thirdwave

Github Mirror

Week 6

"@urlyman@mastodon.social

Some time BCE:

'And the Lord god said I have 10 notifications for you. Write them on these here tablets. They won’t change. Worship me.'

2024:

'And the tech gods said we have overlapping notifications for you in email, SMS, WhatsApp, GitHub, Slack and all your social media apps. They’ll come at you all the fucking time. Worship us.'"

"@molly0xfff@hachyderm.io

✅ gaming the NYT bestseller list

✅ buying full page print ads in WaPo

✅ elbowing onto Hard Fork, Pivot, other tech pods

✅ placing pre-pub features in Wired, Bloomberg, FT"

smells a bit of desperation from a16z..

perhaps he should've released the book on the blockchain...

pumping and dumping his own book is a little poetic"

Vice: "How Tech Firms Made a Crypto-Boosting Book an NYT Best Seller by Gaming the System.. Motherboard found that firms linked to a16z and general partner Chris Dixon bought numerous copies of his new book promoting cryptocurrencies, which became an NYT Best Seller"

F24: "The ‘generals’ elections’ that turned against Pakistan’s military.. Pakistan’s 2024 general elections were dubbed the 'most rigged' in the country’s history, with the popular Imran Khan barred from running and the military seen as backing former prime minister Nawaz Sharif. That was before results showed Khan-backed independent candidates leading the race. Sharif on Friday claimed victory, setting the stage for a turbulent period as an irate electorate reacted to the military’s perceived meddling in politics – again"

Frontline 01/30 - 02/10. Massive RU gains east of Yampolivka, Bilohorivka. Some around Chasiv Yar, Niu-York too. A big chunk to the north of Avdiivka is gone, the pincer is about to close.

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Live by profits, die by profits #UA #Ammunition #Wilkerson

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TASS: "Zelensky changes Ukraine’s chief of General Staff"

The Palestine Chronicle: "We No Longer Ship Weapons to Israel – Spain.. In an interview with Al-Jazeera, José Manuel Albares declared that, since October 7, Madrid suspended all arms export licenses to Israel, noting that the events of that day 'made us realize the importance of a just and permanent solution to the question of the Palestinian people.'.. The Spanish minister has highlighted how Israel has bombed United Nations facilities, schools and hospitals in the Gaza Strip, and urged all parties to comply with the orders of the International Court of Justice (ICJ)"

The Times of Israel: "Saudi Arabia's foreign ministry has issued a firey statement rejecting what it claims was.. John Kirby's suggestion that Riyadh is prepared to normalize relations before there is a ceasefire in Gaza and without progress toward Palestinian statehood"

The Cradle: "Nearly 500,000 fled Israel since 7 October"

Pro-Publica: "The rich, as we’ve reported, often deduct millions of dollars from their taxes related to buying and operating their jets and yachts. [Harlan] Crow followed that formula through a company that purported to charter his superyacht.. 'Based on what information is available, this has the look of a textbook billionaire tax scam,' said Senate Finance Committee chair Ron Wyden"

Autoblog: "Tesla's California registrations fall for first time since the pandemic"

Rickards, Peter Schiff are goldcucks, and constant inflation scaremongers, esp. Schiff. "Government is printing too much money" which they assume will cause inflation, debasing the currency - hence the alarmism and message of buying gold.

While Rickards knows some stuff on taxes (his earlier job) neither he nor Schiff understand money and economy. Inflation is caused by excessive money circulating among the general population, not among the rich. "Government printing money" can only cause inflation if it goes to all citizens (as it briefly did after covid, then went away because all flows end up with the corps). Goverment normally borrows FED printed money, due to the skewed nature of the economy it ends up with big corporations and the wealthy, it does not circulate. You are not in competition with the Citibank CEO to buy potatoes bidding their prices up. He is eating caviar, drinking expensive wine, buying stocks and homes bidding those prices up, not your potatoes (they also buy government debt, so they collect interest on it, gov gives them more money).

Rickards, Schiff are mostly wrong in their analysis, that's probably why they get more than their fair share of audience.. This message is useful. It changes the conversation to something else other than the top 1%, constantly puts the onus on government making them look bad, and centers around an "investment advice" that ultimately has no use for the regular people, and harmless for private interests who are already buying gold (and everything else).

A right-wing guy applauds Milei for "calling out 'the elites' at Davos". He is on the same side as they are, you fool! They are all on the economic right.

US wasn't collapsing yet then, but thanks to "the left", the Democrats and Clinton the infrastructure for it was being laid. If anyone outside US took that stuff to heart, you are screwed now.

Milei is like 50 right, the jackass in his formative years would have grown up watching America in the 90s..

Bill F-ing Clinton.. the worst president since Kennedy, no doubt about it.

The Argentinan GINI score, inequality, had its peak at 2000, I thought they probably followed that Clinton shit in the 90s, that bizarro neoliberal, ultra pro-business, tailored for the well-to-do Democrat airheads. Apparently that is exactly what they did. See article. "The Argentinian crisis is the product of a slavish adherence by successive administrations since the 1990s to the IMF-dictated policies of privatisation, deregulation and globalisation. The following article, which was written in the spring of 2002, provides the historical background to the adoption of this ‘free-market’ model of economic development"

Tucker / Putin interview was good.. TC asked pointed questions. The reason for the Ukranian conflict, Putin iterated most who aren't brainwashed by US corporate media already know - NATO expansion, Maidan, not implementing the Minsk agreement, throwing out the peace agreement in Stanpoli.

"Ford has been investing in its hydrogen vehicles for years. Now its time has come.. Hydrogen vehicles are on the rise. The industry is growing by an astounding 40% annually. Compared to electric vehicles (EVs), hydrogen – powered vehicles are cleaner, more power-efficient, charge faster, and have longer operating ranges"

H2 Mobile: "Nawa, a French startup resulting from CEA and MIT research on vertically aligned carbon nanotubes (VACNT), decided to approach the [electrolyzer] issue differently. Rather than working only on the catalyst, she chose an innovative approach to manufacturing at the nanoscale an electrode combining 3D nanocarbon and nanoplatinum. Using this method, the company has designed electrodes that are 20% more efficient than traditional electrodes"

When that millionaire told Gen Y "not to eat avacado toast if you want to buy a house" notice the implication underneath that statement.. Forget the eightfold increases in house prices, if you have no home it's your fault. A variation of this psyop is commonplace in media, even the self-help, hustler, grinder talk, that entice people "to fullfill their potential" can be deployed to push it... If you don't have a home, grind. Still broke? Grind some more. Broker still? Well it was your damn fault, you could not grind well enough, sucka.

"@baldur@toot.cafe

Your reminder that I've written a book on the business risks of generative AI. 'The Intelligence Illusion'

https://illusion.baldurbjarnason.com

Stuff I cover (not exhaustive):

Kurt Andersen: "In 1998 Brooksley Born, the federal official who was running the agency overseeing financial derivatives, got worried about the accelerating flurry of trading in new sorts of derivatives, in particular one called credit default swaps—which the rest of us would learn about a decade later, during the crash of 2008. But she was only one member of the official presidential task force that oversees the financial markets. By law, the other three are the Federal Reserve chair, a job to which Clinton had just reappointed Alan Greenspan; the treasury secretary, who was Bob Rubin, previously cochairman of Goldman Sachs; and the SEC chair, who’d also spent his pregovernment career working on Wall Street...

Restrain Wall Street? Bah. Regulation? This was the great new age of deregulation, freer and freer markets, big business and finance unbound! But Born persisted, publicly announcing an inquiry into derivatives and their risks—prompting her fellow task force members to put out a joint statement that they had 'grave concerns' about her rogue regulatory inquiry. Rubin’s deputy Lawrence Summers, soon to replace him as secretary of the treasury, warned Congress that by suggesting official skepticism of this latest financial innovation, Born had cast 'a shadow of regulatory uncertainty over an otherwise thriving market.'

She lost and resigned. [Summers, Rubin] won and joined with the Republicans running Congress to write two big new laws, a kind of final grand spasm of the deregulation mania that allowed the financial industry to get even wilder and crazier. The first of those Modernization Acts eliminated the rule, instituted after the 1929 Crash, that prohibited regular banks from investing citizens’ money in the riskier ways that Wall Street firms did. For years, the financial industry had lobbied for that change, and the former Fed chair Paul Volcker had fought it, but in 1999 only seven of forty-five Democratic senators and a single Republican voted against it. The other Modernization Act explicitly outlawed proper regulation of derivatives such as credit default swaps. The House in 2000 passed that one 377 to 4, and the Senate didn’t even bother to take a roll call vote.

In other words, Clinton’s Wall Street–bred economic brain trust helped encode into the system the increased recklessness that Wall Street demanded and that would keep feeding inequality and insecurity and soon lead to the financial meltdown and Wall Street bailout and Great Recession. Congratulations, modern bipartisan Democrats!"

Inequality plots.. GBR is doing better than US, but the winner is Finland. Most Nordic countries are doing fine in that regard.. TR, Argentina, US are about the same, not surprising, these societies have weak governments and are oligarch-driven. See how badly Argentina was doing in the 2000s.

cols = ['SIPOVGINIAUS','SIPOVGINIARG','SIPOVGINIGBR','SIPOVGINIUSA',\
        'SIPOVGINITUR','SIPOVGINIDEU','SIPOVGINIRUS','SIPOVGINIFIN']
df = u.get_fred(1980,cols)
df.columns = [x.replace("SIPOVGINI","") for x in cols]
df = df.interpolate(method='bfill')
df.plot(title='GINI Index')

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"Germany agrees hydrogen-ready power plant subsidy plans.. Berlin has agreed plans to subsidise up to 10GW of hydrogen-ready gas power plants and 'dismantle' construction and operation barriers for electrolysers. Chancellor Olaf Scholz, Economics Minister Robert Habeck and Finance Minister Christian Lindner agreed on Germany’s power plant strategy to develop 'highly flexible and climate friendly' power plants"

Let's go over this again: Your government pays interest to your rich, then runs out of money and cuts your services. An easier solution would be for your government to tax your rich plugging the hole and giving you better services, right?

Where do these 1/3, 1/4 ratios come from? Moneyed interests likely allow the propagation of such misinfo that way CH looks evil (fear them, let's spend more on defense), attention is deflected away from US's own wealthy, the top 10% who has a cool 100 trillion, owns much of that government debt.

China has one third of US debt? That is incorrect. China holds a mere trillion $ of US debt, that is 1/34'th of all US debt.

H2 Insight: "Green hydrogen in shipping.. India outlines funding to retrofit existing vessels and install ammonia fuelling at ports.. The government aims to have a port supplying green fuels in 2025 and two vessels retrofitted to run on H2 or derivatives in 2027"

"The creator economy can't rely on Patreon."

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For many corporations tax is optional. A "good accountant" can arrange it so that you pay zero tax. Rickards wrote about it in his book, see below.

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The system is Byzantine likely because that makes tax avoidence easier.

"@jon@vivaldi.net

Question : Do you know how Norwegians fill out their tax returns?

Answer : They don´t.

This is an oversimplification, but years ago Norwegians started to get pre-filled tax returns in the mail. Later they stopped getting them, but instead had to do an OK online. Now even that is not needed. No comment means it is is OK. You can rectify and modify details online, if needed.

The reality is that the government already had most of the data needed for most individuals. Your salary is reported by the company you work for. Your bank details, including anything you have in your accounts, any loans, stocks, bonds, etc., is reported as well. Your kids are known as well. There might be details to add, but most is known. Why waste people´s time filling out details that are already known and risk people making mistakes?

When will the US get there?"

via @dnanian@mas.to

#VisionPro

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House prices rose EIGHTFOLD since the 80s, but sure, it's about an entire generation wasting their money on avacado toast.

🤣 I remember that shit.. it was funny.

The Guardian: "[2017] Millionaire tells millennials: if you want a house, stop buying avocado toast"

Inside the Games: "Beijing 2022 hydrogen buses prove popular in Zhangjiakou due to ability to start in cold weather.. Nearly a year after the 2022 Winter Olympic Games in Beijing, the hydrogen-powered buses have become the preferred mode of public transport in Zhangjiakou"

Global Times: "[2022/02] Beijing 2022 sees largest use of hydrogen-powered vehicles in Olympic history"

Quick reminder the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics transport was entirely hydrogen-driven, CH used the occasion to showcase the tech, and it worked brilliantly. A lot of corporate battery-brain dipshit media missed this aspect of the games.

China Daily: "China develops four-seat hydrogen combustion aircraft"

Techdirt: "'The Messenger' launched to great fanfare... The brainchild of former The Hill owner Jimmy Finkelstein, the outlet launched with $50 million in backing and a lot of chatter about how it was going to revolutionize U.S. journalism...

The news outlet didn’t even last a year...

The Messenger’s coverage generally suffered from what NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen calls the “view from nowhere,” or a sort of timid, pseudo-objectivity that fails to prioritize the sole function of journalism: getting to the actual truth.

Many Messenger reporters who thought they were being hired to do real reporting had complained for much of the last year about how they were being forced to suddenly chase ad impressions by crafting low-quality aggregated engagement bait more akin to infotainment than journalism.

Such journalism is a direct reflection of millionaire or billionaire media owners who don’t want to offend sources, advertisers, or event sponsors with bold, truth-telling journalism that has actual teeth. So what you get instead is a sort of journalism simulacrum that fails to critique wealth, corruption, or power with any real consistency, since the wealthy and powerful owners very obviously don’t want that"

"Real estate is a huge force in New York’s economy.. Many of these real estate interests hide their ownership information; in Manhattan, 37 percent of the 41,000 total properties are owned by secretive limited liability companies.. These property owners are contributing to a housing crisis. The state ranks in the top five of highest average home prices and has a severe housing shortage, pushing up rents and rates of homelessness. This scarcity in housing is only exacerbated by the fact that huge financial institutions are buying up single-family homes and apartment buildings across the country"

The Lever reports the NY state's LLC Transparency Act, "which was designed to crack down on anonymous shell companies operating in New York, required limited liability companies to report their owners’ identifying information to an online database" was watered down. The changes mean "information about the shadowy corporate landlords that control a wide swath of Manhattan real estate remains inaccessible to the public".

Reading the memoir of Wendell Potter, a former PR exec at Cigna Healthcare, for-profit health insurance corp, learned about him from a Status Coup article detailing how Dems are captured by for-profit interests. The book is an eye opener, highly recommended. WP was one of the nation's top PR execs whose sole job was killing public healthcare initiatives like Medicare-for-All.

TB2 is also too expensive.. Focus recently shifted to FPV drones, for both sides. TB2 is rarely used these days by UA.

Breaking Defense: "#UA #RU Cheap flying robots, like the Chinese DJI Mavic, with even high-end models costing just a couple thousand dollars, can pinpoint targets for artillery, alert troops to lurking ambushes, drop improvised bombs like a flying IED.. Bayraktar TB2 are just too big and fly too high, making them easy prey for radar-guided anti-aircraft weapons that cannot spot the smaller, lower-flying quadcopters"

"@wilbr@glitch.social

What does it say about the health of our society that people are c*nsoring their own words and using random unique invented synonyms on social media (that we're supposed to pick up on as readers) not because of government reprisal but because The Algorithm will associate you with negativity and straight up disappear you from the social space otherwise?"

Monbiot, The Guardian: "Peaceful environmental campaigners are being held on bail for up to two years, subjected to electronic tags, GPS tracking and curfews, and deprived of their social lives and political rights. This is one of many examples of process as punishment. Even before you have been tried, let alone found guilty, your life is shredded.. In a world built by plutocrats, the powerful are protected while vengeful laws silence their critics"

All that Houthi retaliation, for nothing.. strategically that is... Benjamins keep flowing.

Reuters: "Six US-backed Kurdish fighters killed in drone attack on US base in Syria"

Forbes: "Five hundred tanks. More than 600 fighting vehicles. Hundreds of howitzers. Forty thousand troops. According to Ukraine’s eastern command, Russia has assembled a huge field army in eastern Ukraine opposite the free Ukrainian city of Kupyansk"

The Guardian: "McDonald’s records first sales miss in nearly four years amid boycotts.. Company is among several western brands that have seen protests and boycott campaigns over perceived pro-Israeli stance"

Motley Fool: "[2020] Through the years, famed investor and billionaire Warren Buffett has criticized the tax system and made it clear that he feels that the wealthy should be paying more. In a famous interview, Buffett expressed frustration with the fact that he actually pays a lower tax rate on his income than his secretary... why is it that Buffett himself doesn't pay more tax? It's because the bulk of his income comes from dividends and long-term capital gains, which are taxed at a much lower rate than ordinary income"

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"@SynAck@corteximplant.com

It continues to mystify me how large swaths of the tech community have latched onto generative ML as being 'ready to be built on top of' - as if the correctness of these models is a foregone conclusion - when not only is there so much evidence to the contrary but even the creators and minders of these models will admit (but only amongst themselves) that they're broken and are wrong more often than they're right.

There's no critical thinking on the part of the model users as to whether these things work for them; they just take Altman et al's word for it because they're "visionaries" [facepalm]"

Hansford, Aviation Consultant, #ABC AU: "When you start killing that number of people in the number of crashes [Boeing] had, in most countries other than United States you wouldn't survive. The stock market would pillory you. But in America they seem to get away with it, because Boeing is a producer of defense equipment"

"John Cusack says he’s being shadow-banned on Twitter/X. His account does not appear in searches when looking for on the site, Newsweek reported."

Maybe the future will be as depicted in Idiocracy but for the online world. Public discourse will be filled with this stupid garbage, artificial morons talking at eachother feeding off of each others parroty talk. And the stock prices of related companies will rise because the wealthy have nowhere else to put their money, at the same time, widespread homelessness becomes permanent.

"@jsrailton@mastodon.social

#Twitter's #AI #bot problem:

Pic 1: #spam account posts likely AI-generated description of an image without the image.

Pics 2-4

Swarms of blue-check verified bots reply with equally generated replies complimenting the nonexistent image.

Pic 1, Pic 2, Pic 3, Pic 4

"@bushidosquirrel

Uber: we can't make money if we have to follow the law

Google: we can't make money if we're not allowed to be a monopoly

Nestle: we can't make money without using slave labor

OpenAI: we can't make money if we can't steal

Media: should shoplifters be executed?"

Arab News: "Almost immediately after he walked into the Oval Office on his first day as president, Joe Biden began rolling back his predecessor’s immigration policies, which he had assailed throughout the 2020 campaign as harsh and inhumane. A lot has changed in three years. Biden, now sounding increasingly like former President Donald Trump, is pressing Congress for asylum restrictions that would have been unthinkable when he took office. He’s doing it under pressure not just from Republicans but from Democrats, including elected officials in cities thousands of miles from the border who are feeling the effects of asylum seekers arriving in the United States in record numbers"

The Intercept: "State Department declares 'ethnic cleansing' in Sudan but won’t say the same about Israel’s war in Gaza.. The U.S. risks complicity with Israeli atrocities, experts say"

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Truthout: "After Belgium Refused to Cut Off UNRWA Funding Israel Bombed Its Gaza Aid Office"

The Guardian: "UK manufacturers hit by Red Sea disruption and rising shipping costs"

The Guardian: "The music rights company BMG is parting ways with the Pink Floyd co-founder Roger Waters over comments he made about Israel, Ukraine and the United States"

Salon: "[2023] Corporate landlords reap big profits as rents in many U.S. cities soar by double digits.. Six biggest property management companies in U.S. made $1.3 billion more in 2022 on inflated rents and extra fees"

The Lever: "Blinken Stranded After Davos By Boeing, His Old Client.. The Secretary of State previously advised the airline manufacturer; on his return from the World Economic Forum, he ran into one of its troubled 737 planes"

"@VeryBadLlama

Companies: we are committed to working towards a greener future.. Also companies: hi i know your entire job can be done from your couch but we really need you to go back to idling in traffic 10 times per week because Brian needs to time your bathroom breaks to feel alive"

I did a rough data analysis a while back, looked at a weighted market cap of top 20 defense contractors, and saw their cap skyrocketed not after 9/11 but after Egypt and Syria. If it is true it is bad news for us, the world, because the bleepers learned a new trick.. There was always death squads, provocations and the like but the widespread chaos after Egypt, Syria was something else..

There is always the next bright shiny object to chase in tech. Inequality is partly to blame here; too much money sloshing around the system looking for things to invest in. Even if there was nothing, some people would create buzz around any bullshit tech to get a piece of that excess wealth. One day that new buzz is "the blockchain", sometimes "AI". After that it will be something else.

Andersen: "In the 1988 primary, Jesse Jackson ran as a full-on leftist, calling for single-payer healthcare, free community college, a big federal jobs program, and the cancellation of Reagan’s tax cuts for the rich—and by sweeping the black South and winning everywhere among voters under thirty, he beat Joe Biden and Gore and came in second to Dukakis, but…he was never going to be nominated... In 1992, when Clinton won the nomination, his only serious competitors were two fellow New Democrats, Brown and Tsongas. Democrats had settled into their role as America’s economically center-right party. There was no organized, viable national economic left in the vicinity of power"

Declassified UK:

Adam F-ing Smith was against excessive profits. Maybe some people misinterpreted the "free" in the free markets he talked about.

Boucoyannis, LSE Blogs: "[W]hy has inequality been naturalized? This is where influential master-narratives of the market are so consequential in shaping public beliefs—from the 1970s anti-tax narratives that frame government intervention as a violation of free market principles to the original text that defined market discourse, the Wealth of Nations itself. Adam Smith is assumed even by his most progressive interpreters to have accepted inequality as the necessary trade-off for a more prosperous economy...

But the assumption is wrong. As I show in my article, the building blocks of Smith’s economic system do not allow the concentration of wealth—not due to normative constraints, but to how the blocks are set up in his theory to maximize the 'wealth of nations.' Further, even in neo-classical economics, in a competitive economy with no entry barriers, profits should decline over the long term, so profit concentration is not an equilibrium prediction. Yet high firm profits, for instance, are treated as a sign of economic success that have to be sustained over time...

In Smith, profits should be low and labor wages high, legislation in favor of the worker is 'always just and equitable,' land should be distributed widely and evenly, inheritance laws should partition fortunes, taxation can be high if it is equitable, and the science of the legislator is necessary to thwart rentiers and manipulators...

The key principles of Smith’s system work against the concentration of wealth—they also speak to the top issues in economic policy today: profits, taxes, and the minimum wage. First, Smith thought high profits denoted economic pathology. The rate of profit, he said, was 'always highest in the countries which are going fastest to ruin.'

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