a true roller-coaster-ride-story of launching ICO in Hong Kong in 2018, insights that you don’t know but should know.Figure 1: The roller-coaster ride of launching an ICO14th Jan 2018: 1 ETH = $1,384, “The peak of ETH and hype of ICO.”Chris, who I knew for over 10 years, the founder of a Shenzhen-based software company approached me for the second time, persuading me to join him to transform his company from a software development house to a SaaS-based company underpinned by a self-developed #blockchain platform. Given my vested interests in Blockchain and being an entrepreneur; and knowing Chris had received a pre-A round (...)

    #entrepreneurship #fundraising #blockchain-startup

  • #entrepreneurship as an Asset Class
    https://hackernoon.com/entrepreneurship-as-an-asset-class-8634ac6f1e8b?source=rss----3a8144eabf

    Wanna get rich? Just become an #entrepreneur!Want the freedom to do whatever you want? Easy! Just become an entrepreneur!Entrepreneurship is commonly depicted as the bastion of easy success, but the simple reality is that entrepreneurs consistently face a long, painful journey.Thought leaders might try to condense entrepreneurship to a simple definition or soundbyte. My favorite from Elon Musk. In an interview TechCrunch, he said that being an entrepreneur is like eating glass and staring into the abyss of death.” Doesn’t he make it sound so… cool? It’s no wonder so many people have thrown their hats into the entrepreneurship ring, chasing the lifestyle they see in happy-go-lucky media coverage glosses over the many negatives.It’s too bad the media doesn’t transmit a different message: (...)

    #asset-classes #entrepreneur-asset-class #startup

  • Elon Musk is not reading articles online about how to become Elon Musk
    https://hackernoon.com/elon-musk-is-not-reading-articles-online-about-how-to-become-elon-musk-d

    If you Google ‘How to become Elon Musk’, you will come across thousands of articles that address that question in one way or another. Either they are answers on Quora to that specific question itself, or they are indirect answers to that question with titles ranging from ‘10 ways to think like Elon Musk’ (Forbes) to ‘8 things that Elon Musk does before 8am’ (Medium).You can substitute Elon Musk with any successful entrepreneur, author, sports person, actor, CEO, musician, politician, nobel laureate and you will see similar results.The Internet is full of literature on how to do things like, how to think like and how to become any of these successful people.The Internet is full of this literature because it attracts clicks.People love short cuts. They want to learn how to become successful in (...)

    #life-lessons #progress #success #elon-musk #self-improvement

  • Four #startup Engineering Killers
    https://hackernoon.com/four-startup-engineering-killers-1fb5c498391d?source=rss----3a8144eabfe3

    Beware these engineering mistakes for your early stage software startupIn 2016, I gave technical advice to a first-time entrepreneur building a seed-funded food delivery marketplace. In my view, every tech choice the company had made was wrong.The CEO believed in “empowering the engineer.” They then let their first engineer choose the framework (Scala/Play) because it was what the engineer wanted to use, not because it made sense for the company, their use case, or the recruiting pool. Much of the early technical work had been outsourced. Their product roadmap was widely optimistic (web and mobile concurrently) despite the fact that most of the business was still unvalidated. It was a recipe for disaster.Startup engineering is different from any other type of software engineering. It (...)

    #programming #software-development #hackernoon-top-story

  • The Secret To Getting Free Drinks, Upgrades And Genuine Smiles When You #travel
    https://hackernoon.com/the-secret-to-getting-free-drinks-upgrades-and-genuine-smiles-when-you-t

    Image Credit: alusruvi/PixabayA very good friend of mine has heard me tell many a tale of trips in which I have been given free drinks, gratis hotel and car rental upgrades and various travel freebies. However, without experiencing my stories first hand, he always suspected there was a degree of embellishment involved to make my stories a bit more entertaining.We eventually had the opportunity to travel together and I was able to show demonstrate the power of a little respect and an authentic smile.It’s Kool To Be KindWe began our trip sitting in the dreary, uncomfortable airport terminal, with ample time before our flight. Bored, I explored the terminal and located the airline’s club lounge. Despite not being a member, I entered and immediately knew where I was going to spend the next (...)

    #entrepreneurship #startup #entrepreneur #travel-upgrades

  • Uganda accused of promoting sex tourism with ’curvy women’ ...
    http://news.trust.org/item/20190207175109-1s11y

    Uganda must cancel a beauty contest that seeks to attract more visitors by showcasing “curvy women” because it objectifies women and promotes sex tourism, campaigners said on Thursday.

    Tourism Minister Godfrey Kiwanda sparked outrage on Wednesday when he unveiled the “Miss Curvy Uganda” contest, saying the east African nation had “naturally endowed” women who should be used as “a strategy” to boost tourism.

    Women’s rights activists, politicians, church leaders and ordinary Ugandans said the contest was “state-sponsored objectification of women” and was treating women as though they were wildlife. Some are calling on Kiwanda to resign.

    More than 1,000 people have signed an online petition calling on the tourism ministry to abandon the pageant and apologise to the public.

    “In Uganda, the ministry of tourism has added ’curvy women’ on the list of ’tourism attractions’. I personally feel attacked. This is degrading women,” said Primrose Murungi, an entrepreneur and activist who started the online petition.

    #Ouganda #femmes #attractions_touristiques #curvy_women

  • 16 Lessons From John Mcafee Quotes
    https://hackernoon.com/16-lessons-from-john-mcafee-quotes-6e3a7f7ada84?source=rss----3a8144eabf

    “When I do interviews, I seldom, I don’t go to studios, of CNN or Fox or Turner and everybody. They send some people here with a camera and they do the interview from my house. Why? ’Cause I’m too old to be traveling around. And if you want to talk to me, come to me”.“I’ve been called paranoid, schizophrenic, the wild child of Silicon Valley. But I’m an entrepreneur. I always have been. I am curious and I enjoy solving problems”.“Marketing is making sure that innovation actually sees the light of day. So much innovation does not because there’s no marketing. Or the marketing is imperfect. You know if I market something, it sees the light of day”.“Most of my bosses also used drugs of some kind. I was in the tech field, after all, we were the leading edge in technology and the leading age in personal (...)

    #bitcoin #john-mcafee-quotes #john-mcafee #john-mcafee-lessons #btc

  • Crystal Ball 3000™ : Will the next crypto hype start in 2019?
    https://hackernoon.com/crystal-ball-3000-will-the-next-crypto-hype-start-in-2019-d005cb743121?s

    Crystal Ball 3000™ : Will the next crypto hype start in 2019?At the beginning of each year, I ask myself the same question as probably pretty much everyone else in the crypto field:“Where will #bitcoin be at the end of the year?”Every investor, entrepreneur and reporter in the press wants to know how the crypto prices will behave in the coming year. After entering the blockchain field in 2014, I asked myself the same questions in 2015, 2016, 2017 and 2018. Now it’s the beginning of 2019 and with 2018 we have just had one of the worst crypto-bear years behind us. So:When will the next crypto-hype finally start?Should I put fresh capital into crypto at these supposedly low prices or will it go further down?What is the best coin this year?Will crypto die?Not only the rest of the world, also I want (...)

    #investment #finance #life-lessons #cryptocurrency

  • 29 Tools and Resources for the #bootstrapping Entrepreneur
    https://hackernoon.com/29-tools-and-resources-for-the-bootstrapping-entrepreneur-65c01a81fefb?s

    Starting a business is already expensive and time-consuming enough. The young internet entrepreneur can use some of the following tools and resources to help get started on their journey (while they’re still working in a basement, parents home or shared apartment) before they can afford to pay for every piece of software they need or to hire someone who knows the tricks of the trade.1. 7 Zip: http://7-zip.org (free download) An open source, free alternative to WinZip.2. Audacity: http://audacity.sourceforge.net (free download) An open source software used for recording & editing audio files.3. AVG: http://free.avg.com (free download) Anti-virus and anti-spyware protection.4. BrowserShots: http://browsershots.org (free online tool) Use this site to view how your website look in various (...)

    #bootstrapped-entrepreneur #entrepreneurship-tools #entrepreneur-tools #design

  • Google Knowledge Graph — The Best Guide For Beginners
    https://hackernoon.com/google-knowledge-graph-the-best-guide-for-beginners-d513c1180abf?source=

    Google Knowledge Graph — The Best Guide For BeginnersDo you want to learn about the latest gadgets in the market? Perhaps you’d like to check out the best Chinese restaurants in your town? Or are you conducting research on the life of an entrepreneur?Regardless of the nature of your search query, Google tries its best to deliver the most relevant and meaningful answers to you.There is no doubt that Google has become an indispensable part of every internet user’s life. From acquiring knowledge to buying products, you run quick Google searches for almost every need, big or small. In fact, more than 71,000 search queries are conducted by Google every second.HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT:8 Inbound Marketing Strategies Your Startup Needs to Start Using Today8 Website Navigation Mistakes You Might Be (...)

    #google-knowledge-graph #seo #knowledge-graph #google-analytics #guides-and-tutorials

  • DO THINGS THAT DON’T SCALE: 4 Inspirational #startup Examples
    https://hackernoon.com/do-things-that-dont-scale-4-inspirational-startup-examples-a2ab3a5c4926?

    Have an idea that you haven’t been able to kick-off? Early stage founder thinking of the big league before you start? Here’s some inspiration from highly funded start-ups on how they validated their initial idea.Start small. Start now. Just start..https://medium.com/media/dd7e47217623d7a87257a498b4e99d87/hrefIn no particular order, here we go:DoordashY Combinator-backed, DoorDash is one of several technology companies that uses logistics services to offer food delivery from restaurants on-demand. Here’s a small excerpt from the founder, Stanley Tang on how to get started and doing things initially that don’t scale at all.Zero to one, real quick. Here’s how:Landing page in an afternoon and they were doing restaurant pick-ups and deliveries by the night (all by themselves and while in college!). (...)

    #scaling-a-startup #entrepreneur #do-things-that-dont-scale #things-that-dont-scale

  • 10 Best #infographics Of 2018
    https://hackernoon.com/10-best-infographics-of-2018-b979c171ede7?source=rss----3a8144eabfe3---4

    We have had so many great projects this year that it was exceedingly difficult to narrow it down to just ten of our favorite projects. A sincere thank you to all of our clients who entrusted us with your infographics this year — we thoroughly enjoyed all of the projects we did, even though many of our favorites aren’t on this list. Here are the best infographics of 2018 (Here are the best from 2017 2016 2015 2014 2013 2012 2011 2010).1. The Art And Science Of DelegationSource: ScaletimeFeatured On Entrepreneur, Tech Republic, and Small Business Trends2. How Does #amazon Make Its Money?Source: SellbriteFeatured On Business Insider, Big Commerce, Tech Republic, and Visual Capitalist3. The Future Of Augmented RealitySource: Lumus VisionFeatured On PC Mag, RisMedia, Entrepreneur, and Small (...)

    #cannabis #blockchain #small-business