2022
Thursday Night Purge: Elon Musk’s Twitter Bans Tons Of High Profile Journalists — Mike Masnick at Techdirt.
“… it seems that whatever brakes or controls were in place at the new ‘free speech absolutist’ Twitter have really come off.”
How cable monopolists tricked conservatives into shooting themselves in the face – Cory Doctorow
“No matter how hard conservative culture-war cannon-fodder love big business, it will never love them back.”
While out walking the dog late this afternoon I saw a little four-year-old girl wearing a beautiful green Christmas dress with a red bow on it. She was getting out of the car with her Dad, coming home from daycare I guess.
This was the same little girl I’d seen one morning a week or two ago, getting into the same car with her Dad. That morning she was wearing an elf costume, and was delighted to show it off for me.
So today I said to her, “Don’t you look pretty!” The dog, meanwhile, wanted to say hello, so I took a step or two slowly toward the girl and her father, keeping an eye on the situation.
This time, the girl was not delighted. Her face slowly started to crumple, and she clutched for her Dad’s leg and started to wail. So I backed away.
I don’t think she was afraid. I think she had just had a busy day, with a lot of stimuli and was overwhelmed.
“Kid,” I wanted to say. “A lot of the time I feel just like that.”
Years ago, two friends of mine, one at the CIA, one at the Pentagon, advised me to delete the app. So I don’t want to position the concerns about TikTok as an extreme position. Having a Chinese-owned social media app embedding itself into our lives is not without risk. But it’s worth noting that the things we fear from Chinese software companies—privacy invasions, data selling, democracy disruptions—are things that American social media companies have been doing with our full cooperation. It’s also worth noting that American social media companies have a particular interest in reducing competition from global players, and they’ve never faced this kind of a domestic business threat from a China-based company. In other words, the pressure to ban this outside app could be coming from inside players.
— Dave Pell, NextDraft, Tok Bottom
… a conservative is someone who believes that some of us were born to rule, and the rest of us were born to be ruled over.
— Cory Doctorow, @pluralistic@mamot.fr Plato Would Ban Ad-Blockers. He was a dick.
The idea that “if you’re not paying for the product, you’re the product” is utter nonsense. The factor that determines whether a company will treat you like the product is whether they can get away with treating you like the product. A company that is disciplined by neither competition nor regulation will extract value from you in every way it can get away with.
— Cory Doctorow, Plato Would Ban Ad-Blockers. He was a dick.
I have just disabled micro.blog’s cross-posting to my main mastodon account, and will instead use micro.blog’s native ActivityPub support. If you want to follow me on Mastodon, you can do so on @mitchw@micro.blog.
This situation is permanent. Until I change my mind. Which could be never. And could be in, like, an hour.
But if you follow me on mastodon, you should probably do it on @mitchw@micro.blog. One reason to do that is that the posts are formatted a little nicer that way.
micro.blog doesn’t show me who’s following me, who likes my posts, and who boosts them. I don’t even get numbers for those statistics. Doing without this information will be character-building for me.
I can’t make up my mind whether I want to cross-post from micro.blog to my primary mastodon account—as I am doing now—or simply use micro.blog’s built-in ActivityPub support. I go back and forth.
When I’m not cross-posting, I boost my micro.blog posts to my mastodon account manually, which maybe sounds like a hassle but it’s actually no big deal
I also can’t decide whether to redirect mitchw.blog to micro.blog.
This back-and-forth is pretty typical for me with regard to blogging and social media. I seem to like fiddling with my setup as much as I like posting.
Crypto Was Always Smoke and Mirrors: The fall of FTX shocked everyone. Except this guy.
The world of cryptocurrency is rich with eccentric characters and anonymous Twitter personalities. So perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise that one of the early figures who called attention to the problems with Sam Bankman-Fried’s cryptocurrency exchange, FTX, is a 30-year-old Michigan psychiatrist who investigates financial crimes as a hobby.
He’s James Block, and he runs a crypto newsletter called Dirty Bubble Media.
Block, a vehement crypto skeptic, has spent the past 18 months doing forensic blockchain research. He uses open-source tools to follow flows of money between crypto companies, repeatedly demonstrating how shadow banks and nefarious scammers inflate the value of worthless assets in order to generate enormous wealth that exists only on paper.
Charlie Warzel interviewed Block for The Atlantic.
Block: The AMC-meme-stock thing is a good example of how this can happen. People buy the stock of a semi-worthless company because they have this idea about short squeezing, or whatever. They are not financial experts and have a loose or maybe even wrong understanding of how finance works, and want to try to move the market. Crypto takes this abstraction a step further, because there’s nothing linked to it at all. There’s no economic activity in this space. There’s nothing produced by these companies. In fact, it’s a negative-sum game because of the cost of running the blockchains alone—the computational cost is tremendous. The amount of time and money people put into just running these things is tremendous. And they produce nothing of value. There’s a reason these massive companies aren’t all using blockchain for their processes: It is incredibly inefficient. And realistically, who actually wants their financial information public and visible to everybody?
…
Warzel: Do you think most entities in the crypto space are insolvent and know it, and are just pretending right now, post-FTX?
Block: Absolutely. That’s because of what I said earlier about crypto. There’s no value created by any of these companies. It’s all just moving money from Person A to Person B.
Support Railroad Workers Fighting for Humane Conditions and Paid Sick Leave.
The RR workers get NO sick leave and NO regular schedules! They are always under their bosses’ thumb. COVID shows how important sick leave is. Inhumane schedules, and denying sick leave, especially during a pandemic, increases illness, deaths, and disparities, especially among people already vulnerable to Covid.
Sick leave and humane scheduling will not ruin the companies financially. Paid sick leave only amounts to 3.5% of the industry’s soaring profits; in fact, over 50% of their revenue is profit.
— People’s CDC
American healthcare is split into 2 piles:
- Face holes
- Not face holes
— US Healthcare, by Matt Haughey on A Whole Lotta Nothing
h/t kottke.org
Speaking as a former comedian, it’ll be interesting to see how this plays out. Because … have you ever had 10,000 people hate you TO YOUR FACE before? Because I have. And humans aren’t wired for that.
I’d note that the 10,000 people hating me to my face were actually just stonily silent while I ate it on stage while opening for a musical act. And while I laughed it off after .. it was rough. And I’d been working for years at that point. But BOOING?!
And for a *narcissist*? Just saying – expect some serious whiplash crazy coming over the next week.
— John Rogers @jonrog1
h/t jwz
jwz: “I would like to report an absolutely absurd use of metaphor.”
Truck fire leads to huge pile of trash dumped in front of police station.
If you walked by 17th and Valencia on your way to lunch today, you may have noticed an enormous pile of trash steaming on the road just beyond the police station doors.
— Will Jarrett at the San Francisco Mission Local
The service I use to track of TV and movies to watch, trakt.tv, has been down for two days. They post occasional updates on Twitter. The latest just says their main database crashed two days ago at 7:30 am PT, and they’re working around the clock to fix things. Good luck!
Idea for a crime novel about a man who steals a yarmulke from his male sibling. Working title: “His Brother’s Kipah.”
Contrary to all good writing advice, sometimes I like to use baroque, sesquipedalian language where monosyllabic verbiage will do.
Orphaned neurological implants. By Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr.
Second Sight, a company that makes ocular implants, sold out to another company that doesn’t want to be on that business, leaving users blind and with crippling vertigo. Not the first time a neural implants company has done this to users.
Medtech startups are like any other startup. “… when a startup fails, investors try to make back some of their losses by selling the company’s assets to any buyer, no matter how sleazy.”
The solution: Neural implants should be open hardware, and users should have legally protected right to repair.
Cory:
Opponents of this proposal will say that it will discourage investment in “innovation” in neurological implants. They may well be right: the kinds of private investors who hedge their bets on high-risk ventures by minimizing security and resilience and exploiting patents and user-data might well be scared off of investment by a requirement to make the technology open.
It may be that showboating billionaire dilettantes will be unwilling to continue to pour money into neural implant companies if they are required to put the lives of the people who use their products ahead of their own profits.
It may be that the only humane, sustainable way to develop neural implants is to publicly fund that research and development, with the condition that the work products be standard, open, and replicable
Heavy rain when walking the dog this morning. The dog didn’t like it. Neither did I, but only one of us had a choice about being out there.
A few weeks ago, I was communicating with a 26-year-old colleague, talking about increasing work demands in the face of an oncoming launch. I started to say, “I definitely picked the wrong week to quit sniffing glue.” Then I stopped myself, because I thought she probably hasn’t seen the movie, and doesn’t know about the national panic in the 1970s where kids were supposedly huffing glue to get high.