1 Cash-strapped California (San Francisco Chronicle) California will run out of cash by March 1 if the Legislature does not take immediate action, Controller John Chiang told budget leaders at the Capitol in a letter. The controller recommends borrowing and delaying some payments to deal with the shortfall, which he projects will last seven weeks. Absent that kind of action, which lawmakers and the administration of Gov. Jerry Brown say is assured, the state would probably have to send IOUs and delay tax returns.
The controller said the overarching problem is that, as of the end of the calendar year, the state was spending $2.6 billion more than was included in the budget while tax revenue coming into state coffers was $2.6 billion below projections. He said $3.3 billion must somehow be found if the state is going to bridge the seven-week cash shortfall period, but the situation could get worse if there is more overspending and further reductions in tax income. Part of the problem, Chiang said, stems from court rulings. On Monday, a federal judge in Los Angeles issued a preliminary order blocking planned 10% rate cuts to providers of Medi-Cal, the state's health program for the poor.
2 Facebook millionaires (The New York Times) The graffiti artist who took Facebook stock instead of cash for painting the walls of the social network’s first headquarters made a smart bet. The shares owned by the artist, David Choe, are expected to be worth upward of $200 million when Facebook stock trades publicly later this year. The social network company announced its $5 billion public offering, which is expected to value the whole company at $75 billion to $100 billion. Ultimately, that offering will mint a lot of billionaires and millionaires. Some of them are well known, like Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s co-founder, but many others are not household names.
Facebook’s first outside investor, Peter Thiel, the billionaire contrarian, led a $500,000 investment in Facebook in late 2004. He has 44.7 million shares that could be worth more than $2 billion. Elevation Partners, the venture capital firm of Bono, the U2 frontman, paid $120 million for a chunk of Facebook’s shares in 2010 and could receive a payout that would help mask less sage investments in Palm and Forbes. Accel Partners, whose principal partner, Jim Breyer, invested in the start-up seven years ago, holds 201.4 million shares. Accel could have a thousand-fold return on some of its investment.
Netscape’s 1995 offering made millionaires of scores of people, including its founder Marc Andreessen, now a Silicon Valley venture capitalist who invested early in Facebook and holds 3.6 million shares worth nearly $200 million. When Google went to market with its $1.67 billion I.P.O. in 2004, hundreds of people joined the millionaire ranks, including secretaries, a company masseuse and a company chef. Bill Gates controlled only 49.2% of Microsoft as it went public in 1986. Google’s co-founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, each owned about 15% of their company when it went public in 2004.
3 Mark Zuckerberg’s masterplan for ‘sharing economy’ (The Guardian) Mark Zuckerberg believes he is not changing human nature but enabling it. He has created the platform for the sharing economy. He sees Facebook as an evolutionary step beyond Google and other net services. "They crawl the web," he said in an interview. "But there's nothing you can crawl to get information about people. It's all in our minds. So in order to have that service, you need to build the tools that let people share."
The two giants of the net are at war over what is called signal generation: the ability to get us to generate data about ourselves – who we are, where we are, what we like, whom we like, what we buy, what we want, what we know, what we want to know – so they can serve us more relevant and valuable content, services, and advertising. "In the world before the internet and things like Facebook, there was a huge amount of privacy through obscurity," he says. Now, he believes, the net gives us choice. "The default in society today still is, OK, I should not share it. The by‑far default today is that everything's anonymous," Zuckerberg laments. "In the future, things should be tied to your identity, and they'll be more valuable that way." There is the master plan.
4 The direction of global protests (Dawn) If 2011 felt, at times, like a rerun of 1848 with stereo headphones, 2012 is already exhibiting some of the features that made 1849 a byword for reaction. In Egypt, the secular democratic forces can still lead hundreds of thousands of youth and workers on to the streets, but Salafist Islam can gather seven million votes in the slums and villages. In Greece, the euphoria one could sense among the indignados camped in Syntagma Square last June has given way to an angry silence; to fragmented, anomic acts and the struggle to survive.
Yet in the past 12 months the technological drivers of the revolts led by young people have powered forward. There are now nearly one billion Facebook users: two-fifths of them joined since the start of the Arab Spring. By Feb 23, 2012, on current trend, the 500 millionth Twitter account will be created — the 400 millionth was created just four months ago, on the day Egyptians clashed with the army in an attempt to retake Tahrir Square.
So what remains of the revolution? As the events recede and solidify it becomes clear that 2011 was, above all, a cultural revolution: a loss of fear in the dictatorships of north Africa; a loss of apathy among educated youth in Europe, Latin America and the US. And the revolution consisted of this: a mass rejection of the values dominant during 20 years of free-market capitalism. It was free-market ideology that painted Hosni Mubarak, Muammar Qadhafi and Zine El Abidine Ben Ali as icons of economic progress. Free-market norms of regulation that created the banking crisis, and then demanded we should bankrupt states instead of banks. And free-market patterns of wealth distribution that created the most potent political meme of 2011 — which was not the Egyptian slogan ‘Bread, freedom, social justice’ but ‘We are the 99 per cent’.
5 South African youth desperately seek education (Daily dispatch) Yesterday we reported that the Eastern Cape’s four universities were unable to accommodate 60,000 matriculants who applied for places. Today we report that a number of pupils are unable to find places in bursting-at-the-seams township schools. These pupils – both primary and high – have been referred to former Model-C schools, which in turn claim they are filled to capacity. Where on earth are these young people supposed to go? What are they to do?
A whopping 65.8% of South Africa’s population is estimated to be under the age of 30. Countries with a disproportionately large population of young people are said to have a youth bulge. This can have a disastrous outcome. Research by the advocacy group Population Action International shows that between 1970 and 1999, 80% of civil conflicts occurred in countries where 60% of the population or more were under the age of 30.
6 Statistics from The Economic Times: India’s GDP at constant prices of Rs 48.9trn is just 10 times Facebook’s valuation. India's two most valuable companies Reliance and Oil and Natural Gas Commission put together have a market capitalisation worth that of Facebook.
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