Also likely plenty of oil to be discovered under those ice sheets, so the defrosting of Antarctica will be a virtuous cycle.
Big Climatology doesn't want you to remember that global warming will not only unlock an entire new continent, but solve a whole host of currently intractable social problems. Want a more equitable Senate and an expanded Bay Area with lots of room for new homes? Burn that coal!
You want Brexit? Global warming will give you Brexit on steroids. No more worries about a land border with Northern Ireland, and London becomes a fun scuba destination instead of dominating British politics.
Big schadenfreude opportunities for Taiwan if all the ice caps melt.
Australians are constantly whining about climate change but a huge barren chunk of their interior would become livable if Antarctica melted.
(The real lesson of this 70 meter sea level rise map is that China is the one great power for whom climate change *is* an existential threat, and they will try some bonkers geoengineering shit long before they allow Sichuan Bay to happen)
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To be clear, I am 100% on board with the possibility that Tether is a massive fraud. But there's a broader context of shenanigans here that is underreported. For example, consider the way Chinese stocks are listed on US exchanges.
When you buy a Chinese stock on a US exchange, you're not buying shares of that company, but a Variable Interest Entity incorporated in the Cayman Islands. This VIE is a smoke-and-mirrors entity that has no enforceable relationship with the Chinese giant, and is illegal in China.
But because it is convenient for everyone, this flimsy and very shady looking fiction has worked as a way to duct-tape Chinese companies to US capital markets. If you're a freshly arrived Martian just learning about money, it doesn't look much different from something like Tether
I've been in mostly violent agreement with @smdiehl and others who call out cryptocurrency and its descendants for what they are—an end run around financial regulation at best, a massive fraud at worst. We all agree it makes no sense as a technology. But one thing worries me:
The culture around NFTs and other cryptowoo is genuinely vibrant and interesting. People have an enthusiasm and fearlessness about trying stuff that reminds the dinosaurs still among us of the early web days. This is especially true for young people just arriving on the scene.
The web itself, meanwhile, is sterile and moribund. There's nothing fun or weird around that doesn't get immediately co-opted, and there's certainly no DIY or collaborative culture of making cool things. You can play with the toys Google or Amazon gives you, big whoop.
Campaign finance nerds, do you know of a way to track indirect Facebook spending by candidates? In other words, if my campaign committee pays ABC DIGITAL CONSULTING a million dollars and they spend half of that running Facebook ads, is their expenditure a public record?
We seem to be in an uncomfortable situation where the legislators who would potentially regulate Facebook spend heavily on the platform, but the amount of their expenditure is not a matter of public record because it is spent indirectly.
Because indirect expenditures aren't tracked by the FEC, the only source we have for what politicians spend on Facebook is... Facebook. This is part of the larger pattern where only Facebook has the data we would need to make informed decisions about regulating its activities.
This is a good point, and I would add to it that the internet as a system is robust *because* the protocols are ancient and crufty and not too reliable. Ancient is antifragile! Real systemic risk lurks in the cloud—a complex system of cruft that is designed to never, ever fail.
There is an inverse relationship between severity and rarity. As services like AWS become better at containing imaginable failures, the ones that do make it through to affect the whole system will be wilder and weirder, and unplanned for by definition. Complexity always wins.
At the same time, people will treat any platform that demonstrates 99.9999% reliability as having 100% reliability, recursively in layer after layer, laying the seeds for cascading disaster when probability catches up with them. Think about the 2008 bank crisis as an example.
Facebook insider testimony is valuable, but Congress should not make policy based on a former Facebook exec's recommendations any more than they would regulate cigarettes by listening to Big Tobacco. On Section 230, they should solicit testimony from what's left of the open web
The content of the whistleblowing so far has been the same critique that's been directed at Facebook by outside observers for many years. It's neither a story about evil monopolies or an evil CEO, but how we choose to embed ubiquitous communication and surveillance into our lives
This is a vital area for regulation, but previous efforts like the GDPR or the European cookie law show how important it is to get your thinking right if you don't want to make things worse. That requires expanding the conversation beyond a morality play about corporate greed.
To make the antimonopoly argument fairly, you would have to factor in how many times WhatsApp avoided downtime because it had Facebook resources behind it. Maybe that number is zero, maybe it's a lot.
Maybe half of humanity relying on a messenger app is a bigger monopoly issue than who bought that app.