FaceBook Behaving Very Badly Indeed; + BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2021-08-08 Su
Things that went whizzing by that I want to remember:
First:
This is really, really bad. For one thing, for Facebook to say the report is inaccurate, but then not dare to say how the report is inaccurate—that is the ultimate non-denial denial. If you can truthfully say anything else—or even if you are confident that your lies will hold—you will say something else, rather than take refuge in a denial that might apply only to the smallest quibbling smidgen of the story.
There is no way to read this other than like this: There were powerful forces inside Facebook that saw selling more ads and getting richer as a cause subject to no moral or, indeed, contractual (with Apple) limits whatsoever. And Mark Zuckerberg likes, approves of, and keeps such people around, permanently. So saw, and see. They are still there, and that is still how Facebook is trying to conduct its business:
Rene Ritchie: Facebook & Spyware: ‘NSO Group’s CEO, he said two Facebook representatives approached them back in October 2017 and asked to purchase the right to use certain capabilities of ther military-grade Pegasus spyware on iPhone user…. Now, Facebook claimed NSO’s account was inaccurate and misrepresented the discussion, but offered no alternate account or rational for the that discussion, at least that I’ve ever seen…
LINK: <https://reneritchie.net/?fbclid=IwAR14zNCW9o1VTa5uaCF3hrpXgSjoagDy-tleHfRrePoDm6kYVi2SOVxoJ1c> <https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=o_yXeiGcMOA>
One Video:
David Begnaud: ‘Congresswoman Julia Letlow (R-LA.) looked at soaring Covid cases in her state, yet again, and a very low vaccination rate in her own district, she decided to tell her story and that of her dead husband, in hopes others will get vaccinated. Here she is…
Very Briefly Noted:
Tim Berners-Lee (1991): The World Wide Web Project: ‘WA wide-area hypermedia information retrieval initiative aiming to give universal access to a large universe of documents. Everything there is online about W3 is linked directly or indirectly to this document… <http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html>
Pfizer: Second Quarter 2021 Earnings Teleconference<https://s21.q4cdn.com/317678438/files/doc_financials/2021/q2/Q2-2021-Earnings-Charts-FINAL.pdf>
Harold Meyerson: Coal Miner’s Son <https://prospect.org/labor/coal-miner-son-richard-trumka-remembrance/>
Dylan Scott: Medical Debt Was Cut Nearly in Half After Medicaid Expansion <https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2021/7/29/22598211/medicaid-expansion-medical-debt-credit-ratings-study>
Sarah Chevallier: Satan Informs His Devil’s Advocates That Their Services Are No Longer Needed<https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/satan-informs-his-devils-advocates-that-their-services-are-no-longer-needed>
Jordan Schneider: Will China Hit Back on Chips?: ‘What’s driving China’s reticence to hit back at the US on chips? What could change that calculus? If China does decide to make a move, what segments of the supply chain are most vulnerable?…
Noah Smith: Is an Economics Phd Still a Great Deal?: ‘Yes, but for different reasons than a decade ago…
Brian Potter: Where Are The Robotic Bricklayers?
Paragraphs:
Olúfémi O. Táíwò: Elite Capture & Epistemic Deference: ‘Deference epistemology marks itself as a solution to an epistemic and political problem. But not only does it fail to solve these problems, it adds new ones…. Elites from marginalized groups can benefit from this arrangement in ways that are compatible with social progress. But treating group elites’ interests as necessarily or even presumptively aligned with full group interests involves a political naiveté we cannot afford. Such treatment of elite interests functions as a racial Reaganomics: a strategy reliant on fantasies about the exchange rate between the attention economy and the material economy…. After we in the chattering class get the clout we deserve and secure the bag, [will] its contents… trickle down to the workers who clean up after our conferences, to slums of the Global South’s megacities, to its countryside[?]… Probably not…
LINK: <https://www.thephilosopher1923.org/essay-taiwo>
Paul Krugman: ‘Noodling around on recent economic numbers. It’s really amazing how much recent inflation reflects just three things: used cars, hotel rooms, and airfares. Combined, these three sectors account for less than 5% of the CPI but more than 1/2 of inflation over the past three months. It’s always true that some prices are rising more than others. But this is really extreme, and does suggest transitory bottlenecks rather than broad-based inflation pressure…
Paul Krugman: What Covid Vaccine Supply Tells Us About International Trade: ‘Vaccine ingredients are mainly produced in advanced countries… very similar in… level[s] of technological competence…. So why wasn’t each… producing the whole ensemble?… Here’s… Bown and Bollyky…. “The business model… of the pharmaceutical industry… involved fragmentation…. That trade could play a greater role in distributing pharmaceutical products globally meant that companies could operate fewer plants but at a larger scale.” [Emphasis mine." Hey, it’s New Trade Theory in action! And it sure looks as if there was a lot of random historical contingency determining national roles…. Is there a moral?… Vaccine production illustrates a positive side of globalization…. These miracle vaccines are incredibly complex products…. A global market made it possible to deliver all the specialized inputs that are saving thousands of lives as you read this…
LINK: <https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/>
Peter Hotez: ‘A dire situation unfolding across the South and one we’ve not seen before: Large numbers of young people, including adolescents and kids being hospitalized and even pediatric ICUs (PICUs) filling up. We need to take stock about what’s happening here: PICUs being overwhelmed and schools haven’t opened yet for in person classes. I was very blunt. We have to stop screwing around, realize that we might soon face an unprecedented surge in children’s hospital COVID19 admissions. Also we’re seeing lots of RSV even RSV-Covid co-infections. We’re in crisis mode and must do the following now: 1) mask mandates for schools, 2) vaccine mandates for schools, 12 and up, and 3) EUA for vaccines for school aged kids, 5–11. That’s the reality if you want school…
LINK:
Jacob T. Levy: Who’s Afraid of Judith Shklar?: ‘Meet the American philosopher who showed that Western politics could only move forward by first taking a step backward…. “The Liberalism of Fear”… is fundamentally an essay about the boundaries of liberalism. Over the course of the mid- to late 20th century, liberalism became encumbered by considerable cultural baggage…. Shklar tries to recenter liberalism by insisting it is essentially a political… doctrine… freedom, but the substance of freedom is to be determined by the individuals seeking it for themselves…. She thought the philosophical and juridical liberalism of rights and justice associated with Immanuel Kant and Rawls, as well as the aspirational liberalism of self-development found in John Stuart Mill’s work, ultimately went astray because it distracted from the most urgent political task associated with freedom: restraining state violence…. Shklar treated people’s experience of injustice as worthy of moral consideration on its own….. Shklar’s was a liberalism motivated not by a summum bonum, an ultimate good, but by a summum malum, an ultimate evil, something to be avoided: namely, cruelty and the fear it inspires. Liberalism’s emphasis on restraint, she argued, should be motivated by the distinctive political evil of living in fear of state violence and cruelty…
LINK: <https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/07/16/whos-afraid-of-judith-shklar-liberalism/>
Ed Zitron: The Hybrid Office Is Anti-Worker—& a Failure of Management: ‘Companies such as Zillow and Salesforce… level the playing field…. Instead of having in-office employees gather in a conference room while remote employees dial in, if one person is not in the physical room, everyone will dial in separately on their laptop, regardless of whether they’re in the office. And just like that, there’s an immediate solution to “leaving people out” of meetings…. Hybrid work… is a stopgap between a reframing of what an office actually is, and an attempt to hold back the future of work, which will be primarily remote for those who can do their work at the computer. It’s a frenzied attempt by executives and managers to keep some form of control other than “paying and treating people well enough to keep them working for you,” with bizarre attempts to recreate after-work drinks and social events that nobody at work really needed…. We are at a point where people are actively coming up with reasons not to go remote, and hybrid work is simply their way of instituting a compromise, with the (potentially) intended consequence of alienating those who don’t come into the office…
LINK:
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Re: "Where are the robot bricklayers?". A very interesting read. However, I kept thinking - why are we still building with brick? It is energy-intensive to make bricks, and labor-intensive to use bricks for construction. At best, the robot can only reduce labor costs. In a world where we need to be more innovative in our use of materials to reduce GHG emissions, we would be better off avoiding brick (and concrete) as much as possible. However, the lessons concerning robots to automate construction with traditional bulk materials are useful and should temper the techno-utopians who think we can automate almost everything. I am still waiting for a fully automated self-driving car and how the manufacturer will solve the moral problems of who should die in an unavoidable collision. The automation of machine decision-making was alluded to in the movie "I, Robot" with Spooner wracked with survivor guilt when he was rescued by a humanoid robot, but a young girl in another car was not.
I understand the inflationary impact on cars - chip shortage to complete vehicles. What I don't understand is the inflation in hotel rooms and airfares. Aren't these last 2 in abundance with a shortage of demand due to covid? Is it something to do with limited flights for citizens trying desperately to return home, and also needing places to stay with no recourse to avoid the gouging?