I was watching Paul Graham interview Mark Zuckerberg once. Graham asked Zuckerberg what he thought Facebook brought to the table that MySpace and Friendster didn't. Zuckerberg said that, although people forget it now, when Facebook first came into existence, there was still a strong stigma attached to posting personal details about yourself online. People still thought it was a dangerous thing to do. Something Facebook had to do, Zuckerberg acknowledged in this interview, was to help make posting online personal details about yourself a socially acceptable behavior and to help people feel comfortable doing it. (Looking back, Zuckerberg's claim that we live in a post-privacy world seems so much more sinister in light of these comments. Changing social norms about privacy weren't an accident, or something that happened on its own, but something that Facebook proactively sought to achieve.)

Anyway, one thing Facebook is is a directory of people, kind of like a global phone book. I don't know if phone books have risks associated with them. But Facebook certainly does.

And on the flip side of that coin, I've found this phone book to be useful more than a couple times....

Can I get an lmao?

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-04-06/george-soros-prepares-to-trade-cryptocurrencies-as-prices-plunge?utm_campaign=socialflow-organic&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter&cmpid%3D=socialflow-twitter-tictoc&utm_content=tictoc

Dems all buying crypto, the_donald all selling. Glorious, glorious, glorious

The amount of people rooting for Amazon in opposition to Trump is disturbing. It's AMAZON. They're a plague, they're awful. This country is f'ed if people can't see how bad they are for the country.

Right?

I don't think people see Amazon as awful at all.

Not that many people hate Walmart either.

This. The more I think about it, the more I think blockchain and all cryptocurrency is a pointless sham.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_vault/2013/06/28/voting_rights_and_the_supreme_court_the_impossible_literacy_test_louisiana.html

In case none of you have ever seen what a civil rights era literacy test looked like. 20 seconds per question, confusing instructions, one wrong answer is a fail. Can't make this **** up.

Some of these instructions make me feel like I'm having a stroke:

Write right from the left to the right as you see it spelled here.

Draw a triangle with a blackened circle that overlaps only its left corner.

Spell backwards, forwards.

Hmm.. my gut was telling me something was off about that test, because the formatting appeared too modern, didn't look like scans of carbon copies, etc.

I guess it was taken down from the original site, with the reason "[NOTE that at one time we also displayed a "brain-twister" type Louisiana literacy test. We removed it from this website because it was quite atypical and was probably little used.]"

Might be to save face, and maybe that test was some bull**** someone came up with, because it doesn't feel right. Other scans of other literacy tests seem fairer, and appear to be actual carbon copies so..

I guess there is a document with typesetting that looks more legitimate, but the origins of it are dubious enough to bear some skepticism. So might be legitimate, might not be. Also would appear to be an atypical test. Still clearly bull****, though.

I’ve chosen to believe the test with modern typesetting and grammatical errors is genuine because it satisfies my internal narrative of voter eligibility testing being primarily racist rather than a sincere if misguided concern about suddenly granting suffrage to a bloc that had previously been denied any form of education.

American democracy was originally designed to deny direct participation to the public. I don’t mean the landowner bit. That part wasn’t tough the way it is now. I mean it was designed to be a representative democracy where you don’t even vote for direct representatives, you vote for electors who then vote for you. The idea was that, maybe the average person isn’t smart enough to decide issues, or maybe even smart enough to hire the right person to make those decisions, but they probably know someone who is.

This intention was almost instantly perverted by political parties and their pledged electors. But the anxiety about incompetent voters is baked into US history and culture, so, yeah. Pretty racist anyway tho.

Yeah, this shows "fake news" has been a problem since before it got Trump elected. That was some chain email bull**** that was not vetted by anyone, and was spread to a bunch of major publications as "legit". I'm rather annoyed, because it's not helpful to misremember history in that kind of way.

Does help to lower my estimation of journalists, though. I was taken in, but it's also not my job to vet things. Journalists who should know better wrote articles on it. That kinda mistake needs to be taken more seriously by people. It's not tolerable to pass along bull****.

Obviously the problem is that the people who wrote the test were illiterate.

The "original version" doesn't have the same typos, the first article was apparently transcribed from another document. The other document is of suspicious origin, though.

****ing lmao

they're endowed with truth discerning super powers and unlike the rest of us aren't prone to bias, so if they're mistaken it can only be because of malice and not because they're humans that have 3 hours to word vomit out their story... so yeah, they should definitely know better

This. The root cause is rarely the people on the ground.

This pretty well speaks to the issue with blockchain, and the mango grower issue brought up in the medium article.

Of course, that doesn't mean it isn't going to be a thing, and I like getting on wild rides. But people are messy, really messy and we don't have a good solution for that yet. Well, we probably do, but they never scale, so it's as god as useless.

SEE wat I D ID THERE

Historically, the way we've dealt with messy human-ness is by building systems that are introspective and flexible. Software systems are awful at both of those things. Take DAO's smart contract vulnerability, for example. A bug in the smart contract effected the transfer of millions of dollars to a single party. In real life it would never get that far. We have legal norms for how contracts are written and enforced for precisely this reason. Legally enforceable contracts require consent, consideration, and mutual understanding, all of which are missing from that DAO bug 'clause'.

Those requirements are from common law, btw. Judicial precedent. Some British judge hundreds of years ago saw some dude trying to pull some unethical but not-explicitly-illegal contract bull**** and said "nuh uh, that ain't legal". Consideration maybe seems strange, but consent is the basis of all contracts. No reasonable person would agree to a contract that didn't provide some reasonable benefit to them. So therefore, without consideration, there must not have been consent. Common law gives judges the power to fill in the blanks like that, when there's no existing statute or legal precedent to work from. This is the kind of introspective, flexible, human-y system that's good at accommodating us.

A computer, on the other hand, is a superhumanly autistic bureaucrat.

Just imagine a human who acts like a computer. Really.


"This contract you signed has a smudge on page 3 line 16. All of your money now belongs to Dave."

"You filled out this form WRONG" *poops on your desk, falls over and dies*

very nice

You should try living outside North America. Unfortunately bureaucracies can be more like this than you'd expect.

One of Harper's legacies, incidentally, was refocusing CRA's management from revenue to compliance. Dealing with the CRA has become much more painful in the last few years as a result. Harper's new career is at a tax consultancy. I'm sure it's a coincidence.

Hypothesis: neoliberalism is a repudiation of the New Liberalism of 1906 and a return to the Gladstonian liberalism that preceded it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_welfare_reforms

Salient question: did Gladstonian liberalism coincide with a large-scale expansion of British imperialism (and therefore, global free-market trade)? Is is not an historical precedent for developments in our own time, when the rise of internationalism and cosmopolitanism have coincided with a liberalism which emphasizes personal responsibility (defined as economic self-sufficiency) and limited government (not necessarily limited government power and intervention in personal affairs, but specifically a limited welfare state)?

Interesting. In some ways, what was happening in 1906 was actually the opposite of what was happening now. Popular sentiment was outraged by tariffs, and the liberals came into power advocating free trade. Wikipedia:



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_general_election,_1906

Why would you want to pay more for ****ty British goods when you can buy imports?

It also looks like the liberals passed comprehensive welfare reforms, which could have been strongly motivating for voters as well.

One thing you can say for sure is similar: people then were certain that, whatever the politicians were saying about tariffs, they were probably doing it just to enrich themselves and screw you over.

Tariffs weren't nearly as rare in the previous centuries as they have been in the past few decades. Before the past few decades, tariffs were a significant source of revenue for governments. Until the 1860s, the US didn't even have a federal income tax, and tariffs were the federal government's primary means of collecting revenue (the federal government instituted a the first federal income tax to pay for the Civil War, but it was seen as a "war time" measure). In fact, in 1894 the Supreme Court even ruled that the federal income tax was unconstitutional. It wasn't until the 16th amendment (which guaranteed the federal government's right to be able to levy a federal income tax) passed in 1913 that the US government began to collect most of its revenue from sources other than tariffs.

Trade must have looked really different when only a handful of countries accounted for the entire industrialized world.

The question becomes "who pays the cost of a tariff?" Not being an economist I can only guess, but I bet prices increase as supply decreases, so I doubt sellers lose as much as buyers. Again, pure speculation.

Anyone else subject themselves to the Ezra Klein/Sam Harris podcast?

What's even more infuriating (but ultimately more innocuous) is getting pinned down by one of these single-digit IQ phone menu systems, as it forces you to repeat voice commands corresponding to an extremely limited set of phrases it has memorized.

"I'm sorry, I didn't get that. Please say one of the following..."

Also in fiction.