Tag: society

Peter Thiel & TechDirt

Problem was that now that Ayyadurai was armed with that settlement money, and saw that the strategy worked, and he now he had the tools to file more frivolous lawsuits against people who laughed at his claim of inventing e-Mail. One such target was TechDirt, a tech/civil rights blog published by Mike Masnik. I had not met Mike until after all of this, but his blog was very much liked at the EFF and in many other places, and a valuable service and resource for the community.

Harbinger customers

there exist “harbinger customers” who systematically purchase new products that fail (and are discontinued by retailers). This article extends this result in 2 ways. First, the findings document the existence of “harbinger zip codes.” If households in these zip codes adopt a new product, this is a signal that the new product will fail. Second, a series of comparisons reveal that households in harbinger zip codes make other decisions that differ from other households. The first comparison identifies harbinger zip codes using purchases from one retailer and then evaluates purchases at a different retailer. Households in harbinger zip codes purchase products from the second retailer that other households are less likely to purchase. The analysis next compares donations to congressional election candidates; households in harbinger zip codes donate to different candidates than households in neighboring zip codes, and they donate to candidates who are less likely to win. House prices in harbinger zip codes also increase at slower rates than in neighboring zip codes. Investigation of households that change zip codes indicates that the harbinger zip code effect is more due to where customers choose to live, rather than households influencing their neighbors’ tendencies.

Mesh networks

Over the last 10 years, communities seeking more resilient and responsive infrastructures that are more closely aligned with their commitment to common resources and mutual aid have chosen to build their own networks. Greta Byrum tells the story of their efforts — from Brooklyn to Detroit, Tennessee, and the Hudson Valley — and the lessons learned on the way to a People’s Internet. The process has not been seamless: Their builders must navigate bureaucracy and neighborly tensions, and the connectivity these networks ultimately provide isn’t of the lightning-speed frictionless sort promised by the major commercial providers. Yet local networks — owned, operated, and governed by those who use them — don’t simply link devices together into a mesh; they also link people together into a community of stewardship and self-governance.

Ages Of Discord

Turchin has some great stories about unity vs. polarization over time. For example in the 1940s, unity became such a “problem” that concerned citizens demanded more partisanship: Concerned about electoral torpor and meaningless political debate, the American Political Science Association in 1946 appointed a committee to examine the role of parties in the American system. 4 years later, the committee published a lengthy (and alarmed) report calling for the return of ideologically distinct and powerful political parties. Parties ought to stand for distinct sets of politics, the political scientists urged. Voters should be presented with clear choices.

Against Against Billionaire Philanthropy

taking down lazy thinkpieces that are entirely about mood affiliation:

The Gates Foundation plausibly saved 10M lives. Moskovitz and Tuna saved a 100M animals from excruciatingly painful conditions. Norman Borlaug’s agricultural research (supported by the Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation) plausibly saved one billion people. These accomplishments – and other similar victories over famine, disease, and misery – are plausibly the best things that have happened in the past century. All the hot-button issues we usually care about pale before them. Think of how valuable 1 person’s life is – a friend, a family member, yourself – then try multiplying that by 10M or 1B or whatever, it doesn’t matter, our minds can’t represent those kinds of quantities anyway. Anything that makes these kinds of victories even a little less likely would be a disaster for human welfare. The main argument against against billionaire philanthropy is that the lives and welfare of millions of the neediest people matter more than whatever point you can make by risking them. Criticize the existence of billionaires in general, criticize billionaires’ spending on yachts or mansions. But if you only criticize billionaires when they’re trying to save lives, you risk collateral damage to everything we care about.

101 Work Changes

Adaptability quotient In an ever-changing work environment, ‘AQ’, rather than IQ, might become an increasingly significant marker of success. Deep work Always being switched on means we never have the chance to think deeply. That is a problem for companies wanting to get the most out of their employees.

New Era of Political Reform?

History suggests that we’re at an inflection point on the cusp of a new era of reform. In one sense, it’s right on schedule. As Samuel Huntington notes in his 1981 classic, American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony, the US goes through periods of reform politics about every 60 years or so: the 1960s, the Progressive Era, Jacksonian Democracy, and the Revolutionary War. In these years, Americans grew disillusioned and discontented with the corrupt status quo, and reform movements spread. New media and expanding participation upended traditional power politics. The parallels of today with earlier eras are striking.