Even a $2,400 membership fee can't insulate The Battery, the private club founded by Michael and Xochi Birch, from the ubiquitous protests against Terra Nova Industries, a nonunion contractor. A tipster sent in this photo from last night.

Randi Zuckerberg, the Roger Clinton of the tech world, is back to profiting off the success of her younger brother. Her latest exploit? Failing up from her miserable Dot Complicated newsletter to a weekly radio show on SiriusXM.

Marvel is turning Tony Stark into an app maker. In the new Superior Iron Man comic, Stark moves to San Francisco, gets a "Genius Bar" costume, and "has very ambitious plans for the city that some of its residents embrace, but not all." In other words: Ron Conway meets Elon Musk.

It's easy to dismiss wacky venture capitalist Tim Draper's "Six Californias" plan. After all, the notion of splitting America's third-largest state into six pieces just for the tax benefit of Silicon Valley is silly! But it sounds even sillier from someone taking it seriously.

The best minds of our generation have graduated from "thinking about how to make people click ads" to thinking about how to make people click "the buy button." Facebook is letting small and mid-sized companies test it for free, but we know how that ends.

Google's glistening fleet of employee coaches will soon be tainted by the presence of Everyman. In an effort to get ahead of concerns that the search giant is growing too quickly for Mountain View, Google is funding a free shuttle network to appease their detractors.

Gurbaksh Chahal, the RadiumOne CEO who was fired after pleading guilty to domestic violence, has launched his new startup with what appears to be a low-budget Nike ad. Ever the marketeer, Chahal added his own twist to the stock footage of men jumping off cliffs: a dramatic voiceover, written in the same kind of business gibberish as his blog.

Silicon Valley's loudest mouths love little more than demanding free market solutions to every public ill—the Bay Area's housing crisis being no exception. Their pitch is simple: just build more housing and prices will plummet. But that's not happening.

In an agonizingly euphemistic memo to his company ("Starting to Evolve our Organization and Culture"), Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella says he's getting rid of 18,000 jobs at the struggling software mammoth. That's 14 percent of the entire company.

ModCloth, the online clothing retailer, laid off 70 employees yesterday. The Los Angeles-based company has raised $63.7 million since it launched in 2002, including investment from Accel Partners and First Round.

The Hotels.com of unregulated sublease bedrooms got a big makeover today, and thousands of words have been typed out over how it represents "community," "butts," "belonging," and or some other stuff, I don't know—who read this? It also represents a bad copy job.

Maria Zhang, the Yahoo engineering executive sued for sexual harassment by one of her female employees, is striking back. Zhang, who helps lead Yahoo's crucial mobile efforts, filed a cross-complaint (embedded below) against her accuser, Nan Shi. It alleges defamation and claims Shi was trying to "extort" Yahoo.

First impressions are important. For those who've only just moved to San Francisco, they often find themselves smitten with the city's fog-swept valleys, Victorian architecture, curious eccentrics, alluring hills, and adorably incompetent bus system. But not for hacker-maker Keith Horwood: he's just stoked that it's a hotbed of techno-libertarian capitalism.

America's prettiest sun-soaked research university has somehow managed to become the "Harvard of the West" without getting any of the loathing that befalls the "Harvard of the East." It's time we talk about Stanford as it is: a stuck-up temple to new plutocracy, cronyism, and greed.

The resemblance apparently did not look familiar to any Airbnb employees. In a rare display of design virtuosity, it also kind of looks like a butt. [Image via @SeamusCondron]

Every economic cycle exhibiting unsubstantiated optimism deserves its own euphemism for calm the fuck down—a evocative, but subtle phrase implying that investors may want to check themselves before they wreck themselves.

San Francisco's plan to legalize the armada of tech buses has sailed past its last regulatory hurdle. The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency voted today to approve increased fees charged to tech companies for using city bus stops, as part of its controversial shuttle pilot program.

Earlier this afternoon, Bloomberg reported that Google Ventures managing partner Bill Maris (the Glass man in the middle, above) thinks that Uber could one day be worth "$200 billion or more." Why would a sensible outlet like Bloomberg give an Uber investor the platform to pump up his investment?

Google generously allows the freedom to use pseudonyms on Google+, a social network designed to find out what you do when you're online.

Satya Nadella took over as Microsoft's CEO just under six months ago and he's already poised to give thousands of employees a pink slip "as soon as this week." Bloomberg reports that the restructuring "may end up being the biggest in Microsoft history," and could surpass the 5,800 employees laid off in 2009.