https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2019/02/becoming-jan-van-ijken/

On the marginal value gain by destroying your privacy. The whole thing is well worth a read.

I don’t mind letting your programs see my private data as long as I get something useful in exchange. But that’s not what happens.

A former co-worker told me once: “Everyone loves collecting data, but nobody loves analyzing it later.” This claim is almost shocking, but people who have been involved in data collection and analysis have all seen it. It starts with a brilliant idea: we’ll collect information about every click someone makes on every page in our app! And we’ll track how long they hesitate over a particular choice! And how often they use the back button! How many seconds they watch our intro video before they abort! How many times they reshare our social media post!

And then they do track all that. Tracking it all is easy. Add some log events, dump them into a database, off we go.

But then what? Well, after that, we have to analyze it. And as someone who has analyzed a lot of data about various things, let me tell you: being a data analyst is difficult and mostly unrewarding (except financially).

See, the problem is there’s almost no way to know if you’re right. (It’s also not clear what the definition of “right” is, which I’ll get to in a bit.) There are almost never any easy conclusions, just hard ones, and the hard ones are error prone. What analysts don’t talk about is how many incorrect charts (and therefore conclusions) get made on the way to making correct ones. Or ones we think are correct. A good chart is so incredibly persuasive that it almost doesn’t even matter if it’s right, as long as what you want is to persuade someone… which is probably why newpapers, magazines, and lobbyists publish so many misleading charts.

But let’s leave errors aside for the moment. Let’s assume, very unrealistically, that we as a profession are good at analyzing things. What then?

Well, then, let’s get rich on targeted ads and personalized recommendation algorithms. It’s what everyone else does!

Or do they?

https://apenwarr.ca/log/20190201

Mr. Trump won the presidency proclaiming himself a self-made billionaire, and he has long insisted that his father, the legendary New York City builder Fred C. Trump, provided almost no financial help.

But The Times’s investigation, based on a vast trove of confidential tax returns and financial records, reveals that Mr. Trump received the equivalent today of at least $413 million from his father’s real estate empire, starting when he was a toddler and continuing to this day.

Much of this money came to Mr. Trump because he helped his parents dodge taxes. He and his siblings set up a sham corporation to disguise millions of dollars in gifts from their parents, records and interviews show. Records indicate that Mr. Trump helped his father take improper tax deductions worth millions more. He also helped formulate a strategy to undervalue his parents’ real estate holdings by hundreds of millions of dollars on tax returns, sharply reducing the tax bill when those properties were transferred to him and his siblings.

These maneuvers met with little resistance from the Internal Revenue Service, The Times found. The president’s parents, Fred and Mary Trump, transferred well over $1 billion in wealth to their children, which could have produced a tax bill of at least $550 million under the 55 percent tax rate then imposed on gifts and inheritances.

The Trumps paid a total of $52.2 million, or about 5 percent, tax records show.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/10/02/us/politics/donald-trump-tax-schemes-fred-trump.html

Dutch fashion designer Iris Van Herpen (previously) blends cutting-edge technology and classic motifs in her thought-provoking garments. Van Herpen’s most recent collection, Shift Souls, was showcased at Paris Fashion Week, and featured dresses that play with structure and color to blur the boundaries between fashion, technology, and art.

In a statement on the brand’s website about the collection, Van Herpen explains that she was inspired by the fluidity of identity change in myths, particularly from Japan. The stories “gave me the inspiration to explore the deeper meaning of identity and how immaterial and mutable it can become within the current coalescence of our digital bodies.”

https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2019/01/dizzying-multi-layered-gowns-by-iris-van-herpen/

Praise Bob!

Poor is the person without Slack. Lack of Slack compounds and traps.

Slack means margin for error. You can relax.

Slack allows pursuing opportunities. You can explore. You can trade.

Slack prevents desperation. You can avoid bad trades and wait for better spots. You can be efficient.

Slack permits planning for the long term. You can invest.

Slack enables doing things for your own amusement. You can play games. You can have fun.

Slack enables doing the right thing. Stand by your friends. Reward the worthy. Punish the wicked. You can have a code.

Slack presents things as they are without concern for how things look or what others think. You can be honest.

You can do some of these things, and choose not to do others. Because you don’t have to.

Only with slack can one be a righteous dude.

Slack is life.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yLLkWMDbC9ZNKbjDG/slack

There may be no reasonable max loss. Some things want too much.

A clean example is free to play mobile games. If allowed, they charge tens of thousands of dollars. Players called whales are so addicted they pay. The games destroy them.

The motivating example was Facebook. Facebook wants your entire life. Users not consciously limiting engagement lose hours a day. Every spare moment is spent scrolling, checking for updates, likes and comments. This reliably makes users miserable. Other social networks share this problem.

An important example is politics. Political causes want every spare minute and dollar. They want to choose your friends, words and thoughts. If given power, they seize the resources of state and nation for their purposes. Then they take those purposes further. One cannot simply give any political movement what it wants. That way lies ruin and madness.

Yes, that means your cause, too.

This generalizes into most sufficiently intense signaling and status competition. One must always signal harder or seek higher status. This takes over everything you are and eats your entire life. Part of sending sufficiently intense signals is showing that you have allowed this! Maya Millennial has fallen victim. Those keeping up with the Joneses fall victim. Many a child looking fitting in or applying to college falls victim.

Obsession with safety does this.

Television eats people’s lives. So do video games. So do drugs and alcohol. One must be careful and know your tenancies and limits.

Ethical arguments do this, ensnaring vulnerable people.

This property is a way to distinguish cults from religions. Cults want it all. Religion wants its cut.

You can only pay off those who charge a bounded price and stay bought. Before you pay the ransom, be sure it will free the hostages.

Would going along result in cooperation? Or put blood in the water?

https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2017/09/23/out-to-get-you/

Via https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yLLkWMDbC9ZNKbjDG/slack

Via https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/01/31/book-review-zero-to-one/

David Roberts

The Dutch don’t wear bike helmets. How safe is it to ride a bike in the Netherlands?

Chris Bruntlett

We — like you — live in a place where helmets have been mandated by law, because they’ve been accepted as a commonsense safety device, normal as a seatbelt. But the Dutch show that [for them], safety in infrastructure, safety in slowing cars, and safety in numbers are all far more important than safety in body armor.

David Roberts

Yeah, the US approach seems to be to up-armor the cyclist so that cars don’t have to change.

Chris Bruntlett

Exactly.

Less than 0.5 percent of Dutch cyclists wear helmets, which is one in 200 people on bikes. And that’s really just the sport cyclists. Virtually everybody else, from children to old people, doesn’t even think about helmets. It’s just not present in their culture, because they’ve ultimately decided that it’s far more important to build this culture of everyday cycling, and to build safe streets, instead of requiring people to protect themselves.

https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/8/28/17789510/bike-cycling-netherlands-dutch-infrastructure

Polyesters, industrially produced from petroleum, are widely used in plastic bottles and clothing.

Current recycling processes mean that polyester materials follow a downward quality spiral, losing some of their properties each time they go through the cycle. Bottles become fleeces, then carpets, after which they often end up in landfill.

PETase reverses the manufacturing process, reducing polyesters to their building blocks, ready to be used again.

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-43783631

(Denis Diderot, Conversation between d’Alembert and Diderot [Entretien entre d’Alembert et Diderot], 1769)

I too haz this feels

https://xkcd.com/2102/