hedgedoops2

CCC has a longstanding policy demand called the "Datenbrief" ('data letter'). Under this proposal, every corporation that keeps personal information about a natural person would be obligated to, once a year, mail the subject a letter containing their information, with instructions how to exercise their existing statutory deletion/correction rights.

If you keep PII, you'd also need to keep some contact info for the subject, and use it to ensure they know about their rights / the data. The existence of the data-related right would imply an obligation to inform the subject about it.

I guess I'd prefer a web interface displaying all the data holders with little "delete" buttons, over getting a gazillion letters, but if this is implemented by a single organization that actually has all your data (even if only for the purpose of faciltating GDPR), it could be a central point of failure.

[1] https://www.ccc.de/en/datenbrief

Or perhaps we could allow obtaining of some carbon credits through carbon capture / sequestration, and tighten the emissions cap. For 4% of global GDP you could stop/compensate global co2 emissions based on current carbon capture technology's prices per ton of co2 removed. [1] If there were a business case for CCS, the cost would come further down. Currently there is no profit in it.

One would need to restrict the allowed methods to safe and scalable ones (like extraction from seawater, not ocean seeding).

[1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GmWpFCjh0Fk for prices and methods + https://www.mcc-berlin.net/fileadmin/data/clock/carbon_clock... + simplistic back of envelope calculation (assumes cost scales up linearly)

Here's how. Hong Kong is part of China, yeah, but it was (under one country two systems) an autonomous part, with its own constitution, law and judiciary, which was democractic. What makes a state? Territory, legal and executive autonomy, defense. HK did not have defense, but it had everything else. It was a de facto state, and unfortunately HAD to be, because it was to be democratic in China. Hence, it was de-facto invaded when the "security law" was imposed (in violation of HK autonomy). The analogy is not perfect, and for sure this does not make it worse or better (it's bad because it's a violation of democratic rights and against the expressed wishes of at least half the population that demonstrated against the extradition law, NOT because of souvereignity issues). But there is an analogy with invading a foreign country that is pretty strong.

One problem with the coexistence argument is state regulation.

Because so much of the web is a corporate-operated SAAS, regulation is being made that assumes that everything on the internet is a corporate-operated SAAS. The people who make the laws don't understand (or really care about) the potential of networked general purpose computers who can send arbitrary messages and perform arbitrary computations. What they know is platforms and services: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Signal, ...

The problem is that things that don't fit this mold will 'accidentally' become illegal by virtue of compliance being impossible for the authors of such software.

Look at the upcoming EU regulation about encryption, terrorism related content, copyright enforcement. Everything is aimed at the platform companies but in effect regulates all software as though it were a platform. There always has to be an employee who can process takedown requests, or provide access to cops.

In the eyes of "serious people" making laws, this problem does not exist, because everything that lives on the internet is a platform, backed by a corporation. There is no attempt to suppress alternatives, they are just not acknowledged to exist and matter, and thus become banned by collateral damage. If they did exist and had tons of users, those laws could never pass.

The internet used to be a series of tubes, now it's a series of platforms.

Are you in javascript web development? Or some other environment where you use a lot of dependencies, each of which introduces its own terminology?

There are much better comments here (especially the one pointing out that 'impostor syndrome' may be characterized as a misconception about the level of required competence), but I'd like to add this:

If I understand correctly, "impostor syndrome" is a term coined by ivy league university psych counsellors. It does not apply to the workplace. It refers to ivy league freshmen not thinking of themselves as geniuses and/or mistakenly believing you have to be a genius to be admitted to the ivy league.

That doesn't seem to be your problem though. It seems more like you feel that you're not learning anything permanently. That seems unlikely but... maybe it's true? Maybe your job is all about pointless details of framework X which you then promptly forget again.

While the threat (expressed as P(harm)*harm) from XYAgency surveillance is low or medium, the unmitigated threat from the things their surveillance practices protect against - namely, terrorism - is also low. The mitigation effect is lower still.

Objectively, even in 2001 terrorism was a negligible risk compared to everyday risks, and subjectively, there hasn't been a major terrorist attack for years. The only reason mass surveillance exists is a rationale by the US state that "more power is good". This may apply to the US army, but not to the spies.

Also, like you say, once the american spies start to (pun intended) "Interfere in american elections", then the problem affects everybody with P=1. Personally I could live with it trump were the only candidate they work against, but if they do it to trump, they likely do it to others. (I see no evidence of interference or other abuse of collected data currently, but I think it's dangerous to give them the power to collect all this info that can in principle be abused for selective prosecution and/or blackmail).

Also, it affects not just politicians, but also corporate execs, who can be further pressured using the other means of the state, and who themselves have power the state can deputize.

A democracy should have the surveillance powers that are proportionate to the benefit from these powers and no more. There is a positive value in minimizing state surveillance power; this concept seems lost on america. (In fairness, it seems lost on conservative parties worldwide.)

I guess the price is low because no-one is buying offsets. You'd expect the cheapest ways to offset emissions to be sold first.

There is a Decemberists refrain about the reaction to 9/11, the war on terror: "Because America can, and America can't say no." Or at least, I thought it stood for that, at the time.

Part of a solution may be to introduce a "principle of proportionality" like [1] (if one does not already exist), and to aggressively remove the bugs in the US judicial system that prevent ordinary courts from examining the spies, the military and the executive. Like the state secrets privilege [2]. Then the system can prevent itself from backsliding during crises.

Laws are no good if courts take 10 years or more to figure out whether they have jurisdiction over, or are able to subpoena evidence relating to, crass, publicly known, obviously illegal, civil rights violations. If courts take too long, standards shift, are forgotten, then abolished. The normative power of the facts.

Jewel vs NSA has taken 10 years and has gotten nowhere.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportionality_(law)#European...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_secrets_privilege

Has anyone ever created an anki deck from their college coursework that would have allowed them to pass verbal exams 10 years later?

Cusins. By the way, have you any religion?

Undershaft. Yes.

Cusins. Anything out of the common?

Undershaft. Only that there are two things necessary to Salvation.

Cusins [disappointed, but polite] Ah, the Church Catechism. Baptism and —

Undershaft. No. Money and gunpowder.

Cusins [surprised, but interested] That is the general opinion of our governing classes. The novelty is in hearing any man confess it.

Undershaft. Just so.

Cusins. Excuse me: is there any place in your religion for honor, justice, truth, love, mercy and so forth?

Undershaft. Yes: they are the graces and luxuries of a rich, strong, and safe life.

Cusins. Suppose one is forced to choose between them and money or gunpowder?

Undershaft. Choose money and gunpowder; for without enough of both you cannot afford the others.

Cusins. That is your religion?

Undershaft. Yes.

(https://opentextbc.ca/englishliterature/chapter/major-barbar...)

Those are all islamic fundamentalists though.

More precisely, we are talking about the people targeted or captured during the 'war on terror'.

The pertinent category here is "whoever is considered an 'enemy' in 'war'" - they will get their rights trampled.

The problem is that police are being involved in the job of social workers. I guess it would be an acceptable and useful system if:

- Police had write-only access to the database.

- Police had no involvement in interventions.

- Anyone was able to fill out a form and get their data purged.

- Everyone in the database could easily discover it.

Basically, separate law enforcement and social work. And enforce strict data souvereignity.

The next problem is that it blurs the line between 'client' and 'suspect'.

So you set up a focus group of potential customers and vickrey-auction (or VCG-auction) one subscription (or k subscriptions) among them, for the purpose of recording the bid distribution?

For this to work, wouldn't the participants need to believe that the auction really is the only way they can get a subscription?

I misread it, as:

> I then say clearly that I will remove 6 of the other cups. And, to retain the mystery, I will not reveal the prize.

It wasn't a criticism.

I just wanted to draw attention to the point that in the random game (I.e. player marks two, you reveal 6 random unmarked, if no prize is revealed, player decides to switch to one or to keep two) it is the better strategy to never switch.

Do you think it would be an interesting variant to play the game like that?

> I then say clearly that I will remove 6 of the other cups and, to retain the mystery, will not reveal the prize

Do you say 'I will now remove 6 empty cups?', or is it believed that you removed 6 unmarked cups at random?

One source of such an incentive could be a cap-and-trade emissions trading scheme with strict caps [0], in which air-capturers are granted emissions rights they can sell.

The EU's ETS [1] is currently the biggest carbon market, regulating about 40% of EU emissions.

It does not grant rights to capturers that take CO2 out of the atmosphere - only to those that reduce the emissions at some plant or factory. Apparently this choice is partly because it's not clear how to make sure that the carbon sink is stable - that the CO2 won't get out again. [2]

Lets assume you could get emissions rights for removing CO2. Would this provide the incentive we want?

The current price for emissions rights is 15€ per 1000 tons of CO2 [3], so an operation to sequester all of the EU's emissions (3.4 * 10^9 t, 2014, [4]) would get a revenue of at most 50 million euro / year. Probably much less since the market would get flooded.

Why is this price so low? The ETS' cap could be too low. Also, the ETS does not really cap emissions at all. Only certain industries, like power or aluminium manufacturing need to present certificates [1b], hence the 40%. Also, industries which would be 'at risk' to leave the EU if they were forced to pay, get free certificates [5] - arguably these would pay the most for rights.

Overall the EU does seem to be doing something right though, since the overall emissions are going down [4]. But the ETS does not seem to internalize the carbon externality.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emissions_trading

[1] https://ec.europa.eu/clima/policies/ets_en

[1b] https://ec.europa.eu/clima/sites/clima/files/factsheet_ets_e...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_Emission_Tradin...

[3] https://www.theice.com/products/197/EUA-Futures/data?marketI...

[4] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.PC?location...

[5] https://ec.europa.eu/clima/policies/ets/allowances/leakage_e...

It's quite simple. The press is free and it is not responsible for national security, whatever that means today. It is responsible for getting the truth out. If secrets must be kept, it is the spies' responsibility to keep them, not the media's.

And WL is absolutely part of the media.

As for the 'reasonably general conception of the public interest' of wikileaks, I suppose it is 'to get all of the truth out'.

The agenda was to promote radical transparency.

Check out 'Inside Wikileaks' by Daniel Ellsberg, a WL cofounder who had a falling out with Assange and founded his own radical transparency platform called OpenLeaks. Brigitta Jonsdottir used to work there too, an Icelandic green.

Wikileaks stated policy and concept used to be:

- Receive, in a way that keeps the leaker anonymous, any and all state secrets that are of public interest

- Publish them after checking authenticity

This constitutes an attack on secrecy as such, not on any particular country or entity.

Molecular Biology of the Cell (Alberts)

If I remember correctly, CORBA was all about standardizing APIs. You'd have your distributed "CORBA Objects" whose methods anyone who knew the unique object ID could call. The idea was that there would be a "standard library" for each industry. So all the barbers would implement a standard library "Appointment Schedule" object, all the exchanges would implement a stdlib "Orderbook" object, etc.

CORBA would generate RPC stub objects for you in various OOP languages, and potentially automate discovery, so you could say, give me all an array of all the orderbooks of all the bitcoin exchanges, and ask each for the last price.

They didn't 'steal' this, they transferred it to lenders (and/or short sellers).

Bitfinex (unwisely) specified that during the Bcash-Bitcoin fork, lenders would get Bcash for lent-out Bitcoin. However if Alice lends 1 Bitcoin to Bob before the fork and Bob sells it to Carol then Bitfinex will owe both Alice and Carol one Bcash after the fork, but they will only have one to distribute. So they split it up.

This can get worse when Carol lends it out again, etc, etc, and in the end Zack withdraws the Bitcoin. Unbounded liability and potentially no assets. So them paying out 15% less than expected was a pretty good result.

> think tanks are a euphemism for propaganda machine

While I tend to agree, it's interesting that this think tank employee seems to have believed that 'think tank' means something closer to 'independent private research institute' or 'university department' than to 'paid propagandists, for moneyed special interests, kept on a leash by their masters'.

What did he think his group was? Maybe not a 'think tank'?

Are there any 'think tanks' that might be called 'independent'? Any 'think tanks' that might be said not to be 'propagandists'? 'Good' think tanks?

I guess it's tricky to define, when merely being super dogmatic can already ensure that you'll be loyal to whatever special interests happen to benefit from your particular brand of dogmatism. So no direct control/intervention is needed.

ACLU or EFF are also dogmatic in a way, and they're activist organizations, they exist to improve the world according to some ideology (civil liberties, free software).

I guess the difference between 'think tank' and 'research institute' is that the latter is more interested in advancing science, than in saving the world.

Among the 'think tanks' you can then, differentiate between those that serve (through control or dogmatism) the less powerful (EFF?) vs those that serve the more powerful (Kochs, arguably Cato, AEI).

I guess a better, orthogonal way you can differentiate, is: does the organization end up adding or detracting from the ideal of educated public discourse? Are their arguments manipulative, or do they serve, in the end, to educate? (This is about effect, not intent, or bias.)

You can ask about intent too, I guess. Do they presume ideas are at "war" or do they presume that ideas tend to combine to get closer to the truth?

A highly biased, paid-for group can still be useful to discourse, either it refrains from demagogic manipulation (it 'plays fair' so to speak), or its ideology is so weird and fringe, rather than hegemonic, that it adds alot of new stuff to discourse.

I'm sure there are other ways of dividing up the space of highly biased schools of thought.

The ancient philosophical schools like the Pythagoreans were probably a species of think tank. Although they likely weren't 'propagandists'. Although they drowned the guy who came up with the irrational numbers. It's confusing.

What we should avoid is trying to divide them just by "left" vs "right". That's just dumb.

What's also kind of dangerous is falling into the trap of saying, everything is propaganda. The university is a propaganda machine, for the left, haha. That's moldbuggery. I think Voltaire would get cramps when being made to deal with mr Moldbug, I'll leave it at that.

shapeshift.io - I used to use this a lot. It doesn't hold your crypto for more than a minute.

bitmex.com - (futures exchange) - This is a gem. They're extremely professional. Every feature seems throughly considered, e.g. margin positions are valued based on global indices, not the local princes, to prevent flash crashes. The API is the most feature complete I've seen. One thing that bothers me is that Bitmex seems to have a conflict of interest, since they run a trading bot ('anchor market maker') on their own platform.

etherdelta.github.io - (ICO tokens only) - This was designed so that the exchange owner never controls your tokens, an Ethereum contract does. You decide whether this reassures or frightens you. It supports all tokens which is probably the main reason I used it (besides being a cool proof of concept). The in-browser UI is pretty bad.

I remember that during G20, some grandstanders set fire to some cables in the Berlin S-Bahn system, disrupting train service for a day. They then claimed responsibility with a letter on linksunten. [1]

Thing is, the comments on linksunten were uniformly condemning of the letter and the act. Yet still by sympathizers, not outsiders coming to the site. I'd link to the web archive version but the only thing the crawler was able to retrieve was a 'DDOS protection for civil society' banner [2].

"Antifa" is a bogeyman currently, imo.

[1] https://linksunten.indymedia.org/de/node/215853 (offline) [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20170620143720/https://linksunte...

Why shouldn't it?

While "How can I change to adapt?" may be the more productive reaction to most personal problems, the "This is unfair. How can the world change to accomodate me?" reaction is, in fact, the one that is more altruistic. This is how society discovery ways to improve laws. By complaining intelligently and in a way that considers others' needs besides your own, you are contributing to society.

This is costing you time, therefore you are actually sacrificing something to help others. Yet people always get this condescending reaction from conservatives.

That, and it's just painful to see people endorse unfairness as some kind of natural law. The amount of natural law is very limited. Almost everything is possible, apart from perpetual motion and the like.

In fact, the ICOS ICO is open now:

https://icos.icobox.io/

Apparently, they promise to build part of your ICO for you in exchange for a 50BTC upfront fee (link at top right - 'Apply for FREE ICO').

Alternatively you can get their service without an upfront payment (hence 'FREE ICO'), by instead reserving 250 BTC worth of your ICO's tokens for holders of ICOS tokens. The latter can burn each ICOS token for 0.04 BTC worth of your token, which works out to a 75% discount on your presale price assuming that the ICOS tokens were bought during the ICOS ICO (for 0.01 BTC each).

The catch is, that since there's only 250 BTC reserved of each token, while there are, at least initially

4 * BTC_raised_in_ICOS_ICO

in outstanding rights to discounted tokens, buyers will only ever get a tiny discounted allocation.

You're currently looking at needing to participate in 100 ICOs until you've converted all your ICOS tokens. As there is no cap how much ICOS can raise, so this could get much higher.

Also, when the 250 BTC are oversubscribed, allocation is pro rata, based on how much ICOS you would be willing to convert. So lets say you've done due diligence and determined something will go up, now you're locking up your funds in ICOS and only a tiny fraction will buy the thing you want. It might make more sense to just sell your ICOS on an exchange and use the proceeds to buy the ICO normally.

The other catch is that the SEC might ban all this business before you find 100 ICOS-incubated ICOs to invest in. Nevermind that i haven't seen a reason why ICOS itself would ever acquire any clients. But they do have 10M$ in cash now.