Links and Notes for February 4th, 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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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
• Science & Nature
• Art & Literature
• Philosophy & Sociology
• Technology
• Video Games

Economy & Finance

When Crypto-Exchanges Go Broke, You’ll Lose It All by Cory Doctorow (OneZero)

“The idea that a society can survive without a state or other actor that can create and destroy money based on prevailing economic conditions is both ahistorical and impractical. If we all adopted cryptocurrency tomorrow, there’d still be an elastic money supply, as Yanis Varoufakis explains […]”

“Almost everyone who uses crypto relies on these exchanges. In theory, it’s possible to manage all your own keys and transactions, but in practice, it’s a complex, error-prone, high-stakes business. Even if you can manage it, the people you’re hoping to transact with likely can’t, meaning that nearly everyone involved with cryptos has an account with one or more exchanges.”

“And even if you do get paid, you’ll be paid at the dollar value of your assets on the eve of the collapse. If your coins double in value over the years it might take to unwind a complex bankruptcy, your prorated share will be based on their value when the exchange tanked.”

“[…] all of this is a feature of cryptos, not a bug. The point of the “sound money” delusion is to take money out of the realm of democratic state control and move it into a wild west of caveat emptor and smart contracts.”

Back from the Brink: Argentina and the IMF Negotiate a Better Agreement by Joseph Stiglitz & Mark Weisbrot (CounterPunch)

“Given Argentina’s circumstances — and the likelihood of rising international interest rates — there was likely to be little in terms of capital flows or investment from abroad. The idea that cutting government spending would magically restore confidence, leading to an influx of money and compensating for the loss of fiscal support, is sheer fantasy.”

Fear Is a Good Motivation for Fraud by Matt Levine (Bloomberg)

“A lot of financial frauds seem to appeal to people with a conspiratorial mind-set; they are happy to believe that the regular system is stacked against them and they need to give their money to a scammer to protect themselves.”

“I am looking forward to next year when I will read stories about Tindercoin venture capitalists who stake penniless young daters who work 12-hour days updating their profiles and give 50% of their Tindercoin earnings to the venture capitalists. When I will read stories about how you can use your Tindercoins to buy non-fungible tokens in the metaverse (a cartoon drawing of a hat that you can put on your Tinder profile), and about how nobody will date anyone who does not have the right sort of NFT hat on their profile picture. When I will read stories about how young people are not getting married anymore because it would require them to stop updating their Tinder profiles and give up all their sweet sweet Tindercoins, which are now the main store of value in society.”

Libor Was Made Up Anyway by Matt Levine (Bloomberg)

“Libor asked banks to make up a number. The banks made up numbers. Prosecutors decided in hindsight that some of these made-up numbers were “true” and fulfilled the abstract purpose of Libor, while others were “false” and constituted criminal fraud for which people should go to prison. But all the numbers were made up! They were all guesses, and the distinction between guesses that were good and guesses that were crimes had nothing to do with their correspondence to objective truth; it was just about which guesses came with embarrassing chats and impure motives.”

“Isn’t modern finance amazing? The basic model here is that you imagine the world five years in the future, and you imagine that your company has monopolistic dominance of the grocery business in that future, and then you think “that seems like it would be profitable,” and you model a stream of profit that is many billions of dollars every year for the rest of time starting in five years, and you calculate the net present value of that stream of income, and it is very large, and so you say “well then it makes sense to spend a lot of money giving everyone free groceries for a few years to get us to that future of monopolistic dominance,” and you go to venture capitalists with that pitch, and they say “well we do have a ton of money and we love monopolies,” and they give you the money, and you buy everyone groceries.”

Don’t bother mentioning how horrifically wasteful of time and resources this is. Or the equally horrifying class implications.

Public Policy & Politics

The Hostage-Taking at Beth Israel Synagogue: What You Weren’t Told by Nicky Reid (CounterPunch)

“[…] once the hysterical post-9/11 tabloids caught wind of a pretty young scientist with all kinds of spooky sounding science degrees they went nuts and constructed a ridiculous narrative straight out of a James Bond film about a femme fatale with a deadly expertise in the latest trend in Islamo-fascism, biochemical weapons. Once the New York Post had labeled her Lady Al-Qaeda and Fox News sank their fangs into the story, the dye was cast, and Dr. Siddiqui was as good as fucked. The fact that the woman studied cognitive neuroscience and was mainly focused on helping disabled children seemed irrelevant.”

“[…] her story has been corroborated by both Pakistani officials as well as former prisoners of America’s notorious Bagram Prison who picked her out in a lineup as the infamous Prisoner 650, a young woman who’s [sic] routine sexual abuse and impoverished screams for mercy shocked even her most hardened fellow prisoners so much that they went on a hunger strike to protest her savage treatment. The American government continues to deny these harrowing stories, but Aafia Siddiqui’s name has appeared in two separate footnotes of a largely unreleased Senate Committee report on torture and no other sources have come forward to account for her whereabouts during those five years.”

Ukraine Needs a Treaty to Guarantee Neutrality, Because NATO is Not Coming to the Rescue by Patrick Cockburn (CounterPunch)

“In judging the claims by Nato governments and their intelligence services about events in Russia and Ukraine, one should be cautious. Recall their dismal record in Iraq in 2003 when everything said by American and British intelligence about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein and his non-existent WMD turned out to be untrue.”

“The best solution to this crisis is a treaty that guarantees the neutrality of Ukraine similar to the Austrian State Treaty of 1955. This would stabilise Ukraine and prevent a possible Russian attack, in return for which Ukrainians would lose very little since they are never going to be a member of the EU in the foreseeable future, and joining Nato, a military alliance that is not going to defend them, should not be an attractive option.”

Fresh Hell by Jason Arias (The Baffler)

“Last week, we brought word of the fifty-two-year-old bridge that collapsed in Pittsburgh, injuring ten, after the city failed to do anything about its “poor” condition, which had been known to inspectors from the Department of Transportation since at least September—only one of nearly three thousand structurally deficient bridges across the state. At first, it seemed odd that Pennsylvania, which levies the third-highest gas tax in the nation to fund bridge and road repairs, would be in such a sorry state, but then, in a shocking twist, it was revealed that over $4 billion had been diverted from the bridge and road fund to the police over the past six years. That money would have been enough to repair every structurally deficient bridge in Pittsburgh nine times over, but instead it went to more exciting projects, like six-figure settlements for fatal police shootings.”

Putin is Playing a Strong Hand on Ukraine…as Long as He Doesn’t Invade by Patrick Cockburn (CounterPunch)

“The report states categorically that Russian forces are not in a position to invade in the next two or three weeks and are unlikely to be able to do so in 2022. It points to the absence of ammunition and fuel along with field hospitals and trained up-to-strength military units essential to a modern army going to war. This negative judgement about the prospect of a Russian offensive is confirmed by Ukrainian ministers and defence officials who politely downplay the war hysteria in Washington and London.”

“Looked at from Russia’s point of view, the threat of an invasion is a strong card – but only if it is never played. To play it would be to start an unwinnable war which would be political suicide for Putin and his government. Western media may suggest that he is isolated in the Kremlin, his judgement eroded by two decades in power. But this should probably be dismissed as crude propaganda.”

“One conspiratorial explanation for the American and British overreaction to a not-atypical bit of Russian sabre-rattling may have something in it. This holds that Western intelligence services are neither stupid nor ill-informed enough as to not know that Russia is not going to invade Ukraine. But they are cunningly pretending to believe in the threat to provide an excuse for the West to expand its military presence in Eastern Europe.”

Journalism & Media

The British Medical Journal Story That Exposed Politicized “Fact-Checking” by Matt Taibbi (TK News)

“Whether about maintenance issues at American Airlines or a bank employee’s reports about the pooling and marketing of defective mortgages, such “bad practices” reporting has long been a staple of investigative journalism. Previously, the idea of spiking or flagging such reports on the grounds that they might have convinced some people not to fly or use banks would have been laughable. Having done many of these stories myself, I’m familiar with demands for “missing context,” but always from a corporate defense lawyer or a political spokesperson. That it’s coming from media gatekeepers now is crazy.”

“It goes without saying that in this environment, any negative information about Pfizer, or any report of issues with the company’s trials, is likely to be upheld as meaningful by people suspicious of the vaccine. That does not mean one gets to exonerate companies based upon audience reaction. Are we now saying that anything Robert Kennedy Jr. or Robert Malone finds newsworthy is suspect? By this method, we’re taking stories that aren’t “anti-vax” by any rational standard, and making them anti-vax by association.

“This new “fact-checking” standard bastardizes the whole idea of reporting. It’s also highly convenient for corporations like Pfizer, which incidentally have extensive records of regulatory violations. As Thacker details below, firms have successfully manipulated reporters and Internet platforms into seeing a binary reality in which all critics are conspiracy theorists.”

Covid 2/3/22: Loosening Bounds by Zvi (LessWrong)

“Rogan is a person who is trying in good faith to construct the most accurate model of the physical world he can and who is willing to listen to people with rather out there beliefs. Also he likes to hang out with cool and funny people with no agenda and talk for a few hours, and lets us listen. A lot of people enjoy this, and he reached 5 million listeners. A lot of other people very much do not like this and think they should be allowed to force him to stop, or at least tell him what he can and can’t say.”

“There’s no question in my mind that Rogan is importantly wrong about vaccines and other aspects of Covid-19, and also that he’s entertained guests who expressed views that are rather more wrong than Rogan’s, and that these mistakes can have serious real-world consequences when five million people are listening.

“Of course, I don’t think that we should be in the habit of censoring ‘dangerous misinformation’ and that goes double when it’s truth-seeking in good faith.”

The end of the metaverse hopefully by Ryan Broderick (Garbage Day)

“I don’t know why Facebook let the content on their site atrophy like this. Perhaps, at their size, actual units of content begin to matter less than the general trends or vibes their algorithms produce. But the absolutely noxious vibes produced by Facebook’s algorithm have become true for Instagram, as well. The platform, particularly Reels, has become awash in its own unique form of content detritus: multi-level marketing schemes, useless DIY hacks, and, of course, freebooted TikTok videos.”

“Basically, Facebook and Instagram is Squid Game, the algorithm is the big piggy bank, and the last three traumatized contestants in tuxedos armed with knives are an out-of-work magician, an antivax chiropractor, and a QAnon mom from Tuscon who runs a drop-shipping pyramid scheme.”

“The “Torment Nexus” postulate of tech ethics states that if someone conceives a fictional technology, people will go to great lengths to make it real, in blatant disregard of the real-world consequences of said technology. Well, Crisis Text Line is a parallel, or perhaps a corollary, to the Torment Nexus theory. It shows how if doing something would be not only profitable, but easy with the tools at hand, it will be done and at great scale, accompanied by intelligent and well-meaning people pretzel-twisting their own morality to arrive at convincing justifications for it.”

This next sentence is, apparently, a real thing.

“Ad Age reports that the super viral and not-particularly Steak-umm-focused Steak-umm Twitter account is under new ownership. All of the account’s creative will be handled by an agency called Tombras. According to their website, Tombras won a Clio advertising award for building an Alexa skill that let you talk to the snack food MoonPies so you’d be less lonely during COVID. God, the world of branded content is so weird.”

“Put another way: Justin Bieber’s business partner launched an NFT line and then used the money from the initial sale to pay Justin Bieber to buy an expensive Bored Ape NFT as a way to further promote his NFT line. In fact, though Bieber shared the Bored Ape on his Instagram, his Twitter profile pic is actually one of D’Alessandro’s NFTs.

“God, this is all so stupid.”

The Real Fake News Crisis in America Comes From Corporate Media by David Sirota (Jacobin)

“[…] corporate media doesn’t get to lie the country into a war and a financial crisis, continue enriching right-wing fabulists, offer up news literally “presented by” corporate villains, and then pretend that a podcaster is the singular source of misinformation. And it sure as hell doesn’t get to feign surprise when after decades of lies, almost nobody ends up trusting corporate media about anything.”

Science & Nature

Drug-Resistant Malaria Is Emerging in Africa. Is the World Ready? by Pratik Pawar (Undark)

“Haunted by the failure of chloroquine, though, researchers have remained on the lookout for signs that the malaria parasite is evolving to resist artemisinin or its partner drugs. The gold-standard method is a therapeutic efficacy study, which involves closely monitoring infected patients as they are treated with antimalarial drugs, to see how well the drugs perform and if there are any signs of resistance.”

The thankless legwork/drudgery that is required is simply staggering.

“The Medicines for Malaria Venture drug pipeline has about 30 molecules that show promise in preliminary testing, and about 15 molecules that are undergoing clinical trials for efficacy and safety, said Wells. But even the drugs that are at the end of the pipeline will take about five to six years from approval by regulatory authorities to be incorporated into WHO guidelines, he noted — if they make it through trials at all.”

Art & Literature

Heeding James Joyce’s “Ulysses” by Chris Hedges (CounterPunch)

“He watched as European intellectuals, artists and writers, including those in Ireland, descended into the moral squalor of jingoistic cant to support military adventurism. The flip side of nationalism is always racism, the exaltation of the self, the tribe, the nation, the race above the other, who is debased and dehumanized as unworthy of life. To Joyce this was a sacrilege.”

“For Joyce the language we use to know ourselves, whether in official pronouncements, mass culture or the press, which he calls “dead noise,” fragments reality into small digestible bits, sound bites highlighting the trivial, the mythic or the extraordinary. This rhetoric and language obfuscate rather than elucidate. It is a linguistic trick to perpetuate the potent fictions we tell ourselves about ourselves, as individuals and as a nation. In the name of fact and objectivity, it distorts and lies.”

“Shakespeare inhabited, like Joyce, the world around him and used that raw material to explore the rhythms of human nature and human society, its mix of good and evil, selfishness and altruism, capacity for heroism and deceit, ability to love and hate, often all rolled into one contradictory human being.”

Verdi’s Macbeth at La Scala in Milan: The opera of the year—an inspirational experience for millions of viewers by Verena Nees (WSWS)

“The Italian RAI television broadcast the premiere to 2.2 million viewers, while hundreds of thousands were able to watch the opera in Germany and France via the European channel ARTE. Cinema screenings of the premiere also took place in Britain, Spain and other European countries.”

Philosophy & Sociology

Capitalism’s Productive Capacity is an Argument for Socialism by Freddie DeBoer (SubStack)

“What’s interesting to me is that these remarkable improvements in productivity − this immense growth in material abundance − is typically used as evidence for capitalism and against socialism. Look at how great capitalism is! Why would we ever want to change to a different system? And yet to me, the lesson is the opposite: look at how advanced humanity is! Why would we let anyone go hungry or cold when we have this kind of productive capacity? The more that humanity advances, the more the implicit argument for socialism grows stronger. And I have zero problem with ascribing that growth to capitalism, as long as people get on board with a more humane stage to come.”

“if you present people with a society where technological progress is so advanced that abundance for everyone is possible, even the most ardent capitalist will concede that it would be immoral to perpetuate a system that did not allow for the distribution of abundance to everyone.”

People don’t work as much as you think by David R. MacIver (Overthinking Everything)

“I don’t have good evidence from this, but my anecdotal impression of people who are telling you that they work 60-80 hour weeks is that they’re lying and/or deluding themselves about how much time they actually spend working, because there’s an incentive to be seen to be working long hours, but there are such diminishing returns on actually working long hours that there’s very little incentive to actually do the extra work because it doesn’t help anyone.”

“They’re at their computer all day, but a lot of that is spent on Twitter, reddit, staring into space. A great deal of one’s work day is spent drifting, and this is considered normal, because you have to be present but can’t work for all that time.”

“The problem is that there is no incentive to fix the expectations because doing so is politically hard (you’re paying these people how much and you want them to work less??) and lying about how much work you’re doing is so widespread that it looks like the system is working.”

Technology

Plagiarism as a patent amplifier: Understanding the delayed rollout of post-quantum cryptography by D. J. Bernstein (The cr.yp.to blog)

“What we do know, what we’ve already known for years, is that large-scale attackers are already recording as much Internet traffic as they can. Do they throw the data away if it’s encrypted with RSA-2048? Of course not. They keep it forever, hoping and expecting that someday they’ll develop the ability to decrypt it, for example by building a quantum computer.”

“By adding a post-quantum algorithm on top of the existing one, we are able to experiment without affecting user security. The post-quantum algorithm might turn out to be breakable even with today’s computers, in which case the elliptic-curve algorithm will still provide the best security that today’s technology can offer. Alternatively, if the post-quantum algorithm turns out to be secure then it’ll protect the connection even against a future, quantum computer.”

“Fundamentally, the question of who introduced X is the same information that scientists publishing papers on X are ethically obliged to report, but now the stakes are much higher. There isn’t an exact match between the scope of a patent monopoly and the credit that the patent holder is scientifically entitled to receive, but there’s nevertheless an important overlap between the process of assigning scientific credit and the process of finding relevant patents. Plagiarism damages one of the most important processes for managing patent risks.”

“This difference helps bolster the idea that 2014 Peikert is more important than 2012 Ding, which in turn encourages authors who haven’t investigated (i.e., most authors) to cite 2014 Peikert. How can 2014 Peikert’s highlighted “innovation” be plagiarism, a ripoff of 2012 Ding, if so many scientists have agreed to cite 2014 Peikert?”

“Why is it dangerous for scientists to look at a patent and skirt the edges of the patent? One reason is that the edges are determined by rules followed by patent courts, rules that the scientists generally don’t know. How many scientists know what a Markman hearing is? How many scientists have spent time studying the doctrine of equivalents? It’s horrifying to see that a scientific-sounding PDF making claims about the validity and applicability of a patent was written by people who say “court procedure was not the point of our writeup (since we don’t pretend to know it)”.”

So, if I’m following along here, we had a company decide to do something good for the future of information security in a quantum age, but aborted it because of capitalism and the patent system. These are the hidden ways in which private property and the profit motive as incentives lead to disastrously and needlessly negative outcomes. Peikart wouldn’t have expended such huge effort cheating Ding. Google wouldn’t have had to worry about having accidentally encroached Ding because none of it would have mattered. Improving knowledge and techniques would have been paramount, rather than accumulating wealth. It stands on its head instead.

“The fact that there are differences in the details doesn’t eliminate the core overlap of ideas, and it’s this overlap that requires crediting Ding. It’s certainly possible that poor patent drafting narrowed the scope of Ding’s legal monopoly below Ding’s scientific contribution, but the doctrine of equivalents and other court procedures tilt the system towards patent holders, and people who aren’t familiar with these procedures simply aren’t competent to evaluate patent threats.”

“I’ll return to this question in a subsequent blog post. Anyway, under patent law, what counts is the filing date of the patent application.)”

Reading something this long and involved reminds me of how time-intensive knowledge-acquisition is. If you were uploaded, you could slow your time-sense down and avoid wasting time. But what does wasting time mean to an immortal? Well, interactions with external systems must still be coordinated, right? External systems being other consciousnesses and reality itself. If an externality like corrosion threatens the infrastructure keeping virtual selves viable, then you are no longer free temporally. You have to focus and stick to deadlines. For the non-uploaded, prosaic concerns like food or school and work deadlines impose on this more limited luxury.

“But I hope that what’s being rolled out now is (1) patent-free and (2) at least strong enough to meaningfully limit the number of users attacked by future quantum computers. The risk of something going horribly wrong with NTRU doesn’t justify our failure as a community to start encrypting as much data as we could with NTRU in 2017.”

Video Games

The Biggest NFT Video Game’s Economy Is Collapsing Because NFT Games Don’t Work by Daniel Friedman (Reason)

“[…] some big problems have emerged in Axie Infinity: The value of an in-game currency called Smooth Love Potions (SLP) crashed from last summer’s high, above $0.40, to a value of around $0.01 in January 2022, lower than its price a year earlier when few people had heard of NFTs and the game itself had only about 50,000 active players.”

Now that’s a pretty brutal inflation.

“The game’s explosive user growth in 2021 was almost entirely driven by laborers in the developing world using borrowed NFT assets to grind for currency to sell to investors who were investing in the game because they were excited about the user growth. It was a house of cards. And, as the value of SLP produced from completing daily tasks has plunged below the minimum wage in the Philippines, many of those players have stopped logging in.”

OMG I’m dying. I sometimes can’t tell if the scammers ended up scamming themselves or if the parent company is just pretending that it’s just as mystified as everyone else that their game was so woefully out of balance that it could never have worked the way they described it working, as it scaled.

If they’re really surprised and not just criminally disingenuous, then we have reached peak Idiocracy, I think. They really don’t understand even the basic principles of game-balancing, to say nothing of economics. But I don’t think that’s it. I think that’s giving them too much credit and letting them off the hook. They’re running a scam. They’ve most likely personally all cashed out before the floor fell out and now they’re just flailing and telling stories, pretending that they’re super-interested in keeping it going, at all costs. They’re not. If they manage to awaken more interest with a few stupid features and a few well-placed PR releases, then they’ll do it. But, if it all collapses, then they’ll also happily just move on to the next scam. I feel back for the poor people who got scammed into taking part, as usual.

“As the sector evolves toward supporting this kind of play, the optimum strategy for these games is not “playing to earn” and does not even involve playing the games at all. Rather, investors in rich countries will speculate on in-game currencies and assets while outsourcing the actual playing of the game to workers in the developing world who are paid less than $1 per hour to grind for currency until massive inflation caused by oversupply renders the currency worthless, at which point everybody migrates to another game to repeat the cycle and people who are overinvested in the old game’s NFT assets lose a lot of money.”

Holy cow, does this sound like useful economic activity. The added benefit is that it’s all crypto-based and, therefore, also probably wastes a lot of energy, as well. Win-win.

“t may be possible to devise a play-to-earn model that rewards casual or less-invested players without creating economic incentives for people to play in ways that inevitably tank the value of the reward currency. But the biggest publishers in gaming have previously tried and failed to figure out sustainable ways to introduce real money into the player-to-player economies of video games, and blockchain technology does nothing to address the reasons previous efforts have failed. NFT game developers and their investors may be underestimating the problems inherent to this business model.”

Nah, they know what they’re doing. They’ve combined video games with crypto. It’s like having hamburgers and pizza for dinner. Through and ice-cream sundae in for dessert. They’re not really interested in creating anything sustainable—the goal is to extract rent. If it collapses, so be it. A few people got rich. Mission accomplished.