To fulfill his ambitions, he teamed up with a business mind, Jim Balsillie, a

9 min readNov 17, 2020

It becomes a vicious cycle. At some point, we view monthly credit payments as part of our budget of fixed expenses. We don’t realize credit card payments are not only money unnecessarily going out the door, but they represent a premium paid on goods and services we most likely no longer even have possession of. But we’re living the good life so we accept credit card debt — and the recurring payments — as the cost of doing business.On January 22, 2009, big news from the White House broke: incoming President Barack Obama could keep his BlackBerry. At the time, the manufacturer was slightly more popular than the new president, with 55% of the U.S. mobile phone market, compared to Obama’s 53% of the 2008 vote.By 1990 RIM had $1 million in annual revenues, largely by pivoting from the Budgie to more successful digital ad tech; one 1988 invention would even go on to win a technical Oscar. But what Lazaridis really wanted to create was a portable email gadget.

Want to make it a little more exciting? Open a page on your notebook, draw a heart, and fill it with all the things that you’re grateful for in life. Repeat this 2-minute exercise every single day and watch how you naturally become a more peaceful, positive-oriented, and happy person.

Few of these scandals or internal conflicts have affected the social media giant’s bottom line. Despite an advertiser boycott during the summer, Facebook saw its revenues grow 22% year-over-year in the third quarter, and its users grow by 12%.
When you have a true cash cushion, you’re more likely to feel at ease. I know I am. But it’s not a true cash cushion if you’re in debt at the same time as you’re saving. Or if you’re investing money before you’re ready. “Ready” meaning you have the aforementioned personal finance ducks lined up in a quack-free row.
51%: That’s the share of Facebook’s more than 49,000 employees who believe the social network is having a positive impact on the world, according to an October internal survey, as reported by Buzzfeed News. That number was down by 23 percentage points from the last semiannual employee survey conducted in May and down by 5.5 percentage points from the same period last year. A human resources leader at the company identified concerns about leadership’s decisions on hate speech and misinformation, and a focus on the wrong metrics, as reasons for the low score.This article is for informational purposes only. It should not be considered Financial or Legal Advice. Not all information will be accurate. Consult a financial professional before making any major financial decisions.And that’s just in the U.S.: Misinformation and hate speech have continued to proliferate on the platform in other parts of the world, including India, where Facebook’s head of public policy provided the country’s ruling Hindu nationalist party with favorable treatment on the platform, relaxed hate-speech rules on anti-Muslim comments from a member of the party and three others, and shared a post demonizing Muslims herself (she later resigned).

But its precipitous decline wasn’t terminal. BlackBerry is no iPhone, but it’s still around, and its technology is in more places than you might think. A lot of that has to do with an acquisition made at its peak that was meant to futureproof its phones’ aging operating system, but instead vaulted it into the growing smart-device business. Before the pandemic, the Waterloo-based company placed a big bet on corporate cybersecurity, in time for the digital workforce to hitch itself to a remote future. Meaning the once-ubiquitous brand could once again be a 24/7 tether to work, but this time ambiently in the background.

The Untold History of Facebook’s Most Controversial Growth Tool
‘People You May Know’ helped the social media giant grow exponentially. One man made it happen. An exclusive excerpt…marker.medium.com

The lower your cost of living, the easier it will be to save enough money to cover it for a year. Getting there is the opposite of being in debt in every way. That’s practically obvious, but, based on the amount of credit card debt people take on (an average of $6,194 per consumer, as of 2019, according to Experian), it must not be psychologically obvious. It’s at least not psychologically easy to embrace. It’s easier to feel the rush of living like you make more money than you actually do.
This article is for informational purposes only. It should not be considered Financial or Legal Advice. Not all information will be accurate. Consult a financial professional before making any major financial decisions.
Three years later, to the day, BlackBerry’s co-CEOs resigned. The company had fallen from 20% to 5% of the global cellphone market, with its shipments down 41% year over year.

But Facebook’s role in the election goes far beyond what happened during election week itself. The Wall Street Journal reported that in 2017, Facebook made changes to its newsfeed algorithm that restricted the visibility of left-leaning news outlets like Mother Jones. And fearful of accusations of anti-conservative bias, the social network also repeatedly allowed right-wing accounts to violate its own policies on misinformation.

In her evaluation of Facebook and Twitter’s Election Day performance, OneZero staff writer Sarah Emerson notes that Facebook appended warning labels to many of the president’s posts that included misleading claims about the election, as well as to former Vice President Joe Biden’s posts, which didn’t. Emerson also reported that Facebook shut down a pro-Trump “Stop the Steal” group raising funds to challenge election results and promoting violence that had grown to more than 300,000 people.

I learned I’m not the type of person who can pay a credit card off each month. Therefore, I don’t use them anymore. I cut them off cold turkey. I wish more people would do this. You can live just fine without a credit card. I haven’t used one in several years and have never run into an instance where this has stopped me from doing anything other than spending money I don’t have.If you do what Cuban says — and take it to the extreme, you’ll position yourself to be set for life. Don’t put the credit cards in a block of ice in the freezer. Get rid of them altogether. Chip away at your credit card debt until it hits zero. Then eliminate all other debt (I’m not perfect. I’m working on that). From there, take the money that’s suddenly left over and invest every penny of it after you have given yourself the game-changing, practical, and psychological cash cushion that will allow you to ride out a year without income.BlackBerry’s creator, Research in Motion (RIM), was launched from a Canadian strip mall in 1984 by 23-year-old Mike Lazaridis, an engineering prodigy and University of Waterloo graduate who dreamed of revolutionizing wireless communication. He started with the Budgie, a computer hooked up to a TV that took text input from a wireless remote and displayed it to passers-by in malls and storefronts. An old picture from the Budgie’s debut shows it reading out “I ATTRACT CUSTOMERS” in plain, Atari-like type. It turned out to not actually be great at attracting customers, but the interface — a solidly designed keyboard that beamed words to a screen — foreshadowed what RIM would become.
I have written about the financial walk of shame. When you invest money only to turn around and liquidate your holdings because you need or feel like you need the cash. Investing fits and starts not only deter the wealth-building process, but they can also sour you on investing. I quit investing for many months because I didn’t want to feel like a loser doing the financial walk of shame — again.
Despite a seeming lack of faith in the company’s goals, most Facebook employees are still happy to work there, with 69% of them reporting in the same survey that it is a favorable place to work, down only half a point from the year before.

To fulfill his ambitions, he teamed up with a business mind, Jim Balsillie, a

Written by Rosemarie Calvin