New York City has a composting mandate that’s been in effect since October, but now the powers that be are getting serious about implementing it, meaning, they’re levying fines on buildings/landlords who don’t comply and separate organic material from other detritus.
“But despite the mandate, the participation rate is abysmal: Public data indicates less than 5% of the city’s organic waste is actually being composted,” Gothamist reported.
Meanwhile, NYC landlords fume over new composting fines turning them into dumpster divers: ‘Detached from reality, wrote the New York Post.Read More...
Variations on a theme and in case you missed it, 23andMe filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy Privacy, “leaving the fate of millions of people’s genetic information up in the air as the company deals with the legal and financial fallout of not properly protecting that genetic information in the first place. The filing shows how dangerous it is to provide your DNA directly to a large, for-profit commercial genetic database; 23andMe is now looking for a buyer to pull it out of bankruptcy,” as 404 Media et al reported.
“Once valued at $6 billion, executives have yet to find a bidder for the $50 million gene testing company that has never turned a profit,” Reddit noted, but that’s a whole other story.
“This strategic shift coincides with the resignation of its co-founder and CEO, Anne Wojcicki, who stepped down to spearhead an independent bid to acquire the company after facing repeated rejections from its board,” said Reclaim the Net. “For the millions who entrusted their DNA to 23andMe, the assumption might have been that such intimate data enjoys the ironclad protections of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), a law designed to shield sensitive health information from unauthorized disclosure. Yet, 23andMe operates outside HIPAA’s reach, leaving it tethered only to its own privacy policies — rules it can rewrite at will.”Read More...
This month marked the fifth anniversary of the Covid lockdowns, and we thought it might be interesting and instructive to go over some of the developments since that time.
During the Covid Era, we were instructed to follow the science, and now that the novel mRNA vaccines have been out in the population for a while – in other words, studied over at least some time, which historically has been done before new vaccines are released to hundreds of millions of people, here are the results, and we’re just reporting, so don’t shoot the messenger: The Largest COVID-19 “Vaccine” Safety Study Ever Conducted, on 99 Million Individuals, Confirms the Injections Are NOT SAFE FOR HUMAN USE. We do realize that there was a pandemic afoot and lives at stake and the vaccine was rolled out for emergency use, but as Dr. Peter McCullough reported, In fact, 100-Year-Old BCG Vaccine Outperforms Novel mRNA Injections Against COVID-19.
““We Were Badly Misled About the Event That Changed Our Lives,” says the headline on a New York Times piece that looks back at one of the deceptions promoted by government health officials during the Covid panic of 2020. The story appears in the opinion section but also notes that New York Times news reporting was subject to spin from what we might call the medical branch of the Beltway swamp,” said the Wall Street Journal.Read More...
A subject matter expert friend of ours is being pressed ad nauseam to write a book, but his free time is in short supply. It has been suggested to him, again ad nauseam, to have an LLM do it for him. The book would be generated in days!
Before deferring to a generative AI, some things to keep in mind: “AI Search Has A Citation Problem. We Compared Eight AI Search Engines. They’re All Bad at Citing News,” Columbia Journalism News reported. “We found that…
• Chatbots were generally bad at declining to answer questions they couldn’t answer accurately, offering incorrect or speculative answers instead.
• Premium chatbots provided more confidently incorrect answers than their free counterparts.
• Multiple chatbots seemed to bypass Robot Exclusion Protocol preferences.
• Generative search tools fabricated links and cited syndicated and copied versions of articles.
• Content licensing deals with news sources provided no guarantee of accurate citation in chatbot responses.Read More...
Om Malik wrote an amazing piece (Skype is dead. What happened?) on the demise of Skype and there are lessons to be learned here for founders – and investors.
At launch, Skype was a seminal technology that upended communications. Prior to the launch of the peer-to-peer network, long-distance calls were prohibitively expensive. Suddenly, one could call anywhere in the world for free, as one can do with so many services today – now, even video, of course. At one point, like Zoom, Skype was a verb.
Startups are often put under the microscope when they go belly-up. The press is quick to do the forensics on what went wrong. What about the investors who put in the money? Where’s the scrutiny there? We’ve seen the bar raised for founders, but what about that other side of the table?
“Here’s the problem: this entire system optimizes for investor survival, not startup success,” said Paul O’Brien in a LinkedIn post. “A 90% startup failure rate? That’s not an inevitability…But no one in venture has an incentive to change. The funds get raised, the 2% management fees roll in, and the game continues. If investors actually cared about optimizing startup success, they’d be applying First Principles thinking, not just playing the same old VC lottery. They’d be using frameworks like the Bell Mason Diagnostic, which systematically assesses startups based on real, stage-appropriate criteria, rather than some partner’s gut feeling on whether the founder has “the right energy.”
“But most firms don’t do this because, why fix a system that already benefits them?Read More...
A Flea and a Fly and the Worst Flu Season in Years
Again, the headline is courtesy of a poem by Ogden Nash
“A flea and a fly in a flu
Were imprisoned, so what could they do?
Said the fly, “let us flee!”
“Let us fly!” said the flea.
So they flew through a flaw in the flue.”
It’s winter. It’s the height of flu season, and it’s being reported as one of the worst flu seasons in years. We’re always curious as to why and while we’re not a conspiracy theorist at all, it’s always interesting to connect the dots and to separate truth/science from media talking points. If you believe that the latter is an exaggeration, we came across this, and it’s worth a watch.
We’re hearing from more and more of our readers who took the Covid vaccine about what we’ll call ‘buyers regret,’ and this just in: Yale scientists link Covid vaccines to alarming new syndrome causing ‘distinct biological changes’ to body, the Daily Mail et al reported.Read More...
Newly minted HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr stated that he will immediately focus on soil restoration/agriculture. Pay attention, founders: with fewer dollars, both VC and governmental, going to climate change, it may be time to focus on a different shade of green, and if it makes you feel any better, Latest Arctic Ice Data Shows 26% Larger Than 2012 . As for global warming/climate change, a Former NOAA Scientist Confirms Colleagues Manipulated Climate Records, so it looks like we all won’t be dead by 2016, as Al Gore had predicted. Since many inconvenient truths seem to be surfacing of late, here are 10 times ‘experts’ predicted the world would end by now. And as many a failed founder will tell you, it’s hard to fix a problem that may not be as critical as we were led to believe, so focus.
Who exactly is Big Ag? “Four companies (Bayer, Syngenta, BASF, and Corteva) dominate the agricultural market, with Bayer controlling 18.2% of global agrochemicals and, together with Corteva, over half of U.S. retail seed sales for major crops, Mercola reported.Read More...
We’ve said it before and given what’s going on with the forensics that DOGE is performing at the speed of tech, it bears repeating: investor money is not a founder piggy bank, meaning, use the funds as if it’s your hard-earned cash. There’s not necessarily an unlimited supply of it, and the waiter always comes around with the check.
For those of you attempting to sort out how much to raise, here’s Y-Combinator’s Guide to How Much to Raise. As the author points out, “Raising too little can put you in survival mode—slowing down progress, increasing stress, and forcing you to fundraise again sooner than expected. On the flip side, raising too much too early can lead to unnecessary dilution and misaligned expectations. The ideal amount? Enough to reach profitability if possible.”
Which leads us to the three Es, once you’ve secured funding:
Execute, Execute, Execute.Read More...
The tech community was taken by storm last week by DeepSeek, which in our mind, we refer to as DeepSix, which seems much more accurate, all things considered: all the news that we see as fit to ‘print’ and bugger all to the rest. The technology has the same problems that all LLMs have: it scrapes/is trained on the information readily available on the web. And picks and chooses what you can see.
From a technical point of view: “What’s clever about what DeepSeek has done is that they’ve figured out a way to squeeze out more performance from Nvidia’s chips by going a level deeper and tinkering with how the chips work. In short, this is better engineering, and it has allowed them to overcome the constraints imposed on them due to US chip controls. In doing so, they have shown the world a new approach to building AI models much more cheaply,” wrote Om Malik in Crazy Stupid Tech. “I think the hysteria is hugely overblown…If you read the original paper, two things are clear: DeepSeek has done something clever that will help lower the cost of the AI revolution for everyone, and they’ve shared how they’ve done it.”
Then there’s this: “OpenAI Furious – DeepSeek Might Have Stolen All the Data OpenAI Stole From Us,” 404 Media reported. “OpenAI shocked that an AI company would train on someone else’s data without permission or compensation.”Read More...
