Companies of the United States

"There are garment factories in the U.S. where employees have union contracts, get full family health benefits, decent wages, three and four weeks of paid vacations, a decent pension and respect from their supervisors. When you buy a shirt, a dress, a suit or a T-shirt from these companies, you can shop with a conscience. This isn't the case at American Apparel."

"I’m not sure if you could universally say sex doesn’t sell any more. [But] as soon as the brand loses that genuine claim to be something fresh and representing its customers, it has got to find something else to pitch itself as, and I’m not sure American Apparel has."

"Sex is inextricably linked to fashion and apparel. It has been and always will be. And our clothing is connected to our sexual expression."

"I love the American Apparel long-sleeve waffle shirt. You can't do it too much. If you wear a long-sleeve black T-shirt every single day, nobody's going to say, "That guy wears a long-sleeve black T-shirt too much." If you're wearing a sweatshirt that says "Gap Est. 1969" on it, you've got a couple days of wearing that before someone goes, "Why don't you do some laundry?""

"American Apparel, Charney’s clothing company, is going against the trend of globalization in clothing manufacturing; he’s making mad cash with unbranded T-shirts, all locally produced in his downtown L.A. factory."

"'They're operating in a mindset that's outside the tautological knowledge structure of most of the people who run the country. Microsoft is getting all this flak for not paying attention to Washington. Why should they? Gates has created an operating system that's become the central nervous system for an entire global culture."

"I thought I would learn faster, and it's a very complicated company. There's a lot of tradition there, and I just wasn't a part of it."

"I think most people either forget or don't know that Microsoft only hires people with I.Q.'s well over 130."

"Our head of HR has taken personal accountability and resigned from GitHub yesterday morning, Saturday, January 16th,"

"Throughout the industry, the quality assurance departments are treated poorly, paid very little, and treated as replaceable cogs"

"Don't bother trying to create a better commercial desktop OS -- it doesn't matter how hard you try, how many engineers you throw at the problem, how much money you spend, or how many years you put into it. Microsoft owns that space and, worse, the public is totally complicit with that fact. People will not stop using Windows. It is a losing battle."

"The Government holds that Microsoft is illegally using the near-monopoly of its Windows operating system to dominate the market for software used to view the World Wide Web. In addition, its lawsuit says the company is doing the same with Internet commerce. The Government insists that traditional antitrust safeguards must be enforced to prevent a dystopian situation in which consumers one day find themselves utterly dependent on Microsoft for all things digital -- not just one product or one industry but all the facets of life that are rapidly being transposed to cyberspace."

"What is different about Microsoft is its distance from Silicon Valley. Rather than trading jobs for a better deal down the block, employees tend to stay put. With only a 7 percent turnover rate, Microsoft will hire 3,000 recruits this year. The insularity helps to reinforce a monolithic culture in which employees cultivate an almost fanatical devotion to their work and to Mr. Gates, whose combative cross-examinations on minute details are as legendary as his accessibility by E-mail to the lowliest employee. ("Even reasonably cynical people get starry-eyed over Bill," observed one of Microsoft's newer managers.)"

"Perhaps the most successful global monopoly is Microsoft, which has succeeded in gaining global market power not only in PC operating systems but in key applications such as browsers. [...] Microsoft's monopoly power leads not only to higher prices but to less innovation. [...] The failure to develop a global approach to global cartels and monopolies is yet another instance of economic globalization outpacing political globalization."

"Microsoft has had two goals. One was to copy the Mac and the other was to copy Lotus' success in the spreadsheet. And over the course of the last 10 years, Microsoft accomplished both of those goals. And now they are completely lost. They were able to copy the Mac because the Mac was frozen in time. The Mac didn't change much for the last 10 years. It changed maybe 10 percent. It was a sitting duck. It's amazing that it took Microsoft 10 years to copy something that was a sitting duck. Apple, unfortunately, doesn't deserve too much sympathy. They invested hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars into R&D, but very little came out They produced almost no new innovation since the original Mac itself."

"We provide customer data only when we receive a legally binding order or subpoena to do so, and never on a voluntary basis. In addition we only ever comply with orders for requests about specific accounts or identifiers. If the government has a broader voluntary national security program to gather customer data, we don't participate in it."

"While we have seen great success, we are hungry to do more. Our industry does not respect tradition — it only respects innovation. This is a critical time for the industry and for Microsoft. Make no mistake, we are headed for greater places — as technology evolves and we evolve with and ahead of it. Our job is to ensure that Microsoft thrives in a mobile and cloud-first world."

"One of the most painful things in our culture is to watch other people repeat earlier mistakes. We're not fond of Bill Gates, but it still hurts to see Microsoft struggle with problems that IBM solved in the 1960s."

"Bill Gates"

"Steve Ballmer"

"Satya Nadella"

"Spider-Man"

"Captain America"

"Fantastic Four"

"Marvel: Ultimate Alliance"

"New Warriors"

"Nextwave; Agents of H.A.T.E."

"Avengers Forever"

"Young Avengers"

"Spider-Girl"

"New Avengers"

"The Amazing Spider-Man"

"Ultimate Spider-Man"

"The Incredible Hulk"

"Astonishing X-Men"

"Ultimate X-Men"

"Uncanny X-Men"

"X-Men: Pixie Strikes Back"

"Ultimate Fantastic Four"

"The Avengers (2012 film)"

"Spider-Man 2"

"Spider-Man 3"

"X-Men: The Last Stand"

"X-Men Origins: Wolverine"

"Spider-Man: The Animated Series"

"Spectacular Spider-Man"

"X-Men: Animated Series"

"X-Men: Evolution"

"Wolverine and the X-Men"

"Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D."

"The Incredible Hulk (1978 TV series)"

"Ultimate Spider-Man (video game)"

"Spider-Man 3 (video game)"

"Spider-Man: Web of Shadows"

"Hulk (video game)"

"The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction"

"If you had two things, and on one you earned 100% of the revenues from the efforts that you put into making it, and the other you earned a much smaller percentage for the same amount of time and effort, you’d be more likely to concentrate more heavily on the first, wouldn’t you?"

"Wired: …what’s the relationship like with the comic book side of the company? Is there back-and-forth?"

"So the Chitauri were Al-Qaeda? O.K., good to know. A suspicion I had during Iron Man 3 was confirmed during Captain America: The Winter Soldier. The Marvel Cinematic Universe (by which we mean the movies starring Marvel comic-book characters that aren't distributed by Sony or 20th Century Fox) has decided to go back and reposition the big battle from Marvel’s The Avengers as its 9/11. On the one hand, this is a “no duh” observation—at the end of The Avengers, New York was blown to smithereens. But the tenor in which Joss Whedon shot and cut the lengthy third act sequence was so zippy and fun that it seemed as if Marvel was “taking back” the iconography of New York’s destruction, from both the terrorists and real life. The key image from Avengers is an adulatory 360-degree swoop of Earth’s Mightiest Heroes assembled in full flex before the sturdy columns of Grand Central. It is not “Falling Man.”"

"Much like the once wide-eyed Captain, I felt a little manipulated. Had I known those whiz-bang scenes from The Avengers were supposed to have more heft, I may have approached them differently as I was strapping that feed bag of popcorn to my face. I would have looked for more pathos in the Hulk flinging Loki around like a rag doll and muttering “puny God.” Perhaps it was less of a laugh line and more of a comment about fundamentalist religion’s unsuitability with liberty-loving New York. Which means I don't even want to think about that shawarma gag!"

"I enjoyed my time at Marvel, and the people there, but it was time to go. I left Marvel because I'd hit the glass ceiling. I was never going to be promoted, so if I intended to make a mark in the business, it would be as a freelance writer, not an editor. Leaving Marvel allowed me to take assignments at several other companies, and ultimately, to help found Milestone."

"Reflecting back on some of his co-creations in 1975, Stan Lee dubiously claimed that "Marvel Comics has never been into politics" or beholden to an "official party line" before offering a near-apology for the moral simplicity of the portrait of the Vietnam conflict in 1963's "Iron Man Is Born!" (Son of Origins 47.) A disinterested observer would find much evidence to counter these claims in the pages of Tales of Suspense between 1963 and 1968."

"I think they’re so complete now, Marvel. They probably don’t need me anymore. But if they needed me? I’d love to. It’s great to be wanted."

"It's kind of a difference based upon mood and vibe of the material. There's something about the stoic heroes of DC that could be contrasted against the hyperkinetic heroes of Marvel."

"It was nice in a way to work with more obscure Marvel characters because then the audience wouldn’t have a strong expectation of what they were going to find. It gives us a lot of creative freedom."

"First, Bain Capital is a great firm. I have co-invested with them and some of my closest friends are managing directors there. You will not find a smarter, higher-integrity, harder-working group of professionals. They have also been incredibly generous with their success and become philanthropic leaders, both in the Boston community and beyond. If you are going to pick on a private equity firm for bad behavior and hubris (of which there is plenty), they are the last ones to select."

"My business experience confirmed my belief in empowering people. For example, at Bain Capital we bought Accuride, a company that made truck rims and wheels, because we saw untapped potential there. We instituted performance bonuses for the management team, which had a dramatic impact. The managers made the plants more productive, and the company started growing, adding 300 jobs while Bain was involved. My faith in people, not government, is at the foundation of my plan to strengthen America's middle class."

"So we started a new business called Bain Capital. The only problem was, while WE believed in ourselves, nobody else did. We were young and had never done this before and we almost didn't get off the ground. In those days, sometimes I wondered if I had made a really big mistake. I had thought about asking my church's pension fund to invest, but I didn't. I figured it was bad enough that I might lose my investors' money, but I didn't want to go to hell too. Shows what I know. Another of my partners got the Episcopal Church pension fund to invest. Today there are a lot of happy retired priests who should thank him. That business we started with 10 people has now grown into a great American success story. Some of the companies we helped start are names you know. An office supply company called Staples – where I'm pleased to see the Obama campaign has been shopping; The Sports Authority, which became a favorite of my sons. We started an early childhood learning center called Bright Horizons that First Lady Michelle Obama rightly praised. At a time when nobody thought we'd ever see a new steel mill built in America, we took a chance and built one in a corn field in Indiana. Today Steel Dynamics is one of the largest steel producers in the United States."

"Facebook's introduction of a new feature that uses [Wikipedia] to combat “fake news” [...] poses arguably the greatest test in years to the volunteer-run online encyclopedia, constituting a massive threat to the internet's largest and ostensibly most trusted source of free knowledge. ... It also highlights the risks posed by Facebook's efforts to seemingly outsource its problems to the online encyclopedia. Indeed, Wikipedia has struggled to defend its standards in the face of its new role as the internet's “good cop.” As more and more tech giants like Facebook and YouTube make use of its content, a new influx of users has flooded the website [–] not all of them well intentioned."

"I think with all technology, people have an idea of how it will be used, but then it has a life of its own and people use it in all kinds of ways. In the same way with Facebook. I doubt when people first created Facebook they imagined it was going to help people in Egypt overthrow a dictator. So it does have a life of its own that we can’t predict."

"On his own Facebook page, Zuckerberg describes his personal mission this way: “I’m trying to make the world a more open place.” There is no mention of ripping apart the social fabric. Tobacco companies once tried marketing like this: “More Doctors Smoke Camels Than Any Other Cigarette!” The difference is, the media called them on it. A glowing cover story in Time magazine from 2014 opens with a photo of Zuckerberg surrounded by a crowd of poor children in India. “Our mission is to connect every person in the world,” Zuckerberg is quoted as saying. The article does briefly note the obvious financial interest Facebook has in hooking every living person on social media. But the piece quickly moves on to suggest that “creating wealth and saving lives” are likely Zuckerberg’s real motives. When elites do focus their attention on Facebook, it’s invariably to demand the company exert even more control over its users. Following the 2016 election, there were widespread calls for Facebook to further restrict the news Americans are allowed to see on the site. According to the Washington Post, Barack Obama took Zuckerberg aside during a meeting of world leaders in Peru and begged him to impose greater censorship. Democratic senator Dianne Feinstein of California made the same demand. “You created these platforms and now they are being misused,” she said. “And you have to be the ones who do something about it—or we will.” If only Obama and Feinstein were as concerned about Facebook’s relentless invasions of the public’s privacy. Or about the millions of addicted users steadily degrading from its use. Or about the rending of the social fabric."

"FB isn’t a social media company, it is a data tracking company. Why care that they track this data? Think the future, not just today. ... It isn’t just Facebook and what they will do with this data, but this data’s existence is a threat to our privacy and freedom."

"Regardless, this new research shows that Wikipedia editors of different opinions have strived for consensus over time. That's opposed to Facebook or Twitter, where people are siloed into their own self-reinforcing echo chambers. ... Consider this a version of the “miracle of aggregation” – that large groups of people are able to act rationally and solve problems despite having vastly different interests."

"Facebook has now firmly established itself as a hub on the internet, making it a destination for surfers to do multiple tasks such as communications, gaming, shopping, photo-sharing and information gathering."

"I would ask [Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg], 'Can you explain to me the reasoning why such broad access to user data is granted, especially friends' data?"

"This power over our egos has granted Facebook what we can think of as bullying rights. It routinely attempts to bully people into compliance with its rules on the boundaries of free speech, using tactics such as arbitrarily blocking users or reducing the visibility level of particular posts and videos."

"The hard reality is that the more you interact with Facebook, the more control it will assert over you. The company’s tactic is to encourage people to comply by intimidating them enough to internalize Facebook’s way of thinking. Users are reluctant to walk away from the platform because they have invested time and energy in it and are unwilling to abandon their relationships."

"A big part of Facebook's pitch is that it has so much information about its users that it can more effectively target ads to those who will be responsive to the content. If Facebook can prove that theory to be true, then it may not worry so much about losing its cool cachet."

"Facebook is the backbone of small business in America"

"Now let me pull out so we’re clear about the problem we all face and how we got here. The attacks against us in Rappler began 5 years ago when we demanded an end to impunity on two fronts: Duterte’s drug war and Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook. Today, it has only gotten worse – and Silicon Valley’s sins came home to roost in the United States on January 6 with mob violence on Capitol Hill. What happens on social media doesn’t stay on social media. Online violence is real world violence. Social media is a deadly game for power and money, what Shoshana Zuboff calls surveillance capitalism, extracting our private lives for outsized corporate gain. Our personal experiences are sucked into a database, organized by AI, then sold to the highest bidder. Highly profitable micro-targeting operations are engineered to structurally undermine human will – a behavior modification system in which we are Pavlov’s dogs, experimented on in real time with disastrous consequences in countries like mine, Myanmar, India, Sri Lanka and so many more. These destructive corporations have siphoned money away from news groups and now pose a foundational threat to markets and elections. Facebook is the world’s largest distributor of news, and yet studies have shown that lies laced with anger and hate spread faster and further than facts on social media. These American companies controlling our global information ecosystem are biased against facts, biased against journalists. They are – by design – dividing us and radicalizing us. Without facts, you can’t have truth. Without truth, you can’t have trust. Without trust, we have no shared reality, no democracy, and it becomes impossible to deal with our world’s existential problems: climate, coronavirus, the battle for truth."

"Comparisons to the lies and tactics of Big Tobacco in the 20th century are wholly justified. Facebook, and the politicians benefiting from it, know full well the harms they are unleashing on the public. Facebook is the world’s largest distributor of news, yet studies have shown that on social media, lies laced with anger and hatred spread faster and farther than facts."

"I believe that Facebook represents one of the gravest threats to democracies around the world, and I am amazed that we have allowed our freedoms to be taken away by technology companies’ greed for growth and revenues."

"The tools Facebook provides make discrimination easy. Facebook has monopoly profit margins, so it could easily provide real staffing to protect against discrimination, if it wanted to. It doesn’t want to."

"Facebook likes to present itself as a tech company, but often appears more like an advertising corporation that happens to use digital technology in order to conduct its core business. [...] Facebook represents a new kind of corporate power, the dimensions of which are only now becoming apparent."

"Facebook mistreats its users. Facebook is not your friend, it is a surveillance engine. For instance, if you browse the Web and you see a 'like' button in some page or some other site that has been displayed from Facebook. Therefore, Facebook knows that your machine visited that page. So, Facebook carries out surveillance over visitors to thousands of different Websites, even for people who are not Facebook users. I hope we will have something for free browsers to block Facebook 'like' buttons so that people won't be under surveillance. In any case, this is why I ask people not to put photographs of me on Facebook, because Facebook collects data about the names of people in photos. It might as well be working directly for Big Brother. Facebook collects a lot of data from people and admits it. And it also collects data which isn't admitted. And Google does too. As for Microsoft, I don't know. But I do know that Windows has features that send data about the user."

"I have one friend whose Facebook updates are exclusively complaining about Facebook."

"I doff my fedora to this Facebook! It's the smartest way to keep people dumb since we started fluoridating the water."

"I think MySpace is doomed, I give them about two more years. [...] I think Facebook is the next Microsoft in both the bad and the good senses. That's an amazing company that is going to do a lot of good and bad things."

"The civic tech expert Ed Saperia used as his parable the difference between Wikipedia and Facebook. Jimmy Wales’s big experiment, which started life in 1999 as Nupedia, has created an open-source collection of human knowledge in hundreds of languages that is essentially trustworthy. If a mistake creeps in through the gates of human generosity, it gets corrected in the same way. If malicious actors try to slander their foes, the punishment is not cancellation, but more like lifelong ridicule, which is proportionate, given how long a slanderous person is likely to carry on doing ridiculous things. In other words, it is the best of humanity, all natural desire to help each other with cross-pollinated knowledge concentrated in one place. Facebook, for brevity, takes the same raw material – all the people in the world – and finds the worst in it. Facebook manages to winkle out things we didn’t know we were capable of – levels of vitriol, gullibility and hysteria – in between a scare ad for dark politics and a mesmerising video of five types of mince baked around a kilo of cheese. (I am paraphrasing a bit; I don’t think civic tech gurus dwell much on the cheese.)"

"Facebook allowed the president of Honduras to artificially inflate the appearance of popularity on his posts for nearly a year after the company was first alerted to the activity. The astroturfing – the digital equivalent of a bussed-in crowd – was just one facet of a broader online disinformation effort that the administration has used to attack critics and undermine social movements, Honduran activists and scholars say. Facebook posts by Juan Orlando Hernández, an authoritarian rightwinger whose 2017 re-election is widely viewed as fraudulent, received hundreds of thousands of fake likes from more than a thousand inauthentic Facebook Pages – profiles for businesses, organizations and public figures – that had been set up to look like Facebook user accounts."

"לא לדאוג, אנחנו על זה #פייסבוק_מתה"

"If the people who ran Facebook were monsters, I wouldn’t have worked there."

"We believe that a key part of combating extremism is preventing recruitment by disrupting the underlying ideologies that drive people to commit acts of violence. That's why we support a variety of counterspeech efforts."

"We stand against all forms of hate including hate targeting the Muslim community. We do not allow people to attack anyone based on their race, ethnicity, national origin or religion, and we remove this hate speech as soon as we become aware of it...Facebook “appreciate[s] feedback from governments, experts and communities as we work to keep our platform safe."

"[Facebook had removed the president's posts] because we judged that their effect - and likely their intent - would be to provoke further violence."

"The proposed law fundamentally misunderstands the relationship between our platform and publishers who use it to share news content."

"It has left us facing a stark choice: attempt to comply with a law that ignores the realities of this relationship, or stop allowing news content on our services in Australia. With a heavy heart, we are choosing the latter."

"We've been combatting human trafficking] on our platform for many years and our goal remains to prevent anyone who seeks to exploit others from having a home on our platform."

"Our goal is to help deter people from searching for this type of content."

"[the existing brand could not] possibly represent everything that we're doing today, let alone in the future."

"Google Analytics is a measurement product that helps businesses better understand their web and app performance. Any data in Google Analytics is obfuscated, meaning it is not tied back to an individual and our policies prohibit customers from sending us data that could be used to identify a user. Additionally, Google has strict policies against advertising to people based on sensitive information."

"We use purpose-built technology and work with child safety organisations to find, remove and report it, because we never want this material to appear in our search results. We are working with experts on effective ways to deter anyone tempted to look for this sickening material."

"Don't use the camera or microphone to cross-reference and immediately present personal information identifying anyone other than the user, including use cases such as facial recognition and voice print. Applications that do this will not be approved at this time."

"We also have clear policies that prohibit videos promoting medically unsubstantiated methods to prevent the coronavirus in place of seeking medical treatment, and we quickly remove videos violating these policies when flagged to us."

"In some ways the higher echelons of Google seemed more distant and obscure to me than the halls of Washington. We had been locking horns with senior US officials for years by that point. The mystique had worn off. But the power centers growing up in Silicon Valley were still opaque and I was suddenly conscious of an opportunity to understand and influence what was becoming the most influential company on earth."

"If the future of the internet is to be Google, that should be of serious concern to people all over the world—in Latin America, East and Southeast Asia, the Indian subcontinent, the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa, the former Soviet Union, and even in Europe—for whom the internet embodies the promise of an alternative to US cultural, economic, and strategic hegemony."

"Google is winning the game, and they are winning because the quality of their services beats the competition."

"We're agreed that child sexual imagery is a case apart, it's illegal everywhere in the world, there's a consensus on that. It's absolutely right that we identify this stuff, we remove it and we report it to the authorities."

"May I recommend, if you're doing your own homework, don't do a Google search. Seems to me that Google is pretty deeply in bed with the government. Maybe this is explaining why Google is being kicked out of all the other countries? Are they just a shill now for the United States government? Who is Jared Cohen? Is he private citizen or government operative? And isn't this the second Google guy we've found? This is the second Google executive now being exposed as an instigator of a revolution."

"Facebook's introduction of a new feature that uses [Wikipedia] to combat “fake news” [...] poses arguably the greatest test in years to the volunteer-run online encyclopedia, constituting a massive threat to the internet's largest and ostensibly most trusted source of free knowledge. ... It also highlights the risks posed by Facebook's efforts to seemingly outsource its problems to the online encyclopedia. Indeed, Wikipedia has struggled to defend its standards in the face of its new role as the internet's “good cop.” As more and more tech giants like Facebook and YouTube make use of its content, a new influx of users has flooded the website [–] not all of them well intentioned."

"Google users trust our systems to help them with important decisions: medical, financial and many others. Our search results are the best we know how to produce. They are unbiased and objective, and we do not accept payment for them or for inclusion or more frequent updating. We also display advertising, which we work hard to make relevant, and we label it clearly. This is similar to a well-run newspaper, where the advertisements are clear and the articles are not influenced by the advertisers’ payments. We believe it is important for everyone to have access to the best information and research, not only to the information people pay for you to see."

"You’re actually socially isolating yourself with your phone. I feel like it’s kind of emasculating. This Google Glass really takes away that excuse.… It really opened my eyes to how much of my life I spent secluded away in email or social posts. My vision when we started Google 15 years ago was that eventually you wouldn’t have to have a search query at all — the information would just come to you as you needed it. This is the first form factor that can deliver that vision."

"Celebrities always get a lot of interest and the passing of well-known figures makes people want to learn more about them. Despite that, some of the more traditional aspects of British life, from the Grand National to the royal birth, have generated many Google searches and will be remembered as events that have characterized the year."

"I use Google all the time, I’m happy it’s there. But just as when I read The New York Times or the Washington Post, or the Wall Street Journal knowing that they have ways of selecting and shaping the material that reaches you, you have to compensate for it. With Google, and others of course, there is an immense amount of surveillance to try to obtain personal data about individuals and their habits and interactions and so on, to shape the way information is presented to them. They do more [surveillance] than the NSA."

"About 650 Google workers have signed a petition asking the company to protect users' abortion-related location data and search history. The move comes over concerns that law enforcement agencies will seek such data from Google to prosecute abortion seekers. Workers sent the petition Wednesday to Google-parent Alphabet's top executives, including CEO Sundar Pichai. Most of the workers belong to the Alphabet Workers' Union, according to Bambi Okugawa, a spokesperson for the group. "If Google or Facebook or any tech company wants to present the face of being a compassionate company and an ally for people that need reproductive health care or gender affirming health care, then they need to back that up in their actions by protecting privacy," said Okugawa, who works at a data center in Tennessee, where a law is going into effect this month that will outlaw abortion."

"Okugawa said tech companies like Google have become key information providers and embedded in people's lives. So workers' demands provide an opportunity for the company to innovate. "There are situations where a woman could die if she does not receive certain healthcare services," she said. "It's on the shoulders of tech companies to do what they can to protect them." In July, Google said it automatically purges information about users who visit abortion clinics or other locations that could lead to legal problems. Each year, Google responds to thousands of subpoenas and search warrants by providing user location and search data to law enforcement investigators. The workers also demanded that the company provide travel benefits to contract staff who need to go out-of-state to get abortion services. "It's very fair for us as a union to say you should provide to contractors — security staff and vendors — the same benefits that we get," Okugawa said, on behalf of Alphabet Workers' Union members."

"This attack has a little bit of everything. It has unique social engineering at the front end. It leverages a legitimate site to help get into the inbox. It uses trickery and obfuscation to confuse security services."

"Elizabeth Warren is saying we should break up Google. And like, I love her but she’s very misguided, like that will not make it better it will make it worse, because all these smaller companies who don’t have the same resources that we do will be charged with preventing the next Trump situation, it’s like a small company cannot do that. .. We all got screwed over in 2016, again it wasn’t just us, it was, the people got screwed over, the news media got screwed over, like, everybody got screwed over so we’re rapidly been like, what happened there and how do we prevent it from happening again. .. We’re also training our algorithms, like, if 2016 happened again, would we have, would the outcome be different? The reason we launched our A.I. principles is because people were not putting that line in the sand, that they were not saying what’s fair and what’s equitable so we’re like, well we are a big company, we’re going to say it. .. We have gotten accusations of around fairness is that we’re unfair to conservatives because we’re choosing what we find as credible news sources and those sources don’t necessarily overlap with conservative sources"

"Vaccine misinformation appears globally, it appears in all countries and cultures."

"Supporting Wikipedia is [...] a shrewd business decision that will likely benefit Google for years to come."

"This is an exciting development for preventive healthcare industry. It is likely to spur a range of other innovations towards miniaturizing technology and using it in wearable devices to help people monitor their bodies better."

"[YouTube,] a megacorporation with billions of dollars and thousands of brilliant employees is relying on a volunteer-run platform anyone can edit to fact-check information? It is odd. But it's also a validation of Wikipedia's mission and a reminder of its importance."

"Google's vision of the future is pure atom-age 1960s Jetsons fantasy, bubble-dwelling spiritless sexists above a ruined earth."

"The destiny of Google's search engine is to become that Star Trek computer, and that's what we are building."

"Search is not used to set a political agenda, and we don't bias our results toward any political ideology. We never rank search results to manipulate political sentiment."

"When people are looking for abortion services, they often turn to Google, searching a phrase like "abortion clinic near me" or "planned parenthood." Yet the ads they'll see at the top of the Google search results are often not abortion providers at all, but instead misleading ads for anti-abortion "crisis pregnancy centers" — facilities that use various tactics to dissuade or delay pregnant people from getting an abortion. Any delay or confusion can have serious consequences: Strict bans in much of the country mean people seeking surgical abortions may have to travel hundreds of miles, and ordering abortion pills by mail can be legally thorny. These ads on Google are no small business, according to a new report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate, a U.S.- and U.K.-based nonprofit focused on research, campaigns and policy to counteract hate and disinformation. The group finds that anti-abortion pregnancy centers in the U.S. spent an estimated $10.2 million on Google Search ads over a two-year period, and those ads were clicked on an estimated 13 million times. The group's researchers began by identifying 976 websites for anti-abortion pregnancy centers. Using the enterprise analytics tool Semrush, they found that 188 of the centers had actively run Google search ads between March 2021 and February 2023. They assessed those centers' ads, websites and the keywords for which they bought paid advertising. Among the organization's findings: 38% of the centers that advertised on Google in this period had no homepage disclaimer stating that they don't provide abortions. That appears to violate a Google policy prohibiting ads or destinations concealing or misstating information about the advertiser's business, product or service. Researchers found that the anti-abortion pregnancy centers targeted more than 15,000 queries related to abortion, including phrases like "telehealth abortion pill texas" and "how much is an abortion in california.""

"Digital marketing firms that specifically cater to anti-abortion pregnancy centers make the ad-buying strategy clear. One such firm, Choose Life Marketing, has a guide that urges the centers to buy Google keywords using abortion terms. "It's vital to reach women on their phones early in the search process, before the abortion clinic can reach them," it says. Choose Life Marketing's guide recommends that centers note on their websites that they do not provide or refer abortions, while suggesting ad language that's vague about what the center does provide. "You can also be creative and instead use abortion terms in your ads without using them to describe a service offering: 'Get the facts before scheduling an abortion...' or 'Considering Abortion?' " it says. "Reaching abortion-minded women requires centers to be very strategic in all areas of marketing, but especially in Google advertising." In a guide focused on reaching women in states with restrictive abortion laws, Choose Life recommends that anti-abortion centers "bid on keywords related to the next city or town where abortion is available." Paid advertising, it says, "can help reach her in the knick [sic] of time. This is especially critical for reaching women before they travel for abortion.""

"Google has specific policies for advertisers running ads on abortion queries. To run ads on such queries in the U.S., U.K. or Ireland, Google dictates "you will first need to be certified as an advertiser that either provides abortions or does not provide abortions. If you are not certified, you won't be able to run ads using queries related to getting an abortion." If the advertiser provides abortions or is a certified online pharmacy providing abortion pills, the Google ads will include a disclosure that says "Provides abortions." If it is an advertiser that does not actually provide abortions, the disclosure on the ad will say "Does not provide abortions.""

"Google says it removes or blocks ads that violate its policies. "We know that people come to Google looking for information they can trust during deeply personal moments and are committed to ensuring advertisements on this topic are clear and easily understood," the company said in a statement to NPR. After the Center for Countering Digital Hate released a report last year on similar issues with paid Google advertising — such as Google Maps results that would direct those seeking abortions to anti-abortion clinics — Google says it "took immediate action" on ads violating its policies, including those that misrepresented the services they actually provide. The company says it regularly reviews its policies and updates its list of "in-scope abortion queries" as needed. To ensure that people seeking abortions don't get taken in by misleading ads, the Center for Countering Digital Hate is calling on legislators to ban misleading advertising on abortion. It's also asking Google to make all ads from anti-abortion pregnancy centers bear the disclaimer "does not provide abortions," to require the centers' websites to display clear disclaimers — and for Google's search results to highlight actual abortion clinics."

"[W]e are concerned that, in a world in which abortion could be made illegal, Google’s current practice of collecting and retaining extensive records of cell phone location data will allow it to become a tool for far-right extremists looking to crack down on people seeking reproductive health care. That’s because Google stores historical location information about hundreds of millions of smartphone users, which it routinely shares with government agencies."

"While Google collects and retains customer location data for various business purposes, including to target online ads, Google is not the only entity to make use of this data. Law enforcement officials routinely obtain court orders forcing Google to turn over its customers' location information. This includes dragnet “geofence” orders demanding data about everyone who was near a particular location at a given time. In fact, according to data published by Google, one quarter of the law enforcement orders that your company receives each year are for these dragnet geofence orders; Google received 11,554 geofence warrants in 2020."

"No law requires Google to collect and keep records of its customers’ every movement. Apple has shown that it is not necessary for smartphone companies to retain invasive tracking databases of their customers’ locations. Google’s intentional choice to do so is creating a new digital divide, in which privacy and security are made a luxury. Americans who can afford an iPhone have greater privacy from government surveillance of their movements than the tens of millions Americans using Android devices."

"While Google deserves credit for being one of the first companies in America to insist on a warrant before disclosing location data to law enforcement, that is not enough. If abortion is made illegal by the far-right Supreme Court and Republican lawmakers, it is inevitable that right-wing prosecutors will obtain legal warrants to hunt down, prosecute and jail women for obtaining critical reproductive health care. The only way to protect your customers’ location data from such outrageous government surveillance is to not keep it in the first place."

"The Web site started out as Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web but eventually received a new moniker with the help of a dictionary. The name Yahoo! is an acronym for Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle, but Filo and Yang insist they selected the name because they liked the general definition of a yahoo: "rude, unsophisticated, uncouth." Yahoo! itself first resided on Yang's student workstation, "Akebono," while the software was lodged on Filo's computer, "Konishiki" - both named after legendary sumo wrestlers."

"Ben Hammersley has written a curious article that is decidedly in favour of Yahoo over Google"

"The United States should lead the world when it comes to transparency, accountability, and respect of civil liberties and human rights. We filed the [law]suit today because we are not authorised at present to break out the number of requests, if any, that we receive for user data under specific national security statutes. We believe that the US government's important responsibility to protect public safety can be carried out without precluding internet companies from sharing the number of national security requests they may receive."

"I originally wrote The w:ONElist File in 2001/2002. It started as my attempt to collect and save as much collateral from ONElist as possible, including emails, press releases, articles, etc. I eventually wrote the story of the first year and a half of ONElist, from the time I thought of the idea, through our Series A venture funding. I haven’t touched it since then; I’m reformatting it now for the new blog."

"It took a tongue-lashing from Congress before these high-tech titans did the right thing and coughed up some concrete assistance for the family of a journalist whom Yahoo! had helped send to jail...What a disgrace."

"Yahoo! had a choice. It chose to provide an e-mail service hosted on servers based inside China, making itself subject to Chinese legal jurisdiction. It didn't have to do that. It could have provided a service hosted offshore only."

"I want to reiterate what we have said in the past - Yahoo has never given access to our data centres to the NSA or to any other government agency. Ever. There is nothing more important to us than protecting our users' privacy."

"Yahoo was Jerry Yang’s baby. He did a great job creating the baby. Unfortunately, some of the key executives after the foundation of the company couldn’t keep up with the technology innovation of the industry. They thought that Yahoo should become a media company."

"If they had listened to me and had equal partnerships in China, the U.K., Germany and Brazil, maybe Yahoo in those countries could have become positioned like Yahoo Japan."

"The early story of Yahoo is now Silicon Valley mythology. As graduate students at the Stanford School of Engineering in 1994, Yang, a math-oriented Taiwanese immigrant, and Filo, a quiet programmer from Louisiana, created a directory of links called Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web. It was a handy map to what was then an unnavigable digital landscape, and web surfers loved it. The following year, when w:Sequoia Capital invested in the newly renamed startup, it brought in a former Motorola executive named Tim Koogle to be CEO."

"During the 2000s, Yahoo’s biggest mistakes were failures of will. Semel, billed as a “deals guy” from Hollywood, could have bought Google in 2002, as Fred Vogelstein reported in Wired. Yahoo also came close to buying Facebook in 2006, until Semel lowered his offer from $1 billion to $850 million after a disappointing earnings report, alienating an already reluctant Mark Zuckerberg in the process, according to David Kirkpatrick’s book, The Facebook Effect."

"[The release of the documents would contribute] constructively to the ongoing public discussion around w:online privacy"

"At Yahoo, we believe in the transformative power of the Internet. That's why we are so committed to working to support free expression and privacy around the world."

"I kept bugging Dave to show me the sites he had found. So he made his hot-list, and I made my hot-list, and he wrote some software to combine both our lists."

"We’re shutting down the Yahoo Groups website on December 15, 2020 and members will no longer be able to send or receive emails from Yahoo Groups. Yahoo Mail features will continue to function as expected and there will be no changes to your Yahoo Mail account, emails, photos or other inbox content. There will also be no changes to other Yahoo properties or services. You can find more information about the Yahoo Groups shutdown and alternative service options on this help page."

"It's the oldest institution of its kind and, as such, many people refer to it as the Harvard of Internet colleges."

"How did the institution that we would call career college or trade school transform itself into a $32-billion-a-year business? Mainly by "milking" the government for profit, and taking advantage of student-loan programs designed to help those on the bottom of the economic pyramid continue their studies beyond high school. The Apollo Group, which owns the University of Phoenix, derives almost 89 percent of its revenues from the federal government, and Kaplan Higher Education, owned by Graham Holdings (formerly the Washington Post Group), almost 88 percent."

"The University of Phoenix, the publicly traded grand-daddy of for-profit colleges, made headlines a few weeks ago with the revelation that the company's enrollment had dropped 50 percent over the past five years. … John Murphy, a co-founder of the University of Phoenix, isn't surprised by any of this news. Murphy argues that the company lost its direction when it abandoned its roots, which were serving working adults, not recent high school graduates. … [I]t was the combination of chasing stock prices with the temptation of the open spigot of federal loans."

"I am proud to serve as the new president of University of Phoenix, and deeply grateful for the opportunity to build on the legacy of Dr. Pepicello. University of Phoenix has pioneered change throughout higher education, and I'm excited to lead this groundbreaking and innovative institution.I am passionate about higher education and strongly believe in the important role it plays in preparing our future leaders and helping to solve many of our most vexing societal challenges. I am committed to helping preserve and enhance the investment our students are making in their education, and ensuring they have the support and innovation from University of Phoenix they need to achieve their education and career goals."

"Specific threats of violence or wishing for serious physical harm, death, or disease to an individual or group of people is in violation of our policies. Our new changes include more types of related content including: Accounts that affiliate with organizations that use or promote violence against civilians to further their causes. Groups included in this policy will be those that identify as such or engage in activity — both on and off the platform — that promotes violence. This policy does not apply to military or government entities and we will consider exceptions for groups that are currently engaging in (or have engaged in) peaceful resolution."

"We are deeply sorry about the pain these statements, and the attention they are drawing, are causing the family, we've been working to expand existing product features and policies so we can more effectively address things like this going forward, and we hope to have those changes in place shortly."

"Twitter is actively preparing to support the transition of w:White House institutional Twitter accounts on January 20th, 2021. As we did for the presidential transition in 2017, this process is being done in close consultation with the w:National Archives and Records Administration."

"Voter fraud of any kind is exceedingly rare in the US, election experts confirm"

"! This claim about election fraud is disputed"

"As a result of the unprecedented and ongoing violent situation in Washington, D.C., we have required the removal of three @realDonaldTrump Tweets that were posted earlier today for repeated and severe violations of our Civic Integrity policy"

"This means that the account of @realDonaldTrump will be locked for 12 hours following the removal of these Tweets. If the Tweets are not removed, the account will remain locked."

"After close review of recent Tweets from the @realDonaldTrump account and the context around them — specifically how they are being received and interpreted on and off Twitter — we have permanently suspended the account due to the risk of further incitement of violence"

"Elon’s appointment to the board was to become officially effective on 4/9, but Elon shared that same morning that he would not be joining the board. I believe this is for the best."

"HB20 would compel platforms to disseminate all sorts of objectionable viewpoints, such as Russia’s propaganda claiming that its invasion of Ukraine is justified, ISIS propaganda claiming that extremism is warranted, neo-Nazi or KKK screeds denying or supporting the Holocaust, and encouraging children to engage in risky or unhealthy behavior like eating disorders."

"I don’t have confidence in management."

"Too many twits make a twat."

"I Don't Look at Twitter Because It Doesn't Tell Me Anything."

"Twitter hates comedy. It hates truth. It hates free speech. And it hates the American People, because they refuse to be docile sheep."

"They [Twitter] are not principled in this. They have so much garbage and filth on that platform all the time. They did not censor people when they are using those platforms or the rioting that occurred over the summer."

"A million fucking message boards, email, Twitter, any number of free tools, being limited only by time and your imagination? If I’d had the internet in 1988 I WOULD OWN AN ENTIRE COUNTRY BY NOW AND WOULD PUT HUNDREDS OF YOU TO DEATH EACH DAY JUST FOR FUN AND IT WOULD BE THE LAW."

"That is the central tenet of twenty- first-century Western philosophy: ‘I tweet, therefore I am.’"

"Running an ad-free website where millions of people gather every day to discuss facts and update scores of pages is a monumental task. It’s incredible that Wikipedia doesn’t often go down and has few technical problems. Most of the time, Wikipedia works without issue. The same is not true for X (formerly known as Twitter)."

"Regardless, this new research shows that Wikipedia editors of different opinions have strived for consensus over time. That's opposed to Facebook or Twitter, where people are siloed into their own self-reinforcing echo chambers. ... Consider this a version of the “miracle of aggregation” – that large groups of people are able to act rationally and solve problems despite having vastly different interests."

"That you cannot argue with 30 million people on Twitter I will grant you, which is why nobody is asking anybody to do that. But do you know what you can do with 30 million people on Twitter? You can wait one afternoon. People can be ruthless on social media, but they also have the long-term memory of goldfish. The whole cycle—the controversy, the apology, the rash of takes about the apology, the rash of takes about the takes about the apology, and the redemption—lives its lifespan so quickly you could miss one completely if you flew from New York to LA and didn’t spring for the Gogo in-flight WiFi. If you make a piece of art, and Twitter registers its displeasure with it, you can either stomp your feet and quit the game forever, or—I promise you this is true—go to the gym for a couple hours."

"The offensive attitudes and statements discovered on James' Twitter feed are indefensible and inconsistent with our studio's values, and we have severed our business relationship with him."

"No official directive at all, and I don’t think I’ve ever tweeted anything that bad. But it’s nine years of stuff written largely off the cuff as ephemera, if trolls scrutinizing it for ammunition is the new normal, this seems like a “why not?” move."

"I think there are times that the other side does it to get you caught."

"There’s no way that this is just happening randomly."

"I do think it was not correct to ban Donald Trump"

"Without significant subscription revenue, there is a good chance Twitter will not survive the upcoming economic downturn. We need roughly half of our revenue to be subscription."

"Much of the stuff on Twitter or in op-ed pieces is all the more embarrassing for having been written from a presumed position of great intellectual superiority..."

"People are always criticizing Twitter. "Twitter is crazy!" they say. I think that's misguided. Twitter is simply an avenue -- there are many -- by which people reveal who they are."

"I complained to Twitter about the man who, pretending to be me, commended the Charleston racist murderer. Twitter responded: “We have determined that it’s not in violation of Twitter’s impersonation policy.” I felt a flash of rage. Every time an online shaming occurred Twitter and Google made money. Whereas those of us doing the actual shaming? We got nothing. Twitter suddenly felt uncaring, intimidating, even dangerous. We were unpaid shaming interns for a company that didn’t care about us. I quit Twitter. The world outside Twitter was great. I read books. I reconnected with people I knew from real life and met them for drinks in person. Then I drifted back on to Twitter."

"If Shakespeare were alive today, he might be writing on Twitter."

"Twitter is the people’s tool, the tool of the ordinary people, people who have no other resources."

"If you’ve ever been to the monkey house in one of those awful downscale zoos, you know what monkeys — these particular monkeys — are like: They jerk off and fling poo all day, generally using the same hand for both, and they don’t do a hell of a lot else, unless there’s McDonald’s. All day: jerk off, fling poo, jerk off, fling poo, jerk, fling, jerk, fling. Twitter, basically."

"I've had a great relationship. In Delaware, the largest growth in population is Indian-Americans moving from India. You cannot go to a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin' Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent. I'm not joking."

"I see kids who are complete cynics. They're not dreaming. They're out there with high-powered weapons, smoking crack behind the 7-Eleven. They've seen it all. These kids are going to take us into 2000 and beyond. That's scary, man. I wouldn't say I'm pessimistic or optimistic. I'm more realistic, I guess. But not cynical. I look. I watch."

"Slurpees and 7-Eleven helped me live the American dream."

"Although the company was taken private by Japanese investors in 2005, the company, headquartered outside of Dallas, still embodies everything that’s great about the American entrepreneurial spirit and capitalism at its best. 7-Eleven stores introduced convenience-revolutionizing innovations... Still 7-Eleven, on balance, is a great American company that deserves its prominent place in American culture. Its commitment to the marketplace is the reason it has survived."

"Last year we witnessed the launch of the Foundation for a Smoke-Free World... It is funded by the tobacco industry itself... We call on governments and the public health community to have nothing to do with this foundation... Even internal Philip Morris documents indicate that these efforts were designed to normalize the company and its deadly products. It shows they are doing this for themselves, not for the poor people suffering from tobacco."

"All of us at Philip Morris, no matter where we work, are extremely sorry for this. No one benefits from the very real, serious and significant diseases caused by smoking."

"As the most powerful state, the U.S. makes its own laws, using force and conducting economic warfare at will. It also threatens sanctions against countries that do not abide by its conveniently flexible notions of "free trade." In one important case, Washington has employed such threats with great effectiveness (and GATT approval) to force open Asian markets for U.S. tobacco exports and advertising, aimed primarily at the growing markets of women and children. The U.S. Agriculture Department has provided grants to tobacco firms to promote smoking overseas. Asian countries have attempted to conduct educational anti-smoking campaigns, but they are overwhelmed by the miracles of the market, reinforced by U.S. state power through the sanctions threat. Philip Morris, with an advertising and promotion budget of close to $9 billion in 1992, became China's largest advertiser. The effect of Reaganite sanction threats was to increase advertising and promotion of cigarette smoking (particularly U.S. brands) quite sharply in Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea, along with the use of these lethal substances. In South Korea, for example, the rate of growth in smoking more than tripled when markets for U.S. lethal drugs were opened in 1988. The Bush Administration extended the threats to Thailand, at exactly the same time that the "war on drugs" was declared; the media were kind enough to overlook the coincidence, even suppressing the outraged denunciations by the very conservative Surgeon-General. Oxford University epidemiologist Richard Peto estimates that among Chinese children under 20 today, 50 million will die of cigarette-related diseases..."

"ExxonMobil is the world's most profitable corporation. Its sales now amount to more than $1bn a day. It makes most of this money from oil, and has more to lose than any other company from efforts to tackle climate change. To safeguard its profits, ExxonMobil needs to sow doubt about whether serious action needs to be taken on climate change."

"Exxon made more money than God this year and, by the way, nothing has changed."

"We at Dick's Sporting Goods are deeply disturbed and saddened by the tragic events in Parkland. Our thoughts and prayers are with all of the victims and their loved ones. But thoughts and prayers are not enough...We believe it's time to do something about it. Beginning today, Dick's Sporting Goods is committed to the following: We will no longer sell assault-style rifles, also referred to as modern sporting rifles. We had already removed them from all Dick's stores after the Sandy Hook massacre, but we will now remove them from sale at all 35 Field & Stream stores. We will no longer sell firearms to anyone under 21 years of age. We will no longer sell high capacity magazines. We never have and never will sell bump stocks that allow semi-automatic weapons to fire more rapidly. At the same time, we implore our elected officials to enact common sense gun reform and pass the following regulations: Ban assault-style firearms Raise the minimum age to purchase firearms to 21 Ban high capacity magazines and bump stocks Require universal background checks that include relevant mental health information and previous interactions with the law Ensure a complete universal database of those banned from buying firearms Close the private sale and gun show loophole that waives the necessity of background checks"

"In 1989, rather late in the computer revolution, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) was finally able to say which gun manufacturers turned up most often in trace requests. The company whose handguns were traced most often from January of 1990 to December of 1991 was the giant Smith & Wesson."

"The Smith & Wesson Holding Corporation, the nation's oldest maker of handguns, named Dennis Bingham chairman after the departure of James Minder, whom a newspaper reported served prison time in the 1950's and 1960's. Mr. Minder offered to resign this month after telling the board he spent 15 years in prison in the 1950's and 1960's for armed robberies and an attempted escape from prison, The Arizona Republic reported."

"When he picked up the phone at his Scottsdale, Ariz., home last month, James Joseph Minder realized it was the call he'd been dreading for the past 20 years. A reporter with the Arizona Republic had an urgent question for the 74-year-old chairman of Smith & Wesson Holding Corp.: Was he the notorious felon known as the "Shotgun Bandit" in Michigan decades ago? Mr. Minder felt a flash of fear. At first he insisted the reporter had a case of mistaken identity. "I told him, 'I'm not that person,'" he recalls. He confirmed his name and date of birth. Then, they hung up. But after talking to his wife of 28 years, Mr. Minder says he decided that "I had better tell the truth." Mr. Minder quickly informed the other members of the company's board and, at the next meeting, tendered his resignation as chairman."

"Gunmaker Smith & Wesson Holding Corp. yesterday stood by board member and former chairman James J. Minder despite revelations that the 74-year-old executive spent more than a decade in prison for using a sawed-off shotgun to commit holdups in the 1950s. The company said yesterday that Minder, who stepped down as chairman earlier in the week, will remain on the board of directors."

"The future of the chairman of handgun maker Smith & Wesson was in question on Thursday night after it turned out he knew more about guns than the company might have liked: he once carried out a string of armed robberies holding a sawn-off shotgun. James Joseph Minder's criminal past emerged this month in newspapers in Detroit and Arizona, which reported he spent 15 years in prison in the 1950s and 1960s for the robberies and an attempted prison escape. Mr Minder was quoted by a Massachusetts newspaper on Thursday as saying he had voluntarily resigned at a directors' meeting on Monday as he felt it was "the best thing, given the circumstances"."

"The head of America's oldest gun maker, Smith & Wesson, has resigned after a local newspaper exposed his past as a convicted armed robber. It emerged that James Joseph Minder, 74, appointed as chairman just a month ago, spent more than a decade in prison in the 1950s and 1960s and had even attempted a jailbreak. As a convicted felon, he is not allowed to carry a firearm. Mr Minder's convictions came to light in the Arizona Republic newspaper. According to the report, he used a sawn-off shotgun to commit eight hold-ups wearing a trademark hat, white scarf and trench coat. The robberies were at a bank, several drugstores, and a jewellery shop in the Detroit area. He was not very successful, and was arrested several times, as well as serving time for his attempted escape from prison."

"While recognizing the very serious mistakes in his early life, the board believes that Mr. Minder has led an exemplary life for 35 years and has provided tremendous services to the community. Based on this, and other successful business experience, the board believes he should and can continue to provide invaluable input to Smith & Wesson within both strategic planning and the ongoing drive toward operational excellence."

"This story ends with an embarrassing moment in February 2004. That was when executives at Smith & Wesson, the firearms manufacturer, found out their new board chairman, 74, had spent a dozen years in prison for armed robbery — armed with a Smith & Wesson pistol, actually. Naturally, the board chairman faced some questions. For one: Why didn’t you mention this to the company? “They never asked,” he said."

"It is hard to imagine a company sinking as low as Smith & Wesson, the legendary arms maker that equipped soldiers from the Civil War to Vietnam and 98 percent of American police forces. Just two years ago, the company's chairman was found to be a convicted felon: he had failed to disclose spending 15 years in jail for armed robbery. Federal investigators were looking into accounting irregularities, and the company's stock was stuck at $1.50 a share. Adding to the company's woes, American soldiers for the last decade have carried Italian-made Berettas, while most police forces long ago switched to handguns from Glock, an Austrian company."

"The four weapons that authorities say were used in the massacre at a Colorado theater showing of the latest Batman movie included a popular semiautomatic rifle, a .223-caliber assault-style rifle with a 100-round drum magazine. The suspect also had two .40-caliber Glock handguns and a 12-gauge Remington Model 870 pump shotgun. In the past 60 days, police said, Holmes bought more than 6,000 rounds of ammunition, at gun shops and over the Internet, including: * 3,000 rounds of .223-caliber ammunition for the rifle. It was described as an AR-15-type weapon built by Smith and Wesson. * 3,000 rounds of .40-caliber ammunition for the Glock handguns. * 300 rounds for the shotgun.... Officials told NBC News that all four were purchased legally, beginning in May, from two national chain stores: Gander Mountain Guns and Bass Pro Shops."

"Smith & Wesson is one of many firearms manufacturers to produce a version of the AR-15, marketing more than a dozen models that range in price from about $700 to $2,000. The weapon is popular among collectors, military veterans and target shooters who say it is easy to handle and can be modified in numerous ways. Some soldiers call it “a Barbie doll for men” because it has a wide range of accessories and replacement parts, including different styles of barrels, stocks, magazines and scopes."

"Holmes’s use of Smith & Wesson’s M&P15 assault rifle demonstrates the clear and present danger of a gun designed for war and ruthlessly marketed for profit to civilians. In early 2006, Smith & Wesson announced that it had begun shipping the first of its M&P15 rifles. The M&P (Military & Police) “tactical rifle” was the first long gun produced by a company that had been long known as a handgun manufacturer. According to Shooting Industry, the new rifle was “specifically engineered to meet the needs of global military and police personnel, as well as sporting shooters.” The handgun company’s turn to assault rifles was a stark example of the gun industry’s relentless militarization of the civilian market. By 2006, military-style semiautomatic assault rifles had become one of the mainstays of the civilian gun market. Smith & Wesson did not make rifles. But it had successfully marketed a line of M&P semiautomatic handguns to military, police, and civilian customers. Its executives decided to introduce their own line of Military & Police assault rifles. Based on the AR-15/M-16 design, these “tactical rifles” would be heavily pitched to civilians."

"The money continued to roll in. On July 20, 2009, exactly three years to the day before the Aurora mass murder, Golden stated in an interview that a “category that has been extremely hot is tactical rifles, AR style tactical rifles.” On a June 2009 investors conference call, Golden enthused that “tactical rifles were up almost 200% versus the same period the year before. We have increased our capacity on that rifle.” The company was doing so well with its assault rifles that it decided to introduce a new variant in 22 caliber because the ammunition is much cheaper than the military-style ammunition used in the M&P15."

"Last Friday, 20-year-old Adam Lanza killed 26 students and teachers at Sandy Hook School with an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle. Much of the ensuing debate has focused on ways to regulate and potentially ban weapons like these. So, how many auto-loading rifles actually exist in America? In its 2011 report “The Militarization of the U.S. Civilian Firearms Market,” the non-partisan Violence Policy Center noted that “selling militarized firearms to civilians—i.e., weapons in the military inventory or weapons based on military designs—has been at the point of the industry’s civilian design and marketing strategy since the 1980s.” And in its 2011 annual report to investors, Smith & Wesson Holding Company noted that there was a $489 million domestic, non-military market for “modern sporting rifles,” a euphemism for auto-loading, assault-style rifles. Modern sporting rifles are perhaps the fastest-growing segment of the domestic long gun industry. From 2007 to 2011, according to the Freedom Group’s most recent annual report, domestic consumer long gun sales grew at a compound annual rate of 3 percent; modern sporting rifle sales grew at a 27 percent rate."

"Political and other factors also can affect our performance. Concerns about presidential, congressional, and state elections and legislature and policy shifts resulting from those elections can affect the demand for our products. For example, we experienced strong consumer demand for our firearm products following a new administration taking office in Washington, D.C. in 2009. In addition, speculation surrounding increased gun control at the federal, state, and local level and heightened fears of terrorism and crime can affect consumer demand for our products."

"Smith & Wesson Holding Corp. agreed to pay $2 million to settle a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation into allegations of foreign bribery by the gun maker."

"Smith & Wesson Holding Corp has agreed to pay $2.03 million to settle U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission charges its employees and representatives bribed foreign officials to supply firearms to military and law enforcement departments overseas. The SEC said on Monday that sales staff at the Springfield, Massachusetts-based company engaged in a "pervasive" effort to win contracts from 2007 to 2010 by authorizing or making illegal payments or providing gifts to government officials in Pakistan, Indonesia, Turkey, Nepal and Bangladesh. In one instance, Smith & Wesson approved a sale of 548 pistols to Pakistani police after its agent, who was hired in 2008, notified the company he would give cash and more than $11,000 worth of guns to police officials to complete the deal, the SEC said."

"The Massachusetts-based company has agreed to pay the U.S. government $2 million for bribing officials in Pakistan, Indonesia and other countries as it tried to sell firearms to military and law enforcement agencies. The Securities and Exchange Commission says the violations took place between 2007 and 2010...In one case, the SEC says Smith & Wesson provided more than $11,000 worth of guns as a gift to Pakistani police officials there. That deal won the gun maker a contract to sell 548 pistols to the police department for a profit of $107,852. While that was the only corrupt contract ultimately fulfilled, the SEC says the company also tried to secure sales contracts by bribing officials at an Indonesian police department, as well as foreign officials in Turkey, Nepal and Bangladesh."

"A Pakistani police department received a cache of guns from U.S. gun manufacturer Smith & Wesson in return for a deal to sell hundreds of pistols to cops in the South Asian country, one of numerous attempts to bribe officials in developing economies, U.S. regulatory officials said on Monday. The U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, or FCPA, prohibits companies from bribing officials to make sales even if it is common practice to do so in some countries.... The company said in its latest financial earnings report last month it was the subject of a U.S. Department of Justice investigation into FCPA violations as far back as 2010, the same year the SEC informed the company it was being investigated for “any violations of the federal securities law.” “We are cooperating fully with the SEC in this matter and have undertaken a comprehensive review of company policies and procedures,” the company said in the filing."

"Smith & Wesson Holding Corp. agreed to pay about $2 million to settle U.S. regulatory claims that it bribed officials in Pakistan, Turkey and other countries to win firearms contracts."

"Smith & Wesson, the US firearms manufacturer, has paid more than $2m to the Securities and Exchange Commission for allegedly bribing foreign officials to win contracts to supply arms to overseas police and military forces, the SEC said on Monday."

"Gun stocks are surging, even as America mourns another mass shooting and Hillary Clinton vows to restrict sales. Popular gun companies Smith & Wesson (SWHC) and Sturm Ruger (RGR) are among the best stocks in America in 2015. It's a reminder of just how profitable these businesses are. Smith & Wesson has skyrocketed over 80% this year. To put that in perspective, if the stock were in the S&P 500, it would be the second best performer this year, behind only Netflix (NFLX).... This stellar performance comes in a year when many stocks have tanked.... The reason investors like gun stocks is simple: people are buying a lot of guns. Sales hit a record for Smith & Wesson in 2014 and for Sturm Ruger in 2013."

"In the years since Obama took office, gun makers have had some of their most profitable years. Last year, Smith & Wesson sales hit a record high of $626m, up 6.7% from $587.5m in 2013."

"Police officials said that two suspects, Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik, were armed with two semiautomatic rifles and two semiautomatic handguns. The semiautomatic rifles were a .223-caliber DPMS Model A15 and a Smith & Wesson M&P15. One of the handguns was manufactured by Llama, and the other by Smith & Wesson."

"The suspects arrived at the Inland Regional Center at 11 a.m. on Wednesday, armed with the four guns and wearing masks. Chief Burguan said the suspects were wearing “tactical vests,” with pockets for spare magazines and other equipment. The two handguns that were recovered were bought by Mr. Farook, and all four weapons were bought legally, Chief Burguan said. A senior federal law enforcement official said the assault rifles were bought by a third person who is not considered a suspect. Officials said the two assault rifles were variants of the AR-15, the semiautomatic version of the military M-16 rifle; one was made by DPMS Panther Arms, and the other was a Smith & Wesson M&P model, a designation meaning military and police. The senior law enforcement official said one handgun was made by Llama, and the other by Smith & Wesson."

"The suspects in the San Bernardino holiday party shooting were armed with four guns, an explosive device and several magazines of ammunition in a “well-planned” attack, police and federal officials said. Syed Rizwan Farook, 28, a U.S.-born health inspector for San Bernardino County, and Tashfeen Malik, 27, were carrying two .223-caliber assault rifles and two semi-automatic handguns... San Bernardino Police Chief Jarrod Burguan said the two .223-caliber assault rifles were a DPMS model and a Smith & Wesson M&P 15 model, while the two semi-automatic hand guns were manufactured by Llama and Smith & Wesson."

"The AR-15 is the model of gun used in several recent mass shootings in America, including the massacres at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, in 2012 and the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, in June this year. It is not unusual that gun sales rise at election time in the US. The more dramatic surges usually come in the immediate aftermath of mass shootings, however, as buyers both feel greater concern about their own safety and fear a US government response to crack down sales. In the year that followed Newton, Sturm Ruger, Remington Outdoor, and Smith & Wesson - the three most important gun manufacturers in the US - saw a windfall of over $390 million in profits on record sales. Shares in publicly traded Sturm Ruger and Smith & Wesson jumped more than 70 percent in the same year."

"There was some fear-based buying that would take place from time to time. There is no fear-based buying right now."

"What do James Holmes, Adam Lanza, and Omar Mateen have in common? Besides being the perpetrators of three of the deadliest mass shootings in U.S. history, they all share a preference for the AR-15 assault rifle. The AR-15 assault rifle was used at the Aurora, Colo. shooting, the Newtown, Conn. shooting, and now the mass shooting in Orlando, Fla. that killed 50 and is officially the deadliest such massacre in U.S. history...While Colt alone makes the official AR-15, variants and knock-offs are made by a huge number of gun manufactures, including Bushmaster, Les Baer, Remington, Smith & Wesson (swhc, +0.00%), and Sturm & Ruger (rgr, -2.04%), just to name a few. TacticalRetailer claims that from 2000 to 2015 the AR manufacturing sector expanded from 29 AR makers to about 500, “a stunning 1,700% increase.”"

"Feb. 14, 2018 Seventeen people were killed when Nikolas Cruz, 19, opened fire at his former high school in Parkland, Fla., with a Smith & Wesson M&P semiautomatic rifle.... Dec. 2, 2015 Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik, husband and wife, killed 14 people at a holiday office party in San Bernardino, Calif. Four guns were recovered: a Smith & Wesson M&P assault rifle, a DPMS Panther Arms assault rifle, a Smith & Wesson handgun and a Llama handgun.... Oct. 1, 2015 Christopher Harper-Mercer, 26, killed nine people at Umpqua Community College in Oregon, where he was a student. He was armed with six guns, including a Glock pistol, a Smith & Wesson pistol, a Taurus pistol and a Del-Ton assault rifle, according to The Associated Press.... April 2, 2014 Specialist Ivan Antonio Lopez opened fire at Fort Hood with a Smith & Wesson semiautomatic pistol, killing three people and wounding 16 others.... July 20, 2012 James E. Holmes, 24, killed 12 people and wounded 70 at a theater in Aurora, Colo., using a Smith & Wesson semiautomatic rifle, a Remington shotgun and a Glock .40-caliber semiautomatic pistol."

"Stocks were up Thursday for American Outdoor Brands, the company that makes the AR-15 rifle used in the Florida school shooting that claimed 17 lives. The company’s shares closed up 1.49%, netting the company an additional $8.8 million on the day. The Associated Press reported that accused gunman Nikolas Cruz used a Smith & Wesson M&P15 rifle – a variant of the AR-15 – during his allegedly shooting spree at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, on Wednesday. Smith & Wesson, which was founded in 1852, is a Springfield, Mass.-based holding of American Outdoor Brands.... Shares of American Outdoor Brands closed 5.6% higher on Wednesday, the day of the shooting. It’s not uncommon for gun maker shares to rise following a mass shooting as people are likely to stock up fearing potential gun control measures. This is the third time an M&P15 has been used in a mass shooting in the United States. James E. Holmes, who was convicted of killing 12 and wounding 70 in the 2012 Aurora, Colorado movie theater shooting, used a Smith & Wesson M&P15 rifle. An illegally modified Smith & Wesson M&P15 Sport rifle was recovered by law enforcement officials after the 2015 San Bernardino shooting, where 14 people were killed."

"A quick Google search shows that P. James Debney is the CEO and president of American Outdoor Brands, which until last year was named Smith & Wesson. By whatever name, the company Debney heads manufactured the AR-15 assault rifle that Cruz used to kill 14 Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School students and three staff members.... Debney kept selling assault rifles as if he were just selling more plastic after a madman with a Smith & Wesson assault rifle murdered 12 people in an Aurora, Colorado, movie theater....The company’s profits came to include the sale of the M&P15 that was used in the 2015 terror attack in San Bernardino. Fifteen were murdered.... Smith & Wesson did experience a modest bump after a madman used one of its M&P15s to murder 14 students and three staff members at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High on Valentine’s Day."

"Smith & Wesson was in the midst of getting new leadership, having been further shaken when its chairman, James Minder, proved to have served time in prison for a string of armed robberies while a journalism student at the University of Michigan. The young Minder had started with one of his future company's revolvers but had then opted for a sawed-off shotgun."

"Beginning Thursday, a group of students will march westward a quarter of the way across Massachusetts in the latest act of a national, youth-led campaign to save lives and change the conversation about gun violence.... The activists have two main goals. The first is to get Smith & Wesson to agree to stop manufacturing military-style weapons like the M&P 15, an AR-15-style rifle that has been used in a number of recent high-profile shootings, including in Parkland, Florida, in February, in San Bernardino, California, in 2015, and in Aurora, Colorado, in 2012. The second is for Smith & Wesson to donate $5 million to study gun violence and other crimes involving the company’s firearms."

"The world is full of gatekeepers and the web was the [first] place where anyone could share ANYTHING with everyone else."

"Everything, By Everyone"

"Black lives may matter to the NBA, but Uighur lives do not."

"My experience in the NBA was a catastrophe, because I’m a born winner. I don’t like losing, even in card games."

"You can find me puffing trees in the Summer League; NBA against the wannabees. 5 on 5, Me and Stretch and Whookid is in the front row, iced out, not even watching the game."

"There was some fear-based buying that would take place from time to time. There is no fear-based buying right now."

"The Company’s reputation as a strong defender of the Second Amendment is not worth risking for a vague goal of improving the Company’s reputation among non-customers or special interest groups with an anti-Second Amendment agenda.... To summarize, AOBC’s reputation among firearm buyers and Second Amendment supporters is more critical to the success of the Company and the enhancement of shareholder value than its reputation among industry detractors and special interest groups with a political agenda. In fact, efforts to improve the Company’s reputation among its critics would not only be futile but would hurt the Company’s business as it did 19 years ago."

"The solution is not to take a politically motivated action that has an adverse impact on our company, our employees, our industry, our shareholders, the economies we support and, significantly, the rights of our law abiding customers, but results in no increase in public safety."

"... we are all seeking solutions to the epidemic of gun violence in our country....The majority of guns used in crimes in major U.S. cities are AOBC guns. AOBC’s AR-15 style rifle was used in mass shootings in Parkland, Florida, San Bernardino, California and Aurora, Colorado. These are only a few of the most recent and highest profile violent incidents involving AOBC products that present grave financial and reputational risks. Each event brings new threats of lawsuits, boycotts, divestment and demonstrations - and along with them, a wave of damaging news stories about gun companies and their inability to make their products safer for civilians, and most critically, to help prevent their misuse by children....we are all looking for solutions to gun violence. The shareholders who filed this proposal believe that, as a company directly implicated in these events, American Outdoor Brands is obligated to help find them. These solutions could help save many lives, and AOBC’s long-term business prospects in the process."

"A quick Google search shows that P. James Debney is the CEO and president of American Outdoor Brands, which until last year was named Smith & Wesson. By whatever name, the company Debney heads manufactured the AR-15 assault rifle that Cruz used to kill 14 Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School students and three staff members.... Debney kept selling assault rifles as if he were just selling more plastic after a madman with a Smith & Wesson assault rifle murdered 12 people in an Aurora, Colorado, movie theater....The company’s profits came to include the sale of the M&P15 that was used in the 2015 terror attack in San Bernardino. Fifteen were murdered.... Smith & Wesson did experience a modest bump after a madman used one of its M&P15s to murder 14 students and three staff members at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High on Valentine’s Day."

"Are they doing everything they can to be part of the solution? Personally, I didn't find that they were.... We as responsible shareholders will continue to attempt to engage American Outdoor Brands and move them to really accept responsibility for the safety of their products."

"Responsible business policies and practices are critical to firearms manufacturers' long-term prospects. We will continue to engage with these companies to further understand their business policies and practices in order to protect our clients' investments in them."

"AMTRAK lives on subsidies; always has, always will. Americans have limited demand for passenger-train services. Nearly everyone prefers to use a personal automobile, for all sorts of good reasons, including privacy, flexibility, and convenience. None of this is news. Transportation economists have been documenting it in study after study for decades."

"The average intercity auto trip today uses less energy per passenger mile than the average Amtrak train."

"While Elon Musk is talking about that, Ford is increasing their investment overwhelmingly, Ford is increasing investment and building new electric vehicles. Six thousand new employees, union employees I might add, in the Midwest. So, you know, lots of luck on his trip to the moon."

"We [SpaceX] started off with just a few people who really didn't know how to make rockets. And the reason that I ended up being the chief engineer or chief designer, was not because I want to, it's because I couldn't hire anyone. Nobody good would join. So I ended up being that by default. And I messed up the first three launches."

"When starting SpaceX I thought the odds of success were less than 10%, and I just accepted that I would probably just lose everything. But that maybe we would make some progress. If we could just move the ball forward, even if we died some other company could pick up the baton and keep moving it forward. So that would still do some good."

"In the long term, space-based AI is obviously the only way to scale. It’s always sunny in space!"

"Mossberg will take your back, liver ribs and all."

"Mossberg pumping, shotgun dumping, and drama means nothing. It's part of the game."

"Mossberg pump; I'm riding shotgun literally."

"FBI agents are devoting substantial resources to a multistate hunt for two baby piglets that the bureau believes are named Lucy and Ethel. The two piglets were removed over the summer from the Circle Four Farm in Utah by animal rights activists who had entered the {Smithfield Foods-owned factory farm to film the brutal, torturous conditions in which the pigs are bred in order to be slaughtered. While filming the conditions at the Smithfield facility, activists saw the two ailing baby piglets laying on the ground, visibly ill and near death, surrounded by the rotting corpses of dead piglets. [...] Under normal circumstances, a large industrial farming company such as Smithfield Foods would never notice that two sick piglets of the millions it breeds and then slaughters were missing. Nor would they care: A sick and dying piglet has no commercial value to them. Yet the rescue of these two particular piglets has literally become a federal case — by all appearances, a matter of great importance to the Department of Justice. On the last day of August, a six-car armada of FBI agents in bulletproof vests, armed with s, descended upon two small shelters for abandoned farm animals: Ching Farm Rescue in , and Luvin Arms in . These sanctuaries have no connection to DxE or any other rescue groups. They simply serve as a shelter for sick, abandoned, or otherwise injured animals. Run by a small staff and a team of animal-loving volunteers, they are open to the public to teach about farm animals. [...] Subsequent events confirmed that this show of FBI force was designed to intimidate the sanctuaries, which played no role in the rescue."

"At Smithfield, like most industrial pig farms, the abuse and torture primarily comes not from rogue employees violating company procedures. Instead, the cruelty is inherent in the procedures themselves. One of the most heinous industry-wide practices is one that DxE activists encountered in abundance at Circle Four: gestational crating. Where that technique is used, pigs are placed in a crate made of iron bars that is the exact length and width of their bodies, so they can do nothing for their entire lives but stand on a concrete floor, never turn around, never see any outdoors, never even see their tails, never move more than an inch. That was the condition in which the activists found the rotting piglet corpses and the two ailing piglets they rescued. [...] In the U.S. states where factory farms actually thrive, these devices continue to be widely used, which means a vast majority of pigs in the U.S. are subjected to them. The suffering, pain, and death these crates routinely cause were in ample evidence at Smithfield Foods, as accounts, photos, and videos from DxE demonstrate. [...] What has vested these two piglets with such importance to the FBI is that their rescue is now part of what has become an increasingly visible public campaign by DxE and other activists to highlight the barbaric suffering and abuse that animals endure on farms like Circle Four. Obviously, the FBI and Smithfield — the nation’s largest industrial farm corporation — don’t really care about the missing piglets they are searching for. What they care about is the efficacy of a intent on showing the public how animals are abused at factory farms, and they are determined to intimidate those responsible. Deterring such campaigns and intimidating the activists behind them is, manifestly, the only goal here."

"When Trump came for the Mexicans, I did not speak out — as I was not a Mexican. When he came for the Muslims I did not speak out — as I was not a Muslim. Then he came for me."

"As far as I’m concerned, Motown was a once-in-a-lifetime musical event. Nothing like that happened before. I seriously doubt anything like that will ever happen again..."

"[C]ritics usually disparage Motown as watered-down blues or lesser soul music, but they ignore the essence of Motown’s urbane soulfulness. ... What people respond to in a Motown song, after the rhythm, wit, and piquancy, is the sound — the ethos — of the love of freedom. Only in America could a company like Motown Records exist."

"The POLITICO's goals are simple. Over the past several weeks, we set out to assemble the most talented and interesting collection of journalists -- established names as well as promising young people -- that we could find. Now, we will turn these reporters loose on the subject we love: national politics."

"POLITICO strives to be the dominant source for news on politics and policy in power centers across every continent where access to reliable information, nonpartisan journalism and real-time tools create, inform and engage a global citizenry."

"POLITICO, the world’s leading global news operation and information service specializing in politics and policy, today announced that it has entered into an agreement to acquire E&E News, the renowned news organization focused solely on energy and the environment, now in its 22nd year"

"San Francisco to crack down on brazen shoplifting"

"The new investment partnership with MDP will accelerate our momentum, and help us achieve our ambition of disrupting the CX market, which has been underserved by both metric-heavy and market research led approaches. MDP is the ideal partner for InMoment at this stage in our history – they have a long track record of success across their portfolio and, most importantly, their vision aligns soundly with our own strategic goals."

"VShojo is a talent-first VTuber company, dedicated to the growth and success of its members. Founded by fans of VTuber culture, we aim to create and foster content that pushes the boundaries of VTubing and talent freedom, while maintaining deep respect for the people and companies that helped paved the way."

"VTubing experienced a massive upswing this year as more creators and viewers embraced avatar-rooted entertainers. With the VTuber medium exploding and providing a large new audience for brands, it was the perfect time to launch VShojo as a conduit between both parties. Now if brands want to enter the VTuber space and tap into the top talent, we’ve streamlined the process for everyone."

"VShojo has failed, and I've mismanaged the company into the situation you're all witnessing. So today I am sharing the difficult news that VShojo is shutting down, and I take full responsibility for the decisions that led us to this point. I've been doing everything I can to fundraise and right the ship these past few months, but despite my efforts, we are in a worse position, and those I care about are now paying the price. Over the past few years, we raised around $11 million to pursue a bold, talent-first approach in Tubing, prioritizing creators and community over short-term profits, to achieve long-term sustainability. Our funding went directly to our creators through generous splits, debut investments, infrastructure, concerts, events, and staffing, all designed to support them. We also wanted talent to own their IP, which we knew was a unique creator-first approach for an agency. However, despite all our efforts, the business failed to generate the revenue we needed to sustain that model, and eventually, we ran out of money. Additionally, I acknowledge that some of the money spent by the company was raised in connection with talent activity, which I later learned was intended for a charitable initiative. At the time, we were working hard to raise additional investment capital to cover our costs, and I firmly believed, based on the information available to us, that we would be able to do so and cover all expenses. We were unsuccessful in our fundraising efforts. I made the decision to pursue funding, and I own its consequences. I am deeply sorry to all the talents, staff, friends, and community members who believed in our brand. You did not deserve this."

"Several Republicans including Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan and Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) criticized Texas’ near-total ban on abortion Sunday because of its provision empowering private citizens to sue those who aid and abet abortions—potentially signaling the legal tactic could face resistance from within the GOP as more states plan to copy Texas’ law. The Maryland governor specifically pointed to the law’s “problem of bounties,” as the Texas law—known as Senate Bill 8 (SB 8)—says government officials cannot enforce the law, but rather directs private citizens to file lawsuits against anyone who “aids and abets” an abortion and stipulates they can earn at least $10,000 in damages if they win. Kinzinger said on CNN that while he’s “pro-life,” what he “doesn’t like to see” is letting “everyone being able to tattle” and the fact that under SB 8, private citizens are “deputized to enforce this abortion law” against even potentially Uber drivers that transport a Texan to their abortion."

"Authorities in the Indian capital, Delhi, have banned international taxi-booking service Uber after a driver allegedly raped a female passenger. A transport department official said the company had been "blacklisted" for "misleading customers"."

"Uber, which is growing in popularity in India, has been accused of failing to conduct adequate checks on its drivers. "(The) Transport Department has banned all activities relating to providing any transport service by the www.Uber.com with immediate effect," news agency AFP reported, quoting from a government statement. The ban means any Uber taxi in Delhi will now attract a fine or even be impounded, officials say. The company is still accepting bookings on its app and it is not yet clear how the ban will be enforced since Uber taxis do not carry any visible branding. Before the ban was announced, Uber described the incident as "horrific" and said it would do everything "to help bring this perpetrator to justice". "Our entire team's hearts go out to the victim of this despicable crime. We will do everything, I repeat, everything to help bring this perpetrator to justice and to support the victim and her family in her recovery," Uber CEO Travis Kalanick said in a statement. He said Uber would "work with the government to establish clear background checks currently absent in their commercial transportation licensing programs"."

"Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black."

"It was at the microeconomic level, however, that the output war was really won. For the biggest wartime advances in mass production and management were made in vast factories like Ford's mile-long bomber assembly line at Willow Run, Boeing's B-29 plant at Seattle or General Motors' aero-engine factory at Allison. At peak, Boeing Seattle was churning out sixteen B-17S a day and employing 40,000 men and women on round-the-clock shifts. Never had ships been built so rapidly as the Liberty ships, 2,700 of which slid down the slipways during the war years. It was at wartime General Motors that Peter Drucker saw the birth of the modern 'concept of the corporation', with its decentralized system of management. And it was during the war that the American military-industrial complex was born; over half of all prime government contracts went to just thirty-three corporations. Boeing's net wartime profits for the years 1941 to 1945 amounted to $27.6 million; in the preceding five years the company had lost nearly $3 million. General Motors Corporation employed half a million people and supplied one-tenth of all American war production. Ford alone produced more military equipment during the war than Italy. Small wonder some more-cerebral soldiers felt they were risking their necks not in a 'real war . . . but . . . in a regulated business venture', as James Jones put it in The Thin Red Line. It was strange indeed that the recovery of the American economy from the Depression should owe so much to the business of flattening other peoples' cities."

"One of the hardest-to-down myths about the evolution of mass production at Ford is one which credits much of the accomplishment to 'scientific management.' No one at Ford—not Mr. Ford, Couzens, Flanders, Wills, Pete Martin, nor I—was acquainted with the theories of the 'father of scientific management,' Frederick W. Taylor. Years later I ran across a quotation from a two-volume book about Taylor by Frank Barkley Copley, who reports a visit Taylor made to Detroit late in 1914, nearly a year after the moving assembly line had been installed at our Highland Park plant. Taylor expressed surprise to find that Detroit industrialists 'had undertaken to install the principles of scientific management without the aid of experts.' To my mind this unconscious admission by an expert is expert testimony on the futility of too great reliance on experts and should forever dispose of the legend that Taylor's ideas had any influence at Ford."

"We are pleased to have found the ideal location for the planned construction of our mRNA vaccine manufacturing facility"

"Writer and director Vivek Agnihotri deserves a lot of credit for having the will to fight for years to be able to make this film. There were reports that he could have made a deal with Netflix if he had agreed to not mention Islamic terrorism, which would be akin to making a movie about the Holocaust that doesn’t mention the Nazis. Good for him and his team for not caving to such a cowardly and ridiculous demand."

"Obviously, those suspected of sexual abuse, be they religious leaders or not, should be prosecuted—but not because Netflix says so. ...[The television industry] knows that illicit sex always titillates and sells, and this is even more true for the combination between religion and illicit sex. ...The producers of the TV shows claim that they give voice to victims of sexual abuse by religious leaders. This is legitimate and also important (if the victims are real, of course). However, the pain of the victims is not relieved if the shows stereotype and generalize, and further pain is inflicted on those who want to remain in the religious movements and are personally not guilty of any crime. ...If I learned one thing, it is that in the long run invariably hate speech generates hate crimes, violence, and in the end murder. Netflix and the other networks should remember that hate speech can kill—and television can kill too."

"I arrived at CNN with a suitcase, with my bicycle and with about 100 dollars."

"When the war finally started, we were ready. On January 16, 1991, CNN anchor Bernard Shaw reported to the world, “The skies over Baghdad have been illuminated . . .” As predicted, Iraqi power and communications systems were destroyed by stealth fighter jets and cruise missiles. Every media company based in Baghdad—except CNN—lost power and transmission capabilities. Only CNN broadcast live to hundreds of millions of people worldwide. All channels turned to us for exclusive coverage; there was no place else. Back then CNN was the only global 24/7 news channel. That live coverage of war—the first time it had been televised worldwide—transformed the media landscape. CNN became required viewing for informed citizens and heads of state, the one truly global news source. That has changed now, with multiple cable networks and news breaking on social media. But without the investment in journalism from visionary owners such as Turner, today’s networks focus more on commentary than newsgathering."

"Playing by the rules of Entebbe in the world of CNN and Al Jazeera is a failure for its own sake."

"Remember that CNN, Time Warner, Disney, NBC, Fox News, and the rest are part of the same ideological system, serve the same clientele, and are owned by the same relatively tiny group of people whose interest is to keep things as they are. Memory is an inhibition, a possible threat to their hegemony, just as it is very dangerous for a critic to keep making connections between supposedly un- or nonpolitical institutions like the Supreme Court and the Constitution, and on the other hand, base commercial interests."

"You turn on CNN, that’s all they cover. [...] Covid, Covid, pandemic, Covid, Covid. You know why? They're trying to talk people out of voting. People aren't buying it, CNN, you dumb bastards."

"Why didn't CNN break that story? I was outraged! Haven't they ever seen Dickens's A Christmas Carol? Scrooge felt a lot happier when he saved Tiny Tim and bought the turkey for the poor family, right?"

"In a society where there is no freedom of the press, it is difficult for victims to be noticed. Just take the example from yesterday: I had given a telephone interview to CNN. Then, suddenly, CNN was shut down for a couple of minutes. It was the first time I experienced that my television went totally dead. I realized: Oh my God, it’s because of me. This is crazy! Which nation would do that? Maybe Cuba, North Korea, China. But what do they want, what are they so afraid of?"

"The Holy Rodent Empire"

"Gillette is a brand that everyone respects and I'm looking forward to being part of its business for several years. I get many offers for commercial associations, but I only ever consider the ones that I feel are right. I have always tried to associate myself with the best brands, as my existing relationships with Adidas and Pepsi show."

"Being a champion is much more than holding a trophy or receiving a medal – a champion stands up for what is right and encourages others to do the same. I am a Gillette Champion because I want to encourage others to be the best they can be, not only during a game, but also in life."

"They won’t hire somebody unless they’re into metal. They take pride in what they do and genuinely love metal."

"This may come as a surprise to young music fans, but there once was a time when there was no such thing as record labels specializing in heavy metal -- not until the early 1980s, anyway, at which point a handful of enterprising independents started rearing their iron fists into the air, including Los Angeles’ proudly named Metal Blade. But one of the things that set Metal Blade apart, even then, is that it was one of the first labels launched for metalheads, BY metalheads -- a young man named Brian Slagel, to be more specific, after taking it upon himself to promote some of his favorite bands on the first of many Metal Massacre compilation albums."

"Fender is arguably the most well-known guitar manufacturer of all time. Without Leo Fender's influence on the wonderful world of guitars, amplifiers and basses, the landscape of music would look very different – it certainly wouldn't be as colorful. Having been responsible for the first mass-produced solid-body electric guitar with their legendary Broadcaster, Fender has cemented itself as one of the most important music brands to ever exist. Known for their bright and shimmery tone – and equally eye-catching finishes – the versatile sound of guitars such as the Stratocaster, Telecaster, Jazzmaster and Jaguar is perfect for everything from blues and indie to alternative rock, punk, jazz, and just about anything else. So, if you're looking for an adaptable guitar that's steeped in history, then look no further than Fender."

"Fender amplifiers are legendary and celebrated for their clean tones and versatility. They have defined the sound of blues, rock, and country music, making them a staple for musicians worldwide. Popular models include the original tweed units such as the Blues Junior, Hot Rod Deluxe, and Bassman, followed later by black-clad units such as the Twin Reverb and Princeton. Fender has always been a little more reserved than its hard rock counterparts, and it is best known for its combo amplifiers, which align with the brand's image for producing practical, workhorse instruments that put performance first."

"Gibson guitars need no introduction. They’re the royalty of the electric guitar realm and for a good reason."

"With a little over a century in the guitar business, it will come as no surprise that Gibson has been responsible for some of the most influential guitars ever produced. From the seductively beautiful Gibson Les Paul to the indulgent semi-hollow king, the ES-335, as well as the J-45, SG, Flying V, Explorer and Firebird, Gibson has cultivated a legacy that will easily stand for another 100 years."

"Gibson acoustic guitars offer a strong and robust mid-range that is perfect if you are playing in a band and need your acoustic to be heard over loud drums, pianos or enthusiastic vocals."

"There is a plethora of guitarists whose names evoke images of them with their Gibsons."

"As much as [Led Zeppelin's] hard hitting beats and powerful guitar riffs embodied the era when rock and roll hit its peak, Jimmy Page in his leather pants embedded with dragons holding up his double neck Gibson and belting out the solo to the epic "Stairway to Heaven" is an image to put to the music. As iconic as the double neck is his Gibson Les Paul, which he used to mesmerize audiences from Earls Court in London to Madison Square Garden in New York in tunes like "Whole Lotta Love" and "Kashmir"."

"It duckwalked across countless stages in the hands of Chuck Berry, produced some of the most iconic riffs in the Guns N’ Roses catalog and hung dangerously low on Joan Jett’s hips for decades. And while Gibson’s future is up in the air following the company’s filing for bankruptcy protection earlier this week, there is no erasing the the 124-year-old guitar maker’s titanic place in rock history."

"If there is a guitar brand that is best known for its exquisite build quality and stunning custom finishes, it's PRS. [...] Paul Reed Smith has [become] a pioneer of modern manufacturing techniques, creating guitars that perfectly balance form and function."

"The superiority of the PRS lies in the fact that each guitar is produced with the highest-quality maple, and every little detail is considered during the production of their electric guitars. The second puzzle piece is its design features, significantly adding to its playability. We’re talking about the 24-fret design, which allows for more expressive playing, as well as the locking tuners and tremolo system, which the brand actually patented. The result is a fantastic guitar that can hold anything from clean to overdriven sounds, from warm to aggressive leads."

"Players have been chasing "that Gretsch sound" for decades, and frankly, they'll be pursuing it for many more to come. The high-end piercing sparkle, bellowing mid-range, and rich, warm lows culminate in a tone that has more than stood the test of time. [...] These large-bodied, Bigsby-clad guitars will instantly transport you back to a simpler time with their charming good looks, fantastic playability, and retro-inspired tones. Gretsch has become a staple of both country and rockabilly, with their stylish hollowbody guitars laying down the foundations on which the rest of the music is built."

"In the late 1970s, Jackson was there to help usher in a new breed of guitar player – the glammed-up hair metal virtuoso. Priding themselves on high-performance instruments that would allow players to achieve new heights on the instrument, Jackson quickly established themselves as a force to be reckoned with in the shred guitar game. By the middle of the '80s, the once small Southern California guitar repair shop was now at the forefront of the pointy headstock, gassed-up super guitar movement – and today, their instruments are just as popular as ever with modern metalheads such as Misha Mansoor, Mark Heylmun, Chris Broderick and Rob Caggiano all having signature models."

"Music Man is one of the legendary instrument brands that helped shape the future of electric guitar and bass. Today many players count on Music Man to express themselves. Everyone from St. Vincent to John Petrucci, Steve Lukather and Albert Lee aren't seen too far away from their beloved Music Man signature models."

"Most known for their rich and retro tone [...] Martin is one of the most famous and long-lasting family-owned brands in American history and easily one of the most influential forces in the guitar industry. The acoustic guitar giant has a legacy that stretches back close to 200 years and is responsible for shaping how everyone else builds and designs acoustic guitars. From popularizing X-bracing to inventing the iconic dreadnought shape, Martin is one of the most important guitar brands to ever exist."

"Taylor is a forward-thinking company that produces some of the finest six-strings available today. Recognized as a flat-top trailblazer with strong and passionate views on sustainability, Taylor offers modern players a contemporary guitar that feels and sounds just as good as it looks. Taylor is beloved for their crisp, contemporary tone. These guitars deliver a singing upper mid-range that can cut through even the densest of mixes."

"While most see Guild as a traditional brand, they were innovators in their time. Guild was the first to manufacture a dreadnought with a cutaway. The famed D-40C gave players access to notes that were simply out of reach before, and well, the rest is history. Guild guitars are beloved for their full-bodied, well-balanced tone that perfectly compliments a vocal – so singer-songwriter, take note."

"A truly modern classic, the BigSky reverb brings heavenly-sounding reverb down to earth and places it firmly at the feet of guitarists. Underneath the bonnet the BigSky boasts a whopping 12 studio-quality reverb machines ranging from the traditional Hall, Room, Spring, and Plate to more progressive modes such as Chorale, Shimmer, and Nonlinear."

"The role of ARP in the development of synthesis is of great importance, as it provided a very different colour palette to that being created by Moog. Some aficionados actually went further, commenting that the ARP oscillators were far more stable at holding pitch. Harsh words, but forgotten pretty quickly in the same year, when Moog released the synthesizer that would go on to become the most revered and coveted machine of them all; The Minimoog."

"Any amp company that puts out models with names like Ecstasy, Uberschall, and Shiva is wearing its high-gain heart on its sleeve, and Bogner goes all-in and then some where heavy rocking is concerned. [...] From the start, the company was known for stacking up searing gain stages to suit the needs of shred maniacs and heavy rockers, and the above-named amps fit the bill to a "T.""

"Like several names among the boutique crowd, Dave Friedman established his reputation by modifying and hot-rodding amps, particularly Marshalls, and had several prominent clients (Steve Stevens and Edward Van Halen among them) before establishing his own line of ground-up amp designs. As you might expect, Friedman’s offerings therefore follow a generally Marshall-inspired theme, often incorporating as standard equipment the modifications that he added to original amps for more than 25 years."

"Being in an indie band back then, you weren’t allowed to have dreams of being huge. None of the major labels [had] touched anything that’s remotely left of field since the punk movement. It was all Huey Lewis. That changed with Sonic Youth and then Nirvana signing to Geffen. Alternative became this huge business, and now Arcade Fire or Vampire Weekend can be [number one]."

"You can't miss with a Fulltone pedal, especially if it's the OCD. There's also a new improved version now, called OCD V2 which provides players not only with better sound quality but also with a better dynamic response. The only downside here is the use of Comic Sans font, which is a deal breaker for some."

"Peavey Bandit amps have long been famous for their reliability, with many owners reporting them lasting decades thanks to their outstanding build quality."

"Peavey amplifiers are respected for their durability and affordability, offering reliable performance across different musical genres. They've been a longstanding choice for musicians seeking quality gear without breaking the bank, and as a result, they are among the most popular choices by educational institutions the world over. One thing that appears to be lacking with Peavey amps is a definitive aesthetic across its range, and its logo looks a little dated, suggesting that the brand, as a whole, could use an overhaul. [...] While Peavey amplifiers are undoubtedly well-made and sound good, there's no denying that they are niche, and there's a limited range. [...] but it does offer some of the best value models among the big-name manufacturers."

"[Line 6's] amplifiers allow musicians to easily emulate various tones and effects, making them among the most versatile options for guitarists, as it's equivalent to owning a whole array of classic amps and effects in a single compact unit."

"[Line 6's] products have to be heard to be believed, and as anyone who has dialed up the "Cliffs of Dover," "Bohemian Rhapsody," or "Money for Nothing" patches will attest, Line 6 turns mimicry into an art form."

"With real-world functionality like native software, digital connectivity, DAW compatibility, and stompbox-style effect units, Line 6 leaves no stone unturned in its quest to satisfy its large user base. While some brands could be accused of resting on their laurels on the back of their heritage and reputation, Line 6 continues to be a trailblazer that helped kickstart the amp modeling revolution."

"One early proponent of [Randall] Smith's work [in manufacturing guitar amplifiers] was counterculture legend Carlos Santana, a relationship that endures to this day. Anyone who has heard [Carlos] Santana's singing sustains and harmonically-rich driven tone will be familiar with the sound of a Mesa/Boogie amplifier. However, these are far from a one-trick pony. They are renowned for their exceptional build quality and rich sounds that cover a broad sonic spectrum. That helped to set a new standard in the world of high-gain amplification, originally saturated by British brands."

"Mesa/Boogies do tend to be rather bewildering in both their variety and complexity - and are often misunderstood."

"How indistinguishable from country was rock at Sun Records? Less than three years after Elvis Presley’s initial success, Sam Phillips had signed the other three members of his “Million Dollar Quartet” – Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash and Jerry Lee Lewis. All three men were sonically similar to Presley and had tremendous success as country stars for decades without veering too far away from their original sound. Roy Orbison, another of Phillips’ rockabilly acts, got his start singing country hits in his high school band, the Wink Westerners."

"On January 7, 1952, the city purchased for $138,785.57 the privately owned and bankrupt California Stree Cable Railroad and with it acquired that company's three cable car lines. Within five years, this event would forever change the cable operations. The Muni ran five cable car lines."

"The predecessor of California Street Cable Company commenced operation in 1878 with a line on between and s, and twenty-five cars seating approximately eighteen passengers each."

"... 905 The was started by as a tidy investment that could also, if he wished, transport him to his door. After a luxury apartment with an inner court replaced his palace. It was converted at great expense to a luxury hotel, but somehow the low-ceiling court does not convey a sense of grandeur."