Links and Notes for January 7th, 2022

Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.

Table of Contents

• COVID-19
• Economy & Finance
• Public Policy & Politics
• Journalism & Media
• Science & Nature
• Art & Literature
• Philosophy & Sociology
• Technology

COVID-19

One More Time: What Do You Want Us to Do About Covid that We Aren’t Doing Already? by Freddie DeBoer (SubStack)

“I ask that you consider this possibility: that aside from the vaccines and gradual improvements to treatment, there was never anything much we could have done to change the course of the pandemic. I ask you to consider the possibility that from the beginning, the only solutions were solutions brought to us by medical technology. I look at all of these people, shaking with anger at the unseriousness of their countrymen and incensed that we didn’t stop it, and I wonder how they could possibly be so confident that we ever had a chance to do so. It’s a highly infectious respiratory virus and we live in an unprecedentedly interconnected world, guys.”

“It is entirely possible that all of our mitigation efforts, aside from vaccination and treatment, have just been a way to look busy, that the universe decided that a terrible disease was going to sweep through the world and kill millions of people. It’s entirely possible that you get vaccinated and hope for the best and that’s it. It’s out of our hands.

“Have you considered the fact that sometimes the world is simply out of your control?”

Whereas I do like the last line, what he’s saying is rewriting history a bit. The mitigations did work to stop the virus before we had vaccines. Don’t be obtuse in the other direction, DeBoer. He’s right in saying that most people would rather take the overall 1% risk of death and go to the movies without a mask instead. It’s a long time to be without society’s goodies. It’s arguable that the retreat into online idiocy is almost entirely due to COVID.

Economy & Finance

The Ticking Bomb of Crypto Fascism by Hamilton Nolan (In These Times)

“They are called crypto ​“currencies,” but clearly they are not currencies. Their value fluctuates far too much to be a useful medium of exchange. So what are they? They are collectibles, pure speculative objects with zero intrinsic value. If you buy a stock, you own a portion of a business; if you buy a house, even if the price goes down, you still have a house. If you buy a Bitcoin, you have nothing but the title to a piece of computer code that can do absolutely nothing for you except to the extent that someone else can be induced to pay you money for it. In the midst of a mania, as we are now in, the price of these imaginary assets tends to rise, because the collective public sentiment is that the prices will rise. When that sentiment changes — whether due to fear, or some event that causes crypto holders to need to cash out — the price will plummet. This basic dynamic has been demonstrated a zillion times in financial history, often by assets with far more substance than crypto.”

“The American way is to cheer on the few lucky ultra-rich people, and fete them as heroes, and look for a way to emulate them, although such a thing is mathematically impossible. Instead of socialism, we have given people crypto. They buy crypto, for the most part, not because of lofty beliefs in techno-futurism, but because they think it is a way to get rich quick for a low entry price. Crypto is just a modern lottery ticket. But whereas lottery tickets only cost you a little at a time, crypto will inflate to the moon and then crash into the gutter in a far more devastating way. The bitterest irony, perhaps, is that while the regular folks flock to crypto because they think it’s a utopian land of opportunity for the little guy to make a buck, it is, in fact, largely controlled by a small cartel of rich investors. Just like everything else.”

“Crypto, a portfolio of inherently worthless online tokens, is already sustained almost entirely by myth. Its value proposition is so inscrutable that when it melts down, almost any narrative could be crafted to plausibly explain it. It was the Fed! The government! The leftists who hate entrepreneurialism! It was the dark and devious forces of the shadowy deep state! Anything will do.”

It’s a religion. It’s not falsifiable.

Of Course GameStop Is Doing NFTs by Matt Levine (Bloomberg)

“I do not personally think that the future of the world economy will be a metaverse in which most of the value is created by people selling each other the right to use images in video games. But I cannot rule out that possibility, and smart people seem to take some form of it seriously.”

Because they can make short-term personal gain from it. That seems to be the only thing that matters anymore. As long as there are enough people comfortable in that world without having to interact with the vast majority of the world that doesn’t benefit from it, it will continue. Without pitchforks, nothing happens. So far, the people are still in the begging-for-admission phase and not in the burn-the-club-down phase.

“The point here is just that if a corporation ends up accidentally having some level of systemic power like this, where its policy decisions have huge effects not just on its shareholders and customers but on the world as a whole, then perhaps it should take pains to make those decisions transparently and with public engagement. If your company somehow becomes a quasi-government, perhaps it should act quasi-governmentally.”

All voluntarily, of course.

Nobody Wants to Misplace Their Crypto by Matt Levine (Bloomberg)

“Both the Class B shares and the Private Placement Warrants held by the Sponsor would be worthless if Churchill did not complete a deal. As of the record date, the Private Placement Warrants were worth roughly $51 million and the founder shares were worth approximately $305 million, representing a 1,219,900% gain on the Sponsor’s $25,000 investment. These figures would have dropped to zero absent a deal. That is, Klein put up $25,000 of startup costs to form the SPAC, and got stock and warrants worth about $350 million, if it closed a deal.”

“What is perhaps more important here is just the general sense from a Delaware court that SPAC deals are inherently conflicted, that the basic structure is built around conflicts of interest and that any SPAC deal that ends up in court will be treated with suspicion.”

“But you can sidestep it by just pretending. Instead of digitizing ownership of Olive Garden franchises, with the right to hire and fire employees and collect cash flows and the obligation to maintain food-safety standards and take out the trash, you can digitize pretend Olive Garden franchises, digital receipts associated with pictures of Olive Garden franchises.”

Is this fantasy franchising? Like fantasy football?

“Instead of selling an NFT that conveys ownership of my house, I could sell an NFT “of” my house, which conveys nothing except itself. (Or: Anyone else could sell an NFT of my house.)

““If I buy the NFT of your house do I get your house?”

“No, you get the NFT of my house.

““Why would I want that?”

“I don’t know.”

These Are the Plunging Charts that the New York Stock Exchange Hopes You Won’t See by Pam Martens (Wall Street on Parade)

“The report from Scorpion Capital sums up its analysis of the company like this: “The company claims to have a ‘magic material’ that’s led to a breakthrough solid-state battery for electric vehicles. Even amidst the current mania of retail gambling on vaporous SPAC promotions, QS stands out for its reckless, nosebleed valuation of $15B – or roughly ~ $80MM per employee, a mere 188 per LinkedIn. QuantumScape, across its investor materials, has only released about 7 key ‘data’ slides with a few scraps of information. This leads us to pen a new valuation metric – ‘Market Cap per Powerpoint Slide’ – in this case, about $2B for each tantalizing crumb.””

“Citigroup is the Wall Street megabank that blew itself up in 2008 and became a 99-cent stock by the spring of 2009. (Its own shares are still down 90 percent from January 1, 2007. It did a dodgy 1-for-10 reverse stock split in 2011 to dress up its share price.) Ben Bernanke’s Fed decided to secretly pump $2.5 trillion in cumulative loans into Citigroup between December 2007 and July of 2010 so that it could survive”

“Last December, both houses of Congress unanimously passed legislation called the Holding Foreign Companies Accountable Act. The legislation requires that the Securities and Exchange Commission identify companies that are listed in the U.S. which the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) cannot “inspect or investigate completely because of a position taken by an authority in the foreign jurisdiction.” The law requires the delisting of the company’s stock if its audits cannot be inspected for three consecutive years. The legislation also requires that U.S. listed companies provide documentation showing that they are not owned or controlled by a governmental entity. That’s a big problem for the New York Stock Exchange.”

Business Begins Bitcoin Bividend by Matt Levine (Bloomberg)

“My broader point here is that the system of stock ownership runs on different rails from the system of crypto ownership. For instance, it is pretty unusual, in the U.S., to actually own stock in your own name.

“Most stock is owned in the name of a thing called “Cede & Co.,” a “nominee” for the Depository Trust Co., the big U.S. stock clearinghouse. And then DTC keeps a list of the brokers who “really” own its shares, and those brokers keep their own lists of the customers who “really” own their shares. So if you buy a share of stock through your broker, what you own is a notation in the broker’s database saying that you are entitled to one share, and what the broker owns is a notation in DTC’s database saying that it is entitled to one share. DTC/Cede, meanwhile, actually owns the share, which is to say that Cede owns a notation in the issuer’s transfer agent’s database saying that it is entitled to one share. Actual share ownership — “record” ownership — means being on the transfer agent’s list.”

“When a company pays a cash dividend, it pretty much wires the money to DTC, which wires the money to brokerage firms, which deposit the money in their customers’ accounts.”

Apple market valuation touches $3 trillion by Nick Beams (WSWS)

“The Financial Times also published data pointing to Apple’s meteoric rise. In August 2018 it became a $1 trillion company and just two years later became the first company to be valued at $2 trillion. At the end of October, it lost the title of the world’s most valuable company to Microsoft but then quickly regained it by adding half a trillion dollars to its market value since November 15—less than two months ago.”

How does anyone even think that this reflects real value anymore?

“Up until 1982 share buybacks were illegal as they were considered to be market manipulation. Today they are regarded as core financial activity.”

“Apple increased its market value by 123 percent in 2021, Microsoft by 110 percent, to record a market value of $2.5 trillion and Alphabet increased its market value by 108 percent to reach a market value of $1.9 trillion by the end of last year. Amazon recorded an 85 percent increase in market value, sending its capitalization to $1.7 trillion. The biggest rise of all was by Tesla. It recorded a 1311 percent increase in market value to send its total capitalization to $1.1 trillion. As a recent Wall Street Journal Article noted, Tesla gained almost $200 billion in market value within four days in late December—more than the equivalent of the total market capitalization of Ford and General Motors combined.”

Slaying the Blood Unicorn by Matt Levine (Bloomberg)

“Now of course it is 2022 and we are all a bit more jaded. There was the SoftBank boom, we’ve had a couple of years of SPACs, there is so much crypto. Raising hundreds of millions of dollars from gullible investors who don’t do much due diligence is not particularly impressive anymore. If you want to do it by pretending to have a technology, you can (try electric vehicles!), but these days even that is optional.”

“Or you can raise lots of money from investors by letting them pretend to own digital pictures of apes, or by just saying “hey here’s a Ponzi.” Theranos raised a lot of money from investors who did not do too much due diligence, because the world was awash in money and investors got careless; that is much, much, much, much more true now, and Theranos looks a little quaint.”

“If the lesson you learned from Theranos’s fall in 2015, or 2018, was “I am not going to invest in any tech companies with charismatic founders and vague promises unless I’ve done thorough rigorous diligence, and if those founders object to that then they are not getting my money,” then you have missed a lot of good deals and the founders have not missed your money.”

Fine, though. God this world is just gross. People living hand-to-mouth and this kind of nonsense is going on at the same time. People congratulating themselves for having so much money that they can “get in on deals”. Even if some of them are losers, at least one will be stupidly successful for no useful reason, making them even richer. Hooray. This is progress? Is this really the only way we can conceive of running this place?

“In a generally rising market where lots of fortunes are being made quickly, rushing to back popular projects without a lot of due diligence seems to work, and if you back enough of them you’ll be fine even if a few are frauds. The ones that work make you rich; the ones that are frauds give you an entertaining story.”

“In both Coal and Oil, private equity firms are betting that the energy transition will take longer than expected and that demand will outpace a shrinking supply. The ensuing combination of high commodity prices and low acquisition costs for unwelcome assets may provide these firms the bonanza of a lifetime. I think “get the bonanza of a lifetime while also destroying the environment” is not a pitch that will appeal to everybody, but it definitely will appeal to somebody?”

“[…] suspect that they’re mostly less important than the basic core function of taking $7 trillion from investors, channeling it where the investors want it to go, and slowly and subtly diverting those channels so that the money moves more in the direction that BlackRock wants it to go.”

“ESGU’s fees are lower than industry averages for sustainable funds but are still five times higher than an S&P 500 tracker that trades under the ticker IVV – a popular BlackRock fund whose makeup and expected performance are closely aligned with those of ESGU.”

There it is.

“The pitch here is not, you know, about the technical skills of the people building the DeFilm streaming platform, or about their aesthetic judgment in movies, or even about their marketing skills. The pitch here is that there are a bunch of speculative assets, because that is what Web3 is.”

Public Policy & Politics

Australian court overturns government cancellation of Novak Djokovic’s visa by Oscar Grenfell (WSWS)

“Home Affairs Minister Karen Andrews consented to the judgement and agreed that the government would pay Djokovic’s legal costs, which could be as high as $250,000. Such an outcome would be unthinkable if the case concerned a refugee or a poor immigrant.”

First, Djokovic gets in on a technicality that is only available to him because he’s rich and famous. This is SOP in our world. The punchline is that he gets the technicality because he’s rich but not because he will actually pay for it. He’s able to pay for it, so the government will pay for it. Joseph Heller, where art thou?

The whole story is one of the rich pretending to go through motions intended to prove that they don’t get special treatment.

“[…] the story of the visa has grown stranger and stranger. Documents presented to the court show that Djokovic applied for and was granted a visa on November 18. There is no indication that this was accompanied by an exemption application, and the COVID infection that he would subsequently invoke did not occur until a month later.”

Why even bother anymore? Do they really have guilty consciences? No-one actually believes that anything is fair. You can at least be efficient and skip the bullshitting that you are even trying to be fair and conform to some sort of set of laws. There are certain people to whom the law does not apply. It’s insulting enough without the half-assed and transparently corrupt process pretending that it’s not. Just own it.

If the rich are treated so well, how are the poor treated?

“Immigration and refugee lawyers have noted that in their field, the wheels of justice turn exceedingly slowly, and the eventual outcome is often not favourable. Some of the refugees at Park Hotel, where Djokovic spent several days, have been imprisoned at the rundown facility and others like it for nine or more years in a perpetual legal limbo.”

Ah, that sounds about right. Four days for the rich; nine years for the poor.

The Empire That Cried Genocide: Washington’s Exploitation of Ethnic Brutality from Rwanda to Xinjiang by Nicky Reid (CounterPunch)

“No matter how woke these presstitutes pretend to be they always jump at the opportunity to virtue signal over the flag of some poorer nation of color and wax philosophic about the cultural superiority of western democracy as if they’ve never smelled a dead Indian. It’s the kind of absurdly hypocritical prestige racism that only sells with perfect government-corporate synergy.”

“These rugged separatists have only recently been removed from this list and reborn as freedom fighters since the Xinjiang region has become an essential highway in China’s attempts to expand their economic footprint across Central Asia and into Europe with their ambitious Belt and Road Initiative. This is when the horror stories began to proliferate and while there are some very credible accounts surfacing from individuals in the region, most of the stories of widespread abuse seem to originate from the same handful of highly suspect sources.”

“Long story short, the American Empire’s favorite sources of proof that China is committing genocide against its own people come from the American Empire itself.”

“It should also be noted that Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed had been on good terms with the US until his recent decision to approve a Chinese-funded railway between Addis Ababa and Djibouti as part of the aforementioned Belt and Road Initiative.”

“Anytime America wanted to declare another seemingly pointless war on another seemingly defenseless third world nation, our officials would merely utter the word Rwanda and pontificate about our god-given responsibility to protect. Anyone who even questioned this cracked logic could easily be tainted as a genocide denier”

“[…] the infamous Srebrenica Massacre in Bosnia where Serbian militias killed some 8 thousand Bosnian males of fighting age. The part of this tragic story often omitted by western sources however is that the bloodbath only began after local Bosnian forces had slaughtered thousands of Serbs in nearby villages before conveniently abandoning the city of Srebrenica to be ransacked in revenge in order to justify an American bombing campaign that guaranteed a Bosnian victory.”

“[…] was only revealed by thorough international investigations after the brutal NATO bombing that the death toll had actually been closer to two thousand and many of them had been killed by our terrorist allies in the Al-Qaeda linked Kosovo Liberation Army who subsequently engaged in the ethnic cleansing of almost a quarter-million Serbs, Roma, and Jews once Washington had them installed in power”

“America only chose to get self-righteous over Ethiopia and Xinjiang because they are both essential pieces of China’s Belt and Road initiative, a massive multi-trillion-dollar infrastructure project aimed at integrating the economies of Europe and Asia in a way that could further advance a new multi-polar Eurasian Century that poses an existential threat to American primacy.”

“Accusations of genocide should always be taken seriously, but when the primary source is a trigger-happy superpower that has literally turned both genocide and genocide accusation into a veritable industrial complex, it should also be taken with a hefty grain of salt, especially when another world war is the prescribed cure for the violence.”

Taiwan Does Not Resemble Ukraine as Much as it Does the Donbas by Juan Alberto Ruiz Casado (CounterPunch)

“This stance, which hypocritically defends the moral integrity of the US as a global policeman despite the countless abuses of “international law” that it upholds, is based on the misrepresentation and manipulation of the facts. To begin with, China does not fly its fighter jets over “Taiwan’s airspace”, but over its ADIZ, an area without international legitimacy far from the island’s territory, over international waters. Likewise, the fact that China puts its weapons to test does not make China any different from any other military, unless we depart from the biased premise that all military development by China is illegitimate because it threatens US global dominance.”

“This is the post-truth of hegemonic discourse: it relies on a drop of truth to build a distorted political imaginary that precisely coincides with what the majority of the public wants to hear: China and Russia are evil, we Westerns are the force of good (and God).”

“Ukraine claims the Donbass employing the exact same arguments as the People’s Republic of China claims the Republic of China (Taiwan). Both conflicts were the product of the intervention of great powers supporting different sides and allowing the disintegration of both states into two separated areas with, eventually, different national and political sentiments.”

“Western media such as The Washington Post are accusing Russia of not respecting international law and wanting to undermine Ukrainian sovereignty, clearly recognized by international law, so Crimea or Donbass cannot be “expropriated” by Russia. On the contrary, the same emphasis is not made in pointing out that under international law Taiwan is part of China, so that the US efforts to grant Taiwanese independence are equivalent to Russia’s actions against the sovereignty of a recognized state.”

“Equivalently, the US military presence around China, within Taiwan with US troops on the ground, through regular warship crossings of the Taiwan Strait, and so on, is envisaged as a defence of freedom and as a warning to China’s intention to invade the island.”

The difference being that Donbass directly borders Russia whereas Taiwan is half a world away from mainland U.S.

“In the end, the conflicts in which Taiwan and Ukraine are inserted have as a main point in common the meddling of the US and its goal of imperialist domination. The headache is not living next to Russia or China, but living in a world where uniquely the United States dictates what is wrong and what is right according to its national interests transformed into a “rules based order”.”

Behind the News, 1/13/22 by Doug Henwood (Apple Podcasts)

This interview with Katrina vanden Heuvel on Russia was absolutely excellent and sane and welcome. It’s the first half of the show. The second half of the show—and interview with Tim Shorrock on China and North Korea was also quite good. But it was vanden Heuvel who was a breath of fresh air. Henwood was excellent, as nearly always, just getting out of the way and dropping a bon mot every once in a while.

Journalism & Media

Libertarian kryptonite by Ryan Broderick (Garbage Day)

“[…] the age of consent question is “Libertarian kryptonite,” and now the project’s Discord is overrun with both trolls asking if they’ll be allowed to legally murder people on the island […]”

““Outrage trolls don’t want dialogue, and you aren’t going to get one. They exist to waste your time and your followers’ time, to pollute your feed, to distract you from more important issues, and to make you angry enough to say something you regret,” she wrote. “In our media environment, attention is currency. It doesn’t matter if that attention is positive or negative — all that matters is that you’re clicking, viewing, commenting, sharing, and driving ad revenue.”

“I’m not totally sure I believe that all attention is useful, but I do think that the American right wing understands that Trending Topics are a launchpad that run on a dumb enough algorithm (with lazier enough moderators) that they can use it to dominate the online conversation and then crowdfund off of it.”

Episode 173: The Disinformation Society w/ Marcus Gilroy-Ware (QAnon Anonymous)

This was a really good interview. I don’t have any transcriptions of choice quotes, but overall, the 90-minute discussion was very, very interesting and worthwhile. In case you don’t know the podcast, it’s not a rabbit-holed Q-podcast, but performs essentially a meta-analysis of conspiracy theories, cults, and the like. This episode very much discusses how it is that we, as a society, end up wasting so much time on distracting trivialities when there is so much real work to do.

“A bird’s eye view of how the market-driven society has evolved into a potent catalyst for “disinformation” and conspiracy theories. This week’s guest is Marcus Gilroy-Ware, senior lecturer in digital journalism at the University of West England and the author of 2017’s ‘Filling the Void: Emotion, Capitalism & Social Media’ and 2020’s ‘After The Fact: The Truth About Fake News’. ”

Viral content optimized to piss off old people by Ryan Broderick (Garbage Day)

“There should be no illusions anymore about what Facebook is, as a platform. It’s just random bits of sensory information meant to make old people fight with each other. And if you’re a media company or an advertiser, this is the kind of content that is producing the abstract, but impressive-sounding engagement that Facebook dangles in front of you.”

The text of the original Facebook post that garnered over 4M comments is: “No English word has a double ‘ee’ except for the words: meet and tree. Prove me wrong.”

The Pentagon and CIA Have Shaped Thousands of Hollywood Movies Into Super Effective Propaganda by David Swanson (Antiwar.com)

“In the original script for the first Iron Man movie, the hero went up against the evil weapons dealers. The US military rewrote it so that he was a heroic weapons dealer who explicitly argued for more military funding. Sequels stuck with that theme.”

The Lesson of Covid: When People Are Anxious, Isolated and Hopeless, They’re Less Ready To Think Critically by Jonathan Cook (Mint Press News)

“A major goal of critical thinking is to stand outside tribal debates, where people are heavily invested in particular outcomes, and examine the ways debates have been framed. This is important because one of the main ways power expresses itself in our societies is through the construction of official narratives – usually through the billionaire-owned media – and the control and shaping of public debate.”

“Thinking critically increases anxiety by uncomfortably exposing us to the often artificial character of official reality. It can leave us feeling isolated and less hopeful, especially when friends and family expect us to be as deeply invested in the substance – the shadow play – of official, tribal debates as they are.”

“[…] they have the emotional and psychological resilience to cope with stripping away the veneer of official narratives to see the bleaker reality beneath and to grasp the fearsome obstacles to liberating ourselves from the corrupt elites that rule over us and are pushing us towards ecocidal oblivion.”

“the key distinctions from a public health perspective are between those with immunity to Covid and those without it and those who are vulnerable to hospitalization and those who are not. These are the most meaningful markers of how to treat the pandemic. The obsession with vaccination only serves a divide and rule agenda and bolsters pandemic profiteering.”

“This is how much of our public discourse operates. The good guys control the narrative so that they can ensure they continue to look good, while the bad guys are tarred and feathered, even if they are proven right.”

Science & Nature

Race Is a Spectrum. Sex Is Pretty Damn Binary. by Richard Dawkins (Areo)

“Inheritance is Mendelian, which is the very antithesis of blending. Genes (as they are now called) are particulate. Heredity is digital, not analogue. Mixing paint is a deeply false analogy. The truth is more like shuffling black and white beads. Beads don’t blend into a grey smudge, they retain their black or white identity. Every gene in a father or mother either is, or is not, passed on to each child as a discrete, particulate entity. As the generations go by, a gene (in the form of copies) either increases or decreases in frequency. Paint doesn’t have frequency.”

“[…] every one of your genes comes from either your father or your mother. No gene is a mixture of paternal with maternal. Every gene either marches on to the next generation or it doesn’t. Genes never mix like paint.”

“Sex is pretty damn binary. Male versus female is one of surprisingly few genuine dichotomies that can justly escape censure for what I have called “The Tyranny of the Discontinuous Mind.” Discuss.”

Art & Literature

The United States of Lyncherdom by Mark Twain (Wikisource)

“The people in the South are made like the people in the North — the vast majority of whom are right-hearted and compassionate, and would be cruelly pained by such a spectacle [a lynching] — and would attend it, and let on to be pleased with it, if the public approval seemed to require it. We are made like that, and we cannot help it.”

“The Moral Sense teaches us what is right, and how to avoid it — when unpopular.”

“[…] lynching mob would like to be scattered, for of a certainty there are never ten men in it who would not prefer to be somewhere else — and would be, if they but had the courage to go.”

“When Hobson called for seven volunteers to go with him to what promised to be certain death, four thousand men responded — the whole fleet, in fact. Because all the world would approve. They knew that; but if Hobson’s project had been charged with the scoffs and jeers of the friends and associates, whose good opinion and approval the sailors valued, he could not have got his seven.”

“The Chinese are universally conceded to be excellent people, honest, honorable, industrious, trustworthy, kind-hearted, and all that — leave them alone, they are plenty good enough just as they are; and besides, almost every convert runs a risk of catching our civilization. We ought to be careful. We ought to think twice before we encourage a risk like that;”

“[…] it is the law of our make that each example shall wake up drowsing chevaliers of the same great knighthood and bring them to the front.”

The War Prayer by Mark Twain

“It was indeed a glad and gracious time, and the half dozen rash spirits that ventured to disapprove of the war and cast a doubt upon its righteousness straightway got such a stern and angry warning that for their personal safety’s sake they quickly shrank out of sight and offended no more in that way.”

““Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth into battle—be Thou near them! With them—in spirit—we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O Lord our God, help us tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended in the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames in summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it […]”

Philosophy & Sociology

crypto and web3: the magical coconut by njv (LessWrong)

“we are in humanities first anthropocene era. shit is hitting the fan. we just got slapped in the face by covid. china is increasingly embarrassing us. our operating frameworks are so clearly not working. and what do we do about it? our smartest minds spend their time selling ape jpegs. and then tell us that it is our future. is this not the crowd cheering in the colosseum cheering on gladiators as the roman empire collapses? have we gone mad? i’m embarrassed to write this because of how against the grain it goes. its probably why watching leos don’t look up was so cathartic or terry crews in idiocracy was eerily relatable — mainstream examples that my pov have not fully drowned. if i were handing a societal instruction guide to an alien, the book could very well be titled “the emperors new clothes” with a captivating bang of an intro, “the emperors new clothes: the introduction of the magical coconut and web3.” ”

I’ve been saying this for a while now. How can building a second version of the economy that we already have—like, literally, a copy, but with different winners (maybe)—be the number-one priority for mankind? We have got a lot of other shit to take care of. Because, say the cryptolords, once we’ve transferred the economy to cryptocurrency—and made a (possibly) different handful of people wildly wealthy beyond all imagination without changing anything that is fundamentally out of whack in our world—then we will finally have the technology to fix all of those other things. The path to redemption on the really high-priority things leads through cryptocurrencies. They are a dependency and therefore must be taken care of first. That is just what a bunch of scammers would say. Good thing you’re not a bunch of … oh, never mind.

Technology

NFT drama has finally hit Tumblr by Ryan Broderick (Garbage Day)

This next bit is about the inherent conflict in so-called Web 3.0's promises. This is Broderick citing Aaron Levie, the CEO of collaboration platform Box,

“And so, depending on where you are in the economy — the user, you want cheap stuff. And if you’re a shareholder, you want expensive stuff. Now when you combine those two groups — the user and the shareholder — the question is two-fold. Do you start to create this very difficult decision tree for your users of what kind of product feedback are they giving you? Are they giving you that feedback because they want to make more money as a token holder or are they giving you that feedback because they want more value as a user?”

This is exactly what is happening in meme stocks and crypto—and, quite frankly, pretty much most of the stock market. It’s the HODL mentality that makes people keep things, not because they have inherent value, but because they know—or think—that keeping them will imbue them with value. That is the art of artificial scarcity. How you can extract value from something like that is an open question. On paper, it has value, but you can’t use it directly—because using it will cause its value to collapse. That’s exactly what happened to Tesla’s share price when Musk began selling a bunch of stock to pay for taxes on his options he’d exercised.

Users who are invested in the platform will be less likely to do anything that would damage its price, sure. On the other hand, wouldn’t they continue to be invested in maximizing value? The statement the guy made above applies to situations where the value is based on nothing. If there value were based on something—like, say, a worker’s cooperative that produces something that actually exists, rather than jpegs of a monkey—then this would be a proper incentive. Essentially, what it boils down to is a cooperative but, instead of being owned by the workers, it’s owned by the users. This does not seem like an improvement on Marx.

Will Bitcoin Be Done In By Terrible Zoning Laws? by Christian Britschgi (Reason)

“Those boxes make up a bitcoin “mine.” Inside each one, a network of linked computers works to solve equations that keep bitcoin’s decentralized network up and running. In exchange for solving these equations—for performing the work of keeping the bitcoin network alive—the mining computers are rewarded with bitcoins. This process is how bitcoins and many other forms of cryptocurrency are brought into the world; it’s complex and computationally intensive, a little like running a video game with cutting-edge graphics.”

The rest of the article is a typical one by someone of relatively strong libertarian bent like Britschgi and I only skimmed it. (Zoning is bad and businesses like giant, headless, employee-less, noisy data centers are great cash cows for struggling rural reasons and those hicks should be happy to bask in the beneficence of their hyper-capitalist and vastly technologically superior crypto-overlords rather than nitpicking about zoning laws. If I didn’t get the gist of the article, I apologize.)

Anyway, I found the description above quite a fitting one. It’s interesting how the author likely wrote it with the impression that it puts bitcoin mining in a good light rather than a bad one. For me, it explains everything about how silly and needless this whole thing is. Why can’t we think of something more efficient? Why does there have to be this senseless recalculation of the data?

That is, I know why the “proof of work” is at the heart of the consensus algorithm and the purpose it serves as an arbiter of justice and impartial source of trust. What I mean is: why do we have to invent something that uses so much power, that feels so inefficient, in this day and age? We need energy reduction, not expansion.

It was an interesting innovation in its time, but when everything moves at Internet speed, why are we satisfied to keep using literally the first algorithm we invented for impartial, non-fiat currency? We get new versions of everything else—why is the first version still so powerful? It’s slow as hell and costs a lot per transaction at this late stage. There are newer currencies that use alternatives; see What are the alternative strategies to proof-of-work? by Toshendra Kumar Sharma (Blockchain Council).

SpaceX abandons Starlink plan that Amazon objected to, but fight isn’t over by Jon Brodkin (Ars Technica)

“paceX’s January 7 filing said it has launched 1,900 first-generation satellites and said that the “Gen2 system will complement and augment that first generation system so that their combined capacity will be available to meet the growing needs of American consumers… A SpaceX customer user terminal will be able to receive service from satellites of either system.”

“Starlink says it has more than 145,000 users in 25 countries. User growth seems to have slowed down since SpaceX revealed that the global chip shortage is affecting its ability to fulfill orders for prospective customers who still haven’t received satellite dishes.”

That’s 76 users per 1st-generation satellite. This is an absolute scandal. And “SpaceX’s chosen configuration includes 29,988 satellites at altitudes ranging from 340 km to 614 km.”. Orders are slowing down. Are we going to let them fill all of LEO with satellites and then … what? Force the US government to make people use them?

Crypto: the good, the bad and the ugly by Laurie Voss (Seldo.com)

“But crypto hasn’t grabbed me like that. Every time I dig into crypto I find things that seem stupid, or useless, or actively bad. But so many people are into it! I’m a big fan of the wisdom of crowds, especially when it comes to technical choices, so a big crowd of people doing something that seems stupid really eats at me. I must be missing something!”

“Crypto creates a massively multiplayer online game where the game is “currency speculation”, and it’s very realistic because it really is money, at least if enough people get involved. That means everyone’s behavior is very realistic, and also if you win the game you have actual money that you can spend on other things you enjoy, like a 133 million dollar house.”

“Running code on a cryptocurrency (called a distributed app or dApp) is different: once the app is deployed, it’s possible for you to completely relinquish control of it, and it will run as long as anybody feeds it money. There’s no way to take it down without taking down the entire network, which (per above) is highly distributed, so that’s nearly impossible. This is again a pretty interesting technical accomplishment; you can write an application that costs you literally $0 to run (because users pay in order to make it run).”

Or not. User won’t pay to make it run because that business model is part of the old world, where people paid for services rather than trading their data and attention for them.

“There is definitely something here. Huge numbers of people have been effectively incentivized to create a massive network of computers that can do arbit[r]ary tasks (I’m speaking of distributed apps, Bitcoin itself is much less interesting). As a technologist it’s hard not to be impressed, and intrigued by the potential applications of such a system.”

“[…] the biggest problem with a lot of the potential applications for crypto technology: the things that happen inside the network happen only inside the network. The interfaces to other systems, and to the physical world, are weak or non-existent. A great example is NFTs […]”

“There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with founders of projects controlling them, but it’s not democracy, and it’s identical to how startups work now. If anything, the concentration of power is greater and longer-lasting.”

This is not new, though. New boss is the same as the old boss.

“[…] if it’s very cheap to tweet, then the system will become over-run with bots, spam and other kinds of abuse. Twitter has huge and expensive systems to deal with all of this, CrypoTwitter has to figure out how to solve it with financial engineering. If instead you make it expensive to tweet, nobody will tweet, earnings from popular tweets will fall, those people will tweet less, and the network will die. (The same mechanic applies if you try to make the transaction following, or liking, or replying)”

“Why does playing a game, or making music, or watching a movie, or sending a message, or any of the millions of other things we spend time doing on the web make more sense or improve if modeled as a currency?”

“I could go on and on about the huge numbers of grifters and scams but the important thing here is that the ugly and the bad are separate. Even if all the criminal elements and scamming were taken away, there are still the huge problems of boundary interactions, abuse, and incentives.”