Tag: stupid

Backup Life

as life backups become a thing, expect this sort of stuff to be much more common. and then of course some will turn off the backup intentionally to make it feel more real.

The Ukrainian urban climber “Mustang Wanted” has described himself as a “dumbass” – not for hanging by 1 arm off the sides of buildings, as you might think, but for failing to maintain a proper website to update his legion of fans.

Europe

One of my favorite topics and in the end the reason why I left Europe.

One doesn’t have to have a US-centric view of privacy, competition policy, or free speech to notice the dissonance between European mores and the digital economy. One assumes Europeans want to enjoy the benefits of the Internet, but they also seem consumed with ensuring that nothing of the old order is changed—let alone destroyed—in the process. They are the continental incarnation of what Virginia Postrel calls stasis—they are unwilling to accept the tradeoffs that come with progress and instead hopelessly try to plan around all discomfort.

2013-04-10: Remember Quaero, the search engine just like real search engines, but with more european commission? Apparently someone forgot to shut the project down and they are proudly working on a human adventure
2013-04-11: Economies in Europe don’t have the flexibility to deal with the double challenge of globalization and automation, so they’ll shrink a lot.
2015-06-19: Why Europe can’t have nice things.

Americans tend to act in a more rational and less emotional way about the goods and services they consume, because it’s not tied up with their national and regional identities. In Europe, stability is prized. Europeans are conservative with a small c. They pretty much like things the way they are

2018-03-26: European protectionism

Using a new survey, we show that the dispersion of marginal products across firms in the European Union is 2x as large as that in the United States. Reducing it to the US level would increase EU GDP by more than 30%. Alternatively, removing barriers between industries and countries would raise EU GDP by at least 25%.

2018-07-20: European Commission really hates innovation.

The European Commission continues to be a bit too cavalier about denying companies — well, Google, mostly — the right to monetize the products they spend billions of dollars at significant risk to develop; this was my chief objection to last year’s Google Shopping case. I am concerned that the Commissions’ publicly released reasoning doesn’t seem to grasp exactly how Android has developed, the choices Google made, and why.

2021-03-04: Anemic GDP growth, or even shrinking

The average European is ~33% or more worse off than the average American, and it’s getting worse.


2021-03-05: More regulatory nonsense

What people making these calls — and these laws — need to be more honest about, though, is that they killing competition. If you want to ensure that Twitter wins in audio, or that Facebook wins everywhere else, then elevating privacy over everything else, ignoring both tradeoffs (like killing competition in social networks) and facts on the ground (like the reality that your contacts have long since ceased to be private), is an excellent way to accomplish exactly that. Look no further than ecommerce.
Shopify, 1 of the most exciting companies in tech and the seeming leader of The Anti-Amazon Alliance, effectively moving into Facebook’s garden, because the web is increasingly a barren wasteland for small businesses. The cause is Apple: its approach to cookies makes platform-based web storefronts increasingly difficult to monetize effectively (Shop Pay performed magic in this regard), and its attack on “tracking” — which goes far beyond the IDFA — makes it increasingly impossible to acquire users in 1 place and convert them in another. The solution is to do user acquisition and user conversion all in 1 app — i.e. on Facebook — which is why Shopify is helping merchants move off the web and onto Facebook.

2022-12-14: A good summary why there’s no innovation in Europe

  • Talented people have a choice of careers. In Europe we steadfastly underpay technologists. Many people that really really want to get into engineering and programming continue to do so anyhow. A larger class however gets swayed by better paying jobs in financial engineering and other non-productive shenanigans. The response here to far higher US salaries for technical people is always that money is not the only factor. This is true. However, the OTHER factor of work is being appreciated and valued, and we also do not offer that! In Europe we outsource technology, as we don’t really consider it a core activity.
  • Not only do we not appreciate technologists, we also penalize founders. Banks, tax agencies and even family members distrust startups and will make life difficult for you.
  • For better or worse, here in Europe we are fond of business plans that somehow make sense. Blue sky “let’s launch this and I’m sure we’ll eventually find sufficient rent seeking or surveillance possibilities to one day make money” things don’t fly too well here.
    • Specifically, I’ve found that in the US it is quite acceptable to discuss plans that revolve around eventually screwing over your customers when they aren’t in a position to leave
    • In addition, European investors and entrepreneurs don’t tend to see their ventures as ’lottery tickets’ that might pay off. We like to see things costed with at least a theoretical path to profits
  • Related, it really is the case that (on average) US entrepreneurs are more ruthless and competitive than European ones. The flip side of this is that any nastiness hinders trust which makes it harder to build partnerships.

2023-07-17: Europeans are getting poorer.

The eurozone economy grew 6% over the past 15 years, compared with 82% for the US. That has left the average EU country poorer per head than every US state except Idaho and Mississippi. If the current trend continues, by 2035 the gap between economic output per capita in the US and EU will be as large as that between Japan and Ecuador today.
Spending on high-end groceries has collapsed. Germans consumed 52 kg of meat per person in 2022, 8% less than the previous year and the lowest level since calculations began in 1989.

European ignorance kills

Here’s one for all the anti-nuclear nuts in Europe. Your irrational behavior is killing people.

Coal is gaining traction in part due to the actions of Germany, which ditched nuclear power in favor of coal in the wake of the Fukushima disaster.

2019-11-08: Germany Expensive Energy

France’s nuclear energy spending was 60% of what Germany spent on renewables. France gets 400 Terawatt hour per year from nuclear but Germany gets 226 Terawatt-hours each year. 45 Terawatt-hours of Germany’s renewable power comes from burning biomass which generates air pollution.

China has a more recent buildup of nuclear energy. China has spent less than $150b from 2000 to 2019 to develop 300 Terawatt-hours per year of nuclear energy.

Germany’s solar farms will have to be rebuilt every 15-25 years. The wind farms will need to be rebuilt every 20-25 years. Nuclear plants can last 40-80+ years.

2020-01-04: Nuclear Energy Saves Lives

Germany’s closing of nuclear power stations after Fukishima cost billions of $ and killed 1000s of people due to more air pollution

Buttcoin crimes

dispatches from libertarian paradise, i guess.

But looking back, I have been lucky. from reading the forums, it’s clear that there are scammers on Silk Road7, and shipments do get lost in the mail or seized or otherwise not delivered. (I do not expect any legal problems; law enforcement always go after the sellers, to achieve maximum impact, and Silk Road presents both technical and jurisdictional problems for law enforcement.) This is inherent to the idea of an anonymous marketplace, but the system worked for me. SR describes it well in one of his messages:

Silk road self-regulation:

Entrepreneurs have found it necessary to create and maintain communities, making rules, enforcing them, punishing rule-breakers, and turning towards violence when all else fails. They have built petty versions of the very governments they are fleeing. The modern state began as a protection racket, offering its subjects protection against outsiders and each other. The same logic is playing out today on the hidden internet, as would-be petty barons and pirate kings fight to tax and police their subjects while defending themselves against hostile incursions.

prisoners dilemma would say this isn’t likely, yet still it happened:

The experimental recipe of feedback mechanisms and emergent self-regulation may prove to be a more cost-effective alternative to modern state-driven regulation.

how is that alternative buttcoin economy going, dread pirate roberts?

It appears the Federal Bureau of Investigation has finally cracked down on Silk Road, the underground marketplace where users could buy cocaine, heroin, meth, and more using the virtual currency Bitcoin. Journalist Brian Krebs has just published a purported copy of a complaint filed in the Southern District of New York against Ross Ulbricht, who is alleged to be the mastermind behind the site and the handle Dread Pirate Roberts.

There’s a new dank web marketplace. I give it a week before the owner makes a mistake and is outed.

On Wednesday morning, Silk Road 2.0 came online, promising a new and slightly improved version of the anonymous black market for drugs and other contraband that the Department of Justice shut down just over a month before. Like the old Silk Road, which until its closure served as the Web’s most popular bazaar for anonymous narcotics sales, the new site uses the anonymity tool Tor and the cryptocurrency Bitcoin to protect the identity of its users. As of Wednesday morning, it already sported close to 500 drug listings, ranging from marijuana to ecstasy to cocaine.

A kind of buttcoin ad malware network. So if you get 1m concurrent users you can make 0.0008 bitcoins per hour at current conditions! oh wait, that’s like $0.28

Monetize without ads. Let your visitors help you mine Bitcoins

The latest chapter in the buttcoin saga: buttcoin murder.

Last month I received an encrypted email from someone calling himself by the pseudonym Kuwabatake Sanjuro, who pointed me towards his recent creation, The website Assassination Market, a crowdfunding service that lets anyone anonymously contribute bitcoins towards a bounty on the head of any government official–a kind of Kickstarter for political assassinations. If someone on its hit list is killed–and yes, Sanjuro hopes that many targets will be–any hitman who can prove he or she was responsible receives the collected funds.

But what about liquidity?

One of the largest heists in buttcoin history is happening right now. 96k bitcoins – that’s £60m – was taken from the accounts of customers, vendors and administrators of the Sheep Marketplace over the weekend.

buttcoin action! if you want to get a sense how “liquid” this whole joke is, read this account about trying to convert even just a few 10s buttcoins into actual money:

Trying to sell the coins in person, and basically saying he either wants Cash, or a Cashiers check, has been a hilarious clusterfuck.

This is a great summary, and the magic cards are a nice dig.

What Nigerian scams are to your grandfather, Bitcoin exchanges are to the 20-30 semi-tech-savvy libertarian demographic. While the underlying cryptocurrency is quite interesting and the wallet software is fairly good, the exchanges are based on layers upon layers of bad software, run by shady characters. The Bitcoin masses, judging by their behavior on forums, have no actual interest in science, technology or even objective reality when it interferes with their market position. They believe that holding a Bitcoin somehow makes them an active participant in a bold new future, even as they passively get fleeced in the bolder current present.

this is why buttcoiners are getting life sentences, like mr. ulbricht did today:

Since January, random.org has required the use of the more secure HTTPS protocol and has returned a 301 Moved Permanently response when accessed through HTTP. As a result, vulnerable installations of Blockchain for Android generated the private key corresponding to the address 1Bn9ReEocMG1WEW1qYjuDrdFzEFFDCq43F, regardless of the address specified by the user.

2022-02-09:

“What was amazing about this case is the laundry list of obfuscation techniques [Lichtenstein and Morgan allegedly] used”. Redman points to the couple’s alleged use of “chain-hopping”— transferring funds from 1 cryptocurrency to another to make them more difficult to follow—including exchanging bitcoins for “privacy coins” like monero and dash, both designed to foil blockchain analysis. Court documents say the couple also allegedly moved their money through the Alphabay dark web market—the biggest of its kind at the time—in an attempt to stymie detectives. Yet investigators seem to have found paths through all of those obstacles. “It just shows that law enforcement is not going to give up on these cases, and they’ll investigate funds for 5 years until they can follow them to a destination they can get information on”

Unions trying to sell weed

the USPS should get into that action too, then we’d have 2 dinosaurs staying relevant.

Unions are shrinking and their members are aging. Their traditional bastions in the construction trades and manufacturing have withered, and they’ve had deep trouble breaking into the service sector — especially at big retailers like Wal-Mart that have had great success fending off the UFCW in particular. In the big scheme of things, they have very little lose by trying to cultivate a new, more labor friendly industry, albeit a highly speculative and technically illegal one.