Links and Notes for February 11th, 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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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

• Economy & Finance
• Public Policy & Politics
• Journalism & Media
• Philosophy & Sociology
• Programming

Economy & Finance

The internet turned “money” into a hobby by Rebecca Jennings (VOX)

“If Instagram made everyone a photographer and Twitter made everyone a writer, perhaps whatever the internet has done to the traditional banking system is in the process of turning us all into finance bros.”

“Because of the ways in which this type of information disseminates — in subreddits, in breathless Twitter threads, on niche Discord servers — the world of betting and investing is dominated heavily by people who are already well-represented in tech, finance, and internet culture, which is to say that it is overwhelmingly young and male. Proponents of crypto love to talk about the benefits of decentralizing the financial system, how it can allow for historically underrepresented groups to build wealth, and how NFTs can be used to fund projects supporting charitable causes.”

“in practice, buying and selling crypto often amounts to a whisper network of people already in the know advising each other in private group chats what to buy and when. To an outsider, it can look like a perfectly legal form of insider trading, entirely shielded from any sort of oversight. The wealth gap among holders of bitcoin is 100 times worse than the US economy: the top 0.01 percent control 27 percent of the 19 million bitcoin currently in circulation.”

Peloton’s CEO Has Had Enough by Matt Levine (Bloomberg)

“Nike, as the issuer of Nikes, should be the one selling rare Nikes and not delivering them. That makes them especially rare! It’s one thing for StockX to sell you an Air Jordan 4 and hang onto it, but Nike can sell you an Air Jordan 69,420 and not even make it! It’s the rarest sneaker of all! Exactly zero were ever made! It’s worth millions.”

Reductio ad absurdum.

The Internet Is Just Investment Banking Now by Ian Bogost (Atlantic)

“First the internet made it easy for people to conduct their lives online. Then it made it possible to monetize the attention generated by that online life. Now the digital exhaust of all that life online is poised to become an asset class for speculative investment, like stocks and commodities and mortgages.”

“In art, horse breeding, real estate, and countless other human affairs, provenance and ownership have always been bureaucratic matters: You own your house because a deed says that you do, and a traceable record of title affirms it. It’s somewhat disconcerting to apply this principle to, say, computer pictures of ugly apes, but perhaps only because those pictures seem so new. One can, after all, own shares of a company, a practice once recorded on physical stock certificates but long since delegated to electronic bank records. Such ownership is entirely symbolic; the owner of stock cannot claim a portion of a company’s inventory or a measure of office space in its headquarters.”

“Regulation notwithstanding, anything that can be construed as an asset can become the basis for a security. And if anything can become the basis for a security, then why not JPEGs? Before software ate the world, finance already had.”

“like any security, an NFT’s worth has less to do with what it is than what it might be worth. Just as the pork-futures commodity trader is not principally interested in taking delivery of pig meat, so the NFT trader is not necessarily concerned with the usefulness or even the symbolic value of an ape. NFT traders are betting on the underlying digital assets, but they are also betting on the whole asset class—the idea that people, and maybe lots of them, will find ongoing and growing value in securities collateralized by digital data rather than material goods, corporate equity, or government debt. They’re also counting on the prospect that cryptocurrencies and blockchain technologies will have huge value potential on their own.”

“Whether Web3 really ends up being decentralized might not really matter, so long as enough people believe in the speculative value it purports to create.”

Hedge Fund Managers Are Expensive by Matt Levine (Bloomberg)

“The more people who join the project after you, the more money you make. Ordinarily a network benefits from network effects, and you should join a network that a lot of people already use. But crypto networks benefit from “token effects,” and you should join a network that a lot of people will use in the future. There is some guesswork involved there of course, and some incentive for hype. (“A cardinal rule of Helium’s 140,000-member Discord chat server is that you’re not allowed to discuss token prices,” notes Roose, which should reduce hype.)”

“Every society’s wealth distribution is based in part on weird historical contingencies; this would not be the worst historical contingency to create an economic class system but it sure would be a weird one. This is also mostly how I think about crypto by the way.”

Public Policy & Politics

The War in Ukraine Will Not Take Place: The New Cold War as Simulacra by Nicky Reid (CounterPunch)

“Putin is not going to invade Ukraine. Anyone who takes the time to turn off the TV and look at the facts rationally can tell you that. There is quite simply nothing to gain that would be worth the fallout. Ukraine is a rusted-out economic basket case and Russia, a nation the size of a small planet with an economy the size of Italy’s, isn’t doing much better.”

“First, you launch a massive campaign of wargames on the target nation’s borders, which essentially amounts to a well-armed dress rehearsal for a hypothetical US invasion. Then you wait until said target nation responds with their own show of military force, the western media covers the latter while pretending like the prior never happened, and when the target tries to tell the world that they were the ones who were provoked, we act like they’re the fucking crazy ones.”

“While the American TV audience was dazzled by a technicolor fireworks show in the sky, a totally defenseless Iraq was treated to 177 million pounds of depleted uranium munitions on the ground, wiping a modern industrial nation from the map in a totally one-sided massacre without us even having to get our nails dirty.”

Journalism & Media

The Great International Convoy Fiasco by Matt Taibbi (TK News)

“As for talking to protesters, that’s out of the question. As Politico recently put it, the “conspiratorial mindset” of the demonstrators means “sitting down with them could legitimize their concerns.” Since we can’t under any circumstances have that, the only option left is the military “eventuality.” Or, as former Obama Deputy Homeland Security Secretary and CNN analyst Juliette Kayyem (the same person who went nanny-bonkers over the Southwest Air “Let’s Go Brandon” incident) put it, “Slash the tires, empty gas tanks, arrest the drivers, and move the trucks.””

“What’s happening in Canada and other countries seems less about specific demands than about the general principle of being listened to. Leaders like Trudeau could likely make this thing go away if they’d make even a slight gesture toward the idea that legitimate differences of opinion exist on questions like mandates, vaccine passports, surveillance tracking, lockdowns, the vaccination of children, and other matters. You don’t have to agree with people, just find a way to look at them without betraying your profound regret they were ever born. The longer this convoy phenomenon goes on, the clearer it becomes that none of the leaders involved knows how to do this. They’re not choosing to govern without listening. They just don’t know any other way.”

Philosophy & Sociology

We Are Still Not Living in a Simulation by Justin E.H. Smith (Hinternet)

“[…] all experience of reality is experience of “augmented” reality, whether you’re wearing goggles or not, and whatever the state of technology. This means that in principle I see no reason at all not to take experiences grounded in the encounter of the conscious self with pixels or bits, rather than with midsize physical objects, as real.”

“[…] what we experience as consciousness comes not only from the “multi-track processing” of different sensory inputs, each of which has its own distinctive evolutionary pedigree, and some of which are present in some other animal species, while some other animal species also have sensory inputs we lack, but also comes from a subsequent process of “editorial revision” that goes to work upon the initial multi-track recording. In effect this revision actively gives shape to our memories; what I call “my seventh birthday party”, for example, is not a high-fidelity brain-based recording of an event, so much as a story I’ve elaborated over time that bears some historical relation to that event, and that in turn serves to constitute the set of memories that give me my enduring sense of identity, which in turn is an ineliminable part of the package of my conscious experience […]”

“Other venerable traditions have variously described reality as a “book”, as a “chariot”, as a “loom”, as a “temple”, as a “horse” (one likes to suppose that the most lucid representatives of these traditions always understood they were using figurative language in order to get at some profound truth). We center what we value. In the early twenty-first century, we value computers.”

Programming

Async / Await vs. PipeTo in Akka.NET Actors by Aaron Stannard (Petabridge)

“await works the same way inside Akka.NET actors as it does everywhere else in .NET. await suspends the flow of execution without blocking a thread and allows the re-entrancy when the await-ed operation completes − the only difference here is that the actors manage the re-entrant portion through their Mailboxes, since that’s where actor thread-safety / serial message processing originates.”

“As you can see from the Phobos graphs I included above, the PipeTo sample is significantly faster than the await sample − but this is only in the context of judging the throughput of a single actor. If you wanted to achieve similar throughput numbers with await the answer is simple − scale out and run more actors in parallel!”