Daily Pulse: Downsizing at Twitter, The US Encryption Maneuver, New Life for Ex-Im

Un-Tweet: Twitter is planning company-wide layoffs next week, Kurt Wagner is reporting for <re/code>. Wagner's sources tell him "it will likely affect most, if not all, departments," but much of the brunt will be born by engineers, "which make up about half the staff." Twitter has about 4,200 employees, "more than double the roughly 2,000 employees it had in Q2 2013 just before the IPO."

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Keys to the Lockbox: The Obama administration has decided not to seek legislation requiring companies to provide a backdoor to encrypted data held for their customers — for now. But it will continue to try to “persuade companies” who encrypt customer data to “create a way” for the government to get at it anyway, write Ellen Nakashima and Andrea Peterson for The Washington Post. What’s better? A very public, legislative debate about what the government should have access to, or private discussions that don’t involve you?

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Black Gold: The House voted to lift a 40-year-old ban on the export of crude oil. The bill, pushed by more than a dozen oil companies but opposed by refiners (who are allowed to export their finished product) and consumer groups (who fear higher domestic prices at the pump), faces an uncertain fate in the Senate. And, President Obama has threatened to veto the legislation.

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In the Money: A bi-partisan majority of US House legislators has come up with an end-run to reauthorize the Export-Import Bank, which lost its charter on June 30 in the face of conservative opposition. Nobody disagrees on what the bank does — financing the purchase of US goods by foreign companies. But critics say Ex-Im plays favorites and is a generally affront to free market capitalism. Backers have now secured the votes of a simply marjority and came up with “a rare parliamentary maneuver” to force a vote.

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House Call: Paul Ryan futures rose Friday, with confidants letting it be known that the reluctant future Speaker of the House was considering a run for the position he still publicly does not want.  There was even a call from — and public statement by — Mitt Romney, who topped the 2012 Republican presidential ticket Ryan shared. "I wouldn't presume to tell Paul what to do," Romney said, "but I do know that he is a man of ideas who is driven to see them applied for the public good." Talk about laying it on thick. "There may be no way for Ryan to avoid the calls to run," reports CNN. 

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#Quote

"It is one of the few pop cultural depictions of the tech industry to buy into Silicon Valley’s essential worldview: an aggressive optimism that is willing to roll over just about everything and everyone in its path in the service of what it sees as the more important goal of building tomorrow."

— Farhad Manjoo, tech correspondent for The New York Times, on Steve Jobs, which opens in limited release today.

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What you may have missed — and simply must read: 

• "Ultimately, San Francisco has a money problem, not a tech problem." Why this techie is running for SF mayor
• A post from the inimitable Jonathan Jackson: I Lost My Memory for 14 Months. Here’s What It Taught Me.
• You need a butler. Yes, really
• Why one woman—an engineer herself—told her daughter not to become a programmer

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Cover Art: People dressed as Sally from Nightmare before Christmas and the Joker from Batman sit in the foodcourt at the New York Comic Con in Manhattan, New York, October 8, 2015. The event draws thousands of costumed fans, panels of pop culture luminaries and features a sprawling floor of vendors in a space equivalent to more than three football fields at the Jacob Javitz Convention Center on Manhattan's West side.