Various web links I found to be of interest recently.
The reality is that Trump's removal or resignation from office, while desirable, would not do much to change the trajectory of America's political institutions. And the mounting desire for something cataclysmic that could change their trajectory strikes me as dangerous. The best we can do, I fear, is to muddle along and try our best to keep things from getting worse. And the less we accept that, and the more we escape into fantasias of collapse and redemption, the harder making those modest incremental improvements will be.
A new study finds that Trump voters weren't losing income or jobs. Instead, they were concerned about their place in the world.
Whereas Facebook is plagued by fake news, Amazon is littered with fake products. And these fake products encourage fraud and play a role in global money laundering.
Even those who designed our digital world are aghast at what they created. A breakdown of what went wrong - from the architects who built it:
Jaron Lanier, Antonio García Martínez, Ellen Pao, Can Duruk, Kate Losse, Tristan Harris, Rich “Lowtax” Kyanka, Ethan Zuckerman, Dan McComas, Sandy Parakilas, Guillaume Chaslot, Roger McNamee, Richard Stallman
Facilitating Efficient Bargaining with Partial Common Ownership of
Spectrum, Corporations, and Land.
Authors: Eric A. Posner & E. Glen Weyl August 9, 2016.
The existing system of private property interferes with allocative efficiency by giving owners the power to hold out for excessive prices. We propose a remedy in the form of a tax on property, based on the value self-assessed by its owner at intervals, along with a requirement that the owner sell the property t o any third party willing to pay a price equal to the self-assessed value. The tax rate would reflect a tradeoff between gains from allocative efficiency and losses to investment efficiency, and would increase in line with expected developments in information technology. The legal and economic implications of this system are explored.
It turns out cryptocurrencies and blockchains have a few problems.
George Mason economist Alex Tabarrok set out to prove that federal regulations are strangling the economy. That's not what he found.
When Tabarrok and his former grad student Nathan Goldschlag set out to
measure how federal regulations impact business growth, they were sure
they'd find proof that regulations were dragging down the economy.
But they didn't. No matter how they sliced the data, they could find no
evidence that federal regulation was bad for business.
...
The trend of declining dynamism since 1980-along with wage stagnation,
rising inequality, and a host of other ills-has tracked a parallel rise
in monopolization, as the economy becomes increasingly consolidated
in the hands of a few giant businesses. As New York Times columnist
Eduardo Porter put it recently, "By allowing an ecosystem of gargantuan
companies to develop, all but dominating the markets they served,
the American economy shut out disruption. And thus it shut out change."
First from July 21, 2015: Ben Thompson's Aggregation Theory
The value chain for any given consumer market is divided into
three parts: suppliers, distributors, and consumers/users.
The best way to make outsize profits in any of these markets is
to either gain a horizontal monopoly in one of the three parts or
to integrate two of the parts such that you have a competitive
advantage in delivering a vertical solution. In the pre-Internet
era the latter depended on controlling distribution.
...
The fundamental disruption of the Internet has been to turn this
dynamic on its head. First, the Internet has made distribution
(of digital goods) free, neutralizing the advantage that pre-Internet
distributors leveraged to integrate with suppliers. Secondly, the
Internet has made transaction costs zero, making it viable for a
distributor to integrate forward with end users/consumers at scale.
Why do blockchains allow new startups to compete with FANG and break Aggregation Theory --> ML? Because blockchains diminish the two aspects of defensibility held by FANG:
So how do you get people to join a brand new network? You give people partial ownership of the network. Just like equity in a startup, it is more valuable to join the network early because you get more ownership. Decentralized applications do this by paying their contributors in their token. And there is potential for that token (partial ownership of the network) to be worth more in the future. This is equivalent to being a miner in the early days of Bitcoin. ...When the network is less populated and useful you now have a stronger incentive to join it.
Retail space in Manhattan sits unused as rental prices soar.
Yes, there are bank branches, restaurants, fast-food outlets, theaters, Duane Reades, a vitamin shop and a few tourist-targeted "discount" stores. But mainly there are oodles of empty spaces covered with signs touting SUPERB CORNER RETAIL OPPORTUNITY.
Old article from 2011 about the origins of meetup.com For some more recent (2016) information see, What Meetups Tell Us About America.
And the most recent (2017) meetup.com news:
The trend can explain slow growth, "missing" workers, and stagnant salaries.
In sum, growing labor market power may well be a significant explanation of the host of maladies that have beset wealthy countries, notably the United States, in the past few decades: declining growth rates, falling labor share of corporate earnings, rising inequality, falling employment of prime-age men, and persistent and growing government fiscal deficits. It's remarkable how well labor market power alone can simultaneously explain all these trends.
Here's how to see everything Facebook knows about you and how to download your own archive of that information.
To see how Facebook allows an advertiser to track you see: About Facebook Pixel.When neuroscientist Barbara Lipska was diagnosed with brain cancer, she thought she knew about the physical toll. But she was unprepared for its effect on her behaviour
Yet for two distressing months, after surgery and radiation and
just as she began an immunotherapy clinical trial, Lipska slid
into what she terms "insanity", the tumours and swelling in the
different areas of her brain triggering bewildering behaviour changes,
lack of judgment, empathy and tolerance, and difficulty in
relating to the world around her.
...
Most important, she states, is to build the understanding that
mental illness is a disease of the brain and must be studied and
treated as such, "just as coronary illness is a disease of the heart".
Notions of mental illness as different - "somehow involving blame" -
still linger, she believes. "We are so far away from understanding
how the brain functions. Understanding how it malfunctions is even
further away. There is so much work to do."
Genes and the microbiome are some of the most promising leads.
Today, about one in 68 US children has autism - a rate that's remained
unchanged since at least 1990, though there's been a steady increase
in awareness and diagnosis.
...
But "of all the causes of autism, the thing we know with the
greatest certainty is that it's a very genetic disorder," said
UCSF geneticist and autism researcher Stephan Sanders. "If you
look at a child with autism, then look at their siblings, you'll
find the rate of autism is 10 times higher in those siblings than
in the general population. This has been looked at in populations
of millions."
...
"The bottom line is that when you add up all of the genetic risks,
it looks like genetics can account for 50 percent of the risk for autism,
which is very high," said David Amaral, an autism specialist at the
UC Davis MIND Institute.
...
Exposure to infections and certain medicines during pregnancy
may be linked to autism .
...
Overall, the evidence for these prenatal exposures is stronger
than the evidence for the range of postnatal causes that may
trigger autism, said Amaral.
And for the sordid history of the vaccine-autism controversy and how Andrew Wakefield's shoddy science fueled autism-vaccine fear: 20 years ago, research fraud catalyzed the anti-vaccination movement.
The study, led by the now discredited physician-researcher Andrew
Wakefield, involved 12 children and suggested there's a link
between the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine - which is
administered to millions of children around the world each year
- and autism.
The study was subsequently thoroughly debunked. The Lancet
retracted the paper and Wakefield was stripped of his medical
license. Autism researchers have shown decisively again and again
that the developmental disorder is not caused by vaccines.
Still, public health experts say the false data and erroneous
conclusions in that paper, while rejected in the scientific world,
helped fuel a dangerous movement of vaccine skepticism and refusal
around the world.