In the 1950s bunkers were a middle-class neurosis, but now they’re an upscale luxury.
@sqrtminusone@emacs.ch @GuerillaOntologist The fact that WhatsApp is (at least in theory) secure helps immunize Zuckerberg from ownership. If a platform’s security is so weak that every state security service has everything they want all the time, there’s no need to own the principal. If it’s so secure the principal has no access, same. When the principal can get access but unaffiliated security services cannot, that’s when the principal becomes a very desirable target. 1/
@sqrtminusone@emacs.ch @GuerillaOntologist All that said, I wouldn’t presume WhatsApp is secure from US state intelligence gathering, even though the label promises it should be. I expect Zuckerberg is owned, in that way. But Meta is a bureaucratic behemoth in a way Telegram is not. The person of the principal (as opposed to other sources of access) is arguably more relevant for Telegram. 2/
@sqrtminusone@emacs.ch @GuerillaOntologist Telegram is arguably pretty unique in the scale and intelligence value of what it hosts, combined with how personally it is controlled. 3/
@sqrtminusone@emacs.ch @GuerillaOntologist All that said, I’m not affirmatively arguing this is what happened. I do think it facially plausible, but of course the most likely thing is a state action is just what it claims and appears to be, not some conspiracy.
I do think, from the outside, both might be plausible here. Thus the poll, “just asking questions!” /fin
i really dislike it when my internet acquaintances die. please don’t.
The blanket liability courts have interpreted onto Section 230 is growing threadbare. cf @matthewstoller https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/judges-rule-big-techs-free-ride-on
@sqrtminusone@emacs.ch @GuerillaOntologist My understanding is he has plaintext access to nearly everything that goes across Telegram if he wants it. In that circumstance, there’s arguably no country and no security service and no amount of money that can protect you. You are too valuable for a state actor not to own. If that’s right, the question before you isn’t how to protect yourself from state actors, but which state actor to be protected (and owned) by.
@_dm right back atcha, agreed!
@_dm Again, I think we’ll have something of a test if Trump craters in the polls. If it’s about an appearance of independence, their weird stretches towards legitimating Trumpish ideas and not holding him to ordinary standards of scrutiny will continue. If it’s about hedging their bets against a possible new political environment, and then likelihood of that environment collapses, we should see them suddenly raise their standards and call out the nonsequiturs, lies, and cruelty.
@_dm I guess where appearing to be independent requires defying standards of accuracy and clarity that a news organization should and otherwise would sustain, I think “be friendly”, is a fairer description. It’s not just pushing the edge of an Overton Window, choosing to take seriously ideological perspectives that might previously have been out of bounds. I think if you look at, say, the New York Times, you’ll find they are really stretching standards in the name of “fairness”.
Durov and France:
77.8%
Surprise arrest
(21 votes)
22.2%
Cover for defection
(6 votes)
@_dm I don’t think it’s so binary, independent vs not. I think newsrooms do strive for independence, but imperfectly. Sponsorship does color a general procorporate slant, I think. They are better about guarding against bias towards particular advertisers, because frankly they have a diversity of potential advertisers, so they can afford it. They can’t diversify across political regime though, re both risk of harrassment and to access, so that does color coverage.
@_dm I really do think so. If the polling breaks hard towards Kamala, we’ll have something of a test to distinguish the hypotheses.
journalistic organization are vulnerable, risk-averse, profit-seeking corporations.
as long as there’s a roughly 50% chance a Trump Administration controls the regulators, controls DOJ, has a sympathetic Court, there will be a lot of coverage that in retrospect could demonstrate “fairness” where fairness means nothing more or less than sympathetic coverage of Donald Trump.
media orgs are “triangulating”.
coverage will become less sympathetic and more accurate only if/when he’s clearly losing.
what if it really is all that goat’s fault?
“Almost all ‘contrarianism’ is like that, nobly and courageously supporting the status quo and existing power, while presenting yourself as bravely swimming upstream.” @Atrios https://www.eschatonblog.com/2024/08/contrarianism.html
“Given the Supreme Court's observations that platforms engage in protected first-party speech under the First Amendment when they curate compilations of others' content via their expressive algorithms, id. at 2409, it follows that doing so amounts to first-party speech under § 230, too.” via #MikeSacks https://x.com/mikesacksesq/status/1828795866590896599 ht @matthewstoller
// Wow.
What audiences mostly reward in writers is not new insights or ideas, but eloquence in expressing what an audience already thinks and believes.
Readers seek champions of their prejudices, advocates who in theory might persuade people with contrary views to also see the light, if people with contrary views weren’t too busy reading and rewarding their own champions to ever be persuaded.
I think the reasoning here by #PaulKrugman is not so great. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/27/opinion/trump-inflation.html
First, to be clear, he and nearly everybody else are absolutely right that 10%-20% across-the-board tariffs would raise US consumer prices. Trump and his sycophants are ridiculous to deny that.
But Krugman treats the capital account surplus, the “the [net] amount of foreign capital flowing into the United States” as exogenous, as though it would be unaffected. That's wrong. 1/
Text: More fundamentally, tariffs would tend to raise the foreign exchange value of the dollar, making our exporters less competitive. Why would this happen? The balance of payments always balances — the total inflow of money into America must equal the total outflow. In particular (leaving aside some technical issues involving investment income), it must be true that: Trade deficit = net inflows of capital. So unless we reduce the amount of foreign capital flowing into the United States - the amount that foreign governments, companies and individuals are investing here — we can't reduce the trade deficit. The way that normally plays out is that if we reduce imports, that change is offset by a fall in exports. Squeezing any one piece of the trade deficit is like pushing on a balloon: It just expands someplace else. And the mechanism through which that happens is typically a stronger dollar.
Much of the “foreign capital inflows” are basically vendor finance. Foreign firms sell into the US market, and get dollars in return. In accounting terms, they have “invested” in the US by holding dollars. They typically exchange those dollars for interest-earning Treasury securities and the like. 2/
Foreign entities “disinvest” from the US when they buy US goods and services from those dollars they hold. The scale of net investment is thus a function of the trade deficit, not some independent fact.
It’s certainly true that foreign actors might also have portfolio preferences, they might affirmatively want to accumulate dollars, not only do so as a residual to unbalanced trade. But Krugman effectively assumes that’s the whole story, and the vendor finance is none of it. 3/
I don’t know for sure whether 10%-20% across the board tariffs would reduce the US’ (multilateral) trade deficit. As an old English proverb, and I think Keynes, says, “There's many a slip 'twixt the cup and the lip.” Interational balance of payments has lots of moving parts.
You can tell the story Krugman tells. You can argue that countervailing tariffs by foreign countries will cause US exports to fall more than imports do. 4/
My guess is putting a pretty thick tariff barrier between the US and the world probably would bring the US trade account toward balance rather than away or do nothing.
That doesn’t mean it’s remotely a good idea or wise. It would risk the US dollar’s popularity as a reserve currency (for better or for worse), it would lead at least over a short-term to sharp rises in tradable good prices in the US, it would exacerbate trade tensions with our allies as well as our rivals. 5/
A drug can be effective but not safe, or not worth the cost of its side effects. There are much gentler, much smarter ways to bring the US trade account towards balance, if that’s what we want to do. I favor “capital account protectionism”. https://www.interfluidity.com/v2/540.html
But I think it’s a step too far to say we know tariffs wouldn’t narrow the trade deficit. Sure, they might not. But there are perfectly credible ways they might just.
They are still not a great idea. /fin
(sometimes i think when it’s all over, the Russians will have taken Ukraine, the Ukrainians will have taken Russia, and the border between the two will be unchanged.)
Text: In a rational world, governments would treat companies like criminals on parole. They would ankle monitor them and say, "You can only go to work and do your job, that's it. You can't fund candidates for office who will rewrite the laws in your favor. You can't run advertising campaigns to lure people into your house. Do the one thing that you do and collect your pay and shut the fuck up." That is the arrangement that we should hold in our minds as a goal. I realize that this is all rather broad, but it is useful to always remain conscious of the fact that corporate power is, at all times, trying to dominate the world, and that it is the project of democracy to stop it, and that its capture of the state should be despised and avoided everywhere it manifests itself. Workers are people. Companies aren't. Every single union contract is a small step towards keeping the world out of the hands of the evil robots.