Image: Adam Zubin / Skeccio / Postmates / Protocol
Uber finally gets its delivery deal

Good morning! Hope you had a great holiday weekend. This Monday, Uber's deal to buy Postmates, Twitter's changing its programming lingo, and one Japanese town banned texting and walking.
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Nick Clegg's note about Facebook's free speech policies is nonsense, Common Sense Media's Jim Steyer said:
Reid Hoffman is prepared to fight President Trump not just politically, but economically:
The social ad boycott is changing the whole business, said World Federation of Advertisers CEO Stephan Loerke:
On Protocol: Better data will change supply chains more than self-driving trucks will, Convoy CEO Dan Lewis thinks:
Over the years, the tech industry has learned a lesson that may not be true but is nonetheless considered gospel: To the victor go the spoils. If you want your unprofitable business to become profitable, the thinking goes, all you have to do is own that market completely. Then, something something, you get rich.
I can't think of a better way to explain Uber's $2.65 billion deal to buy Postmates, which Bloomberg reported could be announced today. (Update: It's official!)
It's hard to say exactly where this leaves Uber in the immediate term, given that Postmates has single-digit market share in most cities. It's definitely good news for Postmates, though, which raised money last fall at a $2.4 billion valuation. It gets a solid win, rather than having to brave a potentially rough IPO market after two years of not quite going public.
The "consolidation will unblock the money fountain" argument does make some sense in the delivery world. Any company wants to be the default app that diners use, and the default system that servers check for new orders.
Consolidation also gives the remaining players more leverage against restaurants, drivers and diners alike – which means prices, fees and commissions could go up. Some gig workers are already expressing worry about what comes next.
Regynald Augustin, a Twitter engineer, said he realized how many programming terms came with racist connections when he got an email that used the phrase "automatic slave rekick." Since early 2020, Augustni and another Twitter engineer named Kevin Oliver have been working on a new, more inclusive lingo, that Twitter is starting to roll out.
Twitter's starting by changing nine terms and categories: It's replacing whitelist and blacklist with allowlist and denylist; master/slave with a handful of options including leader/follower.
Twitter's engineering group pointed outthat this isn't an easy switch, and in addition to code and tools it requires "updating documentation across internal resources, Google Docs, runbooks, FAQs, readmes, technical design docs, and more."
And it's not just Twitter pushing for change. David Kleidermacher, Google's VP of engineering, pulled out of a talk he was scheduled to give at the Black Hat conference in August, saying that terms like black hat and white hat need to change.
Stronger Care….from anywhere, to anywhere
At Philips, we're pioneering stronger care networks with technologies we've spent decades innovating. With connected care solutions from telehealth to at-home monitoring, today's healthcare workers can face today's greatest challenges with smarter virtual tools. See how our telehealth technologies help doctors and nurses deliver care from anywhere, to anywhere.
For Justin Mitchell, the CEO of Yac, his adventures in other people's pitch decks started with an email address. When Hey first came out, Mitchell was early on the waiting list, but justin@hey.com was already taken. So rather than take jmitch or justinmitchell, Mitchell decided to use the new service for a new project. He registered pitch@hey.com, and tweeted that he'd offer feedback to anyone who sent their pitch deck to that address.
I asked Mitchell if he's been giving the same feedback over and over, and he said there are a few things everyone seems to hear from him:
As for what Mitchell himself has learned? He said mostly that he's been underestimating the opportunity for tech outside of Silicon Valley. He said the folks reaching out for help are largely not Americans, and that more than once he's seen things that "were so unbelievably disconnected from my world, but so needed."
Now that the EARN IT Act is past its first Judiciary Committee vote, conversation over the bill and encryption in general is likely to heat up.
Fortune's Brainstorm Health conference starts tomorrow, with two days of talks about how the pandemic is changing, you know, everything.
This week, the city of Yamato, Japan will start enforcing a new law that makes it illegal to use your phone while you're walking. It's a totally toothless ban, since there's no penalty for getting caught. (I've always thought a fun penalty would be that you have to hand your phone over to a stranger who then gets to text anyone in your contacts.) But it's still an interesting development: A few places, like Honolulu, outlaw using your phone while crossing the street, but Yamato wants people to stop using their phones in motion at all. Pretty soon, when we're walking, we're going to have to look up. At the street. Sounds awful.
Stronger Care….from anywhere, to anywhere
At Philips, we're pioneering stronger care networks with technologies we've spent decades innovating. With connected care solutions from telehealth to at-home monitoring, today's healthcare workers can face today's greatest challenges with smarter virtual tools. See how our telehealth technologies help doctors and nurses deliver care from anywhere, to anywhere.
Today's Source Code was written by David Pierce. Thoughts, questions, tips? Send them to david@protocol.com, or our tips line, tips@protocol.com. Enjoy your day, see you tomorrow.
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