Mammouth Café
#mkath
Req: Advice on Effective Data Poisoning [Serious]
"With the current and past social media fiascos on Facebook and elsewhere I want to look more deeply at effective data poisoning techniques. As information about me is routinely collected without my knowledge or permission, I feel more and more that that data should be rendered worthless or, even better, actively detrimental for these organisations to process...."
Immigration: reform ideas
"...What if states had the right to decide for themselves how many and what type of immigrants they would accept? This would push the notion of growth or stasis to a more local level...."
Spectre / Meltdown CPU Side-Channel Attack Announcements and Discussion
I've been making an ongoing compilation of announcements and significant discussions of the Spectre / Meltdown attacks.
Yonatan Zunger: What is your "Financial Shock" Wealth?
...It is a brilliant reframing of the notion of wealth into one of shock resilience, and, based on the size and likelihood of such shocks, of overall precariousness, of coercive potential, and more....
What were the homeless called before they were "homeless", and what gave rise to the 1980s crisis?
."..I'm going through the NY Times archive, 1900 to present. A few observations: Through most of that period (I've scanned through 1969), "homeless" wasn't a label but a temporary condition. People were "made homeless", usually by some specific mishap or accident, almost always a fire, perhaps a major storm or hurricane...."
Weinsteinomics 101: Monopoly is fundamentally a control dynamic, not a marketshare proposition
"..."Harvey Weinstein and the Economics of Consent" by Brit Marling is one of the more significant economics articles of the past decade. In it, she clearly articulates the dynamics of power, and re-establishes the element of control so critical to understanding monopoly -- a component that's been stripped from the economic literature of the past half-century..."
Weinsteinomics 101: Monopoly is fundamentally a control dynamic, not a marketshare proposition
"..."Harvey Weinstein and the Economics of Consent" by Brit Marling is one of the more significant economics articles of the past decade. In it, she clearly articulates the dynamics of power, and re-establishes the element of control so critical to understanding monopoly -- a component that's been stripped from the economic literature of the past half-century..."
There's something on the Web that Doesn't Suck, and it badly needs your help: the Online Etymological Dictionary
...I've spent literally hours at a time going through it out of sheer joy and discovery of words and word origins (though it's also possible to dive in and get a quick and direct answer). The whole project has been largely a labour of love by Douglas Harper....
The Fallacy of Assumed Competence
"...assuming 'these really smart people will figure it out' without looking into the nuts and bolts of their assumptions, methods, goals, and perhaps most importantly, motivations, strikes me as a fundamental flaw...."
Consumer, Customer, Citizen, Subject, National, Resident, Person ... ?
...One possiblity, and it appeals to me, is to reclaim citizen from its limited and papers-please formulation of present. My Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary from the Ancient Times of 1989 offers "an inhabitant of a city or town; esp : one entitled to the rights and privileges of a freeman"....
"[T]he beating heart of Buffettism, celebrated in a thousand investment books, is to avoid competition and minimise capital investment in the real economy."
"...He tells Berkshire Hathaway managers to widen their moat every year. The Buffett definition of good management is therefore clear. If you have effective competitors, you are doing it wrong...."
Anticipating the Tyranny of 7 Billion Minimally Viable Android Users
"...If Google are planning on providing a One Size Fits All platform ... I can only predict that the viability of Google's web services, browsers, apps, and operating systems for technical users is going to head downhill rapidly...."
Kenya's presidential reelection of Kenyatta rulled null by Supreme Court amidst Cambridge Analytica and Mercer propaganda claims
"...U.S.-based Cambridge Analytica reportedly occupies a whole floor of a building owned by President Kenyatta’s Jubilee Alliance coalition. The company is currently suing the British publication The Guardian over its reporting on its alleged connections to the right-wing web site Breitbart.com and the Brexit movement...."
Visualising a North Korea Endgame: What outcomes could be actively sought?
"...What does victory look like? China doesn't want US troops or weapons any closer to their border. China doesn't want North Korean refugees. South Korea doesn't want to support the north. The best solution might be a collaboration between South Korea and China to build the north into a semi-autonomous zone..."
TPM: A Serf on Google's Farm
"...We are paying customers of Google. We were forwarding emails from the site’s main address to all staffers. But because we receive a lot of spam, the spam that we were forwarding to ourselves marked us as a major spammer and led to Google banning all our emails with no notice in advance or notification after the fact...."
Just one of many insights on Google's leviathan influence over ... pretty much all information.
Scientific Etymologies
...Force: conquor by violence.
Vector: one who carries.
Speed: to thrive or prosper.
Mass: barley cake.
Gravity: thoughtfulness, seriousness.
Energy: activity, action, operation.
Temperature: to restrain oneself....
Instagram hack: What constitutes a "high-profile user"? How many are there?
...how many John Podestas are there: very high-value targets? I see this as likely set of tiers of users. I'm not entirely sure how to group them, though a few schemes come to mind. One looks at various groups of users. Another considers scope by the reach of impact, probably on a log-population scale....
What's up with Qatar?
"...Planet Money / NPR gave some interesting backstory and general info I didn't know. Summary/spoilers..."
Will clap for food: Medium's quest to measure (and pay for) quality writing online
"Content is a mug's game. "Content is king", a phrase originating from Viacom mogul Sumner Redstone, not Bill Gates as is commonly given, is a lie. And a cable mogul would certainly be aware of it: channel control is king. And cable is control over the channel...."
Geothermal energy at Yellowstone: NASA proposal to mitigate supervolcano risk whilst supplying baseload generation capacity
"...As the BBC article notes, there's the equivalent of "six industrial power plants" -- in hard numbers, roughly 6 GW thermal of energy -- available from the Yellowstone supercaldera. This is the largest geothermal reservoir in the United States, and among the largest in the world...."