Technology

The flood underinsurance problem is arguably the largest unsolved problem in insurance. Over the last ten years, an average of $41bn per year of flood damage has gone uncovered by insurance, leaving people, businesses and governments to pay the bill. Itestimated that there are $50bn of losses caused by floods around the world. Currently, only $9bn of these are covered by insurance.

FloodFlash, an insurtech startup that offers a way for customers to insure their property for flood risk, even in high risk areas, by employing an internet-connected water-sensor has raised £1.9m in seed funding from LocalGlobe, Pentech Ventures and InsurTech Gateway. They previously secured a pre-seed/Angel round in 2017 (Hambro Perks Insurtech Gateway and one private investor).

When a flood happens, it triggers an internet-connected water-sensor and the payment is made immediately to the policy holder. A FloodFlash policy pays out a pre-agreed, fixed sum as soon as a pre-defined level of flooding occurs. A slice of the premium goes to FloodFlash in return for installing the sensor, plus automated underwriting and claims services.

Founders, Adam Rimmer and Ian Bartholomew, created the company after looking at ¶metric catastrophe bonds&. These are typically used by large corporations or governments to recover large sums in the event of a catastrophe, but many of the benefits they confer were previously unavailable to small- and medium-sized enterprises.

Rimmer says: &Every year tens of thousands of business owners lose their livelihoods because they have been unable to take out an affordable policy that protects their business. In the immediate aftermath of a catastrophic flood, people care less about dollar-for-dollar reimbursement for damages and more about whether their business will survive at all. We believe FloodFlashevent-based insurance is absolutely the best way for insurers to cover higher-risk areas.&

FloodFlash is regulated by the FCA and is currently carrying out a live pilot for its policies with a select group of SMEs in parts of the UK with significant flood risk, including Carlisle.

Insurance capacity for FloodFlash policies is provided by Everest Re through their syndicate at Lloydof London.

The startup has been working as part of the InsurTech Gateway, the InsurTech focused incubator since mid 2017.

Tara Reeves, partner at LocalGlobe, said: &Climate change is leading to more extreme weather events, but these are often hard to insure. Parametric insurance dramatically reduces underwriting and loss adjustment costs, and those savings can be passed on to the consumer. Adam and Ianbackground in risk modelling and hydrology is uniquely suited to this challenge.&

Eddie Anderson, partner at Pentech Ventures, said: &FloodFlash is a business that has global potential. There is no country on the planet where severe or freak weather does not cause havoc, whether it is flood or hurricane. We think markets around the world will welcome this innovative, cost-effective way to sell insurance that has been adapted to take into account the way we live today.&

A colleague, who shall remain nameless (because privacy is not dead), gave a thumbs down to a recent column in the NYT. The complaint was that the writer had attacked tech companies (mostly but not exclusively Facebook) without offering any solutions for these all-powerful techbro CEOs& orchestral failures to grasp the messy complexities of humanity at a worldwide scale.

Challenge accepted.

The thought experiment: Fixing FB

We&ll start with Facebook because, while itby no means the only tech company whose platform contains a bottomless cesspit of problems, it is the most used social platform in the West; the de facto global monopoly outside China.

And, well, even Zuckerberg& thinks it needs fixing. Or at least that its PR needs fixing — given he made &Fixing Facebook& his‘personal challenge& of the year this year— proof, if any more were needed, of his incredible capacity for sounding tone-deaf.

For a little more context on these annual personal challenges, Zuckerberg once previously set himself the challenge of reading a new book every two weeks. So it seems fair to ask: Is Facebook a 26-book sized fix

If we&re talking in book metaphor terms, the challenge of fixing Facebook seems at least on the scale of the Library of Alexandria, say, given the volume of human content being daily fenced. It may, more likely, bemultiple libraries of Alexandria. Just as, if Facebook content was housed in a physical library, the company would require considerably more real estate that the largest library of the ancient world to house its staggeringly-massive-and-expanding-by-the-second human content collection — which also of course forms the foundation of its business.

Zuckerberg himself has implied that his 2018 challenge — to fix the company he founded years before the iPhone arrived to supercharge the smartphone revolution and, down that line, mobilize Facebooksocietal ‘revolution& — is his toughest yet, and likely to take at least two or three years before it bears fruit, not just the one. So Facebookfounder is already managing our expectations and hebarely even started.

In all likelihood, if Facebook were left alone to keep standing ethically aloof, shaping and distributing information at vast scale while simultaneously denying thatediting — to enjoy another decade of unforgivably bad judgement calls (so, basically, to ‘self-regulate&; or, as the New York Times put it, for Zuckerberg to be educated at societal expense) — then his 2018 personal challenge would become just ‘Chapter One, Volume One& in a neverending life‘work-in-progress&.

Great for Mark, far less great for humans and democratic societies all over the world.

Frankly, there has to be a better way. So herean alternative plan for fixing Facebook — or at least a few big ideas to get policymakers& juices flowing… Bear in mind this is a thought exercise so we make no suggestions for how to enact the plan — we&re just throwing ideas out there to get folks thinking.

Step 1: Goodbye network of networks

Facebook has been allowed to acquire several other social communication networks — most notably photo-focused social network Instagram [1BN monthly active users] and messaging app platform WhatsApp [1.5BN] — so Zuckerberg has not just ONE massively popular social network (Facebook: [2.2BN]) but a saccharine suite of eyeball-harvesting machines.

Last month he revealed his sunless empire casts its shadow across a full2.5BNindividuals if you factor in all his apps — albeit, that was an attempt to distract investors from the stock price car crash conference call that was to follow. But the staggering size of the empire is undeniable.

So the first part of fixing Facebook is really simple: No dominant social network should be allowed to possess (or continue to possess) multiple dominant social networks.

Thereliterally no good argument for why this is good for anyone other than (in Facebookcase) Zuckerberg and Zuckerbergshareholders. Which is zero reason not to do something thatnet good for the rest of humanity. On one level itjust basic math.

Setting aside (for just a second) the tangible damages inflicted upon humans by unregulated social media platforms with zero editorial values and a threadbare minimum of morality which wafts like gauze in the slipstream of supercharged and continuously re-engineered growth and engagement engines that DO NOT FACTOR HUMAN COST into their algorithmic calculations — allowing their masters to preside over suprasocietal revenue stripping mega-platforms — which, to be clear, is our primary concern here — the damage to competition and innovation alone from Zuckerberg owning multiple social networks is both visible and quantifiable.

Just ask Snapchat. Because, well, you can&t ask the social networks that don&t existbecause Zuckerberg commands a full flush of attention-harvesting networks. So take a good, long, hard look at all those Stories clones hecopypasted right across his social network of social networks. Not very innovative is it

And even if you don&t think mega-platforms cause harm by eroding civic and democratic values (against, well, plenty of evidence to the contrary), if you value creativity, competition and consumer choice itequally a no brainer to tend your markets in a way that allows multiple distinct networks to thrive, rather than let one megacorp get so powerful itessentially metastasized into a Borg-like entity capable of enslaving and/or destroying any challenger, ideaor even value in its path. (And doing all that at the same time as monopolizing its users& attention.)

We see this too in how Facebook applies its technology in a way that seeks toreshape laws in its business modelfavor. Because while individuals break laws, massively powerful megacorps merely lean their bulk to squash them into a more pleasing shape.

Facebook is not just spending big on lobbying lawmakers (and it sure is doing that), itusing technology and the brute force of its platform to pound on and roll over the rule of law by deforming foundational tenets of society. Privacy being just one of them.

And itnot doing this reshaping for the good of humanity. Oh no. While democratic societies have rules to protect the vulnerable and foster competition and choice because they are based on recognizing value in human life,Facebookmotives are 100% self-interested and profit-driven.

The company wants to rewrite rules globally to further expand its bottom line. Hence its mission to pool all humans into a single monetizable bucket — no matter if people don&t exactly meshtogether because people aren&t actually bits of data.If you want to be that reductive make soup, not a &global community&.

So step one to fixing Facebook is simple: Break up Zuckerbergempire.

In practical terms that means forcing Facebook to sell Instagram and WhatsApp — at a bare minimum. A single network is necessarily less potent than a network of networks. And it becomes, at least theoretically possible for Facebook to be at risk from competitive forces.

You would also need to at keep a weather eye on social VR, in case Oculus needs to be taken out of Zuckerberghands too. Thereless of an immediate imperative there, certainly. This VR cycle is still as dead as the tone of voice the Facebook founder used to describe the things his avatar was virtually taking in when he indulged in a bit of Puerto Rico disaster tourism for an Oculus product demo last year.

That said, therestill a strong argument to say that Facebook, the dominant force of the social web and then the social mobile web, should not be allowed to shape and dictate even a nascent potential future disruptor in the same social technology sphere.

Not if you value diversity and creativity — and, well, a lot more besides.

But all these enforced sells-offs would just raise lots more money for Facebook! I hear you cry. Thatnot necessarily a bad thing — so long as it gets, shall we say, well spent. The windfall could be used to fund a massive recruitment drive to properly resource Facebookbusiness in every market where it operates.

And I do mean MASSIVE. Not the ‘10,000 extra security and moderation staff& Facebook has said will hire by the end of this year (raising the headcount it has working on these critical tasks to around 20k in total).

To be anywhere near capable of properly contextualizing content across a platform thatactively used by 2BN+ humans — and therefore to be able to rapidly and effectively spot and quash malicious manipulation, hateful conduct and so on, and thus responsibly manage and sustain a genuine global ‘community& — the company would likely need to add hundreds of thousands of content reviewers/moderators. Which would be very expensive indeed.

Yet Facebook paid a cool $19BN for WhatsApp back in 2014 — so an enforced sell off of its other networks should raise a truck tonne of cash to held fund a vastly larger ‘trust and safety& personnel bill. (While AI systems and technologies can help with the moderation challenge, Zuckerberg himself has admitted that AI alone won&t scale to the content challenge for &many years& to come — if indeed it can scale at all.)

Unfortunately thereanother problem though. The human labor involved in carrying out content moderation across Facebook2BN+ user mega-platform is ethically horrifying because the people who Facebook contracts for ‘after the fact& moderation necessarily live neck deep in its cesspit. Their sweating toil is to keep paddling the shit so Facebooksewers don&t back up entirely and flood the platform with it.

So, in a truly ideal ‘fixed Facebook& scenario, there wouldn&t be a need for this kind of dehumanizing, industrialized content review system — which necessitates that eyes be averted and empathy disengaged from any considerations of a traumatized ‘clean up& workforce.

Much like Thomas MooreUtopia, Zuckerbergmega-platform requires an unfortunate underclass of worker doing its dirty work. And just as the existence of slaves in Utopiamade it evident that the ‘utopian vision& being presented was not really all it seemed, Facebookoutsourced teams of cheap labor — whose day job is to sit and watch videos of human beheadings, torture, violence etc; or make a microsecond stress-judgement on whether a piece of hate speech is truly hateful enough to be rendered incapable of monetization and pulled from the platform — the awful cost on both sides of that human experience undermines Zuckerbergclaim that he&building global community&.

Moore coined the word ‘utopia& from the Greek — and its two components suggest an intended translation of ‘no place&. Or perhaps, better yet, it was supposed to be a pun — as Margaret Atwoodhas suggested — meaning something along the lines of ‘the good place that simply doesn&t exist&. Which might be a good description for Zuckerberg&global community&.

So we&ll come back to that.

Because the next step in the plan should help cut the Facebook moderation challenge down to a more manageable size…

Step 2) Break up Facebook into lots of market-specific Facebooks

Instead of there being just one Facebook (comprised of two core legal entities: Facebook USA and Facebook International, in Ireland), ittime to break up Facebookbusiness into hundreds of market specific Facebooks that can really start to serve their local communities. You could go further still and subdivide at a state, county or community level.

A global social network is an oxymoron. Humans are individuals and humanity is made up of all sorts of peoples, communities and groupings. So to suggest the whole of humanity needs to co-exist on the exact same platform, under the exact same overarching set of ‘community standards&, is — truly — the stuff of megalomaniacs.

To add insult to societal and cultural injury, Facebook — the company that claims itdoing this (while ignoring the ‘awkward& fact that what itbuilding isn&t functioning equally everywhere, even in its own backyard) — has an executive team thatalmost exclusively white and male, and steeped in a very particular Valley ‘Kool Aid& techno-utopian mindset thatwrapped in the U.S. flag and bound to the U.S. constitution.

Which is another way of saying thatthe polar opposite of thinking global.

Facebook released its fifth annual diversity report this yearwhich revealed it makinglittle progress in increasing diversity over the past five years. In senior leadership roles, Facebook2018 skew is 70:30 male female, and a full 69.7% white. While the company was fully 77% male and 74% white in 2014.

Facebookongoing lack of diversity is not representative of the U.S. population, let alone reflective of the myriad regions its product reaches around the planet. So the idea that an executive team with such an inexorably narrow, U.S.-focused perspective could meaningfully — let alone helpfully — serve the whole of humanity is a nonsense. And the fact that Zuckerberg is still talking in those terms merely spotlights an abject lack of corporate diversity and global perspective at his company.

If he genuinely believes his own &global community& rhetoric hefailing even harder than he looks. Most probably, though, itjust a convenient marketing label to wallpaper the growth strategy thatdelivered for Facebookshareholders for years — by the company pushing into and dominating international markets.

Yet, and herethe rub, without makingcommensurate investments in resourcing its business in international markets….

This facet of Facebookbusiness becomes especially problematic when you consider how the company has been pouring money into subsidizing (or seeking to) Internet access in emerging markets. So it is spending lots and lots of money, just not on keeping people safe.

Initially, Facebook spent money to expand the reach of its platform via its Internet.org ‘Free Basics& initiative which was marketed as a ‘humanitarian&, quasi-philanthropic mission to ‘wire the world& — though plenty of outsiders and some target countries viewed it not as charity but as a self-serving and competitive-crushing business development tactic. (Including India — which blocked Free Basics, but not before Facebook had spent millions on adstrying to get locals to lobby the regulator on its behalf).

More recently itbeenputting money into telecom infrastructure a bit less loudly — presumably hoping a less immediately self-serving approach to investing in infrastructure in target growth markets will avoid another highly politicized controversy.

Itmore wallpapering though: Connectivity investments are a business growth strategy predicated on Facebook removing connectivity barriers that stand in the way of Facebook onboarding more eyeballs.

And given the amounts of money Facebooks has been willing to spend to try to lodge its product in the hands of more new Internet users — to the point where, in some markets, Facebook effectivelyis the Internet — iteven less forgivable that the company has failed to properly resource its international operations and stop its products from having sometruly tragic consequences.

The cost to humanity for Facebook failing to operate with due care is painfully visible and horribly difficult to quantify.

Not that Zuckerberg has let those inconvenient truths stop him from continuing to suggest hethe man to build a community for the planet. But again that rather implies Facebookproblems grow out of Facebooklack of external perspective.

Aside from the fact that we are all equally human, there is no one homogenous human community that spans the entire world. So when Zuckerberg talks about Facebook‘global community& he is, in effect, saying nothing — or saying something almost entirely meaningless as to render down to a platitudinous sludge. (At least unless his desire is indeed a Borg-esque absorption of other cultures — into a ‘resistance is futile& homogenous ‘Californormification& of the planet. And we must surely hope itnot. Although FacebookFree Basics have been accused of amounting to digital colonialism.)

Zuckerberg does seem to have quasi-realized the contradiction lurking at the the tin heart of his ‘global& endeavor, though. Which is why hetalked suggestively about creating a ‘Supreme Court of Facebook‘ — i.e. to try to reboot the pitifully unfit for purpose governance structure.

But talk of ‘community-oriented governance& has neither been firmed up nor formalized into a tangible structural reform plan.

While the notion of a Supreme Court of Facebook, especially, does risk sounding worryingly like Zuckerberg fancies his own personal Star Chamber, the fact heeven saying this sort of stuff shows he knows Facebook has planet-straddling problems that are far, far too big for its minimalist Libertarian ‘guardrails& to manage or control. And in turn that suggests the event horizon of scaling Facebookbusiness model has been reached.

Aka: Hello $120BN market cap blackhole.

&Itjust not clear to me that us sitting in an office here in California are best placed to always determine what the policies should be for people all around the world,& Zuckerberg said earlier THIS YEAR— 2018! — in what must surely count as the one of the tardiest enlightenments of a well educated public person in the Western world, period.

&I&ve been working on and thinking through,& he continued his mental perambulation. &How can you set up a more democratic or community-oriented process that reflects the values of people around the world&

Well, Mark, herean idea to factor into your thinking:Facebookproblem is Facebookmassive size.

So why not chop the platform up into market specific operations that are free to make some of their own decisions and let them develop diverse corporate cultures of their own. Most importantly empower them to be operationally sensitive to the needs of local communities— and so well placed to responsively serve them.

Imagine the Facebook brand as a sort of loose ‘franchise&, with each little Facebook at liberty to intelligently adapt the menu to local tastes. And each of these ‘content eateries& taking pride in the interior of its real estate, with dedicated managers who make their presence felt and whose jobs are to ensure great facilities but no violent food fights.

There would also need to be some core principles too, of course. A set of democratic and civic values that all the little Facebooks are bound to protect — to push back against attempts by states or concerted external forces seeking to maliciously hijack and derail speech.

But switch around the current reality — a hulkingly massive platform attached to a relatively tiny (in resources terms) business operation — and the slavering jabberwocky that Zuckerberg is now on a personal mission to slay might well cease to exist, as multiple messy human challenges get cut down to a more manageable size. Not every single content judgement call on Facebook needs to scale planet-wide.

Multiple, well resourced market-specific Facebooks staffed locally so they can pro-actively spot problems and manage their communities would not be the same business at all. Facebook would become an even more biodiverse ecosystem — of linked but tonally distinct communities — which could even, in time, diverge a bit on the feature front, via adding non-core extras, based on market specific appetites and tastes.

There would obviously have to be basic core social function interoperability — so that individual users of different Facebooks could still connect and communicate. But beyond a bit of interplay (a sort of ‘Facebook Basics&) why should there be a requirement that everyoneFacebook experience be exactly the same

While Facebook talks as if it has a single set of community standards, the reality is fuzzier. For example it applies stricter hate speech rules to content moderation in a market like Germany, which passed a social media hate speech law last year. Those sorts of exceptions aren&t going to go away either; as more lawmakers wake up to the challenges posed by the platform itclear more demands will be placed on Facebook to regulate the content on the platform.

So, Zuckerberg, why not step actively into a process of embracing greater localization — in a way thatsensitive to cultural and societal norms — and use the accrued political capital from that to invest in defending the platformcore principles

This approach won&t work in every market, clearly. But allowing for a greater tonality of content — a more risqué French Facebook, say, vs the ‘no-nipples please& U.S. flavor — coupled with greater sensitivity to market mood andfeedback could position Facebook to work with democracies and strengthen civic and cultural values, instead of trying to barge its way along by unilaterally imposing the U.S. constitution on the rest of the planet.

Facebook as it is now, globally scaled but under-resourced, is not in a position to enforce its own community standards. It only does so when or if it receives repeat complaints (and even then it won&t always act on them).

Or when a market has passed legislation enforcing action with a regime of fines (a recent report by a UK parliamentary committee, examining the democratic implications of social media fueled disinformation, notes that one in six of Facebookmoderators now works in Germany — citing that as &practical evidence that legislation can work&).

So there are very visible cracks in both its claim to be &building global community& or even that it has community standards at all, given it doesn&t pro-actively enforce them (in most markets). So why not embrace a full fragmentation of its platform — and let a thousand little blue ships set sail!

And if Facebook really wants one community principle to set as its pole star, one rule to rule them all (and to vanquish its existential jabberwocky), it should swear to put life before data.

Locally tuned, culturally sensitive Facebooks that stand upfor democratic values and civic standardsshould also help rework the moderation challenge — removing the need for Facebook to have the equivalent of sweat shops based on outsourcing repeat human exposure to violent and toxic content.

This element is one of the ugliest sides of the social media platform business. But with empowered, smaller businesses operating in closer proximities to the communities being served, Facebook stands a better chance of getting on top of its content problems — and getting out of a reactive crisis mode, piled high with problems, where itcurrently stuck. Instead it could take up a position in the community intelligence vanguard where its workforce can root out damaging abuse before it can go viral,metastasize and wreak wider societal harms.

Proper community managementcould also, over time, encourage a more positive sharing environment to develop — where posting hateful stuff doesn&t get rewarded with feedback loops. Certainly not algorithmically, as it indeed has been.

As an additional measure, a portion of the financial windfall gained from selling off Facebookother social networkscould be passed directly to independent trustees appointed to the Chan Zuckerberg Foundation for spending on projects intended to counter the corrosive effects of social media on information veracity and authenticity — such as by funding school age educational programs in critical thinking.

Indeed, UK lawmakers have already called for a social media levy for a similar purpose.

Step 3) Open the black boxes

There would still be a Facebook board and a Facebook exec team in a head office in California sitting atop all thesecommunity-oriented Facebooks — which, while operationally liberated, would still be making use of its core technology and getting limited corporate steerage. So there would still be a need for regulators to understand what Facebookcode is doing.

Algorithmic accountability of platform technologies is essential. Regulators need to be able to see the inputs underlying the information hierarchies that these AI engines generate, and compare those against the outputs of that shaping. Which means audits. So opening the commercial black boxes — and the data holdings — to regulatory oversight.

Discrimination is easier to get away with in darkness. But Mega-platforms have shielded their commercial IP from public scrutiny and itonly when damaging effects have surfaced in the public consciousness that users have got a glimpse of whatbeen going on.

Facebookdefensehas been to say it was naive in the face of malicious activity like Russian-backed election meddling. Thathardly an argument for more obscurity and more darkness. If you lack awareness and perspective, ask for expert help Mark.

Lawmakers have also accused the company of willfully obstructing good faith attempts at investigating scandals such as Cambridge Analytica data misuse, Kremlin-backed election interference, or how foreign money flowed into its platform seeking to influence the UKBrexit referendum result, in just a few of multiple examples.

Willful obstruction to good faith, democratically minded political interrogation really isn&t a sustainable strategy. Nor an ethically defensible one.

Given the vast, society-deforming size of these platforms politicians are simply not just going to give up and go home. There will have to be standards to ensure these mega-powerful information distribution systems aren&t at risk of being gamed or being biased or otherwise misused. And those standards will have to be enforced. The enforcement must also be checked and verified. So, yes, yet more audits.

Mega-platforms have also benefited from self-sustaining feedback loops based on their vast reach and data holdings, allowing them to lock in and double down on a market dominating position by, for example, applying self-learning algorithms trained on their own user data or via A/B testing at vast, vast scale to optimize UX design to maximize engagement and monopolize attention.

User choice in this scenario is radically denuded, and competition increasingly gets pushed back and even locked out, without such easy access to equivalently massive pools of data.

If a mega-platform has optimized the phasing and positioning of — for example — a consent button by running comparative tests to determine which combination yields the fewest opt outs, is it fair or right to the user being asked to ‘choose& Are people being treated with respect Or, well, like lab rats

Breaking Facebookplatform into lots of Facebooks could also be an opportunity to rethink its data monopoly. To argue that its central business should not have an absolute right to the data pool generated by each smaller, market specific Facebook.

Part of the regulatory oversight could include a system of accountability over how Facebookparent business can and cannot use pooled data holdings.

If Facebookexecutive team had to make an ethics application to a relevant regulatory panel to request and justify access each time the parent business wanted to dip into the global data pool or tap data from a particular regional cluster of Facebooks, how might that change thought processes within the leadership team

Facebookown (now former) CSO, Alex Stamos, identified problems baked into the current executive team‘business as usual& thinking — writing emphatically in an internalmemo earlier this year: &We need to build a user experience thatconveys honesty and respect,not one optimized to get people to click yes to giving us more access. We need to intentionallynot collect datawhere possible, and to keep itonly as long as we are using itto serve people… We need tobe willing to pick sideswhen there are clear moral or humanitarian issues. And we need to beopen, honest and transparentabout challenges and what we are doing to fix them.&

It seems very unlikely that an application to the relevant regulators asking for ‘Europe-wide data so we can A/B test user consent flows to get more Europeans to switch on facial recognition‘ would pass the ‘life before data& community standard litmus test.

And, well, itwell established that the fact of being watched and knowing ithappening has the power to change behavior. After all, Facebookplatform is a major testament to that.

So it may be more that itexternal guidance — rather than a new internal governance model — which Facebook sorely lacks. Some external watchers to watch its internal watchmen.

Step 4) Remove Zuckerberg from (his) office

Public companies are supposed to be answerable to their shareholders. Thanks to the share structure that Mark Zuckerberg put in place at Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg is answerable to no one except himself. And despite Facebookyears of scandals, he does not appear to haveever felt the urge to sack himself.

When the idea of personal accountability was brought up with him, in a recent podcast interview with Kara Swisher, he had a moment of making a light joke of it — quipping &do you really want me to fire myself right now For the news& before falling back on his line that: &I think we should do whatgonna be right for the community.&

And, you know what, the joke was exactly right: The idea that Zuckerberg would terminate his own position is both laughable and ludicrous. It is a joke.

Which means Facebookexecutive structure is also a joke because there is zero accountability at the highest level — beyond Markpersonal threshold for shame or empathy — and thatnow a global problem.

Zuckerberg has more power than most of the worldelected politicians (and arguably some of the worldpolitical leaders). Yet he can&t be kicked out of his office, nor lose his CEO seat at any ballot box. Hea Facebook fixture — short of a literal criminal conviction or otherwise reputation terminating incident.

While you could argue that not being answerable to the mercenary whims of shareholder pressure is a good thing because it frees Zuckerberg to raise business transformation needs above returns-focused investor considerations (albeit, letsee how his nerve holds after that $120BN investor punch) — his near 15-year record in the CEOchair counters any suggestion that hea person who makes radical and sweeping changes to Facebookmodus operandi.

On the contrary, heshown himself a master of saying ‘oops we did it again!& and then getting right back to ‘screwing things up& as usual. Thateither rank incompetence or intention.

Healso demonstrated a consistent disbelief that Facebookplatform creates problems — preferring to couch connecting people as a glorious humanitarian mission from whence life-affirming marriages and children flow. Rather than seeing risks in putting global megaphones in the hands of anyone with an urge to shout.

As recently as November 2016 he was still dismissing the idea that political disinformation spread via Facebook had been in any way impactful on the US presidential election — as a &pretty crazy idea& — yet his own business had staffed divisions dedicated to working with US politicians to get their campaign messages out. It shouldn&t be rocket science to see a contradiction there. But until very recentlyZuckerberg apparently couldn&t.

The fact of him also being the original founder of the business does not help in the push for disruptive change to Facebook itself. The best person to fix a radically broken product is unlikely to be the person whose entire adult life has been conjoined to a late night college dorm room idea spat online — and which, through him sticking and sticking with it, ended up spinning up and out into a fortune. And then into a major, major global mess.

The ‘no better person than me to fix it& line can also be countered by pointing to Zuckerbergpersonal history of playing fast and loose with other peopledata (from the &dumb fucks& comment all the way back in his student days to years of deliberate platform choices at Facebook that made peopleinformation public by default); and by suggesting entrenched challenges would surely benefit from fresh eyes, new thinking and a broader perspective.

Add to that, Zuckerberg has arguably boxed himself in, politically speaking, thanks to a series of disingenuous, misleading and abstruseclaims and statements made to lawmakers — limiting his room formanoeuvre or for rethinking his approach; let alone being able to genuinely compromise or make honest platform changes.

His opportunity to be radically honest about Facebookproblems probably passed years and years back — when he was busy working hard on his personal challenge to wear a tie everyday [2009]. Or only eat animals he kills himself [2011].

By 2013personal challenge, itpossible that Zuckerberg had sensed something new in the data stream that might be coming down the pipes towards him — as he set himself the challenge of expanding his personal horizons (not that he put it that way) by &meeting a new person every day who does not work at Facebook&.

Meeting a new person every day who did work at Facebook would have been far too easy, see.

Is it even possible to think outside the box when your entire adult life has been spent tooling away inside the same one

Step 5) Over to you…

What are your radicalsolutions for fixing Facebook Should Zuckerberg stay or should he go What do you want lawmakers to do about social media What kinds of policy interventions might set these mega-platforms on a less fractious path Or do you believe all this trouble on social media is a storm in a teacup that will blow over if we but screw our courage to the sticking place and wait for everyone to catch up with the cardinal Internet truth that nothing online is what it seems…

Ideas in the comments pls…

Letbe honest, if you use a receiver as the hub of your home entertainment system, you probably only use about a quarter of the buttons, dials and inputs on it, at most. Not everyone needs all the bells and whistles of a receiver-driven surround sound system. For those looking to get their sound with a considerably smaller footprint, 2.1 powered systems consisting of a pair of bookshelf speakers and a subwoofer are just the ticket, and Edifier‘s $300 S350DB is solid option.

Setup is simple: just connect both speakers to the subwoofer and you&re good to go. The sub has a plethora of input options, so you can easily route your entire setup through it. Itgot a pair of 3.5mm AUX inputs, optical and coaxial, along with Bluetooth connectivity. Thereno HDMI, which is fine for my setup but might not be for others&.

The speakers and sub are sturdy. They have a nice weight to them and don&t feel cheap. The system is also easy on the eyes — itstriking, yet understated, with both speakers and the sub clad in a dark, cherry wood-like grain. It would look right at home in any modern home theater setup, but also has a great retro appeal to it. The bass, treble and volume knobs flanking the right speaker are a nice touch, providing a solid tactile sensation in a world beset by feedback-less touch screens. The volume can also be controlled with the included remote.

The systempair of bookshelf speakers pack 3/4-inch titanium dome tweeters, which each output 40W total, while the 8-inch subwoofer puts out 70W. The subwoofer can be cranked up to wall-shaking, neighbor-infuriating levels, but also dialed back considerably while still picking up the nuances of the low end from every source I threw at it.

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The system has a good value/quality-to-price ratio. At $300, itcheaper than many high-end sound bars, and can stand on its own as the hub of your homesound system. The S350DB speakers warmly and faithfully reproduce sound equally well from cable TV, set-top boxes, video game consoles old and new, Blu-rays and even vinyl. I tried everything from classical to hip-hop albums using the system and I was impressed with the fidelity and clarity of the playback on every genre, even with my middling quality record player. It also has Bluetooth V 4.1 APTX, which promises lossless sound from whichever device you&re streaming. The Bluetooth was easy to connect. It never dropped the connection and always sounded rich and full.

My few complaints are more like nitpicks. For one, the speakers don&t have grill covers. Which, for some, is an aesthetic deal breaker. The tweeters haven&t been quite the dust magnet I&d feared so far, but time will tell if that design choice affects their lifespan. The remote is a little… odd. Itshaped like a hockey puck, which makes it somewhat unwieldy. I still haven&t quite figured out the best way to hold it yet. The buttons are laid out well, however, with the play/pause button in the center pulling double duty as the mute button (which is not noted on the remote itself, I, somewhat embarrassingly, had to consult the manual to figure this out).

The remote was also somewhat persnickety in registering button presses, requiring somewhat precise aim at the speaker (which houses the active input indicator LEDs). I also wish the wire connecting the right speaker to the subwoofer was a little longer. I&m somewhat limited in how much I can spread the system out since the right speaker can be no more than a few feet from the sub.

Nitpicks aside, theS350DB from Edifier is a good, budget-friendly option that will cover the home audio needs for most people. It packs a punch when you need it to, but it can easily rein it in and show its softer, subtler side.