Tag Archives: Processing

Bitcoin, Meet China. May You Have Many Happy Days Together.

Mother Jones

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Tyler Cowen points me to this from the Economist:

Most trading in bitcoin takes place in China: Huobi and OKCoin, two Chinese exchanges, are thought to account for more than 90% of transactions. The currency seems to have become an outlet for Chinese savers frustrated with their limited investment options and searching for high-yielding assets. The Chinese authorities are worried enough to have banned banks from dealing in bitcoin, but individuals are still free to speculate and have been doing so with gusto.

….China has also become the global hub for bitcoin mining, the process by which heavy-duty computing power is used to process transactions involving bitcoin, earning those doing the processing some new bitcoin as compensation. Over 80% of new bitcoin are now minted in data centres in places like Sichuan and Inner Mongolia.

One of the selling points of e-currencies like Bitcoin is that their decentralized nature makes them inherently free of government meddling. But is that really true? I’ve long thought that techno-evangelists show far less respect than they should toward meatspace assets like nuclear bombs, gun-wielding police forces, ownership of fiber optic networks, vast fortunes in physical goods, and so forth. This is, for example, why so many of them were naive enough back in the 90s to believe that the internet would spell doom for traditional marketing—only to wake up a few years later and discover that traditional marketers had adapted remarkably quickly to their supposed revolution. It turned out that high IQs aren’t limited to Silicon Valley, and that websites and Google searches and Facebook advertising posed no more of a challenge to the existing order than television did in the 50s.

So is Bitcoin really safe from government meddling? It has been so far, but only in the same sense that an ant is safe from my boot as long as it doesn’t annoy me. China, however, has already proved that a meatspace government can, in fact, crush the digital world if it’s sufficiently motivated to do so. It’s not even all that hard. So if e-currencies are now mostly a ploy for evading Chinese capital controls, I’d say we’re about to learn pretty quickly whether (a) e-currencies can grow big enough to matter, and (b) national governments are truly helpless to do anything about them. I’ll put my money on the meatspace men in Beijing if push ever comes to shove on this.

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Bitcoin, Meet China. May You Have Many Happy Days Together.

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Another Long, Hot Summer of Catcalling Is Coming to a Close

Mother Jones

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Hannah Giorgis writes about the endless struggle with catcalling in New York City:

After another summer spent shrugging off men’s loud assessments of my body any time I left my apartment, I am exhausted. And as the streets thin out and the weather cools to a temperature less accommodating of men who consider catcalling a leisure sport, I am increasingly able to pause and feel the depth of my own fatigue.

….Every outing involves dozens of split-second decisions. The short, loose dress or the long, form-fitting one? The almost-empty subway car or the crowded one? The shorter route or the more well-lit one?….My mind can only make so many daily calculations before it slips into what social psychologist Roy F. Baumeister calls “decision fatigue.” Processing each of these useless equations takes a biological toll on my brain, leaving it more inclined, as the day wears on, to look for shortcuts.

Read the whole thing. Or, if you’d prefer a video dramatization of what it’s like, check out the YouTube below.

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Another Long, Hot Summer of Catcalling Is Coming to a Close

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Does the Internet Really Make Dumb People Dumber?

Mother Jones

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I don’t normally get to hear what Bill Gates thinks of one of my ideas, but today’s the exception. Because Ezra Klein asked him:

Ezra Klein: ….Kevin Drum, who writes for Mother Jones, has a line I’ve always thought was interesting, which is that the internet makes dumb people dumber, and smart people smarter. Do you worry about the possibility that the vast resources the internet gives the motivated, including online education, will give rise o a big increase in, for lack of a better tterm, cognitive or knowledge inequality that leads to further rises in global inequality?

Bill Gates: Well, you always have the challenge that when you create a tool to make activity X easier, like the internet makes it easier to find out facts or to learn new things, that there are some outliers who use that thing extremely well. It’s way easier to be polymathic today than it was in the past because your access to materials and your ability if you ever get stuck to find people that you can engage with is so strong.

But to say that there’s actually some negative side, that there actually will be people that are dumber, I disagree with that. I mean, I’m as upset as anyone at the wrong stuff about vaccination that’s out there on the internet that actually confuses some small number of people. There’s a communications challenge to get past.

But look at IQ test capability over time. Or even take a TV show today and how complex it is — that’s responding to the marketplace. You take Breaking Bad versus, I don’t know, Leave it to Beaver, or Combat!, or The Wild, Wild West. You know, yeah, take Combat! because that was sort of pushing the edge of should kids be allowed to watch it.

The interest and complexity really does say that, broadly, these tools have meant that market-driven people are turning out more complex things. Now, you can say, “Why hasn’t that mapped to more sophistication in politics or something like that?” That’s very complicated. But I don’t see a counter trend where there’s some group of people who are less curious or less informed because of the internet.

I’m sure that was said when the printing press came along and people saw romance novels and thought people would stay indoors and read all the time. But I just don’t see there being a big negative to the empowerment.

Unsurprisingly, Gates agrees that the internet can make smart people smarter. By analogy, the printing press also made smart people smarter because it gave them cheap, easy access to far more information. Since they were capable of processing the information, they were effectively smarter than they used to be.

It’s equally unsurprisingly that he disagrees about the internet making dumb people dumber. It’s a pretty anti-tech opinion, after all, and that’s not the business Bill Gates is in. But I think his answer actually belies his disagreement, since he immediately acknowledges an example of precisely this phenomenon: the anti-vax movement, something that happens to be close to his heart. Unfortunately, to call this merely a “communications challenge” discounts the problem. Sure, it’s a communications challenge, but that’s the whole point. The internet is all about communication, and it does two things in this case. First, it empower the anti-vax nutballs, giving them a far more powerful medium for spreading their nonsense. On the flip side, it makes a lot more people vulnerable to bad information. If you lack the context to evaluate arguments about vaccination, the internet is much more likely to make you dumber about vaccinating your kids than any previous medium in history.

The rest of Gates’ argument doesn’t really hold water either. Sure, IQ scores have been rising. But they’ve been rising for a long time. This long predates the internet and has nothing to do with it. As for TV shows, he picked the wrong example. It’s true that Breaking Bad is far more sophisticated than Leave it to Beaver, but Breaking Bad was always a niche show, averaging 1-2 million viewers for nearly its entire run. Instead, you should compare Leave it to Beaver with, say, The Big Bang Theory, which gets 10-20 million viewers per episode. Is Big Bang the more sophisticated show? Maybe. But if so, it’s not by much.

In any case, the heart of Gates’ response is this: “I don’t see a counter trend where there’s some group of people who are less curious or less informed because of the internet.” I won’t pretend that I have ironclad evidence one way or the other, but I wouldn’t dismiss the problem so blithely. I’m not trying to make a broad claim that the internet is making us generally stupider or anything like that. But it’s a far more powerful medium for spreading conspiracy theories and other assorted crap than anything we’ve had before. If you lack the background and context to evaluate information about a particular subject, you’re highly likely to be misinformed if you do a simple Google search and just start reading whatever comes up first. And that describes an awful lot of people.

Obviously this has been a problem for as long humans have been able to communicate. The anti-fluoridation nutballs did just fine with only dead-tree technology. Still, I think the internet makes this a more widespread problem, simply because it’s a more widespread medium, and it’s one that’s especially difficult to navigate wisely. Hopefully that will change in the future, but for now it is what it is. It doesn’t have to make dumb people dumber, but in practice, I think it very often does.

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Does the Internet Really Make Dumb People Dumber?

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Watch Almonds Suck California Dry

Mother Jones

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A worker watches an almond harvesting machine dump nuts near the town of Kerman, California.

Photographer Matt Black remembers the moment in December 2013 when he realized the drought in California had begun. The brown-hills in the horizon stretched into a cloudless blue winter sky. It was quiet. Too quiet.

“It was just this, yawning kind of silence,” Black says. “And that’s when I started working. It was just clear that this was going to be really bad.”

More stories about the almond boom and what it means for California.


Invasion of the Hedge Fund Almonds


Charts: Almonds Suck as Much Water Annually as LA Uses in 3 Years


Photos: The Story Behind California’s Nut Boom


It Takes How Much Water to Grow an Almond?!


Lay Off the Almond Milk, You Ignorant Hipsters

Black has spent the better part of the last year documenting the drought. “For most of it I felt like I was coated in dust—in my eyes, my ears, my cameras—everywhere.” In the summer, the temperature rose well above 100 degrees. “One day I was taking pictures of abandoned fields near I-5. It was a 114 degrees and the dust was blowing and there was not a single bit of green in sight,” he says. “At that moment, it felt like the entire Valley was about to catch fire.”

His photos, which have appeared in The New Yorker, Time, and National Geographic, among other publications, offer a glimpse into the lives and livelihoods of the Central Valley. In black and white, Black, who was recently named Time‘s Instagram Photographer of the Year, aims to capture “the flatness, uniformity and to a certain extent monotony of this way of farming. He adds, “It’s not a land of quaint little farms and pastoral scenes. These are factories, and that’s why they are important—because they feed millions.”

But it is the people who reside in the communities hit hardest that Black hopes to highlight with his work—those who are forced to drink water from bottles, who cannot flush a toilet, or take a shower without the use of a bucket. “Yes, the drought is huge and catastrophic and all those things that everyone by this point is pretty much aware of,” he says. “But what people aren’t aware of is how that filters down to some of these towns. What photos are really best suited for is to try to put a face on the problem—to make it concrete and real.”

All photos by Matt Black.

Near the town of Ducor, California, a newly planted pistachio orchard.

A worker loads crates of almonds at a processing plant near Los Banos, California.

A worker sorts almonds at the processing plant near Los Banos.

A worker drives an almond-harvesting machine in an orchard near the town of Kerman, California.

A pistachio tree in a newly planted orchard near the town of Alpaugh, California.

A worker checks pistachio trees in a newly planted orchard near the town of Alpaugh, California.

Workers repair a well near Alpaugh, California.

Water pumped from wells fills a storage canal in a newly planted orchard near Alpaugh, California.

A home in the town of Alpaugh. Overpumping in nearby orchards has forced the closure of one of the town’s wells, and Alpaugh’s water supply now has high levels of arsenic contamination.

Jorge Cruz collects water from his kitchen sink at his home in Alpaugh.

Jorge Cruz stores drinking water at his home in Alpaugh.

An almond shaker knocks nuts from a tree in an orchard near Firebaugh, California.

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Watch Almonds Suck California Dry

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More Patents Does Not Equal More Innovation

Mother Jones

Via James Pethokoukis, here’s a chart from a new CBO report on federal policies and innovation. Needless to say, you can’t read too much into it. It shows the growth since 1963 of total factor productivity (roughly speaking, the share of productivity growth due to technology improvements), and there are lots of possible reasons that TFP hasn’t changed much over the past five decades. At a minimum, though, the fact that patent activity has skyrocketed since 1983 with no associated growth in TFP suggests, as the CBO report says dryly, “that the large increase in patenting activity since 1983 may have made little contribution to innovation.”

The CBO report identifies several possible innovation-killing aspects of the US patent system, among them a “proliferation of low-quality patents”; increased patent litigation; and the growth of patent trolls who impose a substantial burden on startup firms. The report also challenges the value of software patents:

The contribution of patents to innovation in software or business methods is often questioned because the costs of developing such new products and processes may be modest. One possible change to patent law that could reduce the cost and frequency of litigation would be to limit patent protections for inventions that were relatively inexpensive to develop. For example, patents on software and business methods could expire sooner than is the case today (which, with renewals, is after 20 years), reducing the incentive to obtain those patents. Another change that could address patent quality, the processing burden on the USPTO, and the cost and frequency of litigation would be to limit the ability to obtain a patent on certain inventions.

Personally, I’d be in favor of limiting software and business method patents to a term of zero years. But if that’s not feasible, even a reduction to, say, five years or so, would be helpful. In the software industry, that’s an eternity.

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More Patents Does Not Equal More Innovation

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Will This New GMO Potato Take Off? McDonald’s Has Spoken

Mother Jones

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Would you be excited to pluck a bag of precut, gleaming-white potato slices from supermarket produce bin—fresh not frozen, and ready to throw in the pan or the FryDaddy?

Your answer may decide the fate of the “Innate” potato, which has been genetically engineered to resist browning and to contain less of the amino acid that turns into acrylamide—a probably human carcinogen—when potatoes are fried at high temperatures. Developed by the agribusiness giant J.R. Simplot, a major player in the $3.7 billion American potato market, the product won approval last week from the US Department of Agriculture (USDA). The reason you can currently only buy frozen precut potatoes is that they turn brown quickly. The Innate solves this, uh, problem.

To understand why the success of the new potato will hinge on your desire for convenience, a little background is in order: Simplot is one of the three massive companies (alongside ConAgra and McCain Foods) that buy potatoes from farmers, process them into French fries—as well as tater tots, spiral fries, and wedges—freeze them, and distribute them to companies ranging from fast-food giants to supermarket chains.

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Will This New GMO Potato Take Off? McDonald’s Has Spoken

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Elizabeth Warren Demands An Investigation Of Mortgage Companies

Mother Jones

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On Monday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) called on the Government Accountability Office to investigate non-bank companies that service Americans’ mortgages, noting in a letter co-signed by Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) that an increasing number of lawsuits has been filed in recent years against these firms—which are not regulated as strictly as banks.

Mortgage servicers, whether they are owned by banks or not, handle mortgages after they’ve been sold to a customer. That means they take care of administrative business including collecting mortgage payments and dealing with delinquent borrowers. What Warren and Cummings are worried about is that the share of non-banks servicing mortgages has grown astronomically—300 percent between 2011 and 2013—and it appears that the increased workload has led to shoddier service.

The rise of the industry, which typically services lower-income borrowers, “has been accompanied by consumer complaints, lawsuits, and other regulatory actions as the servicers’ workload outstrips their processing capacity,” according to a recent report by the Federal Housing Finance Agency. Last December, for instance, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau—the agency Warren helped create—entered a $2 billion settlement with the nation’s largest non-bank servicer over mortgage mismanagement. Financial industry watchdogs and consumer advocates have charged that the non-bank home loan servicing companies are often unwilling to work with troubled borrowers to modify mortgages and prevent foreclosures.

In their letter, Warren and Cummings also urge the Government Accountability Office to investigate how consumers might be harmed in the event that a large non-bank servicer collapses during a economic downturn. Non-bank mortgage companies are not subject to the regulations governing banks that perform the same functions, such as the requirement that they hold onto a certain amount of emergency funds in case of a financial collapse.

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Elizabeth Warren Demands An Investigation Of Mortgage Companies

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