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Antivirus Software Pioneer John McAfee Reportedly Dead From Suspected Suicide In Spanish Jail Spanish media reported the 75-year-old former antivirus pioneer was found dead in his cell after a Spanish court ruled in favor of his extradition to the United States to face tax fraud charges.
John McAfee, the antivirus-pioneer-turned-cryptocurrency-enthusiast, alleged murderer, and alleged tax evader, was found dead in a prison cell in Spain, according to multiple reports by Spanish media.
On Wednesday, a Spanish court ruled that McAfee was to be extradited to the United States, where he faced charges for tax fraud. News reports say he was found dead and the authorities suspect he died by suicide.
The Mossos d'Esquadra, the local police in the Spanish region of Catalonia, where McAfee was held, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The US Department of Justice also did not respond.
McAfee, 75, made a fortune in the late 1980s and early 1990s after he founded McAfee Associates, one of the first companies to make a computer antivirus. His involvement in the cybersecurity world practically stopped in 1994, when he resigned from the company. Since then, his life has been mired in one controversy after another. McAfee dipped his toes in several ventures, such as yoga, herbal antibiotics, and more recently cryptocurrency.
In 2012, when he was living in Belize, McAfee was accused of murder after one of his neighbors who was found dead. A 2016 documentary by director Nanette Burstein laid out the case against McAfee, who was able to escape from Belize and avoid any repercussions. |
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Rethinking Capitalism: The Power of Creative Destruction With the proper safeguards, creative destruction – the process by which the new replaces the old – remains the way to greater economic growth and prosperity.
Let's face it: Capitalism has a bad reputation these days. While it is still seen as the "least awful" of alternatives, many accuse it of having led to exploding inequality, disastrous climate change and fractured societies. For some, these consequences are enough to advocate abandoning it altogether.
In The Power of Creative Destruction, economists Philippe Aghion, Céline Antonin and Simon Bunel argue that abolishing capitalism is not the solution. Historically, a market economy has proved to be a formidable engine of prosperity, enabling societies to develop in ways that were unimaginable even two centuries ago. However, market forces cannot be given free rein. The state and civil society both have a role to play in guiding the forces of disruptive innovation that underpin growth.
Creative destruction refers to the process by which innovations continually displace existing technologies and ways of doing things. New firms continually step up to the plate and new jobs replace obsoleted ones. In sum, the new destroys the old. This constant innovation is the driving force of capitalism and the catalyst of long-term growth. However, feats of innovation aren't heaven-sent. They are achieved by entrepreneurs motivated by the prospect of dominating over a given market. The problem is that once they manage that, they often use their might to maintain the status quo and block the natural Darwinian process. |
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Time Management Won't Save You Conventional time management often is ineffective in combating overload and reducing stress. Its focus on working more efficiently only leads us to take on even more tasks. A better approach is to reduce the number of tasks we take on in the first place, institute concrete principles for deciding what categories of things you won't do, and create structures such as instituting a day when no meetings will be held. |
Research: When A/B Testing Doesn't Tell You the Whole Story When it comes to churn prevention, marketers traditionally start by identifying which customers are most likely to churn, and then running A/B tests to determine whether a proposed retention intervention will be effective at retaining those high-risk customers. While this strategy can be effective, the author shares new research based on field experiments with over 14,000 customers that suggests it isn't always the best way to maximize ROI on marketing spend.
Instead, the author argues that firms should use A/B test data alongside customers' behavioral and demographic data to determine which subgroup of customers will be most sensitive to the specific intervention that's being considered. Importantly, the data suggests that this subgroup doesn't necessarily correspond to the "high-risk" customer group - in other words, it's very possible that the intervention won't be as effective at retaining high-risk customers as it will be at retaining some other group of customers. By identifying the characteristics that actually correlate with high sensitivity to a given intervention, marketers can proactively target their campaigns at the customers who will be most receptive to them, ultimately reducing churn rates and increasing ROI. |
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Powerball mystery: Someone in this tiny town won $731 million. Now everyone wants a piece of it. There haven't been a lot of big wins in this little town tucked between gentle green mountains in Maryland's far western reaches. Coal brought work, then took it away. The railroad meant prosperity, then stopped running. They made glass here, and then they didn't.
These days, the line of cars at the First Assembly of God food giveaway is so long that the volunteers split each box into two smaller portions to feed more families.
But over the past few weeks, Lonaconing - the locals call it "Coney" - has acquired a new shine, a glint of gold in iron country. Sometime in late January, someone bought a Powerball lottery ticket at the Coney Market, and that ticket's six numbers won the big one - $731 million, the biggest jackpot ever in Maryland and the fifth-richest payout in U.S. history.
That someone lives in Lonaconing, according to the owner of the market. But because Maryland is one of seven states that allow lottery winners to remain anonymous, and because the winner is no fool, the identity of that someone isn't public.
The fact that someone in this town of 1,200 people (just 400 families, actually, down by half over the past 50 years) is suddenly Midas-rich has caused some strange things to happen. |
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Inside Biden's bubble: How an insular White House has kept drama and leaks at a minimum 100 days into the Biden administration, the White House is a tight ship run by a cadre of longtime Biden loyalists.
When President Joe Biden sat in one of his first Oval Office briefings to discuss the earliest acts of his presidency - impending executive actions - he brought only five people into the room.
The five: Mike Donilon, Steve Ricchetti, Bruce Reed, Ron Klain and Stef Feldman. Each had been close to Biden for at minimum a decade. Three of them had served at different points as his chief of staff.
That lifers would be with Biden in the early moments of his presidency was not a surprise. That so few of them were there was a sign of things to come.
One hundred days into the Biden administration, the White House is a tight ship defined by insularity, internal power centers and top down micromanagement - interviews with nearly two dozen people across the administration, including senior White House officials, reveal. The result is a unit that doesn't leak (at least not that often) and that stays on script (most of the time). But it is also one where there is competition to show proximity to the boss and occasional difficulty in moving agenda items along in a timely manner. |
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