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Cory Doctorow #BLM Profile picture
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21 Nov, 7 tweets, 4 min read
I’ve got a little challenge for you, Sark, a new recruit. It’s a tough case, but I want him treated in the usual manner. Train him for the games, let him hope for a while, then blow him away. wilwheaton.tumblr.com/post/635432920…
I’ve got a little challenge for you, Sark, a new recruit. It’s a tough case, but I want him treated in the usual manner. Train him for the games, let him hope for a while, then blow him away. wilwheaton.tumblr.com/post/635432920…
I’ve got a little challenge for you, Sark, a new recruit. It’s a tough case, but I want him treated in the usual manner. Train him for the games, let him hope for a while, then blow him away. wilwheaton.tumblr.com/post/635432920…
I’ve got a little challenge for you, Sark, a new recruit. It’s a tough case, but I want him treated in the usual manner. Train him for the games, let him hope for a while, then blow him away. wilwheaton.tumblr.com/post/635432920…
I’ve got a little challenge for you, Sark, a new recruit. It’s a tough case, but I want him treated in the usual manner. Train him for the games, let him hope for a while, then blow him away. wilwheaton.tumblr.com/post/635432920…
I’ve got a little challenge for you, Sark, a new recruit. It’s a tough case, but I want him treated in the usual manner. Train him for the games, let him hope for a while, then blow him away. wilwheaton.tumblr.com/post/635432920…
I’ve got a little challenge for you, Sark, a new recruit. It’s a tough case, but I want him treated in the usual manner. Train him for the games, let him hope for a while, then blow him away. wilwheaton.tumblr.com/post/635432920…

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More from @doctorow

Cory Doctorow #BLM Profile picture
23 Nov
Today's Twitter threads (a thread).

Inside: Opsec and personal security; Australian predictive policing tool for kids; A textbook grift; Labor and large firms; The power of procurements; Guatemala's guilltoines; and more!

Archived at: pluralistic.net/2020/11/23/ops…

#Pluralistic

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Opsec and personal security: Runa Sandvik and Window Snyder on the Attack Surface Lectures.



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Australian predictive policing tool for kids: Digital phrenology vs racialized kids.



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Read 24 tweets
Cory Doctorow #BLM Profile picture
23 Nov
Guatemala is in bad shape - even by the historic terrible conditions in Guatemala, things are bad. Poverty, covid, and a hurricane have all slammed into each other, with poor and indigenous people caught in the crossfire.

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But then Congress acted: they slashed human rights programs, judicial funding, and anti-malnutrition programs....and gave themselves a raise.

After public outrage, they reversed this, but it was too late.

aljazeera.com/news/2020/11/2…

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The country is literally on fire, with protesters setting the Congressional building ablaze and erecting a guillotine on its steps.

Protesters have gone from demanding a change to the budget bill to demanding the resignation of the entire Congress and the president.

3/
Read 5 tweets
Cory Doctorow #BLM Profile picture
23 Nov
The IoT Cybersecurity Act - passed both houses, awaiting presidential signature - is pretty good. It deputizes @NIST to come up with standards that any IoT device purchased by the federal government must adhere to.

congress.gov/bill/116th-con…

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NIST is charged with coming up with guidelines for "secure code, identity management, patching and configuration management" and the GSA has to coordinate vulnerability reporting and response across federal agencies.

theregister.com/2020/11/18/us_…

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But for me, the most interesting part is the lever that the act pulls on to achieve its policy ends: procurement. Uncle Sam buys a LOT of stuff, and when the USG refuses to buy substandard stuff, it puts bad vendors at a serious commercial disadvantage.

3/
Read 8 tweets
Cory Doctorow #BLM Profile picture
23 Nov
The labor movement has a complicated relationship with monopolism. For a long time, economists (both right and left) documented the "large firm premium" - the higher wages that workers at big companies got as a share of the companies' high profits.

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Concentrated industries can be easier to bargain with, since a strike at a dominant company can effectively shut down the whole industry, bringing all the firms around in one go. By contrast, strikes against small firms have few systemic effects.

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But there's definitely a limit to this dynamic: once industries become sufficiently concentrated, they can skip the large firm wage premium and instead mobilize their monopoly profits to crush unions. That's been underway since the Reagan years.

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Read 20 tweets
Cory Doctorow #BLM Profile picture
23 Nov
Last week, I wrote up @Econ_Marshall's case for forgiving student debt (we're already doing it, but only after it has destroyed debtors' lives).

pluralistic.net/2020/11/20/sov…

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By counterpoint, @michael_olenick argues that we shouldn't forgive student debt, we should make it easier to discharge it in bankruptcy - that way the predatory lenders get nothing and the bankrupt borrowers aren't stuck with a huge tax bill.

nakedcapitalism.com/2020/11/michae…

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Olenick offers some interesting technical and political notes on this, as well as some zingers (he calls bankruptcy "the Donald Trump special"), but I was struck by a quoted email exchange with @yvessmith about textbook pricing.

3/
Read 12 tweets
Cory Doctorow #BLM Profile picture
23 Nov
Predictive policing tools work really well: they perfectly predict what the police will do. Specifically, they predict whom the police will accuse of crimes, and since only accused people are convicted, they predict who will be convicted, too.

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In that sense, predictive policing predicts "crime" - the crimes that the police prosecute are the crimes that the computer tells them to seek out and make arrests over. But that doesn't mean that predictive policing actually fights actual crime.

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Instead, predictive policing serves as empirical facewash for bias. Take last year's biased policing statistics, give them to a machine learning model, and ask it where the crime will be next year, and it will tell you that next year's crime will look much the same.

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Read 13 tweets

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