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22 Oct, 6 tweets, 2 min read
What we could really use is a whistleblower from Facebook's dirty tricks division.
The last thing the world needs or want is another one of these. But they are apparently an unavoidable waste product of the surveillance economy. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tristan_H…
The most explosive accusation in this whistleblower's affidavit appears to be that a Facebook marketing person told the truth
The fact that this is an SEC complaint is a big boost to @matt_levine's theory that everything is securities fraud. The alleged harm here is to investors, who I guess were hurt because Facebook's stock has only tripled since the 2016 election?
So in a nutshell, the theory of harm being asserted here to the SEC is that Facebook hurt investors by doing everything it could to maximize profits.
I'm not super fond of Facebook, but this is an effort to use securities law to create liability for behavior that is not against the law, because we have never regulated it. It takes us a step further away from making good tech policy.

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Pinboard Profile picture
22 Oct
The buried lede here is we need to think harder about preparing for another solar event like happened in 993 that left its mark in the tree rings, because such events are not all that rare and the next one will destroy GPS and much of the power grid. nytimes.com/2021/10/20/sci…
Another solar event about 200 years earlier was nearly twice as intense. And for the less intense ones (that would still fry our infrastructure) we're basically dependent on some monk somewhere writing down how weird it is that he can read by aurora light en.wikipedia.org/wiki/774%E2%80…
Everyone loves the Carrington Event, the well-documented solar storm in 1859 that has been the gold standard for "if this happened today, we'd be toast". But the 774 event was at least 10 times as strong. The Sun does not play. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carringto…
Read 6 tweets
Pinboard Profile picture
21 Oct
Every election cycle there's one of these explainers about how having a 20 minute conversation on your porch with a condescending stranger is so much different from just telling them to go away. The one thing deep canvassing really *is* good for is as a fundraising fairy tale. Image
The impression left is that ordinary, unenlightened canvassers tear themselves away from these potentially transformative, deeply empathetic conversations on the porches of real America so they can meet their arbitrary canvassing quota. The truth is we all hate door knockers.
But expect to hear all about this secret progressive weapon to bridge the political divide just around the time when campaigns badly need your donation to meet their filing deadline.
Read 7 tweets
Pinboard Profile picture
20 Oct
I really like this question and the challenge of answering it. I believe what makes NFTs different is a transformative vision of a future that true believers find inspiring and achievable. In their eyes, the current speculative bubble is a mechanism for growing something enduring
A good analogy to NFT believers are the people who are really into colonizing Mars. You can argue with them on the technical demerits of their project (no air, far away, all our stuff is here, slow internet), but you're not really getting to the heart of their belief system.
People want to colonize Mars because they (pick one) want to live out a libertarian fantasy, have deep anxieties about human extinction, want humanity to take over the galaxy, want a fresh start in Year Zero without all the baggage that comes with life on Earth, you name it.
Read 14 tweets
Pinboard Profile picture
20 Oct
This is a fun paper that shows there's a decent chance we don't have to go to Mars, because Mars may eventually come to us (thanks to instabilities in Mercury's orbit). We'd only need to put landing gear on the ISS. perso.imcce.fr/jacques-laskar…
The authors ran a general relativity model on the Solar System extrapolated 5 billion years out. For each run, they changed the initial size of Mercury's orbit by a few millimeters. Since the Solar System is chaotic, this is enough to produce some spectacularly different outcomes
The upshot is—don't trust Mercury, especially when it's in retrograde. In many of these scenarios it gets pulled into a highly eccentric orbit by Jupiter, and then crashes into Venus or into the Sun. Add this to your list of anxieties if you feel optimistic about life extension.
Read 4 tweets
Pinboard Profile picture
20 Oct
It would be hard to overstate the scientific return on investment from missions like New Horizons, which cost taxpayers less than the dining room on the International Space Station. It's enormously frustrating that we don't do ten of these a year.
To pick one egregious example, we visited Uranus exactly one time, in 1974, and discovered the planet is really weird, colder than any planetary model predicts but with a strangely hot corona, a bizarro magnetic field, and... that's it. No plans to go back. Just dads to the Moon.
(Sorry, got my dates wrong. The one Uranus flyby took place in 1986, with 1974 hardware.)
Read 4 tweets
Pinboard Profile picture
18 Oct
Okay, I think there's an Apple event? Let's do this. God help us all.
The Apple Music guy has some thoughts on R.E.M.'s uneasy embrace of mainstream success Image
The new AirPods have a thing called spatial audio, which will make it sound like you're listening to a band playing somewhere even though in reality you're on a bus
Read 27 tweets

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