Memia on Easter Sunday 17-Apr-2022🇺🇦: poison pill or poisoned chalice?💊// terraformation🏞️// capsule living📦// robot prayers🤖🙏

...is on holiday

Apr 16

Kia ora!

As flagged this week, I’m taking a short break over Easter, enjoying the sunshine and clean air here at Lake Takapō in the heart of Te Waipounamu. Hope you’re enjoying a relaxing long weekend break wherever you are as well!

Ben Reid 🧠⏩☁ @ben_r

Chilling in a windy Takapō

So no long newsletter this weekend. Please feel free to peruse the Memia archives since Jan 2020 at https://memia.substack.com - and paid subscribers also have access to the ever-expanding Memia knowledge graph in Roam Research as well.

Weekend exploring

Meanwhile, here are just a few short links to keep you going!

🇺🇦Russian warship go…oh

Not making light of this awful war, but…

Rob Cropton @RealRobCropton

The Russian ship Moskva (Moscow) that was told "F*** yourself" by Ukrainian border guards, before bombarding their posts, sank yesterday. Russia claims an accident caused an explosion, Ukraine claims they sunk it. Either way as it sank Ukraine released this stamp...

The stamp may need updating:

💊Poison pill or poisoned chalice?

Elon Musk continues to suck all of the oxygen out of the room with his Twitter takeover antics - this week he offered to buy 100% of the company for $US43 billion. In response, the Twitter board adopted a ‘poison pill’ defence to counter a hostile takeover attempt… which will probably stall matters for a while… expect more drama. (Either way the share price is up significantly so Musk may have set things up for an epic scale pump-and-dump if that was his plan all along).

Twitter founder and erstwhile CEO Jack Dorsey responded tersely to events.

Meanwhile here’s perhaps the longest-ever (???) Twitter thread by former Reddit CEO Yishan Wong on why Musk just might not want to own the company. (ht @samrag for spotting). Somewhere in the middle is the thread:

Yishan @yishan

Elon is going to try like heck to "fix" the problems he sees. Each problem he "fixes" will just cause 3 more problems.

That’s likely so true.

🏞️Terraformation

Incidentally, since Reddit, Yishan went on to found Terraformation, a global network of seedbanks for reforestation:

Memia @memialabs

Terraformation

TerraformationTerraformation creates partnerships to scale reforestation with hardware, software, and knowledge based solutions.buff.ly

Here’s a thread on how it works:

Yishan @yishan

One of the things we work on at Terraformation is seed banking: creating low-cost working seed banks and educating others on how to do seed banking. I'm going to explain why that's a crucial element of forest restoration as a climate solution.

📦Capsule living

Tokyo’s iconic 1972 Nakagin Capsule Tower, a prime example of Japan’s post-war Metabolism architectural movement is to be demolished. The Economist sings its praises ($Paywalled):

“Kurokawa Kisho, the building’s architect, envisioned his cramped “capsules” as dwellings for what he called Homo movens, or highly mobile modern humans, such as the businessmen who lived in distant suburbs and worked late in Tokyo offices.”

Memia @memialabs

An ode to Tokyo’s Nakagin Capsule Tower