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Mstislav Rostropovitch (Baku, 27 de Março de 1927 — Moscovo, 27 de Abril de 2007), violoncelista e maestro russo.
Sergei Rachmaninoff - Cello Sonata Op. 19 3rd mov., Andante
Mstislav Rostropovich
Vladimir Horowitz
Recorded in concert, May 18, 1976.
@CStamp ok, ending with Cpt. Hastings cosplay...
Did you know that a lot of screenplays for #ITV #Poirot were written by Anthony #Horowitz? Later on he wrote Moonflower Murders, a novel in a novel, which features a character named Atticus Pund, whom it is impossible not to "read" as Hercules Poirot.
Actually, everything by Horowitz is a banger after banger.
- 
6/n of my favorite western classical pieces
Schumann: Kinderszenen, Op. 15: VII. Träumerein (with mandatory coughing around 2 minutes mark :P)
In September,
the day after the debate between Harris and Trump,
I spoke again with the lobbyist #Ed #Rogers.
“You know, I’m a Trump voter, a Trump donor,” he said,
“but I think Harris is going to win.”
Another Republican told me that, after Trump’s poor debate performance,
he had seen similar hand-wringing from other major donors:
“Can I stomach giving money to this guy and he keeps blowing it?”
In at least one notable case,
Harris managed to regain a major donor who had defected to Trump,
the Silicon Valley venture capitalist
#Ben #Horowitz.
Horowitz and his business partner, #Marc #Andreessen, who are both longtime Democratic givers,
had stunned the tech world in July by endorsing the ex-President,
citing, in part, Trump’s newfound support for the crypto industry.
But, in October, Horowitz announced that he and his wife planned to make a “significant donation” to Harris,
saying that, though the Biden Administration had been
“exceptionally destructive on tech policy,”
he had spoken personally with Harris, a friend from California,
and was “hopeful” that she would take a different approach.
“There was no real engagement by the Biden world with the business community,”
a Democratic donor who has spoken with the Vice-President told me.
“Harris has been very intentional about engaging.
She’s saying all the right things.”
Harris’s success with the moneyed class infuriated Trump.
“All rich, job creating people, that support Comrade Kamala Harris,” he wrote in a social-media post in September,
“you are STUPID.”
A couple of weeks later, he posted the
false claim that
Jamie Dimon, the JPMorgan C.E.O., whom Trump had also mused about as a candidate for Treasury Secretary,
had endorsed him.
Not only was this untrue, as JPMorgan swiftly announced;
it turned out that Dimon’s wife had donated more than $200,000 to the Democratic ticket
and attended a dinner this summer with Harris.
As if to rebut the doubters,
Trump appeared in early October at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania,
the scene of the first assassination attempt against him,
alongside his wealthiest benefactor, Musk.
Trump had outsourced much of his campaign’s turnout operation
—the traditional preserve of the political parties and the candidates
—to Musk’s America pac.
Musk, whom the Times called “obsessive, almost manic” in his backing of the ex-President,
had all but relocated to Pennsylvania to oversee an effort to swing the crucial battleground state.
In Butler, he leaped around the stage in a black maga hat,
as the former President grinned with delight.
If Trump does not win, Musk told the crowd, “this will be the last election.”
A few days later, Harris’s campaign made a stunning announcement:
she had raised $1 billion in a matter of weeks,
the largest sum ever collected for an American politician in such a short amount of time.
Harris more than doubled Trump’s contributions in September alone.
Will it matter?
During the past two decades, the winner of the Presidential election has always been the better funded of the two candidates
—with the notable exception of Hillary Clinton, in 2016.
By Susan B. Glasser
October 18, 2024
Score video of a favorite Scarlatti sonata recorded in 1964 by Vladimir Horowitz:
VC Ben #Horowitz donates to #HarrisWalz campaign
Reading between the lines, it is clear that they are only doing it grudgingly, and only after the realization that #KamalaHarris is likely to win #Election2024 — So, why not build bridges instead of burning them down like Marc #Andreesen did by endorsing #Trump?
The #AndreesenHorowitz partner makes an implicit threat to #Harris — #Biden has been destructive to us, and you better DO BETTER on #Crypto 
https://www.axios.com/2024/10/04/ben-horowitz-endorse-kamala-harris
Imagine you could choose your citizenship the same way you choose your gym membership.
That’s a vision of the not-too-distant future put forward by #Balaji #Srinivasan.
Balaji – who is mostly just known by his first name – is a rockstar to the #cryptobros.
A serial tech entrepreneur and venture capitalist who believes that pretty much everything governments currently do,
tech can do better.
I watched Balaji outline his idea last autumn, at a vast conference hall on the outskirts of Amsterdam.
“We start new companies like Google;
we start new communities like Facebook;
we start new currencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum; 
can we start new countries?”
he asked,
as he ambled on stage,
dressed in a slightly baggy grey suit and loose tie.
He looked like a middle manager in a corporate accounts department.
But Balaji is a former partner at the giant Silicon Valley venture capital firm #Andreessen #Horowitz.
He has backers with deep pockets.
“Imagine a thousand different startups, each of them replacing a different legacy institution,” Balaji told the audience.
“They exist alongside the establishment in parallel,
they’re pulling away users,
they’re gaining strength,
until they become the new thing.”
If startups could replace all these different institutions, Balaji reasoned,
they could replace countries too.
He calls his idea the “#network #state”: startup nations.
Here’s how it would work:
communities form
– on the internet initially
– around a set of shared interests or values.
Then they acquire land,
becoming physical “countries” with their own laws.
These would exist alongside existing nation states, and eventually, replace them altogether.
You would choose your nationality like you choose your broadband provider.
The network state movement doesn’t just want pliant existing governments so that companies can run their own affairs.
It wants to replace governments with companies.
Many technology companies would be more benign if they were owned and governed by their users.
Users have the most to lose from tech-driven addiction and automation,
and their data generate most of the companies’ value.
User-owners would share in this value and have an incentive to keep companies from causing harm.
How might users come together to start and run more technology companies?
Bringing together a disparate and dispersed group of people is difficult;
-- economists call this the #collective #action #problem.
Influential nonprofits such as the 
Center for Humane Technology and Project Liberty can play an organizing role,
incubating a new generation of user-owned social media businesses.
While it’s a competitive field with entrenched players,
social media technology is not complex,
and there is a real hunger for more benign versions.
Existing firms can also be redesigned.
Instead of raising capital from profit-seeking corporations,
OpenAI could seek funding from users and give them representation on its board.
And with users on the board, the company might take more care to launch products safely
and dedicate resources to maintaining employment.
Most important, more of the financial gains of the AI revolution would flow to the people creating the value.
If Keith Gill,
also known as Roaring Kitty,
could organize retail investors to drive up the market value of GameStop by $10 billion,
could a similar approach have been employed to acquire Twitter for users in 2022?
Given the millions of defections from the platform since Musk purchased it,
it may not be too late.
The government can also help if it’s not headed off by Big Tech political contributions.
The Small Business Administration,
the Department of Energy and
the National Science Foundation
should encourage user ownership of the companies they fund.
The venture capitalists of Sand Hill Road will of course scream that this is socialism,
but they will be wrong.
It’s just business.
The root of the problem is that the United States and Silicon Valley in particular are dominated by what we call an 
“investor monoculture.”
Modern corporations are designed to serve investors and no one else.
About 80% of public company stock in the United States is owned by institutional investors,
most of which have one objective:
to maximize profits,
largely in the short term and without regard to the costs for society.
In 1980, their share of stocks was just 29%.
Venture capital firms,
the biggest funders of Silicon Valley startups,
have grown from under $400 billion in assets in 2010
to nearly $4 trillion today.
Their performance is measured by
“multiples on invested capital,” or “#MOIC,” as insiders call it.
Suicide rates among young people are up more than 60% since 2007,
and U.S. democracy is in danger.
-- But these are not investors’ concerns.
Regulation and advocacy can certainly make a difference.
But Big Tech is cash-rich, lawyered up and capable of running circles around regulators.
It’s time for a different approach.
When businesses are owned and governed by employees, customers, suppliers or communities, they become less predatory
and more benign.
️And as it turns out, corporations have been designed in such ways across time and cultures.
Capitalism comes in many forms.
Farmers, employees or customers own and govern some of the world’s most respected companies,
including
Ocean Spray,
Publix Super Markets,
Organic Valley,
New York Life Insurance Co. and
Vanguard.
Corporations such as Patagonia,
Rolex,
Novo Nordisk and
Ikea
are owned or controlled by nonprofits, trusts or foundations,
which have no investors
and thus face less pressure to boost profits.
Silicon Valley has examples too.
Mozilla, which operates the web browser Firefox,
is owned by a nonprofit.
It has no incentive to maximize profits,
which explains why it does not sell user data to advertisers.
Wikipedia, among the world’s most visited websites, is also run by a nonprofit,
which shows that scale and impact don’t always depend on investor capital.
A nonprofit owns a majority of ChatGPT maker OpenAI,
a design it chose to “ensure that artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity.”
But its minority investors, such as Microsoft, are profit-driven,
which has led to concerns that it’s releasing products at an irresponsible pace.
Silicon Valley is maximizing profit at everyone’s expense.
It doesn’t have to be this way
A public battle has broken out among the titans of Silicon Valley.
One side, led by #Elon #Musk, PayPal co-founder #Peter #Thiel and venture capitalists #Marc #Andreessen and #Ben #Horowitz,
is backing Donald #Trump for president.
The other, led by LinkedIn co-founder #Reid #Hoffman, is behind Kamala #Harris.
We should not make the mistake of thinking this is a battle over ideology or policy.
It’s a battle to maximize Silicon Valley’s profits regardless of the consequences for society.
On this objective, both sides agree.
Andreessen Horowitz is one of the largest investors in #cryptocurrency and #artificial #intelligence,
and Trump has signaled that he would keep the government out of its business.
Meanwhile, soon after donating $7 million to a Harris super PAC,
Hoffman called for her to oust Federal Trade Commission Chairwoman #Lina #Khan,
who has brought antitrust cases against Big Tech and introduced rules to protect workers.
Silicon Valley, a longtime engine of human achievement,
has become a significant source of human harm.
Aware of the gathering backlash, its leaders have dived into the political fray 
to protect their wealth.
Two Silicon Valley obsessions threaten the most damage:
creating human #addiction to increase profits
and #eliminating #humans altogether to decrease costs.
Social media platforms,
which started out by bringing old friends together and giving voice to the otherwise powerless,
have become “social slot machines”
compelling excessive use.
Gaming companies have a similar objective.
Teenagers today spend more than eight hours a day on screens,
fueling digital advertising revenues that reached $225 billion last year.
Meanwhile, the artificial intelligence revolution promises to cut labor costs.
A recent study by MIT economist #Daron #Acemoglu found that 50% to 70% of the growth in inequality between more and less educated workers can be attributed to automation.
Poverty rates in Silicon Valley’s home state are rising
even as AI makes Big Tech richer.
The broader prospects are equally concerning.
AI is enabling killer robots, autonomous weapons and massively destructive misinformation.
Elon Musk’s X is apparently getting money from some pretty shady people.
A federal judge ordered Tuesday that a list of investors who helped fund Musk’s $44 billion takeover of X, formerly Twitter, in October 2022 be #unsealed.
Buried among the lengthy list of nearly 100 investors are several particularly troubling figures.
One entity listed is Sean Combs Capital, LLC—better known as #Sean “#Diddy” #Combs, the rapper who has been accused of rape, assault, forcible drugging, and even implicated in a sex trafficking operation.
“I don’t know if you know this, but #Puff is an investor in Twitter,” Musk said, using Combs’s nickname. “You know, he’s a good friend of mine, we text a lot.”
The list also includes several Silicon Valley entities run by billionaires like Musk himself and backing Donald Trump in the 2024 election.
One of the first names included is Andreessen Horowitz, a venture capital firm run by #Marc #Andreessen and #Ben #Horowitz, who recently announcedthat they were backing Trump in 2024.
“It doesn’t have anything to do with the big issues that people care about,” Andreessen claimed, making clear that he was ignoring Trump’s platform on immigration and abortion, for a more favorable view on issues like crypto
—in which Andreessen and Horowitz claim to be some of the world’s largest investors.
Also on the list is Sequoia Capital, run by #Douglas #Leone and #Shaun #Maguire, who donated a whopping $1 million and $500,000 respectively to Musk’s pro-Trump super PAC, the #AmericaPAC, which is currently under investigation for the shady way it was collecting voter information.
Another investor is 8VC, a venture capitalist firm run by #Joe #Lonsdale, who also donated $1 million to Musk’s PAC in June.
Lonsdale is a co-founder of intelligence contractor and data analysis platform Palantir, which was also headed by Peter Thiel.
While it’s hardly surprising that Musk’s billionaire buddies are invested in his social media company, it’s clear that X is being heavily underwritten by the same individuals funding Trump’s campaign.
Also included on the list of investors is #Saudi #Prince #Al #Waleed #bin #Talal #Al #Saud, who has long had a stake in the social media company.
In 2015, bin Talal owned 5.2 percent of Twitter, more than the company’s co-founder Jack Dorsey
https://newrepublic.com/post/185174/elon-musk-x-investors-shadiest-people-diddy
Tech executives and investors said they were invigorated by Harris
“It’s democracy time, people,” Roy #Bahat, an investor at Bloomberg Beta, posted on LinkedIn.
Aaron #Levie, the chief executive of Box, a cloud storage company, wrote on X that Mr. Biden had shown “amazing leadership,” adding, “Now let’s go!”
The energy was a far cry from the dismay felt in tech circles recently as some of the industry’s most influential voices declared they were for Mr. Trump.
The rejuvenation could blunt the momentum of pro-Trump conservatives in Silicon Valley and entice more wealthy tech executives to throw their support — and money — behind the Democratic ticket.
Just last week, the political winds in Silicon Valley appeared to be blowing to the right.
On Tuesday, Mr. #Andreessen 
and Mr. #Horowitz, founders of the influential investment firm Andreessen Horowitz, argued in a 90-minute podcast that Mr. Trump was the best candidate for start-ups, with plans to donate millions to his campaign. Days earlier, Mr. #Musk had also endorsed Mr. Trump.
They had been preceded by David #Sacks and Chamath #Palihapitiya, two tech investors who had hosteda $12 million fund-raiser for Mr. Trump in June. Doug #Leone and Shaun #Maguire of Sequoia Capital, a top investment firm, had also said that they would vote for Mr. Trump.
Yet despite the growing sense of a MAGA takeover, not everyone in tech moved toward Mr. Trump.
“You have people with the loudest voices claiming to speak for the broader community, and the views don’t match,” said Katie Jacobs #Stanton, founder of Moxxie Ventures, a venture capital firm.
“By no means do they line up with the thousands of founders and employees and investors who live and work in Silicon Valley.”
John #Coogan, a start-up founder, wrote in a blog post in June that media coverage of Silicon Valley’s support for Mr. Trump was “at odds with reality.”
Top venture capitalists had given four times more money to Democrats than Republicans in the first part of the year, he argued.
“Trump is very unpopular in Silicon Valley in general,” Mr. #Khosla said, adding that those who were pro-Trump were “only a small constituency.”
Now liberals in tech are rejuvenated.
Mr. #Mehta said that some of his WhatsApp chats, particularly those that included Indian people in tech, exploded with excitement for Kamala Harris, whose mother is from India.
To show support for the vice president, some implored people to make small donations, while others discussed potential fund-raisers, he said.
Mr. #Hoffman, a founder of LinkedIn and a prominent Democratic donor, emphasized in essays, videos and social media posts that Mr. Trump was a danger to the rule of law and democracy.
“You can’t use business justification as your cloak, as your rationalization, for being supportive of Trump,” he said.
Mr. #Levie of Box said he had spoken to a dozen other tech and business people on Sunday who were now optimistic about the election in November.
He said he was hopeful that Democrats could deliver a positive message on issues that the tech industry cared about, including A.I., entrepreneurship and immigration reform for high-skilled workers.
“We have a chance to get excited and rally around someone,” he said.
On Sunday, Mr. #Hoffman endorsed Ms. Harris, while Mr. #Khosla called for an open process at the Democratic convention.
Mr. #Suster said his phone blew up with a collective message of “thank god.”
He estimated that three-quarters of the people he interacted with in tech were happy about Mr. Biden’s withdrawal and would not support Mr. Trump.
It’s Silicon Valley vs. Silicon Valley as Political Fights Escalate
Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman and other tech billionaires,
-- many of whom are part of the “PayPal Mafia,”
-- are openly brawling with one another over politics as tensions rise.
Less than an hour after a gunman in Butler, Pa., tried to assassinate Donald Trump this month,
David #Sacks, a venture capitalist based in San Francisco,
directed his anger about the incident toward a former colleague.
“The Left normalized this,” Mr. Sacks wrote on X, linking to a post about Reid #Hoffman, a technology investor and major Democratic donor.
Mr. Sacks implied that Mr. Hoffman, a critic of Mr. Trump who had funded a lawsuit accusing the former president of rape and defamation, had helped cause the shooting.
Elon #Musk, who leads SpaceX and Tesla and previously worked with Mr. Sacks and Mr. Hoffman,
then weighed in on X, name-checking Mr. Hoffman and saying people like him “got their dearest wish.”
In Silicon Valley, the spectacle of tech billionaire attacking tech billionaire has suddenly exploded,
as pro-Trump executives and their Democratic counterparts have openly turned on each other.
The brawling has spilled into public view online, at conferences and on podcasts,
as debates about the country’s future have turned into personal broadsides.
The animus has pit those who once worked side by side and attended each other’s weddings against one another,
fraying friendships and alliances that could shift Silicon Valley’s power centers.
The fighting has been particularly acute among the “PayPal Mafia,”
a wealthy group of tech executives
— including Mr. Hoffman, Mr. Musk, Mr. Sacks and the investor Peter #Thiel
— who worked together at the online payments company in the 1990s
and later founded their own companies or turned into high-profile investors.
Other tech leaders have also been pulled into the political spats, including Vinod #Khosla, a prominent investor, and Marc #Andreessen and Ben #Horowitz of the Silicon Valley venture firm Andreessen Horowitz.
Their unabashed vitriol is stark.
While tech leaders often criticize one another in private,
they rarely do so publicly for fear of upsetting a potential deal partner or future job prospect.
“Until a year or two ago, there was something like an #omertà in Silicon Valley,” said Roger McNamee,
a Silicon Valley venture capitalist, using a word popularized by the Italian mafia for a code of silence.
“People had fights all the time and leaders would disagree, but you wouldn’t disagree in public.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/29/technology/silicon-valley-politics-elon-musk-reid-hoffman.html?unlocked_article_code=1.-00.mbMn.lcxJeRZWmP_6&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
The moral bankruptcy of Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz
Two of Silicon Valley’s famous venture capitalists make the case for backing Trump:
-- that their ability to make money is the only value that matters.
Last week, the founders of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz declared their allegiance to Donald Trump in their customary fashion:
talking about money on a podcast.
“Sorry, Mom,” Ben Horowitz says in an episode of The Ben & Marc Show. “I know you’re going to be mad at me for this. But, like, we have to do it.”
Marc #Andreessen and #Horowitz insist they voted for Democrats until now. They are friends with liberals. They claim to be nervous about the social blowback they will receive for this, especially because of the historically progressive nature of the tech industry and the Bay Area.
But given the general movement among their class toward Trump, I think those claims about being nervous are overblown, if not performative.
There is, for instance, Elon #Musk’s pro-Trump super PAC, which has support from Sequoia Capital’s Shaun #Maguire and 8VC’s Joe #Lonsdale, among other notables.
(The Wall Street Journal reported Musk is planning to donate $45 million a month -- which Musk has denied.)
There’s the $160 million the #crypto movement has put forward in support of crypto-friendly candidates.
We can’t forget their VC pal David #Sacks speaking at the Republican National Convention.
And last but not least, there’s Trump’s running mate choice of JD #Vance, a former venture capitalist whose firm’s investors included Peter #Thiel, Eric #Schmidt, and Andreessen himself.
This isn’t a movement. It’s a clique.
The podcast itself is an extraordinary performance.
At one point, Andreessen concedes that their major problems with President Joe Biden
— the ones that led them to support Trump
— are what most voters would consider “subsidiary” issues.
“It doesn’t have anything to do with the big issues that people care about,” he says.
If we take this podcast at face value, we are to believe that these subsidiary issues are the only reason they’ve chosen to endorse and donate to Trump.
️These subsidiary issues take precedence for Andreessen and Horowitz over, say, mass deportations and Project 2025’s attempt to end no-fault divorce.
️We are looking at a simple trade against personal liberty
— abortion, the rights of gay and trans people, and possibly democracy itself
— in favor of crypto, AI, and a tax policy they like better
https://www.theverge.com/2024/7/24/24204706/marc-andreessen-ben-horowitz-a16z-trump-donations
#Andreessen #Horowitz co-founders explain why they're supporting #Trump
https://techcrunch.com/2024/07/16/andreessen-horowitz-co-founders-explain-why-theyre-supporting-trump/
TL;DR: #Dollars come first, #humanity comes last, if at all.
Over the years, #a16z has invested in several well-known companies like Airbnb, Coinbase, Instacart, Lyft, and Slack, among many others.
The firm’s founders #Marc #Andreesen and #Ben #Horowitz have recently said that they are supporting #Donald #Trump in the upcoming presidential elections.
So it comes as little surprise that they stiff the cybersecurity researcher
( @xyz3va ) that saved their bacon
The payoff from Thiel’s early gamble in Trump is a lesson that has not passed others by.
As with their other obsession, #crypto, the best time to have invested in Trump was 2016,
and the second best time is today.
We already have a word for what we’re watching now:
it’s #oligarchy.
And we’ve already seen how this plays out.
In Putin’s Russia, political and commercial interests are one and the same.
Thiel is betting
– again
– on the same phenomenon in America.
Betting that he will be first among a new breed of tech bro oligarchs
– a new super-class of #broligarchs.
In Trump’s America, there will be hard choices for everyone, including the billionaires. --
Though it may be less hard for them.
Vance has said he wants to #deregulate crypto and
unshackle AI.
He’s said he’d #dismantle Biden’s attempts to place safeguards around AI development.
And while he has it in for the legacy monopolies of Google and Facebook
– the platforms that his ideological bedfellows in the “new right” see as part of the “censorship industrial complex” suffocating rightwing speech
– Silicon Valley is betting on a gloves-off, regulation-free, pro-business #goldrush.
Another Peter Thiel acolyte was on stage at the Republican National Convention last week,
electrifying the crowd:
#Hulk #Hogan.
Hogan is less well known as one of Thiel’s longterm bets, though in some ways he’s even more instructive than Vance. In 2007, the online magazine Gawker outed Thiel and ran a series of unflattering articles about him. It took him years, but he ultimately got his revenge, covertly funding Hulk Hogan to the tune of $10m to sue the publication for invasion of privacy and forcing it into bankruptcy.
On stage at the RNC, the wrestler, a permatanned orange, ripped off his shirt for the man who increasingly looks like he’ll be America’s next president. Or, if JD Vance, is correct, the man who will prove to be the Caesar he says America needs. A man who he has already urged to fire the nation’s civil servants to “replace them with our people”, to defy the courts and rule his own way. Or, to put this in simple terms: to foment a coup.
Thiel knows what every investor knows. That a crisis is an opportunity. And that if Trump succeeds in tearing up the federal administration, there is not only billions to be made in the ensuing market turmoil but that a new breed of oligarchs, close to Caesar’s throne, will be the first to share the spoils.
And chief among them will be Thiel. It’s not a stretch to see how Palantir, his data-mining company – that under the Conservatives got its teeth into the NHS – will profile and surveil and target Caesar’s enemies. And Thiel’s track record in winning, in successfully betting on the longest of odds, on biding his time, is maybe the most chilling of all the factors in a fortnight that has started to feel like the start of a run on the bank.
Biden’s debate disaster, Trump’s victorious assassination survival, and now Silicon Valley’s ascension to the presidential ticket. The broligarchs have made their move – and the rest of us need to understand exactly what that means.