Oof. Good work! HT @str4d It's awesome that THORChain and other open source projects that depend on this cryptographer rewarded the discoverers with $500,000 worth of bounties!
I heard that Youtube (owned by Google/Alphabet) took down a video of Florida Gov DeSantis hosting a round-table retro on covid-19 with Scott Atlas, Jay Bhattacharya, and others. That interested me.
As I've previously tweeted, I'm profoundly concerned about censorship and other forms of thought-control beginning to be exercised by the Tech Titans like Google, among others.
Of course, they say that they're doing it for our own good! For good reasons. And honestly, I believe that they believe that. But that doesn't assuage my fear about its potentially deadly effects on our society.
When trying to learn about the state of the pandemic, I try avoid paying attention to the kinds of facts and data which are vulnerable to being manipulated and misrepresented and look for "harder data":
I'm convinced that the most effective tools for propaganda, panic-mongering, and thought-control are data that are *true facts* and *true data*, selected and framed to support a false narrative. True facts are more powerful tools for deception than falsehoods are.
Misinfo and disinfo are rampant. Media corporations, Tech Titans, governments, and probably other actors are running successful disinfo ops. Additionally, fear and anger are "cognitive pandemics" sweeping through populations and making people deceive themselves and their friends.
Total deaths in USA per week from all causes (the orange line is basically "how many deaths we'd have in a particularly bad year") cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr…
Note that the most recent few weeks haven't yet had all of the deaths that week fully counted, so those bars will get revised up over the next few weeks, which is why I excluded the most recent two weeks from the highlighted image (left).
But even taking that into account, it seems like USA is currently experiencing fewer deaths per week than an average week in April.
Privacy technology (such as Zcash) doesn't *just* protect Americans from their own government (in accordance with quintessentially American values such the Fourth Amendment). Perhaps more importantly, it protects Americans from *enemy governments*.
Listen to Chairman Powell. Liberty, and limitations on central power, is the way we do things here. It's what makes us different and better.
In fact, because of the way law, technology, information security, and industry interact, fully-transparent blockchains expose normal everyday American users to foreign military/espionage operations *much more* than they expose criminal users to law enforcement.
What the fuck? Amazon is now doing "Virtual Book Burnings" to prevent people from reading dangerous ideas. This trend will further destabilize human society and make it harder to learn and harder to make peace with each other.
Amazon has now joined the Hall of Shame of the Monopoly Tech Overlords who are giving into the inevitable human desire to control other people's thoughts: