Links March 2020

Rolling Stone has an insightful article about why the Christian Right supports Trump and won’t stop supporting him no matter what he does [1].

Interesting article about Data Oriented Architecture [2].

Quarantine Will normalise WFH and Recession will Denormalise Jobs [3]. I guess we can always hope that after a disaster we can learn to do things better than before.

Tyre wear is worse than exhaust for small particulate matter [4]. We need better tyres and legal controls over such things.

Scott Santens wrote an insightful article about the need for democracy and unconditional basic income [5]. “In ancient Greece, work was regarded as a curse” is an extreme position but strongly supported by evidence. ‘In his essay “In Praise of Idleness,” Bertrand Russell wrote “Modern methods of production have given us the possibility of ease and security for all; we have chosen, instead, to have overwork for some and starvation for others. Hitherto we have continued to be as energetic as we were before there were machines; in this we have been foolish, but there is no reason to go on being foolish forever.”‘

Cory Doctorow wrote an insightful article for Locus titled A Lever Without a Fulcrum Is Just a Stick about expansions to copyright laws [6]. One of his analogies is that giving a bullied kid more lunch money just allows the bullies to steal more money, with artists being bullied kids and lunch money being the rights that are granted under copyright law. The proposed solution includes changes to labor and contract law, presumably Cory will write other articles in future giving the details of his ideas in this regard.

The Register has an amusing article about the trial of a former CIA employee on trial for being the alleged “vault 7 leaker” [7]. Both the prosecution and the defence are building their cases around the defendent being a jerk. The article exposes poor security and poor hiring practices in the CIA.

CNN has an informative article about Finland’s war on fake news [8]. As Finland has long standing disputes with Russia they have had more practice at dealing with fake news than most countries.

The Times of Israel has an interesting article about how the UK used German Jews to spy on German prisoners of war [9].

Cory Doctorow wrote an insightful article “Data is the New Toxic Waste” about how collecting personal data isn’t an asset, it’s a liability [10].

Ulrike Uhlig wrote an insightful article about “Control Freaks”, analysing the different meanings of control, both positive and negative [11].

538 has an informative article about the value of statistical life [12]. It’s about $9M per person in the US, which means a mind-boggling amount of money should be spent to save the millions of lives that will be potentially lost in a natural disaster (like Coronavirus).

NPR has an interesting interview about Crypto AG, the Swiss crypto company owned by the CIA [13]. I first learned of this years ago, it’s not new, but I still learned a lot from this interview.

• [1] http://tinyurl.com/r2zyrpz
• [2] https://blog.eyas.sh/2020/03/data-oriented-architecture/
• [3] https://abe-winter.github.io/2020/03/07/wfhdemic.html
• [4] http://tinyurl.com/tf4yj4m
• [5] http://tinyurl.com/y9dcnzma
• [6] http://tinyurl.com/v3mxgh5
• [7] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/03/05/cia_leak_trial/
• [8] http://tinyurl.com/y6cn42us
• [9] http://tinyurl.com/y67mo4rr
• [10] http://tinyurl.com/wucsgw8
• [11] https://curlybracket.net/2020/03/16/control-freaks.html
• [12] http://tinyurl.com/s6e7luk
• [13] http://tinyurl.com/qpx3dah