by
Alec J. Ross
View all notes
[...] Fraud protection is a built-in part of the financial world we live in, which we've simply come to accept as the cost of doing business. But Bitcoin at its best could make fraud impossible unless one's private key is stolen and make the thieves easy to find even if a key is stolen. The result could be a major drop in fraud. Furthermore, by codifying trust for high-value transactions, the blockchain could wipe out middlemen and friction in a variety of transactions, creating consumer surplus. On the global stage, it could also help bring frontier countries into the economic mainstream.
- okay, the "unless" is a pretty major one, especially given all the reliance on centralised wallets providers
- how would it make the thieves easy to find ...
- what about the root causes of fraud??? why is it a "built-in part" of our world?
- it'll just create MORE MIDDLEMEN you big idiot
- where is the mention of wealth concentration within bitcoin (worse than fiat currency)
- later on, he quotes Chris Dixon on the wastefulness of banking middlemen taking their cut, without realising that this is literally what's happening with all the Bitcoin hype (entrepreneurs and VCs moving in to try and skim some froth off the top)
[...] annual losses to intellectual property theft from China exceed $300 billion, comparable to the total amount of goods exported annually from the United States to all of Asia. The NSA director at the time, Keith Alexander, has estimated the total value of all American intellectual property at $5 trillion, of which China is stealing 6 percent each year.
intellectual property is BS and Alec J. Ross is a cuck
Precision agriculture will not end hunger in India or turn its subsistence-level farmers into serious agribusinesses, but in an environment of scarcity, it can take those scarce resources, be they seed, fertilizer, or water, and get the most out of them. India does not have a national network of agronomist to provide expertise and resources to its country's farmers as China, the Americas, and Europe do. The budgetary resources in India are spread too thin. [...]
I mean, more efficient agriculture is not a bad idea, but the current problem we're facing is not efficiency, it's d i s t r i b u t i o n
Serendipity fades with everything we hand over to algorithms. Most of these algorithms are noiseless. They gently guide us in our choices. But we don't know why we are being guided in certain directions or how these algorithms work. And because they constitute the value of a company's intellectual property, there is an incentive to keep them opaque to us.
this is a strong argument against intellectual property tbh
Who owns the data is as important a question as who owned the land during the agricultural age and who owned the factory during the industrial age. Data is the raw material of the information age.
Correlations made by big data are likely to reinforce negative bias. Because big data often relies on historical data or at least the status quo, it can easily reproduce discrimination against disadvantaged racial and ethnic minorities. The propensity models used in many algorithms can bake in a bias against someone who lived in the zip code of a low-income neighborhood at any point in his or her life. If an algorithm used by human resources companies queries your social graph and positively weighs candidates with the most existing connections to a workforce, it makes it more difficult to break in in the first place. In effect, these algorithms can hide bias behind a curtain of code.
[...] it is largely unregulated because we need it for economic growth and because efforts to try and regulate it have tended not to work; the technologies are too far-reaching and are not built to recognize the national boundaries of our world's 196 nation-states.
Yet would it be best to try to shut down these technologies entirely if we could? No. Big data simultaneously helps helps solve global challenges while creating an entirely new set of challenges. [...]
he's falling into the same trap that Evgeny Morozov describes people falling into re: the Internet: thinking of it as this one amorphous thing. instead, we have to treat it as just another tool, and isolate the use cases
The choices we make about how we manage data will be as important as the decisions about managing land during the agricultural age and managing industry during the industrial age. We have a short window of time--just a few years, I think--before a set of norms set in that will be nearly impossible to reverse. Let's hope humans accept the responsibility for making these decisions and don't leave it to the machines.
good
(I sound like I'm grading this or something lmao)
The high-water mark for Belarus and the Internet is a social media-savvy graduate student in Massachusetts named Evgeny Morozov, who writes neo-Luddite screeds against American technology companies, advancing the official views of Russia and Belarus.
lmao what????
In Silicon Valley on February 19, 2014, the day after the protests broke out in Kiev, Ukrainian American WhatsApp founder Jan Koum signed a $19 billion deal to sell his company to Facebook. For Ukraine, that same $19 billion would have been the answer to its short-term bond, debt and gas bills.
The fact that Ukraine's economic lifeline could be equal in cost to the purchase of a mobile messaging app--created by a Ukrainian emigrant--exemplifies how much potential Ukraine has an d how badly that potential was being squandered under Ukraine's prior, Russian-model government. [...]
um no? it exemplifies the absolute lunacy of an economic system that allows FB to control so much capital
I often think back to the midnight shift on the janitorial crew. For many people I met on the job, their entire professional lifetimes would be spent pouring chemicals on the floor after a country music concert, even as they were capable of much more--if they'd simply had an option for career growth or the chance to go back to school.
There is no shame in these jobs, but there is great shame for society and its leaders when a life is made less than what it could be because of a lack of opportunity. The obligation of those in positions of power and privilege is to shape our policies to extend the opportunities that will come with the industries of the future to as many people as possible.
this is all right I guess