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11 Oct, 4 tweets, 1 min read
At some point in this morality play it would be nice to bring in parties that have never cashed a check from Facebook.
At the moment we have a situation where a former Facebook product manager is advising a Facebook-reliant Congress on how to regulate an industry whose irredeemable business model she saw no problem with for eight years or more. And now the Facebook Supreme Court will hear all!
A key policy question is whether the surveillance advertising business model is intrinsically harmful or just needs lots of guard rails around it. You're not going to hear the first point of view articulated by anyone who worked for years at these companies, by definition.
People trying to make the case to regulators in 2021 that Facebook's manipulation-for-hire business model is irredeemable are in the same position as anti-tobacco crusaders who had to testify back when there was an ashtray in front of every congressman.

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Pinboard Profile picture
13 Oct
The unintentional lesson in this map is that for Boston, it doesn't really matter much whether we stop emitting greenhouse gases tomorrow or just relax and keep on going. The 1.5º C of warming responsible for most of the flooding is already baked in.
This fallacy comes up a lot in the discussions of climate change. Because so much warming is already locked in, the baseline for comparing various future scenarios should not be how things look today. That is an unattainable future goal unless we start doing crazy geoengineering. Image
When you stop framing the climate question as "can we save Miami?" and replace it with the more correct "can we save West Palm Beach?", it becomes less motivating. People have done a poor job communicating how much future impact is already irreversible. Image
Read 4 tweets
Pinboard Profile picture
12 Oct
The web3 concept that is slowly congealing is an interesting inversion of web 2.0. Back then the idea was "build social websites and figure out the money part later." Today it's "build money stuff and figure out some non-speculative use for it later."
There are three non-fraud foundational problems with "web3":

1. No way to reference anything in the real world (oracle problem)
2. Immutable code makes any smart contract its own bug bounty.
3. Everything breaks (more) unless expensive distributed systems are run in perpetuity.
You can't write this off as idiotic because there may be serendipitous discoveries waiting, just like happened with the web 2.0 hype. But the money element is new and quite toxic. It's a set of legos where every lego is also an unregulated casino, ponzi scheme, and ransomware kit
Read 13 tweets
Pinboard Profile picture
11 Oct
It's interesting that they couldn't find a way to make #8 sound bad.
Meanwhile on this site we're locked in some kind of conceptual battle over @Davidshor Thought when the actual Democratic governing strategy, almost a year after winning power, is "do nothing". I'd like to at least see a robust defense of that by a true believer.
Our political leaders created a huge buildup to bills that were supposed to make the New Deal look like chump change, went all-in on debt ceiling drama, and then just said "meh" about it all. That seems like a bigger political emergency than the specific content of these policies
Read 6 tweets
Pinboard Profile picture
10 Oct
This is pretty great. The undercover FBI agent you're trying to sell nuclear secrets to has asked you to leave a memory card in a specific location, but you're no fool. So to avoid getting caught, you bring your wife to stand next to you and keep a lookout while you crime.
The summary of the email exchanges is pretty great:

FBI: plz put the crime data in a location we picked
Criminal: lol no way. I'll upload it.
FBI: no we need it on a card.
Criminal: OK but I'll pick the place. Also I've never crimed before
FBI: No plz use our place.
Criminal: OK
I guess this guy's long drives *with his wife* to deliver classified information to a location an internet stranger told him to use gave this guy a lot of time to overthink how to safely communicate with that amazingly helpful stranger in the future. There is a parable here.
Read 9 tweets
Pinboard Profile picture
9 Oct
This is hilarious, but they should have gone one step further and made it show zeptodegrees C of global warming.
"Because your flight to Decatur had a layover, there will be now 10 more raindrops in a freak Tamil Nadu downpour in 2109"
What we really need to fight global warming is for Taco Bell to list projected methane emissions on its menu.
Read 4 tweets
Pinboard Profile picture
8 Oct
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
Read 12 tweets

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