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Being recognized by the World Economic Forum as a Young Global Leaderis not easy.And neither was it building thenew currency as admitted byPeter Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal. Managing funds right from $700 million as president of Clarium to $2 billion as a managing partner of FoundersFund, Peters adrenaline has always come from informal innovation-focused startups and mentoring them. He is also known for being the first outside investor in Facebook, Inc. Presently, he presently is aninvestor and co-founder of successful investment and hedge funds management firms like Clarium Capital Management, Valar Ventures,Mithril Capital Management, and FoundersFund. Peter sold PayPal to eBay for $1.5 billion in 2002.

On his 54th birthday, we bring a few interesting yet less known facts about Peter Thiel.

Name: Peter Andreas ThielDate of Birth: 11th October 1967Net Worth: $3.7 Billion (As of October 2021)

Bullish about Silicon Valley being the torch-bearer of American success for years to come, Peter cares less for the education than the impact to the society,the startup founders can bring about through their offering. Branded as a contrarian who likes bashing brands and companies, he does see monopolies likeGoogle driving success more than incremental improvement in building technology companies like Microsoft.

Peter is also pretty biased in the companies he has invested (e.g. Space X, Lyft, Facebook) in and always shoots down the competition stating the reasons why they would not succeed. To mosts dismay, it sounds pretty true, considering the practices of the companies he corners. Even Twitters growth, he had commented, is nowhere close to its potential.

On the other hand, Peter Thiel is an evangelist of innovation in both science and technology (including, health sciences and engineering, which he calls working with atoms).

Classifyingthe Dot com bubble of the 1990s to be the most hard-hitting burst among the many bubbles and bursts over the years worldwide,he seesfour prime reasons causing this:1. Lenders showing complaisance;2. Borrowers being greedy and wanting to make the most of free money available;3. Political scenarios that have failed to prempt and prevent these bursts and recessions;4. The lack of path-breaking innovation and settling down for justminor incremental achievements in both science and technology.

These Less known facts about Peter Thiel will bring you to know this sharp worded visionary even better:

1. The first time he used Twitter was on the stage of TechCrunch Disrupt 2014 in San Francisco, USA.

2. In his book Zero to One he communicates everything he learnt about Tech and Business and that he had taught at Stanford in 2012.

3. If Thiel was not an entrepreneur, he would probably be a teacher, he admitted. He loves to mentor and guide and thus his alternate profession choice.

4. Peter was contesting to be a clerk on the Supreme Court ranks after his degree in Law from Stanford. In retrospect, he was happy he was not among the two selected of the eight he was among interviewing for the post.

5. Though he favors people learning and teaching as a profession, he is pretty skeptical about what falls under education today, classifying it as an incredible abstraction, obscuring a lot of things that we do, and being very unclear on how valuable what is being taught is, in many cases. He has been known to encourage college kids to drop out and become entrepreneurs, even funding their Zero to One ideas and projects by creating the Thiel Fellowship, which will award 20 people under 20 years of age, $100,000, in order to inspire them to quit college and create their own ventures.

6. Peter sees extreme traits (he has quoted some other founders of Paypal had built bombs in their college) in founders being a big giveaway of their entrepreneurial instincts, however, clarifies that mere craziness is not a virtue, and a balance between being crazy and doing business is the key attribute to success. Competing, according to him, is not the way to succeed in entrepreneurship.

7. His view sounds pragmatic yet is controversial on founders quitting the companies they founded, quoting it as the loss of faith in their own product that leads to their disassociating with it.

8. Having a confident stance about technology and entrepreneurship, though against the norm, is certainly a trait much respected, as much it is condemned. And his viewpoints become even more prominent when it comes to the political scenario. Be it about his remarks in the Libertarian Cato Unbound blog, where Peter states that he no longer believed that freedom and democracy are compatible or when he accounted vast increase in welfare beneficiaries liable to render the notion of capitalist democracy into an oxymoron.

9. The first biography of Peter Thiel titled The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valleys Pursuit of Power by Max Chafkin was released on September 21, 2021.

10.Peter Thiel ranked #16 on theForbes Midas List: Top Tech Investors 2021 and #273 on Forbes 400 2021 the definitive ranking of the wealthiest Americans.

11. Peter Thiel is the worlds #574 richest person, with a net worth of $4.9 billion, according to Forbes Billionaire 2021 list.

With all the zeal and enthusiasm, Peter Thiel is nothing less than an idol for many who like libertarianideologies, and his philosophy of being profit-oriented surely should go well with investors too. The believer in long-term he is, we wish his experiments with anti-aging reap him huge dividends and keep his intention to inspire many more path-breaking innovators coming.

Happy Birthday, Peter Thiel! We wish you a lasting lifetime of fiery passion to pass on to the entrepreneurs of tomorrow.

The post is a part of aBday Serieswhere we celebrate the birthday of renowned personalities from Tech Industry, very frequently. The series includes Entrepreneurs, C-level Executives, innovators, or renewed leaders who moved the industry with their exponential skill set and vision. The intend is to highlight the persons achievements and touch base the little-known, but interesting, part of his life. You can see the list of all earlier celebrated tech personalities, includingMark Zuckerberg, Marrisa Mayor, Sean Parker, Andy Rubin, Julian Assange,Sir Richard Branson, SergeyBrin byfollowing this linkorsubscribe to your daily newsletter.

To make it more exciting, we suggest you make use of the comment section if you are among the ones celebrating theirbirthday with todays featured personality.

Continue reading here:
Happy Birthday Peter Thiel: And For The New Currency PayPal - Dazeinfo

DENVER (KDVR) Colorado is getting bluer, even if it is a purplish blue.

Colorado has three statewide measures on the ballot for an November 2021 election: a fiscal accountability amendment, a tax increase for marijuana sellers and a property tax cut. The Colorado Secretary of State will begin mailing ballots to voters on Oct. 8 ahead of election day.

The ballot initiatives could test the states growing conservative/liberal divide. Two of the measures Proposition 119 and Proposition 120 have been sponsored and promoted by Michael Fields, executive director of conservative Colorado Rising Action.

Fields is also a political analyst for FOX31.

The measures lean into Republican goals. While Colorado is a relatively low tax state, its voter rolls have gotten more and more Democratic, even as the state adds mainly unaffiliated voters.

Since last September, the state has gained far more Democratic voters than Republican ones. There are now 29,227 more registered active voters in the state than in September 10 times the 3,117 Republican voters the state gained in the same time period.

Gains to the relatively minor Libertarian Party outnumbered Republican voter gains by more than 1,000.

Still, by far the biggest party gains happened with unaffiliated voters. Colorado has 189,280 more independents now than it had in September 2020.

Purple though they might be in name, records show those voters are more blue than red.

Unaffiliated voters are allowed to list a party preference on their registration if they choose. Not all do, but far more of those who do prefer one party prefer the Democratic Party.

Of unaffiliated voters, 59% swing blue. Republican-leaning unaffiliated voters are only half as many, making up 31% of the party preference whole.

Largely, this follows population trends. As Colorado has exploded with in-migrants from other states, its Front Range counties have gotten less Republican as theyve gotten more populous.

The map above charts the difference between the number of Democrats and Republicans gained in each county since last September 2020. Deeper-colored states gained more of that party than the other.

The counties that gained more Democrats than Republicans in the highest amount were almost entirely in the Front Range. Arapahoe and Jefferson counties, in particular, added 10,000 more Democrats than Republicans.

Most counties outside the Denver metro, though, got redder, but not by the same margin that metro counties got bluer.

Mesa and Weld counties got the largest amount of Republicans over Democrats. Even combined though, they only gained 1,000 more red than blue voters.

Link:
Voter rolls looking bluer ahead of off-year election - FOX31 Denver

Paul Hager| Guest columnist

This guest column was submitted byPaul Hager of Bloomington.

Following the dramatics of the California recall from afar, I found myself terribly conflicted. As some people may know, Im an occasional libertarian politician from Bloomington, but those who know me best are aware that I view many aspects of nations and governments from a systems perspective. This perspective gives rise to my conflict, one that could be called a matter of heart versus mind.

The USA was founded, ultimately, as a federal republic. A republic is a representative democracy, not a democracy like ancient Athens where citizens had direct control of the government. History demonstrates that the Athenian system was unstable, and our founders rejected it. The chief advantage of representatives in a republican system is that they are ideally separated from transient passions and able to render a judgment based upon facts, facts then weighed on the basis of moral, legal, and such other considerations as may affect the commonweal. One of the greatest exponents of this view was a British member of Parliament during the Revolutionary War named Edmund Burke. Burke supported the arguments of the colonists legally and logically, generally presenting their case. This was his job and doing it risked making his constituents quite unhappy, which it in fact did.

I have never spoken to a little-l libertarian over the years who didnt know something about Burke or, lacking that knowledge, couldnt easily explain the qualities of a good representative. Telling unpleasant truths and making people angry is, from time to time, a representatives job. Political philosophy aside, there is a practical consideration: What if, after every decision a representative makes that angers people, there is a legal mechanism allowing the majority to remove this person from office? This sounds a lot like the dangerous sort of democracy that the Founders concluded was a very bad idea. Aside from that, most humans (even politicians) understand rewards and punishments. If representatives are being promiscuously removed after unpopular decisions, the only ones that are elected will be those who cater to their constituents and dont do their job.

Im a libertarian and a Burkean. I therefore must oppose the very idea of a recall. Let me put it to readers at this point, even if you havent thought about these points before given this history, doesnt the idea of a recall seem at least a little un-American?

But heres the thing. Larry Elder is a great guy and, best of all, he is, like me, a little-l libertarian. Initially, even though I knew he wasnt likely to win, I allowed myself to imagine him winning and how much that could benefit California and the country. But, what if, miracle of miracles, he did win? Edmund Burke immediately appeared before my minds eye. This was for me, an agnostic, as close as Im likely to come to committing a mortal sin and having some divine spirit reproach me for it.

I have a great deal of respect for Elder and think he has the makings of a great representative. But not that way. Please, sir. Reread your Burke and run in the next regular election.

View post:
Column: Considerations on the California recall effort and its potential consequences - The Herald-Times

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. The first of several deadlines in a special election to fill the congressional seat left vacant by the death of U.S. Rep. Alcee Hastings, D-Fla., is soon approaching.

Monday marks the deadline for those Palm Beach County or Broward County residents living in Florida's 20th Congressional District to change their party affiliations before the Nov. 2 primary election.

Hastings, who served in the House since 1993, died of pancreatic cancer in April. He was 84.

Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis set the primary and general election dates for Nov. 2 and Jan. 11, leaving the constituents of this mostly Democratic district without representation in Washington for months.

Am I eligible to vote in the special election?

The short answer is, most likely, yes, provided you meet a few basic requirements and assuming you reside within Florida's 20th Congressional District.

In order to register to vote, you must:

What do I need when I go to vote?

Polls are open from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. during the special and general elections. Any voters waiting in line at 7 p.m. will have the opportunity to cast a ballot.

In order to vote, you must provide a Florida driver's license, identification card, U.S. passport or some other form of photo identification with signature.

Where is Florida's 20th Congressional District?

The district includes portions of Palm Beach and Broward counties. That includes parts of Loxahatchee, Royal Palm Beach, West Palm Beach and Lake Park in Palm Beach County and parts of Fort Lauderdale, Miramar and Pompano Beach in Broward County.

Who are the candidates?

A total 11 Democrats and two Republicans -- plus one Libertarian and three independents, one of whom is a write-in candidate -- are seeking to occupy the seat.

Here are the candidates, in alphabetical order by party:

DemocratsSheila Cherfilus-McCormick: CEO of Trinity Health Care ServicesElvin Dowling: West Palm Beach native, former aide and longtime mentee of HastingsBobby DuBose: minority leader in Florida House, representing portions of Broward CountyOmari Hardy: Florida House District 88, former Lake Worth Beach commissionerDale Holness: Broward County commissioner, former mayor once endorsed by HastingsPhil Jackson: retired U.S. Navy chief petty officerEmmanuel Morel: former president of Democratic Progressive Caucus of Palm Beach CountyBarbara Sharief: Broward County commissioner, previously served as first Black mayorImran Siddiqui: doctor of internal medicine in Broward CountyPriscilla Taylor: former state legislator, Palm Beach County commissioner and mayorPerry Thurston: Florida Senate District 33, representing portions of Broward County

RepublicansJason Mariner: former drug addict and convict, CEO of AdSkinzGreg Musselwhite: welding inspector who lost to Hastings in 2020 general election

LibertarianMike ter Maat: Hallandale Beach police officer since 2010

IndependentsJim FlynnLeonard SerratoreShelley Fain (write-in)

What is the difference between a primary and general election?

Florida is a closed-primary state, which means that only voters registered within a political party may vote in that party's primary election, unless a universal primary contest occurs. A universal primary contest is when all candidates for an office have the same party affiliation and the winner will have no opposition in the general election.

That is not the case in this special election, so voters won't be able to cast their ballots for a candidate in another party. For example, a Republican voter can't vote for a Democratic candidate during the primary election and vice versa.

Important Dates

WPTV

Monday, Oct. 4: Deadline to register for primary election or change party affiliationMonday, Dec. 13: Deadline to register for general electionSaturday, Oct. 23: 5 p.m. deadline to request vote-by-mail ballotTuesday, Nov. 2: 7 p.m. deadline to return vote-by-mail ballotTuesday, Nov. 2: District 20 primary electionTuesday, Jan. 11: District 20 general election

Early Voting Dates

Saturday, Oct. 23-Sunday, Oct. 31: 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. (primary election)Saturday, Jan. 1-Sunday, Jan. 9: 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. (general election)

Early Voting Locations

WPTV

Palm Beach County Library, Belle Glade Branch725 NW Fourth St.Belle Glade 33430

Palm Beach County Library, Main Library3650 Summit Blvd.West Palm Beach 33406

Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections, West County Branch Office2976 State Road 15, Second FloorBelle Glade 33430

Palm Beach State College, Loxahatchee Groves Campus15845 Southern Blvd.Loxahatchee Groves 33470

Wells Recreation & Community Center2409 Ave. H W.Riviera Beach 33404

Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections

Read more here:
Voter information guide for special election to fill Alcee Hastings' seat - WPTV.com

The year 2021 has proved a landmark for the "school choice" cause a movement committed to the idea of providing public money for parents to use to pay for private schooling.

Republican control of a majority of state legislatures, combined with pandemic learning disruptions, set the stage for multiple victories. Seven states have created new school choice programs, and 11 others have expanded current programs through laws that offer taxpayer-funded vouchers for private schooling and authorize tax credits and educational savings accounts that incentivize parents moving their children out of public schools.

On its face, this new legislation may sound like a win for families seeking more school options. But the roots of the school choice movement are more sinister.

white Southerners first fought for "freedom of choice" in the mid-1950s as a means of defying the U.S. Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, which mandated the desegregation of public schools. Their goal was to create pathways for white families to remove their children from classrooms facing integration.

Prominent libertarians then took advantage of this idea, seeing it not only as a means of providing private options, but also as a tool in their crusade to dismantle public schools altogether. This history reveals that rather than giving families more school options, school choice became a tool intended to give most families far fewer in the end.

School choice had its roots in a crucial detail of the Brown decision: The ruling only applied to public schools. white Southerners viewed this as a loophole for evading desegregated schools.

In 1955 and 1956, conservative white leaders in Virginia devised a regionwide strategy of "massive resistance" to the high court's desegregation mandate that hinged on state-funded school vouchers. The State Board of Education provided vouchers, then called tuition grants, of $250 ($2,514 in 2021 dollars) to parents who wanted to keep their children from attending integrated schools. The resistance leaders understood that most Southern white families could not afford private school tuition and many who could afford it lacked the ideological commitment to segregation to justify the cost. The vouchers, combined with private donations to the new schools in counties facing desegregation mandates, would enable all but a handful of the poorest Whites to evade compliance.

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Other Southern states soon adopted voucher programs like the one in Virginia to facilitate the creation of private schools called "segregation academies," despite opposition from Black families and civil rights leaders. Oliver Hill, an NAACP attorney key to the Virginia case against "separate but equal" education that was folded into Brown, explained their position this way: "No one in a democratic society has a right to have his private prejudices financed at public expense."

Despite such objections, key conservative and libertarian thinkers and foundations, including economists Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek, Human Events editor Felix Morley and publisher Henry Regnery, backed the white Southern cause. They recognized that white Southerners' push for "freedom of choice" presented an opportunity to advance their goal of privatizing government services and resources, starting with primary and secondary education. They barely, if ever, addressed racism and segregation; instead, they spoke of freedom (implicitly, white freedom).

Friedman began promoting "educational freedom" in 1955, just as Southern states prepared to resist Brown. And he praised the Virginia voucher plan in his 1962 book, "Capitalism and Freedom," holding it up as a model for school choice everywhere. "Whether the school is integrated or not," he wrote, should have no bearing on eligibility for the vouchers. In other words, he knew the program was designed to fund segregation academies and saw it as no barrier to receiving state financing.

Friedman was far from alone. His fellow libertarians, including those on the staff of the William Volker Fund, a leading funder on the right, saw no problem with state governments providing tax subsidies to white families who chose segregation academies, even as these states disenfranchised Black voters, blocking them from having a say in these policies.

Libertarians understood that while abolishing the social safety net and other policies constructed during the Progressive era and the New Deal was wildly unpopular, even among white Southerners, school choice could win converts.

These conservative and libertarian thinkers offered up ostensibly race-neutral arguments in favor of the tax subsidies for private schooling sought by white supremacists. In doing so, they taught defenders of segregation a crucial new tactic abandon overtly racist rationales and instead tout liberty, competition and market choice while embracing an anti-government stance. These race-neutral rationales for private school subsidies gave segregationists a justification that could survive court review and did, for more than a decade before the Supreme Court ruled them unconstitutional.

When challenged, Friedman and his allies denied that they were motivated by racial bigotry. Yet, they had enough in common ideologically with the segregationists for the partnership to work. Both groups placed a premium on the liberty of those who had long profited from white-supremacist policies and sought to shield their freedom of action from the courts, liberal government policies and civil rights activists.

Crucially, freedom wasn't the ultimate goal for either group of voucher supporters. White Southerners wielded colorblind language about freedom of choice to help preserve racial segregation and to keep Black children from schools with more resources.

Friedman, too, was interested in far more than school choice. He and his libertarian allies saw vouchers as a temporary first step on the path to school privatization. He didn't intend for governments to subsidize private education forever. Rather, once the public schools were gone, Friedman envisioned parents eventually shouldering the full cost of private schooling without support from taxpayers. Only in some "charity" cases might governments still provide funding for tuition.

Friedman first articulated this outlook in his 1955 manifesto, but he clung to it for half a century, explaining in 2004, "In my ideal world, government would not be responsible for providing education any more than it is for providing food and clothing." Four months before his death in 2006, when he spoke to a meeting of the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), he was especially frank. Addressing how to give parents control of their children's education, Friedman said, "The ideal way would be to abolish the public school system and eliminate all the taxes that pay for it."

Today, the ultrawealthy backers of school choice are cagey about this long-term goal, knowing that care is required to win the support of parents who want the best for their children. Indeed, in a sad irony, decades after helping to impede Brown's implementation, school choice advocates on the right targeted families of color for what one libertarian legal strategist called "forging nontraditional alliances." They won over some parents of color, who came to see vouchers and charter schools as a way to escape the racial and class inequalities that stemmed from white flight out of urban centers and the Supreme Court's willingness to allow white Americans to avoid integrating schools.

But the history behind vouchers reveals that the rhetoric of "choice" and "freedom" stands in stark contrast to the real goals sought by conservative and libertarian advocates. The system they dream of would produce staggering inequalities, far more severe than the disparities that already exist today. Wealthy and upper-middle-class families would have their pick of schools, while those with far fewer resources disproportionately families of color might struggle to pay to educate their children, leaving them with far fewer options or dependent on private charity. Instead of offering an improvement over underfunded schools, school choice might lead to something far worse.

As Maya Angelou wisely counseled in another context, "When people show you who they are, believe them the first time." If we fail to recognize the right's true end game for public education, it could soon be too late to reverse course.

Nancy MacLean is William H. Chafe distinguished professor of history and public policy at Duke University and author of "Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America."

Read more:
'School choice' developed as a way to protect segregation - Newsday